Many more books than usual this month, to reflect the short attention span I’ve had lately. Every book mentioned here is less than 300 pages long, some are under 100 pages, and each book was read in under three days, some in an evening.
I’m bemused at the number of books that turn out to be exactly 215 or 243 pages long. Either an improbable coincidence or the Heart of Gold sailed nearby this month.
The Cthullu Feel-Good Book of the Year: Practical Demonkeeping, by Christopher Moore :
Around midnight on the night that The Breeze disappeared, every dog in Pine Cove began barking. During the following fifteen minutes, shoes were thrown, threats were made, and the sheriff was called, and called again. Wives were beaten, pistols were loaded, pillows were ponded, and Mrs. Feldstien’s thirty two cats simultaneously coughed up hairballs on her porch. Blood pressure went up, aspirin was opened, and Milo Tobin, the town’s evil developer, looked out the window to see his young neighbor, Rosa Cruz, in the nude, chasing her twin Pomeranians around her front yard. The strain was too much for his chain-smoker’s heart, and he flopped on the floor like a fish and died.
On another hill, Van Williams, the tree surgeon, had reached the limit of his patience with his neighbors, a family of born-again dog-breeders whose six Labrador retrievers barked all night long with or without supernatural provocation. With his professional model chain saw he dropped a hundred foot Monterey pine tree on their new Dodge Evangeline van.
A few minutes later, a family of raccoons who normally roamed the streets of Pine Cove breaking into garbage cans, were taken, temporarily, with a strange sapience and ignored their normal activities to steal the stereo out of the ruined van and install it in their den that lay in the trunk of a hollow tree.
An hour after the cacophany began, it stopped. The dogs had delivered their message, and as it goes in cases where dogs warn of coming earthquakes, tornadoes, or volcanic eruptions, the message was completely misconstrued. What was left the next morning was a very sleepy, grumpy village brimming with lawsuits and insurance claims, but without a single clue that something was coming.
Tim Cahill, on the back cover, puts it best: Stephen King, Douglas Adams, and HP Lovecraft go to a Frank Capra movie (It’s a Wonderful Life). Thus inspired, they write a book entitled Practical Demonkeeping. That’s my theory. I don’t normally quote back-cover blurbs, but that one captures the essence of Christopher Moore’s delightful romp so completely that I just can’t improve on it.
There’s the Big Sur tourist town inhabited by a cast of (mostly) lovable eccentrics and weirdos, whose assorted soap opera lives are put on hold and ultimately straightened out when an Elder God who feeds on the living comes to town, bearing in tow his appalled "master" who desperately hopes that the means to finally, finally sent the fiend back through the portal may be found in Pine Cove. The demon can only be seen by most people when it is feeding, and those who see it naturally think they’re hallucinating (in part because they earlier imagined they heard Wayne Newton singing to them from inside a tree...)
Many, many delightful characters, plot turns and laugh out loud lines, the kind Christopher Moore fans have come to expect. Very highest recommendations.
Nighthawks at the Diner: The Postman Always Brings Mice, by James M. Cain :
We made it $1 a game, and I let him take four or five, maybe more. I shot like I was pretty nervous, and in between shots I would wipe off the palm of my hand with a handkerchief, like I must be sweating.
"Well, it looks like I'm not doing so good. How about making it $5, so I can get my money back, and then we'll go have a drink.?"
"Oh well. It's just a friendly game, and I don't want your money. Sure, we'll make it $5, then we'll quit."
I let him take four or five more, and from the way I was acting, you would have thought I had heart failure and a couple more things besides. I was plenty blue around the gills.
"Look, I got sense enough to know when I'm out of my class all right, but let's make it $25, so I can break even, and then we'll go have that drink."
"That's pretty high for me."
"What the hell? You're playing on my money, aren't you?"
"Oh well. All right. Make it $25."
That was when I really started to shoot. I made shots that Hoppe couldn't make. I banked them in from three cushions. I made billiard shots. I had my English working so the ball just floated around the table. I even called a jump shot and made it. He never made a shot that Blind Tom the Sightless Piano Player couldn't have made. He miscued, he got himself all tangled up on position, he scratched, he put the one ball in the wrong pocket, he never even called a bank shot. And when I walked out of there, he had my $250 and a $3 watch that I had bought to keep track of when Cora might be driving in to the market. Oh, I was good all right. The only trouble was I wasn't quite good enough.
