The Neo-Neocon, in blogging that “It just might be a good time to revisit this quote from Milan Kundera on circle dancing,” cited a long passage from John Updike’s original review of the English translation of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, published circa 1980:

“This book…is brilliant and original, written with a purity and wit that invite us directly in; it is also strange, with a strangeness that locks us out…

“…[T]he mirror does not so readily give back validation with this playful book, more than a collection of seven stories yet certainly no novel, by an expatriate Czech resident in France, fascinated by sex, and prone to sudden, if graceful, skips into autobiography, abstract rumination, and recent Czech history. Milan Kundera, he tells us, was as a young man among that moiety of Czechs–’the more dynamic, the more intelligent, the better half’–who cheered the accession of the Communists to power in February 1948. He was then among the tens of thousands rapidly disillusioned by the harsh oppressions of the new regime: ‘And suddenly those young, intelligent radicals had the strange feeling of having sent something into the world, a deed of their own making, which had taken on a life of its own, lost all resemblance to the original idea, and totally ignored the originators of the idea. So those young, intelligent radicals started shouting to their deed, calling it back, scolding it, chasing it, hunting it down.’

“Kundera’s prose presents a surface like that of a shattered mirror, where brightly mirroring fragments lie mixed with pieces of lusterless silvering. The Communists idyll he youthfully believed in seems somehow to exist for him still, though mockingly and excludingly. He never asks himself—the most interesting political question of the century–why a plausible and necessarily redistribution of wealth should, in its Communist form, demand such an exorbitant sacrifice of individual freedom? Why must the idyll turn, not merely less than idyll, but nightmare?

“The position of a writer from the Socialist world in the West cannot but be uncomfortable. He cannot but despise us for our cheap freedoms, our more subtle enslavements; and we it may be, cannot but condescend to his discovery, at such heavy cost to his life, of lessons that Messrs. Churchill and Truman so roundly read to us 35 years ago.”

Neo-Neocon concludes, “That probably tells you more about Updike’s politics and quality of mind (see much more here) than about Kundera. However, I actually think that, although Kundera doesn’t directly spell out the answer to that ‘most interesting political question of the century,’ the answer is inherent in everything he writes.”

Dr. Fred Andrea, pastor of Aiken’s First Baptist Church, wrote a column on “Faith and Values: How far is away?” for the Aiken Standard in which he begins,

“John Updike’s novel, Rabbit, Run, centers on a man who cannot accept responsibility and, therefore, lives each day with the suffocating feeling of being trapped. Confronted with a decision or a demand, he runs away. When the novel concludes, he is still unable to cope. His marriage is in shambles, his family life is conflicted, his friends have all abandoned him. Miserable and frustrated, he still cannot decide what to do, and so avoids doing anything. The final scene is set on a summer evening and reads as follows:

“‘As he goes down the stairs, worries come as quick as the sound of his footsteps. Guilt and responsibility slide together like substantial shadows inside his chest. Outside in the air his fears coalesce. Afraid, really afraid, he remembers what once consoled him—and lifted his eyes to the unlit windows of a nearby church.’

“‘Rabbit comes to the curb, but instead of going to the right and around the block, he steps down with as big a feeling as if this little side street is a wide river – and runs. His hands lift of their own, and he feels the wind on his ears, even before his heels hitting the pavement at first, but with an effortless gathering, out of a kind of sweet panic, growing lighter and quieter and quicker, he runs. Ah, runs. RUNS!'”

Before shifting to talk about the Old Testament prophet Elijah, who also ran away, Andrea asks, “How many persons at this very hour are running away, trying to hide or to escape? Some do it in the name of liberation, believing they are free only when they have no limiting obligation or responsibilities. Others run away to avoid facing themselves, and some are running away from love and from God.”

Read the whole column.

In a tribute to British author Henry Green (1905-73) titled “A reintroduction to the poet of modern fiction,” Danny Heitman begins with an observation and a quote from John Updike:

“Green’s books haven’t remained reliably in print, evidence of his limited popular appeal. But those who like Green’s novels really like them, and his following, though small, has been distinguished. John Updike, not prone to jacket-blurb hyperbole, celebrated Green’s novels with almost religious zeal.

“‘For Green, to me, is so good a writer, such a revealer of what English prose fiction can do . . . that I can launch myself upon this piece of homage and introduction only by falling into some sort of imitation of that liberatingly ingenuous voice, that voice so full of other voices, its own interpolations amid the matchless dialogue twisted and tremulous with a precision that kept the softness of groping, of sensation, of living.”

Amazon link to Loving

An “Alternative Media” site recently ran an opinion piece masquerading as news (“The Coming White Flight in Europe”) that quotes a big chunk of John Updike’s satirical 1978 novel, The Coup.

“Since the future of the world will be heavily influenced by the huge number of Sahelians headed our way, here’s the opening of John Updike’s 1978 novel The Coup, in which he describes a fictionalized Sahelian country much like Niger. Keep in mind, however, that the population of Niger in 1978 was 5.7 million. Today it is 21.5 million. In another 39 years, the span of time since Updike’s novel, it is expected to grow to 81.4 million. The Coup begins with the Col. Gadaffi-like Col. Ellellou writing his memoirs in a Nabokovian-Updikean prose style:

