Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter by Mario Vargas Llosa

Aunt Julia went out every day to have lunch or tea with one or another of her many suitors, but she saved her evenings for me. We spent them at the movies, as a matter of fact, sitting in one of the very last rows at the back, where (especially if it was a terrible film) we could kiss without bothering the other spectators and without running the risk of somebody recognizing us. Our relationship had soon stabilized at some amorphous stage; it was situated at some indefinable point between the opposed categories of being sweethearts and being lovers. This was a subject that cropped up  constantly in our conversations. We shared certain of the classic traits of lovers--secretiveness, the shared fear of being discovered, the feeling that we were taking great risks--but we were lovers spiritually, not materially, because we didn't make love (and, as Javier was later shocked to learn, we didn't even "feel each other up").

Mario, the narrator of Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, falls in love with his Aunt Julia, and I am obligated before going any further to point out that Julia is his aunt by marriage, recently divorced, so we're not talking about incest. The pair are driven together by the little-r romantic force of mutual admiration, though Mario is eighteen years old and Julia an old maid at the hideous age of thirty-two. (Vargas Llosa really did marry his aunt-by-marriage when he was nineteen and she was twenty-nine.) Their relationship is kept, of course, a secret, because they know that it will cause a furor among their family if anyone finds out. At the same time, the radio station where Mario works hires an accomplished writer of serial programs who brings the station a newfound popularity. Like Julia, who is a devotee of the programs, he is Bolivian (the relationship between the various countries of South America is one of the topics at hand here, as the scriptwriter gets in trouble over and over for sneaking in various insults to Argentines into his work).

Pedro Camacho, the scriptwriter, is the novel's high point: a tiny man who writes without ceasing nearly every minute of the day. He's monomaniacal, difficult to work with, and yet Mario admires him somewhat because he has what Mario wants: accomplishment as a writer. One day, stopping at Pedro's apartment, Mario is shown a box of costumes and wigs that Pedro uses in secret to meterse en papel, get himself into paper--a fun Spanish term I just learned that means to "get into character." But what is most interesting about the novel is that chapters about the "real story" are interleaved with stories that are clearly taken from Pedro's radio serials, gruesome stories of incest, rape, and murder that have captured the attention of Lima. These serials are half the book, and so the novel is in some ways also a collection of short stories. Many of these are fascinatingly disturbing: the serial about the doctor who discovers the incestuous relationship between two siblings on the sister's wedding day, or the one about the Jehovah's Witness accused of rape who threatens to cut off his genitals to absolve himself of a rape. In true radio serial fashion, these stories tend to end on a "tune in next time" cliffhanger.

But the pace of the work is too much even for Pedro, who begins to lose it, mixing up the various characters in his serials. Suddenly, a character who was killed in another serial comes back again in a new one, transformed into a doctor or a priest, or a character who has been named Lituma has suddenly borrowed the name of Quinteros. The effect is that the stories begin to bleed together into one. They become increasingly violent, not just on the scale of pulp, but on the scale of disaster: huge fires, collapsing football stadiums, that murder off characters by the dozen just for them to be put through the ringer in next week's episode. It's funny, the story of Mario and Julia unfolds very staidly and straightforwardly next to the serials. Is their romance like the romances of fiction? Or is it perhaps not complicated enough? Whatever else is true, there's a suggestion that Mario's devotion to Julia above all else is a sign that he'll never be able to reproduce the passion of Pedro, who cares about nothing else beside his art, and that's both a good and bad thing.

With the addition of Peru, my "Countries Read" list is up to 113! Additionally, with the addition of Vargas Llosa, I've now read 57 of 128 Nobel Prize in Literature laureates.

Telex from Cuba by Rachel Kushner

Maybe we should have seen it coming. It takes a while to put things together. You can't always do it while it's happening to you. A week before the fire started, the rebels closed down the main highway east of Las Tunas. That meant they had control of Oriente, so much of which was owned by Americans. Us, and the American government, which ran the Nicaro nickel mine. Batista was persona non grata with the Cubans, and we were caught in the middle. Fidel and Raul, these were local boys, and I think Daddy was hoping he could reason with them.

