The Companion Blog to a Collection of Literary Impressions

Green Mountain Farm by Elliott Merrick

2007-08-15T19:00:00.000-07:00

"What were leaky roofs and cold hands and gray days and rock as compared with such riches of freedom and aloneness," Elliott Merrick writes of raising his family on a farm in Vermont in the 1930s. In a series of essays, Merrick recalls the labor and reward of forging an existence out in wilderness, the work and pleasure of living off the land, not just living on it. He characterizes the spectrum of personalities inhabiting his corner of Vermont, philosophizes on the nature of the writer's craft and the nature of nature itself, and lovingly reminisces about his children's younger years. All the while he maintains his affection for and devotion to the sometimes breathlessly severe, sometimes sweetly mild, always overwhelmingly beautiful landscape.

Merrick effortlessly describes moonlit nights spent cross-country skiing, lakes and streams and waterfalls, verdant summers flavored by blackberries and raspberries. He also acknowledges the harsh frosts and never-ending overcast days. Whatever he writes of takes little to imagine; he penetrates to the essential aspects of a blustery autumn day or the fleeting leap of a doe, his rendering easy and accurate, infused with a pervasive sense of actuality.

Perhaps one of Merrick's most penetrating insights involves his Thoreauvian sense of immediacy, his ability to recognize the present and embrace it. "Into my mind comes the realization that here I am, now, out of all time and all space, here in this place. And I say to myself, This is my house. My woman. A baby. Two babies. Simple things like that." Indeed simplicity, for Merrick as for Thoreau, is a chief virtue.

Merrick at one point recalls a canoe trip he and his wife took. He meditates on the balance between old and new, the sleekly engineered boat gliding on the untouched river of the ancients. He rejoices in accepting the best of both worlds. "And here it is again, the wild and the civilized side by side, and we in the middle, picking and choosing a little of each." In this he almost goes beyond Thoreau, reconciling a deep admiration for the natural world with a balanced appreciation for modern advancements.

Merrick refuses to idolize the past, asserting that the present has all of history's benefits along with improvements of its own, making it the best time yet in which to live. Merrick's refreshing enthusiasm for the here and now illuminates his work, transmitting to the reader an anticipation and a longing for the exhilarating balance he finds in life.

The Art of War by Sun Tzu

2007-08-09T20:00:00.000-07:00

Like Machiavelli with The Prince, Sun Tzu wrote a manual containing instructions for matters of state, only the latter lived one thousand years earlier and half the world away. Sun Tzu's writing pleased the king of his province in 500 B.C. China, and the treatise continues to be revered for its military wisdom today. I heard a guest on a radio program mention it, and so I decided I should read it myself.

"[T]he general is skillful in attack whose opponent does not know what to defend; and he is skillful in defense whose opponent does not know what to attack," declares Sun Tzu. He makes it clear that deception is the key to winning a war; keeping the enemy confused the primary goal. Furthermore, Sun Tzu encourages leaders to keep their subordinates guessing too, by concealing plans from all but a select few and thereby preserving their veil of secrecy from the spies that inevitably creep into the ranks of troops.

For Sun Tzu, flexibility is paramount. "According as circumstances are favorable, one should modify one's plans." A leader should base his movements on his enemy's actions, watching him sedulously and responding appropriately. When attacking, Sun Tzu advises targeting the opponent's weakest point. "Military tactics are like unto water, for water in its natural course runs away from high places and hastens downwards. So in war, the way to avoid what is strong is to strike what is weak. Water shapes its course according to the ground over which it flows; the soldier works out his victory in relation to the foe whom he is facing."

Though Sun Tzu's enthusiasm for war dominates the work, he counsels cautious circumspection in inciting conflict. "[A] kingdom that has once been destroyed can never come again into being; nor can the dead ever be brought back to life." He recognizes that war is irrevocable and urges leaders to refrain from waging wars merely out of personal spite. For where deception reigns virtuous can only be hardship and turmoil, ceaseless unrest.

Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose

2007-07-10T10:02:00.000-07:00

Read the classics to learn how to write well – doesn’t everyone already know this? Apparently not, for the aptly-named Prose makes sure her namesake is quite clear on the subject: "You will do yourself a disservice if you confine your reading to the rising star whose six-figure, two-book contract might seem to indicate where your own work should be heading." Really? Mass-market American tastes shouldn't necessarily be consulted for examples of brilliant writing?

I don't mean to be so sarcastic. Prose's treatise on developing an eye and an ear for writing is spot-on. She, after all, was once a "bookish sixteen-year-old" who idolized Austen and the Brontës, unaware not only that "no one wrote that way anymore," but also that "no one lived that way any longer." Prose liberally quotes her favorite authors, deconstructing their techniques to determine what good writing is and how it is formed. By focusing on the basic elements of a novel or story, she manages a comprehensive examination of what constitutes a literary masterpiece.

Prose constantly discounts venerated rules of composition: “There are many occasions in literature in which telling is more effective than showing.” On the assumption that fictional conversation should not attempt to mimic the real: “Then why is so much written dialogue less colorful and interesting that what we can overhear daily in the Internet café, the mall, and on the subway?” She encourages adhering to some general guidelines but gleefully appends them with masterly exceptions.

Her observations are accurate and insightful. “[D]ialogue usually contains as much or even more subtext than it does text…One mark of bad written dialogue is that it is only doing one thing, at most, at once.” Elsewhere she notes, “A well-chosen detail can tell us more about a character - his social and economic status, his hopes and dreams, his visions of himself – than a long explanatory passage.”

Prose dutifully follows her axioms with appropriate examples culled from classic works. These excerpts illuminate her points, making the book practical and understandable. She realizes the limitations of such instruction though, admitting, “Beauty, in a sentence, is ultimately as difficult to quantify or describe as beauty in a painting or in a human face.” She concludes that the only way to determine whether one has produced a rose or a weed is to spend time in rose gardens.

The book is engaging and profitable, like taking a good English class from a seasoned and passionate teacher. Prose rightly maintains that writing cannot be learned in the vacuum of a classroom; there is no substitute for the real thing. All writers, from the aspiring to the established, would do well to realize that they are only “the dot at the end of the long, glorious, complex sentence in which literature has been written.”

The Best American Short Stories 2006 Edited by Ann Patchett

2007-06-15T13:09:00.001-07:00

As I perused this collection, persistent questions tapped on my shoulder: Why do I read? Why do authors write? Why did they write these stories? Why were these stories included in this book? Unfortunately, "Why?" may be the only question in the world that can never be definitively, indisputably answered. We make partial attempts at settling the issue, but unresolved elements always remain. Nonetheless, Ann Patchett ventures her opinion of the matter of the short story and its purpose in her introduction. "I haven't been able to shake the notion that short story writers are famous people and that short stories are life-altering things. I believe it is human nature to try and persuade others that our most passionately held beliefs are true so that they too can know the joy of our deepest convictions."

Evaluating the book in that light, I think the purpose of this collection centers around inspiring compassion for others. While this is sometimes manifested in benign portraits of lonely senior citizens, bemused immigrants, and tragic marriages, at other times it seems merely a vehicle for gaining widespread acceptance of the practices of the most outlandish members of society. Homosexuality and all manner of promiscuity are boldly, kindly, even pedestrianly presented, as if such liasons were not only permissable but laudable, just another facet of a diverse civilization.

The unifying theme that these stories evoke is a continuation of the American motif of isolation. The individual is triumphed at the expense of the community. The gay military man unable to reach out to the needy family of a deployed solider nor commit to his "partner;" the sex-surfeited girl stringing along her smitten boyfriend; the aloof lesbian whose only human connections are fleeting, physical, and base - the individuals are worlds unto themselves, deceiving even their closest companions as to the true nature of their relationships, unable to foster meaningful interactions, nor engage in fully honest discourse. Here we have only ourselves; father, mother, sister, brother, husband, wife, friend - all are peripheral appendages with whom complete sincerity and verity, with whom selfless love, is tragically impossible. The stories form a paean to self.

So what are Ann Patchett's "deepest convictions" - that the individual is to be prized above all else? That the individual should pursue whatever feels right inside him, regardless of extraneous considerations? How should we apply these "life-altering" stories - Become more self-absorbed and self-obsessed than we already are? Accept whatever society foists on us as social norms?

Literature, like life, is vacuous, redundant, without a clear and defined purpose. Saying these short stories are worth reading is like saying one's aim in life is to just "be." The pursuit of truth and beauty is admirable only if it ends fruitfully. To get meat, hunt a deer. To find truth and beauty, seek the One who holds them, whose very being is composed of them.

Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne

2007-06-12T20:09:00.000-07:00

Unbelievably lengthy, exceedingly verbose, purposefully tedious, Tristram Shandy was one of those books whose Introduction was infinitely more fruitful than the text itself. Peter Conrad, in his introductory remarks, extols Sterne's novel for its daring innovation, unconventional liberties, and subversive wit, meanwhile praising other prominent authors of the eighteenth century, making a thoughtful summary of their respective contributions to the novel form. He makes an excellent case for the merits of this book. While Sterne's originality holds, undoubtedly, historical literary importance, experienced at the present time it lacks immediacy, and ultimately, relevancy.

Ostensibly an autobiography, the book purports to be the "life and opinions" of the eponymous character, though little of either makes an appearance. Tristram famously does not appear himself until well into the narrative, a fact he readily admits is singular: "I am...almost into the middle of my third volume - and no farther than to my first day's life." What, then, constitutes the bulk of the novel? In a word, digressions. Tristram chronicles the inane conversations of his father, uncle, and neighbors, meandering along not only their rabbit paths, but taking liberal detours of his own. He freely addresses the reader at times, leaves blank pages, provides accompanying graphics, and wantonly flits from topic to topic, desperately trying to maintain an accurate chronology but coming nowhere near. Like an attention-challenged child who tries to behave but cannot for the life of him sit still, Sterne's spastic narrator never stays on one subject for long, himself least of all.

