This month’s theme is "strange places", as the Admiral’s booklist travels from Norway to Japan to South Africa, to Argentina (and strangely enough, to the Appalachian Trail of the far future as well. And no, I didn’t plan it that way). We see WWI era Austria, Cold War era Britain, Existentialist France, and a couple of fantasy worlds, comic and tragic, that exist only in their authors’ heads. Pack your bags if you wish and let me give you a guided tour of where I’ve been since school let out...
Equal Rites, by Terry Pratchett :
Anyone watching closely would have noticed strange things happening as she passed by.
There was, for example, the man with three upturned cups who was inviting a small crowd to explore with him the exciting world of chance and probability as it related to the position of a small dried pea. He was vaguely aware of a small figure watching him solemnly for a few moments, and then a sackful of peas cascaded out of every cup he picked up. Within seconds, he was knee deep in legumes. He was a lot deeper in trouble—he owed everyone a lot of money.
There was a small and wretched monkey that for years had shuffled vaguely at the end of a chain while its owner played something dreadful on a pipe organ. It suddenly turned, narrowed its little red eyes, bit its keeper sharply in the leg, snapped its chain and had it away over the rooftops with the night’s takings in a tin cup. History is silent about what they were spent on.
A boxful of marzipan ducks on a nearby stall came to life and whirred past the stallholder to land, quacking happily, in the river (where, by dawn, they had all melted: that’s natural selection for you). The stall itself sidled off down an alley and was never seen again.
Esk, in fact, moved through the fair more like an arsonist moves through a hayfield or a neutron bounces through a reactor, poets notwithstanding, and the hypothetical watcher could have detected her random passage by tracing the outbreaks of hysteria and violence. But, like all good catalysts, she wasn’t actually involved in the processes she initiated, and by the time all the non-hypothetical potential watchers took their eyes off them she had been buffeted somewhere else.
I discovered Pratchett’s Discworld books this year, and chomped through the first two like a kid in a candy store. Even after that, the third volume made me stop and wonder dubiously. "Discworld enters the battle of the sexes", announced the back cover, briefly introducing the new heroine, Esk, and her quest to become Discworld’s first ever female wizard. Oh, great. In fiction, "battle of the sexes" is code for a Girlpower book, in which all of the male characters are belching doofuses, shocked old fuddy-duddies and overconfident swaggerers just waiting to be humiliated by the spunky heroine. And in the rare tales where the guys win, it’s because they’re EVIL, as in The Stepford Wives. Jeez, I read books to escape from the real world, not to have my nose rubbed in it...
I needn’t have worried. Although there are a couple of old fuddy-duddies who are horrified at the idea of learning or doing anything that hasn’t always been studied or done since the beginning of time (the central location is a prestigious University, after all), the rest of the cliches are either thrown out the window or placed on the corner with their pants around their ankles, singing "The Old Grey Mare". Most of the male and female characters are well meaning at worst, and the resolution of the main conflict is not humiliation but union. More than that, the story is too side-splittingly funny to philosophize about. Much.
The bad news is that Rincewind, the Sentient Luggage, and everyone else who romped their way through the first two books are nowhere to be found. The good news is that there are others to take their place who are at least as wild and memorable. Exhibit One is the amazing Granny Weatherwax, the curmudgeonly resident witch of the hamlet of Bad Ass, who has no formal learning but a doctorate in Headology....
Loud and Raucous on the Eastern Front: The Good Soldier Schweik, by Jaroslav Hasek :
Someone pummeled him in the ribs and stood him in front of a table behind which sat a man with a cold official face and features of such brutish savagery that he looked as if he had just tumbled out of Lombroso’s book on criminal types.
He hurled a bloodthirsty glance at Schweik and said, "Take that idiotic expression off your face!"
"I can’t help it", replied Schweik solemnly. "I was discharged from the army on account of being weak minded and a special board reported me officially as weak minded. I’m officially weak minded—a chronic case."
The gentleman with the criminal countenance grated his teeth as he said, "The offense you’re accused of and that you’ve committed shows you’ve got all your wits about you."
