What I read last month. Some from or about the 15th-16th Century; others from all over the bookshelf...in this edition:
Essays (Vol. III), by Michel de Montaigne
Jerusalem Delivered, by Torquato Tasso
The Stripping of the Altars, by Eamonn Duffy
The Reformation, by Will Durant
The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas, by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
Cat's Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
An Imaginary Life, by David Malouf
The Hours, by Michael Cunningham
Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded, by John Scalzi
----and the usual assortment of murder mysteries in historical settings.
Enjoy!
Tidbits of Awesome: Your Hate Mail Will be Graded, by John Scalzi
Every time I hear a well-fed conservative fart about how there's no need to raise the minimum wage, I have to fight the urge to give him a punch right in his fat face. I dare any of them to make a go of it at $17,229 a year, which is the official US poverty level for a family of four. That comes out to $8.61 an hour, presuming a 40-hour work week and 50 weeks of work a year--well above minimum wage. Find an apartment ('cause you certainly couldn't afford a house), find a car that you can afford that won't crap out on you and whose tank you can afford to fill, pay your gas and electric bills, pay for food and for clothing, and hope you don't fall ill, because there isn't a chance in hell you can afford health insurance.
If you can manage that, then try it on the actual Federal minimum wage, which is $5.15 an hour ($10,300). Anyone who thinks the minimum wage is adequate for anything but beer money has simply never had to exist on it.
John Scalzi is one of those authors who, if you haven't read him, I envy you. Because you're going to have such a good time. He writes what I dream of writing. Your Hate Mail Will be Graded is a collection of posts from his blog, "Whatever", that originally appeared between 1998 and 2008. If anything, his blog is even better than his fiction. It's like a stream of op-ed pieces that somehow got by the Snark censor, usually wise, usually funny, often telling me something I didn't know, mostly validating my own world view, occasionally giving my world view a kick in the tuchus. Reading Scalzi helps bring me to a place where the world is getting bigger and funnier every day, and that where the parts that are not are too contemptibly small for you to allow them to ruin your day.
Among the subjects tackled: Why the Scooby Gang is a cult ruled with an iron fist by Fred; Felix the Cat in old age; Which cereal mascots are gay; Why left, right and libertarian politics all suck; musings on the Clinton impeachment, the 2000 election, 9/11/01, the 2004 election, the sheer depths of W's stupidity, the Creation Museum, hate-based faith, parenthood, gay marriage, straight marriage, Scalzi's own marriage, advice to writers, and advice on mowing one's lawn. And a whole lot more. One of his most popular entries, "Being Poor" is included; "How to make a Schadenfreude Pie" (a recipe I really did follow at the time, toasting the bitter tears of my enemies) is not.
And, of course, exhortations to write worthier hate mail.
Very highest recommendations. If there is a flaw in the book, it is the odd forward by Wil Wheaton, praising the book as something of historical interest, a dusty reminder of what blogging was like back in the Jurassic '00s, before everyone and their cat was blogging and we needed Grandpa Scalzi to pave the way for us. Right, and today's college freshmen don't remember Usenet. I know. Pass me my Metamucil and my cane.
Incompetent Design Theory: Cat's Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Dr. Breed told me that Dr. Hoenikker, as a very young man, had simply abandoned his car in Ilium traffic one morning.
"The police, trying to find out what was holding up traffic," he said, "found Felix's car in the middle of everything, its motor running, a cigar burning in the ash tray, fresh flowers in the vases..."
"Vases?"
"It was a Marmon, about the size of a switch engine. It had little cut-glass vases on the door posts, and Felix's wife used to put fresh flowers in the vases every morning. And there that car was, in the middle of traffic."
Like the Marie Celeste," I suggested.
"The police department hauled it away. They knew whose car it was, and they called up Felix, and they told him very politely where his car could be picked up. Felix told them they could keep it, that he didn't want it any more."
"Did they?"
"No. They called up his wife, and she came and got the Marmon."