Rachel Kushner's debut novel Telex from Cuba captures the lives of Americans living in Cuba as the civil war broke out in the 1950s. They come from all walks of life: they're rich, like K. C. Stites, whose father runs one of the plantations of the United Fruit Company, or middle-class, like Everly Lederer, whose father comes down to serve as a manager there. Even the lower classes are able to get in on the exploitation of Cuba's resources, like Allain Hatch, who finds a haven in Cuba away from the laws of the United States, where he's wanted for a killing. To these characters Kushner adds a real-life French arms runner named La Maziere, and a beautiful prostitute--conspicuously named "Rachel K"--who is reputed to be Batista's favorite, but who is really in league with Maziere and the rebels. All of these characters have their role to play in the revolution, whether rebel or victim, and all have their lives upended by the sea change that transforms Cuba.

Telex from Cuba is scrupulously researched, finely detailed, and boring. I thought it bore the hallmarks of a debut novelist's pitfalls: there's too much research, for one, not sifted through enough to give a singular impression. There are too many characters and too many points-of-view: K. C. gives a first person account, rife with patrician resentment at the loss of his birthright, but Everly, La Maziere, and many others get their turn in the third person limited seat, including about a dozen white-collar Americans and their wives whose roles in the novel I found difficult to get straight. Any one of these might have made a good novel--I thought this particularly about the irony in K. C.'s first person narration--but on the whole, they turn into a real mash. Things that ought to be huge, like the Stites' family's son Del joining the rebels, recede into the background in favor of images and symbols of dubious importance, like an abandoned Pullman railway car.

I rather enjoyed The Mars Room, which pulls some of the same point of view tricks, but without feeling overstuffed or encouraging impatience. Maybe the fact that it's mostly set in prison--a naturally confining space--helped. But this one didn't work for me.

Henry VIII by William Shakespeare

WOLSEY

This is the state of man. Today he puts forth
The tender leaves of hopes; tomorrow blossoms,
And bears his blushing honours thick upon him;
The third day comes a frost, a killing frost,
And when he thinks, good easy man, full surely
His greatness is a-ripening, nips his root,
And then he falls, I do. I have ventured,
Like little wanton boys that swim on bladders,
This many summers in a sea of glory,
But far beyond my depth.

So let's start by saying that Henry VIII is not very good. It really has two claims to fame among Shakespeare's play: one, it has more stage directions than any other. These are mostly descriptions of kingly processions and pomp, and not the fun kind about being chased by bears. Two, it was long controversially argued, and now widely accepted, that Henry VIII is a collaboration between Shakespeare and his contemporary John Fletcher. This composite composition helps to explain why the play is often seen as a kind of incoherent mash of parts, even by contemporary-ish observers like Samuel Pepys.

I actually found Henry VIII to be fairly coherent and unified as a play. It read to me as being about the way that the elite are locked into a cycle of rise and fall, from Henry's scheming cardinal Wolsey to Queen Katherine (of Aragon), at one moment on top of the world, and the next exiled or sentenced to death. The king himself is depicted as being rather weak and fickle, led by Wolsey as much as he is his lust for the woman called here "Anne Bullen." Wolsey engineers the downfall of the Duke of Buckingham, and later sits in judgment of Katherine, who has been suspicious of his influence, but later on, Wolsey himself--caught writing to the Pope in opposition to the king's marriage to Anne--is the meteor who falls.

As a result, the best parts of Henry VIII seemed to me to be those moments where a character speaks elegiacally about their own downfall and doom. I liked Katherine's incensed rejoinders to Wolsey:

Sir,
I am about to weep; but, thinking that
We are queen, or long have dreamed so, certain
The daughter of a king, my drops of tears
I'll turn to sparks of fire.

And even Wolsey's sudden realization that his life of glory is over:

I have touched the highest point of all my greatness,
And from that full meridian of my glory
I haste now to my setting. I shall fall
Like a bright exhalation in the evening,
And no man see more.

Anne speaks wisely to her maid when she says, ignorant of the heights to which she is about to be raised, that "'tis better to be lowly born / And range with humble livers in content / Than to be perked up in a glistering grief / And wear a golden sorrow." I expect that those lines resonated quite loudly with Shakespeare's audience, who were not all that far removed from Anne's execution. And yet, the play must hedge a little on the wisdom of Henry and Anne's union, because it produced the legendary Elizabeth (who had died and been succeeded by James I by the time of Henry VIII's performance), who gets held up and prophesied over in a bit that felt like pure propaganda. One can only imagine what James' court thought, though, of these depictions of great people doomed to fall.

