1.
On the cover of his When I Was a Photographer, we see a studio self-portrait of Félix Nadar in a hot air balloon. The French artist gazes into the distance like Hernán Cortés staring out over the Pacific, binoculars at the ready lest something should warrant closer inspection. He is also fully clothed. When he became the first person to capture an image from the air, he was stark naked. Low on gas, he had closed his balloon’s valve on the ascent and began lightening the load, dropping his trousers, shoes and everything else except his camera onto the ground below. Shivering as he rose to an altitude of 80 meters in his “improvised laboratory,” he produced the world’s first successful aerial photograph. (In his many previous failed attempts, the balloon’s gas valve had been open, which had contaminated the developing bath: “silver iodide [from the bath] with hydrogen sulfur, a wicked couple irrevocably condemned to never produce children.”) Nadar, it could thus be said, was a pioneer in both aerostatic and nude photography.
This triumphant, naked flight is one of the spirited accounts in When I Was a Photographer, Nadar’s 1900-book translated and introduced by Eduardo Cadava and Liana Theodoratou. Nadar’s is not one of those conventional memoirs in which the orderly progression of reminiscences serves to obscure rather than illuminate the subject. Rather, Nadar relates an assortment of vignettes, some approaching the central subject head-on, others slantwise, but all in an engagingly conversational style. Reading Nadar’s eccentric musings brought to mind Max Beerbohm’s praise for the lively, unorthodox prose of James McNeill Whistler’s The Gentle Art of Making Enemies: “It matters not that you never knew Whistler, never even set eyes on him. You see him and know him here.” Like Whistler’s, Nadar’s writing is revelatory in the literal sense of the word.
2.
Born Gaspard-Félix Tournachon, Nadar moved from his native Lyon to Paris in 1838, where as a man of letters on the make he became a fixture of the Latin Quarter’s bohemian set. The talented eccentric would eventually turn his attention from journalism to caricature, prompting one illustrator, Paul Gavarni, to exclaim: “Ah! we are done for now that Nadar has learned to draw.” Nadar was prolific, composing caricatures for such publications as Charivari and Le Journal Pour Rire and pouring his considerable energy into the “Panthéon Nadar” (1854), in which the brightest of Paris’s literary lights — nearly 300 in all — appear in a tightly-packed, snaking line. The work is a marvel of compression, the distinctive faces of the teeming cast standing out in stark relief from the collective, sinuous body of the French intelligentsia.
Nadar prepared for the Panthéon project by photographing some of his subjects, and soon his artistic focus shifted yet again, this time to photographic portraiture, which, like his comicalities, sought to capture the “moral and intellectual” nature of the subject. Though his studio was primarily a commercial outfit, Nadar could never resist a technological challenge. Apart from his foray into aerostatic photography, he experimented with artificial lighting in the catacombs and sewers beneath Paris’s streets, embarking on a katabatic “journey through this outlet of the infinite putridness of a great capital.” Nadar and his team lugged their equipment through the stygian mire and staged shots that could take up to 18 minutes of exposure. In the final minute of one such exposure, “a cloud rising from the canal came to veil our photograph — and how many imprecations, then, against the beautiful woman or the good man above us, who, without suspecting that we were there, chose that exact moment to replenish the water in their bathtub!” The ruined plate goes out with the bathwater.
Nadar’s life was full of exploits. In Sidetracks, Richard Holmes notes that Nadar and 500 Republicans attempted to liberate Poland from the Prussians in 1848. As if providing instructions for fellow caricaturists, Nadar’s fake passport read: “Age 27 years, height 1.98 meters, hair rust red, eyes protuberant, complexion bilious.” Nadar found himself resisting the Germans once again, this time during the 1870-71 siege of Paris when he oversaw the effort to transport mail over enemy lines in hot air balloons. Neither snow nor rain nor the Prussian army…Nadar’s “patriotic satisfaction” mixed with wry bemusement over his new role:
Certainly never, after passing through diverse professions in our life, never would we have imagined our latest incarnation under the aesthetic of a varnished cockaded hat and a mailman’s bag on the belly.
Still adventurous in his old age, Nadar would plunge himself, camera in hand, into an unleashed swarm of bees, trusting only the blithe assurances of a Provencal apiarist (“They are sheep, sir, real sheep!”) that he would emerge unscathed:
They have always been alluring for me, these kinds of expeditions: it seems that the adventure whistles for me… — and then once again, as my friend Banville would say, it is so much fun to get mixed up in something that does not concern you: and what’s more, well, my tempter appeared to be so sure of his business, of our business…
In that shift from his to our we can glean the essence of the photographer, who makes a life getting up in his subjects’ business, so to speak.