"What was her name, by the way?"
"Emily." Dr. Breed licked his lips, and he got a faraway look, and he said the name of the woman, of the woman so long dead, again. "Emily."
"Do you think anyone would object if I used the story about the Marmon in my book?" I asked.
"As long as you don't use the end of it."
"The end of it?"
"Emily wasn't used to driving the Marmon. She got into a bad wreck on the way home. It did something to her pelvis...." The raffic wasn't moving just then. Dr. Breed closed his eyes and tightened his hands on the steering wheel.
"And that was why she died when little Newt was born."
See Bookpost, February 2014, for my thoughts on Slaughterhouse Five Vonnegut's most famous book. That one, it seems to me, hasn't weathered time well. With the possible exception of the much less well-known Jailbird, Cat's Cradle is by far Vonnegut's best book. It's been decades since I first read and was influenced by it, and, as with really good books, I discovered whole layers that I'd missed before, including an appreciation for the deceptively expert structure of the book, which comes across at first as somewhat random, with most chapters taking up three pages or less.
It has elements of Moby Dick, including an unnamed narrator who begins the book with "Call me Jonah", and a story about a half-mad protagonist (in this case, the three children of an eccentric scientist who helped to create the atom bomb) on an inexorable path to an apocalyptic ending--that continually diverts into other matters that seem irrelevant but which are not (in this case, mainly about a fictional religion with poems and made-up vocabulary words)
It is full of random anecdotes that start out silly and end in tragedy, or start serious and end with a joke. The scientist father of the three misfit children followed by "Jonah" is revered as a genius and tolerated as an absent-minded silly man, even as his random actions have far reaching consequences, such as the death of his wife in the quoted excerpt above, to the invention of the Atom Bomb and other potentially world-ending things. In Vonnegut's world, this dangerously clever, heedless buffoon is a stand-in for God.
Cat's Cradle is the darkest of Vonnegut's humor, and perversely shows a way for cynics like myself to come to terms with the random nastiness of theuniverse. Very highest recommendations.
The Tudor Murders: The Grail Murders, by Michael Clynes. The Wheel of Fate & The Midsummer Crown, by Kate Sedley. Revelation, by C.J. Sansom
Oh, bittersweet memories! I knew what was coming but could only stare with tear-filled eyes at the small amethyst ring the fellow pushed across the desk.
"I was a child," Coligny continued, "only a babe-in-arms when you gave that to my mother. She always spoke of your kindness and courage.
Do you know, I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. Here was someone paying homage to my courage! Me, Roger Shallott, who in his time was the swiftest runner in Christendom--and believe me, I always proved it! When swords were drawn and blood was spilt, old Shallott, to quote my friend Will Shakespeare, was "like a greyhound in the slips," ready to charge--always the other way. I picked up the ring and gazed at its brilliant sparkle.
"So long ago," I murmured. "So many horrible deaths. Such terrible murders."
--from The Grail Murders
"There'll be another purge," someone said gloomily. "I've heard rumors Bishop Bonner is going to crack down hard on the Bible-men."
"Not more burnings," Dorothy said quietly.
"The city wouldn't stand for that," Loder said. "People don't like the radicals, but they like burnings less. Bonner won't go that far."
"Won't he?" Roger said quietly. "Isn't he a fanatic too, on the other side? Isn't the whole city becoming divided?"
"Most people only want a quiet life," I said. "Even those of us who were once radicals." I smiled wryly at Roger. He nodded in acknowledgement.
"Fanatics on both sides," old Ryprose said gloomily. "And all we poor ordinary folk in the middle. Sometimes I fear they will bring death to us all."
--from Revelation
I have heard it said that when you are first apprised of some great, earth-shaking event, ever afterwards you can remember exactly where you were and what you were doing at the time. And I suppose it says something about the general bathos of my life that when I received the first intimations of the death of King Edward IV, I was coming out of the public latrine on Bristol Bridge.