What sort of person Tristram truly is remains unanswered, though the haphazard sketches he produces of the personalities that peopled his childhood make it evident he was not raised without some degree of eccentricity. His uncle, an emasculate war veteran, and his father, a would-be ivory tower intellectual, volley with the pompous curate and bumbling parish doctor over antiquated obscurities and the more mundane happenings of the household. Though Tristram's father blathers nonsense most of the time, opining about his treasured pet theories involving medieval minutiae like how one's name affects one's life and the physical location of the soul, occasionally he makes an acute observation. Speaking of auxiliary verbs, he avers, "Now, by the right use and application of these...there is no one idea can enter [Tristram's] brain...but a magazine of conceptions and conclusions may be drawn forth from it. - Didst thou ever see a white bear...Would I had seen a white bear...If I should...If I should never..."

Little of what passes for the life of Tristram Shandy is of any consequence to anyone, and Sterne is well aware of this. Inquiring about an anecdote Tristram's father had just told, his mother asks, "[W]hat is all this story about?" The curate replies, "A cock and a bull - And one of the best of its kind, I ever heard." And there the book ends.

Pere Goriot by Honore de Balzac

2007-06-04T16:02:00.000-07:00

Balzac designates Goriot "Pere," father, because the man devotes all he has to his two daughters. They define his amorphous existence, creating the sharp edge of poverty that he lives on in his old age. Though Goriot bestows upon the girls enormous dowries to ensure they are able to marry whomever they want and desires in return only love and a place in their homes, they deny him both. Nevertheless, he procures money for them whenever they plead for the sums their mercenary husbands refuse to grant them. Goriot is only too happy to suffer in miserable squalor if it adds to his daughters' comfort. One day, though, the debts become too much for him to bear. Goriot collapses into a fatal illness, and eventually dies, attended by neither of those whom he had loved so much.

Goriot's privation for the sake of his daughters forces him to live in a boardinghouse, along with varying examples of Parisian life in 1819. One fellow boarder, Eugene Rastignac, a poor law student from the country, befriends him when he discovers Goriot's daughters occupy the lofty sphere of society he desperately wants to inhabit. Eugene becomes increasingly enmeshed in their affairs, at the end burying Goriot when his daughters refuse to.

Eugene develops a profound respect for Goriot's unwavering affection toward his children, viewing him as the prototype of a father. Eugene is disgusted by the ignominious end the man comes to. "Great souls cannot stay long in this world. How, indeed, should noble feelings exist in harmony with a petty, paltry, and superficial society?" Eugene charges society with killing Goriot, finally declaring war on it to avenge the man's death.

Society, Parisian society certainly, with its values, may share some of the blame in the tragedy of Goriot. Materialism, hedonism, the unscrupulous clawing to the top of the heap - the world Goriot's girls inhabited did not triumph unselfish filial duty. But Goriot should have instilled in them the morals and beliefs that would have allowed them to stand tall amidst such pettiness. Giving them all they wanted was not loving them perfectly, not doing what was best for them. Permitting them to marry mercenaries directly contradicted the purpose of the large dowries. Scrambling to find money every time they asked for it only reinforced their remorseless greed.

Eugene refuses to accept the path society would have him take, declining to marry the young, naive heiress who adores him, but to whom he is indifferent. Instead, he aligns himself with Goriot's more compassionate, contrite daughter. As she is still married, it is not the most moral choice, but it is infinitely noble in his, and Balzac's, eyes. Why greed and disrespect for one's parents are sins in Balzac's world, but adultery is not, is unclear.

Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak

2007-05-22T16:44:00.000-07:00

The misguided romance between Dr. Zhivago and Lara is central to this book, and it parallels the Russians' fatal infatuation with socialism that forms the background of the story. Zhivago and Lara come of age and begin their own families separately during the early 20th century, while Marxism is gaining traction and the revolt against landed aristocracy and the Czarist regime rages. In a caprice of war, the two are thrown together more than once, kindling an ongoing affair. But just as war throws them together, it also tears them apart, and they both eventually come to ignobly solitary ends.

Doctor Zhivago is a comprehensive, loftily toned novel that tries hard to be a worthy heir to the legacy of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, et al. However, try as it might, it never quite reaches such heights. Neither Zhivago's appending poetry, which is highly praised in the novel, nor the narrative of the book itself come across as anything but pretentious and self-centered imitations. The characters certainly discuss the masters of Russian literature often enough, but that only sharpens the contrast between their fictional predecessors and them.

Pasternak repeatedly falls into telling rather than showing. When describing a conversation between Zhivago and his uncle, Pasternak says he had never "heard views as penetrating, apt, or inspiring," but these remarkable comments never make an appearance. Pasternak has too much confidence in the profundity of his protagonist. Zhivago writes "Playing at People, a Gloomy Diary or Journal Consisting of Prose, Verse, and What-have-you, Inspired by the Realization that Half the People Have Stopped Being Themselves and Are Acting Unknown Parts," a title whose self-amused attempt at witticism would be at home in these modern incarnations of narcissism, blogs.

But perhaps it would not be wise to blame Pasternak for his shortcomings and mistake "the spirit of the times" for personal inadequacy, as Lara's husband does. As socialist thought slowly permeated every aspect of their lives, it alienated them from each other. "We began to be idiotically pompous with each other," Lara explains to Zhivago, "you felt you had to be clever in a certain way about certain world-important themes." Unable to communicate accurately and thus believing he no longer has his wife’s esteem, Lara's husband joins the army and throws himself headlong into the revolution, effectually abandoning her.

Lara attributes the break-up of her marriage largely to the advent of Communism. To some extent, she is justified. The book chronicles the brutality of socialism, the incongruity between its sweet promises and its bitter actuality. Without a free market, people starve physically, and also intellectually and spiritually. Communist thought enthralled Russians, from the radicals at the universities to the impoverished peasants. Just as Russians deserted their traditions, their native values, so Zhivago betrayed his constant, devoted wife for Lara. The affair gives him no peace or satisfaction, just wrenching guilt and an addled conscience.

Pasternak seems to say that Zhivago, like Lara's husband, would never have strayed had he not been subjected to the insensibility and turmoil of the revolution. Morals became as muddled as politics then. Zhivago feels helpless, powerless, facing unassailable history. "He realized he was a pygmy before the monstrous machine of the future."

Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison

2007-05-11T15:27:00.000-07:00

Toni Morrison's organic prose wends its intoxicating way around you until you're so mesmerized you hardly notice the insidious web it has trapped you in. Song of Solomon begins with a troubled man perched precariously atop a hospital roof, and from there descends into the murky depths of African-American life in the mid-20th century. Highlighting significant points in the lives of one family, the narrative finally rests on the son, Macon Dead Jr, and the journey he embarks on to comprehend the past and its bearing on his future.

At the beginning, the past looks terribly sordid. The sordid taste never really leaves the story, but it does abate somewhat. Morrison draws her characters in untempered manifestations of vulgarity, making no attempt to wipe off the gritty dirt and grime of their lives. Initially, they seem like aberrations of human nature unwittingly stumbled upon. But Morrison later justifies their untoward actions, building a logical scaffolding beneath a seemingly senseless, groundless mess.

Indeed, much of the book explores the underlying causes of the characters', and by extension the African-American culture's, distinctive burdens. "The cards are stacked against us," says Macon's friend Guitar, "and just trying to stay in the game...makes us do funny things. Things we can't help. Things that make us hurt one another." But while undoubtedly many vices can be attributed to cause and effect, this outlook does not admit an adequate address of free will. It is far too easy to shrug off people's shortcomings, blaming them on a troubled childhood or a legacy of sin. At some point each much assume responsibility for his actions.

Morrison's insight crescendoes with self-absorbed Macon's moment of clarity on a dark night in the Blue Ridge Mountains: "Apparently he thought he deserved only to be loved - from a distance, though - and given what he wanted." He later identifies the catalysts behind the individual catastrophes of his respective family members, expanding his understanding of them and gaining compassion where once was merely contempt. But from there Morrison devolves into nebulous philosophizing, attempts at mythologizing, and facile plot twists that lose the edge of realism that Macon's inner revelation and outer realizations have.

Morrison's earthy cadence embodies the souls of her subjects. Her confident assurance in her ability to create a cultural mythology is, strange though the comparison might be, almost Tolkienesque. But that she embraces not just the sinners but also the sin, dismissing their culpability with rational explanations, tarnishes her work.

The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane

2007-05-02T19:38:00.000-07:00

We tend to view the past as unrelated to the present- people did those sorts of things then, but they'd never do that now. It is odd to think that the neat, established facts of the past were once someone's messy, uncertain future. Henry Fleming reflects on this before he first sees combat: "There was a portion of the world's history which he had regarded as the time of wars, but it, he thought, had been long gone over the horizon and had disappeared forever." The Civil War, however, is looming over his, and soon the immediacy of battle comes crashing down upon him.

A young Yankee farm boy, Henry alternates between honest introspection and self-approbating denial. Crane presents him with unflinching authenticity, exhibiting his naïve bravado, his cowardly self-justification, his struggles with life, death, and why. Marching towards battle, Henry encounters his first casualty. “He vaguely desired to walk around and around the body and stare, the impulse of the living to try and read in dead eyes the answer to the Question.”

Henry flees like a threatened animal when he faces the enemy. He recognizes his cowardice but reasons it away, attributing it to a natural sense of self-preservation and excusing it by his later semi-heroics. Crane allows Henry some latitude, giving him moments of unimpeachable profundity, but he nevertheless maintains an ironic distance from him, subtly mocking his pride, which even Confederate bullets glance off harmlessly.

Henry comes face to face with the senselessness of war, but his initial thoughts when the battle is over banish any recollection of it. “He had been an animal blistered and sweating in the heat and pain of war. He turned now with a lover’s thirst to images of tranquil skies, fresh meadows, cool brooks- an existence of soft and eternal peace.”

Henry’s primary impulse is to escape the struggle and strife of the battlefield conflict. Ironically, though, the seeds of such vying lie planted within him. Pride, Henry’s distinctive vice, is at the root of all schisms, and the pride Henry felt in finally presenting himself to the world as a worthy soldier is not so far removed from the pride in the South Robert E. Lee relied on to lead his troops in defying the North.

Crane’s pervasive irony makes uncertain to what extent Henry’s illusions of himself are false. He is a vain boy, to be sure, but he deserves credit for shoring up against his fear and carrying his country’s flag bravely. He wades mainly in the intellectual shallows, but he merits praise for venturing forth as far as he dares. Henry is as complex and blameless, or to blame, as any human. Where our own illusions begin and end are just as vague.

