Fifty Books Project 2012

The Light Fantastic by Terry Pratchett

2012-01-29T21:03:00.002-05:00

“Rincewind, all the shops have been smashed open. There were a whole bunch of people across the street helping themselves to musical instruments, can you believe that?”

“Yeah,” said Rincewind, picking up a knife and testing its blade thoughtfully, “Luters, I suspect.”

It’s always a challenge to write decent reviews of light literature. It's easy to think of something to write about Ulysses, Othello, or Malcolm X, but what can be said about fluff, the sort of books that aren’t guilty pleasures, exactly, but which occupy a place in between real literature (Hamlet) and trash (Twilight)? I tend to read Discworld or John Grisham as palette cleansers after something particularly challenging, but it’s not exactly fair to demote such books to being simply trifles. After all, reading is a pleasurable, as well as mentally stimulating activity, and these books offer their own pleasures. If you enjoy reading high literature at all times, by all means, do it; I’ll take to occasional potboiler or adventure to mix things up.

Of course, low literature has enjoyed something of a renaissance in recent years, with authors like David Foster Wallace, Michael Chabon, Neil Gaiman, and even Thomas Pynchon taking cues from less lofty genres, but, while these and many other authors have genuine affection for the material they homage and reference, it’s hard not to read a little postmodern irony into their genre exercises—after all, something like Pynchon’s Inherent Vice might nod toward Carl Hiassen and Donald Westlake, but could hardly be mistaken for one of their books.

So, that said, The Light Fantastic is a Discworld book, the second, and it’s worlds better than the first, The Colour of Magic, in that it actually a) has a plot, rather than feeling like a series of comical vignettes strung together and b) feels like a Discworld book tonally, in spite of still being embryonic in the bigger scheme of things. It’s fast-moving, short, and introduces many of the characters that populate the later books. Aside from that, I don’t have a lot to say about it. It’s not particularly satirical, except when satirizing fantasy literature itself, and it’s not as funny or as well-plotted as the later books, but I enjoyed reading it, as I always enjoy Pratchett’s novels. It may be pulp, but it’s my pulp.

Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention by Manning Marable

2012-01-27T13:44:00.012-05:00

There are two basic approaches to biographies. The first is the "Great Man," the tome, the multi-volume approach. The idea behind this approach is that readers will be better suited to understand the life of a person if they have all the facts--all the facts. The second model is a more focused approach. Gone are the superfluous details. Gone are the tangents that often lead readers into the proverbial weeds. What remains is a carefully crafted story of a life.

Both of these models serve a purpose. And it is true that the streamlined biographies frequently rely on the tomes that have come before them. They also often highlight a certain aspect--albeit usually rather broad--of a person's life. This is the case with Manning Marable's excellent Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention.

In 1988, Marable was teaching a course in African-American politics that included The Autobiography of Malcolm X. He states, "A close reading of the text revealed numerous inconsistencies, errors, and fictive characters at odds with Malcolm's actual life." Marable didn't begin working on this book in earnest until the early 2000s. According to Marable, his initial breakthrough came when he "finally realized that critical deconstruction of the Autobiography held the key to reinterpreting Malcolm's life." The Malcolm X Project began in 2001 at Columbia University. At one point, more than twenty graduate and undergraduate students were employed by the Malcolm X Project, writing hundreds of profiles and abstracts of important individuals, institutions, and groups that were mentioned in the Autobiography. Much of there work is available at http://ccnmtl.columbia.edu/projects/mmt/malcolmx and the subsequent more multimedia-rich website http://mxp.manningmarable.com.

The next major element in the writing of this biography was the construction of a detailed chronological grid of Malcolm X's life. Each entry on this grid would indicate the source or sources of the information. It took Marable and his team of historians six years to construct the massive chronology that would form the foundation for this biography.

Marable's writing is clear and straightforward, but very readable. He includes a great amount of detail about Malcolm's life without getting in to the aforementioned weeds. The parts I enjoyed the most were those that dealt with the periods in Malcolm's life that the Autobiography glossed over or skipped altogether. I particularly enjoyed reading about the odd beliefs and historical traditions of the Nation of Islam and the extremely complicated relationship between Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad. Marable handles the convoluted events surrounding Malcolm's death exceptionally well.

I would recommend this book to anyone. Marable and his team of researchers do an excellent job reconstructing and portraying the life of one of America's most enigmatic political and cultural figures. If you don't think you want to commit the time to reading this book, I seriously recommend the nine-page epilogue "Reflections on a Revolutionary Vision."

For further reading on the relationship between Malcom X, Elijah Muhammad, Muhammad Ali, I recommend Gerald Early's "Muhammad Ali as Third World Hero" in his book This is Where I Came In.

Coriolanus by William Shakespeare

2012-01-25T21:07:00.004-05:00

Let me have war, say I. It exceeds peace as far as day does night. It's sprightly, waking, audible, and full of vent. Peace is a very apoplexy, lethargy; mulled, deaf, sleepy, insensible; a getter of more bastard children than war's a destroyer of men.

Coriolanus (expertly recounted by Brent here) begins as a political parable and mutates into something much stranger and more horrifying. From the very first scene Caius Martius (later Coriolanus) is at odds with the Roman plebeians, his illustrious military service to Rome overshadowed by his open disdain for common folk. Much of Coriolanus' hatred is bitterly prejudicial ("Bid them wash their faces / And keep their teeth clean," he says after being cajoled into eliciting their support for his consulship). And yet, his tirades against flattery still seem fresh and incisive in the era of the 24-hour media campaign:

CORIOLANUS: I will, sir, flatter my sworn brother, the people, to earn a dearer estimation of them. 'Tis a condition they account gentle; and since the wisdom of their choice is rather to have my hat than my heart, I will practice the insinuating nod and be off to them most counterfeitly.

He says he will, but he will not; he cannot; he simply isn't capable. The closest he can come to glad-handing the people is to say that he will, and in prose, rather than the iambic pentameter reserved for conversing with patricians. As grotesque as Coriolanus is, his unwillingness to dissemble, and the sharp contrast between him and the duplicitous tribunes that plot his downfall, Sicinius and Brutus, are what maintain our sympathy toward him.

When the tribunes successfully rouse the people into exiling Coriolanus, he joins forces with the Volscian general Aufidius, whom he had formerly routed in the name of Rome, and turns to attack his native city. I have to respectfully disagree with Brent that Aufidius is not "fleshed out;" though he has little stage time his relationship with Coriolanus is fascinating. I usually don't fall in for critical theories that see homoeroticism everywhere, but there is no doubt in my mind that Aufidius' obsession with Coriolanus is sexually charged:

AUFIDIUS: Let me twine
Mine arms about thy body, whereagainst
My grained ash an hundred times hath broke,
And scarred the moon with splinters...
Know thou first,
I loved the maid I married; never man
Sighed truer breath. But that I see thee here,
Thou noble thing, more dances my rapt heart
Than when I first my wedded mistress saw
Bestride my threshold.

Coriolanus, for his part, says of Aufidius, "And were I any thing but what I am, / I would wish to be only he." But once allied with his enemy, Coriolanus quickly forgets his former regard and retreats into himself. On the brink of exile, he rails that "There is a world elsewhere," but Coriolanus deems himself too large, too limitless, to admit any one or thing into his own private world. At the head of the Volscian army, he seems to have transformed into something superhuman, a terror unbound to the world:

He was a kind of nothing, titleless,
Till he had forged himself a name o' th' fire
Of burning Rome.

These words are Cominius', the current consul and Coriolanus' former friend. Brilliantly, Shakespeare establishes the report of the march on Rome before the march itself, in a dialogue between Cominius and Coriolanus' mentor Menenius that sounds like the conversation between two men on death row, or the same having arrived together at the gates of Hell. "If he could burn us all into one coal," says Menenius to the tribunes, "We have deserved it." The theme of their exchange is that Coriolanus, no coward before, has become all the more frightening having shaken off the ties of family, friendship, and state:

COMINIUS: I offered to awaken his regard
For's private friends. His answer to me was
He could not stay to pick them in a pile
Of noisome, musty chaff. He said 'twas folly,
For one poor grain or two, to leave unburnt
And still to nose th' offense.

MENENIUS: For one poor grain or two?
I am one of those! His mother, wife, his child,
And this brave fellow too, we are the grains.

As his mother, Volumnia, sallies forth from the city walls to beg for mercy, Coriolanus himself echoes this, saying, "I'll never / Be such a gosling to obey instinct, but stand / As if a man were author of himself / And knew no other kin."

Volumnia is a grotesque, seen in the opening act bragging about sending her son to war and thanking the gods for his wounds. At the end, her plea for mercy begins sympathetically but becomes increasingly desperate and unpleasant, parodying her former praise of an honorable death. Coriolanus breaks down and relents, though his words suggest he knows that to do so will mean the undoing of both his honor and his life:

O mother, mother!
What have you done? Behold, the heavens do ope,
The gods look down, and this unnatural scene
They laugh at. O my mother, mother! O!
You have won a happy victory to Rome;
But for your son--believe it, O believe it!--
Most dangerously you have with him prevailed,
If not most mortal to him.

And indeed, Coriolanus, returning empty-handed from Rome, is killed by the people of Corioles, the city he had sacked single-handedly and from which he had taken his name.

This is the final irony of Coriolanus: Convinced he needs no one but his self, he tries to fashion himself into a sort of ronin, loosed from any relationship or deed that might seek to define him, to become the "author of himself." But Coriolanus is not Hamlet and he has no inner wellspring from which to draw. He can cast off "Caius Martius," the name his mother gave him, but in the end he is his mother's son. Even the name "Coriolanus," which Aufidius denies him on the precipice of his murder, anchors him to a place outside of himself.

Not knowing that Coriolanus' mother has begged peace of him, Menenius continues to despair, but his praise is rendered absurd: "The tartness of his face sours ripe grapes." When the myth of Coriolanus' making is undone, he is left with nothing. And though he loathes flattery, even of himself, and loathes the people for preferring his "hat" to his "heart," he fails to realize that he is more hat than heart--it is the accounting of his deeds that most defines him, more than his deeds and far more than his character. Though he disdains their speech, calling them mere "voices," without their voices he exists hardly at all.

Coriolanus by William Shakespeare

2012-01-23T19:42:00.003-05:00

His nature is too noble for the world:
He would not flatter Neptune for his trident,
Or Jove for ‘s power to thunder.

Coriolanus, by most reckonings Shakespeare’s last tragedy, is probably also his least known (Only Timon of Athens or Cymbeline could really contest it for obscurity, I think), but since there’s a new film adaption that’s been getting rave reviews, it seemed like a good time to give it a shot.

Coriolanus is a warrior, but not just any warrior. He’s more like a Shakespearean Superman, completely fearless and virtually indestructible. However, unlike Othello, maybe his closest analog, he isn’t beloved. He’s arrogant and has little regard for the opinions of those he considers beneath him, which is almost everyone, excluding his mother, Voluminia, his wife, Virgilia, and his mentor, Menenius, . Having returned from a battle with the Volsces, led by his chief rival, Tullus Arfidius, in which he more-or-less singlehandedly won the day, Coriolanus is honored by the senate, but, through the scheming of certain senators, the people are turned against him, and his day of victory becomes one of sorrow, as he is exiled from Rome. He allies himself with Arfidius, his former enemy, to destroy Rome, but, at the last minute, is convinced by his mother to broker a peace instead. Of course, this being a tragedy, he is betrayed and killed in the final pages of the play.

Coriolanus is a little different from the typical Shakespearean lead because we’re not given much of a glimpse into his psyche. There are no real soliloquies, no soul-searching, for him. He’s a man’s man, a warrior who values battle and valor for their own sake and always speaks his mind. He’s not a very sympathetic protagonist in a lot of ways, but the conspiracies that slowly destroy his life turn him into an antihero for the people—a term the patrician Coriolanus would probably detest—in the sense that, who hasn’t felt like they were under-appreciated despite clearly being the best at what they do?

There’s an interesting fascist undertone to the play as well. Coriolanus is openly contemptuous of the common folk, disparaging them for wanting to influence the workings of empire, and, while the play never explicitly states that he is correct, his tragic heroism gives his statist leanings a sheen of idealism, something for Shakespeare scholars to fight over for a while, when they get tired of arguing about sexism in Taming of the Shrew.

Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare

2012-01-21T12:19:00.003-05:00

ORSINO: If music be the food of love, play on;
Give me excess of it, that surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken and so die.
That strain again! It had a dying fall;
O, it came o'er my ear like the sweet sound
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing and giving odor. Enough; no more.
'Tis not so sweet now as it was before.

Twelfth Night opens on a panorama of grief. The twins, Viola and Sebastian, grieve for each other, thinking their sibling drowned in the shipwreck that separates them. The Countess Olivia grieves for her dead brother, refusing the Duke Orsino's advances on the grounds of mourning. Orsino grieves over Olivia's refusal, though it's not difficult to conceive that his bitterness, which wells up after he notes the "dying fall" of his musicians, may originate elsewhere.

Perhaps the comedic elements of Twelfth Night, then--Viola's disguise as Cesario, Sir Toby's antic pranking, and the arbitrary-seeming shuffling of romantic partners--suggest a darker element toward which the play's topsy-turvydom provides, if not a corrective, a brief respite. For those unfamiliar: Viola, shipwrecked on the Illyrian coast, disguises (for some reason) herself as a boy and becomes a servant of the Duke Orsino, with whom she falls madly in love. But Orsino only has eyes for Olivia, and unwittingly tortures Viola by sending her to repeatedly declare his love, a scheme which has the complicated consequence of sending Olivia head over heels for the disguised Viola.

In the B-plot, the pranksters Maria and Sir Toby Belch, along with their idiot friend Sir Andrew Aguecheek, gull the cheerless Malvolio, Olivia's steward, into believing that Olivia is in love with him. Malvolio is the only character who refuses to partake in the celebratory atmosphere of the play, and disapproves of such salubrious activities as carousing and joking, saying of Olivia's fool:

MALVOLIO: I marvel your ladyship takes delight in such a barren rascal. I saw him put down the other day with an ordinary fool that has no more brain than a stone. Look you now, he's out of his guard already. Unless you laugh and minister occasion to him, he is gagged. I protest I take these wise men that crow so at these set kind of fools no better than the fools' zanies.

OLIVIA: Oh, you are sick of self-love, Malvolio, and taste with a distempered appetite.

Malvolio, having wandered in from some other world and declared himself an enemy of laughter, probably gets what's coming to him. He is essentially cast in the play's masque against his will, convinced by a faked love letter that wearing a ridiculous get-up (yellow stockings with cross garters) and smiling ceaselessly will prove his love for Olivia. In an essentially comic play, this play would be sustained until Malvolio's utter embarrassment and possibly reform, but in Twelfth Night the prank results in Malvolio being cast into a madman's dungeon.

We might still laugh at Malvolio in this state, but our laughter is increasingly discomfiting, and undermines the relief that Twelfth Night has promised us. This is nothing compared to the sudden possibility of violence that Orsino threatens upon Viola, whom he has discerned is the object of Olivia's affection:

ORSINO: Why should I not, had I the heart to do it,
Like to th' Egyptian thief at point of death
Kill what I love?--a savage jealousy
That sometimes savors nobly. But hear me this:
Since you to nonregardance cast my faith,
And that I partly know the instrument
That screws me from my true place in your favor,
Live you the marble-breasted tyrant still.
But this your minion, whom I know you love,
And whom, by heaven I swear, I tender dearly,
Him will I tear out of that cruel eye
Where he sits crowned in his master's spite. --
Come boy, with me. My thoughts are ripe in mischief.

VIOLA: And I, most jocund, apt, and willingly,
To do you rest, a thousand deaths would die.

Suddenly, without warning, we are transported to Othello. Orsino's bloodlust is not so shocking; his overtures to Olivia have always had the air of a madman and a solipsist, but Viola's glee at the prospects of her death is one of the most unnerving moments I can think of in Shakespeare. Where are we, and what has comedy wrought? Of course, Sebastian shows up at the last minute to fix everything (conveniently becoming the new, more appropriate object of Olivia's affections) and Orsino marries the servant he was about to murder, his bride still in Cesario's breeches. But one wonders what the play might have been like if Sebastian had been just moments too late. It's true what they say, I suppose--in comedy, timing is everything.

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus by Ludwig Wittgenstein

2012-01-21T12:07:00.004-05:00

The world is everything that is the case.

I am fascinated by philosophy, even though I’m barely qualified to read it, let alone write about it. Last year, I tackled Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling; this year, inspired by David Foster Wallace’s The Broom of the System, I decided to try some Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein has a reputation for being amongst the most difficult of philosophers, second only, perhaps, to Heidigger, and I suspect this is because his philosophy works at such a base level.

Indeed, the primary contribution of the Tracatus is the idea of Logical Atomism which says essentially that all logical statements can be broken down into tiny parts, and then those parts broken down further until at last they reach their “atomic” level, wherein they are recognizable as self-evident tautologies, which Wittgenstein calls propositions. These propositions require no proofs, or, rather, they prove themselves—they are both the statement of a fact and the evidence of said fact. They are self-contained, and by combining these atomic facts, we can construct a logical model that describes the world.

Of course, it doesn’t end there. Wittgenstein is careful to point out that having a model that describes the world does not mean that the model is an accurate representation of the world as a whole; rather, it means that the model is one way to describe the world, and this tells us something about the world itself. If we were to discover another model that could describe the world more accurately, this too would tell us something about the world—but the world itself remains essentially unknowable.

This doesn’t mean, however, that Wittgenstein is a relativist. He takes great pains to point this out:

At the basis of the whole modern view of the world lies the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are the explanations of natural phenomena. So people stop short at natural laws as something unassailable, as did the ancients at God and Fate. And they are both right and wrong. but the ancients were clearer, in so far as they recognized one clear terminus, whereas the modern system makes it appear as though everything were explained. The world is independent of my will. Even if everything we wished were to happen, this would only be, so to speak, a favour of fate, for there is no logical connexion between will and world, which would guarantee this, and the assumed physical connexion itself we could not against will.

There’s a lot more to the Tracatus, which, even at a slim 80 pages, is quite an undertaking, but I don’t feel like I have a strong enough grasp on Wittgenstein’s big picture to go into much detail about it. That’s ok, though. If philosophy is a search for knowledge, a quest to understand the way the world works, then it seems to me that reading it without understanding it all is sort of the point. The key is not to dissect every word—it’s to learn a way of thinking, a method of inquiry that will slowly expose blind spots and blank slates, and to begin to see the world as a beautiful, mysterious place, capable of inexplicable moments of epiphany and complexity. It’s a way of staying humble, of realizing that there is so much that is unknowable, and so much yet to know.

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

The Mandelbaum Gate by Muriel Spark

2012-01-17T19:46:00.006-05:00

Arabs lived in the shelter of the eighteenth-century ruined fortresses, and even now in the years of the establishment of Israel, burning with its mixture of religion, hygiene, and applied sociology, the poor Arabs still hung their washing on the battlements, so that it fluttered all along the antique sea-front, innocent of the offence it was committing in the eyes of the seekers of beautiful sights and spiritual sensations, who had come all the way from the twentieth century, due west of Acre. Indeed, the washing draped out on the historic walls was a sign or progress, enlightenment, and industry, as it had been from time immemorial; it betokened a settlement and a society with a sense of tomorrow, even if it was only tomorrow's clean shirt, as against the shifty tent-dwelling communities of the wilderness; and however murky the cave-like homes along the shore, nad however indolent the occupants, they were one up on the Bedouin, at least in their own eyes if not in the sight of the tourist cameras which photographed the Bedouin shepherds continually but deplored the hung-out washing at Acre.

The Mandelbaum Gate is Muriel Spark's longest book (at a whopping 320+ pages), and bears few of her trademarks. It is surprisingly compassionate toward its protagonists, short on death and tragedy, though the subject matter might have easily invoked Spark's more violent tendencies, and at times borders on florid (the above passage is two sentences!).

But then again, its protagonist, Barbara Vaughan, is the most like Spark of all heroines, so perhaps it's unsurprising that Spark felt kindly disposed toward her, and her attention captured for longer. Like Spark, Vaughan is a half-Jewish, half-Protestant convert to Catholicism. The setting is Jerusalem, 1961, a city separated into an Arab and a Jewish half by the title gate, which is closely guarded and travel restricted. Barbara's fiance, an archaeologist, is working on the Arab side of the border, and Barbara undertakes to pass through, knowing that her Jewish blood puts her at danger even though she is a British citizen.

Such a premise threatens to devolve into a very Graham Greene-like spy caper, but Spark slyly buries the most espionage-like elements into b-plots and isolated moments. Instead, Barbara lingers at the Christian shrines in Jordan, disguised as an Arab woman, catches scarlet fever, and lingers in a sick bed--in short, there is simply too much lingering for The Mandelbaum Gate to qualify as a caper of any kind.

Instead, what Spark delivers is an uncharacteristically deft exploration of the multifarious perspectives on the Holy Land. One of my favorite passages is the one above, which describes the way that the residents of Acre struggle to maintain a present existence against the expectation of tourists and pilgrims, whose in their faith paradoxically seek to deaden and ossify the shrines they visit. In another passage, a collection of friars at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre look on in horror as a visiting priest cautions his congregation against trusting the claims of every shrine:

The three friars gazed at the priest as with one gaze. They had known it. The incipient defroque was undermining the Holy Land, as he went on to enumerate for practical purposes the shrines which his pilgrimage might well skip and the dubiety of their origins, their thoughts went to their brethren, the custodians of the Holy Land to whom these places were their whole heart and life; tears came to the eyes of the eldest friar as he thought of the venerable Franciscan, well past ninety, who kept the house where Our Lady was conceived by St. Joachim and St. Anne, and who had wanted nothing for himself all his life but to show it to the pilgrims and pray with them as they came, and collect alms for the poor of the place, and die there on that spot.

Again we are faced with the essential oxymoron created when the word Holy collides with Land; without a doubt the priest is the more literally correct, but his neatly ordered faith leaves no room for the lives of those that still live in Israel--or, as the Arabs in the book call it, Occupied Palestine.

In a broad sense, the Mandelbaum Gate itself provides a symbol of this conundrum, illustrating the difficulty of moving from one's own perspective into another's:

He followed the ancient walls of the city and Temple, past the gates of historic meaning, sealed and barred against Israel--the Zion Gate, Dung Gate, Jaffa Gate, New Gate. Then St. Stephen's Gate opened within the Old City to another medieval maze of streets--Damascus Gate, that gate of the Lord's triumphal entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, and HErod's Gate. He walked round the city until at last, fumbling in his pocket for his diplomatic pass, he came to the Mandelbaum Gate, hardly a gate at all, but a piece of street between Jerusalem and Jerusalem, flanked by two huts, and called by that name because a house at the other end once belonged to a Mr. Mandelbaum.

But then again, the Mandelbaum Gate carries a different symbolic charge for each character. For the Arab Abdul Ramdez, the gate is the division of his family, as it separates him from his beloved sister, Suzi. For the normally staid English diplomat, Freddy Hamilton, who helps Barbara pass through into Jordan against his character, it is the inaccessible wall that prevents him from recovering his memories of the pilgrimage, through which he seems to inhabit some sort of fugue state. For Barbara, it is the artificial barrier between her Jewish self and Gentile self, that if only it were opened, may provide a total sense of identity:

She had thought then, but who am I?
I am who I am.
Yes, but who am I?

Spark is both canny and blasphemous enough to note the echo of Jehovah's words in Exodus, "I am that I am." If Barbara, made in God's image, cannot get a picture of herself, what then of God? The Holy Land is fractured, Spark maintains, because our view of God is fractured. Just as uncharacteristically, Spark ends the book optimistically, in the passage just above, as Freddy wanders through Jerusalem looking at the gates. Most are shuttered, but the Mandelbaum remains--the only entry way from one side of Jerusalem to the other--and it seems very small and mean, "flanked by two huts," and perhaps even comic. Can such a barrier really be insuperable?

