On The Road

I forgot how much I loved Jack Kerouac! What a great  book On the Road is. Such sweet poetry in his descriptions of people and places. The trip into Mexico (in the last part of the book) sings.

It's funny, I read this book years ago and did not care for it - even as I was reading and loving his other works. I had get past Dean Moriarity and his many, many sins. What a guy he was. Turns out he (in real life, Neal Cassady) was muse for two authors of two other Time 100 books, as well: Robert Stone modeled Hicks (the psychopath) after Cassady in Dog soldiers and Ken Kesey based the character, Randall Patrick McMurphy on him.
And I probably needed to forgive Kerouac his sins too. It's hard to watch him (as the narrator in On the Road) drinking so hard, knowing that that habit will be the cause of his death. I gravitated instead to other his other more sober books -- like Big Sur, but On the Road has all of the same great writing as those other books, and the same positive (and positively) manic energy that is hard to beat. Five stars in my book!

1984

I found 1984 almost as frightening as my initial reading of it at age 17. It certainly came more alive for me this time around as I was reminded of Iran and in particular of Marina Nemat's description of life there in Prisoner of Tehran.  Her experience of being watched, trying to have a lover and most of all her time in prison was similar in many ways to Winston's. That said, nothing comes close to the sheer horror of living with Big Brother watching. Oh my.

I'm glad I dusted this one off and had another "go" at it as part of reading through the Time 100 list.

Next books: I'll try to finish two books I put aside: Gone With the Wind (just 125 pages of Scarlett remaining, I will get through this book, yet) and Rabbit, Run - I just couldn't watch his foolishness and had to put it down. I may have to throw in some lighter reading to get through them.

The Possession

I finished Possession by A. S. Byatt while on a trip to Boston last week. It is a 530 page book with a great amount of detail, numerous Gothic and epic poems and 19th century letters ... it is no quick read. And as for reviewing it, it's the sort of book that dissertations are made of, so I'll keep this short and sweet.

Byatt used every part of her brain to create this one. It is dense, intricate, intellectual and deep. The prose is stunning.

Two modern-day literary researchers find clues about the possible relationship of two 19th century poets. What ensues is a chase through the English countryside as well as a poring over dusty archives to trace the poets' movements. As they do this, they are just steps ahead of their colleagues and adversaries -- who are also trying to claim the prize of discovery. The story of the two poets unfolds bit by bit, with a delicious Agatha Christie style wrap-up that neatly concludes the tale. Quite delightful.

I was not up for the slow-paced work of piecing together clues when I began reading this book and instead tried to blaze through it. That was a big mistake. The book deserves a careful reading, and eventually I was able to find the time to give it its due. That involved rereading the first 200 pages I had raced through. It was worth it. I rank this one highly -- not quite as high as Atwood's excellent The Blind Assassin, but The Possession is a very good book. (****)

LUCKY JIM

You would have thought I'd had enough of English Humor of the 30s after Powell's Dance and try something completely different next. But instead I picked up Lucky Jim by Powell's friend, Kingsley Amis.

No dry humor here, this is slapstick. The story is about an agreeable and easily victimized new PhD of history trying to make his start in a back-water college in England. He is mentored by an old professor who prefers putting on plays to teaching history classes and who invites him to preposterous parties where he drinks too much and gets into hilarious fixes. He is befriended by and nearly betrothed to a neurotic colleague who plays suicide games to get what she wants. He is nearly done in by an exercise to create and give an "important" lecture on the topic of Merrie England. However, there is hope in the form of a lovely lady, the fiance of his mentor's son, who conspires with him in various ways. This, of course, causes more problems, but by the end, he pops out of the tangled mess, lands on his feet and  thumbs his nose at the bunch of them. This is a very silly book. Not sure why it is on the Time 100 except to fill out the humor genre. Pleasant enough. **

A Dance to the Music of Time

I can't believe that I finished this series. 2500 pages! What started out as an immensely pleasurable experience got very, very old in the end when the prose - always at the edge of tediousness became awash with $10 words and 40-word sentences. But I must admit, I was addicted to this series, tedious passages and all and am glad to have read it.

The books cover 50-60 years in the life of narrator, Nicholas Jenkins, an upper middle class literary reviewer/writer with friends in the arts and family with titles. He knows everyone and so is invited to interesting soirees where he meets and becomes friends with a number of outrageous characters. The cast of hundreds has society mavens, alcoholics, hostesses, artists, musicians, millionaires, normal business people, a nymphomaniac, a necrophiliac, cult leaders, seers, and on and on.

