به نام او

«منظور از وارد شدن در این‌گونه «معقولات» روشن کردن این نکته است که اگر پاره‌ای از ذهنی‌ترین و تاریک‌ترین جریان‌های ادبی قرن بیستم نسب خود را به جویس می‌رسانند، در عین حال پاره ای از زنده‌ترین و روشن‌ترین جریان‌ها نیز –به ویژه در امریکا- باز از جویس سرچشمه می‌گیرند. فاکنر و همینگوی و دوس‌پاسوس و تورنتون وایلدر همه شاگرد جویس محسوب می‌شوند؛ و پیروان انها نیز به سنت جویس تعلق دارند. اما از این میان دوس‌پاسوس از لحاظ گرفتن و منتقل کردن شیوه‌های جویس، و به ویژه از لحاظ دنبال کردن روحیه‌یِ آزمایشگری او، بیش از دیگران شایان توجه است.
دوس‌پاسوس در دوران مترقی خود، یعنی پیش از جنگ داخلی اسپانیا (زیرا پس از این جنگ مرتجع شد)، آزمایشگرترین نویسنده امریکا بود. در رمان‌های بزرگ او، «یو اس ای» و «منطقه کلمبیا» و «منهتن ترانسفر»، قهرمان داستان فرد معینی نیست، بلکه خود جامعه امریکاست. نویسنده در توصیف و زنده ساختن صحنه‌های اجتماعی همان قدر تلاش می‌کند که رمان نویسان دیگر به پروراندن سیرت قهرمانی خود می‌پردازند. آدمها، در برابر جامعه، در مرتبه دوم قرار می‌گیرند. نویسنده می‌خواهد تاثیر محیط اجتماعی، و به ویژه محیط اقتصادی، را بر افراد نشان دهد. بنابراین باید محیط را زنده و در حال حرکت ترسیم کند. تکه ای از ترانه‌های روز، نطق‌های سیاسی، تیترهای روزنامه‌ها، بیوگرافی اشخاص واقعی و «تاریخی» - که زندگی‌شان با زندگی ادمهای داستان در آمیخته است – لای داستان بُر می‌خورد. دید «دوربینی» و «امپرسیونیستی»، و حتی «فیلم خبری»، همه مواد کار دوس‌پاسوس را تشکیل می‌دهند. این وارستگی از قید و بندهای متداول رمان‌نویسی، این خطر کردن، این آمادگی – یا دست کم این داوطلب شدن- برای طبع آزمایی در انواع شیوه‌ها، در یک کلام این «مدرنیسم»، درسی است که دوس‌پاسوس از جویس آموخته است. و جوهر این درس عبارت است از پاسخ دادن به مقتضیات موضوع کار.
چنان که خواهیم دید نویسنده‌ی «رگتایم» همه صناعت‌های دوس‌پاسوس را گیرم به شکلی بسیار فشرده‌تر و پالوده‌تر، در رمان خود به کار برده است. بنابراین باید گفت که دکتروف به واسطه دوس‌پاسوس از جویس متاثر است.»



اول بار که با نام جان دوسپاسوس مواجه شدم در مقدمه کتاب «رگتایم» ای. ال. دکتروف به قلم نجف دریابندری بزرگ بود. بعد از اینکه جلد اول «ینگه دنیا» یا همان یو اس ای را خواندم خواستم چیزکی در مورد کتاب بنویسم، دوباره مقدمه رگتایم را خواندم و دیدم که بخشی از مقدمه کاملا برای معرفی سبک دوس پاسوس کفایت میکند، ضمن اینکه باید بگویم متاسفانه به دلایل عدیده ای که بخشیش به انزوای دوس پاسوس در ادبیات انگلیسی زبان بر میگردد و بخش دیگرش به ترجمه و نشر نامنظم آثارش در ایران باز میگردد دوس پاسوس چندان برای مخاطب فارسی زبان شناخته شده نیست. البته خوشبختانه پس از سالها جلد سوم این کتاب با عنوان پول کلان با ترجمه سعید باستانی در حال انتشار است و متاسفانه چاپ جلد اول آن با عنوان مدار 42 به اتمام رسیده است. حال اگر در کتابفروشیهای حاشیه ای مدار 42 درجه را پیدا کردید مفت چنگتان! از رمان بی نظیر این امریکایی لذت ببرید
در آخر اینکه من ترجمه های سعید باستانی را بسیار دوست میدارم و به نظرم مترجم مهمی است که سهم زیادی در معرفی ادبیات آمریکا داشته است که متاسفانه او هم به دلایلی چندان دیده نشده است معروفترین کارش «پرواز بر فراز آشیانه فاخته» کِن کِیسی است که ـآن هم توسط انتشارات هاشمی به زیورطبع آراسته شده