As with last month’s Mildred Pierce, it wasn’t what I expected. No postmen and no doorbells, for one thing. Just a diner (like Mildred’s pie restaurant; there’s at least some continuity) operated by the usual Greek guy, his wife (who, like Mildred, is "no raving beauty, exactly", yet everyman turns his head when she goes by, and some are driven to thoughts of crime by the need to be near her), and the narrator, who gets a job working for them both. The usual menage a trois complications ensue.
Unlike Mildred Pierce, this one at least has a very prominent crime early on. But it’s hard to care, as the main characters are blandly drawn and run the gamut from love to hatred and back again so quickly that they are cliches rather than real characters. It’s too long for a story, and too short for a novel, and a few chapters, involving wisecracking lawyers, blackmailers out of the blue, and short-term alternative love interests who raise big cats just because the plot says so...seem to have been thrown in as afterthoughts and filler, so the thing could be sold between two covers. I kept waiting for the female to inevitably prove to be deadlier than the male, but I guess the femme fatale cliche was evitable after all. So was the deadly male cliche, too, even though the parties do manage at least one killing between them. In fact, maybe the central theme of this one is the narrator being not as smart as he thinks he is, as the pool hustling scene quoted above foreshadows. Some of the diversionary parts do add to the plot.
The Big One that Didn't Get Away: The Old Man and the Sea, by Ernest Hemingway :
He always thought of the sea as "la mar" which is what people call her in Spanish when they love her. Sometimes those who love her say bad things of her, but they are always said as though she were a woman. Some of the younger fishermen, those who used buoys as floats for their lines and had motorboats, bought when the shark livers had brought much money, spoke of her as "el mar" which is masculine. They spoke of her as a contestant or a place or even an enemy. But the old man always thought of her as feminine and as something that gave or withheld great favors, and if she did wild or wicked things it was because she could not help them. The moon affects her as it does a woman, he thought.
I read two other Hemingways earlier in the year: The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms, and the first of those had nothing happen at all, very slowly, and the other had some things happen at such a distance that it was hard to care, because the characters were all surface. In The Old Man and the Sea, which is under a hundred pages, I finally found the Hemingway mythos I had been looking for--the sweat, the machismo, the pride, the lust for life and the enormous energy bubbling under the surface. The worn-out husk of a narrator, who has hardly any possessions and no family, was once the alpha male, so tenacious that he once spent over 24 hours at a single deadlocked arm-wrestling match; during most of the story, he is alone on a skiff with his memories and the blue ocean all around and an enormous marlin on the end of his line, the kind of fish that will be his last and greatest triumph if he can catch it, pulling him ever farther out to sea. There have been many similar tales about big game hunting, the man with the gun against the large wild thing that might turn from prey to predator in an instant; but other than Moby Dick, I'm unaware of similar stories about a fish. Gripping and satisfying. I read it in under an hour, and wanted a thick swordfish steak immediately afterwards.
There Ain'na Butter in Hell!: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, by James Joyce:
The horror of this strait and dark prison is increased by its awful stench. All the filth of the world, all the offal and scum of the world, we are told, shall run there as to a vast and reeking sewer when the terrible conflagration of the last day has purged the world. The brimstone, too, which burns there in such prodigious quantity fills all Hell with its intolerable stench; and the bodies of the damned themselves exhale such a pestilential odor that, as Saint Bonaventure says, one of them alone would suffice to infect the whole world. The very air of this world, that pure element, becomes foul and unbreathable when it has been long enclosed. Consider then what must be the foulness of the air of Hell! Imagine some foul and putrid corpse that has lain rotting and decomposing in the grave, a jellylike mass of liquid corruption. Imagine such a corpse a prey to flames, devoured by the fire of burning brimstone and giving off dense choking fumes of nauseous loathsome decomposition. And then imagine this sickening stench, multiplied a millionfold and a millionfold again from the millions upon millions of fetid carcasses massed together in the reeking darkness, a huge and rotting human fungus. Imagine all this and you will have some idea of the horror of the stench of Hell.
Reminds me of the dorm room of a guy named Phil I once knew, and the camp bunk of another kid who was so pungent that his very name was "Grody". Not to mention my impressions of a certain movie that starred Adam Sandler...but I digress.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is supposed to be the quintessential Kunstlerroman (a Bildungsroman specifically about the coming of age of a young Art Fart), in which the protagonist, Stephen Daedalus, is supposed to be a stand-in for Joyce himself. Too bad I opened up Joyce right on the heels of Romain Rolland's Jean-Christophe (see last month's bookpost), a heavy-duty test of anaerobic capacity that takes the Kunstlerroman all the way to the point where the artist dies of old age, and threatens to take the reader along with him.