The most outrageous character is Kenneth Widmerpoole who first shows up in book 1, an overly-serious lad, running down a lane on his way to a life as a successful businessman, colonel and peer. He is a man without a conscience and without a heart. He marries a sulky nymphomaniac who steals the show (the plot) in several of the later books with her many moods and antics. Widmerpoole makes his final curtain call, again running down a lane, in book 12, an old and very changed man.

The books are full of dry humor. Kingsly Amis, who wrote upper middle class slapstick, called Powell "the most subtle writer now performing in English". Subtle, indeed. If you aren't paying attention, you miss all sorts of jests. Which gets back to the issue of tediousness. It's not always easy to pay such close attention at that level to prose that feels foreign and dated.

The highlights? Books 1, 2, 3, 6, and 7-9. I enjoyed  book 3, a romance, quite a bit. It was both sexy and graceful (in a 1950ish sort of way). Books 7-9 - the war years - were second best. Although Jenkins did not go off to war, the war most definitely came to him in many ways. He spent 5 years in the army ending up as a liaison to other countries. These books provide a solid look at London in blackout conditions with buildings and people disappearing nightly. I found books 4 and 5 boring, but I was addicted to the prose and so got through them quickly. Book 11, set in 1958 is all about sex - and book 12, set in 1968 extends that and wraps up the series with both solemn endings and just desserts.

My Take:  The strength of the books is that they chronicle a certain culture in time with wit and insight. The subject matter, with its serious moments, is generally not deep. This series will either enthrall you or bore you to tears. I stand with the former group. (****)

Falconer

Falconer, by John Cheever details the slimier aspects of prison life, moving between the over-the-top, sadistic behavior of prison guards to the boring (for me) details of how prisoners manage their sexual lives. The protagonist, Farragut, did not come alive for me and so I did not care about his outcome. Details in the surprise ending seemed contrived. All that said, the beauty of the prose kept me going. (***)

Recent Books

My work schedule has increased and I am having trouble keeping up with blogging about what I've been reading. Here are some micro reviews.

A DANCE TO THE MUSIC OF TIME
When I  picked up Anthony Powell's series 0f 12 books (about 2500 pages), I had to decide whether to read the books over a period of months or years and risk forgetting the early stories, characters and locations OR read them all at once and burn out. I chose the latter course, and it nearly put me off of reading completely. I liked most of the books - especially the war years.

The first several pages of each book is horribly cryptic. I found myself reading paragraphs out loud to get a better handle on 40 word sentences with several $10 words in them. Once past that, the reading was usually interesting. The narrator, Nicholas Jenkins, a writer and member of the upper middle class with many musicians, artists, writers and art critics for friends, is an acute observer of human nature. The characters are, well, "characters" and the humor is dry. The settings are typically grand salons or artists' hangouts - pubs and galleries filled with people who seem to have a lot of time to party. The books start when Jenkins is a teen and leave off in his 60s. People come and go throughout the books. The war changes everything and then life starts again. It is truly a dance through time.

I thoroughly enjoyed books 1-3 (see the review of book 1 and books 2-3). Books 4-6 kept me engaged, but were not thrilling. Books 7-9 were a fascinating look at England and London, in particular, during the war years. For me, it could have all stopped there and I would have been satisfied with a "good read". But it didn't. Book 10 introduced an incredibly unpleasant (and highly unbelievable) character who along with her paramours stole the show for the next 500 pages. She is no longer a part of the story in book 12, but that storyline tops 10 & 11 for being factitious. This is humor, (or humour), but it felt over-the-top.

Sometimes when I read a very long book, I'll go back to the beginning and reread sections to help plug the gaps in my understanding. I felt no desire to do that with this series - and in fact, am not sure that an exercise of that sort would be of much value. The books have depth, but not in that way. I think that I would notice changes in style and treatment of character - and perhaps personal philosophy - Jenkins does get more conservative as he ages. I do not think I would find great and deep themes to ponder - but perhaps I'll try the exercise at a later time and see what I've missed.

BTW: There is a reader's guide for the books which I own (but have loaned out, and can't recall the title) which helped to keep names and places straight.****

LUCKY JIM
You would have thought I'd had enough of English Humor of the 30s after Powell's Dance and try something completely different next. But instead I picked up Lucky Jim by Powell's friend, Kingsley Amis.