:)

There are very few reasons for me to have enjoyed this book, but I absolutely loved it. Quirky approach by introducing a number of characters individually, only to seemingly abandon them to work with the others. Interrupt the whole affair with "news reels" from the time that corresponds with the story, plug in a few odd snippets of what could be lost short stories, and pick up the individual characters and weave them together in bits and pieces. What today would be looked at as a gadget novel works so well because of the time it was written in, and the time it was written about. The individual character stories are simultaneously heartbreaking and uplifting and everything in between.

It shouldn't have to be said, but the time the book was written about, as well as the class of characters and circumstances they find themselves in, and the company they keep, bring about the standard fare of racial epithets for seemingly every group imaginable, every color of the human rainbow. I offer this because it's always a reason some readers choose to downvote an otherwise excellent novel. "Of its time" shouldn't have to be footstomped, but it seems to be a requirement these days.

Great book. I look forward to reading the rest of the trilogy.

Usually with 5 star books you want to run into the street telling people to read it immediately – “On your way to a funeral? Don’t go! Read this first!” – but not this one, it’s so exhausting and there are hardly any jokes at all.

For years it held the title of Longest Time Spent on my Real Life TBR Shelf – I bought my copy in 2015 – and why? Because I thought it was some kind of intimidating difficult slab of a modernist left wing novel, its reputation is offputting and I was offput.

But it’s not true, not really. This is easy reading. 90% of it is the life stories of five young Americans up to the year 1917. They are all told in a flat breathless rush of a voice, the prose is plain, even banal, but chockful of detail upon detail. Dos Passos writes the opposite of what we loftily think of as literature. If Edith Wharton, Henry James, Jimmy Joyce, Marcel the Proust and that gang are at one end, John Dos Passos is at the other. His stuff is all “and… and… and….”

She got up and went into the private office with her pencil and pad in one hand.

Ben went back in the diningroom

The party at Ben’s didn’t come off so well.

Mr Hillyard would have gone himself only he had a carbuncle on his neck. He gave Johnny the return ticket and ten dollars for the trip.

But occasionally he will come up with something less like Raymond Carver :

It was a sunny May afternoon and he could smell locustblossoms on the breeze along the Ohio, and there was the sharp whang of the golfballs and the flutter of bright dresses on the lawn round the clubhouse, and frazzles of laughter and baritone snatches of the safe talk of businessmen coming in on the sunny breeze that still had a little scorch of furnace smoke in it.

But what he stuffs his book with is the detail, the texture of these people’s lives, and this is where he is totally convincing and impressive. His characters run all over the States and into England, France and Mexico, and he knows everything about them, the way they talk, the way the dress, and eat, how they talked and what they smelled (I never read a book so full of smells) :

”Let’s go eat somewhere.. Jeez I’m sorry I’m not rigged up better. We lost all our duffle, see, when we was torpedoed….. I know where we’ll eat; we’ll eat at Luchow’s.”

“Isn’t Fourteenth Street a little…”

“Naw, they got a room for ladies…”

*

He talked all day in a thin wheezy voice until the nurse made him shut up, about the Non-Partisan League and the Farmer-Labor Party and the destiny of the great northwest and the need for workingmen and farmers to stick together to elect honest men like Bob La Follette.

*

The wine came in funny-looking bottles upside down in a stand in the middle of each table.

*

The river was higher than the city. It was funny standing on the stern of the steamboat and looking down on the roofs and streets and trolleycars of New Orleans.

And you get frequent beautiful snapshots of America

It wasn’t a tornado but a heavy thundershower and the wheatfields turned to zinc and great trampling hissing sheets of rain advanced slowly across them.

But yes, mostly it is a hectic rush of and…and…and…

The difficult reputation of this book seems to have come from a couple of unusual ideas he uses. After each chunk of biography of one of the five main characters he throws in two sections, one called The Camera Eye and one called Newsreel, and these are freeform unpunctuated bricolage or cubist collages, so to speak, made up of impressions of American life from scraps of songs, newspaper headlines and material that edges quite close to poetry at times, like Eliot’s The Waste Land. Plus, he also throws in three or four mini-biographies of actual people like Edison and Bob la Follette.