Nadar’s reverence for the medium and its skilled practitioners is undeniable; that for his everyday clients nonexistent. Nadar compares a colleague’s studio, a “fateful hut” perched on a Parisian rooftop, to “the Greek temple of the Odeon.” Most of the clients he mentions, however, are distinctly unheroic or comically clueless. One orders a portrait, pays, and leaves. Nadar chases him down and tells him he must actually pose. “Ah…As you wish…But I thought that this was enough…” In general, men suffer from an infatuation with their photographic appearance “pushed to the point of madness;” one spends a sleepless night fretting over a single misplaced hair in his proofs. Men might be the worst offenders, but all subjects present problems:
So good is everyone’s opinion of his or her physical qualities that the first impression of every model in front of the proofs…is almost inevitably disappointment and recoil (it goes without saying that we are talking here of perfect proofs).
In that wonderful parenthetical, Nadar counters his client’s vanity with a display of his own.
3.
Nadar’s breezy style at times belies the book’s gnomic core, in which the “astonishing and disturbing” photographic technology inspires exultation and anxiety in equal measure. (As the translators note, Nadar’s reflections on art in the age of mechanical reproduction attracted the attention of Walter Benjamin, who refers to certain passages in The Arcades Project.) Nadar believed himself to be living in “the greatest of scientific centuries,” an era in which technologies arose with dizzying speed:
Such is in fact the glorious haste of photography’s birth that the proliferation of germinating ideas seems to render incubation superfluous: the hypothesis comes out of the human brain in full armor, fully formed, and the first induction immediately becomes the finished work.
The reference to Athena’s birth from Zeus’s head resonates when Nadar describes the godlike element of photography, which
finally seems to give man the power to create, he, too, in his turn, by materializing the impalpable specter that vanishes as soon as it is perceived, without leaving even a shadow on the crystal of the mirror, or a ripple in the water in a basin.
One detects here, not for the last time, a hint of the demonic: photography as a dark art.
Nadar’s recollections begin with the initial unease brought about by photographic technology, “the contagion of…first recoil” that afflicted even “beautiful minds” such as Honoré de Balzac, Théo Gauthier, and Gérard de Nerval. Balzac, for instance, subscribed to the theory that “each body in nature is composed of a series of specters, in infinitely superimposed layers, foliated into infinitesimal pellicules, in all directions in which the optic perceives this body.” Each “Daguerreian operation” would thus seize one of these spectral layers until a body could waste down to nothing. The ever-playful Nadar seizes on this theory to needle his friend about his weight — “Balzac had only to gain from his loss, since his abdominal abundances, and others, permitted him to squander his “specters” without counting.” (The playground taunt would go something like, Yo Mama is so fat, I could Daguerreotype her all day and she still wouldn’t disappear!)
From Balzac’s “terror before the Daguerreotype,” Nadar moves on to the demonic perceptions of photography:
This mystery smelled devilishly like a spell and reeked of heresy: the celestial rotisserie had been heated up for less. Everything that unhinges the mind was gathered together there: hydroscopy, bewitchment, conjuration, apparitions. Night, so dear to every thaumaturge, reigned supreme in the gloomy recesses of the darkroom, making it the ideal home for the Prince of Darkness. It would not have taken much to transform our filters into philters.
The passage is tongue-in-cheek, but Nadar repeatedly flirts with occult rhetoric to describe his art. Take, for example, his attempts at underground photography, described in the language of esoteric exploration:
The subterranean world was opening up an infinite field of operations no less interesting than the telluric surface. We were going to penetrate, to reveal the mysteries of the deepest, the most secret caverns.
When Nadar leaves the subterranean world and takes to the skies, his initial inability to capture a clear image makes him feel “as if under a cast spell,” unable to “get out of these opaque, fuliginous plates, from this night that pursues me.”
Generally lighthearted though he is, Nadar is haunted by sinister faces and spectral gazes. One chapter involves Nadar’s mysterious entanglement with a mountebank named Mauclerc, one of whose cons involves long-distance portraiture (i.e., a camera in Paris produces an image of a subject in Toulouse.) Years later, Nadar is visited by a young man claiming to have performed the same feat, at which point the has an eerie vision of Mauclerc and his “hideous smile:”
..the features of my noble Hérald [a friend] and the honest face of the young worker were merging, blending into a kind of Mephistophelian mask from which appeared a disquieting figure that I had never seen before but recognized immediately: Mauclerc, deceitful Mauclerc…mockingly handing me his electric image…
Long-distance photography at last! By conjuring the face of his distant tormentor out of thin air, Nadar’s feverish imagination has performed the impossible feat promised by the conmen.