And now he proceeded to enumerate to Schweik a long list of crimes, beginning with high treason and ending with insulting language toward His Royal Highness and Members of the Royal Family. The central gem of this collection constituted approval of the murder of the Archduke Ferdinand, and from this again branched off a string of fresh offenses, among which sparkled incitement to rebellion, as the whole business had happened in a public place.
"What have you got to say for yourself?" triumphantly asked the gentleman with the features of brutish savagery.
"There’s a lot of it," replied Schweik innocently. "You can have too much of a good thing."
"So you admit it’s true?"
"I admit everything. You’ve got to be strict. If you ain’t strict, why, where would you be? It’s like when I was in the army..."
"Hold your tongue!" shouted the police commissioner. "And don’t say a word unless you’re asked a question. Do you understand?"
"Begging your pardon sir, I do, and I’ve properly got the hang of every word you utter."
This Austrian WWI variation on the old theme of the sane madman in a world of mad sane men has been described as the original antiwar novel, influencing every subsequent antiwar writer from Remarque to Brecht to Heller. The author’s chief brilliance is in making every episode ambiguous as to whether the cheerful protagonist with the perpetual comfortably dumb smile and the endless supply of inane subject-changing anecdotes is an imbecile or whether he’s crazy like a fox, but somehow his little misunderstandings and mistakes always seem to take him far from where the fighting is, and the superior officer always ends up bearing the consequences of the official folly that is supposed to make the grunts suffer.
My biggest problems is, Hasek may have paved the way for Joseph Heller, but I read Catch 22 first, and after Heller’s superlative snarkiness---heck, even after M*A*SH* 4077---Schweik is tame by comparison. Catch 3, if you will. His satire intends to bite; it nibbles. Part of the problem may be things that are lost in the translation and the culture barrier. The book goes on for a few episodes too many, begins to go in circles, and then abruptly ends with no climax or resolution. As I learned from Claudio Magris’ tour of The Danube, and from Gogol, Kafka, and Brecht, East European literature has a tendency to muddle, to be more philosophically fog enshrouded than most readers, to step away from the plot and indicate that it is making a point, and to bog down in absurdism. Schweik is packed with officials and more officials, all of whom strut about like nutcracker soldiers, giving nonsensical orders, barking out droning speeches, and throwing paperwork by the shovelful in order to demonstrate to the reader that (hold on to your seat) bureaucratic hierarchies, especially military ones, are often nonsensical and stultifying! I suppose I should be thankful that Hasek lived before the development of departments of Motor vehicles. Schweik is funny, but not laugh out loud funny. It’s more "We just shot our own troops as a cost saving measure" funny.
Am I buggin’ ya? I don’t mean to bug ya. OK, Edge... Cry, the Beloved Country, by Alan Paton:
To the judge is entrusted a great duty, to judge and to pronounce sentence, even sentence of death. Because of their high office, Judges are called Honourable, and precede most other men on great occasions. And they are held in great honour by men both black and white. Because the land is a land of fear, a Judge must be without fear, so that justice may be done according to the Law; therefore, a Judge must be incorruptible.
The Judge does not make the Law. It is the People that make the Law. Therefore, if a Law is unjust, and if the Judge judges according to the Law, that is justice, even if it is not just.
It is the duty of a Judge to do justice, but it is only the People that can be just. Therefore, if justice be not just, that is not to be laid at the door of the Judge, but at the door of the People, which means at the door of the White People, for it is the White People that make the Law.
In South Africa, men are proud of their Judges, because they believe they are incorruptible. Even the black men have faith in them, though they do not always have faith in the Law. In a land of fear this incorruptibility is like a lamp set upon a stand, giving light to all that are in the house.