Father, Son, and Holy Spirit: Relationships, Roles, and Relevance by Bruce A. Ware

2012-01-16T13:33:00.004-05:00

Dr. Ware has written a deep, yet readable book that examines the relationships, roles, and relevance within the Trinity. This is the first book about the Trinity that I have read that deals so extensively with the roles of each member of the Godhead and the application it has for our own lives. I disagreed with a few of his application points, but all-in-all, I agreed with most of what I read. If you’re looking for a deeply theological work or a historical book that traces the roots of Trinitarian theology, this is not the book for you. It does, however, give a brief historical overview of Trinitarian theology and in laymen’s language address how each member of the Godhead relate to each other and how that applies to our lives, marriages, and ministries.

Rashomon and Other Stories by Ryunosuke Akutagawa

2012-01-12T12:40:00.002-05:00

It turns out my understanding of Rashomon, based on watching maybe five minutes of the Akira Kurosawa film, once, comes from a completely different Ryunosuke Akutagawa story. The whole idea of the Rashomon effect, that we can't get a true depiction of an event from just hearsay because people are prone to subjectivity in recollection, is based on a short story called "In a Grove," and doesn't appear once in the story "Rashomon." Kurosawa just mashed the two together for the purpose of the movie ("Rashomon" is the setting, "In a Grove" is the plot).

The Rashomon was the enormous gate (126 feet wide by 26 feet tall by 75 feet deep) that led into Kyoto when it was the capital of Japan, between 700 and 1200 AD. At the time of the story it's fallen into complete disrepair, and what happens there is emblematic of the terrible state of the country. It serves mostly as a shelter for thieves and murderers, and respectable citizens only visit it as a place to dump their dead. The story, surprisingly short, follows a recently discharged samurai's servant (turns out samurai are not immune to recessions, apologies to anyone who followed my advice in 2008) waiting out a storm under the Rashomon gate and writhing in indecision. One moment he's determined to remain virtuous, even if it means starving in a ditch; the next he's resigned himself to becoming a thief to survive. I don't know if "Rashomon" became so famous because of the film or because it's such a perfect example of his writing, at least in the five other story in this book. Akutagawa's protagonists misreport something they witnessed, waver between moral extremes, and manage to trick so many people that they become convinced that their own lies are true. They change their point of view constantly and murder loved ones to protect their name, but seem to remain sure of their moral integrity.

His bio says that he was driven by his opposition to stupidity, greed and corruption, but shied away from the 'easy social criticism' popularized by his contemporaries in the early 20th century. Instead he lets the psychological fluidity and insecurity of his characters criticize for him, showing how malleable a person's sense of morality can be if they let themselves be driven by greed or fear, or even a wish to avoid offending someone. Parts of it reminded me of Dubliners, if Joyce had stopped short of the moments of epiphany that characterize some of the better stories, like "The Dead." Akutagawa has his characters torturing themselves with their insecurities and lack of conviction, changing their mind incessantly and at the slightest influence.

They're beautiful stories, too, with little snippets of reverence for the natural world that sound more like Zen poetry than veiled social criticism. Maybe meant to be a contrast between the impermanent, shifting world of humanity and the solid, defined world of nature, maybe just meant to be pretty, worth reading either way.

EDIT: CHRIS BOUGHT ME THIS BOOK FOR CHRISTMAS.

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

2012-01-10T20:02:00.002-05:00

I said long long ago that I preferred Emma to Pride and Prejudice by a hair, but having just re-read the latter, I think that I must be mistaken--surely Pride and Prejudice is one of the most perfect books ever written. (You will excuse me as I slip into something of a panegyric; I don't think I can help it.) Every moment, every character, every word seems perfectly shaped and in place. Certainly I can think of few other books that compel me to read them so strongly. This is the (I think) fourth time I've read Pride and Prejudice, but every time, I find myself in a bitter disposition doing anything else but reading it, because something about it draws you to its conclusion. The ultimate joke, I think, in a book constructed from jokes is that when the climax comes, it's reported secondhand:

Elizabeth feeling all the more than common awkwardness and anxiety of his situation now forced herself to speak; and and immediately, though not very fluently, gave him to understand that her sentiments had undergone so material a change, since the period to which he alluded, as to make her receive with gratitude and pleasure his present assurances. The happiness which this reply produced was such as he had probably never felt before; and he expressed himself on the occasion as sensibly and as warmly as a man violently in love can be supposed to do.

This is hilarious, and nasty. After priming the reader for a final declaration of love from Darcy and an acceptance of marriage from Elizabeth, Austen drops the dialogue and essentially cuts to black, no kiss, no knee, nothing. Just "[she] gave him to understand that her sentiments had undergone so material a change, since the period to which he alluded...," which is as funny as any of the ironic digs at Mr. Collins or William Lucas.

Not that you would be able to find much of that ironic sense in any of your ersatz Austen sequels, or even much in the (excellent) Joe Wright film, for which the love story outshines all other elements of the novel. But people insist on misunderstanding this book, even--or especially--its biggest fans. Why is it that the most irony-deficient people seem to love this book? How can it inspire such crippling sincerity as this?

In fact, the more I think about it, I wonder if Pride and Prejudice doesn't merely use irony as its modality, but its theme as well. It is, in a sense, a book about irony, that gap between perception and reality. Elizabeth is only able to find happiness with Darcy once she learns to balance public perception of him against his true character; it is a lesson she learns with Wickham in reverse. Mrs. Bennet jeopardizes her daughters' chances of marriage by being deficient in manners, which are a kind of irony, proudly bellowing what she perceives to be true at inopportune moments, unaware that saying what you do not mean, and meaning what you do not say, can both be a kind of social currency. For her part, Jane allows herself to be beguiled by Caroline Bingley because she cannot perceive the irony, or insincerity, of others. On the other hand, there is Mr. Bennet, so removed from the world by way of his ironic veil that he cannot grasp the danger of Lydia's Brighton trip, which serves as the prelude to a misbegotten elopement.

Or I could be completely full of shit. In any case, I love this book.

Matilda by Roald Dahl

2012-01-08T20:47:00.003-05:00

Ah, 2012. A new year in which to start strong and eventually fall off on my reviews. Last year, I didn't review over half of my books, and I'm regretting that now, since that means there is no review of The BFG, my literary introduction to the bizarre and sometimes cruel world of Roald Dahl.

Dahl's universe operates in extremes, largely populated by grotesques and beauties. Matilda's ignorant, crooked family and the kid-hating, shotputting teacher Ms Trunchbull fall in the former category, while Matilda and her teacher Ms Honey fall in the latter--but I'm getting ahead of myself.

Matilda is an extremely precocious little girl, growing up in a family that doesn't value intelligence and force-feeds television to her 24 hours a day (and, as an aside, Dahl apparently REALLY hated TV, to judge from this and Mike Teevee in Willy Wonka). Matilda, four, seeks asylum in books, and by the time she starts school, has read all sorts of things--Dickens, Steinbeck, Hemingway, C.S. Lewis. When she finally goes to school, she finds a sympathizer in the saintly-but-weak Ms. Honey, and an antagonizer in the cruel, abusive Ms. Trumbull.

Dahl presents Ms. Trumbull as an exaggerated monster who picks children up by their hair and hurls them out windows, but in spite of her absurdity, Ms. Trumbull is a wonderfully dark, wicked creation--entirely unambiguous and virtually unassailable. As Matilda says, when asked why parents never complain:

"Never do anything by halves if you want to get away with it. Be outrageous. Go the whole hog. Make sure everything you do is so completely crazy it's unbelievable. No parent is going to believe this pigtail story, not in a million years. Mine wouldn't. They'd call me a liar."

Spoilers.

Matilda eventually discovers that she has special powers, never given a name in the book but which are clearly some form of telekinesis, and, using them, she's able to overthrow Ms. Trumbull, help Ms. Honey and, eventually, even find a new family. It's childish wish fulfillment, but it's handled in such a way that any child would relate to--surely everyone reading this has tried moving something simply by staring at it, and, on an even more universal level, every person feels that they are special in ways that those around them don't understand, a theme also present in The BFG and Willy Wonka. Matilda's victory may come by supernatural means, but the scaffolding upon which it is built is natural and universal.

p.s. Quentin Blake's illustrations, both in this and The BFG are fantastic and perfectly established Dahl's mood before I read a word.

Empire of the Summer Moon by S.C. Gwynne

2012-01-07T17:00:00.005-05:00

Subtitled: "Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History." This was an extremely riveting account of a very significant period in American history that I knew basically nothing about. Am I the only one?

Pre-colonization, the Comanche tribe was living what Gwynne calls a stone-age existence, scratching out their survival mostly by foraging, falling victim to neighboring tribes with more complex culture, technology and religious rites. Post-colonization, as the invading Spanish managed to lose entire herds of horses to the wilderness, they transformed themselves with fierce determination into an unrivaled force, building their warrior culture around their almost superhuman skill on horseback.

Boys were given their first horse at age two or three, and within a few years were expected to perform small tricks, like picking up an object from the ground while riding. This little trick gets progressively more challenging until adulthood, at which point they could approach a fallen comrade, pick him up, and put him on the back of their horse without breaking stride. They were known to drop to the side of their horses when passing an enemy, with just one heel hooked over the back of the animal, and could release between ten and twenty arrows from beneath its neck before their opponent could reload their cumbersome ball and powder guns. This incredible discipline allowed them to master the art of mounted warfare apparently better than anyone before or since, and stop the advancing line of settlement in western Texas for over 150 years, at times even reversing it.

A large portion of the book is devoted to extremely graphic descriptions of the kind of brutality the Comanche inflicted on their enemies, rival tribes and white settlers alike. The mutilation, rape and murder of white settlers by Comanche bands was widely published (and often exaggerated) in Texas, drumming up anti-Indian sentiment to a fever pitch. Gwynne's timeline of the different militia groups and federal dispatches that tried and failed to solve the "Indian problem" gets muddled and confusing (how many unsuccessful military engagements am I supposed to keep track of?), but engaging nonetheless. He presents the Texas Rangers as a filthy, ragtag band of bloodthirsty adventure-seeking young men who proved the most successful opponent to the Comanches until the federal military managed to subdue them completely in the late 19th century (SPOILER ALERT).

Quanah Parker starts as something of a side story that Gwynne keeps returning to, and eventually takes center stage as the leader of one of the last free bands of Comanches that managed to resist the reservation, the Quahadis. His story is emblematic of the American west at the time: his mother, captured by a Comanche war band at age 9, was adopted into the tribe as an equal. She married a minor war chief, had two sons, and was forcibly returned to white society after her band was attacked by General So-and-so's latest expedition. She spent the rest of her life trying to return to them. Quanah went on to rally the remaining Comanche bands to form a resistance movement that managed to route the federals for a while but, surprisingly, surrendered when he realized it was hopeless. He went on to become a strong proponent of his tribe's assimilation, becoming the first principal chief of the Comanche tribe.

I'm rambling, but it's hard to know where to stop. The entire book is completely engaging, and manages to stay relatively impartial throughout. I don't know if I expected this going into it, but there's no clear picture of who held the moral high ground throughout, and Gwynne gives as much attention to the bloodlust and brutality of the Comanches as he does to the groups of settlers who would strike down Comanche women and children on revenge raids. There are moments of tenderness and humanity on both sides, and the clearest picture I can take away from such a complex history is that these were two cultures doing everything they could to preserve their ultimately irreconcilable ways of life.

The Man Who Knew Too Much by G. K. Chesterton

2012-01-06T14:49:00.006-05:00

"I am too tangled up in the whole thing, you see, and I was certainly never born to set it right."

I pulled this book off a bookshelf at my girlfriend's parents house, thinking that it might have been the basis for the Alfred Hitchcock movie with the same title. The author's name was not displayed on the side. I was delightfully surprised to see that it was a Chesterton book, and one that I had not heard of. I quickly stuffed it down the back of my pants.

As I suspected upon discovering its author, this book has no connection to the Alfred Hitchcock movie, other than the title. It is a collection of 8 detective stories set in the early 20th century. The title refers to Horne Fisher, a man who is burdened with private knowledge of public figures in England, due to the fact that he is so well connected. Fisher's intimate knowledge of the lives and motivations of members of Britain's upper class allows him to understand what is really going on, and what it ultimately kept from the public.

Accompanying Fisher in these stories is his friend Harold March--they meet in the first story. March is a journalist whose focus appears to be matters of politics. March does not figure heavily into the stories. However, his presence provides the opportunity for Fisher to voice some of the paradoxes he is facing as a result of what he know. Fisher knows who is guilty, but he also knows the motives behind their actions. And there are reasons why these persons cannot be brought to justice--at least in the traditional sense. Inherent to these stories, is a lack of justice. This is the fundamental difference between these stories and Chesterton's Father Brown mysteries.

While there is not a strict chronology to these stories, there is an overall arc to the collection, beginning with Fisher meeting March in the first story. They should definitely be read in the order.

This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald

2012-01-04T20:32:00.002-05:00

He was in an eddy again, a deep, lethargic gulf, without desire to work or write, love or dissipate. For the first time in his life he rather longed for death to roll over his generation, obliterating their petty fevers and struggles and exultations. His youth seemed never so vanished as now in the contrast between the utter loneliness of this visit and that riotous, joyful party of four years before. Things that had been the merest commonplaces of his life then, deep sleep, the sense of beauty around him, all desire, had flown away and the gaps they left were filled only with the great listlessness of his disillusion.

This Side of Paradise was Fitzgerald's first novel, published at the age of (dammit) 23. It has the unsurprising kitchen-sink quality common to a first-time novelist who wants to try everything, and flits from narrative to poetry to drama with wild abandon. Among other things, it comprises a short play, several bad lyrical poems, an elegiacal one in the Celtic style, and several letters. In one of them, Amory Blaine's friend Tom tells him, "As for the well-known Amory, he would write immortal literature if he were sure enough about anything to risk telling any one else about it."

Also unsurprisingly, Amory, the young proto-writer and disaffected Princeton man, is a stand-in for the young Fitzgerald, as Stephan Dedalus was for James Joyce five years prior. Fitzgerald shares Amory's anxiety about have nothing certain to say, and so the novel becomes about him--"I know myself," Amory cries in the last line of the book, "but that is all!"--and the ecumenical style becomes a way of compensating. Like Portrait of the Artist, Paradise reads as a sort of legend of its own creation, but the key to Joyce's achievement was an otherworldly confidence in the quality of the book, not an otherworldly confidence in the quality of the author.

Paradise is at its best in the straightforward narrative mode, which begins as a satirical portrait of Amory as a precocious and quite insufferable child. My favorite line is this, describing Monsignor Darcy, a priest and friend of Amory's mother:

He was intensely ritualistic, startlingly dramatic, loved the idea of God enough to be celibate, and rather liked his neighbor.

Darcy proves to be a wise man and a stalwart friend to Amory, but the brilliant understatement of "[he] rather liked his neighbor" never fades, as does his confidence that he and Amory are of a special class. (This is a view that the author clearly shares, and perhaps he is borne out by history.)

The satire drops out as Amory grows, and becomes more lyrical as he becomes more lyrical, but the poetry he writes is largely forgettable. The prose is more successful:

Often they swam and as Amory floated lazily in the water he shut his mind to all thoughts except those of hazy soap-bubble lands where the sun splattered through wind-drunk trees. How could any one possibly think or worry, or do anything except splash and dive and loll there on the edge of time while the flower months failed. Let the days move over--sadness and memory and pain recurred outside, and here, once more, before he went on to meet them he wanted to drift and be young.

And:

Only far inside his soul a little fire leaped and cried that something was pulling down, trying to get him inside a door and slam it behind him. After that door was slammed there would be only footfalls and white buildings in the moonlight, and perhaps he would be one of the footfalls.

But then there's a strange interlude where the Devil appears, some more bad poems, and a centerpiece where Amory's brief, tempestuous relationship with a girl named Rosalind is written as a stage play. The meaning of this is gut-wrenchingly obvious (she's histrionic, like an actress) and Rosalind and the playlet itself battle each other to determine which can be less interesting. The momentum of the book never recovers, and for some reason, even when Amory meets more interesting people (one girl rides her horse off a cliff to prove she doesn't believe in God!) he still yearns for Rosalind. Worst of all, where the climax should be, Fitzgerald provides a lengthy discussion about socialism with a complete stranger, and then the novel sort of limps off to die in a New Jersey ditch.

One of the strangest things about Paradise is that World War I is almost completely absent. Fitzgerald calls attention to how little Amory thinks of the war beginning as a high school student by limiting his notice of it to a half-page chapter. Then, when Amory goes off to fight in it, Fitzgerald provides--an act break. The Amory that returns is not markedly different. I'm pretty sure that Fitzgerald did not fight in WWI, but he felt it necessary that his alter ego did. And yet, he felt it not worthy--or too daunting?--to include. I wonder why.

Top Ten 2011

2012-01-01T19:04:00.002-05:00

2011 is over; 2012 is here! This year promises to be even more difficult than the last, since the Mayan spaceships are supposed to arrive in late December, meaning we'll have one fewer weak to get to 50. But don't let that stop you--we would love to add contributors to our blog! You don't have to reach 50, you just have to love books and enjoy writing about them. If you're interested, e-mail me at misterchilton at gmail.com.

Here are the top ten books I read this year. This is a fairly skewed list, since I'm not counting either re-reads (like Brideshead Revisited) or stuff like Shakespeare, which is great, but not very interesting to put on a list because everyone already knows it's awesome.

10.) Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis -- I think of this dark satire of academia every time I work on my graduate school applications. Bonus fact: It was a favorite novel of the late great Christopher Hitchens.

9.) Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence -- I liked this much more than Lady Chatterley's Lover. Both are gorgeously written, but my memory of Chatterley was that its vision of love seems remarkably shallow. Sons and Lovers, on the other hand, matches Lawrence's prose to an appropriately metaphysical vision.

8.) Moby Dick by Herman Melville -- What can be said about Moby Dick? Its size, its universality, its grandeur all serve to obviate commentary. They also obviate a lot of the good will and humor that are built up in the opening chapters, creating an object of awe, rather than an object of love.

7.) The Red and the Black by Stendhal -- "More like the red and the bleak." -- Stephen Brent Waggoner

6.) The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow -- As close as I think I've seen to "The Great American Novel," thanks to its illimitable energy, adventure, and melting-pot approach to prose. It makes me want to be a better "Columbus of the near-at-hand."

5.) The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton -- My students have been complaining that all of Shakespeare's plays end tragically. (Coincidentally, they read nothing but tragedies.) I would like to spend a semester and just teach this, Ethan Frome, and The Age of Innocence and then see how they feel.

4.) Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy -- Now that I think back on what I've read this year, I think that Far from the Madding Crowd reminds me most of Moby Dick, purely in the sense that it reading it is to be overwhelmed by the knowledge Hardy summons to his fingertips. That, along with sympathetic characters and a believable plot, were what I thought were most missing from The Mayor of Casterbridge.

3.) A Passage to India by E. M. Forster -- Don't be fooled--this isn't really a novel about Anglo-Indian relations in the early 20th century. What it is, however, I find much more difficult to say.

2.) Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte -- I only pretended to read this in high school, and now I regret it. Very few characters are as intense as Heathcliff, and very few books are as intense as Wuthering Heights, which at times wavers between a Gus Van Sant movie and a snuff film.

1.) Parade's End (1 2 3 4) by Ford Madox Ford -- Maybe it's cheating to include the whole tetralogy here, but I wanted to save room for a few other books on my list. Parade's End is the best example I have ever seen of what Ford called literary impressionism, the reproduction of life as it is lived--in A Man Could Stand Up--, he spends twenty pages describing a spot on a wall!--and ever since then even great works of literature that attempt similar things have seemed to me disingenuous. I am skeptical, but optimistic, that the upcoming HBO adaptation will be successful. BUT in case you're wondering, Some Do Not... (1) > A Man Could Stand Up-- (3) > No More Parades (2) > The Last Post (4).

Happy New Year!

The Big Book of Irony by Jon Winokur

2011-12-27T13:30:00.002-05:00

Utah will never, ever be ironic.

Jon Winokur's The Big Book of Irony is about eight inches by five inches, and 150 pages long. I probably should have anticipated that when I put it on my Amazon wishlist, but maybe I'm not a very accomplished ironist.

I wanted to read this book because I wanted to start planning a unit on irony (and satire, parody, and comedy) for my AP English class focusing on The Importance of Being Earnest and Pride and Prejudice. The Big Book of Irony fails to make this task any simpler--Winokur obstinately refuses to support one definition of irony over another, preferring to embrace its essential undefinability.

On the other hand, for a slim book, it provides a wealth of examples that I can use, since Winokur's method is essentially to collect as many quotations and examples of irony as possible. This approach lends itself to sloppiness--for example, Winokur basically repeats identical observations on the finale of Seinfeld in separate sections, once as his own and once as a quotation from Slate's Michael Hirschorn. Elsewhere he repeats Kenneth Wilson's bizarrely mistaken claim that the separation-prone Quebecois may be offended by the name of the Vancouver Canucks (which can be considered disparaging) while their own hockey team sports the "all-Canadian name of Maple Leafs." (The Maple Leafs represent Toronto, which is in Ontario.)

But it also seems overwhelmingly comprehensive. The best parts are a section of short biographies of those Winokur considers master ironists (perhaps the only list ever compiled comprising both Jane Austen and Sarah Silverman) and a section of real-life examples of situational irony:

During the filming of an episode of TV's Homicide: Life on the Street, a fleeing shoplifter blundered onto the set, saw the show's actors with their guns drawn, dropped the loot, and surrendered to them, thinking they were actual policemen.

Winokur also includes compilations of quotations entitled "Against Irony" and "In Defense of Irony" without comment, though it's pretty clear where Winokur comes down when he makes observations like, "Brutal dictators are irony-defiicient--take Hitler, Kim Jong-il, and Saddam Hussein, a world-class vulgarian whose art collection consisted of kitsch paintings displayed unironically." On that note, I'll leave you with this actual "art" piece from Hussein's collection:

Elizabeth I by Anne Somerset

2011-12-21T19:26:00.006-05:00

Under Elizabeth, the nation regained its self-confidence and sense of direction. At a time when the authority of the majority of her fellow monarchs was under threat or in decline, she upheld the interests of the Crown while not encroaching on those of her subjects, restored the coinage, and created a Church which, for all its failings, came close to being truly national. While many European countries were being rent by civil war, insurrection and appalling acts of bloodshed, she presided over a realm which (with the exception of her Irish dominions) was fundamentally stable and united. She herself was proud of the contrast between the condition of her own kingdom and that of others.

It might not be fair to compare Anne Somerset's stout biography of Queen Elizabeth I with Stacy Schiff's recent book about Cleopatra--Somerset has probably roughly a hundred times the primary source material to work with--but it is difficult to resist the temptation. Elizabeth and Cleopatra are, after all, probably the two most powerful and legendary female rulers in history. (With Catherine the Great a distant third... am I missing someone?) And while I liked Schiff's colorful account, Somerset's chronicle of Elizabeth's life seems to me to strike the perfect balance between engrossing and rigorous. Like Schiff, Somerset often leans too far in Elizabeth's favor. But as the passage above notes, Elizabeth offers much to be praised, if not lionized. She was prudent, and ably protected her nation from the financial ruin that decades of war threatened; she was shrewd, and ultimately outwitted and outlasted the host of Catholic powers--Spain, France, Rome--that demonized her and her rule; she was a great communicator, and her speech at Tilbury deserves its renown:

I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too, and think foul scorn that Parma or Spain, or any prince of Europe, should dare to invade the borders of my realm; to which rather than any dishonour shall grow by me, I myself will take up arms...

Somerset is smart to let her own prose get out of the way of Elizabeth's, whose words have the power of great poetry. Being a monarch is surely a largely thankless position, but who has expressed as wonderfully as this: "Who longest draws the thread of life, and views the strange accidents that time makes, does not find out a rarer gift than thankfulness is, that is most precious and seldomest found."