In another vignette, Nadar receives a “funeral call” to photograph a recently deceased man. “Surely, this man had been loved…” begins a chapter that will end with an expression of “hatred and contempt.” As Nadar delivers the print to the deceased’s wife and mother-in-law, whose “hellish gaze bore into [him] relentlessly,” he is compelled to admit that he has already given out a print to another mourner: the man’s mistress. Here Nadar witnesses the perils of reproduction. The copy is just one of a (potentially) infinite series, but its circulation destroys the wife’s own image of her husband. She collapses, and Nadar, crushed to have “unwillingly caused so much pain,” is forever after haunted by yet another specter troubling the photographer’s regard:
How many, many times have I found her unexpectedly, at a street corner, at another, everywhere, suddenly focused upon me, an always living reminder of that atrocious hour — motionless and piercing me with her ashen eyes — which I still see…
The most dramatic display of photography’s dark side comes in a chapter entitled “Homicidal Photography.” There Nadar recounts the sensational case of a pharmacist, his bored wife, and a scheming assistant who cuckolds the former, jilts the latter, and robs both. Nadar traces the characters of this “insipid epic of little people” as they develops with the “fateful monumentality and progression of a Shakespeare drama…” Once the wife confesses her adultery, the pharmacist enlists her and his brother to lure the assistant to a remote location, stab him to death, drop his corpse from a bridge, and return to Paris. According to Nadar, a sure acquittal, a simple case of “adultery committed, adultery avenged.” Until, that is, a journalist photographs the decomposing body. Nadar describes this body in vivid detail, but prose is prose, no matter how sickening. Photography exposes the full horror of the “drowned man in total putrefaction, so abominably fashioned that the humor form soon becomes illegible.”
The drama, “monstrous…and sensational in its staging,” riles up the public such that only one outcome is possible: “It is the photograph that has just pronounced THE SENTENCE — the sentence without appeal: “DEATH!” Nadar personifies photography as an avenging angel who, through the accursed image, makes her terrible will known. “But PHOTOGRAPHY wanted it this way this time, ” Nadar concludes, stoically accepting the whims of the capricious demiurge to whom he is, or was, in thrall.
4.
The passages I have selected attest to Nadar’s peculiar temperament, his buoyant lugubriousness. Nadar threw himself into his art with the same abandon with which he followed the apiarist into the beehive:
We find ourselves enveloped, obscured, blinded, lost in the midst of these myriads of sword-bearers, titillated everywhere…by these moving effervescences — an immersion into a universal touch.
This tableau is emblematic of Nadar, an artist forever immersing himself — in a swarm of bees, in the “thickest part of a cloud,” in the Piranesian sewers of Paris, in the mysteries of photography, in darkness and in light.
Netherland is a good book, and much has already been written, here and elsewhere, to that effect. Its central conceit, that of the New York City immigrant subculture of cricket, provides a fresh perspective on a city about which so much has already been written, and the parallel story, of the dissolution of lonely Hans van der Broek’s marriage, often cuts with the immediacy of real, unmitigated loss. But, and of course there is a but — and perhaps it’s only due to my predilection for stories that come at me “like a big hot meteor screaming down from the Kansas sky,” as Stephen King put it in his introduction to The Best American Short Stories of 2007 — there is a deep problem with Netherland, and it’s that the book more often exemplifies rather than illuminates the central dilemma that draws its attention, the modern challenge of an individual trying to author a coherent story for his own life.
I can't help but feel that your review is way off-base. If literature has to be about full-throated, deeply engaged people in order to be literature, then oblique folks like Hans need not apply. Only episodes that have an obvious coherence should be depicted. Extraneous bits, characters, observations become bad and should be cut.
One kind of experience–the "it happened to ME and it changed me forever and my life was completely taken over by what happened"–becomes the only kind of experience.
I've read too many books written out of that aesthetic. After a while they just seem flat in their no nuance, relentlessness.
Part of Netherland's greatness springs from the choice not to make Chuck more essential to Hans' life–by which he would mere become another ethnic wiseman. He is given his own integrity as a character. The book touches on his story but isn't complete; it's an oblique partial portrait of Chuck, and only insofar as he entered a strange time in Hans' life. Just as we find out next to nothing regarding Hans' wife's affair with the chef.
Oblique, get it? Like so much of life. As well as so much great literature.
I found your review interesting and disappointing. For a book I've not read, I like to get some idea of what the book does well as well as it's weaknesses. You give no sense of the writing–no quotes, no close reading of selected passages. Your own disappointment, by the end of the review, comes to feel like pressure you're exerting on the author, postpartum: a complaint that he hasn't written a book that serves up the kind of pleasure you prefer. You acknowledge intellectual and aesthetic engagement (the books evident strengths) without explaining what they are: intellectual and aesthetic engagement are quite enough for some–what is it that makes your preferred pleasures superior? That's not a rhetorical question; had you explained this better I might still disagree in my assessment of the book, but would not have reason to be disappointed with your review.