The Short Stories of Henry James, Collected by Clifton Fadiman

2007-04-27T12:51:00.000-07:00

If Jane Austen's contributions to literature are, as she deprecatingly rendered them, "the little bit of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush," then Henry James' are scribbles made on napkins from a comfortable seat in his club. An unspecified ailment contracted in his youth hindered James from doing much more than that. A rich, untethered American who spent much of his life as a member of European society, James wrote prolifically on the dichotomy between old Europe's traditions and the new American ideals. His language is rich and often portentious, hinting at subterranean meanings. The words and ideas themselves are so substantial that they often form the bulk of his stories; in many, little overt action occurs at all.

Inaction in and of itself plays a major part in the stories collected here, especially within "The Great Good Place." A novelist, paralyzed by the minutiae of daily life, seeks out a refuge where he can live simply, and in doing so, simply live. James' picture of the "place" is bewitching, an earthbound utopia of cool gardens, tinkling bells, and gracious libraries. The novelist comes back to the real world in the end, though, for James fashions the place not as a final destination, but as a temporary vacation from pressing responsibilities.

James carries his theme of inaction further in "The Beast in the Jungle." A man is convinced something momentous is destined to spring upon him, like a beast, at some point in his life. He and a female friend spend years watching and waiting for it, until she, like a sort of feminine Cyrano de Bergerac, dies, and the man realizes she was what he had anticipated all his life. James insists it was the man's fate to live his entire life without doing anything of importance. Though an atheist, James relies unquestioningly, unironically, on fate to explain the motives and actions of many characters, à la Thomas Hardy. Why God is untenable but Fate ineffable is unclear.

James typically approaches things logically, though. He routinely draws characters not just as they are, but also as they see themselves and how they are perceived by others. Often the crux of a story involves a painful disillusionment, like when the son of a sculptor learns while abroad what true art is, and so discovers that his father's treasured oeuvre is far from it. James' stories often suggest a reflection of what strange delusions we all must live under.

James, like Austen, used his limited sphere of society to illuminate his understanding of universal truths. His meanings occasionally become obscured by his ornate prose, which, owing to merely perfunctory plots, sometimes usurps any meaning entirely, becoming an end in itself. The value in his work lies mainly in the more memorable of his observations and impressions, and in reflecting on what a life barely lived looks like from the all too lucid vantage point of its end.

The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton

2007-04-23T16:06:00.000-07:00

Really, this book should not have been about Lily Bart. Intriguing, misunderstood, sensitive to the higher planes of thought- maybe. But it's obvious she's the protagonist because she's flawlessly beautiful. Lily's beauty is her defining quality, her currency in the economy of society, the reason her mother loved her, and, as Wharton would have it, justification for her self-destructive tendencies. Lily's friend "poor" Gerty Farish is not so endowed. Forced to fend for herself because she lacks not just money but also that intangibly valuable resource, a pretty face, Gerty nevertheless supports herself, establishes myriad charities, and maintains a joyful, selfless mien throughout the novel. The passages that feature her perspective are welcome respites from the self-centered jeremiads of Lily.

But of course dowdy Gerty appears merely as a contrast to the unparalleled Lily, who is just as financially destitute. Rather than commit herself to the concerns of others, Lily is determined to rise to the forefront of New York's upper class. She fails miserably, but it is a long, slow fall from the pinnacle of society to a dingy room in a boardinghouse. Lily remains adamantly convinced that she can never be happy if she is not ever wallowing in luxury, and this conviction sustains the suspense of her desperate pursuit: it is only because the end is so final that her restoration into the good graces of the upper crust becomes painfully impossible.

Wharton insists that Lily is a product of her environment- that her mercenary matrimonial aims are seen as virtuous by society, that since she was born into comfort and raised in luxury it is only natural she should strive to maintain such. But Wharton would have Lily attuned at the same time to the "republic of the spirit." During a coquettish conversation with Laurence Selden, an aloofly intellectual lawyer, Lily suddenly finds herself face to face with the vapid, meaningless nature of her percuniary pursuit. Selden offhandedly relates his ideal of success- to live unrestrainedly, free from material concerns. Lily is simultaneously enthralled and despondent. "Why do you make the things I have chosen seem hateful to me if you have nothing to give me instead?" she cries. Lily is convinced that she can never be mindless of money if she does not possess a surfeit of it.

And truly, she never can. For, "what she craved and really felt herself entitled to was a situation in which the noblest attitude should also be the easiest," revealing her utter lack of integrity. Lily's love of luxury and her willingness to go to great lengths to secure it show only the shallowness of her character; her inability to forsake the futile chase and take a more meaningful tack, her selfishness. A lovely profile, smooth skin, and a taste for silken sheets do not "entitle" one to material wealth.

Gerty Farish, however, remains steadfast in her universal goodwill and her devotion to her friend, mastering even her unrequited affinity for Laurence Selden in doing all she can for Lily. Gerty is the first one on the scene when Lily is inevitably found dead of a sedative overdose. Compassionate, selfless, determined to do what she could with her lot in life, Gerty was the true heroine. Lily was just another pretty face.

The Brothers Karamazov by Feodor Dostoevsky

2007-04-15T18:27:00.000-07:00

It may be 19th-century Russia, and it may be a world in which a boy can confound his teachers with the question of who founded Troy because he owns the only book in town with the answer, but the intellectuals of Dostoevsky's day struggled with the same fundamental issues that divide society now. Atheistic socialism and progressive empiricism undermine the tradition and authority of religion on a broad social scale, while individuals wrestle personally with these competing worldviews.

In The Brothers Karamazov, this individual drama is personified by the eponymous brothers. Abandoned by their licentious father in their childhood, the boys reach a tentative reconciliation with him as young adults. But he is murdered, and suspicion falls upon Dmitri, the eldest. Dmitri, passionate and impulsive, lives almost entirely to please himself, and this does not help his case during the ensuing trial.

Ivan, the middle brother, has embraced skeptical materialism, intending to get all he can out of life before "dash[ing] the cup to the ground" at thirty. Alexey, the youngest, is thoughtful and congenial, open-hearted, emanating universal goodwill. It is through him that Dostoevsky projects his ideal philosophy of life and living, though for much of the book Alexey merely listens and observes attentively as others attempt to foist their views on him.

Indeed, the zenith of the book's philosophical discourse occurs as Ivan presents his poem in prose form, "The Grand Inquisitor," to Alexey. In a powerful, railing diatribe, Ivan's inquisitor, a Catholic priest, interrogates Jesus. "Didst Thou forget that man prefers peace, and even death, to freedom of choice in the knowledge of good and evil?" The priest insists that pacifying the people and appeasing them is more loving and merciful than burdening them with free will. "Thou didst not come down [from the cross], for again Thou wouldst not enslave man by a miracle, and didst crave faith given freely...But Thou didst think too highly of men therein, for they are slaves." All the time he speaks Jesus is silent, and when the priest finishes, He rises and gives him a kiss upon his forehead.

In the same way, Alexey remains quiet for much of the novel, interjecting intermittently but mainly watching his family's sordid drama unfold. The concluding chapter, however, represents his longest speech, a benediction to the group of boys he befriends through their classmate Ilusha's fatal sickness. After Ilusha dies. Alexey beseeches the boys to retain the love and sense of comity that they felt for their friend, and he joyfully assures them that they will meet again, if not in this life, then in the next. His buoyant, steadfast sentiments are made more poignant in the wake of the demeaning injustice of his father's murder trial, and of the myriad disavowals of the faith so dear to him that Alexey endures.

A Doll's House by Henrik Ibsen

2007-04-09T18:41:00.000-07:00

Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen examines the plight of a ninteenth-century housewife. The text reads fluidly and compellingly, with little action but with much poignant conversation. Despite the brevity of the play and Ibsen's economical style, the characters are intimately drawn, and drastically altered by the end.

Nora, the housewife, feigns a carefree devotion to her husband and children, but she harbors secret obligations. When, years before, her husband Torvald had fallen so ill the doctor insisted he must go abroad, Nora forged her father's signature and obtained a loan so they could travel. By cajoling money from her husband under the pretense of frivolity, she has almost managed to pay her debt. But the man who holds the bond, Krogstad, is fired by his manager, Nora's husband, and so he threatens to expose her forgery, impugning both the couple. Nora confesses to Torvald, privately hoping he would recognize her love for him and take the blame upon himself, but he rages against her instead. They discover Krogstad has sent them the bond, releasing them, and so Torvald apologizes, expecting they can continue on as before. But Nora has discovered that her relationship with him is fundamentally grounded in deception, and so, to discover how to live in uninhibited truth, she leaves.

While it is morally reprehensible for a mother to abandon her family under such a tenuous pretense, the essential theme is very revealing. Ibsen identifies the dilemma that women have spent the better part of the 20th century trying to solve: What is the female's position in society? Nora, sheltered, petted, and coddled all her life, knows only what has been dictated to her. She feels, and rightly so, as any educator would tell you, that she needs to discover knowledge on her own. Unfortunately, once she married, and more importantly, once she bore children, she really relinquished her rights to explore the world on her own. She has a duty to herself as a human being, certainly, but she has a greater duty to her children, who have all the same rights as individuals added to the dependency of juvenility. To marry and to procreate may not have been entirely of her own volition, but that does not negate the responsibility that she bears as a wife and mother.

Discovering oneself and establishing a satisfactory position in society is honorable, but not worth dissolving one's family for. The relationship between parent and child is the most fundamental, organic one in all the world, and to violate it constitutes one of the most damaging, far-reaching sins. Nora needed a measure of self-actualization, but she should have remained with her children to discover it, because that is where she would have found it evetually, if she sought honestly and deeply.

The Inferno by Dante Alighieri

2007-04-02T18:38:00.000-07:00

Audacity may be Dante's chief virtue. In his ambitious allegory of a trip to the innermost rings of Hell, he dares to rank himself with the great poets of ancient Rome, and with his supreme self-confidence, he succeeds. Guided by Virgil, Dante is privileged to witness the fury of the Inferno without partaking of it. He meets all manner of sinners, from infamous figures of the past to his own recently deceased contemporaries, each one consigned to an eternity of torture specifically tailored to fit his most significant sin. Those who tried to divine the future in life can only look backward in death; murders and wanton warriors eternally drown in a river of blood; sodomites, reflecting the sterility of their acts, continually rove a barren desert.