But Somerset is also honest about Elizabeth's faults, which are myriad. Her shrewdness meant that she was not particularly loyal, and she felt free to break what few promises she made. She was unerringly temperamental, and though reluctant to imitate her sister "Bloody" Mary Tudor, she sent her fair share of her subjects to the Tower of London for perceived slights. Much of her authority was predicated on a delicate system of romantic gamesmanship, in which her courtiers professed a Petrarchan sort of romantic love for her. (See Raleigh's "The Ocean to Cynthia," where the Ocean is Raleigh, whose first name was pronounced as water, and Elizabeth is Cynthia, a name for the virgin goddess Diana.) These relationships, Somerset explains, cemented her courtiers' loyalty and intimacy and prospered the Queen's reputation, but they also placed the courtiers in a sort of limbo that prevented them from marrying. When they did marry, it was often in secret, and if the Queen found out, as she did in the case of her favorite, the Earl of Leicester, it meant political disgrace or, in extreme cases, a trip to the Tower.

In much the same way Elizabeth responded to the pleas of Parliament to produce an heir by maintaining a long succession of would-be husbands, none of which (to the Queen's clear delight) ever came to fruition. Such was the double-edged sword of Elizabeth's womanhood; it afforded her a kind of power over foreign governments eager to form alliances, but her unwillingness to formalize a marriage made the nation's future uneasy.

My favorite episode in Elizabeth's life, and one about which I knew very little before reading this book, is the long captivity of Mary, Queen of Scots. Mary was the Catholic queen of Scotland, but also Elizabeth's cousin and probable heir, which meant that she was the inspiration of innumerable rebellions and attempted rebellions who wished to depose Elizabeth and place Mary on the English throne. Unsurprisingly, this led to an uneasy relationship between the two. Ultimately, when Mary was implicated in the scandalous murder of her husband Lord Darnley (because she, uh, married his murderer), she was forced to abdicate in favor of her son James and flee to England where Elizabeth had her arrested. For almost two decades Elizabeth held Mary prisoner, ignoring her advisers' pleas to execute her, until serious plots against Elizabeth's life forced her hand. Somerset describes Elizabeth's pains of conscience as the fruit of her stalwart belief in divine right:

She did not regret that Mary had been killed, but deplored the official nature of the deed, for even though it had been unavoidable to do violence to an anointed Queen, it would have been preferable if it had been done unwitnessed and on the sly. Much as Elizabeth had detested her cousin, she was speaking no more than the truth when she told the French ambassador in May 1587 that "this death will wring her heart as long as she lives."

The best part of the story, however, is the fact that one of the conspirators was so sure that Elizabeth's murder would be lauded by the English that he commissioned a portrait of himself and the other conspirators beforehand, making it really easy to identify the other culprits.

Somerset's biography is not made to be a best-seller; it is too thick, too dense, and too respectful of its readers' intelligence for that. (She, for example, leaves odd Latin phrases untranslated.) But it shares with Schiff's Cleopatra a clear, breezy style with a muted undercurrent of sardonicism. It's nearly three times the length of Cleopatra but I found myself being bored with the latter far more quickly. Part of that may be Somerset, but part of it may be Elizabeth, who is legendary while Cleopatra seems only a legend.

Orlando by Virginia Woolf

2011-11-23T17:33:00.003-05:00

And indeed, it cannot be denied that the most successful practitioners of the art of life, often unknown people by the way, somehow contrive to synchronise the sixty or seventy different times which beat simultaneously in every normal human system so that when eleven strikes, all the rest chime in unison, and the present is neither a violent disruption nor completely forgotten in the past. Of them we can justly say that they live precisely the sixty-eight or seventy-two years allotted them on the tombstone. Of the rest some we know to be dead though they walk among us; some are not yet born though they go through the forms of life; others are hundreds of years old when they call themselves thirty-six. The true length of a person's life, whatever the Dictionary of National Biography may say, is always a matter of dispute.

Virginia Woolf's Orlando is a strange book: A sort of love letter to a married woman, in which the woman spends the first half of the book a man. Orlando, the alter ego of Woolf's friend/lover Vita Sackville-West, begins life as a boy serving in the court of Elizabeth I; later, as an ambassador to Constantinople for Charles II he suddenly becomes a she, in a scene that Woolf drags out with laborious humor:

And now again obscurity descends, and would indeed that it were deeper! Would, we almost have it in our hearts to exclaim, that it were so deep that we could see nothing whatever through it s opacity! Would that we might here take the pen and write Finis to our work! Would that we might spare the reader what is to come and say to him in so many words, Orlando died and was buried. But here, alas, Truth, Candour, and Honesty, the austere Gods who keep watch and ward by the inkpot of the biographer, cry No! Putting their silver trumpets to their lips they demand in one blast, Truth! And again they cry Truth! and sounding yet a third time in concert they peal forth, The Truth and nothing but the Truth!

Woolf is quite clearly having her bit of fun, not least from mimicking the silliest floridness of Enlightenment writers, but in the book's general mode, which pretends to be a biography cobbled together from real sources, and in such setpieces as the "Great Frost" that turns Elizabeth's Thames into an endless carnival rink. The circuitous, often inscrutable prose that typifies Woolf's more "serious" fiction is reserved for the book's latter portions, in which Orlando, now a woman, adjusts to the advent of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (the fact that no one thinks it's odd that Orlando is over 400 years old is one of the book's better jokes).

Along the way Orlando falls in love, is rejected, joins a band of gypsies, becomes ambassador, is courted, falls in love again, is reciprocated, and writes a poem--"The Oak Tree," for which the quotations in the text are actual reproductions of a poem by Sackville-West. The point, I suppose, being that Sackville-West's work, as well as person, represents the best of 400+ years of European culture, or, rather, as something that, like the best literature, battles against the expectations of its own age:

Orlando was unaccountably disappointed. She had thought of literature all these years (her seclusion, her rank, her sex must be her excuse) as something wild as the wind, hot as fire, swift as lightning; something errant, incalculable, abrupt, and behold, literature was an elderly gentleman in a grey suit talking about duchesses. The violence of her disillusionment was such that some hook or button fastening the upper part of her dress burst open, and out upon the table fell 'The Oak Tree,' a poem.

But moreso, Orlando learns in his/her 400 years to exist beyond words. She and her husband, Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine, speak in a "cypher language which they had invented between them so that a whole spiritual state of the utmost complexity might be conveyed in a word or two without the telegraph clerk being any the wiser, and added [to the telegraph] the words 'Rattigan Glumphoboo,' which summed it up precisely." Or, sweetly, they speak not at all:

...and really it would profit little to write down what they said, for they knew each other so well that they could say anything, which is tantamount to saying nothing, or saying such stupid, prosy things as how to cook an omelette, or where to buy the best boots in London, things which have no lustre taken from their setting, yet are positively of amazing beauty within it. For it has come about, by the wise economy of nature, that our modern spirit can almost dispense with language; the commonest expressions do, since no expressions do; hence the most ordinary conversation is often the most poetic, and the most poetic is precisely that which cannot be written down. For which reasons we leave a great blank here, which must be taken to indicate that the space is filled to repletion.

Of course, a great white space follows. There is an overwhelming suggestion, I think, that since no words can really express how Woolf feels about Sackville-West, any words may do, and the silly, absurd, ironic mess that is Orlando is as great a testament as any that could be made. As such, Orlando is a book as much about the limits of what can be said as it is about the limitlessness of one man/woman.

27 Views of Chapel Hill

2011-11-16T21:56:00.006-05:00

27 Views of Chapel Hill is ostensibly a collection of essays, poems, and short stories connected in some way or another to a small town in North Carolina. What 27 Views of Chapel Hill really is, though, is a love story, as if told by someone who has long since become more than a lover and is now a partner. Someone who knows all of his or her better half's flaws and imperfections but loves nonetheless, focusing instead on the intricacies and quirks that make them great. Some essays discuss people or places in Chapel Hill directly, and others merely use the town as its setting, but in all of them there is an appreciation and adoration of this town that I, too, know and love.

There are stories about little old ladies who keep a garden, about a woman and her dog, about an old bookstore, and more. I loved reading the story written by my Community Journalism professor at Carolina about how his childhood friendship with James Taylor helped him endure his mother's crippling depression. I was interested to read the accounts of all the U.S. presidents who visited Chapel Hill, either before, during or after their presidency (including Gerald Ford, who took my grandmother on a date while she was an undergrad at UNC). I found the story set during the turmoil of the civil rights era especially poignant, especially the description of the sit in at the intersection of Franklin Street and Columbia Street, which made me think about how far we've come from then to just a few years ago, when some of my best memories were made jumping over bonfires in that same spot after we won the national championship. I liked some of the essays better than others and didn't love the poetry, but overall 27 Views of Chapel Hill was a sweet ode to a wonderful town.

A Passage to India by E. M. Forster

2011-11-16T20:36:00.003-05:00

No, she did not wish to repeat that experience. The more she thought over it, the more disagreeable and frightening it became. She minded it much more now than at the time. The crush and the smells s he could forget, but the echo began in some indescribable way to undermine her hold on life. Coming at a moment when she chanced to be fatigued, it had managed to murmur, "Pathos, piety, courage--they exist, but are identical, and so is filth. Everything exists, nothing has value." If one had spoken vileness in that place, or quoted lofty poetry, the comment would have been the same--"ou-boum."

A Passage to India is a strange book. One can rifle off the details--in British-controlled India, a Muslim is accused of assaulting an English girl in a mysterious cave--but a summary seems beside the point. As Mrs. Moore decides about her memory of the accused, Dr. Aziz--"Yes, it was all true, but how false a summary of the man; the essential life of the him had been slain"--there is something crucial missing, something ineffable.

The novel begins and ends as a story about the difficulty of friendship and intimacy between the Indian and the English. Dr. Aziz is the great centerpiece of these sections, a stubborn, fickle, but gregarious man who wishes to make friends of Mrs. Moore and her companion, the young Adela Quested, and resolves to take them to the nearby Marabar Caves:

His friends thought him most unwise to mix himself up with English ladies, and warned him to take every precaution against unpunctuality. Consequently he spent the previous night at the train station.

But the middle section--the book is split into three unequal parts called Mosque, Caves and Temple--is something else all together. The Marabar Caves are annihilators of meaning. The echo that attaches itself to Mrs. Moore proves unshakable, and follows her as she leaves, promising a kind of anti-transcendence:

The unspeakable attempt presented itself to her as love: in a cave, in a church--Boum, it amounts to the same. Visions are supposed to entail profundity, but--Wait till you get one, dear reader! The abyss also may be petty, the serpent of eternity made of maggots..

And so the Caves themselves seem to be responsible for Ms. Quested's experience of a violent attack, which is never explained in a "proper" sense. Unpredictably, the English rally around Ms. Quested and use her story to validate their most brutish prejudices ("Why, the kindest thing one can do to a native is to let him die," one says) and the Indians rally around Aziz and riot. But though this makes for some great scenes of satire (my favorite is when the trial magistrate permits Ms. Quested to sit on the platform to escape the heat of the gallery, and she's joined by every white person in the court save one) Forster's interests lie mainly elsewhere. Ironically, what nearly destroys Dr. Aziz, Mrs. Moore, and Ms. Quested is just what they had been seeking: a sense of unity, a sense of intimacy and oneness with the other. But when difference is annihilated, nothing remains; when man succeeds in finding infinity he has lost himself:

Devils are of the North, and poems can be written about them, but no one could romanticize the Marabar because it robbed infinity and eternity of their vastness, the only quality that accommodates them to mankind.

In what must be the most striking prose Forster ever wrote, he symbolizes the problem with a flame:

They are dark caves. Even when they open towards the sun, very little light penetrates down the entrance tunnel into the circular chamber. There is little to see, and no eye to see it, until the visitor arrives for his five minutes, and strikes a match. Immediately another flame rises in the depths of the rock and moves towards the surface like an imprisoned spirit: the walls of the circular chamber have been most marvellously polished. The two flames approach and strive to unite, but cannot, because one of them breathes air, the other stone.

At first this seems a symbol of the relationship between the Indians and the English--two mirrored flames, unable to connect--but soon becomes a symbol of the inability to touch, to interact, to communicate with anything beyond oneself. Mrs. Moore and Ms. Quested are given brief glimpses of the flame beyond the wall, and perhaps finding only an image of themselves, are traumatized by them. The other conflicts of the novel--Ms. Quested's only-half-wanted marriage to the City Magistrate, the relations between the Indians and their occupiers, the inability to describe or create a unified Indian nation--become slivers of this whole, and the solution promises to be worse than the conflict.

By contrast, the Temple section begins with an extended description of a Hindu ceremony that brings a more beneficial unity:

When the villagers broke cordon for a glimpse of the silver image, a most beautiful and radiant expression came into their faces, a beauty in which there was nothing personal,l for it caused them all to resemble one another during the moment of its indwelling, and only when it was withdrawn did they revert to individual clods.

What is it about the Hindu ceremony that makes it a joy, rather than a terror? Can Prof. Godbole, Aziz's Hindu friend, be right or wise when he remarks of the charges,

I am informed that an evil action was performed in the Marabar Hills, and that a highly esteemed English lady is now seriously ill in consequence. My answer to that is this: that action was performed by Dr. Aziz... It was performed by the guide... It was performed by you... It was performed by me... And by my students. It was even performed by the lady herself. When evil occurs, it expresses the whole of the universe. Similarly when good occurs.

Godbole goes on to say that good and evil "are both of them aspects of my Lord. He is present in the one, absent in the other, and the difference between presence and absence is great, as great as my feeble mind can grasp. Yet absence implies presence, absence is not non-existence, and we are therefore entitled to repeat, 'Come, come, come, come.'" Is this what differentiates these unities, an eye to the presence, and not the absence, of God? Or the hopefulness that one is coming to make the unity meaningful?

These questions fade into the background of A Passage to India. By the end we are left with a little tableau of an Englishman and and Indian promising friendship, but their horses rearing away from one another. We are left, if we wish, to return to thinking about England and India, but also, if we wish, to see that there are more encompassing concerns at hand, and that there is unity in disunity, and also with a thin echo of Godbole's "Come, come, come, come":

But the horses didn't want it--they swerved apart; the earth didn't want it, sending up rocks through which riders must pass single file; the temples, the tank, the jail, the palace, the birds, the carrion, the Guest House, that came into view as they issued from the gap and saw Mau beneath: they didn't want it, they said in their hundred voices, "No, not yet," and the sky said, "No, not there."

Cleopatra by Stacy Schiff

2011-11-09T20:45:00.004-05:00

The personal inevitably trumps the political, and the erotic trumps all: We will remember that Cleopatra slept with Julius Caesar and Mark Antony long after we have forgotten what she accomplished in doing so, that she sustained a vast, rich, densely populated empire in its troubled twilight, in the name of a proud and cultivated dynasty.

Stacy Schiff's Cleopatra is a dogged attempt at the resuscitation of one woman's reputation, sullied over two millennia by misogynists, xenophobes, and axe-grinders. It is perhaps a little late--I suspect that our modern aversion to outdated stereotypes of manipulative and unserious women has scrubbed off much of the tarnish--Cleopatra's reputation as the Great Seducer remains. Schiff doesn't deny Cleopatra's erotic appeal, but traces it to her eloquence, not her lasciviousness, and affirms her canny political acumen. After all, as Pharaoh and later Queen of Egypt, Cleopatra was in a precarious position on a Mediterranean shore being carved up by decades of Roman civil war, and her alliance with two of its most preeminent power holders--Julius Caesar and Mark Antony--ensured her survival for decades in a kingdom where monarchs frequently lasted months, or weeks.

The shortcomings of Schiff's project are many, but they are perhaps not her fault. The long stretches in which Cleopatra takes a backseat to the machinations between Antony and Octavian are probably necessary, both for our understanding and because of a spotty historical record. She is probably right when she argues that Cleopatra's record has been maligned, but when she has torpedoed the bias of ancient historians, she frequently finds herself lacking much material to go on. This is disguised in part by presenting the book as stridently non-academic--she quotes, many times, "one ancient historian," and buries the citation in the endnotes--but this is also it's greatest strength: it's fairly engrossing, and its narrative compelling.

One of the most appealing parts of the book for me was the fulsome descriptions of ancient Alexandria, the (I had not realized) foremost city of the world at the time. Rome was a rustic backwater, but Alexandria "remained a swirl of reds and yellows, a swelling kaleidoscope of music, chaos, and color. Altogether it was a mood-altering city of extreme sensuality and high intellectualism, the Paris of the ancient world: superior in its ways, splendid in its luxuries, the place to spend your fortune, write your poetry, find (or forget) a romance, restore your health, reinvent yourself, or regroup after having conquered vast swaths of Italy, Spain, and Greece over the course of a Herculean decade." Schiff makes much of Cleopatra's expense records, with their absurd numbers of suckling pigs and oysters and golden everythings, and it's easy to see why a man like Antony, with his imperial pretensions, would have such a difficult time returning to Rome, Cleopatra notwithstanding. For Schiff, Alexandria is an image of Cleopatra herself: seductive, exuberant, but also marked by intelligence, prosperity, and a vaunted heritage.

In the end, of course, Schiff cannot excuse the simple fact that Cleopatra's acumen came up short: whether you believe they were in love or not, Cleopatra backs the wrong horse in Antony. In fact, Schiff is nearly undone by her alluring portrait of Alexandria. Cleopatra and Antony's disastrous flight at Actium, a battle staged only to give them a chance to escape back to Egypt once at sea, makes Antony look like a man more desperate to return to luxury than to rule the world. Nor does her description of Antony as a "great brooding hulk" after Actium mitigate the traditional perspective that Cleopatra held undue sway over the once-powerful general.

The greatest part of the story, as it is in Shakespeare (soon to come), the end: Antony, having mangled his own suicide, dying in Cleopatra's arms; Cleopatra committing hers surreptitiously, and somewhat triumphantly, under the watchful eye of Octavian's guard. She cynically implodes the story of the asp, saying that "[a] woman known for her crisp decisions and meticulous planning would surely have hesitated to entrust her fate to a wild animal." But, she suggests, there is always the possibility that Octavian, remembering the sympathy unwittingly engendered toward Cleopatra's captured sister Arsinoe in Julius Caesar's triumph decades before, had her killed. "While her death reduced the glory a little," she writes, "it also eliminated a host of complications."

My Roman history is not quite as thorough as my Latin degree might suggest. But it seems to me that either Schiff is a popular biographer, not a historian, and thus odd to be the first person to voice this suspicion--or she's working from sources she fails to cite. Is that prejudiced? Maybe. But if reputations are going to be resuscitated, it ought to be by means more stringent than the histories that maligned them in the first place.

But that's pedantic. Cleopatra succeeds, in the end, by straddling the line between popular non-fiction and thorough historical assessment. She won the Pulitzer prize for her biography of Vera Nabokov, and it wouldn't surprise me to see this make the shortlist either.

Liturgy and Literature in the Making of Protestant England

2011-11-08T20:32:00.003-05:00

This is in part because, despite criticism's frequently professed desires to "make the past strange," it much more often makes it overly familiar. The depth, passion, and occasional ferocity of early modern religious belief simply doesn't resonate in a secular modern culture committed to toleration and agnosticism, so we tend to reduce its alienness by overlooking it, or translating it into terms we are more comfortable with. But those are by definition not the terms in which these things existed and operated historically; when we use them as the basis of our critical practice, we are looking not at the past but an image of modernity in hose and ruffs.

The influence of the Book of Common Prayer is everywhere, though you may not realize it--it is responsible, for example, the phrases "ashes to ashes, dust to dust," and "dearly beloved, we are gathered here today..." But the author of Liturgy and Literature in the Making of Protestant England, Timothy Rosendale, believes that it has been insufficiently explored as a literary document.

Rosendale gives a brief account of the Book's creation, depicting it as an attempt--or rather, a series of attempts--at negotiating the bitter Protestant-Catholic tensions of post-Henry VIII England. Interestingly, he argues that much of the Book's efficacy comes from its calculated ambiguity that, like Elizabeth I's public religious persona, deliberately left room for residual Catholic practice. By creating a national uniform liturgy in English, it also helped to create and bolster an English national identity, negotiating the need for the monarch's supremacy over religious practice and deeply held Protestant beliefs about the importance of individual priesthood. In the final chapters, Rosendale turns to the Book's literary influence, tracing its impact on Sidney, Shakespeare, Milton and Hobbes. I particularly liked the chapter on political power in Shakespeare's histories, in which Rosendale argues that the history plays, from Richard II to Henry VI, map the transition to a monarchical system in which power is maintained through representation and symbolism, mirroring the Prayerbook's vision of the Eucharist.

What I appreciated most about Rosendale's book is what I have quoted above. One of my deepest misgivings about modern criticism is a sneaking suspicion that it does not treat texts seriously, using them as templates for various ideological, political, or philosophical agendas. While Rosendale happily points out the positive aspects of various critical schools (for example, he praises the way in which New Historicism has "emphasized... the idea that the literary is not walled off from other spheres of culture"), he is careful to treat the religious impulses that created the Book of Common Prayer as genuine and not outward manifestations of psychological or political pressures.

Furthermore, books like this (and too a lesser extent, McCoy's) allay my fears that scholarly language need be obtuse or somehow "beyond me;" not only is Rosendale's text highly engaging and fluid (his paraphrases of his critical sources tend to be far more lucid than they), but occasionally he'll do something like this:

"...even the Zwinglian sacrament is clearly set apart to operate in a different symbolic register; after all, a completely desacralized Eucharist would be nothing more than a snack(rament).

Zing!

Alterations of State by Richard McCoy

2011-11-06T14:27:00.004-05:00

Richard McCoy's Alterations of State is a survey of Reformation-era literature that seeks to investigate changing ideas about sacred kingship. To those of us who, in our high school history classes, congratulated ourselves for not belonging to a society that believes in divine right, McCoy's book does a good job outlining the theological complexities of that philosophy, which give it force beyond the need to consolidate a monarch's power.

McCoy argues that the idea of sacred kingship was ultimately a response to the Reformation's abolition of "real presence" from the sacraments, churches, and relics of England. He takes us back to Marburg (cue Ford Madox Ford) where Zwingli rejects Luther's claim to Christ's presence in the Eucharist and tells us that "Monarchy's enduring power derives in part form a vague but persistent desire for a real presence in the face of an 'essential absence.'" That is, because we could no longer locate Christ's presence in the traditions and icons of the church, a national vision of Christianity required that presence to be relocated in the figure of the King himself.

Alterations of State is persuasive and thorough, yet highly readable. Most of the chapters are organized by the authors in whom McCoy tracks the conflicts over sacred kingship, including Skelton, Shakespeare, and Marvell. Perhaps the most interesting of these, for me, was the chapter on Shakespeare, in which McCoy contends the relationship between Hamlet and his father's ghost mirrors the Reformation-era compulsion for an obviated spiritual presence in the Catholic sacraments. Though I wouldn't recommend this for most readers here, I found it fascinating.

Moby Dick by Herman Melville

2011-11-01T21:23:00.003-04:00

Here then, was this grey-headed, ungodly old man, chasing with curses a Job’s whale round the world, at the head of a crew, too, chiefly made up of mongrel renegades, and castaways, and cannibals…

Moby Dick is the book that this blog followed into a black hole. I started it months ago, and finished it weeks ago, but hadn’t the time or energy to write about it. Other things intervened, I suppose, like the advent of the school year—I’m not sure what made me think I could start and finish it in the last two weeks of summer—but I’ll admit that to review such a monster was a daunting prospect.

Weeks later, then, the strongest impression I retain is the Moby Dick’s sheer immensity. Not its length—though it is long—but its size, its capaciousness. The narrative which everyone knows, the story of Ahab chasing the white whale around the world for his revenge, comprises perhaps less than half the novel, nearly crowded out by the narrator Ishmael’s encyclopedic treatises on whales and whale hunting. There are chapters on eating whales, painting whales, whale anatomy (in fact, the sperm whale’s head gets six pages of its own), the historicity of the story of Jonah, and many chapters painstakingly detailing why whalers deserve your reverence. The best of these, I think, are the chapters where Ishmael expounds on the meaning of whiteness:

Is it by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a colour as the visible absence of colour, and at the same time the concrete of all colours; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows – a colourless, all-colour of atheism from which we shrink?... And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?