And yes, there are mentions of the birth of a passion for writing in there. There are scenes in the beginning among Daedalus's family, where between bouts of drunken fighting over whether Charles Parnell was a superpatriot or a shameless philanderer, they sing of drinking and rebellion. There's Daedelus in school, respected as the top of the class and taunted as a nerd, on the same day, by the same people. By the end, we're treated to excerpts from his journal.
All of that fades in comparison to the central part of the book, which consists of the single most sadistic Catholic sermon I've ever failed to avoid. It dominates Portrait of the Artist the way John Galt's 100-page Jeremiad dominates Atlas Shrugged. It triggered flashbacks to child abuses I didn't even suffer. All about Hell, and about every possible physical and spiritual torment one could ever suffer there, and about how just and fair and right it is that the embodiment of all goodness should cast YOU, boy, to endure such torments forever and ever and ever (complete with further disquisition on the vastly, hugely long duration of infinite time) for such things as a lustful thought not confessed to the priest. Followed by the torments and nightmares and fantasies that plague poor Stephen (and, presumably, every other kid in the school) after the sermon. I wanted to reach into the book and grab him out of there and hold him and tell him he was safe, now. In fact, everything after that is just sort of a blur of relief, as he turns down the offer to join the priesthood (go figure), takes up weird stream of consciousness writing, and eventually flees Ireland entirely. Go Stephen. Nothing I hadn't learned already from the histories of the Magdalene Laundries and the Papal shielding of child-molestor priests, but deeply disturbing nonetheless.
One of my LiveJournal friends has a big hate-on for Joyce and mocks people who mention him in literary criticism. Now I have an idea why. Actually, I have found Ulysses to be one of my favorites, that I come back to to graze from time to time. To the extent that there's a redeeming quality to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, it's that I recognized and appreciated some cameos by characters, besides the Daedalus family, who go on to appear in Ulysses.
His So-Called Life: Words, by Jean-Paul Sartre :
My first stories were merely a repetition of The Blue Bird, of Puss in Boots, of the tales of Maurice Bouchor. They talked to themselves behind my forehead, between my eyebrows. Later, I dared touch them up, I gave myself a role in them. They changed nature. I didn't like fairies; there were too many of them around me. The magical element was replaced by feats of valor. I became a hero. I cast off my charms. It was no longer a matter of pleasing, but of impressing. I abandoned my family. Karlemami and AnneMarie were excluded from my fantasies. Sated with gestures and attitudes, I performed real acts in my reveries. I invented a difficult and mortal universe, that of Cri-Cri, of The Stunner, of Paul d'Ivoi. Instead of work and need, about which I knew nothing, I introduced danger. Never was I further from challenging the established order. Assured of living in the best of worlds, I made it my business to purge it of its monsters. As cop and lyncher, I sacrificed a gang of bandits every evening. I never engaged in a preventative war or carried out punitive measures. I killed without pleasure or anger, in order to save young ladies from death. Those frail creatures were indispensible to me; they called out for me. Obviously they could not have counted on my help since they didn't know me. But I thrust them into such great perils that nobody could have rescued them unless he were I. When the janissaries brandished their curved scimitars, a moan went through the desert and the rocks said to the sand, "Someone's missing here. It's Sartre." At that very moment I pushed aside the screen. I struck out with my sabre and sent heads flying. I was being born in a river of blood. Oh, blessed steel! I was where I belonged.
I was relieved, both at the brevity of Sartre’s autobiography and the amount of sense it made. After the aptly named Nausea earlier this year, I half feared the title, Words, connoted randomness, Sartre saying that his life’s story didn’t really mean much; it’s just a bunch of words, nothing more. Thankfully, the title is really a glorification, celebrating the writer’s discovery of words as toys, weapons, things of beauty, the way Eric Clapton might have written an autobiography called Chords or Notes.
Most of the events described take place before Sartre is ten years old, and so he is able to recount his experiments with written language with a child’s sense of discovery as he first reads children’s stories to pulpy detective novels to great works. I always get a slight shiver when someone describes the effect certain books that I, too, have read, had on them. I wonder if Sartre was made as frightened and lonesome and alienated by Sans Famile as I was, and whether his impressions lasted much longer than mine, and whether the loneliness and alienation in his writing followed from it.