Sun City by Tove Jansson

There are more hairdressers in St. Petersburg than anywhere else in the country, and they are specialists at creating airy little puffs of thin white hair. Hundreds of old ladies stroll beneath the palm trees with white curls covering their heads. There are fewer gentleman, however. In the guesthouses, they all have their own rooms, or they share with another person--some of them for only a short time in the even, healthful climate, but most of them for as long as they have left. No one is sick, that is, not in the normal sense of sick in bed. Such matters are attended to incredibly swiftly by ambulances that never sound their sirens. There are lots of squirrels in the trees, not to mention the birds, and all these animals are tame to the point of impudence. A lot of stores carry hearing aids and other therapeutic devices. Signs in clear, bright colors announce immediate blood pressure checks on every block and offer all sorts of information about things such as pensions, cremation, and legal problems. In addition, the shops have put a lot of thought into offering a wide selection of knitting patterns, yarns, games, craft materials, and the like, and their customers can be sure of a friendly and helpful reception.

The name of the retirement home at the center of Tove Jansson's novel Sun City is utterly perfect: Friendship's Rest. The old people who fill it, this retirement home in St. Petersburg, Florida--still, somehow, nearly fifty years later, the epicenter of America's old people--are sometimes friends, and sometimes at rest, but sometimes they hate each other. Eager-to-please Evelyn Peabody finds a great deal of catharsis in finally letting herself hate the bitter Catherine Frey. Thompson--one of the retirement home's few men--hates everyone more or less, but especially the gardener, on whom he loves to play cruel tricks. He also hates his wife, who shows up one day at Friendship's Rest wondering where he's been for the last twenty years. Rebecca Rubinstein, who cruises through the home like a Borscht Belt Battleship, looks down at them all with a sense of wry bemusement. Even the happy-go-lucky residents, like Hannah Higgins, who seems content to spend her final days with a pair of knitting needles in hand, follow a strict hierarchy of arrangement of veranda rocking chairs that adumbrates all the social relations at Friendship's Rest. The novel has a lot to say about what it's like to be in the last years of your life, and one such message is that you most certainly do not outgrow pettiness and resentment.

I loved Sun City. It felt like a novel that someone wrote specifically for me. And though I have loved Tove Jansson's books before, especially the lovely Summer Book, I never would have expected this particular book from her. It reminded me most of Penelope Fitzgerald: comic and insightful, with a large and slightly absurd cast of characters. Most of them, of course, are old people, but the novel has exactly two young people: "Bounty Joe," a motorcycle-driving Jesus Freak hippie who works as an ersatz swashbuckler at the HMS Bounty, a "movie ship" in St. Petersburg harbor, and his girlfriend, Linda, Friendship Rest's Mexican housekeeper. Joe is waiting for a letter to come from another group of Jesus Freaks that will summon him in the case of, I guess, Jesus Christ's return, and as the letter keeps not coming, he grows increasingly frustrated and bitter. Linda is sweet, and sort of simple-wise, and her philosophy of finding beauty in each moment contrasts with Joe's frustrated millenarianism. It struck me that, in the sense that he is waiting for an imminent world to the end, Joe is both an interesting variation on and contradiction of the old people at Friendship's Rest: they are all waiting for an end that's just around the corner, but Joe seems to think that he will be spared the full progression of life that is the inheritance of every fortunate person.

"Death is young," Peabody remarks cryptically. She is watching a young boys' chorus: "In an irrational moment she got the idea that they were harbingers of death, that they were like death itself, relentless, incomprehensible, and beautiful." Beautiful!? This sort of shocking insight, the surprising word, is the kind of thing that reminds me of Fitzgerald and one of the reasons that I found the book so satisfying. No doubt Thomas Teal's translation from Swedish has a lot to do with the book's impact as well. It's not a perfect novel where all the different threads are brought cleanly and elegantly together; in fact, the ending is kind of a mess: the residents of Friendship's Rest end up at one of Central Florida's freshwater springs at the same time that Bounty Joe and Linda are also there on a long-awaited excursion. It's a curated experience, but the Florida jungle lurks at the margins, full of shadows and monkeys. The residents get loose and lost, and the whole thing is sort of a mess, and when it was over I thought, well, what was the point of all that? But I liked the book a little bit better for that, too, for the way it denies a straightforwardly legible resolution. Because what does the end of one's life ever resolve?