I first read this one when I was a student, young and hotheaded and already knowing everything, at a time when maybe the biggest political issue on campus was Apartheid, and the regular protests to try to pressure the university to disinvest its funds from companies connected to South Africa. I’m glad I came back to it for a second reading, because I missed more than half of the good stuff the first time around. The first time, I filtered the whole thing through "This is about white man’s injustice, and the poor oppressed native population. Pity these people here. Boo and hiss these other people." In fact, one of the most powerful messages to be found here comes from accepting that almost everyone in the book is a good person trying to do the right thing in the face of overwhelming poverty, temptation, prejudice and learned helplessness. Yes, including the white people, and including the land itself. For the land is a major character. The slums, the mines, the fields and hills; the shantytowns for the natives and the comfortable houses for the whites. The central tragic act that drives the plot is presented as inevitable, but the good that results as two elders, one white and one native, come to terms with it, is perhaps a miracle.
In light of the fate of South Africa and its meandering progress over the past century, one line that particularly stands out is spoken by a native leader toward the end of the book: I have one great fear in my heart, that one day when they turn to loving they will find we are turned to hating. High recommendations.
Truth in Advertising: Nausea, by Jean Paul Sartre :
I stopped in front of Julien’s pork butcher shop. Through the glass, from time to time, I could see a hand designing the truffled pigs feet and the sausages. Then a fat blonde girl bent over, her bosom showing, and picked up a piece of dead flesh between her fingers. In his room five minutes from there, M. Fasquelle was dead.
I looked around me for support, a refuge from my thoughts. There was none: little by little the fog lifted, but some disquieting thing stayed behind him in the streets. Perhaps not a real menace: it was pale, transparent. But it was that which finally frightened me. I leaned my forehead against the window. I noticed a dark red drop on the mayonnaise of a stuffed egg. It was blood. This red on the yellow made me sick to my stomach.
Suddenly, I had a vision: someone had fallen face down and was bleeding in the dishes. The egg had rolled in blood; the slice of tomato which crowned it had come off and fallen flat, red on red. The mayonnaise had run a little: a pool of yellow cream which divided the trickle of blood into two arms."
If this is what "existentialism" is about, I don’t understand it, and I don’t think I want to. Had I not known the author was Sartre, I would have assumed that Nausea was written by a conservative theologian who was trying to argue that man without God is without purpose, inexorably alienated from the world, deeply unhappy, criminally amoral. Sartre’s protagonist, Roquentin, is all of these things, and has periodic psychotic hallucinations besides, and yet Sartre writes as if he thinks these are good things, or at least the natural state of human psychology, to be accepted and welcomed. There is barely any plot. Roquentin spends his time writing the biography of a historical figure he doesn’t much care for, going on walks and despising everyone he sees, and eating in cafes, where he imagines the food morphing into disgusting things, served by waiters who have tentacles and lobster claws instead of hands. Mostly he just sits around being alienated, hating life and exasperating the reader. This is supposed to be one of Sartre’s best and best known works; I invite Sartre to explain why, since the book doesn’t seem to have any pleasure or learning to give the reader. The introduction by Hayden Carruth attempts to explain that the greatness of Nausea is that Roquentin is some sort of everyman with whom we will all identify: we are ALL Roquentin. Um, no I’m not. And I hope for your sake you aren’t either. If he has any value at all, it is as a warning not to be like that.
Grouchos of the Pampas: In Patagonia, by Bruce Chatwin:
Milton Evans was the principal resident of Trevelin and son of its founder. He was a round moustachioed gentleman of sixty one, who prided himself on his English. His favorite expression was "Gimme another horse piss!" And his daughter, who didn’t speak English, would bring a beer and he’d say, "Aah! Horse piss!" and drain the bottle.
"Funny, you remind me of Bobby Dawes. Young Englishman, same as yourself, wandering about Patagonia. One day he walks up to an estancia and says to the owner, "If you give me work, you’re a saint, your wife’s a saint, and your children are angels, and that dog’s the best dog in the world." But the owner says, "There’s no work." "In which case", Bobby says, "you’re the son of a whore, your wife IS a whore, your children are monkeys, and if I catch that dog, I’ll kick its arse till its nose bleeds."
Milton laughed a lot as he told this story. Then he told another he heard from the Cooper sheep dip man. The second story was about a cure for scab. The punch line was, "Put a lump of sugar in the sheep’s mouth and suck its arse till it tastes sweet." He repeated the story twice to make sure I’d get the point. I lied. I couldn’t face it a third time.