And plus, from the get-go you have the strong impression that this novel is written by a guy with firm socialist convictions – his first character Mac joins the Wobblies – but nowhere does it become a tract like The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists.

Will I be diving into Volume Two of this massive trilogy? Probably not this year! Haha! Do I recommend this to my lovely GR friends?

Kind of.

This was hyped to me as a novel that rivals "Gatsby" as the great American novel and while that is a bold statement, this book is not far off. It is easily better than anything else Fitzgerald wrote and as good as anything Hemingway wrote. It is probably the best single example of the Modernist novel.

The narrative is a bit disjointed and follows several characters, but most of them are very interesting. This novel does an amazing job portraying the struggle of people during the time between the World Wars. The book also contained some really cool literary experiments, one of which was very cinematic and I did imagine those scenes in black and white with an old time news anchor reading them.

This book was so well written that it is difficult to find fault in it. This is a serious literary work and anyone that has enjoyed the Modernists, Gatsby or Hemingway needs to read this. It was amazing.

Very unusual. While it's labeled historical fiction, it feels more like history than fiction. Thought-provoking, it doesn't wrap me up in the personal experiences of the characters so much as it urges me to research economics.

I listened to this as an audio book. The narrator was wonderful, changing his voice vastly for various characters, singing songs, etc. But I got a print copy of the book after finishing the audio book and read back over most of the biographies and all of The Camera Eye sections, because they had been hard to grasp just by listening. The James-Joyce-like Camera Eye sections made a bit more sense to me knowing that they were definitely autobiographical and also reading them all in series rather than spaced out over the course of the book.

برای شناختن آمریکا تاریخ نخوانید، دوس پاسوس بخوانید. دوس پاسوس با قلمش چنان در این کتاب به زیر پوست آمریکای پیش از جنگ اول رخنه کرده است که حیرت زده می شوید. او قلم را مانند
یک دوربین عکاسی در گوشه کنار آن مقطع از تاریخ آمریکا می چرخاند تا از پس شخصیت ها و کنش های اجتماعی آن دوره، کلاژهایی جالب و جذاب از جامعه ی ز��ر پوستی آمریکا ثبت کند. روایتی که از این کلاژها به خواننده عرضه می شود در پس ظاهر فریبنده اش با انباشتی از فساد و تباهی توام است. و قابل پیش بینی است بنایی که بر چنین شالوده ای ساخته شده است همچنان همانی می تواند باشد که بوده است.
پ.ن: حیف که کمی زبان مترجم در ترجمه این شاهکار فخیمانه است.

I thought this book was great. I loved Don Passos writing style, I loved following the faith of the characters in his simple, cutthroat narrative. His writing is very cool, and it's easy to imagine John smoking cigars and working away effortlessly on his typewriter. Maybe it's too cool.

Reading American historical fiction usually doesn't involve characters with socialist or Marxist ideals, and I found it fascinating to see capitalism fall right before the eyes of the oppressed working class, the unions and anarchists.

Some characters came to life more than others. I was drawn to the character of Mac, a tramping boy trying to make enough to keep his head above water.The introduction of extra characters towards the end got repetitive. It was impressive to see him create rich and poor characters with equal authenticity.

The Camera Eye and biographical excerpts I enjoyed a lot. The Newsreels were a little too nonsensical, though I liked the experimentation.

Manic, vibrant, socially conscious, epic, crowded, busy, sweaty, angry, clear-eyed idealism, rowdy, tragic, subjective, objective, infinitely small, buzzing, slashing, eponymous, snide, pathos, scattershot, fecund, inspirational, landmark, surging, colorful, explosive, magnificent.

I'm almost holding back on the next two installments since I don't want to be dissapointed. This one's a corker.

The first two pages is some of the greatest prose I've ever laid eyes on. What I hope will be my life's philosophy and burns alive in my eyes every time I read it.

I read it to most of my friends and there was little reaction. They are all very literate and extremely intelligent. Disheartening.

But I am truly glad some have seen fit to mention it as being in the running for "Great American Novel".

It won't make it, I think, compared to some of the other contenders. But, it guarentees literary importance and a niche that will never dissapear.

Must admit, don't think I ever heard of Dos Passos until I started reading this trilogy for the Modern Library top 100, but glad I did. Easy reading format, historical context, and I do like history, about the interesting early part of the century in of course, the USA.

