The Golden Ass by Lucius Apuleius

Stupid people always dismiss as untrue anything that happens only seldom, or anything that their minds cannot readily grasp; yet when these things are carefully inquired into they are often found not only possible but probable.

The Golden Ass, or the Metamorphoses, by Apuleius is one of the earliest existing examples of what we would now think of as narrative literature. It’s not quite a novel; it’s more like a short story collection with a more-substantial-than-usual wraparound story. Divided into eleven short “books”, it follows the misadventures of a young man, Lucius, as he pursues his interests: magic, women, and living life.

Every section has at least one interstitial story, some longer and better than others. The most famous of these is Psyche and Cupid, appearing for the first time in Western literature. It’s a beautiful story well-told, and maybe the best part of the book. Other stories generally revolve around violent death or poorly hidden affairs; sometimes there’s magic.

Reading The Golden Ass is somewhat strange. It’s been around for such a long time, and has influenced everyone from Shakespeare, to Cervantes, to Augustine, that reading it sometimes brings on episodes of déjà vu. Its elements have been reappropriated so many times, particularly the central gimmick of the protagonist changing into an animal—in this case, the titular ass—that by all rights, The Golden Ass should be dull and predictable. However, it avoids this pitfall in two ways. First, like Don Quixote, it’s an example of a form in flux, and, as such has no qualms about incorporating poetry, folk tales, songs, author self-insertion in ways that feel almost postmodern—ridiculous, right? Secondly, The Golden Ass is quite a ribald piece of work—Philip Roth can’t hold a candle to the debauchery that takes place in these episodes.

In the last book, which is unfinished, the tone changes as Lucius, desperate for reprieve that seems forever out of his grasp, prays for deliverance from his donkey form or, barring that, death. It’s a beautifully written passage, serious where most of the book is silly, and powerful. I’m sure there’s infinitely more to it than I can cover here—the Latin original is supposedly full of wordplay—but The Golden Ass is still a must-read for anyone interested in the capital-C classics, whatever the language.

The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin.

In the annals of opening lines, very few can top the beginning of The Metamorphosis. How can you help but wonder what’s going on when a novel begins with its protagonist turned into a giant bug? Unfortunately, readers who are wondering what exactly is going on are likely to be disappointed. Kafka, one of the founders of absurdism, isn’t too interested in telling us how or why Gregor became a bug. This is the first Kafka I’ve read, but from what I understand, Kafka never was particularly interested in the mechanics of things. In fact, picking out what Kafka was interested in can be quite a challenge, as evinced by the size and variety of analysis his work inspires.

So, plot summary: it’s mostly up there in the opening quote. Gregor Samsa, primary provider in a household that includes his mother, father, and sister, wakes up one morning to find that he’s become something resembling a giant dung beetle. As the novel progresses (such as it does—it’s less than 100pp), his family discovers his malady and their reactions, and his coping, form the core of the narrative.

Initially, Gregor’s family, although frightened of the creature Gregor has become, try to help him. They call for the doctor, who never actually sees him, and they try to make him comfortable. The most accommodating member is his sister, and Gregor’s thankfulness for her small graces—bringing a variety of foods for him to allow him to discover what he likes, talking to him, straightening his room—form the novel’s emotional core. As time goes on, however, the family grows more and more frustrated with Gregor and the way he inconveniences their life. At the same time, Gregor becomes more and more animalistic, caring less and less about the house’s other occupants. Everything comes to a head one night when, entertaining boarders taken in to compensate for the lack of Gregor’s income, Gregor’s sister is playing her violin. The music touches Gregor’s remaining humanity, and he reveals himself to his family at an inopportune time. It’s the last straw.

The Metamorphosis is such a strange absurd piece of work that it’s difficult to know how to react to it. Parts of certainly comical enough, especially in the early going, but Kafka’s descriptions of Gregor’s bug-life are quease-inducing, and ultimately, Gregor’s story is desperately sad. Take this passage, where, in a moment of clarity, Gregor reflects on his wasted life:

In his imagination appeared again, after a long time, his boss and the manager, the chief clerk and the apprentices, the excessively spineless custodian, two or three friends from other businesses, a chambermaid from a hotel in the provinces, a loving, fleeting memory, a female cashier from a hat shop, whom he had seriously but too slowly courted—they all appeared mixed in with strangers or people he had already forgotten, but instead of helping him and his family, they were all unapproachable, and he was happy to see them disappear.