The best travel and anthropology books, it seems to me, have a double perspective. You get a look at an interesting culture or subculture, and it’s filtered through the eyes of an imaginative writer who brings a special focus to what you’re looking at. In Patagonia delivers on both counts.
Bruce Chatwin is maybe the Sarah Vowell of his generation, becoming passionate about trivia, drawing on popular culture for insight, and making even the dullest subject matter glitter as he rejoices over the history to be found there and rattles off quirky facts by the dozen. Here he’s wandering around the pointy end of South America, which is a lot more heterogenous than I’d thought, being populated not only by the bull-macho supporting cast of a spaghetti western, but by Welsh and Boer settlements, tattered remnants of indigenous peoples, and a chocolate box assortment of hermits, crackpots, goofballs and other misfits trying to hide from the civilized world and find a little remote corner where they can be themselves. Along the way, there are interpretive accounts of Charles Darwin, Butch and Sundance, Antonio Soto, Simon Radowitzky (a Russian communist who spent two decades in a prison right on the tip of the continent), and Charley Milward (a sailor whose biography of true sea stories makes up a good part of the last 50 pages). Very rough around the edges, but a colorful lot of fun.
Paddies on the Railway: On the Narrow Road to the Deep North, by Lesley Downer :
"What you don’t seem to understand", said Horiguchi-san, "is that there is a Basho boom." He sat hunched on his stool, shoulders rounded, an equally tired looking pink prawn hanging limply from his chopsticks. "Ever since they opened the Tohoku Bullet Train, a few years back, there’ve been scores of them", he explained, examining the prawn without enthusiasm. "You get groups, you get couples, you get taxis, you get coaches—they go round each place where he wrote a haiku. There are books, there are television programmes...so you’re bound to get statues of him and souvenir shops and things."
"Heard of Basho, has she, that foreigner?" butted in a red-faced old fellow squashed in next to him."Well, that’s something, isn’t it. ‘Course, they can’t understand Basho, can they, these foreigners."
"Where’s she from?" asked the fat chef. "America?"
"No", I said patiently. "England".
"England, is it?" he said, ignoring me and addressing his remarks to Horiguchi-san. "Good looking, aren’t they, these foreigners—trouble is, you can’t tell them apart." He chortled loudly.
"I realise", I persisted, ignoring him in my turn, "that around here it’s bound to be built up. But what I want to know is, once I turn inland, into the mountains, will I find wild, remote country, like Basho walked through?"
"Wild country? In Japan?"
Horiguchi-san raised an eyebrow in disbelief at such naivety. I felt rather foolish. How could I have imagined that in this most advanced, industrialised of countries there could be anywhere unaffected by progress? No one, after all, would want to live as they had done in Basho’s time. It was all rather dispiriting. The answer to my question was probably no.
"What about yamabushi?" I ventured. I still cherished the hope of finding hermit-priests striding, Benkei-like, across the northern mountains, or pursuing esoteric practices, hidden away in caves.
"We Japanese", said Horiguchi-san wearily, "never think of yamabushi. There haven’t been yamabushi for five hundred years."
I was glad to have read this one concurrently with In Patagonia. Downer’s Japan is yin to Chatwin’s Argentine yang. Where Chatwin rolls in the dirt of a primitive land full of primitive people with primitive manners, Downer enters one of the most modern industrialized nations to retrace the steps of the 16th century haiku poet Matsuo Basho, who took a celebrated journey around the main Japanese island of Honshu 500 years earlier, visiting places that are apparently remembered boastfully to this day for the haikus he left in his wake (I’m trying to think of an American equivalent, and the best I can do is the "George Washington slept here" hotels of the east coast, or perhaps the little pixelated signs along the Oregon trail commemorating the people who died of dysentary.