There’s a lot of nonsense here too, but at least it’s childlike nonsense, not the adult brain-farts that are forever urged on me with the assurance that they are "profound" and which never convince me. I’m glad to have read both Words and Simone de Bouvoir’s Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter. Both were crazy, but you can tell that those two were made for each other.
The Best Spenser Yet: Rough Weather, by Robert B. Parker:
"What make you think I’m packing?", Hawk said.
"Hawk, for chrissake, you haven’t gone anywhere without a gun since you were a pickaninny."
"Pickaninny?" Hawk said.
"I value tradition," I said.
Hawk grinned and opened his shoulder bag and took out a huge, silver .44 Mag with a bone handle.
"Case we get assaulted by a polar bear," he said.
"Good to be ready," I said.
"Understand the Gray Man after you again."
"He is," I said.
"Why don’t we just kill him," Hawk said.
"Can’t", I said.
Hawk shrugged.
"No harm to ask," Hawk said.
"No."
"Susan said it be about the business on Tashtego," Hawk said.
"It be," I said.
"Would you be, by any chance, mocking my authentic ghetto dialect?" Hawk said, in his Laurence Olivier voice.
"No," I said. "I be down with it."
"Love it when honkies be trying to talk black," Hawk said. "It’s like a guy in drag."
Robert B. Parker’s written about eleventy godzillion Spenser books, and I’ve read them all, and almost all of them are little more than nifty little book-snacks, good for an afternoon of chuckles and adventure, with about as much contemporary-issues relevance as the average Law and Order: CSI Edition episode. Rough Weather is a cut above that—it ditches the "contemporary issues" part and presents a good mystery with good characters, wisecracking cops, shadowy government contacts, jovial gangsters who would smile and joke while shooting you, and of course, Spenser, Hawk, Susan, and Pearl the Wonder Dog. The book also features the most sex-obsessed, neurotic rich bitch in any Spenser book (which is saying a lot), and the only villain (the recurring "Gray Man") to ever actually rise to the level of a worthy adversary to the impossibly unstoppable Spenser and Hawk.
The mystery is a real one, with the culprit identified right away but the motive and co-culprit a puzzle. For the record, I correctly figured out the zinger that explains what really happened, by the end of chapter 55.
Brain the size of a planet, and you want me to write book posts? (sigh) Oh, all right...The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams :
Vogon poetry is of course the third worst poetry in the Universe. The second worst is that of the Azgoths of Kria. During a recitation by their Poet Master Grunthos the Flatulent of his poem Ode to a Small Lump of Green Putty I Found in My Armpit One Midsummer Morning four of his audience died of internal hemorrhaging, and the President of the Mid-Galactic Arts Nobbling Council survived by gnawing one of his own legs off. Grunthos is reported to have been "disappointed" by the poem’s reception, and was about to embark on a reading of his twelve-book epic entitled My Favorite Bathtime Gurgles when his own major intestine, in a desperate attempt to save life and civilization, leaped straight up through his neck and throttled his brain.
The very worst poetry of all perished along with its creator, Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings of Greenbridge, Essex, England, in the destruction of the planet Earth.
While rereading Douglas Adams’s masterpiece (I needed at least one delightful romp between the muddled stream-of-consciousness writers above and the too-serious communists below), I realized that part of why I love-love-love Christopher Moore so much is because he is the first American I know of who can finally, finally, give the British humorists a run for their money. Really. From Swift and Fielding to Wilde and Shaw to Jerome K Jerome and PG Wodehouse to Monty Python to Pratchett and Adams, we North Americans don’t even come close. I don’t understand how a culture consistently stereotyped as wooden from their stiff upper lips to the barge poles up their asses, who go out of their way to remove the pleasure from even cuisine and lovemaking, has ended up ruling the comic muse more thoroughly than they ever ruled the seas. They’re just brilliant! Douglas Adams and his four-volume Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series is one of the crown jewels at the very top of British laugh-out-loud silliness. He added new words to the national vocabulary: Vogon to describe a bad performer; Golgafrinchan to describe that useless office drone, Pan Galactic Gargleblaster to describe the most perfect and dangerous of all high-octane booze, Forty Two as a laugh line. Adams’ early death induced mourning among millions of fans comparable to that felt at the deaths of John Lennon and Princess Diana.