No dry humor here, this is slapstick. The story is about an agreeable and easily victimized professor of history trying to make his start in a temporary position in a back-water college in England. He is mentored by an old professor who prefers putting on plays to teaching history classes and who invites him to preposterous parties where he drinks too much and gets into hilarious fixes. He is befriended by and nearly betrothed to a neurotic colleague who plays suicide games to get what she wants. He is nearly done in by an exercise to create and give an "important" lecture on the topic of Merrie England. However, there is hope in the form of a lovely lady, the fiance of his mentor's son, who conspires with him in various ways. This, of course, causes more problems, but by the end, he pops out of the tangled mess, lands on his feet and  thumbs his nose at the bunch of them. This is a very silly book. Not sure why it is on the Time 100 except to fill out the humor genre. Pleasant enough. **

POSSESSION
I read and finished Possession by A. S. Byatt while on a trip to Boston last week. It is a book with a great amount of detail and a great amount of Gothic poetry and 19th century letters - plus it is 530+ pages long. This is no quick read. I started out trying to blaze through it, and then eventually had to come back and reread the better part of the first 200 pages. Fortunately, I managed to slow down and enjoy the book. I found it very enjoyable in the end. ****


THE ELEGANCE OF THE HEDGEHOG
I got to page 113 and then gave up on it. It is awful. The only reason I read that much is because I was traveling and had no other book on me. The word that comes to mind is cloying. *


AND MORE .....That's a lot of books. I travel a lot, and so I have large chunks of time for reading. I am currently reading three books. I picked up Willa Cather's, My Antonia, which is a soft sweet book and had the crazy idea to use it as antidote for what I figured would be two venomous books, Cheever's Falconer and the last half of Gone With the Wind.

Scarlet is certainly venomous. Farragut, the protagonist in Falconer, seems, if not innocent (he is in prison for the murder of his brother), then at least agreeable, but his prisoners are sadists.Taking turns with the three books is making it possible to finish two of them but is absolutely destroying my pleasure in My Antonia.

In any event, Falconer is going fast, and will be completed shortly - this is not a book I choose to read slow and savor. I also learned not to read it late at night, because you never know when the sadistic games will show up. They are fodder for very bad dreams. Gone With the Wind feels infinitely long. After letting it lie unopened for six months I come to it with more patience, but until I hit the last 10 pages, I will not be happy.

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Prose is excellent. The plot went over the top at one point and I had to put the book down for a few days. I think that she tackled a bit too much for 1 book - even a 357 page book. Very sophisticated subject matter for a 23-year old (McCullers) to have written. McCuller's young age shows in dealing with matters of sex, but otherwise paints some very realistic views of the world in the late 1930s.

Dog Soldiers

How does a mild-mannered, middle-aged woman (me) get through a journey into hell like Dog Soldiers? It was a struggle. The saving grace was the meaty, philosphical reflections of its main characters on topics like death, the meaning of life, marriage and drugs.

This is a book about drugs, drug smuggling, drug users, drug addicts - not the sort of book I have any interest in. But what a story teller Robert Stone is - and what a story to tell.

This thriller takes place in the drug-crazy, late-Viet Nam days of the 70's. John Converse is a journalist in Viet Nam trying to find the creativity for a novel or a play by covering the war. As he is getting ready to return to Oakland, CA, and to his wife, Marge, and their young daughter, he is talked into buying and smuggling into the US, 4 kilo of very pure heroin. To him, it sounds easy. It sounds harmless. Little does he know. The heroin gets there before he does with the help of a psychotic friend, Hicks, who is making passage to the US on a mostly-empty military cargo ship. Before Hicks leaves Converse's house where he has not only dropped off the heroin, but seduced/raped Converse's wife, things are already out of control. Two federal agents acting on the wrong side of the law bust in the door and try to steal the heroin. The monstrous strength and psyche of Hicks fends them off. He steals the stash, Marge and Converse's money. Drops off the daughter in a safe location and runs for the LA area desert. The chase is on.

Stone does a terrific job of painting the characters. Marge takes tickets at a porn movie and injects a large part of her salary into her arm. Hicks is part zen adeapt, part monster, presumably the result of having lost his entire troup during a one-sided battle in the jungle. Converse is mostly just a loser with an adict for a wife, a career gone wrong and little heart remaining. Stone manages to pull empathy for this trio from the reader by creating bad guys that are ever-so more evil than them in the two agents who take up the chase, kidnapping and torturing as part of the game.