Because I learned about Japan mostly from TV and manga, I believe that Japan was always a lightly misted vista of rolling pagoda-studded hills until about 1930, when the entire island of Honshu developed overnight into a cartoon metropolis populated mainly by chefs in garish outfits and schoolgirls with huge eyes. On the Narrow Road to the Deep North offers an education from no fewer than three perspectives: Downer’s experiences and insights , Basho’s traditional Japan and Modern Japan. Very well done.
The Day It Fell Apart: There Will Be Dragons, by John Ringo :
The town hall was another new building with another set of useless guards. They were both leaning on their spears when he walked up and asked to speak to Mr. Talbot.
"He’s busy", the guard on the left growled. "Too busy for any old reenactor to just barge in on him."
"I am not surprised that he is busy," Gunny said coldly. "What are your standing orders in the event that someone states that they are a close personal friend and have business with him?"
"What?" the guard on the right said.
"Okay," Gunny growled, as patiently as he possibly could. "What are ANY of your standing orders?"
"We just got told to keep people out that don’t have business in here," the intellectual on the left said uneasily. "I don’t know about any standing orders."
"Right, get me the Sergeant of the Guard", Gunny snapped, losing patience.
"Who’s that?"
"WHO’S THAT?" he shouted. "YOU WILL STAND AT ATTENTION WHEN YOU ADDRESS ME, YOU PIMPLE ON A REAL GUARD’S ASS! OTHERWISE I’LL TAKE THAT PIGSTICKER AWAY FROM YOU AND SHOVE IT UP YOUR ASS SIDEWAYS! LOOK AT THIS THING!" he continued, snatching the spear out of the surprised guard’s hands and submitting it to a minute inspection. "IS THIS DRY ROT I SEE ON THIS SHAFT? THIS THING IS A PIECE OF CRAP EVEN WORSE THAN YOU!" He broke the spear, which was in fact in lousy shape, across his knee and threw half of it on the ground, using the other half as a pointer to emphasize his words. "YOU TWO ARE WITHOUT A DOUBT THE LOUSIEST EXAMPLE OF GUARDS IT HAS EVER BEEN MY DISPLEASURE TO SEE IN ALL MY BORN DAYS, AND I HAVE SEEN PLENTY OF SHIT ASS GUARDS IN MY DAY!"
Edmund looked up from his paperwork and gave Myron a relieved glance.
"Ah, unless I’m much mistaken Gunny has arrived."
My first post on a John Ringo book, A Hymn Before Battle, drew negative comments on several different forums, from people who don’t like the author. I’m told Ringo is one of those formerly sensible people who, Like Orson Scott Card, flatlined after the WTC attacks. I’m told that he’s a fringe right winger, a misogynist and a Bush apologist. A couple of them cited There Will be Dragons as one of his worst books. So I set my phasers to "snark" and headed off to the library, in the mood to write a scathing pan, full of withering sarcasm and scanning to "And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda" (I read just a chapter or two before bed/And as I turned the page with an ache in my head/and saw what John had done, I wished I was undead...never knew there were worse things than Twilight).
Sorry, can’t do it. There Will be Dragons kicks ass. What the heck were you all warning me about?
I go to geeky science fiction conventions, and I go to Society for Creative Anachronism events. In fact, I spent three years living with a lady who actively fantasized about technological civilization breaking down so that the SCA would take over. This book was going to be like candy to me from the very start. It starts out as a convention geek’s wet dream, a utopian world of the far future where all the drudge work, security, environmental protection and technical details are handled by computers, leaving everyone free to pursue fulfillment as creative and performing artists, athletes and adventurers. Elves are real. People can transform their bodies and become part bear, part mermaid, even make themselves consist entirely of electronic particles. And then it becomes a SCAdian’s wet dream when the people in charge of the computer go to war with each other and turn off all the networks, leaving the equivalent of the SCA to set up camp in the appalachian mountains and rescue a planet full of people with no survival skills. Then there are the cameos from Stonewall Jackson’s grave and a red haired "minstrel" who plays March of Cambreadth. OF COURSE I’m going to like this!