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is a book to come back to again and again, something to share with your children. There’s always something new to be found in it, especially as technology and thought slowly catch up to Adams’ Universe. This time around, I was struck by the resemblance of the title character to a Kindle full of downloaded encyclopedias, and the horrifying speculation about the cosmos-threatening results if Eddie and GLaDOS were to somehow mate and have offspring.
If you’re reading my book post, the odds are you’ve already read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, probably more than once. If not, I am green with envy, because you are going to have such a ball.
Single Playa: Double Indemnity, by James M. Cain:
You think I'm nuts? All right, maybe I am. But you spend fifteen years in the business I'm in, maybe you'll go nuts yourself. You think it's a business, don't you, just like your business, and maybe a little better than that, because it's the friend of the widow, the orphan, and the needy in time of trouble? It's not. It's the biggest gambling wheel in the world. It don't look like it, but it is, from the way they figure the percentage on the OO to the look on their face when they cash in their chips. You bet that your house will burn down, they bet it won't, that's all. What fools you is that you didn't WANT your house to burn down when you made the bet, and so you forget it's a bet. That doesn't fool them. To them, a bet is a bet, and a hedge bet don't look any different than any other bet. But there comes a time, maybe, when you DO want your house to burn down, when the money is worth more than the house. And right there is where the trouble starts. They know there's just so many people out there that are out to crook that wheel, and that's when they get tough. They've got spotters out there, they know every crooked trick there is, and if you want to beat them you had better be good. So long as you're honest, they'll pay you with a smile, and you may even go home thinking it was all in a spirit of good, clean fun. But you start something, and then you'll find out.
So the insurance industry has been bad guys since way before I was born; tell me something I don't know.
This one is Cain's most famous book, and the movie Body Heat is based on it. I didn't know how loosely until I read the book and was underwhelmed. I was expecting the story of a deadly seductress who ensnares the insurance agent protagonist with her feminine wiles, to do her dirty work and leave him holding the bag. In fact, that's what the story says it is about. In fact, the vixen does no more than wink at the guy and ask if he does accidental death policies, and he leaps to the conclusion that she wants to murder her husband, and he starts kissing her and telling her how to do it. The male mantis sprinkles himself with mantis tenderizer and goes to the mantis club wearing a "BITE ME" T-Shirt.
The rest is predictable. The "surprise twist" is not the same twist used in Body Heat, but you know from the start it's not going to turn out well for the sap.
This was the last and best in the three-little-novels-in-one-cover Cain set I read, and it still left me feeling flat. Seems to me Cain might have been cutting edge once upon a time, but that time has passed. The plots are hackneyed and cliched, and he doesn't have the immortal language skills of, say, Hammet or Chandler.
Workers of the World Unite, and all that: The Commonist Manifesto, by Marx and Engels:
The Bourgeoise, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder motley feudal ties that bound men to his "natural superiors" and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous "cash payment". It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom--free trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.
The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers.
The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.
This little tract is perhaps history's most famous challenge to capitalism, and an interesting read for a guy who grew up in a third generation union household and now wakes up regularly marvelling at his "landed gentry" status. Marx has a name for those liberal bourgeoise who want to redress the wrongs of society without overthrowing it, and he had better smile when he uses it. As with most political tracts, more of it is spent demonstrating what's wrong with the opponents than explaining exactly what the writers intend to do better.
The telling moment for me is the part where Marx shrugs off what the capitalists are saying. Sure, we want to abolish private property, he says, but so what? You capitalists have already abolished it for 90% of us. By property, you mean bourgeoise property, and yes, we want to get rid of that.
It struck me that the Palin-American right has more claim to being the heirs of Marxism than the American left, which as far as I can tell, has never tried to abolish private property. The Palinists, of course, believe that any taxation is no different from the complete abolishment of private property, but when it comes to all of the other, less tangible values of civilization, their view can be summed up as: Look, a thing of beauty! Let us destroy it forever! By learning, they say, you mean Godless science, snooty elitist education, bourgeioise California/East Coast culture, evil liberal ACLU Civil Rights, and sissy UN diplomacy and international law for people too cowardly to just kick ass....and yes, we want to get rid of those things.