But as I said, I'm not a fan of action books. It was the philosphic musings I enjoyed. Here is an early sample. Converse has just arrived in the US and discovered that his house is trashed and his wife and daughter are gone. Hicks is nowhere to be found. Converse heads out of his house and sees a tan car following him. He meditates on the death he sees in his near, short future.

If he had just been a bit less timid in Viet Nam, he thought, he might be honorably dead -- like those heroes who went everywhere on motorbikes and died of their own young energy and joie de vivre. Now it would be necessary to face death here -- where things were funnier and death would be as peculiar and stupid as everything else.

 Dog Soldiers is by no means on my favorites list, but I'm glad I read it. I would not recommend it to folks not going through the list. It's a hard, hard tale to read.

The Power and the Glory

I found Graham Green's, The Power and the Glory to be a bit tedious. But it was a book that I was glad to have read, even though I did not enjoy reading it. The story tells of a Catholic priest who is being  hunted during the anti-clerical purge in a southern state of Mexico. To get a sense of it, the American TV series, The Fugitive, was loosely based on the novel.

Why was I glad to have read it? The character of the priest was brilliant. What was tedious about the book? The chase. Not-for-me, the story that enthralled millions of people over a several-year period. So goes taste. But I recommend the book to you.

The priest is an interesting character. He's a coward, whiskey-priest, sire to a 10 year-old child. He could marry and go free. He could cross the border into another state and find safe-haven. Instead, he shows up in towns and villages offering confessions, baptisms, marriages and masses to the local residents.

This pattern goes on for several years until an edict comes from on-high to track him down and execute him. A man simply called, The Lieutenant, takes charge of the hunt and begins to take hostages from the Catholic towns he searches as a way of putting pressure on the priest. Some of the hostages are executed. The priest searches his soul and attempts to do the right thing, but his need for whiskey continues to betray him until he finally realizes that he must leave the state or die.

It is his fear of death that he must come to terms with. He fears both the pain of death and the prospect of hell if he dies before confessing his sins to another priest. The plot has some interesting twists toward the end of the book that allow the priest to look deeply into psychological self and grow from that sight.

In the end, the priest is an honorable character worthy of a great book of his tale.

The Sot-Weed Factor

There are only a few books on the Time 100 list that I do not plan to read. I opted out of A Clockwork Orange (although I saw the film) and The Blood Meridian due to excessive violence. I found two other books alarming in various ways (Lolita and Naked Lunch), but managed to complete them (or nearly so) anyway. Such was not the case with The Sot-Weed Factor.

I came to The Sot-Weed Factor, by John Barth, without any prejudice. I missed the not-so-soft-porn illustration on the back cover of my used-British version of the book showing half-nude women being tied up and raped. I also missed the quote next to it from Norman Shrapnel of The Guardian:

"Here be rapes pursuits, swivings, walking of the plank, epic poems, fantastical changes of identity, deep philosophical discussions, more pursuits, more rape."

Had I seen the back cover and blurb, I would have hesitated before opening the book. As it was, I didn't get much further than the first 30-40 pages before becoming thoroughly disgusted with it. I browsed the remainder of the book and decided to give it up. I can see that some will like it -- love it, as a matter of fact. I am sure that Barth has excellent social commentary buried in those sordid pages. I wasn't interested in dumpster diving to find those pearls buried amidst the garbage. It's a matter of taste.

Barth tells the tale of an innocent named Ebenezer Cooke who is a man of high morals, high aspirations but a weak spirit. Cooke spends his free time either gambling or working on an epic poem and both interfere with his earning his keep. He is an easy mark for the miscreants of the world who continuously show up on his doorstep. Although he tries to keep his affairs from his father, an uptight American tobacco farmer who now lives in England, a series of misfortunes befall Cooke and his woes reach his father's ear. In spite of his pleas for forgiveness, he is forced to move to Maryland to manage the family tobacco business.

There is an eventful journey to Maryland and an eventful life in the sot-weed (tobacco) factory. Barth does not treat this hero any better than he did Giles, in The Giles Goat Boy. Cooke is subjected to countless indignities everywhere he turns. He tries to keep to morally high ground, but in the end, the experiences change him deeply. This is a coming-of-age story (parody) that moves in the wrong direction. The book, true to Shrapnel's review, is bawdy: filled with rapes and atrocities.  But it's a parody and all is forgiven in a parody, isn't it? Well, that may not be true, but then one doesn't have to read it, do they. In the end, I chose not to.

I am glad to be rid of the book. On to something more suitable....