The effect of Ishmael/Melville’s towering erudition and knowledge, then, is more than merely to impress. Like the whiteness of the whale, which is made of all colors and therefore seems like none, the great conglomeration of information that is Moby Dick teeters toward meaninglessness. The whale is loaded with so much symbolism that it ceases to symbolize anything.

Moby Dick is an “inscrutable malice” and an “intangible malignity,” not because he is so mysterious but because he is so well-known. In its capaciousness the whale manages to be both the “colourless, all-colour of atheism” and a stand-in for God. In his way Ahab comes to represent man’s vengeance for the fall, to lash out against his maker:

All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale’s white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart’s shell upon it.

Ahab is the other lingering impression: Monomaniacal, blood-lusting, and unwavering. He’s named for a Biblical king, and it’s only through him that the novel’s overblown, King-James-cribbed language works, with its “thees” and “thous” and ponderous, circuitous sentences. The back of my copy calls Moby Dick a “hymn to democracy” because it is the “image of a co-operative community at work,” but one might say the same thing of the Peoples Temple. One of my favorite episodes is when the Pequod meets a ship that has been effectively commandeered by a sailor with pretensions as a prophet, but he pales in comparison to Ahab’s religious intensity:

“Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with theee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee. Sink all coffins and hearses to one common pool! and since neither can be mine, let me then tow to pieces, while still chasing thee, though tied to thee, thou damned whale! Thus, I give up the spear!”

As great as that is, I found that I didn’t love Moby Dick as much as I hoped it would. I expected it to be life-changing, but the long discursive chapters, serviceable to the themes as they were, never faded away to make room for the heightened intensity to the plot. It overwhelmed me and awed me, but did not—completely—endear itself to me. Mostly, I found myself impatient to get back to Ahab. Is that a criticism of Moby Dick, or a praise of it?

19 Cloud Atlas-David Mitchell

2011-09-30T17:46:00.001-04:00

David Mitchell uses a variety of genres to portray 6 amazing story lines: diary, epistolary, mystery novel, memoir, interview, and a sort of third person limited storytelling. The variety of forms reminds me of Melville’s efforts at stylistic variety in Moby Dick. Yeah, I’ll make that comparison, deal with it.

The birthmarks on the shoulders are part of a motif connecting the stories. I found it subtle, but I understand how one could find it unnecessary. There are other gems of transitional bliss inside each story, either preceding or following. The structure is important to note; one half of each story is told in chronological order starting in the 1800’s. The sixth story takes place in a future when mankind has returned to its hunter-gatherer roots; this story is told in its entirety. The reverse order of stories unfolds as we return to the 1800’s.

“The Pacific Journal of Patrick Ewing” provides the experience of a San Francisco notary in route home from assignment. Pious and inexperienced, he contracts a sickness and a doctor friend makes efforts to preserve his life. The opening journal entry finds Doctor Goose searching for teeth on the beach (brilliant). The “eat or be eaten” theme, and the baseness of mankind are introduced subtly.

“Letters from Zedelghem” gives us a 25 year-old composer in 1931, Robert Frobisher. RF writes letters to his friend (and possible lover) Rufus Sixsmith in London. RF sends him mail from Belgium, but ended up there as a result of being down on his luck, and games of chance were the cause. As he fled his creditors in England, he decides on a whim to offer his skills at musical notation to a famous yet retired composer. Love, loss, and humor, particularly the upper class ironies Jane Austen would love, should be enjoyed here. “Her laughter spurts through a blowhole in the top of her head and sprays all over the morning.”

“The Luisa Rey Mystery” brings death to the forefront. The dangers of a nuclear power plant are revealed by the Sixsmith report, yes the same Sixsmith that received Frobisher’s letters. Keeping all parties quiet takes some murder. A page-turner, and the one story I was upset about having to wait 200 pages to learn the second half. “Power, time, gravity, love. The forces that really kick ass are all invisible.” p.396

“The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish” is the dud of the group. Connection to the Luisa Rey mystery comes through his being an editor. Somehow he gets locked away in a convalescence home. More is being said about the nature of society not respecting septuagenarians. Meh.

“Orison of Somni-451” is fucking awesome. This is a clone future in a Korea rife with genetic engineering. Movies are dubbed disneys, smart phones are sonys, and clones don’t have souls. Except for one Somni-451. She is used by a rebellion to prove the immorality of cloning. She is being interviewed before being put to death for her part in trying to overthrow the system.

“Sloosha’s Crossin’ an’ ev’rythin’ after” is the story of Zachary Bailey, a native of Hawaii, the Big I. His experience as a goat herder gets interesting as his pagan god-fearing society allows a visiting anthropologist to stay for several months. Zachary is cautious of her “smart” but begins to trust her after she shares her knowledge of the world before “The Fall.” Dialectically challenging, the violent and peaceful societies on the islands would give any historian an education in atrociology.

Many of these stories could be worthwhile as novellas, but together they speak to the apocalyptic future that our way of life has in store. This has definitely moved to #1 on my list for the year. At 500 pages it was surprisingly quick, but the depths of thought ranged from life and death, philosophy to humor, and conscience to responsibility.

18 Wittgenstein’s Mistress-David Markson

2011-09-04T19:29:00.000-04:00

“There is no better way of keeping sane and free from anxiety than by being mad.” -Leonardo

Allow me to introduce you to the crazy intelligent Kate: as unreliable a narrator as you’ll ever find. She begins her story by acknowledging her search for another living being (the cover holds the first sentence of the novel). Believing she is alone in the world she tells her story of living in museums around the world, traveling to the battlegrounds of ancient Greece, and revisiting locations of personal history. Along the way she leaves messages in the hope that somebody else exists.

The problem for the reader: is she the only living woman, or is she mad? The writing style is stream-of-consciousness, and it’s as good as Joyce on crack. She is sitting at a typewriter, over the span of several months, writing an autobiography. Where a day’s worth of writing ends you have to be told by Kate. She offers that she was mad during many moments of her solitary journey, but her honesty seduces the reader to trust what she is writing now. Much of her surroundings appear tangible: clothes dried in the sun, a jar to fetch water from a stream, a canoe, the beach, and the forest. Many of the objects she describes in her house must be real, an atlas, a painting, and half empty bookshelves:

“There is space. Many of the shelves up here are half empty.
Although doubtless when I say they are half empty I should really be saying they are half filled, since presumably they were totally empty before somebody half filled them.
Then again it is not impossible that they were once filled completely, becoming half empty only when somebody removed half of the books to the basement. I find this second possibility less likely than the first, although it is not utterly beyond consideration.”

These philosophical questions pepper the novel, but Kate seems to have an answer for each of them, and you start to trust and understand her point of view. Logical impossibilities that she answers in her madness:

“Once, when I was listening to myself read the Greek plays out loud, certain of the lines sounded as if they had been written under the influence of William Shakespeare. One had to be quite perplexed as to how Aeschylus or Euripides might have read Shakespeare...Finally it occurred to me that the translator had no doubt read Shakespeare.”

Her actions also seem quite realistic. She travels around the world in any car that still has gas and a working battery. Early in her search she carries baggage and objects, transferring them each time a car runs out of gas. At one point she drops hundreds of tennis balls down The Spanish Steps. Sounds fun, but she stops carrying things and begins leaving things, forgetting.

Kate makes countless classic allusions to Greek dramas, the Iliad, and the Odyssey. More of her allusions are to artists and paintings: Van Gogh, Vermeer, Michelangelo, Da Vinci, Picasso, De Kooning, Magritte, and El Greco. The facts she presents, alongside possible encounters of individuals that lived in the same town during the same time periods, lose value as she tries to connect the lives of masters, apprentices, students, and offspring. At many points you think she is just showing off her knowledge of obscure details about artists, the name of Rembrandt’s cat for example. But she can’t remember the name of her own cat, and obviously “one does not name a seagull.”

She claims to have lived in the Met, the Tate, and the Louvre. While in these museums she burned frames of paintings to keep warm, but also hung her own paintings between the masters. Kate clearly has knowledge of art history, but she offers small truisms that you believe until you can no longer trust her sanity. The reader’s trust turns to sympathy. And with that sympathy you question everything she says. Kate has some facts, but they are not remembered accurately. According to Kate the following was said by Leonardo, sadly, it was not:

“There is no better way of keeping sane and free from anxiety than by being mad.” -Michelangelo

p.s. What happened to 10-17? number 9 was read so long ago and the post so horrible...I'll try to keep up.

09-St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves-Karen Russell

2011-09-03T23:08:00.000-04:00

I saw Karen Russell have a conversation with Wells Tower a few months ago at the NY Public Library. I went because I read the review of her new novel Swamplandia and was intrigued. I bought her collection of short stories, one of which was expanded for her acclaimed novel. Karen is 29. She is one of the New Yorker magazine’s 20 under 40 and she is trying really hard to be someone else: Kelly Link. I love the fantasy realism of Kelly Link. Karen Russell writes in a way that feigns originality, but falls way short, and hits too hard on the southern child narrator. The short stories are soft, easy reads. And I usually like that about short stories. This collection grabbed me twice, the title story and the one that became the novel. I do not recommend this collection. And I won’t be reading Swamplandia.

Nine Stories by J. D. Salinger

2011-09-03T12:01:00.002-04:00

I assigned Nine Stories as the summer reading for my upcoming AP English course. Students respond well to Catcher in the Rye, I reasoned, and might respond well to Salinger's other work, and a set of short stories, as easily portioned as it is, might take some of the burden of summer reading away. Whether or not those things are true--well, I'll tell you that in a few days when I find out how many of them completed the assignment.

Nine Stories remains as I remembered it: a collection of plain-spoken, yet acutely detailed, accounts of human interactions. I am still mostly baffled at "Just Before the War with the Eskimos" (What is it about Ginnie's interaction with Selena's brother that makes her go back on her demand to be paid for the cab fare?), mostly bored by "Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes," and heartbroken by "Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut" and "The Laughing Man," which probably are the best offerings here.

I was less absorbed in "Teddy" than I was the first time around--when you know for sure what's coming, that Teddy accurately predicts his own death, his long, plodding conversation about the nature of reincarnation saps the story of its dramatic thrust. The most rewarding to re-read--that is, the one that seemed richer for offering things I had missed the first time around--was "De Daumier-Smith's Blue Period," about a young artist who fakes his way into teaching at an art correspondence school.

The narrator--a nineteen-boy who is decidedly not the Parisienne De Daumier-Smith, friend of Picasso--takes the job out of boredom, or listlessness, or maybe is simply trying to get away from the stepfather he has to bum around with now that his mother has died. His students are irredeemably bad--not necessarily without talent, but puerile, or pornographic, or both. But one, a Catholic nun in Toronto, piques his interest, and he writes her a very personal letter asking her if he could mentor her as a painter.

What the narrator finds, perhaps without looking, is a kind of religious epiphany. Sister Irma's painting is a scene of Christ's crucifixion, and he experiences it as a secular vision. There is something unmistakably modern in his awe; it is the reaction of a world for whom artistic revelation has usurped religious revelation, who cherishes the symbol because it is more palpable than the murky truth to which it refers. It is easy to point out the tone-deafness of his letter to Irma--he asks, credulously, if being a nun is "satisfactory, in a spiritual way," and privately imagines that she is a young girl he might rescue from her vows--but it is also achingly sincere. This quasi-spirituality is so powerful that it gives Salinger a chance to try out some rare poetic flourishes:

Just before I feel asleep, the moaning sound came again through the wall from the Yoshotos' bedroom. I pictured both Yoshotos coming to me in the morning and asking me, begging me, to hear their secret problem out, to the last, terrible detail. I saw exactly how it would be. I would sit down between them at the kitchen table and listen to each of them. I would listen, listen, listen, and with my head in my hands--till finally, unable to stand it any longer, I would reach down into Mme. Yoshoto's throat, take up her heart in my hand and warm it as I would a bird. Then, when all was put right, I would show Sister Irma's work to the Yoshotos, and they would share my joy.

But it is Sister Irma's parish priest that writes back, withdrawing her from the school. The worldly nature of the narrator's epiphany has not enabled him to make a real connection or a real communication, as is often the case with more religious epiphanies. An agnostic, he fashions the nun into a goddess-figure, who then acts, like a goddess, inscrutably.

But the moment that elevates the story happens at the end, and is something I do not think I totally understood when I read it a couple years ago. The narrator, having dressed up in a tuxedo for dinner and then having changed his mind, watches a girl undress a mannequin in a store window:

She was changing the truss on the wooden dummy. As I came up to the show window, she had evidently just taken off the old truss; it was under her left arm (her right "profile" was toward me), and she was lacing up the new one on the dummy. I stood watching her, fascinated, till suddenly she sensed, then saw that she was being watched. I quickly smiled--to show her that this was a non-hostile figure in the tuxedo in the twilight on the other side of the glass--but it did no good. The girl's confusion was out of all normal proportion. She blushed, she dropped the removed truss, she stepped back on a stack of irrigation basins--and her feet went from under her.

The narrator calls this his "Experience," and has to steady himself against the glass. Clearly, this epiphanic moment has usurped the last one--but why? I think it is because he senses the girl's great bafflement at seeing him, tuxdedoed, outside her shop window, and that in some way she is experiencing an epiphany of her own, an inscrutable spiritual vision. For him, it is not the experience of the vision, but the embodiment of it, that truly satisfies, being the god-figure instead of the saint.

He writes in his diary, "I am giving Sister Irma her freedom to follow her own destiny. Everyone is a nun." This is not quite right; one must be a god to grant freedom to a nun, and though everyone is in some respect a nun, I think Salinger is suggesting that everyone is a little bit more than that. Or, rather, that nuns and the god for whom the toil are not entities as separate as one might have thought.

The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker

2011-08-27T12:11:00.002-04:00

The tongue is a rhyming fool. It wants to rhyme because that’s how it stores what it knows. It’s got a detailed checklist of muscle moves for every consonant and vowel and diphthong and fricative and flap and plosive. Pull, relax, twitch, curl, touch.... Rhyme taught us to talk.

I came into The Anthologist with a chip on my shoulder. The only other book I’ve read of Baker’s is The Fermata, which was awful. I’ve been reading reviews of his newest book, House of Holes, and it sounds equally stupid. But, on the other hand, I read about The Anthologist years ago, before I knew who Baker was, and was fascinated by its central conceit: that a man, hired to write an introduction for a poetry anthology, would be unable to write it without digressing over and over again. This was before I read Pale Fire, or heard of Tristam Shandy, but the idea still held appeal. Plus, it was short.

So I am happy and somewhat surprised to say that I really enjoyed this book, even though my mental comparison to Pale Fire was way off. Where the latter is a chess puzzle, The Anthologist is a diary (unsurprising) and a light, enjoyable primer on poetry (unexpected). There is a story here, about the titular anthologist and part-time poet, Paul, pining for his long-time girlfriend, Roz, who left him over his inability to finish the introduction, but while it’s the primary narrative spring, the gears that turn around it are more interesting. What’s effective though, is how the relationship narrative actually lends weight to the technical talk surrounding it. It feels surprisingly organic, and even though the writing isn’t amazing, it is sometimes funny and never embarrassing.

This might seem like damning with faint praise, but I don’t see it that way. The Anthologist feels like a beach read for the serious reader, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but I still don’t think I’m going to be picking up House of Holes.

Reality and Dreams by Muriel Spark

2011-08-27T11:48:00.004-04:00

She had married him for his looks which were admittedly star quality; but marriage was not a film; Cora was not a director; she had cast him in the role of a husband and he was hopeless at it. In screenplays the husband has a script to go by. Johnny had next to none.

The only other Spark book I’ve read, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, did not in any way prepare me for this slim volume. Strangely, it reminded me much more of late-era Don DeLillo: it is similarly dispassionate, features a lot of stylized dialog, and even the plotline reminded me a lot of DeLillo’s Point Omega. It is, however, much colder and crueler than that; no one does distant like Muriel Spark.

The story follows Tom Richards, a film auteur whose entire live revolves around his film career. Not only does he spend most of his time either on the film set or working on his scripts, he sees the world as a giant set itself. He wonders, more than once, if the world is just a dream God is having, and it isn’t hard to see why the question fascinates him—in his mind, the world is a dream in his head. The story begins after Tom has a fall from a crane while shooting a difficult shot, which brings his family together. The family consists of Claire, his sort-of, open-relationship wife, Cora, his child from an earlier marriage, about whom Tom nurses some disturbingly romantic feelings, and Marigold, Tom and Claire’s daughter, who no one else in the family really understands or likes.

Redundancy is a recurring theme in the book, both the American and British sense. American, in the sense that all the characters feel redundant to one another—Tom’s stream of young actresses are ultimately made redundant by Claire; Marigold is born redundant, since Cora already exists—and British in the sense that everyone seems to be losing their jobs, to such an extent that Marigold decides to make a documentary about redundancy. At some point in the novel, Marigold disappears, and, since this seems to be one of the few Spark books that has a mystery at its center, I won’t spoil what eventually happens. I will say that this is where the book most closely reminded me of Point Omega—in both novels, a strange girl disappears and no one seems especially miffed. Here, though, the reasons no one really cares are spelled out, and boy, are they cold. It’s hard not to see some parallels with Spark’s own life—as covered here—and her estrangement from her own child.

Everything ultimately explodes in violence, according to the blurb on the back, although “explode” is probably a bit strong. Instead, things fall into a not-so-nice cyclical arc. Things get a little muddled thematically, but Reality and Dreams is a funny, nasty, thoughtful piece of work.

Far Away Home by Susan Denning

2011-08-25T11:00:00.002-04:00

She had no strength to stay awake and bid the disappointing year goodbye.

I picked it up on a lark (cheap on kindle, good reviews), and while it started strong by the end it was only disappointing. Far Away Home tells the story of Aislynn, a teenager from New York in the late 1860s who moves west to fully realize her independence after her father dies. According to blurbs on Amazon, Denning put in a lot of effort to make sure her book was historically accurate, which allowed her to paint vivid portrayals of the characters and settings that I appreciated. The first quarter or so of the book was especially good. Denning brings the characters to life through several moving scenes, at least at first. But then, about when Aislynn heads west, the book starts to unravel. Gone is the depth of all the characters except our protagonist, and she becomes uneven. Whereas I was moved by Aislynn's neighbor/love interest's recollection of Aislynn's mother's death (when Aislynn's mother doesn't even actually appear in the book), when one of the main characters dies towards the end I could only muster up a hearty, "Eh." I find a good rule of thumb when evaluating books is that if you start rooting for the protagonist to die in the end because they are annoying, the book has become boring, or both, then it's not a great book. Also, Denning drops the ball on the conclusion; Where she was probably going for meaningful and hopeful, she ended up with my-editor-needs-a-final-draft-by-wednesday-shit-how-am-I-going-to-finish-this-oh-well-here-goes-nothing...

Also, Denning doesn't do a good job of making the conflict matter. For example, at one point a couple that Aislynn befriends on the trip out West tips over in their covered wagon and drowns as Aislynn looks on. And at this point if I wrote one more sentence I'd have equaled the amount of time that Denning spends on this presumably traumatizing event.

I could go on, but hopefully no one else will read this book, so I'll leave it at that.

Pincher Martin by William Golding

2011-08-21T14:34:00.002-04:00

He was struggling in every direction, he was the centre of the writhing and kicking knot of his own body. There was no up or down, no light and no air. He felt his mouth open of itself and the shrieked word burst out.

"Help!"

William Golding loves shipwrecks. His most famous book, Lord of the Flies, is a sort of social parable about a group of children stranded on a deserted island. Pincher Martin is what you might call an anti-social parable, about one man stranded on a desert rock in the middle of the Atlantic, fighting for survival and against sickness, madness, and dissolution.

The beginning of the book is, for me at least, almost inscrutable, a chronicle of sheer impressionistic and sensory experience that is frequently difficult to follow:

The pattern was white and black but mostly white. It existed in two layers, one behind the other, one for each eye. He thought nothing, did nothing while the pattern changed a trifle and made little noises. The hardnesses under his cheek began to insist. They passed through pressure to a burning without heat, to a localized pain. They became vicious in their insistence like the nag of an aching tooth. They began to pull him back into himself and organize him again as a single being.

Once "organize[d]... again as a single being," the story becomes more lucid: Christopher Martin, a navy officer and professional actor, has been stranded on a rock because his ship was struck by a German u-boat. In the feverish sensory assault of the wreck and its aftereffects, Christopher nearly loses himself, his personality subsumed by pure feeling. Throughout his ordeal of survival, he fears a return to this state of fragmentation, which he imagines as a kind of madness brought about by isolation. He imposes civilization on his rock, naming its various features, and tries to employ his mental faculties to prop up his own sanity:

He spoke out loud, using the voice hoarsely and with a kind of astonishment.

"Christopher Hadley Martin. Martin. Chris. I am what I always was!"

All at once it seemed to him that he came out of his curious isolation inside the globe of his head and was extended normally through his limbs. He lived again on the surface of his eyes, he was out in the air...

He looked at the quiet sea.

"I don't claim to be a hero. But I've got health and education and intelligence. I'll beat you."

Through flashbacks--which Golding suggests are the symptoms of the coming madness Christopher tries to resist--we learn that in his former life Christopher was something of an asshole. He tries to rape a girl, Mary, "the Mary who carried, poised on her two little feet, a treasure of demoniac and musky attractiveness that was all the more terrible because she was almost unconscious of it." When he learns that Mary has become engaged to his best friend, Nathaniel, he tries to murder him. He is, as an actor, fit to play Greed in the old morality plays:

"This painted bastard here takes anything he can lay his hands on. Not food, Chris, that's far too simple. He takes the best part, the best seat, the most money, the best notice, the best woman. He was born with his mouth and his flies open and both hands out to grab. He's a cosmic case of the bugger who gets his penny and someone else's bun."

Christopher's will to survive, then, is nothing but a greed for life, a manifestation of his own entitled feeling of primacy extended even over death, which threatens to dissolve the self. But in the manner of the Greek tragedian who unwittingly fashions his own demise, it is his self which threatens to devour him. In a really horrifying moment (which might have been more horrifying if I hadn't read about it already, so--spoiler alert) Chris realizes that the rock he's been set on is a perfect copy of one of his own teeth:

His tongue was remembering. It pried into the gap between the teeth and re-created the old, aching shape. It touched the rough edge of the cliff, traced the slope down, trench after aching trench, down towards the smooth surface... just above the fum--understood what was so hauntingly familiar and painful about an isolated and decaying rock in the middle of the sea.

This is the realization that launches him into full madness, or perhaps the realization that he is mad already. His greed for existence cannot stop the "black lightning" that ends the novel by tearing the universe apart, and finally dissolving him in death. Like the beginning of the book, this end part is something of a slog, phantasmagorical and anti-sensory, but unlike the beginning it seems like an earned slog, and it is terrifying even when inscrutable.

Doctor Fischer of Geneva, or The Bomb Party by Graham Greene

2011-08-14T16:33:00.002-04:00

I think I used to detest Doctor Fischer more than any other man I have known just as I loved his daughter more than any other woman. What a strange thing that she and I ever came to meet, leave alone to marry.

Both James Wood and Gabriel Josipovici have invoked Graham Greene as a sort of bogeyman of realism, terrorizing the modern consciousness with his inert prose. Waugh accused him of lacking a "specifically literary style at all." It is true that Greene is no great experimentalist, but I have always thought these charges were trumped up, and inadequately appreciative of some of the more startling bits of The Power and the Glory or The Heart of the Matter, among others. But Greene put out a lot of work in his life, and I think it might be fair to say that much of it is inconsistent, and it may be accurate even to say that some of it is lazy.