"[I]t is no easy undertaking," says Dante, "to describe the bottom of the Universe," but he manages it excellently. His illustrations of the underworld are luridly, fantastically detailed. He tells of the endless whirlwind to which the carnal are condemned: "I came to a place stripped bare of every light / and roaring on the naked dark like seas / wracked by a war of winds." As he plumbs deeper into the bowels of the earth, Dante becomes superbly gruesome and fabulous in his rendering of suffering. Enemies gnaw one another's heads; men morph involuntarily into reptiles; Judas Iscariot, Dante's ultimate sinner, is suspended in Satan's mouth at the center of Hell, immobilized in an immense floe of ice.

As an allegory, the symbolism is as multilayered and fathomless as the Inferno itself. One of the more obvious and intriguing figures is Virgil, as the light of human reason. Though he is a pagan predating Christ, Dante implies he can still bring spiritual illumination. Virgil, with his wisdom and discretion, leads Dante safely through the perilous abyss and shows him the way to salvation by ascending with him to the gates of Heaven. He cannot, however, journey with Dante farther, demonstrating that human reason can only get one so far.

"I did not dare descend to his own level / but kept my head inclined, as one who walks / in reverence meditating good and evil." Dante converses with the condemned, but he is careful to maintain a safe distance between himself and them. He derives instruction from their mistakes, learning how better to stay on the path of the "True Way." Through sedulous circumspection, he manages to be in their wretched world, but not of it.

Dante's audaciously lofty poetic aspirations were crucial to the effective execution of such a comprehensive delineation. He itemizes nearly every major sin and assigns appropriate punishments to suit them. It is such a terribly attractive idea, to think that every significant action can be put into a neat theological category, that it is no wonder the Comedy became so widely revered. However, this concept of a linear condemnation, like Purgatory, has little biblical basis. Dante does provide some excellent spiritual insights, though, and his literary merit is undeniable.

Anthem by Ayn Rand

2007-03-25T14:58:00.000-07:00

Ayn Rand's oeuvre consists mainly of allegorical fiction that illustrates her philosophy of Objectivism, and Anthem serves as a brief introduction to her canon. The book describes some point in the indeterminate future in which society has progressed to the ultimate extrapolation of universal brotherhood: the word "I" has been abolished from the language. One man escapes, and he discovers that the life he had been forced to live - solely for the common good, not belonging to himself - was a subversion of his true nature, a disgracefully unnatural state.

"[I]t must not matter to us whether we live or die, which is to be as our brothers will it. But we, Equality 7-2521, are glad to be living. If this is a vice, then we wish no virtue." After being punished for trying to introduce a rudimentary form of electricity to his brethren, Equality steals off into the Undiscovered Forest, liberating himself from the despotic dominion of collectivism. He stumbles upon an abandoned house filled with strange books that contain the Forbidden Word that has haunted and eluded him all his life.

The book is simple and concise, containing just enough to adequately address Rand’s thesis: the purpose of existence is the exaltation of the individual. That is the underlying theme of Objectivism, which Rand bases on reason and places in direct opposition to Communism and any less extreme variants thereof. She posits that “[m]an – every man – is an end in himself, not a means to the ends of others; he must live for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself; he must work for his rational self-interest, with the achievement of his own happiness as the highest moral purpose of his life.”

Leonard Peikoff, in his introduction to Anthem, recognizes that the ego as supreme is antithetical to most religions, to which, as an atheist, he found no objection. Unfortunately, without an authority unhampered by the limitations of nature, Objectivism is philosophically incomplete. Whence comes the right of the individual to his pursuit of happiness? Rand was a devoted admirer of the capitalist American political system, considering it the political embodiment of her philosophy. When justifying the existence of the United States, Jefferson attributed this right of the individual to a Creator, as indeed he must have done, for from no other source can such a right originate, least of all from the moral vacuum of atheism.

Moreover, Objectivism champions reason; but how can reason exist outside ourselves without an overarching authority to legitimize and standardize it? We may be able to form a consensus of what is reasonable, but we may all be wrong. Even in Anthem’s dystopia, the World Council, who subdued the masses with their dogmatic decrees, surely believed they were acting reasonably. One man rebelled according to what he thought was right, but who has the authority among us to say whether he was or not? Reason cannot be self-determined.

If one allows for God, however, the worldview becomes much easier to substantiate. Indeed, traces of thought sympathetic to Christianity continually emerge in the book. “It is not good to be different from our brothers,” recites Equality, “but it is evil to be superior to them.” C.S. Lewis echoes these sentiments in “Screwtape Proposes a Toast”: “Their consciousness hardly exists apart from the social atmosphere that surrounds them,” making humans that much easier to subvert and destroy.

But Christianity triumphs the individual only insofar as his worth as a child of God, his distinctions only insofar as they reflect the gifts God has bestowed on him, and his rights only insofar as those God has granted him. Without God, Objectivism is impotent. If a secularist, however, could bring himself to accept the premises of the philosophy, it is there that perhaps its greatest merit could be found – as an atheistic defense of laissez-faire capitalism.

While Objectivism’s “man-worship” in the context of Christianity is fairly nauseating, atheism can have no objection here. Anthem graphically illustrates the nakedness of working for the common good with no moral impetus to do so. Wishful thinking though it may be, secularists would do well to adopt such an outlook and throw their lot in with the capitalist Christian Right.

Agnes Grey by Anne Brontë

2007-03-23T13:48:00.000-07:00

"I began this book with the intention of concealing nothing; that those who liked might have the benefit of perusing a fellow-creature's heart," says Agnes Grey. As the pages of her book unfold, the delightful nuances of Agnes,’ and by association Brontë’s, personality do too. Agnes, daughter of an impoverished clergyman, insists, upon turning eighteen, that she find herself a position as governess to aid the family. She endures nightmarish pupils, haughty employers, and the loneliness of making her way on her own, but she manages to maintain a cheerful demeanor, a cool head, and a firm resolve in God.

Agnes is an excellent, introspective first-person narrator; Brontë 's tone is gratifyingly confidential and, subsequently, strangely modern. Of her sisters, Anne must have been the witty one. When Agnes is summoned by the servant of her capricious charges with "'You're to go to the school-room directly, mum- the young ladies is WAITING!!,'" she comments, "Climax of horror! Actually waiting for their governess!!!"

Agnes is shy and bookish, but her retiring tendencies lend her the steadfastness and circumspection that she relies on. When she inevitably develops a preference for a certain sober-minded curate, she remains beautifully logical even in the midst of her infatuation, refusing to read into any ostensible signals and diligently tempering her ardor with common sense. Watching the flirtations of her pretty student, she wonders "why so much beauty should be given to those who made so bad a use of it, and denied to some who would make it a benefit both to themselves and others," identifying that incessant Brontëan conundrum that Charlotte first identified in Jane Eyre.

Edward Weston, however, cares not for such worldly considerations. The curate pursues Agnes, and the conclusion finds them satisfactorily situated and determined to face any future travails together. They both possess sound religious beliefs. Weston declares his sole purpose in life is to be useful to others. Agnes criticizes a clergyman for his heavy reliance on the writings of the church fathers and his dissuading laypeople from reading the Bible unaided. In an amusing piece of scriptural justification, she uses Philippians 4:8 ("Whatsoever things are good...") to excuse her thinking about Weston as he gives the Sunday morning message.

This book reminded me of why I read. There is nothing quite like opening a book and discovering a complete stranger who is more familiar than many real-life acquaintances. Agnes is reasonable, intelligent, forthright, funny, insightful - I could understand how she thought and why she acted as she did. I could sympathize with her and root for her, and I could be eminently satisfied when she ended happily. Agnes Grey is a straightforward, unadorned, sincere portrait of a sensible, thoughtful girl, and I loved it.

Mindless Eating by Brian Wansink

2007-03-13T18:34:00.001-07:00

I loved this book so much that when I was going through it to compile my notes I found myself reading it all over again. Like Freakonomics, it's a case of an expert applying science to real life, conducting dry, straightforward experiments and interpreting them, uncovering fascinating truths about how we eat and why we do so. Wansink is an eminent scientist who sets out to answer questions such as, "Why do we overeat food that doesn't even taste good?" He compiles data from dozens of studies to support his conclusions, writing all the time with a delightful authority and a familiar confidence.

Many of Wansink's hypotheses are intuitive concepts verified by objective investigation. He renames the snacks at a Vacation Bible School and runs out of the "Rainforest Smoothie" - really just vegetable juice. He finds that thinking a food is special or will taste good predisposes one to like it, and makes one more satisified with the overall dining experience.

"[W]e're pretty much clueless about when we've had enough," Wansink says, demonstrating that our stomachs don't keep count. We were designed to crave sweet, salty, fat-filled foods, and to eat as much of them as possible. Even one hundred years ago this penchant would have been a boon to our survival, but our food supply has changed faster than our tastes have, and now rather than perishing from hunger, our lives are cut short by obesity. Clearly our habits need to change.

Wansink identifies many such habits, like the "eating scripts" we automatically follow - when we go to the movies we eat popcorn; when we come home from work we have a snack - that can be altered or circumvented with a little mindfulness. For instance, "people don't eat calories, they eat volume," so using smaller plates and filling them with healthier choices can radically improve one's perception of satiety and overall nutritional intake.

Wansink does not demonize the food industry as others - Morgan Spurlock, most notably - have done. He instead insists that major corporations are out to make money, not fat people, and that they'd be just as happy if we bought their products and then threw them away. Moreover, he says, "We cannot legislate or tax people into eating" healthily. If they want to, they will; if they don't, well, they should have that choice.

Wansink has either an excellent command of the English language or a superb editor. The book has few, if any, typos, a rare achievement for a first edition. His voice is strong and controlled, bolstered by the authority of scientific evidence and tempered by his affability and genuine desire to help people with the discoveries he has made.