A Dance ... Books 2 & 3

My love for the series, A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell, continues to grow. (See my earlier post on A Question of Upbringing). If I had nothing else on my plate to read, I would devour all twelve right now. I know I will miss them when I am done.

In books 2, A Buyer's Market and 3, The Acceptance World, Nicholas Jenkins is now working for a publisher of art books and struggling to write novels on the side. In the evenings he attends social dances with his peers. These are set up for young people by their parents as a way of arranging marriages for the women. In book 3, he outgrows the dances and instead attends parties - lots of parties, running into his old college chums as well as meeting lords, ladies, artists and fools. An eccentric lot to be sure. The books rely on that eccentricity for the wry humor to flow.

In terms of romances, it is puppy love in book 2 and his first long-term romance in book 3. The latter is actually an affair with a married woman whose husband returns from abroad at the end of the leaving us to wonder if she will still be around in book 4.

On a side note: I bought a used copy of Invitation to the Dance,  a reader's companion to A Dance to the Music of Time that tracks characters, events and places throughout the 12-book series. At this point, I am still able to keep track of what's gone on, but I expect that by book 5 I will be relying on Invitation heavily.

Next: Book 4 - At Lady Molly's

A Question of Upbringing

Whoo-hoo, I'm in love with Anthony Powell! Just finished book 1 of A Dance to the Music of Time: A Question of Upbringing which starts the 12-book series narrated by Jenkins, an astute observer of people, places and politics. This first book introduces us to some of the characters who will come and go through his life - and the remainder of these books.

We meet Jenkins in prep school and stay with him through his first year of college meeting his narcissistic uncle, the prankster Peter Templer, Peter's shy sister Jean and their wealthy friend Stringham. Jenkins looks in awe as his friends leave school, find romance in the world and with women and create their lives while he follows a narrower path: mooning over Jean and Jean-like creatures while attending to his studies at the university.

This is a sweet look at upper class Britain in the mid 1900s. Dry humor abounds, but so does a bit of slapstick. Take the scene in which a champion race car driver, in the dead of night, attempts to remove a visiting lawyer's top hat from his luggage and sneak a chamber pot into it's place. Funny stuff.

Can't wait for books 2-12!

Death Comes for the Archbishop

My friends who have read My Antonia by Willa Cather are disappointed by Death Comes to the Archbishop. It's a book that is short on drama and loose in structure with nine "books" that read well as short stories. The book is based on the lives of the first bishop/archbishop of Santa Fe and his vicar, following them from their overland journey to Santa Fe to their deaths as old men.  While hair-raising stories do come and go within this 300-page epic, the chief focus is the friendship of the two men.

Cather gives us a bit of a travelogue of the southwest in the 1800s as the poor churchmen travel back and forth across the desert, up and down mesas and up into Denver, skirting along mountain precipices.. We meet Navajo chiefs, Mexican priests, rich rancheros and even a few desparados. Kit Carson takes the stage, as well.

Having lived in that area for 3 years, I loved the book. Cather captured the serenity of the landscape, the desolation of the desert and the heart of the people. Santa Fe today, with its cathedral, plaza and winding streets is a beautiful city. We get glimpses into how it came to life and how the cathedral was built.

Read it!

White Noise

I am traveling a lot these days which means that I have a lot of time to read on planes and in hotels, but not much time to write up my thoughts. So I am moving to a simpler format. 

White Noise  by Don DeLillo is a post-modern exploration of American cultural underpinnings: What is around us, what drives us, how do we handle the sounds, scents and visuals that intrude into our space and most important, how do we handle death and our fear of it.

Non-Spoiler Summary:  The story follows a patchwork family: Jack, Babette and their kids from multiple marriages including six year old Wilder who is cognitively impaired. Jack is the department chair at a private liberal arts college and runs the country's most successful Hitler studies program. He has created a persona for himself by wearing dark glasses and copping an attitude when he teaches. At home, he is an average guy and a congenial father and husband. Babette teaches, volunteers and cares for the family. She has a big secret that she is hiding (and, it turns out, other bigger secrets, too). Everyone knows this, but no one can pry them loose from her.

Jack and Babette are both crazy-fearful of death - each afraid to die, but more afraid of being the last one alive. The plot explores the fear of death theme in a myriad ways including Jack and Babbette's denial, angst and rash decisions. When an "airborne toxic event" occurs within view of the family home, Jack and Babette deny the toxic event's danger saying that these sorts of things happen only to the under-privileged - which they are not - and so there is nothing to worry about. (Their children, meanwhile, keep up with radio reports and pack up the car.)