I don’t know whether Ringo is a fringe rightwinger, and I don’t really care. Knut Hamsun was a gorram NAZI sympathizer even while the Germans occupied his native Norway, and he earned a Noble Prize anyway. Books can be bigger than their author. The emergency SCAdian society built in There Will be Dragons doesn’t seem to have anything conservative about it, unless maybe you buy the fiction that only conservatives have any work ethic, or that conservatism means preferring "traditional ways" like weaving and sword fighting to modern technology. A right wing SCA society would have happily extorted all of the belongings of the refugees as tolls or rent for joining their camp, and would have equally happily granted them the freedom to contract themselves into indentured servitude in exchange for food. Then they would have introduced mandatory group prayer, long criminal sentences and cheap prison labor, and created a pariah caste or two. That’s not what the good guys do in this book. There are some members of the "bad guy" faction in the war for the computer, who claim an agenda that might be Communist; however, they lie so often that you can’t really tell if they mean it. Their actual agendas—and their real evil—stems from their amoral Machiavellian power grabbing and their engineering of Frankenstein abominations for their army. Recommended, whatever the advice of others may be.
The Sacrifices of Isak: Growth of the Soil, by Knut Hamsun:
Poor Eleseus, he is so frittered away, so topsy turvy. He probably should have been a settler from day one, now he is someone who has learned to write the letters of the alphabet; he is without initiative, without depth. But he is no pitch black devil of a man, he is not in love and not ambitious, he is next to nothing, not even a great nuisance.
The young man seems doomed, haunted by misfortune; it is as though he has suffered some internal injury. Perhaps the good district engineer from the city shouldn’t have discovered him as a child and taken him into his house to make something of him; the boy probably got his roots torn and fared badly. Whatever he now undertakes can be traced back to something defective in him, something dark on a light ground...
I was glad to have read this one in conjunction with There Will Be Dragons. Both books evoke images of an earlier time, when people were skilled at many basic tasks just to get through life, and technological advances were viewed with suspicion as softening moral character. Growth of the Soil, however, is Nobel-winning literature. The author was a Nazi sympathizer and came to be hated by his country, but his book is bigger than he was. I’m not sure what there would be about self-reliance and hand tools that would be conducive to belief in a fascist state where all people are part of a single minded killer bee hive, but there you are.
The story begins with Isak, the volunteer Robinson Crusoe of the fjords, traveling to the far north of Norway and building a farming homestead with his hands: initial turf hut, livestock shed, house, barn, dairy, haymow, forge. He interacts with Lapp traders and ponderous villagers, all of whom seem to think in geologic time, except for Geisler the happy go lucky wanderer, and Eleseus, the elder son who longs for city life. During most chapters, I seemed to hear the voice of Garrison Keillor reading it aloud, with emphasis on the wholesomeness of the rural life, the unspoiled wilderness, and the cold, sweet air. The lifestyle described is not one I would have chosen for myself, but it’s easy to see what there is to admire in it.
Whack-a-Mole: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, by John LeCarre :
I told the cab driver to go like hell. I didn’t even argue the price. It got like a panic. I barged the information queue and asked for all the departures to Russia or the connections in. I went nearly mad going through all the flight lists, yelling at the Chinese clerks, but there wasn’t a plane since yesterday and none till six tonight. But now I had this hunch. I had to know. What about charters, what about the unscheduled flights, freight, casual transit? Had nothing, but really nothing, been routed for Moscow since yeasterday morning? Then this little girl comes through with the answer, one of the Chinese hostesses. She fancies me, see. She’s doing me a favour. An unscheduled Soviet plane had taken off two hours ago. Only four passengers aboard. The centre of attraction was a woman invalid. A lady in a coma. They had to cart her to the plane on a stretcher and her face was wrapped in bandages. Two male nurses went with her and one doctor, that was the party. I called the Alexandra as a last hope. Neither Irina nor her fake husband had checked out of their room but there was no reply. The lousy hotel didn’t even know they’d left.