Doctor Fischer of Geneva, or The Bomb Party is a remarkably weak Greene novel, mostly because it relies, crutchlike, on a rather brilliant premise. The protagonist, Alf Jones, marries a wonderful woman many years his junior, and comes to find out that her father, Doctor Fischer, is a wealthy psychopath who likes to throw parties where he humiliates a set of cronies. These cronies--his daughter, Anna-Luise, calls them the Toads--put up with the Doctor's savagery because at the end of each party they receive a ridiculously extravagant present. Fischer channels all of his genius until these humiliations:

"Of course you don't know what Mr. Kips looks like."

"I do. I saw him when I tried to see your father the first time."

"Then you know he's bent almost double. Something wrong with his spine."

"Yes. I thought he looked like the number seven."

"He hired a well-known writer for children and a very good cartoonist and between them they produced a kind of strip-cartoon book called The Adventures of Mr. Kips in Search of a Dollar. He gave me an advance copy. I didn't know there was a real Mr. Kips and I found the book very funny and very cruel. Mr. Kips in the book was always bent double and always seeing coins people had dropped on the pavement... The book--I suppose most children are cruel--became a popular success. There were many reprints."

And yet, Mr. Kips comes faithfully to every one of Doctor Fischer's party, in the promise of receiving an eighteen-karat gold lighter or a piece of expensive jewelry. Doctor Fischer's wealth gives him great power, and Greene's narrator is always pausing to note that Fischer is, in his own way, like God. In what should be a really striking moment, Jones is waiting for his wife at a ski lodge when he discovers that she has been in an accident. The waiter at the lodge, not knowing what has happened, is angry at Jones for reserving and abandoning his table:

The waiter was more surly than ever. He told me, "You reserved this table for lunch. I have had to turn away customers.

"There's one customer you'll never see again," I told him back, and I threw a fifty-centime piece on the table which fell on the floor. Then I waited by the door to see if he would pick it up. He did and I felt ashamed. But if it had been in my power I would have revenged myself for what had happened on all the world--like Doctor Fischer, I thought, just like Doctor Fischer. I heard the scream of the ambulance and I returned to the ski lift.

Yes, there is a nice symmetry here when Jones--having just parted the side of his dying wife!--waits to see if the waiter will endure the humiliation that Jones, in his despair, wants to inflict. But must we have it explained to us so plainly? Do we need awkward little bon mots like these?:

"He didn't invite your to a party?"

"No."

"Thank God for that."

"Thank Doctor Fischer," I said, "or is it the same thing?"

Many of the book's flaws are redeemed by the last scene, in which Doctor Fischer throws one last party. Each guest gets to pick out a Christmas cracker, all of which save one contain a check for two million francs. The last contains a bomb. Fischer's cynicism tells him that his guests will endure the enormous personal risk for the money, and he is right, except in the case of Jones, who, ravaged by his wife's death, seeks out the cracker with the bomb in it.

This is rich stuff, but it is only a small part of a short book that seems wrought with too little care. The most interesting part about it may be the way that it ends, on a note that is uncharacteristic in that it is both rather upbeat and insistently agnostic:

Evil was as dead as a dog, and why should goodness have more immortality than evil? There was no longer any reason to follow Anna-Luise if it was only into nothingness. As long as I lived, I could at least remember her. I had two snapshots of her and a note in her hand written to make an appointment before we lived together; there was the chair which she used to sit in, and the kitchen where she had jangled the plates before we bought the machine. All those were like the relics of bone they keep in Roman Catholic churches. Once as I boiled myself an egg for my supper, I heard myself repeating a line which I had heard spoken by a priest at the midnight Mass at Saint Maurice: "As often as your do these things you shall do them in memory of me." Death was no longer an answer--it was an irrelevance.

Doctor Fischer was one of Greene's final novels. Are these words an insight into a man whose long attachment to his faith had waned, or lost power, for whom death and what comes after had become an irrelevance? And is it possible that the weakness of the novel is not unrelated?

Perhaps not. More likely it is Greene's long tendency to slip into pulpiness that, in his best works, is overcrowded by his talents. Greene himself made the distinction between his more literary works and "entertainments," though it is unclear which Doctor Fischer is meant to be. If you're looking for a masterpiece lurking in Greene's minor works, though, I'd suggest skipping Doctor Fischer and going for A Burnt-Out Case.

Will in the World by Stephen Greenblatt

2011-08-13T13:41:00.002-04:00

Toward the end of Will in the World, Stephen Greenblatt relates a story about Shakespeare's dealings as a property owner. When a set of wealthy landowners threatened to enclose a large area of land, some Shakespeare's, essentially transforming common land into private property, he protested the move, as it would have staunched the income he received from the tenants. Having reached a protective agreement with the landowners, however, Shakespeare quite non-heroically dropped his protest--even though the enclosure still promised to evict and impoverish many farmers. "It is not a terrible story," Greenblatt writes, "but it is not uplifting either. It is merely and disagreeably ordinary."

Merely and disagreeable ordinary--this phrase perfectly encapsulates the problem of Greenblatt's method. That is, Shakespeare's life is not particularly thrilling. While Christopher Marlowe was being assassinated by fellow spies in faked bar fights, Shakespeare quietly spent his days turning himself into a shrewd businessman, writing two or three plays a year, and avoiding his wife and children. The details we have of his life, which are extremely few, are strikingly banal.

The result is that Greenblatt's book is composed primarily of conjecture. Shakespeare may have done or seen this, if he was in this place or did that thing, and isn't it possible that that experience is reflected, here, in Much Ado About Nothing?

Shakespeare's plays then combine, on the one hand, an overall diffidence in depicting marriages and, on the other hand, the image of a kind of nightmare in the two marriages [in Hamlet and Macbeth] they do depict with some care. It is difficult not to read his works in the context of his decision to live for most of a long marriage away from his wife. Perhaps, for whatever reason, Shakespeare feared to be taken in fully by his spouse or by anyone else; perhaps he could not let anyone so completely in; or perhaps he simply made a disastrous mistake, when he was eighteen, and had to live with the consequences as a husband and a writer... And perhaps, beyond these, he told himself, in imagining Hamlet and Macbeth, Othello and The Winter's Tale, that marital intimacy is dangerous, and the very dream is a threat.

This makes for a remarkably readable and interesting biography, but what are the chances that even the most careful reader of Shakespeare--the most aloof of all writers--can sketch the map of his interiority, as Greenblatt pretends that he can do? He reminds us over and over again that this is, at best, guesswork, but that doesn't make it any more trustworthy.

Some of the surmises here seem innocent enough--it seems probable that the mobs in Julius Caesar and Coriolanus show Shakespeare's familiarity with, and suspicion of, similar occurrences in London. Some of it seems dangerous, like the long story about the show trial of Elizabeth I's once-Jewish adviser Dr. Ruy Lopez, which suggests to Greenblatt a wariness about public anti-Semitism that informs The Merchant of Venice.

Will in the World can be compelling, and convincing, and as far as biographies of Shakespeare go, it's probably the best that we're going to get. But the method of cherry-picking passages from the plays and matching them to biographical possibilities makes me deeply uneasy, not least because it is the method that leads a whole host of otherwise reasonable people to believe that Shakespeare's plays were written by Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford.

It probably isn't Greenblatt's fault. It is ours, who crave to see the man "behind the plays," and who want Shakespeare to be as interesting as Marlowe or Greene or Kyd. Shakespeare's texts are so compelling, it seems inconceivable that he could be "merely and disagreeably ordinary," but that may be a fact we shall all have to accept.

Henry V by William Shakespeare

2011-08-06T15:28:00.002-04:00

CHORUS: O, for a muse of fire that would ascend
The brightest heaven of invention!
A kingdom for a stage, princes to act,
And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!
Then should the warlike Harry, like himself,
Assume the port of Mars, and at his heels,
Leashed in like hounds, should famine, sword, and fire
Crouch for employment.

You will forgive me for skipping straight from Henry IV pt. 1 to Henry V without reading the second part of the trilogy; I am taking part, you see, in the NEH Summer Shakespeare Institute at Columbia University and this is one of the plays we have been asked to read. While I enjoyed it more than the other two (The Taming of the Shrew and Romeo and Juliet) it has less immediacy than 4H1, and without this class I may not have appreciated it as much as I do now.

Henry V is, more than anything else Shakespeare wrote, a war-play. Henry, the once reckless Prince Hal, has ascended to the throne and wants to legitimize his power by invading France, having a (somewhat tangential) claim to that country's throne. The Dauphin, the heir to the French throne, thinks that this is a hilarious prospect and sends Henry a gift of tennis balls as a jest regarding his reputation. Henry's response would surprise the Dauphin for its savagery, if he could hear it:

And tell the pleasant prince this mock of his
Hath turned his balls to gun-stones, and his soul
Shall stand sore charged for the wasteful vengeance
That shall fly with them; for many a thousand widows
Shall this mock mock out of their dear husbands,
Mock mothers from their sons, mock castles down;
And some are yet ungotten and unborn
That shall have cause to curse the Dauphin's scorn.

Whether this causes you to like Henry more or less I will leave to your judgement, but it resounds with the king's personal history. Though he has cast off Falstaff and his Eastcheap companions, the king does love a good mock--later in the play he plays a somewhat more harmless trick on a pair of his men--but there is no joy or levity in this speech; Henry's jesting has become much more humorless and much more dangerous.

This is just one example of how problematic Henry's war-making is. The most famous lines from the speech are Henry's rousing speech before his unmatched soldiers prior to the Battle of Agincourt, on St. Crispin's Day:

The story shall the good man teach his son,
And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered--
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he today that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition;
And gentlemen in England now abed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.

Shakespeare clearly bestowed Henry with all of his own verbal prowess, and Henry's ability to inspire gulls many of us into taking his claims to glory and honor seriously. They are, of course, quite serious, but they are not the only thing that exists in this play. Henry's words and actions are repeatedly parodized by a group of soldiers in his army that were once his friends at Eastcheap. So Henry's memorable call, "Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more, / Or close the wall up with our English dead!" becomes Bardolph's ludicrous, "On, on, on, on, on! To the breach, to the breach!" While Henry refuses to make a deal with the French and rationalizes his decision to kill his prisoners of war, the Eastcheap soldiers steal remorselessly, shake down French soldiers, and engage in petty squabbles. Henry himself promises that the battle will "gentle [the] condition" of the commoners who fight with him, but when the list of the dead is read out, he forgets everyone but the titled corpses.

At the same time, we are constantly reminded that we are sheltered from this war. There are no actual scenes of battle--unless you count when Fluellen beats Pistol senseless with a leek--and the chorus reminds us repeatedly that we are watching only a play. The sense that, through theater, we can share in the glory of one of England's most admired monarchs is repeatedly undermined. We are so enamored of Henry and his golden tongue that we--like Kenneth Branagh and Laurence Olivier--may miss the many signs that the war Henry fights is not the one he describes. Am I the only one that thinks the bravest, most honorable character in the play is the soldier Michael Williams, who refuses the king's money as recompense for the practical joke that Henry plays on him?

(Perhaps I am not--members of the Supreme Court and other judges found for the French during a 2010 mock trial.)

In the end, I must admit that my perception of war in the play is inextricable from my opinion of Hal's character and actions in the first part of Henry IV, and my general attitude about Shakespeare's political opinions. But there is much in the plays for Branaghs and the Oliviers of the world to point to, and ultimately that is a testament to Shakespeare's unequaled ability to negotiate multiple perspectives without giving any supremacy.

The Watch by Rick Bass

2011-07-29T15:10:00.003-04:00

My roommate gave me his copy of Rick Bass' short story collection The Watch to take on my recent road trip from New York City to California. I don't think we passed through any area really represented in these stories--Mississippi, Idaho, Utah, etc.--but we passed through a lot of empty space, huge swaths of the country nearly devoid of people, which seemed to match the book's setting as well as any place else. Bass' characters are lonesome as a rule, wanderers in empty spaces, ignorant of their own idiosyncrasies because they lack social context. Some stories are set in Houston; even these seem more like a Childe Harold-like wasteland.

The stories that work the best are the ones that dial down this strangeness and emptiness, however, like "In Ruth's Country," about a doomed romance between a Mormon girl and a non-Mormon boy. The two care a great deal for each other, but ultimately the girl must be married off to an insensitive cattle baron who already has several wives. The characters are thinly drawn, as elsewhere in the collection, but Bass is able to wring considerable pathos out of the situation:

"Ruth," I said, and looked at her. She was all dressed up, and wouldn't say anything. She was just looking at me: that look as if she was afraid I wanted to take something from her, that look that said, too, that she could kill me if I tried.

"The baby, Ruth," I said. I ran a hand through my hair. I was wearing my old cattle-chasing clothes, and I felt like a boy, out there in the hall. There was no one else around. We were in a strange building, a strange hallway, and the river seemed very far away.

"Not yours," she said suddenly. She clutched the Bible even tighter. There were tears in her eyes. "Not yours," she said again. It's the thing I think of most, when I think about it now, how hard it probably was for her to say that.

Less successful are offerings like "The Watch," an interminable story about the owner of a desolate general store who joins forces with a bicyclist to track down his elderly father, who has run away to found a community of poor black women in a malaria-ridden swamp.

The women had all screamed and run into the woods, in different directions, the first time Buzbee leaped into the water after an alligator; but now they all gathered close and applauded and chanted an alligator-catching song they had made up that had few vowels, whenever he wrestled them. But that first time they thought he had lost his mind: he had rolled around and around in the thick gray-white slick mud, down by the bank, jabbing the young alligator with his pocketknife again and again, perforating it and muttering savage dog noises, until they could not longer tell which was which, except for the jets of blood that spurted out of the alligator's fat belly--but after he had killed the reptile, and rinsed it off in the shallows, and come back across the oxbow, wading in knee-deep water, carrying it in his arms, a four-footer, his largest ever, he was smiling, gap-toothed, having lost two in the fight, but he was also erect, proud, and ready for love. It was the first time they had seen that.

It's hard to say why "In Ruth's Country" works while "The Watch" fails; clearly Bass prefers the latter story, since he named the entire collection after it. You certainly can't say that "In Ruth's Country" is more creative than "The Watch," but perhaps it resonates more deeply because the central conflict--the unattainable girl--is more generalizable. Reading about Hollingsworth and his father (named Buzbee, of all things) is a little unpleasant and deeply unsatisfying; it does not leave the impression that you have come into contact with another human being.

Human stories are the best stories, after all, and at its best The Watch provides them. When it doesn't, though, it can be a little like walking through that characteristic wilderness--Mississippi, Idaho, Utah, etc.--completely alone.

08 The Remains Of The Day-Kazuo Ishiguro

2011-07-26T16:59:00.000-04:00

Written in 1988, the author seems Japanese, and he is. But while he was born in Japan he also grew up in England. He writes in a very specific style. His sentences are elevated to a level of perfection only a British perfectionist could accomplish.

With 8 Academy nominations in 1994, the movie adaptation of The Remains Of The Day seemed to be taken quite well, critically. Let me just say that the movie was horrible. Anthony Hopkins will forever be Hannibal Lector in my mind. And as a butler, this Hopkins’ character would have eaten the leading men of Europe before WWII. This realistic fiction novel takes place in England after WWII. It is a story told by a butler, about his experiences with his employer who was extremely involved in British Foreign policy between WWI and WWII.

The story is told as a series of journal entries by the protagonist Mr. Stevens, and he thinks his job is the only thing that fills his life with purpose. His opinion of dignity-a seriousness of behavior and a sense of self-respect and pride in ones actions-is the one most important aspect of his existence:

“The story was an apparently true one concerning a certain butler who had traveled with his employer to India and served there for many years maintaining amongst the native staff the same high standards he had commanded in England. One afternoon, evidently, this butler had entered the dining room to make sure all was well for dinner, when he noticed a tiger languishing beneath the dining table. The butler had left the dining room quietly, taking care to close the doors behind him, and proceeded calmly to the drawing room where his employer was taking tea with a number of visitors. There he attracted his employer’s attending with a polite cough, then whispered in the latter’s ear: ‘I’m very sorry, sir, but there appears to be a tiger in the dining room. Perhaps you will permit the twelve-bores to be used?’
And according to legend, a few minutes later, the employer and his guests heard three gun shots. When the butler reappeared in the drawing room some time afterwards to refresh the teapots, the employer had inquired if all was well.
‘Perfectly fine, thank you, sir,’ had come the reply. ‘Dinner will be served at the usual time and I am pleased to say there will be no discernible traces left of the recent occurrence by that time.’” (page 36)

Mr. Stevens is a rather boring man, that lives to work, in opposition to the way I live my own life, I work to live, and try to find joy in my profession along the way. Stevens’ life is his job. He has no social life, no friends, no aspirations or goals. He only cares about his job and making his master happy. The detail and amount of work that go into serving as butler are a bit preposterous. From shining silver, to dusting, to serving dinner, tea, drinks, and ordering other servants around the house. I would never want to be a butler, but while reading the first 30 pages I felt I would have made an excellent butler. I like to think I am one that has “a dignity in keeping with his position”

07 Tender Is The Night-F. Scott Fitzgerald

2011-07-26T16:40:00.000-04:00

I never liked Gatsby, but I like recommendations. Tender is the spectacular study of one man, Mr. Dick Diver. Told in the third person, the three sections are dominated by three characters thoughts: Rosemary, Dick, and Nicole. Tender is a somewhat autobiographical look into Fitzgerald’s own life of love and mental illness. They are expats living it up on the French Riviera during the depression. I’m remembering why I didn’t like Fitzgerald in high school and college; while reading Tender I did begin to appreciate and even love his style.

We first meet Rosemary, the young American actress that has just hit the big time in a Hollywood production. She stumbled to the French Riviera with her mother and while on the beach, happens upon a lovely young couple-Dick and Nicole Diver. She falls in love with Dick, and we learn of all the upstanding and admirable qualities that Dick possesses. The three of them get along famously, and nothing scandalous occurs.

Dick is a young American psychologist writing a book about mental treatments. In Book two, his life is explained. He married Nicole, who was a mental patient, but not his patient. She is the youngest daughter of Chicago “old money.” The love they share is a fantastic thing. They have two children. Dick grows weary of the mental episodes Nicole displays and runs away to work and write and lecture. There is nothing funny about the sadness of the love between these two. It’s meant to fall apart.

I’m willing to give Gatsby another chance, I was young, and it’s easier now to appreciate style, and not use one’s personal life as a reason to not enjoy good writing.

Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis

2011-07-24T13:53:00.002-04:00

Christopher Hitchens once called Lucky Jim the funniest novel of the second half of the twentieth century. I don't think I can agree with that assessment--in fact, I would give my vote to Amis fils' novel Money, or maybe A Confederacy of Dunces--but I can understand the sentiment. The savagery of its satire, and its send-up of the British academic universe, are exactly what I would expect would make Hitchens laugh. It does contain what I think is probably the best description of a hangover ever written:

Dixon was alive again. Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way; not for him the slow, gracious wandering from the halls of sleep, but a summary, forcible ejection. He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider crab on the tarry shingle of the morning. The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at things did; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again. A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he'd somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt bad.

He will feel worse, when he discovers that he has burned a hole in the sheets of his host, Professor Welch, who happens to be the Dean of History at the provincial college where Dixon is a lecturer in history. Dixon's job is in danger--for other similar unintentional shenanigans--and his attempts to ingratiate himself to Welch are complicated by the fact that Welch is an insufferable blowhard, and so is his son, the painting Bertrand:

It was Bertrand who won the little contest. "The point is that the rich play an essential role in modern society," he said, his voice baying a little more noticeably. "More than ever in days like these. That's all; I'm not going to bore you with the stock platitudes about their having kept the arts going, and so on. The very fact that they are stock platitudes proves my case. And I happen to like the arts, you sam."

The last word, a version of "see," was Bertrand's own coinage. It arose as follows: the vowel sound became distorted into a short "a," as if he were going to say "sat." This brought his lips some way apart, and the effect of their rapid closure was to end the syllable with a light but audible "m." After working this out, Dixon could think of little to say, and contented himself with "You do," which he tried to make knowing and sceptical.

That's pretty funny, and it's funnier when Amis begins to slip this tic in elsewhere; at one point, Bertrand uses the word "obviouslam." To make matters worse, Bertrand has a very pretty girlfriend--blowhards often do--named Christine, who seems to fancy Dixon, though he himself is tied up with a manipulative and not very attractive girl named Margaret.

Much of the best comedic bits in Lucky Jim depict Dixon trying to navigate his precarious social and professional situation, and sometimes just pursuing sheer malice, through a series of pranks and tricks. He hides the sheets; he calls the Welch home pretending to be a reporter looking for Betrand; he writes a threatening letter to a rival pretending to be someone else. This is funnier because he isn't good at it, and is always being found out. The mockery quickly becomes something of a compulsion, reaching a disastrous head when Dixon, intoxicated, can't stop himself from delivering a public lecture while mimicking Welch:

When he'd spoken about half-a-dozen sentences, Dixon realixed that something was still very wrong. The murmuring in the gallery had grown a little louder. Then he realised what it was that was so wrong: he'd gone on using Welch's manner of address. In an effort to make his script sound spontaneous, he'd inserted an "of course" here, a "you see" there, an "as you might call it" somewhere else; nothing so firmly recalled Welch as that sort of thing. Further, in a partly unconscious attempt to make the stuff sound right, i.e. acceptable to Welch, he'd brought in a number of favourite Welch tages: "integration of the social consciousness," "identification of work with craft," and so on... Sweating and flushing, he struggled on a little further, hearing Welch's intonation clinging tightly round his voice, powerless for the moment to strip it away.

Ultimately, Dixon is only able to continue by mimicking someone else, and passes through a number of different voices before collapsing on stage. To some extent this is what Dixon deserves, not because he is a trickster but because he is as much a sham as anyone else. His recently finished article, "The economic influence of the development in shipbuilding techniques, 1450 to 1485," bores him to death, and was only written to please his superiors and lead the expected life of an academic:

Dixon had read, or begun to read, dozens like it, but his own seemed worse than most in its air of being convinced of its own uselessness and significance. "In considering this strangely neglected topic," it began. This what neglected topic? This strangely what topic? This strangely neglected what? His thinking all this without having defiled and set fire to the typescript only made him appear to himself as more of a hypocrite and fool.

Being a comedy, things will work out for Dixon. But it isn't at all clear to me that he deserves them, except perhaps in that he seems to know he is a sham, which is something Professor and Bertrand Welch refuse to admit. But the title suggests that maybe deserving the girl, the job, etc., is irrelevant:

It was all very bad luck on Margaret, and probably derived, as he'd thought before, from the anterior bad luck of being sexually unattractive. Christine's more normal, i.e. less unworkable, character no doubt resulted, in part at any rate, from having been lucky with her face and figure. But that was simply that. To write things down as luck wasn't the same as writing them off as nonexistent or in some way beneath consideration. Christine was still nicer and prettier than Margaret, and all the deductions that could be drawn from that fat should be drawn: there was no end to the ways in which nice things are nicer than nasty ones.

This is an interesting statement, and a troubling one, though it forms the lynchpin of the novel's serious treatment of moral questions. How then, do we revise our understanding of the luck that has enabled someone like Bertrand Welch to become a privileged, leisurely artist? As Hitchens notes, Dixon avers that "he badly needed another dose of luck. If it came, he might yet prove to be of use to somebody." The lucky Welches have spent their lives being useless to precisely no one--that's why they're academics, har har--and Amis leaves us with the suggestion that maybe Dixon, lucky for the first time in his life, might be able to make better use of it.

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

2011-07-23T19:14:00.002-04:00

Wuthering Heights is awful. I don't mean, of course, that it is bad, but that the experience of it is like being caught in a vice, so rife it is with cruelty and horror. The petty tribulations that Jane Eyre's family put her through do not compare, nor do the benign torments of Mr. Rochester, to what Heathcliff perpetrates in Wuthering Heights. My memory of him from pretending to read this book in high school was that he was a sort of Byronic anti-hero, devoted to his soulmate Catherine Earnshaw despite attempts to tear them apart, but that is only a partial--and thus very mistaken--perspective.