Jack becomes good friends with Murray, a visiting professor of cultural studies, who formally observes, writes notes and then deconstructs everything around him: children playing, people watching TV, a carton of broken eggs on a supermarket aisle floor, and, yes, the way people react to death. It is Murray, in an oracle's role, who provides most of the book's meta-insights.

Once beyond the airborne toxic event, Jack's obsession with death reaches over-the-top proportions and the plot comes along for the ride. I never-ever would have guessed the plot turns. I'm not sure that I care for them, either. Stepping back from the book, it's almost cartoon-ish in nature. Up close, I found it annoying, but truthfully, it works in this post-modern, meta-novel.

Style:  DeLillo shows more interest in his musings and meta-dialogs than in the plot. White Noise's matter-of-fact style reminds me of Camus: there is little emotional content, scant descriptions of people or scenery and no sub-plots to confuse the issue. DeLillo surfaces a few times in the middle of a paragraph to inform the reader that in keeping with post-modern traditions he will fore-go creating a new plot angle or that he will not bother to describe the vivid hues of a fabulous sunset. This all has the effect of keeping the reader at arm's distance from the story and makes for a  reading experience more akin to reading a newspaper: one watches characters rather than empathizing with them as they confront huge challenges. Did I mention that it is a parody of modern culture? Very clever, though it gets old.

Reading Experience: I truly enjoyed the first 200 pages or so. I became annoyed with the characters and plot thereafter. But in the end, I'm glad to have read it - and have enjoyed mulling it over. This is a good book for group exploration - which mean a class because very few book clubs are going to take this one on.

Gearing up for White Noise (and Next)

The little I know about White Noise by Don DeLillo comes from the book cover and the first few pages. I see a preoccupation with death in the text and there appears to be radiation or something like it in the picture on the cover. The writing draws me in.

I have been looking forward to reading White Noise for about 6 months. I've put it off because it's a post-modern book, and that made me suspect that I would need a clear head (i.e. no work projects screaming to be done) to do it justice. So as I'm cooking the Thanksgiving dinner, I plan to read the short chapters and enjoy the spaces in-between. No disgusting sexuality as in Lolita and Naked Lunch. No creepy babies or settings as in Beloved or Never Let Me Go (much as I loved both). No cryptic stream-of-consciousness as in The Sound and the Fury. Just a solid exercise in great reading. This book won the National Book Award, and DeLillo was a Pulitzer prize finalist for two other books.

Next, by James Hines

For some reason, the first few pages of White Noise remind me of a book by James Hines called Next. It is about a man living in Ann Arbor, who in a panic when he suspects his girlfriend is pregnant, decides to drastically change his life. One morning he secretly flies to Austin to apply for a job. Arriving early, he spends a few hours following a pretty woman around town as she runs errands. (She's in on the game). As he fantasizes about being with her he relives key moments in his life - especially his love life. His anxiety increases with his reminiscences and as a result his morning becomes more eventful, but he survives it intact and arrives for his interview on time. The book leads up to a big twist and so I'll stop here. Loved the book. I chewed on it for a few weeks afterward - which is my idea of a what good book should do.

What is it about White Noise that reminds me of Next? There is a sense of calm before the storm. Here's to a Happy Thanksgiving and to some relaxing reading time!

Lolita - Banning Vs Condoning

Today I got the energy to finish Lolita. A few months ago when I read most of the book, I used the following ploy: I started at the beginning and read until it got disgusting. Then I moved to the last page and read sections backwards until I hit the end of the disgusting part in the middle. I thought I'd missed 20 pages, but the disgusting part was much longer than that. It was also a lot more than disgusting. But I'll get to that.

Before today, I honestly did not know what the middle part contained. When I stopped reading, Humbert Humbert had attempted to drug 12-year-old Lolita to sleep and had joined her in bed expecting to "take advantage" of her as she slept. But she kept waking up. I stopped here and turned to the last pages where he is about to be executed for murdering a man. Safe enough, I turned back further towards the middle... Humbert and Lolita meet when she is older (17?)and she tells him that he ruined her life. She is engaged, pregnant and broke and needs money. He gives her some. I read all of that, and stopped there.

I put the book down - thankfully in the dark - about what may or may not have happened in those middle pages. I noted that Humbart was a fool, that the writing was spectacular, but the material was questionable at best. Several people on a blog I follow mentioned that nothing much happens in that middle section. So I figured that Lolita made a cuckold of Humbert and scampered away unscathed. Today I discovered that "nothing much happens" means that the sex is not explicit, that is, it's not hard-core pornography. Nabokov does, in fact, write about enough details to make scenes come alive.