Each chapter is titled with a character's name and each evolves, through their own eyes, and when paths cross, through others. Most characters are carried onto the other books. Supposedly the books can be read on their own, but I think you would always wonder what you missed. For me the stories were compelling and I couldn't stop reading about them.

Between chapters DP sometimes has a couple pages about a famous person of the era. Some stood the test of history & we know them today, Edison but some are more obscure and those to me were the more interesting ones.

Another item between chapters are bits of text from newsreels of the day. They give the setting of the times
and to me show how the news is totally unrelated to every day life.

Yet another item is the Camera Eye, which shows some activity that is going on with a person, but to me is out of context so doesn't add much to the story.

This is far from being The Great American Novel. Very far. Dos Passos' 'stream of consciousness' style gets old very quickly. He provides a snapshot into American life without developing a story or any of his characters. I was disappointed but plodded through to the end. With so much other material to read, it is doubtful I will ever waste my time on the other two books in the trilogy.

Ο 42ος παράλληλος που μόλις τελείωσα θεωρείται δίκαια ένα από τα αριστουργήματα της αμερικανικής και παγκόσμιας λογοτεχνίας. Το βιβλίο είναι ένα καλειδοσκόπιο της κοινωνίας των ΗΠΑ την πρώτη εικοσαετία του περασμένου αιώνα. Ο Ντος Πάσος χρησιμοποιεί μια τεχνική αφήγησης πολύ δύσκολη να τη χειριστεί ένας συγγραφέας χωρίς να κουράζει τον αναγνώστη και αυτό είναι μεγάλη κατόρθωμα. Στο βιβλίο υπάρχουν τέσσερεις-πέντε κεντρικοί χαρακτήρες των οποίων οι ελπίδες, τα όνειρα, οι επιτυχίες αλλά και οι απογοητεύσεις ξεδιπλώνονται αυτόνομα κατά τα 2/3 της ιστορίας. Μόνο στο τελευταίο 1/3 κάποιοι από αυτούς συναντιούνται χωρίς όμως να είναι αυτά τα συναπαντήματα μεγάλης σημασίας. Κύριο ρόλο παίζει το αμερικάνικο όνειρο όπως μεγάλωσε εκείνη την εποχή της ανάπτυξης για τις ΗΠΑ μέσα από συγκρούσεις συμφερόντων πολιτικών και οικονομικών. Ο ρατσισμός, ο ιμπεριαλισμός, ο αναρχισμός, ο σοσιαλισμός, η κεφαλαιοκρατία, ο συνδικαλισμός είναι μόνο κάποιοι από τους "ισμούς" της εποχής που βγαίνουν στο προσκήνιο. Οι ήρωες του Ντος Πάσος είναι καθημερινοί τύποι που τους σκιαγραφεί εκπληκτικά και περιγράφει τις περιπέτειές τους με ιλιγγιώδη ρυθμό. Ενδιάμεσα παρεμβάλλονται κεφάλαια με αυτοβιογραφικά στιγμιότυπα του συγγραφεα εκείνη την εποχή. Επίσης παρεμβάλλονται κεφάλαια με αποκόμματα εφημερίδων, στίχους τραγουδιών και ποιημάτων, ειδήσεις πολιτικές και κοινωνικές που δίνουν με λίγα λόγια το στίγμα της εποχής. Επιπλέον γίνεται αναφορά σε ξεχωριστά κεφάλαια για κάποιες περισσότερο ή λιγότερο γνωστές μορφές της εποχής (π.χ Τόμας Έντισον). Και οι τρεις αυτές παρεμβολές (η αυτοβιογραφία, οι ειδήσεις και τα ιστορικά πρόσωπα) βοηθούν πολύ στην οικονομία του λόγου αφού προϊδεάζουν τον αναγνώστη για το περιβάλλον στο οποίο θα κινηθούν οι κεντρικοί χαρακτήρες λίγες σελίδες αργότερα. Τέλος πρέπει να πω ότι η συγκεκριμένη έκδοση είναι εξαιρετική με τις σημειώσεις στο τέλος(δυστυχώς αλλά και αναγκαστικά) του βιβλίου να πολύ λεπτομερείς, επιμορφωτικές και απαραίτητες για την κατανόηση της εποχής.

Another great writer unread by Me until I'm 77. So, I'm waiting anxiously for the Pima County Library to email me with an invitation to pick up my reserved copy of Nineteen Nineteen. Then The Big Money for the trifecta!