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

2007-03-12T20:30:00.000-07:00

Okonkwo is a prominent African tribesman whose world falls apart when Europeans begin to colonize it. Despite his inauspicious childhood, Okonkwo rises to a place of respected authority in his clan through diligent, persistent hard work. He establishes a farm large enough to support three wives and their children. But his eldest son Nwoye does not share his father's devotion to the tribe nor his ambitions to reign in it, and so when Christian missionaries come, Nwoye converts. His father, disgusted, disowns him, and he begins a campaign to drive out the new religion. But Okonkwo is alone in his ardent persecution, and after his murder of an official fails to incite a revolt, he hangs himself.

Okonkwo burns with a fervent loyalty to tradition and position. He accepts unquestioningly the dictates of the elders and disdains any who fall out of line with his ideal of strong, masculine adherence to society and unceasing industry. "He had no patience with unsuccessful men," Achebe says of him. This is his tragic flaw: his inability to cope with progress and unyielding demand for perfection. Achebe writes concisely and decisively. He uses a stripped-down English smattered with African phrases that emphasizes the earthy authenticity of the story. He includes folklore and fables and songs, creating a cultural context. The overall effect is beautiful and mesmerizing.

The arrival of the Christians is the vehicle for Okonkwo's downfall. Achebe details the mistreatment the Africans suffer at the hands of the white soldiers who eventually arrive and he illustrates the deterioration of the natives' culture when they assimilate. But Achebe himself converted to Christianity while living in Africa. His sympathies are evident through Nwoye, when he hears the newcomers preach: "The words of the hymn were like the drops of frozen rain melting on the dry palate of the panting earth." He shows how the Christians abolish the tribal superstitions, accepting the outcasts and rescuing the infant twins clanspeople are under compulsion to abandon in the bush. Achebe's aim seems to be a balanced objectivity.

The book is unavoidably profound. One cannot help but admire the steadfastness of this noble savage and mourn the tragedy of his demise. But his irrationality and unwavering trust in brute strength render him unable to entertain further revelations of truth. Okonkwo was sincere but sincerely wrong, as it were. Achebe maintains respect for the culture while gently denouncing the superstitions of his native Africa.

The American by Henry James

2007-03-09T18:33:00.000-08:00

Christopher Newman, lately possessed of a sizeable fortune amassed through years of conscious endeavor in trade in America, decides to throw it all off and go abroad. He has only a vague idea of what he seeks, but what he finds is an enchanting woman who answers his feminine ideal. Madame de Cintré returns his affections, but their engagement is broken by her aristocratic family, who scorn the idea of a common businessman attaining her hand. Newman strives valiantly to win her, but is eventually forced to abandon the matter forever.

Newman is just that - arisen out of obscurity to a self-generated place of prosperity. Easy-going, forthright, warm, congenial, and open, he is a credit to his country. "You take things too coolly," says a European acquaintance. "It exasperates me. And then you are too happy. You have what must be the most agreeable thing in the world, the consciousness of having bought your pleasure beforehand and paid for it." Indeed, he feels, as Americans are wont to do, that most anything can be bought, and in America this is at least true of position. One's origins have little bearing on one's place in society; hard work is virtuous, something to be commended.

But Newman's would-be in-laws take quite the opposite view, living on little else but the glory of their ancient lineage. They shun Newman for his industry while inhabiting a moldering house emblematic of their waning finances. They find Newman's proposal audaciously incomprehensible; Newman is just as incapable of understanding their indignation. "[H]is sense of human equality was not an aggressive taste or an aesthetic theory, but something as natural and organic as a physical appetite which had never been put on a scanty allowance." That his antecedents have any importance to them baffles him.

As Newman later finds, high birth is certainly no indication of high morals. He behaves honorably throughout the degrading ordeal to which his fiancée’s relatives subject him, and he emerges blameless and unscathed. Unfortunately, he also comes out without a wife. Madame de Cintré commits herself to a nunnery to escape the contrivances of her family.

It is too bad that Newman is treated so terribly, for he is a decent protagonist, pleasantly sociable, confident and uninhibited. "He himself was almost never bored, and there was no man with whom it would have been a greater mistake to suppose that silence meant displeasure." He views the Continent with "a placid, fathomless sense of diversion." That world, however, does not look as kindly on him.

The American by Henry James

2007-03-05T21:28:00.000-08:00

Christopher Newman, lately possessed of a sizeable fortune amassed through years of conscious endeavor in trade in America, decides to throw it all off and go abroad. He has only a vague idea of what he seeks, but what he finds is an enchanting woman who answers his feminine ideal. Madame de Cintre returns his affections, but their engagement is broken by her aristocratic family, who scorn the idea of a common businessman attaining her hand. Newman strives valiantly to win her, but is eventually forced to abandon the matter forever.

Newman is just that - arisen out of obscurity to a self-generated place of prosperity. Easy-going, forthright, warm, congenial, and open, he is a credit to his country. "You take things too coolly," says a European acquaintance. "It exasperates me. And then you are too happy. You have what must be the most agreeable thing in the world, the consciousness of having bought your pleasure beforehand and paid for it." Indeed, he feels, as Americans are wont to do, that most anything can be bought, and in America this is at least true of position. One's origins have little bearing on one's place in society; hard work is virtuous, something to be commended.

But Newman's would-be in-laws take quite the opposite view, living on little else but the glory of their ancient lineage. They shun Newman for his industry while inhabiting a moldering house emblematic of their waning finances. They find Newman's proposal audaciously incomprehensible; Newman is just as incapable of understanding their indignation. "[H]is sense of human equality was not an aggressive taste or an aesthetic theory, but something as natural and organic as a physical appetite which had never been put on a scanty allowance." That his antecedents have any importance to them baffles him.

As Newman later finds, high birth is certainly no indication of high morals. He behaves honorably throughout the degrading ordeal to which his fiancée’s relatives subject him, and he emerges blameless and unscathed. Unfortunately, he also comes out without a wife. Madame de Cintre commits herself to a nunnery to escape the contrivances of her family.

It is too bad that Newman is treated so terribly, for he is a decent protagonist, pleasantly sociable, confident and uninhibited. "He himself was almost never bored, and there was no man with whom it would have been a greater mistake to suppose that silence meant displeasure." He views the Continent with "a placid, fathomless sense of diversion." That world, however, does not look as kindly on him.

Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

2007-02-28T18:58:00.000-08:00

If Little Women were a comestible, it would be like milk and honey: wholesome, mild, and nourishing, to be sure; but sweet, so sweet, almost unbearably so; and moreover, replete with biblical connotations. Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy are the March girls, and Alcott, drawing on her childhood, chronicles a turbulent year in their lives. Their father is a Union soldier in the Civil War, and the family's finances are precarious, so the girls and their mother manage as best they can while maintaining their moral fortitude and love and commitment to each other.

The book is soaked with the flavor of the 1800s, evoking an era in which a girl could reach the age of sixteen without ever having looked at a boy as more than a friend, and then at seventeen become engaged. But though Marmee and Papa take the traditionally staid views of propriety in relationships, their position on women's rights is strikingly progressive. They accept the necessity of sending the older girls to work, and encourage useful endeavor. When Papa returns home, he commends Meg: "I remember a time when this hand was white and smooth...this hardened palm has earned something better than blisters."

Altogether the girls are excellent examples of solid Protestant work ethic. They assume their duties as cheerfully as they can, and though they err from time to time, they are quick to amend their follies. They entertain themselves well and get along most of the time, performing plays, hosting clubs, and assembling newspapers. Even their leisure is admirable. When asked about her plans for summer vacation, Jo replies, "'I've laid in a heap of books, and I'm going to improve my shining hours reading on my perch in the old apple-tree.'"

Alcott based Jo on herself, reflecting her penchant for literature. The novel is full of educated allusions, from Shakespeare to Dickens to Thackeray. But it is apparent that the author was rather young when she wrote the book. Many passages suffer from facile sentence constructions and a wordiness awkward even for the time in which they were written. Alcott seems to be afraid of "said;" one finds, in the first chapter alone, to wit: "grumbled," "sighed," "added," "cried," "began," "advised," "returned," "observed," "sang," "continued," "answered," "announced," and "exclaimed."

Much of Little Women reads like a primer. The tone tends toward didactic and the moral lessons are quite overt. The girls face adversity, but they are steadfast, and everything comes right in the end. Characters are developed admirably. The story is exceedingly instructive, suitably nutritious for the children it was obviously written for, but perhaps too treacly for the likes of me.

Silence by Shusaku Endo

2007-02-26T20:25:00.000-08:00

Another recommendation by Will, the father of the boy I watch, this book was just as incongruous with what I'd think he'd like, though it was utterly removed from the former, The Bone People. A Portuguese priest travels to Japan in the 1600s to minister to the persecuted believers there. He is captured and forced to renounce his faith by stepping on a portrait of Christ. Throughout his Japanese sojourn he struggles with the seeming silence of God, but after he apostatizes he realizes that God had been with him all the time.

"It is easy enough to die for the good and beautiful," says Rodrigues, the priest, "the hard thing is to die for the miserable and corrupt." When Rodrigues meets the Japanese Christians, he is struck by the squalor of their lives and their desperate existence. But despite their poverty they manage to feed and harbor him until he is betrayed to the persecuting authorities, who are ardently striving to eradicate any traces of what they view as the religion of the West. The Japanese officials refuse to believe their people can comprehend Christianity in its Western context, insisting that any professing Christians there adhere only to their own corrupted understanding of their native Buddhism.

Rodrigues does not see them this way. Upon observing a Japanese believer's poignant rendition of a hymn as he is martyred, Rodrigues reflects, "Life in this world is too painful for these Japanese peasants. Only by relying on 'the temple of Paradise' have they been able to go on living." There are no noble savages here, no blissful ignorants. Christianity achieved something for these people that their indigenous teaching lacked.

Rodrigues publicly renounces his faith in a complex inner struggle that leads paradoxically to a rejuvenation of his devotion to his God. "He loved him now in a different way from before. Everything that had taken place until now had been necessary to bring him to this love." It is as if when stripped of his trappings of Catholicism - the priesthood, the sacred veneration of icons - Rodrigues discovers the heart of Christianity and depth of God's love and mercy for him.