--from Wheel of Fate
He gave me a quizzical look as he handed me my beaker. "Do you really not know? Or are you sworn to secrecy? The city's full of rumours that Duke Richard means to depose his nephew and take the crown for himself. I thought if anyone knows the truth, you might."
I hedged some more. "How ever do these stories get about?"
He smiled. "From servants in palaces and great houses who listen at doors, who pick up on a word here and a word there from careless masters and mistresses who forget or overlook their presence, or, as often as not, treat them as part of the furniture. There are whispers everywhere that the forthcoming coronation will be of King Richard III and not King Edward V. I can't believe that you of all people haven't heard the talk."
"I only arrived in London last Friday."
--from The Midsummer Crown
I've decided that Michael Clynes' "detective" Roger Shallot is a rogue in the mold of George MacDonald Fraser's outstanding Flashman series. Long retired from active life and covered in praise and honors he never deserved, he writes his memoirs with uncharacteristic honesty, gloating over what a liar, coward and sinner he's been, and how he's bumbled through many adventures through dumb luck. The difference is, he does this as sidekick to Benjamin, the pious and naive nephew of Cardinal Wolsey, and the two of them banter and take turns saving one another like the angel and devil protagonists of Neil Gaiman's even more outstanding Good Omens. With that kind of characterization, and glosses on actual historical characters, expecting a decent plot would be lily-gilding. The Grail Murders is some utter nonsense about Henry VIII sending the protagonists on a quest to find the Holy Grail and the sword Excalibur (they're hidden somewhere near Glastonbury. Of course. They're sure of it) while some surviving Templar hidden in the King's Council tries to find it first and provides lame excuses for providing corpse after corpse from among Mandeville's spy ring for the protagonists to find. And of course, Shallot continues to paraphrase bits of Shakespeare that he claims to have invented himself while having ale with the Bard. You'll either love or hate this series, and possibly both.
CJ Sansom's Shardlake series, on the other hand, continues to get better. To the point of being comparable to great historical literature, not just mystery fiction. His books are longer and richer than anything I've read in the mystery category so far. Revelation is primarily a snapshot of religious life in London as Henry VIII was courting Catherine Parr and dismantling monasteries left and right, with Catholics and protestants, reformers and radicals never sure which faction was going to be on top next, and being very careful about it. People in the King's good graces remembering Cromwell and Wolsey and watching their backs....and then there are the interlocking situations shardlake encounters. Court cases. political intrigue. A look at how the mentally ill in "Bedlam' were treated. A frightening adventure involving a psychotic serial killer, at a time when such things were apparently unheard of. A moral lesson in spousal behavior, and a subtle love story. This one has it all.
Wheel of Fate and The Midsummer Crown bring Sedley's Roger Chapman series through the short reign of boy king Edward V in 1483. Like every historical mystery in this period, it seems influenced by Tey's Daughter of Time (Bookpost, July 2014) and has its own twist as to whether Richard III was a hero, villain, or pragmatist, and whether he had a better claim to the throne than his half-brother's son. Wheel of Fate is centered on a series of murders within a tight-knit London family, unrelated to the Yorkist dynasty. One key clue is telegraphed all over the place, but it isn't until that clue is realized by the narrator and explored in chapter 18 that you really have the information you need to solve it. Meanwhile, on the periphery, Sedley explains the arrests of Rivers, Grey and Vaughn and introduces the reader to the hatred between Hastings and Buckingham. The Midsummer Crown's unrelated murder, involving a boy's disappearance, the locked-room murder of his tutor, and a Stonehenge-era legend, is actually distracting from the arc plot about what Richard is planning, and why, and whether he does it as planned. You can tell Sedley's been leading up to these events for most of the series so far.