Zeno's Conscience by Italo Svevo

In this city, after the outbreak of the war, we are more bored than ever, and, as a substitute for psychoanalysis, I have returned to my beloved papers. For a year I hadn't written a word; in this, as in everything else, obeying the doctor, who commanded that during my therapy I was to reflect only when I was with him, because unsupervised reflection would reinforce the breaks that inhibited my sincerity, my relaxation. But now I find myself unbalanced and sicker than ever, and, through writing, I believe I will purge myself of the sickness more easily than through my therapy. At least I am sure that this is the true system for restoring importance to a past no longer painful, and the dispelling the dreary present more quickly.

Zeno Cosini, an aging businessman in postwar Italy, finds himself in the analyst's chair. He has a deep distrust of the analyst, and is determined to work through his "conscience" on his own, by writing the tome in our hands known as Zeno's Conscience. The story begins with the death of his father and moves through Zeno's association with the well-to-do Malfenti family, whose patriarch takes Zeno in as a kind of surrogate son. Malfenti has only daughters, and it's from these daughters that Zeno feels he must take his choice of a wife: he is deeply in love with the beautiful but cold Ada, and when she spurns him, he turns to the studious Alberta, then a third, Anna, but they spurn him, too, and he turns with despair to Augusta, the plainest of the four, who has nurtured a crush on Zeno for a long time. She understands that he does not love her, but she accepts, believing she will make a good wife--and she does. This picture of a "good marriage" makes Zeno's Conscience rather unique, even as Zeno undertakes a rather pathetic affair with an amateur opera singer.

I really enjoyed Zeno's Conscience, though I fear that I read it too slowly to have much interesting to say about it. It's interesting to see a book about Freudian analysis from 1923, when it was still in its relative infancy; the novel moves very naturalistically and has little of the qualities we might associate with fragmented modernism in a Freudian mode. I think what I liked best about it is how it captures Zeno as a character who acts from impulse and id even when he knows that his actions are wrong or unlikely to lead to happiness; Svevo captures the lengths we will go through to capture the attentions of a member of the opposite sex we know will never really want us in return, even in the face of evidence that we can see and understand clearly. I've heard Zeno called an "unreliable narrator," but I don't know that that phrase really captures what's going on; the later Zeno who is writing understands himself quite well, even as the Zeno of the time doesn't. We share that quality with the writing Zeno, looking back at foolish actions with the knowledge of better judgment.

Zeno strikes up a business relationship with Guido, the Argentinean whom Ada marries. His former love for Ada colors the relationship between Zeno, Guido, and the Malfentis, with many resulting misunderstandings, but Guido and Zeno actually become rather close friends. When Guido becomes a little too addicted to speculating on the stock market, the Malfentis turn to Zeno to help save him, and Zeno is cast suddenly in the position of being the responsible and soberly judging one. Guido is well-meaning and naive, and his speculation is the beginning of a horrible and tragic downfall. One thing that I got from his chapter is a sense that Guido is the one, more than Zeno, who might have benefitted from analysis, that Zeno may not always understand himself with clarity and precision, but that Guido is the true master of repression and foolish self-denial. The ending of Guido's story is, as the rest of the novel is, both deeply sad and somehow riotously funny, as when (spoiler alert) Zeno ends up missing Guido's funeral because he follows the wrong procession to the wrong cemetery.

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

'I wouldn't be you for a kingdom, then!' Catherine declared emphatically -- and she seemed to speak sincerely. 'Nelly, help me to convince her of her madness. Tell her what Heathcliff is -- an unreclaimed creature, without refinement -- without cultivation; an arid wilderness of furze and whinstone. I'd have soon put that little canary into the park on a winter's day as recommend you to bestow your heart on him! It's deplorable ignorance of his character, child, and nothing else, which makes that dream enter your head. Pray don't imagine that he conceals depths of benevolence and affection beneath a stern exterior. He's not a rough diamond -- a pearl-containing oyster of a rustic; he's a fierce, pitiless, wolfish man.'