The novel was translated from the Japanese, and the writing was as pure and unadorned as haiku. I don't know that I've ever read a work of Japanese literature, and I'm pleased my initial foray was a book so sympathetic toward my own beliefs. Endo was a Christian, after all, and he believed that if Christianity wasn't true in Japan, then it wasn't true anywhere.

The Bone People by Keri Hulme

2007-02-22T18:15:00.000-08:00

So one day Will, the father of the little boy I babysit, picked me up as per usual, and, upon his noticing the books that accompanied me, we began talking about what he had read in college. He told me he had loved his World Lit class, and when we got to his house he pulled this book off a shelf, saying, "I've read this three times. It's really great; it's about these people in New Zealand who go to this tower where this woman lives and they're all kind of troubled and they sort of help each other...well, you'll just have to read it." So I did.

Kerewin Holmes is a part-Maori self-sufficient financially independent painter-reader-writer living in a custom-built tower on the New Zealand coast. One day she comes home and discovers a thin, blond, mute boy in her living room. She finds that his name is Simon, and she contacts his father Joe and returns him to his home. Joe invites her over for dinner the next night, she reciprocates, and soon all their lives are intertwined. Kerewin learns that Joe adopted Simon after he washed up on shore one night, the lone survivor of a shipwreck, and that Joe's wife and son died shortly after, leaving the two alone. She also finds that, when drunk, Joe punishes Simon severely, though Simon feels he deserves it and so it just makes him love his father more. But one night Joe's blows send him to the hospital. Months of soul-searching, healing, and repentance find them all reconciled in the end.

The book is altogether strikingly individual. Literate allusions abound in the mind of Kerewin, who is well-read and familiar with French and Latin, as well as fluent in English and Maori. She has a keen ear for language and sound that becomes apparent as the sometimes stream-of-consciousness narrative follows her mental rabbit-paths of rhyme and word-play. She is clever, though at times a little too precious, like when she refers to herself as "Sherlock" - her last name is Holmes - and marvels that she never came up with that before. The distinct culture of New Zealand plays a major part in the individuality of the novel. Maori words are interspersed between the audibly accented English: "Berloody cheeky, mate."

An outré spirituality harbored by the characters pervades the book. They combine Maori spritualism with a brand of missionary Christianity and puerile superstitious mysticism in a confusing conglomeration of beliefs. Kerewin keeps a book of religious writings that includes Buddhist and Hindu texts among her own musings, as well as select books of the Bible. Simon sees auras around people, and Joe is visited by an ostensibly prophetic old Maori chief.

Though things eventually come right, Simon and Joe's relationship forms a terribly sick situation, and it makes the book an uncomfortable one. Kerewin's cold seclusion, too, is unnatural and undesirable, though also rectified by the denouement. The book is engrossing, but not necessarily something I'd want to read more than once. So why did Will - Cubs fan, mathematics major, Mac enthusiast, Guitar Hero champ - read it thrice?

Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy

2007-02-19T19:17:00.000-08:00

The Return of the Native and The Mayor of Casterbridge may both have been as gloomy as the English moors, but Hardy contrived happy endings for at least some of the characters. In Tess, however, Hardy declines any pretense of nicety, submitting his hapless protagonists to increasingly tragic circumstances, culminating in a bitter denouement.

Tess, ill-advised ingenue of the English countryside, is raped by a licentious aristocrat, Alec D'Urberville, and the resulting infant dies shortly after its birth. Tess seeks employment as a dairymaid miles from her home, to escape the scorn of her neighbors and earn money for her impoverished family. A young well-to-do man, Angel Clare, falls in love with her and convinces her, despite her misgivings, to marry him. On their wedding night, Clare confesses to her a night of debauchery in the city, and so, assured, Tess reveals to him her similar past. But Clare is distraught by her revelation, and leaves her.

D'Urberville returns to pursue her in this vulnerable state, and she passively relinquishes herself to him in her hopelessness when he offers to provide for her impoverished family. Clare, repentant, finds them together. Tess kills her lover, rejoins her husband for a few weeks of pleasure, and is subsequently discovered and hanged.

Hardy's prescient pessimism anticipates, or perhaps ushers in, the effects of Darwinism on Western beliefs in the 20th century. Clare, son of an evangelical minister, professes an appreciation of Christianity but denies the verity of its supernatural elements. Tess readily assumes his "rational" views, having always harbored a faith tenuous at best. D'Urberville undergoes a radical conversion halfway through the novel, becoming a traveling preacher. But a brush with Tess, and her iteration of her husband's philosophies is enough to kill his emotional Christianity. Upon renouncing his beliefs, he renews his assault of Tess. "'O why didn't you keep your faith, if the loss of it has brought you to speak to me like this!'" she cries to him.

What Tess doesn't understand is that it just cannot be that way. One cannot have a standard without authority behind it; there is no moral code without God. Clare, full of ideals and clearly endowed with a sense of right and wrong, expects Tess to forgive him his pre-marital dalliance without any qualms, but finds himself unable to to the same for her. He later accepts her companionship, though she has added to her offenses murder. His self-fashioned ethics are startlingly inconsistent.

Hardy purports to write an indictment of ineffable Fate, but all he truly demonstrates is the futility of relativism.

Crime and Punishment by Feodor Dostoevsky

2007-02-12T16:25:00.000-08:00

I avoided this book for a long time because I have mixed feelings about Russian literature, and didn't want to commit myself to a long book I might not enjoy. Chekhov's profundity was entirely lost on me, and I only got two-thirds of the way through War and Peace before the people at the Jeopardy! tryouts told me to just stop and watch the movie instead. But I liked Turgenev's Fathers and Sons, and Tolstoy redeemed himself for me with The Death of Ivan Ilych. I'd heard Crime and Punishment had a redemptive ending, and so, after chastising myself for balking at a novel because of its length - "Since when am I one to pass on a book because it's too long?" - I checked it out.

It turns out I didn't want it to end. I felt nothing lost in translation here; the writing was forceful and immediate. Dostoevsky is a superb storyteller: he infuses the plot with action right from the beginning, honing in on the key players of his drama and sticking with them. Rodion Romanov Raskolnikov is an impoverished young man who, amidst the turmoil of mid-19th century Russia, puts his pet theory of moral relativism into practice by murdering and robbing an old moneylender and her sister. The novel follows Raskolnikov as he tries to make sense of what he has done, detailing his subsequent states of mind - hallucination, recklessness, rationalization, indifference, and finally remorse and repentance.

It is primarily a novel of the mind, and Raskolnikov's inner dialogue is fascinating. He, even at his most irrational, is eminently believable as he discovers just what a "miserable wretch" he truly is. The personalities of his friends, enemies, and family are just as engaging. Russia seems so remote, but the story is so universal. Raskolnikov realizes his depravity, and like Ivan Ilych, asks himself the essential questions: "What should he strive for? To live in order to exist?"

Raskolnikov's salvation is borne by Sofya Marmeladov, whose steadfast devotion to him brings about his final restoration. "There was a New Testament under his pillow...It was hers, the very one from which she had read to him the raising of Lazarus." Like Lazarus, Raskolnikov returns to light and life after being submerged in death and darkness.

Dostoevsky effectively denounces the atheism of 19th-century Russian intellectuals with his masterful, deft pen. His novel is a spellbinding account of a criminal's psychological plight, the striking image of a destitute man ensnared by his own misguided ideals. Raskolnikov mocks religion and the devout, ensconcing himself in jaded, indifferent disbelief. It is not until the very last page that Dostoevsky gives him his answer to the eternal question; the answer to the eternal question.

The Best Short Stories of O. Henry

2007-02-05T18:38:00.000-08:00

I was making my way methodically through the fiction section of our little local library recently, and when I got to the "O" section, I paused. In between the O'Haras and the O'Neills, I found an O. Henry. I sincerely hope a librarian did not put it there. I returned the book to its proper place, where, coincidentally, I had just minutes before selected a volume by the same author.

I've run into Henry's stories periodically throughout school, in various anthologies, and I've yet to read a piece of his that isn't thoroughly enjoyable. He manages his medium deftly, suffusing his abbreviated narratives with easily grasped characters and adorning his denouements with perpetually unpredicatable irony. Irony is of course Henry's hallmark; he is the father of the unexpected twist. His stories are essentially all about the experience of reading them - the bulk of each serves mainly as the setting for the jewel of the concluding line.

Suspense propels most of the plots. But it is not solely the suspense over what is to happen next; often it involves discovering why the story is worth reading at all. Many of Henry's tales appear quite mundane at the outset; they proceed pleasantly but not extraordinarily, and so the payoff for the reader does not occur until that very last line. Much like a Hitchcock movie, the plot in its entirety comes full circle only at the end.

But that's not to say the beginnings and the middles of the stories don't offer up their own merits. Henry writes with a garish verbosity whose audacity would disgrace a lesser writer, but which in Henry's hands becomes exciting and ultimately endearing, as he expertly wields words like "eleemosynary" and "peripatetic." He assumes the dialects of Americans as varied as his surprise endings, from New Yorkers to Texans to Mississippians. He procures excellent metaphors: "They had the appearance of men to whom life had appeared as a reversible coat - seamy on both sides."

Henry treats his characters tenderly, sympathizing with the plights of his hoboes and shopgirls, not too stingy to refuse them a few happy endings. Irony is invariably cruel to the ficitional pawn of fate, but Henry often strives to lessen the sting. In his classic "The Gift of the Magi," he lauds his innocent protagonists: "Of all who give and receive gifts, such as they are wisest."

Henry manages to be both sardonic and sweet in a delightful blend of irony and sentimentality. It's a pity that misguided library shelf stacker had apparently never heard of him.

A Death in the Family by James Agee

2007-01-28T16:44:00.000-08:00

It sounds depressing, and it is, but it is also quite beautiful. Agee illustrates a young family’s noble struggle to comprehend the loss of their husband and father and move on. Jay crashes his automobile on his way home late one night, and he is killed instantly. His death devastates all his relations - that a young father, who worked out of his native rural poverty to attain a respected place in the middle class, who had recently conquered his alcoholism and reconciled himself to his wife, who had two tiny children to raise - that he should be alive one moment and gone forever the next, overwhelms them.