The Stripping of the Altars, by Eamon Duffy
Cranmer's somberly magnificent prose, read week by week, entered and and possessed their minds, and became the fabric of their prayer, the utterance of their most solemn and their most vulnerable moments. And more astringent and strident words entered their minds and hearts too, the polemic of the Homilies, of Jewel's Apology, of Foxe's Acts and Monuments, and of a thousand "no popery" sermons, a relentless torrent carrying away the landmarks of a thousand years. By the end of the 1570s, whatever the instincts and nostalgia of their seniors, a generation was growing up which had known nothing else, which believed the Pope to be Antichrist, the Mass a mummery, which did not look back to the Catholic past as their own, but another country, another world.
The title is a pun. One may reverently "strip the altar" of relics at the conclusion of a mass, or one can strip them of material and spiritual value, leaving only a slab. Guess which happened in the 16th Century?
In some ways, Duffy's history of how Catholicism in England was replaced with Henry VIII and the Church of England is the culmination of the historical works I've read this year--in part because they've been so Anglo-centric and because for the past two years I've been impatient to drop the stultifying emphasis on Christianity and get on with the Age of Reason and actual advances in civilization. Like Huizinga (see Bookpost, July 2014), Duffy seems to view progress as a bad thing, and bemoans the destruction of pretty church relics by the self-serving government.
And, of course, he's partly right, as is anyone who emphasizes the actual atrocities of one's enemies in order to distract from one's own. That's the thing about the Reformation:It was all about Catholics and Protestants behaving badly and destroying nice things while correctly pointing fingers at the other side, which was doing the same whenever it could. Sulieman and the Turks, in contrast, came across as the apex of western civilization.
And of course, the peasants suffered the most. Duffy divides the book into two parts, the first of which portrays simple, humble parish life pre-Reformation, with folktales and customs for the gullible, information from village rolls, rood screen illustrations, tombstones, books of hours, etc; and the second of which shows it all being torn apart to fill the king's coffers. People couldn't even leave wills without allowing for the contingency that the bequests, especially to churches, might be disallowed. On the other hand, a century later, the absence of having the churches to weigh down civilization was part of Britain's rise to supremacy.
Machado About Nothing: The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas, by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
I expired at two o'clock on a Friday afternoon in the month of August, 1869, at my beautiful suburban palace in Catumbi. I was sixty four intense and prosperous years old. I was a bachelor. I had wealth of around three hundred contols, and I was accompanied to the cemetery by eleven friends. Eleven friends! The fact is, there hadn't been any cards or announcements. On top of that, it was raining--drizzling--a thin, sad, constant rain, so constant and so sad that it led one of those last minute faithful friends to insert the ingenious idea into the speech he was making at the edge of the grave: "You who knew him, gentlemen, can say with me that nature appears to be weeping over the irreparable loss of one of the finest characters humanity has been honored with."
This one was described as "wicked satire". It may have lost something in the translation, unless the satire is supposed to be that the narrator takes himself overly seriously. I'm inclined to think that its fame may be due to literary techniques that were considered innovative at the time (the late 19th Century), but which have been over used since, such as having a narrator speak from beyond the grave and having tiny little chapters, some of which are self-referential and meaningless.
Bras Cubas, as advertised, is telling us his life story after he has died, beginning with the day of his death but transitioning quickly to childhood and building back up to the "beginning." He is the son of a wealthy family in Brazil, not particularly motivated, who does fairly little with his life. He has some affairs without marrying, dabbles in politics a little, travels a little, and invents a poultice that is supposed to cure emotional pain, but dies before sharing it with the world.
There are many literary digressions and references to famous works from Aristotle to Tristram Shandy (the rambling, digressionary style of which is pointedly copied by the narrator), and a pessimistic "nothing new under the sun" view of all things as cyclical. A slave from Cubas's household is freed, and later goes on to beat other slaves. A happy go lucky classmate goes from roguish spoiled rich kid to roguish beggar and back to spoiled rich guy again. Between the mostly sad episodes of his life, Cubas discourses on the purpose of noses, why epitaphs are important, and so on. I found literary value in it, but must have missed the humor somewhere.