“‘My country of Kush, landlocked between the mongrelized, neo-capitalist puppet states of Zanj and Sahel, is small for Africa, though larger than any two nations of Europe. Its northern half is Saharan; in the south, forming the one boundary not drawn by a Frenchman’s ruler, a single river flows, the Grionde, making possible a meagre settled agriculture. Peanuts constitute the principal export crop: the doughty legumes are shelled by the ton and crushed by village women in immemorial mortars or else by antiquated presses manufactured in Lyons; then the barrelled oil is caravanned by camelback and treacherous truck to Dakar, where it is shipped to Marseilles to become the basis of heavily perfumed and erotically contoured soaps designed not for my naturally fragrant and affectionate countrymen but for the antiseptic lavatories of America — America, that fountainhead of obscenity and glut. Our peanut oil travels westward the same distance as eastward our ancestors plodded, their neck-shackles chafing down to the jugular, in the care of Arab traders, to find from the flesh-markets of Zanzibar eventual lodging in the harems and palace guards of Persia and Chinese Turkestan. Thus Kush spreads its transparent wings across the world. The ocean of desert between the northern border and the Mediterranean littoral once knew a trickling traffic in salt for gold, weight for weight; now this void is disturbed only by Swedish playboys fleeing cold boredom in Volvos that soon forfeit their seven coats of paint to the rasp of sand and the roar of their engines to the omnivorous howl of the harmattan. They are skeletons before their batteries die. Would that Allah had so disposed of all infidel intruders!’

“‘To the south, beyond the Grionde, there is forest, nakedness, animals, fever, chaos. It bears no looking into. Whenever a Kushite ventures into this region, he is stricken with mal à l’estomac.’

“‘Kush is a land of delicate, delectable emptiness, …’

“‘In area Kush measures 126,912,180 hectares. The population density comes to .03 per hectare. In the vast north it is virtually immeasurable. The distant glimpsed figure blends with the land as the blue hawk blends with the sky. There are twenty-two miles of railroad and one hundred seven of paved highway. Our national airline, Air Kush, consists of two Boeing 727′s, stunning as they glitter above the also glittering tin shacks by the airfield. … The natives extract ingenious benefits from the baobab tree, weaving mats from its fibrous heart, ropes from its inner bark, brewing porridge and glue and a diaphoretic for dysentery from the pulp of its fruit, turning the elongated shells into water scoops, sucking the acidic and refreshing seeds, and even boiling the leaves, in desperate times, into a kind of spinach. When are times not desperate? Goats eat the little baobab trees, so there are only old giants. The herds of livestock maintained by the tribes of pastoral nomads have been dreadfully depleted by the drought. The last elephant north of the Grionde gave up its life and its ivory in 1959, with a bellow that still reverberates. “The toubabs took the big ears with them,” is the popular saying. Both Sahel and Zanj possess quantities of bauxite, manganese, and other exploitable minerals, but aside from a streak of sulphur high in the Bulub Mountains the only known mineral deposit in Kush is the laterite that renders great tracts of earth unarable, (I am copying these facts from an old Statesman’s Year-Book, freely, here where I sit in sight of the sea, so some of them may be obsolete.) In the north there were once cities of salt populated by slaves, who bred and worshipped and died amid the incessant cruel glisten; these mining settlements, supervised by the blue-clad Tuareg, are mere memories now.’

“‘But even memory thins in this land, which suggests, on the map, an angular skull whose cranium is the empty desert. Along the lower irregular line of the jaw, carved by the wandering brown river, there was a king, the Lord of Wanjiji, whose physical body was a facet of God so radiant that a curtain of gold flakes protected the eyes of those entertained in audience from his glory; and this king, restored to the throne as a constitutional monarch in the wake of the loi-cadre of 1956 and compelled to abdicate after the revolution of 1968, has been all but forgotten. Conquerors and governments pass before the people as dim rumors, as entertainment in a hospital ward. Truly, mercy is interwoven with misery in the world wherever we glance.’

“‘Among the natural resources of Kush perhaps should be listed our diseases-an ample treasury which includes, besides famine and its edema and kwashiorkor, malaria, typhus, yellow fever, sleeping sickness, leprosy, bilharziasis, onchocerciasis, measles, and yaws. As these are combatted by the genius of science, human life itself becomes a disease of the overworked, eroded earth. The average life expectancy in Kush is thirty-seven years, the per capita gross national product $79, the literacy rate 6%.’

“‘The official currency is the lu. The flag is a plain green field. The form of government is a constitutional monarchy with the constitution suspended and the monarch deposed. An eleven-man Supreme Counseil Revolutionnaire et Militaire pour l’Emergence serves as the executive arm of the government and also functions as its legislature. The pure and final socialism envisioned by Marx, the theocratic populism of Islam’s periodic reform movements: these transcendent models guide the council in all decisions. SCRME’S chairman, and the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, Minister of National Defense, and President of Kush was (is, the Statesman’s Year-Book has it) Colonel Hakim Felix Ellellou–that is to say, myself.'”

Caleb and Linda Pirtle are writers, and in a recent blogpost they quoted advice from “John Updike: A giant of American literature” that begins with the title: “John Updike: Five pages a day every day of your life.”

Writers write. It can be that simple.

“John Updike, he of the bushy eyebrows and hawkish nose, had a distinct style of prose that was described as baroque, exquisite, and prolifically poetic. He did win a couple of Pulitzer Prizes, a pair of National Book Awards, and the Pen/Faulkner Award. And such novels as Couples and Witches of Eastwick, not to mention his quartet of Rabbit Angstrom novels, have a definite place on the top shelf of American literature.

“His name is widely known.

“His work is widely praised.

“Yet, John Updike, the man, was very private. Not a recluse, perhaps, but, it’s said, he cultivated his embowered solitude and would rather sit amidst isolation in his home on the Massachusetts shore and write.

“No one wrote more.

“He left an unending trail of fiction, poetry, essays, and criticism, most of which appeared rather regularly in The New Yorker. In addition, he published almost one book a year for more than a half century.”

Read the advice that Updike gave writers, which Caleb Pirtle passes along.