It's been fourteen long years since I last touched Wuthering Heights. I decided to reread it in advance of the new adaptation, whose trailer makes it look like a an upstairs-downstairs forbidden sex romp. Maybe it'll be good (I doubt it), but one thing it isn't is sexy. In fact, the stormy love between Heathcliff and Catherine seems to me, even moreso on this reading, to be entirely sexless. Cathy and Heathcliff both describe themselves, again and again, as the same soul occupying two different bodies, which is to say that embodiment is, in Wuthering Heights, a kind of challenge or trap. It's no wonder, perhaps, that people are always getting sick or injured and dying before their time, starting with Hindley's wife/Hareton's mother and continuing all the way to, spoiler alert, Heathcliff himself. The closest that Heathcliff gets to Catherine physically seems to me to be the moment that he digs up her grave to embrace her and accidentally, as he says, releases her ghost.

This disembodiment, perhaps, explains why Catherine is so willing to overlook, as no one else seems to be, Heathcliff's racial coloring and ambiguous heritage. You often hear people say that Heathcliff is supposed to be Black (making Jacob Elordi all wrong for the part), but it's clear to me that Heathcliff's background is meant to be much murkier than that; part of his tragedy is that he is racially ambiguous and thus there is no social place for him at Wuthering Heights, Thrushcross Grange, or anywhere else. He's described as Romani or a "Lascar," but this ambivalence is underlined by the way in which the elder Earnshaw shows up with him in tow from a trip to London as if he's simply materialized; no explanation is given. Nature vs. nurture is an unsettled question in Wuthering Heights: is Heathcliff's savageness meant to be racially constituted? Or does the novel suggest that he is a nasty piece of work because he's othered by the vindictive Hindley? Heathcliff's viciousness is, I feel strongly, too overwhelming to be the product of socialization; I trust Catherine when she says there is no oyster inside the pearl. Then again, perhaps that viciousness is natural, and thus preferable to the viciousness of someone like Hindley, dolled up and justified by his greater social standing. And on top of that, Heathcliff's little experiment turning Hindley's son Hareton into a kind of carbon copy of himself--brutish and resentful--seems so successful, at least until the coda, that perhaps the book really does believe that one is primarily the product of their social environment.

I don't think this book was as pleasurable for me the second time around, mostly just because I knew what was coming--it is a book that thrives on melodrama and shock, of the best kind--but I remain in awe of it. It's really a book that pulls no punches; people say the most out of pocket shit to each other on every page. It's almost like watching a really pulpy reality TV show. What I did come away with on this re-read was an appreciation for the second half, which I expect to be more or less cut out of the movie. Heathcliff's desire for vengeance is so strong, like his love, that it survives even Hindley, his tormentor: what is the point, I wondered this time, of pursuing Hindley's heir and house after Hindley himself has been drinking himself to a miserable death for more than a decade? I found myself interested now in the story of Cathy, Hareton, and Linton, who are all trying desperately to escape the shape that the despot Heathcliff would pound them into. It seemed to me this time around that this is where the "real" story lies, despite the popular image of the novel as consisting mainly of Heathcliff and Catherine's romance. By the end, young Cathy and Hareton seem like true survivors of a kind of natural storm that killed just about everyone else, and it's their romance that seems like a normal human one.

The Penultimate Truth by Philip K. Dick

Because all the Yance-men had this streak. They were selfish; they had made the world into their deer park at the expense of the millions of tankers below; it was wrong and they knew it and they felt guilt--not quite enough guilt to cause them to knock of Brose and let the tankers up, but enough guilt to make their late evenings a thrashing agony of loneliness, emptiness, and their nights impossible.

When Nicolas St. James decides to go to the surface in search for an artificial pancreas for a friend, he knows it might be a suicide mission. If the robot "leadies" fighting the decades-long war between the United States and the Soviet Union don't kill him, the radiation might, or one any number of sinister diseases with names like the Bag Plague and the Shrink Stink. But what he finds is not a war-ravaged Earth, but an expanse of enormous, cultivated "demesnes," each belonging to a member of the world's ruling elite. These elite keep the surface population low--and thus hold on to their demesnes--by concocting a fictional war waged by a fictional president, a robot named Talbot Yancey. Yancey's speeches are written by a cabal of "Yance-men" who are among the surface world's most powerful.