What a surprise. The nothing much in the middle includes him seducing her (this is statutory rape) on the morning of the sleeping pill and implying that this thirteen year old was fair game because she had had sex with a boy at summer camp. This scene was followed by a year of raping her all across the country. He cajoled her, threatened her and sometimes simply raped her. He paid her money to do "special favors" for him. And then, worried that she might use the money to run away, stole the it back from her.

Whoa.

Academically, this book may be a jewel. Nabakov poured his heart into it. I can see that. It is a treasure of wit and prose. But why would anyone recommend that the general public read it? Why would critics put it on the best-books lists? This is prurient material about children. We should not be recommending prurient material about children to the general public (or our best friends, either!). It even appears on the Radcliffe 100 best books. This is a perverse book in which horrible things happen to a beautiful, pubescent girl. Let's not glamorize this as great literature to be read by all. I don't want us to become so jaded that a book like Lolita doesn't make us squeamish any more.

One critic argued that the book is not erotic because the sexually suggestive material in the first three chapters becomes boring  and so the reader is not aroused by the later material. I am not sure if this commentator reads a lot of pornography and so found Lolita boring or if he keeps his genitals buttoned up very tight and is therefore not affected. My guess is that if it were not erotic - even slightly - it would not have sold 100,000 copies in three weeks.

Others say that Nabokov distances himself from Humbert at the end of the book and makes it clear that Humbert's behavior is despicable. What that says at best is that Nabokov is redeemed at the end, not that Humbert is. Humbert never sees himself for the monster that he is. A large amount of sexually titillating material about a child has been read by the time the reader reaches the end. It's a bit late by then to be distancing oneself.

I am not a prude. I am simply noting that this book about a foolish pedophile has prurient material about a child and we should not put it on our best-books lists. I think that someone has missed the difference between objecting to censorship (which I do) and condoning a sexual book about children (which I don't).

I did not finish reading the book. I won't bother. I hope you don't either.

Things Fall Apart

Things Fall Apart is the most widely read novel in Africa. Written by Nigerian national, Chinua Achebe, it details tribal life of a small village both before and during colonization. We see the world through the eyes of yam farmer, warrior and wrestling legend, Okonkwo, a short-tempered, perfectionist with little sympathy for his drunkard father or his sensitive son. Okonkwo is by current-day descriptions, a brute, but he is prosperous and well-respected in his village. He lives a happy life for many years before things begin to fall apart - first within his life in the village and later for the village as a whole as white missionaries and the colonialist government that follows change village cultural ways forever.

Prior to the arrival of the white colonialists, Okonkwo accidentally kills a man during a sacred ritual and is forced out of his village for seven years. He and his three wives and children find refuge in the village of his mother and receive little news from his home village. When he returns, he sees that his people have learned to live peacefully, if not happily, with white (and black) newcomers even to the degree of tolerating a new missionary church and its rituals. But Okonkwo is not adept at negotiating this sort of change. He thinks of his fellow-tribesmen as "soft women" for not fighting the white men. Conflicts arise and tragedy ensues.

Sound like a typical Greek Tragedy? It is. Likewise, it is a classic tale of conflicting cultures.The book is written straight-up and we learn many of the intricacies of life in the Lgbo tribe: the day-to-day events, rites, cultural values and taboos. Achebe writes of a life that existed in the 1890s - around the time his father was growing up. Achebe himself converted to Christianity as a young man and so he sees both sides with a clarity that would be hard to reproduce by a younger writer. The book is chock-full of short folk tales, adages and explanations for the natural world. Here is an example:

When the moon rose late in the night, people said it was refusing food, as a sullen husband refuses his wife's food when they have quarreled.

The matter-of-fact writing prevents it from being a page-turning read, but it's a book one is glad to have read.

Beloved

I made it through Toni Morrison's, Beloved. Whew, what a scary tale! It is a dense story with multiple layers: the historical tale of slavery, the story of a powerful, vengeful ghost with a sad, sad history, and the interesting human story of an extended family who lived through it all.The book opens with a poltergeist shaking the house. Add to that, the dread of the unfolding, brutal story of the characters' escape from slavery and it becomes a book that's both hard to read and hard to put down. In terms of mood, I was reminded occasionally of Housekeeping, by Marilynne Robinson, which is quite eerie and is populated with characters that evaporate if you look at them too hard. But Housekeeping lacks the powerful storyline of Beloved which gives us a potent history lesson in slavery: how slaves were treated, what it took for them to get away, and what getting away meant.