Drew and Jacob- Thanks for reading and taking the time to comment.
I think you're right, Jacob, that a review should explain both the good and less good of a novel. In this case, I chose to focus more on what I didnt like about Netherland because, given how much critical praise the book has already received, I thought readers would have plenty of other places to learn about the book's strengths.
And Drew, some of my favorite literary characters are every bit as disengaged as Hans (Rabbit Angstrom and Frank Bascombe, for two), but in both those cases Updike and Ford wrap the disengagement in a story (nothing dramatic, just the quiet intensity of everyday life), and for me as a reader, it's the story, not the original idea of the disengagement, that makes the characters real. Absent a story to pair with the conception of Hans, I found his character to be less real, understandable or compelling.
Kevin,
I read your review with great interest, more so when it became apparent that it was articulating the vague dissatisfaction that I too had when reading Netherland. While the prose is excellent, and the mechanics of writing are clearly in evidence, I found myself feeling the same way about many of the flashback vignettes. For the most part, I kept wondering "why should I care about this?" Some of the backstory was almost ADD-like , seeming to drift off in only vaguely tangential ways.
For example, unless I'm missing some incredibly important metaphor, why should I have cared that there were parrots or parakeets in the cemetary where Chuck wished to be buried? Did it really flesh out his character, or the character of his long suffering wife? If it was intended to do that, the effort was lost on me. I found myself thinking "Where is this whole bird story leading?", which, for me, was decidedly nowhere.
Of course, I always hold out the notion that perhaps I just missed something, and was not sufficiently engaged enough to glean the important truth from the text. If that is the case, I'm guilty as charged.
Thus, in large part, your review captured exactly the feelings that I was having at many points in the novel.
However, I must disagree with some of your observations, particularly those regarding the cricket metaphor that pervades the novel. I'm not sure what you familiarity is with this game, but I am the president of a local cricket club in upstate NY, and as a native born American and one of only two such members on the club, I can say that O'Neill captures the sub-culture with 100% accuracy. Nowhere is this more apparent than in his encounter with the Sri Lankan taxicab driver.
While you opined "Reading Hans' conversation with the cab driver, I was struck by the improbability of the social engagement that results." I could only think "That's EXACTLY what would have happened.." in such a situation as that. Although cricket is largely an immigrant sub-cultural phenomenon here in the U.S., in my personal experience, the mere mention of in interest in the game sparks an almost instant bonding between individuals. I cannot explain why, but clearly O'Neill understands this. I will agree that USUALLY the social connection between a cab driver and his fare in NYC would be virtually non-existent, but there is no question that the sport of cricket would EASILY transcend that taboo and render it inert…..
(I must confess, though, I share an obsession with the game of cricket that closely parallels Chuck Ramkisoon's in the novel, so my thoughts and opinions on this subject must be taken in that light….O'Neil's description of Chuck's dream cricket stadium and optimism about it's potential success are so much like my own, it's scary…. Much of Chuck's dialogue about cricket sounds eerily similar to my own pontifications regarding the sport in the U.S… but that's a whole other story!)
Thanks for the review, and for putting to words many of the thoughts I shared regarding Netherland….. Despite the shortcomings you mentioned, the cricket content alone is enough for me to recommend the novel to my friends and colleagues, certainly those who play cricket in this country.
I agree with steve w's comment about the longueurs and I also felt that the conversation about sports between the immigrant cabdriver and the millionaire financial analyst seemed entirely possible (and thanks also for the insider's opinion about the sport). The parrots who inhabit the Brooklyn cemetery where Chuck wishes to be buried seem like an obvious symbol for immigration, although I wondered about the migratory instincts of such creatures.
Other than that I agree with Kevin's opinions and observations. The linear arrangement of photos in the album seems to be the antithesis of this novel in terms of form, as described by Garth in his review.
The parent or patient who suffers from memory loss or Alzheimer's is a character that seems to reappear in "9/11 novels" like Ian McEwan's "Saturday" and DeLillo's "Falling Man." I think it's meant to represent something like generational change.
I think it's the loss of the mother that causes Hans's malaise and leads to the breakup of his marriage. After 9/11 I think Chuck becomes a kind of father figure to Hans, who was raised without one. Although his mother is a loving parent, she's not much of an authority figure. For instance, when she catches him skating in the canal playing hooky she's surprisingly nonjudgemental. Chuck's death in the Gowanus Canal reminded me of it. The ending is sentimental but I didn't mind it.