The Penultimate Truth is a kind of riff on the ideas of "Those Who Walked Away from Omelas": prosperity, at its heart, depends on the repression of the subaltern, who are often ruled not merely by violence but by subterfuge and propaganda. But burying the subaltern below ground cannot prevent the rifts of hierarchy from straining the society of the elite. The Yance-men are administered by Stanton Brose, an eighty-year old whose physical grotesqueness comes from his firm control over the continent's store of artificial organs. The main plot of The Penultimate Truth, in fact, concerns intrigue between Brose and a pair of Yance-men named Joseph Adams and David Lantano who may or may not be hatching a plan to kill Brose. Meanwhile, the grip they have on those below proves very vulnerable. Besides St. James, there are thousands of others who have emerged above ground, being stashed away in giant apartment-style prisons, and happy enough to live in a limbo between the underground tanks and true freedom--for now.

There's much that's familiar in The Penultimate Truth: the power of propaganda, for instance, and the sense that what appears to be the real world is only the topmost of a layer of subterfuges that may have no real bottom. But something else that interested me about the novel, which I don't think I've seen before in Dick, is the way that it acts as a metaphor for the frontier and the settlement of the West. The Yance-men want to convince themselves that their claims (and they literally do claim them, like Oklahoma sooners, by being first into a particular "hot spot") are terra nullius, but they know that thousands toil beneath their beds, and they're tortured by this. St. James emerges into Lantano's demesne near what was once Cheyenne, Wyoming; a significant plot point involves the planting of spurious artifacts in Utah's "Dixie" region; the national government is operated outside of Estes Park in Colorado. Even Adams' demesne in foggy California suggests that this is a novel of the West.

Sort-of-significant spoiler here: one character, whose darker skin is thought to be the effects of radiation poisoning, turns out to be an Indian. Only St. James perceives it, not having known (as the surface-dwellers know) that the Indians were all wiped out in the war. And not only this, but the character is a veteran of the earliest Indian Wars on the American continent, having prolonged his life to six hundred years through the use of a complex time-travel device. (Here Dick makes a really simple mistake, identifying the man as a Cherokee, despite describing him as being part of a "war party" in Utah--he ought to be, like, Cheyenne--or is this, too, a half-truth?) Of course, a mistaken belief that Native Americans were wiped out, or were soon to be, sustained the belief in an open West there for the taking. Dick invests the Native man with incredible secret power, and by doing so, symbolically reverses familiar narratives about disappearance and conquest.

This one was really good, not perhaps in the top tier of Dick's work, but among his best pure genre fiction. Reading Dick, really reading him, I think, can only produce awe: he produced a couple of these books every year, and though they recycle many of the same concepts again and again, like "precogs," they are so endlessly inventive, and even the prose is of surprisingly literary quality. I don't think anyone in 20th century America really elevated genre work to literature the way he did, and the fact that no one ever talks about him that way is proof of how seamlessly he melded the two.

River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West by Rebecca Solnit

Cinema can be imagined as a hybrid of railroad and photography, an outgrowth of those two definitive nineteenth century inventions, the technologies Stanford and Muybridge represented, in which case fatherhood is too simple a metaphor for it. After all, zootropes, photography, and magic lanterns are also key aspects of it, and Muybridge only initiated and did not complete the invention of cinema. The railroad had in so many ways changed the real landscape and the human experience of it, had changed the perception of time and space and the nature of vision and embodiment. The sight out the railroad window had prepared viewers for the kind of vision that cinema would make ordinary; it had adjusted people to a pure visual experience stripped of smell, sound, threat, tactility, and adjusted them to a new speed of encounter, the world rushing by the windows; had taken them farther into that world than they would have ever gone before; broadening many horizons at the same time it made the world itself a theater of sorts, a spectacle.

The movies, it can be argued, were born with a photographer named Eadweard Muybridge took a snapshot of a horse. Under the patronage of California railroad magnate Leland Stanford, Muybridge was trying to discern what happened when a horse galloped. Equestrians and scientists couldn't even agree at the time whether a horse always had one hoof on the ground or not. Muybridge's innovations allowed for a photograph to be taken with an exposure time short enough to capture the horse mid-stride. (It turns out that a horse does not have a hoof on the ground at all times.) As a revolution in sight, this was huge; as Solnit points out in her book River of Shadows, the nation's most accomplished painters of horses had to go back and rethink all the work of their careers. But more was to come, because when Muybridge put such snapshots together later in a sequence, the "motion picture" was born.