The writing is dense and sometimes purposefully choppy. I got used to it after about 50 pages, but sections toward the end of the book required 2-3 readings just to make sense of the words. There are 3-4 chapters with stream-of-consciousness writing that hover between poetry and obscurity. Here is a sample:

Sethe sees me see her and I see the smile   her smiling face is the place for me     it is the face I lost   she is my face smiling at me   doing it at last    a hot thing   now we can join   a hot thing

Characterization is fabulous and in 3-D. You can see the characters clearly and understand what drives them. I did not guess how the story would unfold or how it would end, and so it kept me enthralled (while it scared me). I'm not big on scary or creepy books, but Beloved is an amazing book that is worth the effort of the reading.

Never Let Me Go

I surprised myself when I picked up Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro to take on a recent trip. It was a great choice. I read it in a day and digested it in the days that followed. It's a "chewy" book - a startling, sad tale that makes you think of times yet to play out for humankind. The tale speaks of an alternate world in which questionable, ethical decisions have been made that affect thousands of young people in England. The book holds its own on the bookshelf of great futuristic books such as 1984 and Brave New World.  Newsweek called it the best book of the decade. It is the most recently published book on the Time 100 list.

Never Let Me Go is a complex tale and Ishiguro is a master of weaving multiple time periods into a cogent whole. We follow Kathy H., a 31 year old "carer", as she drives around the countryside visiting her clients and reminiscing about her life and her friends and muses on the special fate that she and her friends were prepared for.

Everything else that I say about the book is going to be a spoiler, so if you have not read it, please do so - it is literally a great book.

**SPOILERS FOLLOW***

You can read a good plot summary and some related material on Book Drum. Below is my commentary on the book.

Kathy H. and her friends are clones who are raised solely to provide organs for "real" humans with cancer. The book looks at the issue of cloning humans as a way to grow organs, just as one would grow crops. Clones in this world are typically raised in warehouse-like settings, but Kathy H. and her friends have had better treatment at a boarding school that teaches them the arts and encourages them to showcase their creative talents. Ishiguro lets the story about the group of friends and their teachers play out, and is not overly-focused on the ethical issues surrounding cloning until the end of the book where he shares a few details of the program. Ishiguro instead looks at the sorrow of the cloned beings who give their lives in service and the ways in which they come to terms with their limited lives.

It is indeed a sad book. The student/protagonists have no parents and no friends outside of their community. Adults in their lives, even those championing them, find them repulsive. Once the students are in their early twenties, they become carers who help other slightly older clones recover from a series of surgeries to remove organs. They watch these same people die at a young age once their organs are harvested. We watch Kathy H. care for her best friend, Ruth, and her lover, Tommy, as they proceed along their fated paths.

Is there a way out? In their 2-3 years of freedom after school, the students learn of others before them who have disappeared into the world of humans and thus avoided the role of carer and donor. Kathy H. and her friends, now adults, whisper about this, but they never consider running themselves. Ishiguro leaves us to infer that it would be out of character for them to go. They are deep into their own social world and they have been systematically indoctrinated into their roles, like kidnapped children, who are sympathetic to and obedient to their kidnappers.

What Kathy H. and Tommy attempt to get instead is a stay of leave. They request a few extra years time to spend together before they meet their fates. However, there is no room in the clone organ-harvest system for this kind of leeway. It is during this part of the tale that Ishiguro gives us the few details about the cloning program that he is willing to share as he wraps up a lot of small plot details.

Ishiguro said in an interview that he used the cloning theme as a medium to explore the relationships of a group of young people who were fated to die young. His concern was the relationships of the characters not the scientific or sociological underpinnings of cloning.

And so we are left hanging with questions about the history, politics and ethics of cloning. We do not know to what degree the clones were genetically modified. Were they created as a new species? Who were they cloned from and how were those people selected? Did those who were cloned belong to wealthy families who want to have organs available for their use should they need them? We are also not given details about the warehousing of clone children or of the political struggle to give them better lives. What is the public debate? How does the public manage to ignore the beings who are raised to be donors?

I miss these details, but it is not a lesser book without them. The intimate look at Kathy H, Ruth and Tommy is all the story we need. The writing is superb, the story rich and haunting. It has what feels like a timeless appeal even though, like 1984, it's alternate view of the future is unlikely to play out.