It further struck me that, going back to the economics of communism, why Marx thought it was inevitable, why it seems to fail when put into practice, and why the workers are not in fact taking up arms against the propertied class like Morlocks eating the Eloi, it all comes down to an observation made by the Durants in their wonderful book The Lessons of History: That, left under laissez-faire, wealth tends to end up concentrated in fewer and fewer hands (maybe they steal it, maybe they earn it; the result is the same and to the Durants, that's all that matters), and that when that happens, in all of recorded history, there have been only two possible outcomes. Either the government steps in and does some redistribution, or there is violent upheval and the local carrion-eating birds enjoy frequent and delicious feasts for a long time. This is not right or wrong; it is merely historical fact. It seems to me, the western world has been spared from Marxism only by such poverty-relieving measures as the New Deal and the Great Society. Consider that the next time some Libertarian wants to rail against any form of redistribution. In fact, consider it if you yourself have concerns about redistribution. To the extent that it is a wrong, it seems to me it is the lesser of two evils.
And beyond that...I've said enough for one book post, but The Communist Manifesto is one of those timeless books, like Locke, or Rousseau, or The Federalist, that has more wisdom than its length implies, and that offers more food for thought each and every time you come back to it.
Intersections in Real Time: Darkness at Noon, by Arthur Koestler :
"That is just talk," said Gletkin. "Human beings able to resist any amount of physical pressure do not exist. I have never seen one. Experience shows me that the resistance of the human nerve system is limited by Nature."
"I wouldn't like to fall into your hands," said Ivanov smilingly, but with a trace of uneasiness. "Anyhow, you are a living refutation of your own theory."
His smiling glance rested for a second on the scar on Gletkin's skull. The story of that scar was well known. When, during the Civil War, Gletkin had fallen into enemy hands, they had tied a lighted candle wick onto his shaven skull, to extract from him certain information. A few hours later his own people recaptured the position and found him unconscious. The wick had burnt right to the end. Gletkin had kept silence.
He looked at Ivanov with his expressionless eyes. "That's only talk, too," he said. "I did not give in because I fainted. If I had stayed conscious another minute, I should have spoken. It is a question of constitution.
This is for people who still need to be told that life in Communist Russia wasn't much fun, that people got arrested for "treason against the state" as regularly as we in America get Radio Shack mailings, and that there were show trials in which loyal communists confessed to improbable subversive activities, and were shot.
More than anything, the book explains why those accused people in the show trials actually confessed to things they probably hadn't done. When I was a kid, I frequently wondered about that. Now that I've seen the American Child Welfare system in action, I don't wonder so much. But anyway. Here are the last few months in the life of a man who has dedicated his life to the Communist Party, and who is invited to "serve the party" one last time by obligingly confessing for his show trial. They actually appeal to the greater good, and the protagonist responds because he's that kind of saint...except that, having been a loyal communist, he hasn't behaved all that saintly, as his memories of the probably innocent people he himself had sacrificed to the greater good attest.
The arguments in The Communist Manifesto might have gotten me carried away just for a moment with the wonderful vision of the workers' paradise within. If so, Darkness at Noon, showing the theory put into ugly practice, was the antidote.
Crypt Keeper’s Cruise: The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, by Edgar Allan Poe :
The brig was within fifty feet of us, and it seemed to be her intention to run under our counter, that we might board her without putting out a boat. We rushed aft, when suddenly, a wide yaw threw her off full five or six points from the course she had been running, and as she passed under our stern at the distance of about twenty feet, we had a full view of her decks. Shall I ever forget the horror of that spectacle? Twenty-five or thirty human bodies, among whom were several females, lay scattered about between the counter and the galley in the last and most loathesome state of putrefaction. We plainly saw that not a soul lived in that fated vessel! Yet we could not help shouting to the dead for help! Yes, long and loudly did we beg, in the agony of the moment, that those silent and disgusting images would stay for us, would not abandon us to become like them, would receive us among their goodly company! We were raving with horror and despair--thoroughly mad through the anguish of our grievous disappointment.
If this one had a drinking game, you could get intoxicated just from having a sip for every variation on But for the merest chance, I must surely have perished right then. Poor Pym takes it into his head to go to sea, and has things happen to him that would make Robinson Crusoe and Ishmael bless their own comparative good fortune. Pym survives endless rounds of confinement, starvation, suffocation, mutiny, storms and shipwreck, cannibalism, sharks, island savages, civilized European savages, and supernatural horrors, until at last the book breaks off abruptly at the most odd cliffhanger of all...although we know Pym finally made it home because of the prologue and epilogue.