Gregor’s transformation has been interpreted as everything from a mental condition to a metaphor for transubstantiation, but upon this initial reading, what I took away was a sense of alienation. Gregor, in spite of spending his life toiling for his family, never knows them, never spends time with them, pushes everything important to some hazily-defined future, and, with his separation taken to illogical extremes, is now as irrelevant as any other bug.

I mentioned earlier that Gregor’s story is sad, and it is, but the novel itself ends on a bittersweet note: the family realizes that they now have more money than before, since they are all working. They move to a more convenient place, and they are all happy. Gregor and his horrible experience seem to fade into the background by the end of the last page. In a way, I guess, that’s the saddest part of all.

The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West

It is hard to laugh at the need for beauty and romance, no matter how tasteless, even horrible, the results of that need are. But it is easy to sigh. Few things are sadder than the truly monstrous.

---

"Mr. Greener, the bedraggled Harlequin of our caption, is not bedraggled but clean, neat and sweet when he first comes on. By the time the Lings, four muscular Orientals, finish with him, however, he is plenty bedraggled. He is tattered and bloody, but still sweet… His is the final victory; the applause is for him.”

So, a very quick plot summary before the review proper: The Day of the Locust is set in the early years of film, when Hollywood was expanding, moving from talkies to sound, from melodrama to drama, from cultural barometer to cultural thermostat. The novel follows several characters, each pitiful in their own way: Tod Hackett, an aspiring artist who longs to paint Hollywood as it really is; Faye Greener, an aspiring actress who spreads her love, among other things; Homer Simpson, a socially-awkward recluse, in Hollywood for his health, dragged against his will into love with Faye; and an assortment of Hollywood extra types, including the cowboy, the singing child star, the comedian, the oily agent, etc. The narrative is loose, but not flabby—the book is a slim 120pp—and as the lives of these characters intersect, things happen, mostly awful things.

The Day of the Locust is a harrowing read. Once every 10 or so pages, there’s a passage that hits like a kick to the stomach. If it were possible, it would be tempting to read certain bits with eyes closed, cowering beneath a blanket. The characters are not lovable, not light, and their adventures, such as they are, reveal more despair than joy. Indeed, it’s difficult to think of a single joyous moment in the entire novel. Tod is a would-be rapist, would-be in a way that makes his inability to follow through almost worse than if he did. Faye is a heartless harpie, cruel to the ones who care for her, desperate for attention and unable to quit acting even when her father dies. Homer is a pitiful cipher: we are told that some men can lust after things and control them, but others, like Homer, must not allow such thoughts—they are like a spark in a field of dry hay. Indeed, that turns out to be true.

There is no glamour in West’s depiction of Hollywood. The stars exist on a different plane from our struggling “heroes”—Gary Cooper is spotted late in the novel, near but completely uninvolved in a major riot—and there are no happy endings. Every single character does despicable things, when they do anything at all. In an amazingly disturbing description of a cockfight late in the novel, West summarizes his character’s motivations in the cruelest way possible.

I know I haven’t said much about the specifics, but they’re devastating. The Day of the Locust is depressing, eerie and affecting in its depiction of humanity without grace, mercy, or hope. It’s beautiful the same way as a mushroom cloud.

Chris's Review

The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler

"You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that, oil and water were the same as wind and air to you. You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how you died or where you fell. Me, I was part of the nastiness now.”

First up, confession time. Apart from Harlequin-grade romance, I’m less familiar with crime fiction than any other genre. I cut my grown-up teeth on John Grisham and Stephen King and moved on to classics, so with the exception of Victorian crime novels like The Woman in White, I’m unfamiliar. That said, there was an awful lot in The Big Sleep that felt familiar. As Chris mentioned in his review, this isn’t really Chandler’s fault. His books and his protagonist Philip Marlowe have been so influential that returning to the source is a little like watching your first performance of Romeo and Juliet.