Flowers for Dimetrodon: The Hours, by Michael Cunningham
The woman's head quickly withdraws, the door to the trailer closes again, but she leaves behind her an unmistakable sense of watchful remonstrance, as if an angel had briefly touched the surface of the world with one sandaled foot, asked if there was any trouble and, being told all was well, had resumed her place in the ether with skeptical gravity, having reminded the children of earth that they are just barely trusted to manage their own business, and that further carelessness will not go unremarked.
Cunningham's book is inexorably intertwined with Virginia Woolf's book Mrs. dalloway. Here's what I had to say about Mrs. Dalloway in my October 2009 Bookpost:
" If this one wasn't so short, I might not have bothered finishing with it. Neither the plot, the characters nor the language are particularly memorable. From the introduction, I'm told that Mrs. Dalloway is an experiment in Joycean stream-of-consciousness writing. It is not. I'm told that the heroine is an example of a Strong Modern Woman. She is not, unless slight lesbian overtones are all that it takes. The character is a typical English lady between the wars, and has mostly put her own desires on hold in favor of her dull, successful husband. I'm told she is also an exuberant optimist. That much the book says. However, if it hadn't said so, I wouldn't have been able to tell from any of her actions. She spends most of the book planning a party, and then hosting it, and disappearing from it, and most of the book is told from the point of view of other characters, who are mostly not thinking about her. For me, the defining moment of her character is when she learns that someone has committed suicide, and her immediate thought is to tut-tut that the news might dampen the atmosphere of her party. The best parts are about the callous and counterproductive way that the mentally infirm are treated..... The impact on me was almost negligible. I take it as a sign that I’m no longer as neurotic as I used to be."
So here we have The Hours, the book version about Woolf and two generations of neurotic women who follow and are influenced by the flower-purchasing, stream-of-consciousness sharing heroine of her novel. In alternating chapters, Woolf writes Mrs. Dalloway in 1923; A California housewife named Laura Brown reads the novel in 1941 while planning her husband's birthday, exploring bisexuality along with Woolf, and warping her toddler's mind; yet another woman (named Vaughn but nicknamed "Dalloway" by her poet-friend who is dying of AIDS and failing to cope with it) experiments with bisexuality in 1998 while planning a party in honor of the poet. Planning for the party involves---YES! Buying flowers.
It's a big homage to an author loved by people different from me, sharing Woolf's characters, themes and writing style, and possibly showing that the human, or at least, the female condition, hasn't changed much in 100 years of progress. As with Woolf's original, there is flower-purchasing. There is suicide. There is bisexuality. There is a lot of stream-of-consciousness meant to reveal characters' minds as lovely, delicate, vulnerable flowers but which struck me as revealing the characters to be stultified and mundane. A plot detail that I had taken for granted is presented at the end as if it were a shocking Big Reveal tying up the separate plot lines in a way I wasn't supposed to expect.
It's brief and maybe thought provoking, and probably of significant academic, if not entertainment, value, and may well be loved by people different from me
Magnificent Muddled Meanderings: Essays (Vol. III), by Michel de Montaigne
In my opinion, 'tis the happy living, and not (as Antisthenes' said) the happy dying, in which human felicity consists. I have not made it my business to make a monstrous addition of a philosopher's tail to the head and body of a libertine; nor would I have this wretched remainder give the lie to the pleasant, sound, and long part of my life: I would present myself uniformly throughout. Were I to live my life over again, I should live it just as I have lived it; I neither complain of the past, nor do I fear the future; and if I am not much deceived, I am the same within that I am without. 'Tis one main obligation I have to my fortune, that the succession of my bodily estate has been carried on according to the natural seasons; I have seen the grass, the blossom, and the fruit, and now see the withering; happily, however, because naturally. I bear the infirmities I have the better, because they came not till I had reason to expect them, and because also they make me with greater pleasure remember that long felicity of my past life. My wisdom may have been just the same in both ages, but it was more active, and of better grace whilst young and sprightly, than now it is when broken, peevish, and uneasy. I repudiate, then, these casual and painful reformations. God must touch our hearts; our consciences must amend of themselves, by the aid of our reason, and not by the decay of our appetites; pleasure is, in itself, neither pale nor discoloured, to be discerned by dim and decayed eyes.