It's Poe, and so you know there will be over-the-top emotional drama, and the psychological horrors of the several impending dooms will be explored in poking, prodding detail. It's also Poe's longest story, described as his "only novel", although it's only about 150 pages, and really consists of several vignettes, one nasty sea adventure after another. You have a heart of stone if you can read about all the Unspeakable Horror endured by poor Pym without laughing out loud.
Very Special Episodes: The Human Comedy, by William Saroyan :
"I'm glad I've spoken to you," she said, "rather than to anyone else I know. When you leave this school--long after you have forgotten me--I shall be watching for you in the world, and I shall never be startled by the good things I know you shall do." The ancient history teacher blew her nose again and touched her handkerchief to her eyes. "Run along to the athletic field", she said. "Race against Hubert Ackley in the two-twenty low hurdles. If there isn't time to change into your track clothes, run as you are, even if everybody laughs at you. Before you go very far along in the world, you will hear laughter many times, and not the laughter of men alone, but the mocking laughter of things themselves seeking to embarrass and hold you back...but I know you will pay no attention to that laughter." The teacher sighed and said wearily, "Run along to the field, Homer Macauley. I shall be watching." The second son of the Macauley family of Santa Clara Avenue in Ithica, California, turned and walked out of the room.
It says a lot when a book begins by setting off my glurge reflex and then manages to make me cry because it really is so moving on a simple, folksy level.
The Human Comedy is a series of vignettes in the life of a small, mid 20th Century Norman Rockwellish town that somehow manages NOT to be located in the midwest. To emphasize that it a tale of an epic coming-of-age odyssey in the lives of some children, the main characters are named Homer and Ulysses. Really.
Homer, the teenager, is employed as a delivery boy by the local telegraph office, where he is required to deliver to wholesome families the news that their sons have been killed in the war. Ulysses, the small boy, likes to wander around town, saying nothing and observing with all his might as various everyday small town things happen that are only significant because you know that a small child is watching and learning the nature of the world from the everyday actions of ordinary people. Often, the point of view shifts between characters, as in the boys whose hearts pound with guilty excitement on their quest to steal unripe apricots from the grumpy old man's tree, while the old man, unseen, smiles indulgently as he watches them sneak, before he dutifully steps out onto the porch to make them squeal and run. The central theme is, that the biggest measure of strength is not conquest, but how high one can lift others.
And yes, I blubbed at the ending. Highly recommended.
Poetic Justice: A Rich, Full Death, by Michael Dibdin :
I did not know what to say, for my only thought was of the irony of the situation: My most earnest wish had been granted: I had formed a relationship with a man I believed to be truly great—and we must apparently spend our whole energies discussing these gory and depressing crimes. It is SO maddening! Imagine being magically transported back to Shakespeare’s times, only to discover that you are his lawyer, and he will talk to you of nothing but land values. What of Art? What of Spirit? What of the great ideals that can make human life seem worth the living? It is on them that I would fain dwell with a soul such as Browning’s...instead of which we seem condemned to spend our time contemplating the legs of garden tables, bits of mouldy rope, lamps and pen knives, and the precise design of dog collars!
And the worst of it is that Browning appears positively to revel in it! It seems that he is in some sense attracted by crime, by diseased and abnormal behaviour of every type, and in the greater detail, the better! Indeed, I am very much afraid that there is a danger of his undoubted poetic gifts suffering as a result. In the volume I purchased, for example, I have noticed—despite my enduring enthusiasm for the collection in its entirety—several pieces which display an unseemly fascination with the workings of evil and deranged minds. The one entitled My Last Duchess is a particularly repulsive example of the tendency to which I allude.
Michael Dibdin is one of the strangest and most innovative mystery writers I've come across in years, and A Rich, Full Death, set in 19th Century Florence with Robert Browning cast as the main detective and Dante hovering over the proceedings like an angry God, is an inspiring bit of literature as well as a thriller. The whodunnit aspect isn't particularly important (I guessed the murderer only a few chapters in, although subsequent events had me second-guessing my first conclusion more than once) compared to the chase and the methods used by the detective and killer.
Be warned: there are many murders, and some of them are written in fairly gruesome detail. Also, as in Dibdin's Dirty Tricks, Dibdin tries to add one surprising twist too many, right at the end, and winds up giving an otherwise great feast a bitter aftertaste. Like the magician explaining a trick at the end, or maybe rubbing it in that it’s all a game.
Snow White and the Seven Lost Lords: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, by CS Lewis:
"What was it you uglified them for", asked Lucy. "I mean, what they call uglified?"