Agee's voice, as in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, is subdued but arresting. He writes in a mesmerizing cadence of prose, an unparalleled lilting song; his works are a melancholy ode to humanity. He describes his characters and their world in furious detail, invoking all the senses and imbuing the novel with a shocking degree of authenticity. His portrayals of sounds ring in the ears with unsurpassed verisimilitude. His is a severe but thoroughly accurate realism.

The intensely realistic nature of the book is due, no doubt, to its autobiographical origins. Agee's own father died in the same manner as Jay when Agee was six; Jay's six-year-old son Rufus bears Agee's middle name. Rufus' bewilderment and anguish in the wake of the events form some of the most poignant elements in the book; Agee's careful delineation of a young boy's thoughts surely bespeaks his own recollections.

The book must have functioned, therefore, as a tribute to his father. For Agee's work transcends reality, assuming a sort of symbolically charged air. Under his pen real life becomes loftier, more poetic, more important, drenched in deep emotion; fervently grounded in practical matters but simultaneously reaching for ethereal heights. He permits some of his characters a belief in the supernatural, and is on the whole sympathetic towards them, allowing them to cry out to God with the utmost sincerity. Spirituality pervades his work.

The novel inevitably leads one to ponder mortality, as all deaths do. In a society in which accidental deaths are increasingly rarer, and life spans are continually lengthening, these times of reflection are not as prevalent. Agee's book, then, in its ferocious veracity and breathless immediacy, functions as that reminder, urging self-evaluation on the reader: What would I do if someone close to me died? Am I ready to die?

Agee himself died rather young, at 45, of a heart attack. He never saw his book published and so did not enjoy the acclaim of the entirely deserved Pulitzer Prize that it would bring him.

The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James

2007-01-18T13:54:00.000-08:00

Henry James, in sketching his Portrait, takes a young, idealistic woman and explores the detour her fortunes take when she inherits a fortune from her uncle. Isabel Archer's aunt proposes to escort her across Europe after her father dies. Isabel charms her relations and so finds herself financially independent upon her uncle's decease. Isabel is largely self-educated, having spent much of her adolescence steeped in books; from literature she extracted a varied brew of self-aware knowledge and untempered opinions. "She had a theory that it was only on this condition that life was worth living; that one should be one of the best, should be conscious of a fine organization (she could not help knowing her organization was fine), should move in a realm of light, of natural wisdom, of happy impulse, of inspiration gracefully chronic."

Isabel has lots of theories, in fact, and her newfound riches allow her to execute them. "She always returned to her theory that a young woman whom after all everyone thought clever should begin by getting a general impression of life." Isabel embarks upon her European tour. While she considers marriage important, she strives to achieve a destiny and identification without having to marry advantageously. She refuses the hands of several worthy suitors, but she is eventually captivated by a destitute widower whose good taste, veneer of decorum, ostensibly humble existence, and good favor by Madame Merle, a friend of Isabel's, do much to recommend him to her. Defying the misgivings of her relatives, she weds him.

Though she is years in discovering it, Isabel's marriage is solely mercenary on her husband's part. When a wedding occurs in the very middle of a book, depend upon it to be unfortunate. Isabel learns that Madame Merle is the illegitimate mother of her husband's daughter, and the motive behind Merle's encouragement of the courtship becomes apparent to her. Distraught over this discovery, Isabel flees to the bedside of her dying cousin, whose deteriorating health adds to her agony. After his funeral, an old suitor beseeches Isabel to run away with him and salvage some sort of happiness out of life, but she steadfastly refuses and returns home to a husband who despises her.

Isabel makes the right decision. The climactic scene is deeply reminiscent of Jane Eyre's refusal of Mr. Rochester; both women decline the fervent pleas of men to forsake their scruples and disregard the eyes of the world. Isabel's ideals may not have prevented her from being deceived when the correct path was obscure, but they allowed her to choose wisely when the decision was clear.

The story elicits many moral lessons, though from what I understand James was averse to viewing fiction in such a didactic manner. Money often causes more problems than it solves. Consult one's family in matters of romance; their sensibilities are not clouded by the illusions of infatuation. Accept responsibility for the byproducts of mistakes. Have an open mind, but not one too open. Take care as to whom one invites into confidence; even the least likely can harbor ulterior motives.

James retains vestiges of the traditional view of women as inferior. When Isabe speaks in illogical tautology, it is considered characteristic of gender. "'Because it's not,' Isabel said femininely. "I know it's not.'" And later, James remarks, "She knew how to think- an accomplishment rare in women." At the risk of disparaging my gender just to make myself look better, I'm sometimes half inclined to agree.

James' writing involves a delightful dearth of symbolism, making the book eminently accessible. He desires solely to analyze a young woman's fate when her free will is enhanced by pecuniary freedom, and the result is blatantly apparent. Stocked with a surfeit of self-assurance, she is easily ensnared, and, along with her bookish ideals, is beset by the terrible actuality of reality. But she is not vanquished entirely.

The Professor by Charlotte Bronte

2007-01-12T17:20:00.000-08:00

The 19th-century British authoress is a paradox- Austen and the Brontes, save Charlotte, never married, and even Charlotte not until she was 39, and then only a year before she died. But all their respective works deal almost exclusively with romance. It lends their books a poignant irony.

The Professor is so plainly autobiography combined with wistful daydreaming that I could only read it detachedly. A young, intelligent, uncommitted British man, William Crimsworth, seeks employment abroad in Brussels. He becomes a schoolteacher, falls in love with an impoverished student of his, marries her, runs a school with her for some years, and eventually settles comfortably in England. As a student and teacher herself in Brussels, Charlotte undoubtedly must have developed an attachment, or dreamed of one, at least, and decided to transform her unfulfilled hopes into a novel.

William has setbacks and obstacles, but they are systematically taken care of. Crimsworth is essentially faultless- studious, scrupulous, religious, fastidious, not too good-looking. He is more or less destined to succeed in life. His love, Frances, is much the same, but being a woman at that period of time, attempting to maintain a level of self-sufficient decency, her chances at happiness before Crimsworth entered the picture were not as certain. Some of the most telling passages occur when Crimsworth discusses with his now-wife what she would have become if he had not married her. "Had I been an old maid," she avers, "I should have spent existence in efforts to fill the void...and died weary and disappointed, despised and of no account, like other single women."

The book lacks the breadth and scope of Charlotte's masterpiece, Jane Eyre, and it contains many little oddities besides. Crimsworth has an inordinate confidence in physiognomy, often describing his acquaintances solely in terms of the relation of their features to their personalities. Many conversations in the novel are carried on entirely in French, obviously intended for an audience better educated than myself. Both Crimsworth and Frances denounce Catholicism with a vigor rarely seen in novels of romance.

Male first-person protagonists drawn by female writers are overwhelmingly idealized and hardly believable. Bronte's hero complies with this, exhibiting a markedly effeminate sensibility towards life. The timid but steadfast young woman and the dashing lover come to rescue her found in Jane Eyre are prefigured here, but Frances and Crimsworth are not nearly as compelling or as vivid as Jane and Rochester.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig

2007-01-07T14:41:00.000-08:00

Robert Pirsig chronicles his intellectual journey into the essence of belief and existence within the scope of a cross-country motorcycle trip. Most of the story is related by his present self, who refers to the person he was before being treated in an insane asylum, as "Phaedrus." Phaedrus, Pirsig tells us, made a discovery tantamount to Copernicus' reconfiguration of the universe, and he, the present narrator, is here to explain it all.

Phaedrus found that by looking at the world not as a duality of subject and object only, but as a triune format in which subject and object are striving towards what he terms "Quality," or ultimate reality, he could reconcile himself to the idea of existence and achieve peace of mind. From this principle Pirsig reasons that the revered Ancients, Plato and Socrates and Aristotle, were mistaken, and the Sophists, whom the great philosophers derided, were in fact closer to the truth, that their Virtue was synonymous with his Quality, their pre-Socratic striving for "arete," excellence, more in line with the way things should be. He descends into an equation of Eastern mysticism, ultimately ending with an inconclusive attempt at transubstantiation. He partially bases his theories on the "mythos," the collective awareness of mankind that we are all privy to, almost echoing Chesterton when he said, "Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors."

When Pirsig equates Dharma and the Buddha with his Quality, he loses credibility. The ancient Eastern texts have no authority; they have themselves only to offer. It is as if he fixates on them merely because they are not Western, because they are not heir to the legacy of those mistaken Greek philosophers.

Pirsig reasons for pages and pages, and though his overarching philosophy is faulty, he does have some good minor points. He takes up with the scientific method, insisting that there are an infinite number of hypotheses for any given experiment, and so the selection of the hypotheses that may be correct cannot be done scientifically, that is, in some objective textbook format; rather, the selection invariably involves a sort of subconscious art that comes from the perpetual reach for Quality.

"It is the quest of this special classic beauty, the sense of the harmony of the cosmos, which makes us choose the facts most fitting to contribute to this harmony. It is no the facts but the relation of things that results in the universal harmony that is the sole objective reality." That harmony speaks to the central drive of humanity. In literature, one continually seeks cohesion, threads of continuity, recurring symbolism- harmony. In life, one looks for meaning, purpose, reason, to make sense of it all- to bring the universe into harmony. His is a valid observation.

When extending his concept of Quality into real life, Pirsig infuses his esoterism with a more pragmatic air. "It is the little, pathetic attempts at Quality that kill. The plaster false fireplace in the apartment, shaped and waiting to contain a flame that can never exist." He identifies a feeling I have harbored for quite a while but only on vague, indefinite terms.

The Death of Ivan Ilych by Leo Tolstoy

2006-12-20T11:10:00.000-08:00

So I was rummaging through our hall closet at home and I came across my dad's old literature anthology from college. This presented me with a fascinating moment for self-reflection. I have always taken an instinctively pragmatic approach to evaluating works of fiction- is the work instructive? redemptive? satisfying? and ultimately, is it entertaining?- rarely able to muster up sufficient appreciation for the darkly profound or avant-garde.