I remember seeing the TV dramatization starring Alec Guiness as protagonist and master spy George Smiley long, long ago, when I was about 8 years old and not really able to comprehend all of it. From my very fuzzy recollection, it was a completely different story. At least, the details I remember—the early establishment of five suspects, initially including Smiley himself, at the highest levels of British intelligence, one of whom is betraying secrets to the Russians; the constant observation, "There are three of them, and Alleline"; the identification of the suspects in code as "Tinker", "Tailor", etc; and a trailing sequence in episode one of the series that doesn’t occur in the book until very late—they’re all different and downplayed. More than half of the book is concerned with flashbacks, and the nature of the flashbacks make the identity of the traitor downright obvious. Or maybe it’s just 20/20 hindsight. Further, the private life of Smiley is emphasized to a degree that I don’t remember seeing in the series. Nonetheless, it’s a classic highbrow espionage novel and a treat for anyone who likes their British spy thrillers long on intelligence gathering and intense procedural suspense and short on the James Bond gadgets, supervillains and wenches.
Portrait of a Lady: Rosa at Ten O’Clock, by Marco Deveni :
Do you know why Robespierre was so merciless? Because he was sexless. By sending those who had sex to the guillotine he had his revenge for not having it. If you could have changed Robespierre’s endocrine system, you could have changed the course of history. There would have been no terror, no Thermidor, no consulate, no Napoleon, no Holy Alliance, no nothing. Well, as I was saying, Camillo Canegato belongs to this category of potentially dangerous little men. I have known him for some time, ever since I’ve been living at La Madrilena, a matter of some two years. In spite of his little smiles, his sick little monkey glances, his bows—look, he always had the appearance of a checkroom attendant, of the man in charge of a file room who is about to go into retirement, or of the fellow who takes care of the plants in the botanical garden, or who has charge of the theosophical library of a Salvation Army home. I was alerted from the first moment I laid eyes on him. What I mean to say is I realized that in spite of his appearance he was a man who someday could cause us a lot of trouble.
WOW. In a just world, this expertly crafted "What the heck really happened" mystery would replace Rashomon as the definitive tale told by different observers, one by one, each with their own insights, blind spots and prejudices, in which the truth comes out gradually.
The first half of the book is told from the perspective of the landlady of an Argentine boarding house, as she describes a particular lodger who comes to stay, and the scented love letters that arrive for him, and the events that follow. Then come increasingly briefer narratives from others, culminating in a very satisfying ending. It’s a fairly short book, but it took me longer than usual to read because, after every new narrative, I found myself having to go back and review parts of the previous narratives, looking for clues and checking for consistency. I won’t say more than that for fear of spoilers, but this book is highly recommended.
Three-Pil’d Hyperbolae: Inverted World, by Christopher Priest :
One graph in particular had been discussed in great and onerous detail.
It showed the curve of an equation where one value was represented as a reciprocal, or an inverse, of the other. The graph for this was a hyperbola. One part of the graph was drawn in the positive quadrant, one in the negative. Each end of the curve had an infinite value, both positive and negative.
The teacher had discussed what would happen if that graph were to be rotated about one of its axes. I had neither understood why graphs should be drawn, nor that one might rotate them, and I'd suffered another attack of daydreaming. But I did notice that the teacher had drawn on a piece of large card what the solid body would look like should this rotation be performed.
The product was an impossible object: a solid with a disk of infinite radius, and two hyperbolic spires above and below the disk, each of which narrowed towards an indefinitely distant point.
It was a mathematical abstraction, and held for me then as much interest as such an item should.
But that mathematical impossibility was not taught to us for no reason, and the teacher had not without reason attempted to draw it for us. In the indirect manner of all our education, that day I had seen the shape of the world on which we lived.
Inverted World is a strange, brief book. It’s one of those "hard science fiction" books in which the author seems to have thought up a mathematically strange model for a world, and all the rest of it—plot, characters, dramatic themes—are added as afterthoughts. It took me a while to get over the initial hump of colorless exposition; after that, it picked up a bit and I began to care what the Everyman hero thought. And then, the ending wrapped things up tidily, but it was wearying getting there. Then again, a friend with a mathematical background read it and found it amusing. Nice if you like hard-SF; otherwise, it’s more like having to solve a jigsaw puzzle than like reading a story.