Heathcliff enters the novel mysteriously, a gypsy urchin brought home by Catherine's father. Heathcliff is his only name (and it matches the windswept, bleak terrain of the Earnshaw estate, Wuthering Heights). He and Catherine form an instant bond, and when their father dies, Catherine's cruel brother Hindley contrives to keep them apart, debasing Heathcliff as a servant, and the difference in their social station drives Catherine to marry the handsome, effete Edgar Linton. Yet, Catherine maintains that she and Heathcliff are so connected to one another that they share a soul:

"This is nothing," cried she; "I was only going to say that heaven did not seem to be my home; and I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth, and the angels were so angry that they flung me out, into the middle of the heath on the top of Wuthering Heights, where I woke sobbing for joy. That will do to explain my secret, as well as the other. I've no more business to marry Edgar Linton than I have to be in heaven; and if the wicked man in there had not brought Heathcliff so low; I shouldn't have thought of it. It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff, now; so he shall never know how I love him; and that, not be cause he's handsome, Nelly, but because he's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same, and Linton's is as different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire.

Separated from Cathy, Heathcliff vows to wreak havoc on the external forces he perceives to be at fault, namely Hindley Earnshaw and Edgar Linton. He doesn't dare while Catherine is alive, but the tensions between Heathcliff and Edgar push her into madness and illness, and when she dies his cruelty becomes extreme:

He seized, and thrust her from the room; and returned muttering, "I have no pity! I have no pity! The more the worms writhe, the more I yearn to crush out their entrails! It is a moral teething, and I grind with greater energy, in proportion to the increase of pain.

The second half of the book--the better half, I think, though not the one that seems to be best remembered--details Heathcliff's revenge. He becomes a tenant at Wuthering Heights, knowing that the near-mad Hindley would not refuse his money, and swindles him out of the property by buying up the mortgage to support Hindley's alcoholism. He marries Edgar's sister Isabella, whom he hates and abuses, and fathers a sickly, irritable son, Linton Heathcliff, whom he contrives to marry Cathy and Edgar's daughter, Catherine. Knowing that Linton will die young--and doing his part to help!--and that Edgar's home Thrushcross Grange will pass to him, Heathcliff becomes the owner of both of his rivals' estates.

It is difficult to describe how cruelly Heathcliff goes about this. He cares about no one but the dead Catherine, and terrorizes everyone else, including his own wife and son. And yet Heathcliff and Catherine's relationship is the most spiritually powerful thing in the entire novel. Attempts to cast Heathcliff's actions in a moral--specifically, Christian--light nearly always come off as weak, and God never seems nearly as powerful as Heathcliff. As the young Heathcliff says to his nurse Nelly, "God won't have the satisfaction that I shall" when Hindley is punished. It is difficult to call Heathcliff a villain because the moral and spiritual compass of Wuthering Heights is centered, like everything else, on his relationship with Catherine.

In the end, the only thing that saves the two houses from utter destruction is a sort of spiritual elevation that Heathcliff experiences, whereby he feels himself closer to Catherine, and therefore also to death, and disinterested in what remains of an earthly world:

"It is a poor conclusion, is it not," he observed, having brooded a while on the scene he had just witnessed. "An absurd termination to my violent exertions? I get levers and mattocks to demolish the two houses, and train myself to be capable of working like Hercules, and when everything is ready, and in my power, I find the will to lift a slate off either roof has vanished! My old enemies have not beaten me--now would be the precise time to revenge myself on their representatives--I could do it; and none could hinder me--But where is the use? I don't care for striking, I can't take the trouble to raise my hand!"

This is horrible, but it is right: We could imagine the entire territory of the novel being wiped off the face of the earth by a sweep of Heathcliff's hand, but the same intensity of love that sparked his anger calls him away from it.

Wuthering Heights endures because it is like a funhouse mirror toward our most worn ideas about romantic love: It leads us toward destiny; it elevates us spiritually; it is more powerful than what surrounds it; it will survive despite all obstacles. Here, in the earthly realm at least, all these things are true, but they make no one happy, not even Cathy and Heathcliff.

Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare

2011-07-22T22:19:00.001-04:00

I don't really enjoy reading Romeo and Juliet; if I didn't have to, I wouldn't. But this is one of the texts for the upcoming Shakespeare seminar at Columbia I'll be taking, along with The Taming of the Shrew and Henry V. The topic is "Becoming a Man," in what I suppose is a romantic context, otherwise I can't imagine why something like Romeo and Juliet would be preferable to Henry IV or Hamlet. (And for that matter, who exactly "becomes a man" in The Taming of the Shrew?) Not to mention the fact that Romeo never really graduates from a mewling little girl.

This time around I took notice of--even more than the last time I read it--the sharp contrast between Romeo's language when he speaks of Juliet and when he speaks of Rosaline. I am more convinced now than ever that Romeo's lovesickness at the beginning of the play is a Petrarchan fantasy that is more play-acting than true agony. Here, he talks of Rosaline's chastity:

Well, in that hit you miss: she'll not be hit
With Cupid's arrow, she hath Dian's wit;
And in strong proof of chastity armed,
From love's weak childish bow she lives uncharmed.
She will not stay the siege of loving terms,
Nor bide th' encounter of assailing eyes,
Nor ope her lap to saint-seducing gold.
O she is rich, in beauty only poor,
That when she dies, with beauty dies her store.

I get the strong sense that Rosaline's chastity is not the cause of Romeo's agony but rather the cause of his idealization of Rosaline. The style Romeo adopts cannot be divided from the tradition of loving from afar; if Rosaline were not chaste, she would not be an appropriate object of Romeo's romanticism. When Romeo and Juliet first meet, their words form a sonnet together, something that would have been impossible in the Petrarchan tradition because the lover remains always aloof. Romeo must learn what Juliet knows instinctively, that language cannot grasp true love:

Conceit, more rich in matter than in words,
Brags of his substance, not of ornament.
They are but beggars that can count their worth;
But my true love is grown to such excess,
I cannot sum up half my wealth.

In its way, Romeo and Juliet is an ode to the sexual act, which is the action that surpasses words and brings true communion. The perversity of courtly love is underlined when, at the end, Juliet becomes to Paris what Rosaline was to Romeo. Paris' indignation at Romeo's interruption of his "true love's rite" at Juliet's tomb is almost comical, and we know that he cannot seriously mean his promise that "[t]he obsequies that I for thee will keep / Nightly shall be to strew thy grave and weep." Though Benvolio remarks that Romeo's laments over Rosaline are out of date, I wonder if Romeo and Juliet doesn't represent the nail in the coffin of the courtly tradition--it certainly speaks more strongly to modern readers, all of whom know Juliet but probably have never heard of Laura.

I think a case could be made that Romeo and Juliet on the whole is deeply critical of traditions, and that the ancient Capulet-Montague feud is another such example. Perhaps Romeo and Juliet would have been more loved in my class if I had been able to show my students the extent to which the old poison the young, and freedom means breaking free from one's elders.

The Last Post by Ford Madox Ford

2011-07-09T17:20:00.003-04:00

It had been obvious to her for a long time that God would one day step in and intervene for the protection of Christopher. After all Christopher was a good man -- a rather sickeningly good man. It is, in the end, she reluctantly admitted, the function of God and the invisible Powers to see that a good man shall eventually be permitted to settle down to a stuffy domestic life... even to chaffering over old furniture. It was a comic affair -- but it was the sort of affair that you had to admit. God is probably -- and very rightly -- on the side of the stuffy domesticities.

Graham Greene called The Last Post a mistake and omitted from his collected edition of the Parade's End novels (1 2 3), operating according to what seem to have been Ford's express wishes. I am not sure I agree with Ford and his protege, but the purpose of this novel does remain unclear. The last time we saw Christopher Tietjens, he was celebrating Armistice Day, having decided once and for all to abandon the income of Groby, his ancestral home, and to take up with his would-be mistress, Valentine Wannop. It was an awfully sweet ending for a series about a perpetually tortured man, and it's hard to shake the feeling that Ford couldn't resist adding a dash of bitters:

It had come through to Marie Leonie partly then and partly subsequently that Christopher's wife had turned up at Christopher's empty house that was in the Square only a few yards away. They had gone back late at night probably for purposes of love and had found her there. She had come for the purpose of telling them that she was going to be operated on for cancer so that with their sensitive natures they could hardly contemplate going to bed together at that moment.

In the first novel, Father Consett, the confessor of Tietjens' vindictive wife Sylvia, warns that if Christopher ever leaves her for another woman, "[t]he world will echo with her wrongs." In this way, Ford's impulse to write a fourth novel makes sense; Sylvia Tietjens would never consent to simply let Tietjens and Valentine live together apart from her torments. And true to form, on Armistice Day she invents a lie about cancer to keep them apart.

The most perplexing thing about The Last Post, however, is that it's barely about Tietjens at all. The strongest character is his brother, Mark, who has had some sort of seizure brought on by the news that England has refused to follow the Germans into their own territory. Mark maintains that his paralysis is voluntary--he echoes Iago's insistence that "from this time forth I never will speak word"--but whether that is true is never clear. The narrative perspective bounces from Mark to his recently married mistress, Marie Leonie, to Valentine, but Christopher is away on an aeroplane, gone to Groby to convince Sylvia's tenants there not to tear down the symbolic Great Groby Tree.

But Sylvia of course, is at Christopher's house, in order to "torture that girl out of her mind. That was why she was there now. She imagined Valentine under the high roof suffering tortures because she, Sylvia, was looking down over the hedge." She brings with her (for reasons that are never all that clear to me) a murderers' row of the series' villains: General Campion, Tietjens' godfather who sends him to the front because of Sylvia's mud-slinging; Ruggles, who does much of Sylvia's dirt-digging; Edith Ethel Duchemin, who hates Tietjens because her husband owes him money; Mrs. de Bray Pape, the uncouth American who is renting Groby (and believes herself the spiritual descendant of Louis XIV's consort); even Michael Mark, Tietjens' son, whose dubious parentage tortures Tietjens. All this leads to a very tense climax in which Sylvia, at the head of her phalanx of scoundrels, confronts a defenseless Valentine. But, because this is Ford, things do not turn out as they seem that they will:

[Sylvia said, "]They can all, soon, call you Mrs. Tietjens. Before God, I came to drive those people out... But I wanted to see how it was you kept him..."

Sylvia Tietjens was keeping her head turned aside, drooping. Hiding a tendency to tears, no doubt. She said to the floor.

"I say again, as God hears me, I never thought to harm your child. His child... But any woman's... Not harm a child... I have a fine one, but I wanted another... with its littleness... It's the riding has done it..." Someone sobbed!

Sylvia, having come intent to destroy Valentine psychologically, discovers that Valentine is pregnant with Tietjens' child and cannot do it. Perhaps the corruption of an innocent thing is too far; perhaps it is the realization that Valentine has succeeded where she could not, not just in keeping him, but in giving him a child that is doubtlessly his, and a family. I wish that I knew what that last phrase--it's the riding has done it--meant, but I have not been able to figure it out.

Is The Last Post a failure? On one hand, it ties up the loose end of Sylvia, who broods over the happy ending of A Man Could Stand Up--, and I think it does so appropriately. On the other hand, there's something discordant about packaging Christopher Tietjens away in an aeroplane to finish the tetralogy which is expressly his. I am reminded of Rabbit Remembered, but in that case Rabbit was dead, and the novella was written in the spirit of mourning. The Last Post is a novel of mourning too, but for an English culture that has perished with the war (like Groby Great Tree, which takes out half Groby wall with it).

Tietjens' absence, however, provides us--with what, exactly? More space for someone like Marie Leonie, Mark Tietjens' wife, who gives us the French perspective on the end of World War I, I suppose. Marie Leonie is a well-developed, intriguing character, and so is the "paralyzed" Mark, but they aren't Tietjens, and so the experience of reading The Last Post is like ordering the steak and being served the beef consomme.

But--then again--these books are wonderful and it's wonderful to have more of them. I am a little sad to have done with them, but I have the upcoming BBC adaptation to look forward to, scripted by none other than Tom Stoppard. It will probably be the best five hours of television that anyone has ever seen, ever.

What Ever Happened to Modernism? by Gabriel Josipovici

2011-07-07T13:40:00.003-04:00

Since the passages I quoted in the last chapter from Mallarme, Hofmannsthal, Kafka and Beckett all fall between the years 1850 and 1950 the temptation is strong to date Modernism in that hundred-year period. This is certainly when it flourished and when its manifestations were so prevalent that no-one could ignore it. The danger in seeing it like that, though, is that Modernism is thereby turned into a style, like Mannerism or Impressionism, and into a period of art history, like the Augustan or the Victorian age, and therefore as something that can be clearly defined and is safely behind us. I, on the other hand, want to argue that Modernism needs to be understood in a completely different way,as the coming into awareness by art of its precarious status and responsibilities, and therefore as something that will, from now on, always be with us. Seen this way, modernism, I would suggest, becomes a response by artists to that 'disenchantment of the world' to which cultural historians have long been drawing our attention.

This is the central insight of What Ever Happened to Modernism? and the one that strikes me as the most undeniably persuasive. By defining Modernism as a crucial mental shift and not an arbitrary period, Josipovici transcends the petty boundary-setting of the academic.

Here is the following argument, as best I can understand it: Modernism is the expression of the mental crisis that comes from the loss of reliable standards of truth. Art is not a mirror to the world, but a set of signs and symbols that describe it--what may seem a quibbling difference, but quite important. The Modernist, Josipovici argues, is all too aware that art can never really reach its goal, which is to describe the experience of life, and so the old realism games begin to seem disingenuous. The real artist then has only one recourse, which is to create art that is cognizant of this tension:

The remarks of Kierkegaard and Sartre help explain why so many Modernist writers have been at pains to stress that their fictions are only fictions, not reality. Not in order to play games with the reader or to deny the reality of the world, as uncomprehending critics charge them, but on the contrary, out of a profound sense that they will only be able to speak the truth about the world if the bad faith of the novel, its inevitable production of plot and meaning, is acknowledged and, somehow, 'placed.'

In supporting this argument, Josipovici is both broad (he includes examples from visual art and music, not just literature) and deep (he goes back as far as Cervantes and Albrecht Durer, who he claims as Modernists). I am delighted to report that he repeats Erich Heller's idea that the problem of poetry began with the Marburg Colloquy, where Protestant reformers were unable to compromise between the various truth claims of the eucharist, though he fails to note that Ford placed this moment at the heart of The Good Soldier when Heller was three years old.

Furthermore, he complains that the modern novel--especially the English one--fails to acknowledge this shift, preferring to pretend as if this crisis of conscience has never happened. His focus on the contemporary, however, I find to be the weakest part of his argument. At one point he presents for criticism a set of quotations from contemporary writers like Iris Murdoch and Philip Roth (!) which are meant to represent the kind of bread-and-butter realism that ought to be banished to the pre-Enlightenment, but as a critical method this is uncharitable at best. Does Josipovici really think that it is impossible to find a similarly banal block of text from In Search of Lost Time? Like in Wood's essays, John Updike and Graham Greene are presented as betes noires, which tells me that Josipovici has never read Greene's short story "Under the Garden," which would have fit nicely between the bit on Beckett and the bit on Kafka.

I come back to an anecdote Josipovici dregs up about Francis Bacon and his correspondent, David Sylvester:

Abstract painters, [Bacon] suggests, only have allegiance to the artwork, and to themselves. Hence the work will lack what he feels to be a vital ingredient. Sylvester, however, is puzzled: 'If abstract paintings are no more than pattern-making, how do you explain the fact that there are people like myself who have some sort of visceral response to them at times as they have to figurative work?'

Bacon's response is, "Fashion." But I do not see why this claim can't be made in reverse--while what Josipovici is saying is quite persuasive, how does it deal with the very real response many of us have to the psychological fineness of Rabbit, Run or A House for Mr. Biswas? It is not very pleasant to have one's favorite works trucked off because they fail to meet art's new "responsibilities," a phrase which seems unfittingly draconian.

At the end, Josipovici makes this concession, saying, "But I realise that this may be largely because of who and what I am." Of course, he does this only at the end and really quite reluctantly, but it is true: the final arbiter of artistic quality remains, infuriatingly, personal taste.

The Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare

2011-07-02T18:31:00.003-04:00

The Taming of the Shrew makes me, as it has made many readers over the years, deeply uncomfortable. The story of a woman (Katherina) being tamed by a man (Petruchio) so that she will become more docile and obedient is inherently repellent, and modern audiences are unsurprisingly ill at ease with sentiments such as these:

PETRUCHIO: But for my bonny Kate, she must with me.
Nay, not look big, nor stamp, nor stare, nor fret;
I will be master of what is mine own.
She is my goods, my chattels; she is my house,
My household stuff, my field, my barn,
My horse, my ox, my ass, my anything.

I sincerely doubt that one could write a play in the 21st century in which a man calls his wife his "household stuff" and not be perceived as a villain. This is tempered somewhat by the undeniable fact that, like Benedict and Beatrice, Kate and Petruchio are well-matched for each other because they share an affinity for a kind of verbal (and physical) sparring as flirtation:

PETRUCHIO: Come, come, you wasp. I' faith, you are too angry.

KATHERINA: If I be waspish, best beware my sting.

PETRUCHIO: My remedy is then to pluck it out.

KATHERINA: Ay, if the fool could find it where it lies.

PETRUCHIO: Who knows not where a wasp does wear his sting?

KATHERINA: In his tongue.

PETRUCHIO: Whose tongue?

KATHERINA: Yours, if you talk of tales. And so farewell.

PETRUCHIO: What, with my tongue in your tail Nay, come again,
Good Kate. I am a gentleman.

Zing! It is clear to me that, despite Petruchio's mercenary intentions and Kate's unwillingness to be controlled, they have an affection for each other. (Kate, for example, seems to be genuinely upset when it seems as if Petruchio will leave her at the altar.) But try as I might I cannot close-read away the thought that Petruchio, who "tames" Kate by withholding food from her and keeping her from her family, is awfully cruel. Bloom sees a strong undercurrent of irony in Kate's final speech, in which she extols the virtue of submissiveness, and believes that The Shrew is actually the story of how Kate tames Petruchio by letting him think he's getting what he wants. If you can find that in here, let me know:

Such duty as the subject owes the prince,
Even such a woman oweth to her husband.
And when she is froward, peevish, sullen, sour,
And not obedient to his honest will,
What is she but a foul contending rebel
And graceless traitor to her loving lord?

This speech is so over the top that the temptation to read it as ironic is very strong, but it seems to me that treating earnestness as irony becomes an unwise critical loop by which we question whether anyone really believes anything. If Kate does not believe this, she has learned this lesson deeply and is too cunning to provide any wink to the audience.

Of course, Shakespeare never was a moralizer, and attempts to tease out the moral prescription of The Shrew are short-sighted. The feminists will find it to be feminist, and the misogynists will find it to be misogynist. As a comedy, it is not the best--too much time spent on the idiot romance between Kate's sister Bianca and the disguised Lucentio, for one--and I wonder if, had it been a greater play, such a question would have occupied us less.

Snow Crash by Neil Stephenson

2011-06-24T19:10:00.004-04:00

"Wait a minute--this snow crash thing, is it a virus, a drug, or a religion?" Juanita shrugs. "What's the difference?"

Snow Crash is not a good book. It somehow made it onto the Time Top 100 novels list, it’s widely considered one of the best of the science fiction genre, but it’s so full of missteps, poorly thought out ideas, and convoluted writing that I’m at a loss to explain why.

First, the good: Snow Crash, in the early going, serves as a pretty funny satire of cyberpunk in the style of William Gibson. It follows a samurai pizza delivery guy, Hiro Protagonist (haha), who’s a slacker in the real world but a hero in the “Metaverse”, a virtual world that seems Stephenson’s answer to Gibson’s Sprawl. It’s silly, but for the first half of the book, the silliness at least seems intentional. However, when the titular “snow crash”, a drug that is chemical, physical, and digital, is introduced, the book strives for a more serious tone that fits it very poorly.

Introducing elements of linguistics, Christianity, and microbiology through reams and reams of dialog-based exposition, Stephenson lays out the science behind the ideas which is ultimately far too far-fetched (and, for anyone with a passing knowledge of the history of Christianity, factually inaccurate) for me to buy into. It reads like Stephenson had a lot of ideas, but rather than organically integrate them into the narrative, they are shared in endless dialogs between Hiro and a computerized librarian. I was also fairly skeeved by the sexualization of the 15 year old co-protagonist, Y.T., which includes a fairly explicit maybe not-quite-consensual sex scene.

On a more personal note, I was somewhat offended by Stephenson’s dismissal of Christianity. The following exchange, between Hiro and Juanita, a self-described devout Catholic, is so condescending that it makes my condescending organ ache:

"Do you believe in Jesus?"

"Definitely, but not in the physical, bodily resurrection of Jesus.", said Juanita.

"How can you be a Christian without believing it?"

"I would say, how can you be a Christian with it? Anybody who takes the time to study the gospels can see that the bodily resurrection is a myth that was tacked onto a real story several years after it was written. It's so National Enquirer-esque, don't you think?"

Snow Crash climaxes with a battle between two characters that are introduced in the last 70 pages of the novel, but it somehow seemed fitting: after a book full of characters with no real humanity, it's appropriate that the ending should feel like it doesn’t mean much at all.

Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence

2011-06-23T14:23:00.004-04:00

He was brooding now, staring out over the country from under sullen brows. The little, interesting diversity of shapes had vanished from the scene; all that remained was a vast, dark matrix of sorrow and tragedy, the same in all the houses and the river-flats and the people and the birds; they were only shapen differently. And now that the forms seemed to have metled away, there remained the mass from which all the landscape was composed, a dark mass of struggle and pain. The factory, the girls, his mother, the large, uplifted church, the thicket of the town, merged into one atmosphere--dark, brooding, and sorrowful, every bit.

Paul Morel loves his mother. Saddled with a violent, unhappy marriage to an uncouth coal-miner, she dotes on her son, with whom she forms a tight friendship. As Paul grows to become handsome and ambitious, he becomes attached to two different girls, which strains his relationship with his mother. The grammatical ambiguity of the title is no accident; at times Paul seems more like a boyfriend to his mother than a son, and more a son to his girlfriends than a lover. It is difficult, Paul shows us, to inhabit these social roles at the same time, which threaten to cleave you into parts and prevent you from devoting all of your being to anyone, even yourself.

Sons and Lovers hits many of the same settings and themes as Lady Chatterley's Lover, but it is also hugely different. The latter book is a paean to the physical act of love, which frees Constance Chatterley into herself, but sex in Sons and Lovers is (accurately, I might add) a messy, confusing affair. Paul resists giving himself physically to his lover, Miriam, until very late in the book, and it is not an unqualified success:

And afterwards he loved her--loved her to the last fibre of her being. He loved her. But he wanted, somehow, to cry. There was something he could not bear for her sake. He stayed with her till quite late at night. As he rode home he felt that he was finally initiated. He was a youth no longer. But why had he the dull pain in his soul? Why did the thought of death, the after-life, seem so sweet and consoling?

I thought that Lady Chatterley's Lover seemed strangely void of the Christian mysticism that Lawrence is known for. Sons and Lovers has it in spades, and though I'm sure others have taken to forming a precise catechism of Lawrence's religious philosophy, I must admit that such an endeavor is beyond me. There is the "sweet and consoling" after-life, and the paradoxical life that comes with being still (unlike Lady Chatterley!), and much to do with images of size and importance:

All the while the peewits were screaming in the field. When he came to, he wondered what was near his eyes, curving and strong with life in the dark, and what voice it was speaking. Then he realised it was the grass, and the peewit was calling. The warmth was Clara's breathing heaving. He lifted his head, and looked into her eyes. They were dark and shining and strange, life wild at the source staring into his life, stranger to him, yet meeting him; and he put his face down on her throat, afraid. What was she? A strong, strange, wild life, that breathed with his in the darkness through this hour. It was all so much bigger than thamselves that hewas hushed. They had met, and included in their meeting the thrust of the manifold grass stems, the cry of the peewit, the wheel of the stars.