The third and last volume of the great collection that invented "Essay" as a new literary form. See my Bookposts from April and August of this year for the first two.
There's not much to add to the first two reviews. Volume three has fewer and longer essays, and is dominated by three in particular, the way Volume two is dominated by the Apology for Raymond Sebonde: "On some Verses of Virgil" (about love and sex); "Of Vanity" and "Of Experience". Toward the end, Montaigne didn't bother even pretending to have a single topic for each essay; he went stream-of-consciousness in several places, and his penchant for proving himself right by quoting Plutarch or Cicero or some other ancient authority who had said the same thing (he does so in the original Latin or Greek, such that you have to look up a footnote to understand any given reference) disrupts the train of thought frequently.
Nevertheless, you know you're reading real wisdom, and Montaigne, if he was as good a conversationalist as he was a writer, would have made an excellent dinner companion. His works together are high on my list, not just of good books, but of books, learned and otherwise, that rocked my world.
Nationalist Propaganda: Jerusalem Delivered, by Torquato Tasso
Besides, the tow'r upon that quarter found
Unsure, uneasy and uneven the way
Nor art could help, but that the rougher ground
The rolling mass did often stop and stay:
But now of victory the joyful sound
The King and Raimond heard amid their fray,
And by the shout they and their soldiers know
The town was entered on the plain below.
Which heard, Raimondo thus bespake his crew:
"The town is won, my friends, and doth it yet
Resist? Are we kept out still by these few?
Shall we no share in this high conquest get?"
But from that part the King at last withdrew.
He strove in vain their entrance there to let
And to a stronger place his folk he brought
Where to sustain th' assault awhile he thought.
The conquerors at once now entered, all
The walls were won, the gates were opened wide
Now bruised, broken down, destroyed fall
The ports and towers that battery durst abide.
Rageth the sword, death murd'reth great and small
And proud 'twixt wo and horror sad doth ride;
Here runs the blood, in ponds there stands the gore
And drowns the knights in whom it lived before.
Tasso was a notorious madman, and the prospect of a Homeric epic poem celebrating the First Crusade and the slaughter of "evil Infidels" (called "Pagans" here) who deserve to die painfully because they worship a different God, did not exactly thrill me. I was imagining a fanatical Reformation-era Bubba the Teahadist writing about King George W Bush in his flight suit, kicking the asses of ThoseDamnMuslims as a bunch of good-hearted, misty-eyed country boys marched into Baghdad and gave Saddam's terrorists what for.
It wasn't quite that bad. The Homeric parallels are interesting, with a similar region under siege and revised opportunities for 'divine intervention' from a different set of Gods that the ones the Greeks were accustomed to. Tasso makes Gabriel and other angels into characters in order to solve the problem of making heaven polytheistic. The Arabs ("pagans"), of course,are served by Pluto, which is another name for Satan, with an assortment of demons, enchantresses, forest monsters, etc., some of whom can shapeshift and fool the Christians, or ensorcel them into fishes, or carry so-and-so off the battlefield, just like the Greek divines used to back in the days of the Trojans. Some few of the enemy are credited as great and honorable warriors, with Argantes in the doomed Hector role and Clorinda as a magnificent Pagan Amazon who slays great numbers of Christians.
(Note: The female warrior is much more of a stock character in old literature than many people realize. The Aeneid, Orlando Furioso, Niebelungenlied, Faerie Queene and Jerusalem Delivered all prominently feature super-strong armored women who put armies to shame. unfortunately, they mostly are required to remain chaste or lose their superpowers, and end up either killed or "tamed" by the hero, but at least they're there.)