"Well, they wouldn't do what they were told. Their work is to mind the garden and raise food--not for me, as they imagine, but for themselves. They wouldn't do it at all if I didn't make them. And of course for a garden you want water. There is a beautiful spring about half a mile away up the hill. And from that spring there flows a stream which comes right past the garden. All I asked them to do was to take their water from the stream instead of trudging up to the spring with their buckets two or three times a day and tiring themselves out besides spilling half of it on the way back. But they wouldn't see it. In the end they refused point blank."
"Are they as stupid as all that?" asked Lucy.
The magician sighed. "You wouldn't believe the troubles I've had with them. A few months ago they were all for washing up the plates and knives before dinner; they said it saved time afterward. I've caught them planting boiled potatoes to save cooking them when they were dug up. One day the cat got into the dairy and twenty of them were at work moving all the milk out; no one thought of moving the cat."
The third Narnia book, reread because the movie's coming out soon, and while working on a song from the point of view of Eustace. As a former Bad Boy, his part of the tale speaks volumes to me, especially considering that he's treated as though he's wrong about everything, even when he's right.
The book pretty much has four sections: The Lone Islands adventure; Eustace's adventure; the magician's house, and the edge of the world adventure, with a couple of smaller episodes in between. Only in the final few chapters does Lewis's In-Yo-Face Christianity come into play; the rest of it is simply a good set of fantasy adventures, with pirates and magic and talking animals. And Lucy is still the kind of person I wish I'd had for a friend when I was much smaller. Highly recommended, as is the whole Narnia series.
In the serendipity department, having read the ending of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, I understand the surprisingly similar ending of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. Think about it...
Doctor Deadlydull's Hours of Boredom: Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf :
And Elizabeth waited in Victoria Street for an omnibus. It was so nice to be out of doors. She thought perhaps she need not go home just yet. It was so nice to be out in the air. So she would get on to an omnibus. And already, even as she stood there, in her very well cut clothes, it was beginning...People were beginning to compare her to poplar trees, early dawn, hyacinths, fawns, running water, and garden lillies; and it made her life a burden to her, for she so much preferred being left alone to do what she liked in the country, but they would compare her to lillies, and she had to go to parties, and London was so dreary compared with being alone in the country with her father and dogs.
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.
I was inspired to read it because of the movie The Hours, about Woolf herself, and how her book impacted the lives of others (neurotic women, in particular) who came after her. 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.
Black Belt Astrophysics: Warp Speed, by Travis S. Taylor :
When Fines finally woke me up, we were at stable LEO and were given the okay to get out of our flight gear. We helped each other with our suits as we played with the microgravity effects on things. Like my stomach, for instance. I lost my steak and eggs almost immediately. Fines wasn't amused. So, I threw up on him again.
This time he was amused to the point where he lost his breakfast. We had a lot of fun repeating this procedure for the next hour or two. Finally, the nausea subsided to drunken spins. I wished that I had some of my grandmother's "dizzy pills". I hadn't spun like that since playing quarters with tequila that night in undergraduate school after we won the Iron Bowl.
After several hours of the spins followed by nausea followed by a severe pain in my ego, all of the symptoms disappeared and I felt wonderful. I even offered to help clean up but the flight surgeon had ordered both Fines and myself to take a shot of motion sickness medication and try to take a nap. I slept like a baby. In other words, I pissed and moaned the whole time.
Travis S. Taylor is yet another author who friended me out of the blue on FaceBook (My guess is he's a Bujold fan), and so I figured I ought to at least read his book. I'm glad I did.
Anson Clemons, the hero of Warp Speed, is one of the more wonderful sci fi protagonists I've found in recent years. Josh Holloway would probably have a ball playing him in the big budget movie, an aw-shucks country boy who is either hypercompetent at everything he touches, or only touches those things he can show off at. He discovers the secret of the warp drive while unconscious after being knocked out while winning the International Sport Karate Association championship, and celebrates by getting drunk in the arms of a female astronaut who is brilliant, beautiful and athletic. In other words, he's my kind of guy. When he went into space for the first time, I expected him to let out a rebel yell; instead, he let out his breakfast.
And, of course, as the inventor of the warp drive, he finally has it all....until THEY come to take it from him. Oh those crazy, stupid "them", "they" never ever learn to pick on the right guy, do they? Clemons not only goes on to win World War III but explains hard physics, designs his dream space colony and tours the known galaxy and beyond. Very high recommendations.