But mostly I enjoyed reading Sons and Lovers more than Lady Chatterley because it is a novel more in tune with its protagonist's psychology, more interested in human detail. Lady Chatterley's reputation as pornographic, I feel, may have as much to do with its positivity about sex as its graphicality. Most of us, I think, simply have never felt as unabashedly pure and overjoyed about human intimacy as Connie does--though if you feel otherwise, I am quite happy for you. I feel much more in tune with the confused, needy, insolent Paul, who says things like this:

"You know," he said, with an effort, "if one person loves, the other does."

"Ah!" she answered. "Like mother said to me when I was little, 'Love begets love.'"

"Yes, something like that, I think it must be."

"I hope so, because, if it were not, love might be a very terrible thing," she said.

"Yes, but it is--at least with most people," he answered.

Love is a terrible thing, as Paul will find out, at least terrible in capability. Paul is never able to give himself wholly to either Miriam or Clara because the prospect is too frightening; he uses words like "freedom" but the subtext is of diminishing, of vanishing into the other, which is both appealing and horrifying.

Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen

2011-06-17T17:44:00.003-04:00

One question after this only remained undecided between them; one difficulty only was to be overcome. They were brought together by mutual affection, with the warmest approbation of their real friends; their intimate knowledge of each other seemed to make their happiness certain, and they only wanted something to live upon... they were neither of them quite enough in love to think that three hundred and fifty pounds a year would supply them with the comforts of life.

(Spoiler alert!) Marianne Dashwood is all feeling, and quite hot-headed; her sister Elinor is reasonable, pragmatic and cool. Sense and Sensibility is about the difficulty of both of them to procure a husband with either approach, as Marianne allows herself to be suckered into a passionate relationship with a cad and Elinor must suffer silently from the knowledge that her intended is secretly engaged to someone else. The Dashwoods are, in fact, so much the obvious precursors of the Schlegel sisters from Howards End that it makes me retroactively enjoy the latter book a little less.

That is my first observation about Sense and Sensibility. The second is this: Sense and Sensibility is, of the four Austen novels I've read, the strongest condemnation of the connection between marriage and money among them. No one wants to see Elizabeth Bennet marry Mr. Collins just for the stability, but it's awfully convenient that Mr. Darcy just happens to be a bazillionaire. And it is hard to condemn her friend Charlotte, who has few of Elizabeth's charms, for marrying Mr. Collins in a fit of practicality.

In Sense and Sensibility, however, everyone who marries for love is a saint and everyone who marries for money is a scoundrel. Marianne's tempestuous dalliance with Willoughby finally ends when he marries an heiress. Edward Ferrars, whom Elinor loves, is disowned by his wealthy family for his proposed marriage to Lucy Steele, and his inheritance promised to his brother Robert, who first appears in the novel buying a toothpick-case:

At last the affair was decided. The ivory, the gold, and the pearls, all received their appointment; and the gentleman having named the last day on which his existence could be continued without the possession of the tooth-pick case, drew on his gloves with leisurely care, and bestowing another glance on the Miss Dashwoods, but such a one as seemed rather to demand than express admiration, walked off with a happy air of real conceit and affected indifference.

I dare you to find a better (and funnier) sentence that so perfectly captures the shallowness and the selfishness of the supremely wealthy.

There are no Charlottes in this book. Even Elinor's practicality can't prevent her from marrying Edward when his engagement falls apart, though she understands perfectly the difficult road ahead of her. That Edward is provided with a living as a priest is fortunate, but it needn't have happened, and it's significant that Elinor, unlike Elizabeth Bennet, Emma Woodhouse, or Anne Elliot, takes a real risk for love.

Yet Sense and Sensibility is not quite the equal of those books. The characters are weaker (you can say almost nothing about Edward Ferrars except that he's a better man than his brother and Elinor loves him) and the plot forced, as when Austen foists a sudden illness on Marianne to bring Willoughby back into the picture. I hope for better from Mansfield Park and Northanger Abbey.

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

2011-06-17T13:44:00.005-04:00

"What is a country? A country is a piece of land surrounded on all sides by boundaries, usually unnatural. Englishmen are dying for England, Americans are dying for America, Germans are dying for Germany, Russians are dying for Russia. There are now fifty or sixty countries fighting in this war. Surely so many countries can't all be worth dying for."

"Anything worth living for," said Nately, "is worth dying for."

"And everything worth dying for," answered the sacrilegious old man, "is certainly worth living for."

When Joseph Heller was asked, late in life, why he had never written another book as good as Catch-22, he responded, “Who has?” Cocky, perhaps, but not unjustified—Catch-22 is certainly one of the densest, funniest, most rewarding books I’ve ever read.

The plot ostensibly follows Yossarian, a bombardier captain in the waning days of World War II, who wants nothing more to be sent home. He first tries completing the required missions, but his captain keeps raising the number. He carries on, faking sickness, faux insanity, and even talking to his largely inept or uncaring superiors, but nothing works—he is caught in a catch 22, a term that is never directly defined in the novel, but which has passed into popular usage as an impossible situation, and is exemplified throughout the novel, both explicitly and more subtly. Defining the novel as Yossarian’s story is misleading though, as any first-time reader will quickly learn.

Structurally--and I’m a serious geek for structure--it’s right up there with Ulysses and As I Lay Dying, completely unique and sometimes bewildering in its presentation. Chapters jump from person to person and place to place, sometimes in mid-scene. The novel is constantly folding in on itself, jumping through timelines, shifting perspectives, and recasting previous events as the backstories and motivations of supporting characters become more fully fleshed out. There’s really no way to explain how all this works; it just does. It brings to mind the film technique of showing a character, say, looking into a mirror, and when the camera pulls back, the character’s face is now on a photograph being held by someone else. It’s remarkably effective, both comedically and dramatically, throughout Catch-22, and I’m fairly certain I’ve never seen another novel use it. Nothing is unimportant or frivolous—even the most insignificant character arc pays off as the story goes on. As the disparate strings were woven together, it was honestly pretty amazing.

Catch-22 has a reputation as a funny book, and it definitely is, for much of its bulk, laugh out loud funny. Even the pervasive humor, however, works toward the novel’s unexpected final third, where everything comes together in a way that’s both nightmarish and bleakly (VERY bleakly) hilarious. It’s a scathing satire not just on the military or the long-term futility of war, but on the very core American values. Nothing escapes unscathed—God, country, capitalism, government—but the satire isn't without buried affection, and the ending is almost joyful, relative to the very bad things leading to it.

Still, this is a challenging book. Anyone expecting a comic novel to be an easy read will probably be put off fairly quickly—just check out some of the scathing Amazon reviews for proof—but this is serious literature covered in a thin candy shell, and it deserves to read that way. It’s almost a Catch-22 itself.

Othello by William Shakespeare

2011-06-05T15:59:00.003-04:00

IAGO: ...Divinity of hell! When devils will the blackest sins put on,
They do suggest at first with heavenly shows
As I do now. For whiles this honest fool
Plies Desdemona to repair his fortunes
And she for him pleads strongly to the Moor,
I'll pour this pestilence into his ear:
That she repeals him for her body's lust,
And by how much she strives to do him good,
She shall undo her credit with the Moor.
So I will turn her virtue into pitch,
And out of her own goodness make the net
That shall enmesh them all.

As is sometimes true in Shakespeare, Othello is not really the main character of his title tragedy. The tragedy, to be sure, is his, but we are never so close to him as we are to Iago, who is nearly as accomplished a soliloquist as Hamlet, and who dominates the play. Othello himself is, as A. C. Bradley points out, "the most romantic figure among Shakespeare's heroes" and becomes something like a ruined fairytale, distantly horrific, while we hew more closely to his destroyer. This is, I think, the genius stroke of Othello: Nowhere else in Shakespeare, even in Macbeth, are we so close to evil.

The guiding sentiment of the play is jealousy. It is not, at first, Othello's; he is, as he says at the end, "not easily jealous." But Iago harbors a deep jealousy for Cassio, Othello's newly chosen lieutenant, and it is this jealousy which he manages to push, like a disease-carrier or an accomplished politician, on to Othello. Conventional wisdom holds that Iago has no motivation for his jealousy, but as I read it, Iago has several, including the fact that Othello passed over Iago for Cassio's position and that Iago has suspected Cassio of sleeping with his wife, Emilia. At one point, Iago makes this startling statement:

If Cassio do remain
He hath a daily beauty in his life
That makes me ugly...

I find this fascinating--Iago, who has chosen evil as his good and constantly touts the power of his will, retains a deeply held jealousy for those who make the opposite choice.

The creature that Iago reduces Othello to is like Iago in the seething bitterness of its envy, but in its shallowness and foolishness it resembles also Iago's companion Roderigo, who is deeply in love with Othello's wife, Desdemona. There is some irony to the spectacle of Othello, the romantic warrior-prince, reduced to insanity at the idea that his wife is not his completely:

I had rather be a toad
And live upon the vapour of a dungeon
Than keep a corner in the thing I love
For others' uses.

What is most frightening about Othello is that Othello--just, valiant, accomplished, romantic--is turned into a weapon against himself--

No, my heart is turned to stone. I strike it and it hurts my hand.

--not through any flaw of his own, but because he is overpowered by a stronger will. In any other play, Othello should have towered over every other character, but his misjudging of Iago extends not only to his dishonesty but also his immense intelligence and power. I would venture to say that Iago is the strongest of all personalities in Shakespeare, and that no one but he could have left behind the ruin that he does, extending even to himself. He is like the witches of Macbeth, but more frightening because he is more human.

A Man Could Stand Up-- by Ford Madox Ford

2011-05-31T17:45:00.003-04:00

Coming into the square was like being suddenly dead, it was so silent and so still to one so lately jostled by the innumerable crowd and deafened by unceasing shouts. The shouting had continued for so long that it had assumed the appearance of being a solid and unvarying thing, like life. So the silence appeared like Death; and now she had death in her heart. She was going to confront a madman in a stripped house. And the empty house stood in an empty square all of whose houses were so eighteenth-century and silver grey and rigid and serene that they ought all to be empty too and contain dead, mad men. And was this the errand? For to-day when all the world was mad with joy? To become bear-ward to a man who had got rid of all his furniture and did not know the porter--mad without joy!

Three books and over 500 pages into the Parade's End (1 2) novels, we get out first glimpse of real combat. For Christopher Tietjens, it has been a steady spiral to the bottom, from a high-ranking government position to quartermaster to the front lines, rejected at each step of the way because those around him cannot bear his stoic goodness, which is increasingly an anachronism. At the front, Tietjens is mentally unraveling:

It was like being a dwarf at a conversation, a conflict--of mastodons. There was so much noise it seemed to grow dark. It was a mental darkness. You could not think. A Dark Age! The earth moved.

Ford's dexterity as a novelist continues to amaze me. There is so much packed in here--the literal darkness of the world, which is at that moment being bombed, the "mental darkness" which is also the darkness, like the Dark Age, of human civilization. The cunning em-dash, which somehow expresses perfectly the stumbling gait of Tietjens' (once nimble) mind. The absurd matter-of-fact statement, "The earth moved."

Tietjens' middle portion is bookended by two sections dominated by his unspoken love object, Valentine Wannop, on Armistice Day. Valentine's excitement over the end of the war is tempered by the return of Tietjens, whom she loves, but has reportedly gone mad:

What was the coming together that was offered her? Nothing, on the face of it, but being dragged again into that man's intolerable worries as unfortunate machinists are dragged into wheels by belts -- and all the flesh torn off their bones! Upon her word that had been her first thought. She was afraid, afraid, afraid! She suddenly appreciated the advantages of nunlike seclusion. Besides she wanted to be bashing policemen with bladders in celebration of Eleven Eleven!

What is it, I found myself wondering, that makes the Tietjens and Valentine of A Man Could Stand Up-- different from those of Some Do Not...? I think we are rightly meant to respect their decision not to become lovers in that first novel, a decision which they reverse toward the end of this book. It is partly excused, I think, by the sense that Sylvia has abandoned Tietjens (though this is not explicit, her absence is peculiar). And also that both have simply earned their rest and companionship; Tietjens for his suffering, and Valentine for her willingness to become Tietjens' nursemaid if he turns out to truly be mad. (As John Dowell does for Nancy Rufford in The Good Soldier.)

Happily, this is not the case. I am struck by the strange optimism of A Man Could Stand Up--. There is the strong suggestion that Tietjens and Valentine come out on the other side of WWI better than they entered; not that something irrevocable has been lost or the world has been disfigured, as Modernist literature commonly regards the war, but that life can be instead rebuilt. I think Ford draws a sharp line between social consequences and personal ones, and notes that the couple's happiness can really only be found apart from the culture of war and spiritual emptiness:

A man could now stand up on a hill, so he and she could surely get into some hole together!

This is the third of the four Parade's End novels; I know that the fourth is a horse of a different color. A Man Could Stand Up-- carries a sense of closure, and so I feel comfortable calling it--gasp--a "happy ending."

Translation is like sex.

2011-05-26T13:25:00.001-04:00

...or at least, that's what Julian Barnes seems to be implying in this article about the difficulties of translating Madame Bovary. Witness:

1.) If you go to the website of the restaurant L’Huîtrière (3, rue des Chats Bossus, Lille) and click on ‘translate’, the zealous automaton you have stirred up will instantly render everything into English, including the address. And it comes out as ‘3 street cats humped’. Translation is clearly too important a task to be left to machines.

2.) Then we make a key decision: should this translator be ancient or modern? Flaubert’s contemporary, or ours? After a little thought, we might plump for an Englishwoman of Flaubert’s time, whose prose would inevitably be free of anachronism or other style-jarringness. And if she was of the time, then might we not reasonably imagine the author helping her? Let’s push it further: the translator not only knows the author, but lives in his house, able to observe his spoken as well as his written French. They might work side by side on the text for as long as it takes. And now let’s push it to the limit: the female English translator might become the Frenchman’s lover – they always say that the best way to learn a language is through pillow talk.

3.) Madame Bovary is many things – a perfect piece of fictional machinery, the pinnacle of realism, the slaughterer of Romanticism, a complex study of failure – but it is also the first great shopping and fucking novel.

4.) When my novel Flaubert’s Parrot was being translated into German, my editor in Zurich modestly suggested some additional flourishes: for instance, a pun on Flaubert as a ‘flea-bear’, and a German slang phrase for masturbation which literally means ‘to shake from the palm tree’. Since Flaubert, at this point of my novel, was being masturbated in Egypt, this felt like a happy improvement on the English text.

What's the connection? My guess: Translating literature is like sex because two writers come together to create one new work, and you can never tell how ugly (or not) it's going to turn out.

The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy

2011-05-24T21:11:00.003-04:00

Very often, as his hay-knife crunched down among the sweet-smelling grassy stems, he would survey mankind and say to himself: "Here and everywhere be folk dying before their time like frosted leaves, though wanted by their families, the country, and the world: while I, an outcast, an encumberer of the ground, wanted by nobody, and despised by all, live on against my will!"

Spoiler alert!

The Mayor of Casterbridge opens with a scene of remarkable cruelty: Michael Henchard, drunk on rum, sells his wife and daughter at a county fair. The book immediately fast-forwards eighteen years to the point at which Henchard, still distraught at his actions, has become a profitable businessman and mayor. When his wife and daughter return to find him, it presents him with, he hopes, an opportunity for redemption.

As it happens, at that same moment Henchard has made a purchase of bad grain (ohmygod there's so much in this book about grain) which prompts this exchange:

"But what are you going to do to repay us for the past?" inquired the man who had before spoken, and who seemed to be a baker or miller. "Will you replace the grown flour we've still got by sound grain?"

Henchard's face had become still more stern at these interruptions, and he drank from his tumbler of water as if to calm himself or gain time. Instead of vouchsafing a direct reply, he stiffly observed--

"If anybody will tell me how to turn grown wheat into wholesome wheat I'll take it back with pleasure. But it can't be done."

This is a bit on the nose for me, but it sets up the B-story, in which Henchard hires a young Scotsman named Donald Farfrae to run his grain business. Farfrae, as it happens, has invented a process that turns "grown wheat into wholesome wheat" and so offers Henchard a different kind of redemption.

But redemption is elusive. Henchard's wife soon dies, and leaves him with his daughter, who does not know she is Henchard's offspring. To make matters worse, his wife leaves him a letter that confesses she's not actually his, but that their daughter died in infancy and she named her next daughter after the first. Feeling cheated, he spurns her at the same time that his reliance on Farfrae turns to jealousy, and they become bitter rivals.

Casterbridge is a story about a man who works tirelessly to redeem himself, but cannot get out of his own way. As his place in society declines, he blames bad luck and the machinations of Farfrae, but cannot see that his pettiness, viciousness, and pride are what unravel his successes, just as they severed his marriage. After the sale he imposes a 21-year tee-totaling sentence on himself, but alcohol is not to blame for his powerful vices.

I did not find Casterbridge to be a success on the order of Far From the Madding Crowd (though the jacket erroneously calls it his "first masterpiece"). The prose is comparatively muted, and without the high-toned whimsicality of Crowd it is difficult to ignore how over-plotted it is. But it had me by the end, where Henchard, destitute, estranged from his "daughter" Elizabeth-Jane (who has married Farfrae!), has died and left this as a will:

MICHAEL HENCHARD'S WILL

"That Elizabeth-Jane Farfrae be not told of my death, or made to grieve on account of me.
"& that I be not bury'd in consecrated ground.
"& that no sexton be asked to toll the bell.
"& that nobody is wished to see my dead body.
"& that no murners walk behind me at my funeral.
"& that no flours be planted on my grave.
"& that no man remember me.
"To this I put my name.

Jesus.

A Girl Named Zippy by Haven Kimmel

2011-05-24T19:41:00.007-04:00

Two things I don’t care for much are memoirs and audiobooks. The people that read the audiobooks either speak too slowly or get the voices all wrong. With memoirs, it’s always the doom and gloom factor that gets me—someone was abused or has some problem with addiction or—you get the point, and in the end you can’t put it down and know it’s just fabricated like you can with fiction. The last memoir I tried to listen to, Unbearable Lightness, made me want to give up on the whole consuming food thing all together. My mother gave me a memoir on audiobook and despite all of the many ways that could go wrong I had to listen to it because it was a gift. If I had known the only problem with it would be trying not to laugh hysterically in my cubicle at work, I would have listened to A Girl Named Zippy months ago.

The catch about Zippy is that it’s a memoir of a happy childhood. Like all childhoods, there are the scattered introductions to heartbreak, but there's nothing basement-level-sorrow-inducing here. In her case, it’s finding that the chicken she loved had been killed by some local dogs and watching other friends experience family woes and grief and not quite knowing how to handle it. Other than those two things, her biggest problems (on the page, at least) were obstacles like having to reclaim her best elementary school friend from the cool new kid from LA that brought culture and a leather jacket to their small town of Mooreland, Indiana and trying to talk her way out of going to the Quaker church with her mom each Sunday morning. Her stories are mostly centered around the quirky cast of characters from the town they live in and her family, who swore they bought her from a pack of traveling gypsies. The novel is full of normal childhood moments that were relatable to my own childhood: the attempted séances at slumber parties, simultaneously hating and worshiping older siblings, going crazy over decoupage and crafts only to discover that you aren’t particularly talented in the art department, and having major crises over the state of one’s hair. There was also a period where she recorded everything she could on a little cassette tape, which I vaguely remember trying to do with a YakBak without much success.

The thing that I enjoyed the most about the book was Kimmel’s ability to narrate everything from the voice of her childhood self without dumbing down the content. While I obviously can’t speak to the accuracy of that voice as I didn’t know her twenty some years ago, I can say with certainty that it’s believable:

"I figure heaven will be a scratch-and-sniff sort of place, and one of my first requests will be the Driftwood in its prime, while it was filled with our life. And later I will ask for the smell of my dad's truck, which was a combination of basic truck (nearly universal), plus his cologne (Old Spice), unfiltered Lucky Strikes, and when I was very lucky, leaded gasoline. If I could have gotten my nose close enough I would have inhaled leaded gasoline until I was retarded. The tendency seemed to run in my family; as a boy my uncle Crandall had an ongoing relationship with a gas can he kept in the barn. Later he married and divorced the same woman four times, sometimes marrying other women in between, including one whose name was, honestly, Squirrelly."

See what I mean?

The thing that got me the most about the book, though, was Kimmel’s relationship with her father. She knows he only gets drunk at work but she’s not quite sure if he works or what he does. He plays the best prank on their neighbors I’ve ever heard of in my life. When someone messes with his kids, he gets pay back. While he doesn’t agree with a lot of things the mother says or does, he still backs her, regularly giving Kimmel a look she says means, “I respect every way in which you are a troublemaker, but get up and do what your mother says."

While her parents are genuinely good people and actively show her love and support, they aren’t always the most involved or strict and usually don’t exactly know what’s she’s up to. After visiting a friend’s home and witnessing a different family dynamic, she says, "They did a lot of cleaning in their house, which I considered to be a sign of immoral parenting. The job of parents, as I saw it, was to watch television and step into a child's life only when absolutely necessary, like in the event of a tornado or a potential kidnapping." This is probably because her Dad is usually doing something smart assed and her mother is constantly just making her dent in the couch bigger, rereading science fiction, which leads to a misunderstanding where Kimmel thinks her mother is having an affair with Isaac Asmov. (This leads to Kimmel's second memoir, She Got Up Off the Couch, which details her mother finally doing just that.)

The best part of the book (for me) was the scene where the father tells Kimmel he’s going to take her to his church since neither of them believe in God so she can see his version of religion. When he takes her out to the middle of a campground to sit in the woods, she gets confused, because there’s no proper pews or minister or singing. He asks her, “What does the Bible say about where one or more are gathered?” and she tells him that equals fellowship, but there aren’t any people out there for fellowship. He points out the Bible doesn’t say one or more people, just one or more in general, and he’s having fellowship with this group of trees and that group of birds… that there's one or more of a lot of things to have fellowship with out in nature. While the school aged Kimmel is no devoted Quaker like her mother, she doesn’t seem to be able to get behind her dad’s brand of religion either, but there in the woods they make the most of it. It reminded me quite a bit of some moments I shared off the parkway with my college friends up in the mountains. (Unfortunately, somehow those moments also usually involved them being high and/or naked, but that’s neither here nor there.)

While Kimmel finds every excuse in the book not to go to church with her mother, at one point she decides she wants to bond with a girl she considers to be holy that informs Kimmel that in order to be a good Christian, you’ve got to do good works. Feeling put upon, she reconsiders that friendship after her quests to do good deeds turn into minor disasters. Later, she decides she wants Jesus to be her boyfriend, and she says of him, "On Jesus: "Everyone around me was flat-out in love with him, and who wouldn't be? He was good with animals, he loved his mother, and he wasn't afraid of blind people." She waits for boyfriend Jesus in the woods and her family doesn’t discourage her because they think it’s finally an act of dedication. Since she seemed earnest about it and she was only a kid, I laughed endlessly at this without feeling like I was cracking up over something sacrilegious. Kimmel eventually went to study theology at a divinity school but I'm not sure where she stands on faith now.

The last two best things about Kimmel are that she studied creative writing at NCSU and she currently lives in my home state which I appreciate because this means there’s finally an author I like that I may be able to realistically catch at a book signing. (How I always manage to miss Sedaris has become an ongoing point for frustration. Also, don't point out that he writes memoirs, becuase they are in the fiction section.)

Dog Run by Arthur Nersesian

2011-05-22T15:55:00.006-04:00

"Soon as I hung up, I suffered the acute and divine epiphany of being jobless. It was the modern equivalent to what medieval monks recorded after weeks and even months of starvation and sensory deprivation. I lay in bed and watched moments break into phenomenal particles of panic and could actually see the divine crack of God’s ass as he completely turned his back on me. I rose, dressed, grabbed doggy, and went to the ATM where I checked my balance. Doing some basic math, I realized that I had about three weeks before I would be in debt. I got a New York Times and a cup of coffee and brought the dog back home. Flipping through the classifieds, I looked for employment. I saw a couple of lousy-looking, tele-sale jobs and realized that this was going to be a real disaster. I cringed at the thought of having to start the whole job search again, updating my bogus resume, finding a costume that made me look responsible and professional, and then, worse of all, making calls and going for torturous interviews. Instead I turned on the TV and watched some white-trash sex nuts charging at each other on the Jerry Springer Show. For all the country’s political sensitivity and moral outrage, we secretly hungered for pornographic gladiator fights. Numb put her chin on my knee just like she used to do with Primo."