The poem is at its best when it zooms in on individual characters, like Tancred the pure, who is closer to a real hero than any of the Greeks in the Iliad, or Rinaldo the Italian, who has the Odysseus role and is fated to do the important army-rescuing work after enduring tribulations. Jingoism creeps in to spoil many effects, as when the Christian army is exuberantly depicted slaying all, or when the few honorable "Pagans" manage to request and receive baptism from the enemies who give them mortal wounds, but it's definitely worth reading once.
Black Sea Biography: An Imaginary Life, by David Malouf
We give the gods a name and they quicken in us, they rise in their glory and power and majesty out of minds, they move forth to act in the world beyond, changing us and it. So it is that the beings we are in process of becoming will be drawn out of us. We have only to find the name and let its illumination fill us. Beginning, as always, with what is simple.
It is about to begin. All my life till now has been wasted. I had to enter the silence to find a password that would release me from my own life. And yet the words were already written. I wrote them years ago, and only now discover what they meant, what message they had for me: "You will be separated from yourself and yet be alive."
Now I too must be transformed.
Brief and interesting, this is a poetic novel of character and atmosphere, in which the Roman poet Ovid (See Bookposts September 2010 and July 2012 for Metamorphoses and Ars Amatoria, respectively), exiled by the Emperor Augustus to the fringes of the Roman Empire, gradually loses touch with "civilized thought" and comes to terms with something more primal that has always been within him, and arguably, within us.
He lives in a primitive, superstitious Barbarian village. Beyond it are lands even more remote and wild, and from those comes a feral child raised by animals and thought to be possessed by demons. Ovid protects the child from being ritually sacrificed, attempts to teach it language, and instead learns deeper language from the child. A fascinating read, and highly recommended.
Stirring up the Dung Heap: The Reformation, by Will Durant
It is part of Rabelais' boundless and uncontrollable humor, an overflow beside which even the humor of Aristophanes or Moliere is a modest trickle. His coarseness is another phase of this unmanageable flux. Perhaps some of it was a reaction against monastic asceticism, some of it the anatomical indifference of a physician, some of it a bold defiance of pedantic precision; much of it was in the manner of the age. Undoubtedly Rabelais carries it to excess; after a dozen pages of urogenital, excretory and gaseous details we weary and turn away. Another generation of classic influence would be needed to tame such volcanic exuberance into disciplined form.
We forgive these faults because Rabelais' style runs away with us, as with him. It is an unpretentious, unliterary style, natural, easy, flowing, just the medium for telling a long story. The secret of his verve is imagination plus energy plus clarity; he sees a thousand things unobserved by most of us, notes innumerable quirks of dress and conduct and speech. unites them fantastically. and sets the mixtures chasing one another over the sportive page.
The Reformation is the sixth in the Durants' long Story of Civilization series, and the last one attributed to Will alone. As is typical, it attempts to give a broad, not deep, picture of European civilization as a whole during a given period, this time going from 1300 until the beginning of Queen Elizabeth I, but without the Italian Renaissance, which is covered in the previous volume (see Bookpost, June 2014).
It's dull. Outside Italy, culture is fairly barren and limited to theology. The book pivots around Luther and Calvin, with other emphasis on emperor charles, King Francis and Henry VIII, none of whom appear in a good light and all of whom were ruthless in stamping out ideas they objected to. revolving around the religious and political life-wreckers is one section, mostly chronology, of the two centuries before Luther; a section about "outsiders" (the birth of Russia; Turkish and North African Islam; and the Jewish enclaves); a separate section with one meager chapter each on literature, art and science; and a closing section on Loyola and the Counter Reformation.
Overall, it's like having to slog through the long dull passages in a Hugo novel before getting to the payoff. The 17th Century will have an outstanding blossoming of science, philosophy, literature, art, music and political and economic innovations, but, in my reading project, those are yet to come.
Find all of my previous Bookposts here: http://admnaismith.livejournal.com/...