I found Solnit's biography of Muybridge to be incredibly fascinating. She captures some of what has made Muybridge himself a subject of fascination: he was an English weirdo who changed his name a half-dozen times and ended up killing his wife's lover in cold blood. But the strength of the book is in the way Solnit connects Muybridge's innovations to the changing technological landscape of the Western United States and the world as a whole. The motion picture, she shows, is deeply connected to the way that the railroad--that technology pioneered by Leland Stanford--transformed the lives of Americans. It's true, there's something about looking out a railroad window that is replicated in the experience of the frames being pulled hastily over the projector. But more convincingly, Solnit connects both technologies to the nineteenth century attempt to "annihilate space and time," to break down the barriers that separated people by time and distance.

Muybridge's achievements weren't only in motion photography; he was also known for pioneering large-scale landscape and cityscape photography, taking, for example, some of the earliest panorama shots of the city of San Francisco. Solnit takes these in, too, connecting Muybridge's time photographing the Modoc War in northern California to the rapidly shifting face of the West. (I chuckled a little at the academic attitude toward the word technology, which takes in both horses and the "Ghost Dance" of the nineteenth century West, and which certainly made making these connections easier.) Solnit does a good job, too, of making the case that Muybridge shows the centrality of California in the emergence of the modern world. It's the reason the railroads were built, after all, and Muybridge was at the center of the innovations by which California changed the world: Hollywood and Silicon Valley.

I don't know much about Solnit; I associate her with the book Men Explain Things to Me and a cultural flashpoint over stuff like "mansplaining." This book is, I'm pretty sure, much earlier, and perhaps a relic of a time when Solnit was less of a well-known name, but I thought it was really insightful and erudite, and I can easily imagine why such an intelligent and thoughtful writer would bristle at being spoken down to by male chauvinists. Really enjoyed this one.

Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner

You can plan all you want to. You can lie in your morning bed and fill whole notebooks with schemes and intentions. But within a single afternoon, within hours or minutes, everything you plan and everything you have fought to make yourself can be undone as a slug is undone when salt is poured on him. And right up to the moment when you find yourself dissolving into foam you can still believe you are doing fine.

Larry and Sally Morgan return after many years to the Vermont cabin where they once spent their happiest moments. Their old friend, Charity Lang, is dying, with her husband Sid at her side. Charity's impending death promises an end to a lifelong friendship between the foursome, fused at first in the crucible of the University of Wisconsin, where Larry and Sid were professors of literature. After losing their jobs in a flurry of firings during World War II, rich Sid's Vermont property was offered as a safe haven to the poorer Morgans. An idea of a life was constructed there, in which the Langs might act as patron to their friends, but the idyll proved to be short-lived, as Sally's sudden polio whisked them away. Now, as Charity is dying, it is an occasion for narrator Larry to look back on a beautiful friendship that never quite made as large a part in anyone's life as they would have liked.

I found the first half or so of Crossing to Safety terrifically boring. We are asked to believe that these two couples are amazed and awe-inspired by what they find in each other, but outside of a clear kind of sympathy, it was never independently clear to me that any of them was quite worth the hearts in the eyes or the dropped jaws or what have you. And the setting of the academy of the 1940's, when someone like Larry could receive a check equivalent to a quarter of his yearly salary for writing a single short story and mailing it off to the Atlantic, made the book feel sort of self-consciously "literary" in a way that people tend to make fun of. (Stoner, anyone?)

But I thought it became more interesting when the cracks started to show in the friends' relationship: we're told that Sid nurses a crush on Sally, for one. More than this, I was interested in the relationship between Sid and Charity: he sees himself as a poet but she pressures him into a narrow view of success, academic success, something at which he is manifestly less talented and less passionate about. Larry's brief success as a writer activates Sid's jealousy, and more than that, his resentment toward Charity. There's a great and telling scene where the friends go hiking and Charity is so slavishly devoted to the counsel in her guidebook that she nearly kills them with undercooked chicken. (When it says "three minutes on one side," everyone points out to the stubborn charity, it means hamburger, not poultry.) Charity even tries to die "by the book," sending Sid away at the last minute and "slipping away" (I guess this means suicide?) so that she might die cleanly, without burdening anyone. Of course, this isn't what Sid wants--he wants to be by his wife's side--but even at the end of their lives, the differences between the two seem intractable.

I don't think I'd recommend this one. It has some nice elements to it, but I found the whole thing a little tweedy and twee, and it often felt that the book was too insistent, and consequently not persuasive enough, about the power of the foursome's friendship.