I can tell a book that’s been spat out from the fine folks at MTV Books a mile away because their jacket designs make me salivate even though I have to be automatically skeptical about them due to the company behind their imprint. To be fair, these are the same people that brought us the angsty gem Perks of Being a Wallflower. Dog Run by Arthur Nersesian beckoned to me while I was recovering from too much wine at Barnes and Nobles and I decided to see if I liked the inside as much as the cover. I won’t tell you it was as bad as I expected it to be, but it’s certainly no Perks.

On the back, a Jennifer Bell (who wrote a book I’ve never read) was quoted saying “Nersesian’s writing… is beautiful, especially when it is about women and love.” I’m pretty sure that I was misled by this, because while there was plenty about women and men and sex, there wasn’t a damn thing about love in this novel anywhere.

Our main character, Mary, is a 29 year old fuck-up that has been drifting from one temp job to the next without any real sense of purpose or direction. She’s got a book she’s been writing about shitty minimum wage franchises called The Book of Jobs and until maybe the third page, a live in boyfriend named Primo who she comes home at the opening to discover dead on her couch. Through a strange turn of events she finds out that everything she knows about the dead beau has been a lie and finds him infinitely more interesting dead than she did while he was alive. To put all of Primo’s puzzle pieces together, she hunts down (and sometimes stalks) all of his former lovers. Her detective work takes her to seedy strip clubs, art galleries, and a band audition where she ends up accidentally becoming the bassist for Crazy and Beautiful, whose singer is Primo’s ex wife and baby mama Sue Wotts. Sue has a reputation for being “that crazy Cambodian bitch” and even without Sue knowing what Mary’s connection to her is or her agenda, Mary still manages to rile Sue up incessantly throughout the novel.

I think most people have SOME degree of morbid curiosity about their partner’s former significant others, so it was interesting to see someone act out on that in ways that no one in my actual life (I hope) ever would. As long as it’s fictional, I enjoy a good train wreck.

While Mary tries to come to terms with Primo’s life and death, she also has to deal with recurring bouts of unemployment, manage a friendship with a histrionic husband-hunter that’s trying to find any decent remaining unattached Jewish men in New York after sleeping with the rest of the city of New York in its entirety, a string of dates with bizarre men, not pissing off Crazy and Beautiful, and being a decent dog mama to Primo’s overly needy canine Numb. Her relationship with the dog leads to a relationship with the local dog run (hence the book title), where she meets her new love interest, scatters Primo’s ashes, and bludgeons someone in the head and almost gets arrested. I found most of the subplots to be more interesting than the Primo fascination, which became tedious to read about a lot faster than I thought it would. The only subplot I could have done without involves Mary doing write ups on novel manuscripts sent into a publisher for a literary contest. The novels that she has to read all leave a lot to be desired, and Nersesian beats us over the head with that by making us endure three page stretches that describe their crummy plots, involving things like strange sex machines and self flagellating priests. I guess he’s trying to get us to feel sympathetic for Mary but I quickly became impatient with him, instead.

The book was entertaining enough over all, but there were quite a few boring stretches and bad sex scenes to work through before getting to the end, which was a landmine of back to back plot twists I never would have seen coming. I devoured the last quarter of the book right up until the last page, where Nersesian seemed to have forgotten that he made his main character neurotic and self involved and tied things up a little too nicely for them to be believable. The last page is not the right place for warm and fuzzy epiphanies.

I feel like I should follow this up with something more respectable and literary for my next review, but I probably won’t.

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

2011-05-22T14:10:00.003-04:00

These memories, which are my life--for we possess nothing certainly except the past--were always with me. Like the pigeons of St. mark's, they were everywhere, under my feet, singly, in pairs, in little honey-voiced congregations, nodding, strutting, winking, rolling the tender feathers of their necks, perching sometimes, if I stood still, on my shoulder or pecking a broken biscuit from between my lips; until, suddenly, the noon gun boomed and in a moment, with a flutter and sweep of wings, the pavement was bare and the whole sky above dark with a tumult of fowl. Thus it was my that morning.

Reading Brideshead Revisited for the second time is markedly different that reading it for the first, moreso than for most novels. As I pointed out in my earlier review, Brideshead reshuffles itself constantly, and it is another experience to know when the shifts are coming. It is not the story of protagonist Charles Ryder's friendship with Sebastian Flyte, or his romance with Flyte's sister Julia, or even the story of his strange relationship with the Flytes' manor at Brideshead, but the story of his long conversion to Catholicism. The second time around, that thread is much easier to follow.

I reread it mostly because I would like to write a short article on it. In brief, I would like to compare a scene in Brideshead to a corresponding one in Huysmans' A Rebours. In Huysmans, the effete dandy hero Jean Des Esseintes gilds the carapace of a tortoise's shell with gold and jewels; the weight eventually kills the tortoise. In Brideshead, Julia's shallow fiance Rex Mottram gives her a similar gift, in miniature:

It was a small tortoise with Julia's initials set in diamonds in the living shell, and this slightly obscene object, now slipping impotently on the polished boards, now striding across the card-table, now lumbering over a rug, now withdrawn at a touch, now stretching its neck and swaying its withered, antediluvian head, became a memorable part of the evening, one of those needle-hooks of experience which catch the attention when larger matters are at stake, and remain in the mind when they are forgotten, so that years later it is a bit of gilding, or a certain smell, or the tone of a clock's striking which recalls one to a tragedy.

I do not believe that Huysmans intended us to be put off by the cruelty to the tortoise; that the tortoise could not survive the ordeal of its beautification is indicative of Nature's inability to live up to Des Esseintes' ideal. Mottram's gift is a parody: Des Esseintes' is a massive Galapagan creature; Mottram's is a "small tortoise." Des Esseintes' dies, tragically; Mottram's escapes and buries itself somewhere, as if from shame.

The implication is that Mottram is something of a parody of Des Esseintes: strikingly modern, preoccupied with the superficial, curiously devoid of soul, but without the quartzy brilliance of Huysmans' protagonist. Later, Mottram tries futilely to become a Catholic to marry Julia, and his absurd willingness to embrace the Catholic tradition despite his inability to grasp its deeper significance is an indictment of the modern mind's estrangement from its spirit.

Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare

2011-05-14T17:33:00.002-04:00

Perhaps strangely, the book that Julius Caesar brings most to my mind is Howards End. Like that novel, here is a work about the struggle between the pragmatic life and the life of “personal relations.” Brutus claims to have a deep friendship with Caesar, and yet he lets his pragmatism overrule him:

It must be by his death, and for my part
I know no personal cause to spurn at him
But for the general. He would be crowned.
How that might change his nature, there’s the question.
It is the bright day that brings forth the adder,
And that craves wary walking. Crown him that,
And then I grant we put a sting in him
That at his will he may do danger with.
Th’ abuse of greatness is when it disjoins
Remorse from power. And, to speak truth of Caesar,
I have not known when his affections swayed
More than his reason, but ‘tis a common proof
That lowliness is young ambition’s ladder,
Whereto the climber upward turns his face.
But when he once attains the upmost round,
He then unto the ladder turns his back,
Looks in the clouds, scorning the base degrees
By which he did ascend. So Caesar may.
Then, lest he may, prevent…

As others have pointed out, this is a fairly specious line of reasoning. Shakespeare’s Caesar, though immensely prideful, shows no inclination toward being a dictator, and Brutus’ conclusion—that possible tyranny, however unlikely, should be met with force—is horribly strained. “So Caesar may” is a long way from “Then, lest he may, prevent.” But Brutus is a man wedded to his own principles, and allows them to divorce him from the reality of his friendship with Caesar. His nobility and stoicism can be unnerving, as when he confesses to Cassius—then his closest friend—that he is tormented inwardly at his wife’s suicide, though to a late messenger he responds only by saying, “Why, farewell, Portia. We must die, Messala.”

Cassius is the third point of this (somewhat homoerotic?) triangle, and he is Brutus’ opposite in that he lets the personal override his good judgment. His love for Brutus overwhelms him so much that a quarrel brings him to the brink of suicide:

Oh, I could weep
My spirit from mine eyes. [offering his dagger] There is my dagger,
And here my naked breast, within, a heart
Dearer than Pluto’s mine, richer than gold.
If thou that be’st a Roman, take it forth.
I, that denied thee gold, will give my heart.
Strike, as thou didst at Caesar, for I know
When thou didst hate him worst, thou loved’st him better
Than ever thou loved’st Cassius.

Later, Cassius will kill himself for real, but only when he thinks that Brutus is dead. There is an echo here of truth: Brutus does not love Cassius nearly as much as Cassius loves Brutus, and Brutus is a man who suppresses what love he does hold. Cassius’ parallel is Mark Antony, whose love for Caesar also toiled in the shadow of Brutus and Caesar’s friendship, and who uses Caesar’s death to, in effect, claim the filial inheritance that was Brutus’.

And yet, unlike Howards End, which favored one side of things so forcefully, there are no easy answers in Julius Caesar. (Are there ever, in Shakespeare?) Cassius’ values are deeply human and personal, but they ruin him as completely as Brutus’ flawed devotion to a higher standard. In his forward to the Barnes and Noble edition, editor Andrew Hadfield argues that Julius Caesar takes place in a denatured system, in which friendship—long considered a social good that bound the ligatures of the Roman Republic—becomes a destructive force. I myself wonder if it does not show us that all good things may become vile.

Dr. Zhivago by Boris Pasternak

2011-05-11T20:17:00.000-04:00

Oh, what a love it was, utterly free, unique, like nothing else on earth! Their thoughts were like other people's songs.

Dr. Zhivago is usually remembered as a love story. And it is that, to be sure, but so much more: It is an epic in the Russian style, with a massive cast of characters (who all seem to be running into each other improbably over the course of their lives, as if it were no big deal to stumble across your childhood friend from Moscow in the desolation of Siberia). It is a war novel, about the upheaval in Russia created by the Russian Revolution. Much like Parade's End, it is about the way that the world changed fundamentally in the early part of the 20th century, ravaged by war and forced to find its footing again.

And it is a love story. The titular Yuri Zhivago grows up in Moscow, only occasionally entering the orbit of Lara Guishar, who he will meet later as a field nurse and then will become his lover. By then both are married and have children, but war has separated them from their spouses: Zhivago having been captured and impressed into medical service by a roving band of Bolsheviks; Lara's husband having become the renowned Bolshevik commander Strelnikov. The war brings them together, but ultimately it must also drive them apart.

The ultimate verdict on the Revolution is decidedly mixed. It drives lovers apart; it drives them together. It does away with the poisonous old system, but what does it have to offer but violence and instability instead? Yuri regards it with something near awe:

He realized that he was a pygmy before the monstrous machine of the future; he was anxious about this future, and loved it and was secretly proud of it, and as though for the last time, as if in farewell, he avidly looked at the trees and clouds and the people walking in the streets, the great Russian city struggling through misfortune--and was ready to sacrifice himself for the general good, and could do nothing.

And yet, in the individual moment of human lives, the Revolution proves horrific:

They stood around a bleeding stump of a man lying on the ground. His right arm and left leg had been chopped off. It was inconceivable how, with his remaining arm and leg, he had crawled to the camp. The chopped-off arm and leg were tied in terrible bleeding chunks onto his back with a small wooden board attached to them; a long inscription on it said, with many words of abuse, that the atrocity was in reprisal for similar atrocities perpetrated by such and such a Red unit--a unit that has no connection with the Forest Brotherhood.

No wonder the book was suppressed by the Soviet Union; Dr. Zhivago is a vile account of its national mythology. Yuri and Lara's love prospers in spite of their terror and their grief, and perhaps is even enhanced by it. Yet they live a doomed love, with no future, because they live in a futureless world. The Russia that emerges is utterly foreign to Yuri, and though he is wise, kind, and upright he is unable to deal with the totality of her changes.

There is a moment when Yuri is in the Bolsheviks' service that he sees a young boy with a head wound trying dutifully to keep his hat on straight and exacerbating his wound meanwhile. His comrades try to help him, through their misbegotten and shallow vision of goodness; the only one who has the power to see the deeper goodness is the doctor, Zhivago. He plays this same role as a poet--a sort of physician of the soul--and tries desperately to preserve sanity in an increasingly maddened world. Like Tietjens, he is too good for it. Pasternak himself lived daily with the heritage of that madness, and Dr. Zhivago--like Yuri with his poems--is the record of that struggle.

150 Covers of Lolita

2011-05-03T12:15:00.001-04:00

Some fairly lurid, but maybe not as many as you would expect.

No More Parades by Ford Madox Ford

2011-05-01T20:44:00.003-04:00

The whole of the affair, the more she saw of it, overwhelmed her with a sense of hatred.... And of depression! She saw Christopher buried in this welter of fools, playing a schoolboy's game of make-believe. But of a make0believe that was infinitely formidable and infinitely sinister.... The crashings of the gun and of all the instruments for making noise seemed to her so atrocious and odious because they were, for her, the silly pomp of a schoolboy-man's game.... Campion, or some similar schoolboy, said: "Hullo! Some Germain airplanes about... That lets us out on the air-gun! Let's have some pops!".... As they fire guns in the park on the King's birthday. It was sheer insolence to have a gun in the garden of an hotel where people of quality might be sleeping or wishing to converse!

No More Parades follows Christopher Tietjens to the theater of World War I, which we did not get to see in Some Do Not..., though it lurked in the background. Tietjens is a quartermaster now, in charge of supplying a draft of troops and preparing them to march, a job at which, with his organizational brilliance, he excels. But the two days that make up No More Parades are ones in which Tietjens is unraveling: Not only must he cope with the stress of getting the draft off, but he has been shaken by the unexpected death of one of his soldiers by a German bomb (this is, we are told, supposed to be far from the conflict). What is worse is that his wife Sylvia has "dropped in" on the camp to turn the screws into him.

No More Parades continues many of the same themes from Some Do Not.... Christopher lives by an outdated code, radiating a propriety and goodness that for some reason makes people despise him. Every single character in this book and the last at some point either suspects Christopher of vice or accuses him of it directly, and yet Christopher continues to be upstanding. The worst of these is Sylvia, who--for no other reason than to torture him--spreads the rumor that Christopher is a communist, a rumor which ultimately, at the end of the book, gets Christopher sent to the front line.

It seems to me that Ford is commenting on the decay of the moral compass' Western world. Here is a passage that will fit quite neatly in my paper on Ford's The Good Soldier, which is about the way that modernity ruins religious sentiment:

Tietjens had walked in the sunlight down the lines, past the hut with the evergreen climbing rose, in the sunlight, thinking in an interval, good-humouredly about his official religion: about the Almighty as, on a colossal scale, a great English Landowner, benevolently awful, a colossal duke who never left his study and was thus invisible, but knowing all about the estate down to the last hind at the home farm and the last oak; Christ, and almost too benevolent Land-Steward, son of the Owner, knowing all about the estate down to the last child at the porter's lodge, apt to be got round by the more detrimental tenants; the Third Person of the Trinity, the spirit of the estate, the Game as it were, as distinct from the players of the game; the atmosphere of the estate, that of the interior of Winchester Cathedral just after a Handel anthem has been finished, a perpetual Sunday, with, probably, a little cricket for the young men...

He laughed good-humouredly at his projection of a hereafter. It was probably done with. Along with cricket. There would be no more parades of that sort. Probably they would play some beastly yelping game... Like baseball or Association football... And heaven?... Oh it would be a revival meeting on a Welsh hillside. Or Chatauqua, wherever that was... And God? A Real Estate Agent, with Marxist views... He hoped to be out of it before the cessation of the hostilities, in which case he might be just in time for the last train to the old heaven.

Of course, Tietjens is engaged in the "yelping game" right now, the one that gives his wife Sylvia such a headache with its perpetual noise. War is the new religion of the world.

Poor Tietjens. It is some comfort to watch his commanding officer and family friend General Campion slowly unravel the threads that have led to his poor reputation, and come to accurate conclusions, but in the end it is too late: public perception is all, and Tietjens is off to the trenches. Ford uses this passage from Proverbs as his epigram:

For two things my heart is grieved:
A man of war that suffereth from poverty
and men of intelligence
that are counted as refuse.

But the book brought to my mind this passage by Lady Macduff, from Macbeth:

But I remember
I am in this earthly world; where to do harm
Is often laudable, to do good sometime
Accounted dangerous folly...

I am finding these books immensely rich. They are not at all like The Good Soldier, which is often starved of detail and psychology (by design), but I would wager that three quarters of No More Parades takes place "inside" someone's head. This one suffers compared to Some Do Not... because it is missing Valentine Wannop, Christopher's would-be mistress, who was my favorite character from the first novel, but I know from flipping through the next book that she will be back.

The Adults by Alison Espach

2011-05-01T01:56:00.007-04:00

All of my favorite novels go a little like this: A young woman (usually but not always high school aged) meets a man that is enough older than her that he is significantly older. The (usually inappropriate) relationship starts. Some seemingly world-ending (or ever day) event happens and they are torn apart. The separation continues for years until, one day, fate or sex bring them together again. But there’s more conflict! The conflict is always followed by a second drift. New lives be damned, though, inevitably—like it’s nothing—there they are again, together. They were put on this earth to torture one another and live in the squalid remnants of a basement-level-sorrow-inducing love. The book ends and you want to wail and gnash your teeth and beat your chest or listen to REM in the dark.

This probably means something is wrong with me.

Anyway, this is one of those novels. I discovered it when I was on my MFA-school-success-story-authors-only kick. (If you are wondering, though you probably aren’t, I didn’t get into McNeese and I did get into George Mason and I’ll be studying something else entirely at neither of those schools.) Espach studied at Washington University in St. Louis, where she learned how to write some incredibly clever dialogue. (Or maybe she went in writing incredibly clever dialogue. I don’t know.) Sometimes it’s so incredibly clever that I want to put her characters in time out for being so witty all the time because it’s just positively exhausting. I keep starting to type out examples, but they’re just lost out of context. So are all the lines that made me feel like Espach was sucker punching me.

There’s more than just the relationship between the girl and her English teacher, of course. In the beginning, there’s the uncomfortable and cringe-worthy stretch of passages that accompany all coming of age tales that make you feel like you need to scrub your face or you’ll turn into an awkward fourteen year old again. There’s suicide and the breakdown of the nuclear family unit in upper class America and a whole exciting section about studying interior design in Prague (that’s not sarcasm) and passages that will make you roll your eyes about how college boys try to seem sensitive by listening to Portishead while they screw you. Etc.

Finally, the cover. I am covetous of this cover art. I like to picture the jackets of the books that I imagine writing (but haven’t written because I’m lazy) and I am a little upset that I know this is a jacket that will never be mine.

I leave you with a passage… but first, an explanation. Emily, the main character, discovers that there’s a church in Prague made entirely out of human bones. When her younger sister’s dog dies, the sister requests Emily get the dog out of the house before she goes to sleep and bury it because she doesn’t want to dream in the same space as something dead. Emily puts the dead dog in a suitcase, calls up her ex-lover who happens to be in Prague on business, and has him meet her so that they can go to the bone museum to bury the dog because that’s what seems sensible at the time. On the way, however, they stop at a club to smoke pot and he decides to tell her that he’s married, which ruins this chapter of their reunion. The dead dog suitcase never makes it to the bone yard. He walks her back to her place and doesn't kiss her goodnight because he feels like he's cheating now that she knows about his wife whereas somehow he didn't before. Everything is miserable. Now, the passage:

"No matter where we went, we always ended up back where we started. I laid my head down on the pillow and when I tried to dream of some other life, Jonathon was right—there was no bell that tolled at midnight. But there was a garland of arms lining the entrance of the church. There were elbows flanking the altar. There were strings of skulls draped over windows like curtains, like, welcome, like, hey, like, Why don’t you kneel down and make yourself at home? Why don’t you prepare your bones to be something more elaborate than yourself"?

The Lover's Dictionary by David Levithan

2011-04-28T11:22:00.005-04:00

At 23, I’m still a huge fan of young adult literature. I just don’t consume as much of it as I used to. There’s something exciting for me about my favorite Y.A. authors crossing over to general fiction—which I’ve seen a lot of lately with authors like Meg Rosoff and Francesca Lia Block. Now cue in David Levithan, who wrote a book I enjoyed and reviewed for 50 Books a couple of years ago, titled The Realm of Possibility.

Levithan’s debut to the adult fiction world is The Lover’s Dictionary. It’s a novel written one definition at a time, A to Z, one definition to a page at 211 pages. Some of the entries are short, just statements. Some favorites:

celibacy, n. n/a.

exacerbate, v. I believe your exact words were: “You’re getting too emotional.”

vagary, n. The mistake is thinking there can be an antidote to the uncertainty.

Some of the definitions are full on stories… Think flash fiction or vignettes. My favorite is for offshoot, where he details going to a concert with his girl friend’s best friend. He feels like they’re doing something wrong if they discuss the one shared thing in their life (being his lover) without her being there, but they don’t have any other common ground, so the stories start flowing. At the end of it:

It wasn’t like we held hands during the concert. We didn’t go out for wine or
shots or milkshakes afterwards. But I liked that she was no longer entirely
yours. We had four hours of history without you.

I like the way that he captures the way two people come together, as well. All the little moments:

Cadence, n. I have never lived anywhere but New York or New England, but there are times when I’m talking to you and I hit a Southern vowel, or a word gets caught in a Southern truncation, and I know it’s because I’m swimming in your cadences, that you permeate my very language.

Sacrosanct, adj. The nape of your neck. Even the sound of the word nape sounds holy to me. That the hollow of your neck, the peak of your chest that your shirt sometimes reveals. These are the stations of my quietest, most insistent desire.

The ease that Levithan navigates with through his chosen (and tricky) format seems to be seamless. One moment, he’s throwing out statements about relationships that seem universally true in ways that hit you because of their humor or the eloquence or their perfect placement. The next moment, he’s fleshing out one couple’s particular details. I feel like in the wrong hands, the format would have felt like a gimmick. In this particular case, though, I feel like he delivers exactly what you need to know: all of the hard hitting moments and truths, good and bad, without the transitional fluff that usually carries you from one page to the next. That, or maybe I just liked it so much because I’ve been feeling too distracted to devote myself to anything that required an actual commitment of time and rapt attention. There’s no telling.

It’s a very modern love story. They meet online after he’s been on so many poor blind dates that he’s ready to cancel his subscription, just to realize he’s only got eight days left and there’s really no point in trying to pull out so close to the end of it. On the second to last day, that first e-mail is sent. Eventually they have to figure out whether or not they’re exclusive. They do all the typical get-to-know-your-partner things. Navigate through awkward silences. Get comfortable. She drinks too much. He’s insecure. Sometimes things happen in just the right way and they are momentarily awed by one another again. They decide to move in together. She cheats. They cope. There's also a small bit about a pregnancy that's alluded to in the beginning and once again at the end that we don't seem to have any kind of resolution for, unless I'm missing something. The storyline isn’t anything much in and of itself but I very much appreciated the way that it was delivered.

The one thing that I’m not too sure about is Levithan’s use of pop culture references. He writes about Vampire Weekend, throws out something about Green Day’s American Idiots tour in passing, etc. Maybe I’m just missing the genius of some of the bands he nods to, but I think I’d be more comfortable if he was using people/groups that have already proven they’d have lasting name recognition. I love Bon Iver right now, but you’re not going to find any of the characters in my short stories talking about them, you know what I mean? I don’t know. I guess I just thought it was ballsy. There was a Prince reference, however, that I liked:

non sequitur, n. This is what it sounds like when doves cry.

The only thing I would like better than this book as is if John Cusak could turn it into a one man stage act, which I think would be overwhelmingly appropriate.