That said, it’s worth noting that The Big Sleep, like Romeo and Juliet, is much better than most of its derivatives. This is hard-boiled crime fiction at its most hard-boiled: The women are all beautiful femme fatales, the men are all tough guys, and the plots are twisted and complex in all the ways you’d expect. A plot summary would probably run longer than one of Christopher’s reviews, so just think about a noir you’re familiar with, say, L. A. Confidential, and imagine it’s a lot like that, because it is. For better or worse, it was almost exactly the way I expected it would be. That’s not to say it’s bad. Marlowe is a likeable guy. In spite of his noir exterior, he repeatedly resists seduction by various women, large bribes from dangerous men, and polite conversation with, well, everyone to pursue the best interests of his client. The ending is pretty surprising, and the book doesn’t take too long to read. If this all sounds like damning with faint praise, that’s not exactly what’s up—it’s just that The Big Sleep is out of my regular ballpark and I don’t really know what to say about it.

It’s worth noting, though, that Chandler is quite a good writer, and sometimes he’ll turn out a surprisingly evocative paragraph, like the excerpt above. He’s also quite good with similes—witness, “He wore a blue overcoat that fitted him like a stall fits a horse” or "The General spoke again, slowly, using his strength as carefully as an out-of-work show-girl uses her last good pair of stockings."

As for themes, I struggled to find anything in particular beyond “the world is a violent, dangerous place”, but a repeated line in the novel, “This is a big city now” might give some insight into Marlowe’s mind and help explain the popularity of Chandler’s novels seventy years after their publication. Marlowe is a complex character, but his motives are simple. He wants to complete the job and be able to live with himself. However, throughout the novel, he finds himself stymied by the big world: gangsters, police, women. Through it all, Marlowe is true only to himself and his own moral code. To him, the world is still, at its heart, a simple place, full of complex people with complex motives who are nevertheless the same as they’ve always been: petty, greedy, sometimes noble, and, in spite of their complex circumstances, simple.

Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury

“Beware the autumn people...For some, autumn comes early, stays late, through life, where October follows September and November touches October and then instead of December and Christ’s birth there is no Bethlehem Star, no rejoicing, but September comes again and old October and so on down the years, with no winter, spring or revivifying summer. For these beings, fall is the only normal season, the only weather, there be no choice beyond.”

Somehow, I missed Something Wicked This Way Comes while I was scouring the children’s section of the library, and it’s probably a good thing. It’s hard to imagine how an avid Goosebumps reader would have dealt with a scary book that’s actually scary and substantial, not just for the grotesque images or the shocking twists, but for the themes it carries. There are spoilers in this review, mostly from the first third of the book.

The book opens on its dual protagonists, Jim Nightshade and Will Holloway. Both thirteen years old, they are inseparable sides of the same coin. Jim is rash and impetuous, always on the lookout for a thrill or an adventure; Will is more careful, although, as he says in the book, is often dragged into adventure by Jim whether he wants to be or not. The books opens in Autumn with the arrival of a mysterious carnival, populated by a diverse array of freaks and run by the Illustrated Man, Mr. Dark, a mysterious entity who exercises control over his freaks with his vast array of tattoos. The centerpiece of the carnival is broken down Carousel that nevertheless comes alive at night. It can spin either way, making its riders either older or younger. Soon after the carnival opens, Jim and Will see the carousel in action and make an enemy of Mr. Dark who, of course, spends the rest of the book trying to turn them into a couple of his freaks.

In addition to the boys, there’s a third, equally important character: Charles Holloway, Will’s 54 year old father. Married to a beautiful woman 20 years his junior, he struggles with feeling too old for her and too old to properly relate to his son.

Something Wicked is surprisingly dense, and there are a lot of things I could talk about, but I’d like to focus on what seemed like the overriding themes: the elders’ fear of aging and death and the youth’s desire to speed the process along. The Carousel stands at the center of the novel, towering over even Mr. Dark in its sway over the protagonists. So let’s start with a laundry list: Will fears that, with time, he and Jim will grow apart. Jim fears that he will never grow up at all, and Charles fears that he’s already too old to relate to the people he cares most about. The thing is aging or de-aging on the carousel is no good. It rushes things, so young men end up with old men’s minds and old men are still children inside. It is the ultimate relationship breaker, because it makes relation with other people of your own age impossible—who wants to hang out with the 30 year old who still wants to play marbles, or the 16 year old who has all the worries in the world?

I don’t want to talk much more about the plot, but I will say that there are some very disturbing images, not so much because they’re graphic, but because being turned into a wax dummy is kind of terrifying. Anyway, this review is all over the place, but if you missed this as a child, it’s well worth reading. And I hear the film is pretty scary.

The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood by Howard Pyle

In merry England, in the time of old, when good King Henry the Second ruled the land, there lived within the green glades of Sherwood Forest, near Nottingham Town, a famous outlaw whose name was Robin Hood. No archer ever lived that could speed a gray goose shaft with such skill and cunning as his, nor were there ever such yeomen as the sevenscore merry men that roamed with him through the greenwood shades.

We all know the story of Robin Hood, the sober, humorless soldier, hardened by his battles during the Crusades, rounds up a band of sober, humorless men to fight beside him and, in a psychic flash, discovers the Magna Carta and brings Democracy to Medieval England after fighting an epic battle against the French. And now that we’ve covered the 2010 movie, whose authors apparently didn’t realize that there’s already a fictional character named Robin Hood, let’s talk about this book.

I admit it: although I’ve read Robin Hood before, I was inspired to read it again after seeing the essentially unrelated and joyless film. I knew the basic outline and I knew the source material was much lighter and more humorous, but I had forgotten how much. The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood is really a comic novel, written as a series of inter-related vignettes, which collects various folk tales of Robin Hood and put them into a coherent framework, codifying Robin and his Merry Men into something like an Anglo-Saxon mythology—but this misses the point. Robin Hood isn’t a dull academic exercise, and it doesn’t read, aside from the poetic King’s English, like it was written over a century ago. It moves quickly—I read the entire 350pp book in a little over a day—and rarely missteps.

What was surprising to me is how much of my idea of Robin Hood was missing from the book. Maid Marian warrants exactly two mentions, both times as passing thoughts in Robin’s head. Prince John, immortalized as a lion cub in Disney’s retelling, appears only at the tail end. And what’s included is sometimes surprising as well. Close to a quarter of the book recounts adventures in which Robin himself doesn’t appear at all, focusing on the Merry Men and, in one case, a knight given assistance by Robin’s band.

But, onto the stories themselves. They largely follow the same structure—Robin and his men get bored, hatch an elaborate prank, execute it, and improvise. This leads to Robin’s merry band getting their butts kicked a lot, and it’s this element of “Will it work or not?” that gives the book most of its narrative thrust. However, just when the repetition threatens to grow stale, Pyle switches formats, focusing on a side character or a more involved adventure, such as the elaborate plot to help newfound Merry Man Alan a Dale reclaim his love at her wedding ceremony. The final third of the book, however, abandons the format almost entirely and takes some surprisingly dark and affecting turns.

Ultimately though, Robin isn’t a gloomy slog. It’s joyous and raucous and funny, and the characters, thinly sketched as they sometimes are, are really likable. Like Sherlock Holmes (which also got a terrible movie adaptation recently), Robin Hood is well worth revisiting.

The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

"I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.”

Last year, after several aborted attempts, I finally made it through Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. It took some doing, but by the time I finished it, I was really enjoying Faulkner's mastery of the stream-of-consciousness style and especially his lyrical writing. I intended to follow up with The Sound and the Fury, but then I read Chris's review and, since it sounded approximately 10x more difficult than As I Lay Dying, I wussed out... until now.

The Sound and the Fury may be Faulkner's best known and most critically acclaimed work, and also his most complex, although this is coming before I've read Absolom Absolom. It follows one family, the Compsons, over about a decade. The actual storyline is a dark southern Gothic tale of family, betrayal, incest, and a mentally retarded manchild. So it's basically Anne of Green Gables.

The actual narrative is tough to summarize, and at some points, even to follow--I found out upon reading chapter summaries that I'd completely missed a major event; the book is really more about the characters and the way thy see and interact with one another than a storyline. Each section of the book is narrated by a different character, except the last which has an omniscient third-person narrator. The first section is narrated by Benjy, the aforementioned manchild who has no sense of time or place and whose narration skips from the past to the future without warning. The second is narrated by Quentin Compson, the neurotic, intelligent younger brother, and the third by Jason Compson, the cruel, cynical eldest child who takes an iron fist control over the family after the death of the father. Tying all these disparate narrators together is the enigmatic figure of Caddie Compson. Even with three different perspectives on her, we never get a firm grasp on what she actually is. To Quentin, she represents his repressed incestuous thoughts, but also his need for security and to protect. To Benjy, she is his only steady link to the real, linear world. To Jason, she is a thankless whore whose only contribution to the family was Quentin II, her illegitimate child and the bane of Jason's existence.

The Sound and the Fury is a tough book, both narratively and thematically. The Compson family and their neuroses are fully explored and the story itself is both intense and moving, but the actual heft of the book eludes me. At a base level, it seems to be about family and what constitutes it. Benjy, for example, is a much better brother to Caddie than Jason, and Dilsey, the Compsons' slave, is more of a mother to all the children than their own biological mother. I can't help but feel there's a lot that I'm missing here. Unlike Chris, I did feel myself connected to this band of misfits, but much like Benjy, I can't quite tie it all together.

I'm not sure my review makes it clear how much I enjoyed this book, but I thought it was great, and even enjoyed the Benjy section, which a lot of readers find offputting. Faulkner is a master stylist, and it was worth reading just for that, even if I can't quite figure it all out.

Dracula by Bram Stoker

Brent Waggoner's Journals

Wednesday, June 4th
Another day in Frankfort. The weather is quite hot, so I've retired to the indoors. I've decided to post on Dracula, ironic since the Fifty Books Project has been dead this weeks. But oh, never mind. I'm sure it will pick up at any time, and at any rate, this review will help.

Thursday, June 5th
I've decided to writ a bit more today. Dracula is, of course, the narrative of the most famous vampire of all time. It is told in the form of journal entires from its five principle characters: Dr. Seward, Professor Van Helsing, Lucy Westerna, Mina Harker, Jonathan Harker, and assorted news articles describing events for which the party was not present. I was rather surprised to find how little I knew of the actual Dracula story. I would like to write more, but I fear my time is growing short; the battery light is blinking.

Saturday, June 7th
Completing this review has taken on a strange urgency, although I hardly know what to say. I will try to record my reactions as faithfully as possible so that those reading this in the future will not think me insane. The story is surprisingly dark and creepy, particularly for the first half. The second half gets bogged down for a bit in some procedural crime drama involving shipping lanes and weather patterns, but rebounds nicely for a somewhat anticlimatic but fitting ending. Notable themes in the book include Victorian fears of female sexuality, a study in gender roles, modernity vs. superstition, and, of course, good vs. evil. I read this on the recommendation of Lady Elizabeth, whose gentle spirit embodies all that is good about her gender. She spoke to me in a voice like a song while in the kitchen preparing my meal, suggesting, not vulgarly, that I peruse this volume. And that is enough for now.

Sunday, June 8th
I fear some strange madness has come over me. I cannot eat or sleep, and my skin is as pale as alabaster. Oh, Lord, save me from this dread curse, this twisting of my soul, do not let me turn, not now!

Later
My illness has passed. Turns out it was a bad bit of beet.

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Vengeance is mine; I will repay - Romans 12:19

And so begins Anna Karenina, common nominee for best novel ever written and second of Tolstoy's two major works. I read War and peace last year, and, compared to its 1400 pages, Anna Karenina seemed like a relatively small undertaking. However, it turns out that Anna's relative lack of bulk is deceiving. I found it slightly more difficult to read than War and Peace, although, surprisingly, there were a lot of common themes.

The basic plot of Anna Karenina sounds more like an episode of The Young and the Restless than the plot of one of the greatest novels ever written. Anna Karenina, the titular character, has an affair with Vronsky, a dashing, young, womanizing soldier, and the book explores her narrative alongside that of Levin, a wealthy young man searching for God. Alongside these two plots develop dozens of side characters, families, and friends. There's also a fairly involved political subplot expressing Tolstoy's derision toward many of the attitudes of the day.

Of course, in a book with this scope, any attempt to summarize the plot is going to be underwhelming. The most interesting parts of the book are those that aren't written in stone. Tolstoy steadfastly resists speechifying about the morality of his characters, choosing instead to intimately detail their thoughts so that we, the readers, can see how their reactions come about and draw our own conclusions of their morality. Even the ominous epigram (Romans 12:19) that begins the book is open to interpretation in light of the book's development. The novel itself can be read as a political treatise, a satire, a love story, a romantic tragedy, historical fiction, a mystical/religious novel, or all of the above.

Tolstoy writes the best character interactions I've read anywhere. When his characters speak, whether it's Levin and Stepan discussing politics and religion, or Vronksy and Anna having an arguement, every word and action rings exactly true. The scenes of Anna and her husband trying to function normally after her infidelity is revealed were among the most wrenching passages I've read in any book. Also worth noting is an early use of the modernist technique of stream-of-conciousness during Anna's breakdown in the penultimate section of the book.