I believe this tack stems, at least in part, from a conviction I've intrinsically harbored that a work is not worth reading if I could not in good conscience recommend it to my dad, whose own tastes, indeed, I have often seen mirrored in mine. When I was in the sixth grade I discovered Jules Verne, and I gleefully passed on Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and The Mysterious Island to him after I devoured them. We marveled at Verne's clairvoyant depictions of scuba diving and delighted in the re-emergence of Captain Nemo together. Excellent books to be sure, but, as I learned later, essentially only science fiction, turn-of-the-century boys' adventure novels, and not necessarily the revered classics that for many years I'd held them to be, on par with Faulkner and Hemingway and Joyce, who figure heavily in the aforementioned textbook, and for whom I retain respective distastes.

But it was within this textbook that I found Tolstoy's delineation of death. Ivan Ilych contracts a fatal illness and declines rapidly. He is, until this point, a self-satisfied middle-aged judge well-situated in life with a wife and children. The realization that he is dying devastates him. The heretofore self-sufficient man cries out to God: "'Why hast Thou done all this?'" He recalls the major events of his life and marvels that it should end in such a manner. "'Maybe I did not life as I ought to have done,'" he muses. "'But how could that be, when I did everything properly?'" In the agony of his final days he is unable to continue to justify a life spent striving for power and reputation and position. "He tried to add, 'Forgive me'...knowing that He whose understanding mattered would understand."

The story ends with an allusion to a verse of Scripture my dad is fond of quoting: "He sought his former accustomed fear of death and did not find it. 'Where is it? What death?'" mirroring, of course, Paul's defiant "Death, where is thy sting?" And so, amidst the scathing social commentary, the sardonic irony, and the esoteric symbolism of the untenably profound, I encountered a story of which I could say to my dad, "Here, read this. It's really good."

The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy

2006-12-13T17:21:00.000-08:00

Thomas Hardy's work, while fixated on the countryside, is rarely pastoral and idyllic. Rather, his is a world of determined, pervasive melancholy. Still, he provides instances of redemption, and his dramas are never tedious. The Mayor of Casterbridge satisfied me, so when I saw The Return of the Native at a library book sale, I capitalized on the opportunity to repeat the feeling.

Hardy opens with the heath. "Twilight combined with the scenery of Egdon Heath to evolve a thing majestic without severity, impressive without showiness, emphatic in its admonitions, grand in its simplicity." Egdon Heath proves to be almost a character here in Hardy's novel. The heath does as much to alter the fates of the principal players as they themselves do. Its atmosphere, to some familiar and comforting, to others stifling and oppressive, permeates every scene and action. The plot is one of diametrically opposed lovers whose rash and desperate attempts to orchestrate events to suit their own whims end in tragedy. The heath bears witness to their futile drama, reflecting upon its face a "black fraternization" with its ill-destined inhabitants.

The story is winding and captivating; suffice it to say several intertwined individuals of the mid-19th-century English countryside become yet more closely and convolutedly related when the eponymous native, Clym Yeobright, interrupts the natural course of things and drastically alters life in Egdon Heath. Clym falls in love with Eustacia Vye, an idle, beautiful woman secluded in her grandfather's home, desperate for the imagined pleasures of the city. "The subtle beauties of the heath were lost to Eustacia; she only caught its vapours. An environment which would have made a contented woman a poet, a suffering woman a devotee, a pious woman a psalmist, even a giddy woman thoughtful, made a rebellious woman saturnine."

She bewitches Clym, and they are soon wed. But her capricious dissatisfaction and blind selfishness have tragic consequences, ending ultimately in death, for her and two others. She rekindles a relationship with Wildeve, who is lately married to Clym's dear cousin. While harboring him in her house she neglects to answer the door when Clym's heretofore estranged mother comes to reconcile. Distraught, and believing Clym condoned Eustacia's refusal to admit her into their home, his mother wanders on the heath in the rain, and after being bitten by a snake, dies. Eustacia later determines to flee abroad, aided by her lover, but in a wonted fit of passion drowns herself. Wildeve perishes in an attempt to save her, and Clym just escapes with his life.

Eustacia destroys all that she touches with her self-absorbed ambitions. "Yeobright," however, "loved his kind. He had a conviction that the want of most men was knowledge of a sort which brings wisdom rather that affluence." Why this astute, intelligent man fresh off the streets of 1840s Paris should be so deceived as to make such an unworthy alliance is hard to determine.

Clym dreams of opening a school to educate the villagers of Egdon, much to the chagrin of Eustacia. When his eyesight is temporarily strained, restricting him to "furze-cutting" on the heath to earn money, Clym is not daunted. He throws himself wholeheartedly into the endeavor. "He is set upon by adversities," says Hardy, "but he sings a song." While he is merrily serenading the heath in the glow of his exertion, Eustacia happens upon him. Furious that he could enjoy engaging in the work of a commoner while she too is living like one, she unleashes her wrath upon him, the touching portrait of a man afflicted and nonetheless happily laboring in what capacity he can slashed to shreds by Eustacia's vindictive ranting.

Eustacia, retaliating against Clym as the source of her unhappiness, decimates his chances of achieving anything but, though Hardy does grant Clym an epilogic career as a travelling preacher/moralist. Is beauty truly such an inescapable snare, that a circumspect scholar would fall victim to a conniving, vindictive woman whose chief, and perhaps only virtue, is her face?

The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow

2006-12-04T15:46:00.000-08:00

"I wanted him to give me wisdom," Augie says of a venerable businessman, and says, essentially, throughout his reminiscences. Augie March recalls his impoverished childhood in a Jewish neighborhood in the in the 1920s, continuing the narrative into his adolescence and through to his adulthood in post-WWII Europe. He describes his jobs, his friends, his romantic forays, and his travels- from Chicago, to Mexico, to New York, and finally abroad. His exploits are, as they have often been described, picaresque. Augie is not always above the law, but when he strays, we go right along with him.

Augie is continually caught up in the whirling eddies of strong personalities. One of his first jobs involves assisting a paralyzed business eccentric whom he reveres as a genuine genius, and later he steals textbooks with a Mexican math whiz on scholarship at the University of Chicago. Augie is perpetually seeking knowledge and, as he said above, wisdom. He begins to read the textbooks before delivering them, and he becomes enraptured with the ideas he finds. “I lay in my room and read, feeding on print and pages like a famished man.”

The book is dauntingly long, for Augie’s life is made of innumerable adventures, no detail of which he considers too small to include. Bellow composed complex sentences of description- clause piled on clause, with illustrative concrete nouns and reclassified verbs stacked precariously atop the subjects and predicates. Augie employs esoteric allusions abundantly, almost obnoxiously, as if Bellow wanted to underscore Augie’s self-education, evidence of his having read widely and deeply without perhaps a tempering authority to guide him in the proper deployment of such potent arsenal.

Augie uses very little foreshadowing, restraining himself to telling the story as it happens, avoiding bracing suspense in favor of a more natural revelation of events. Augie traces the development of his perception of himself as the events are unfolding, coming to a refreshing self-awareness towards the end. “I said when I started to make the record that I would be plain and heed the knocks as they came, and also that a man’s character is his fate. Well, then it is obvious that this fate, or what he settles for, is also his character.” Though his character-as-fate theory is nebulous and indefinite at best, the underlying current of personal responsibility that he espouses is a worthy conclusion.

Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

2006-11-27T15:47:00.000-08:00

Tolkien, Chesterton, T.S. Eliot, and now Evelyn Waugh- strangely enough, early 20th-century British Catholic converts all. What a peculiar convergence of literary figures. Someone should write a thesis paper on that. Waugh himself converted to Catholicism mid-career, with the latter half of his works becoming increasingly serious and religiously centered. Brideshead Revisited comes of this era.

It seems Waugh composed the book with a mind to present his new beliefs in a manner palatable to the generally secular reading public. His protagonist, Charles Ryder, falls in with pampered young Sebastian at Oxford, and becomes intertwined with his Catholic family. Years later, Charles chances upon Sebastian's sister Julia, and begins an affair with her that lasts until her father's death. But just when all hurdles have been cleared for them to marry, Julia breaks off their relations, unable to continue in sin.

Through this family Waugh exhibits varying stages of Catholicism, from the mother's lifelong devotion, to the father's insincere conversion, to the children's agnosticism. By the end, Charles, agnostic himself, sees every member return to a more or less genuine faith, each finding their own degrees of peace and happiness. Charles, however, is disillusioned and alone. While he and Julia had both effectually disowned their respective spouses when they took up with each other, Julia turns to missions after their affair ends, replacing that void in her life, but Charles is left unfulfilled.

Waugh's linguistic craftsmanship here is superb. Far surpassing Scoop in complexity and texture, his prose yet retains a lucidity and forceful elegance that can only be admired. His characters are arresting. The only disheartening element of the book is its overtones of homosexuality. Charles' relationship with Sebastian is mostly established to be platonic, but it is startlingly intimate, and there is enough ambiguity involved to make things uncomfortable. Less uncertain is the orientation of flamboyant world-traveler Anthony Blanche, Charles' classmate, whose purpose as a character is just as unclear as Waugh's attitude regarding such things. Waugh himself carried on untoward relationships during college, but this predates his conversion. He later married happily, so surely he viewed the effeminacy of Charles and Sebastian an unsavory but inevitable aspect of adolescence to be repented of later, and the unequivocal perversion of Anthony just another vice of an uninhibited man. That's how I'd have it, anyway.

Brideshead Revisited drew me in. The plot was essentially mundane, but the people continually interested me. I hadn't the slightest idea where Waugh was going until the end, and I was relieved to discover a conclusion compatible with my own convictions, for I was with him regardless.

Erewhon by Samuel Butler

2006-11-20T16:40:00.000-08:00

I guess this is what I get for reading a book solely because someone, somewhere, made an oblique reference to it. I can't even recall where I heard of it. Somehow, nevertheless, I got the idea the book was worth my time, which prejudiced it in my favor. I dearly wanted to like it. But a sense of the foreboding fell over me when, in the preface to the revised edition, the author admitted, "I have found it an irksome task to take up work which I thought I had got rid of thirty years ago, and much of which I am ashamed of..."

Erewhon, in its entirety, feels derivative, in part because it is, but also because so many others have gleaned inspiration from it. In the best style of Gulliver's Travels, Butler strands his protagonist in a strange society through whose unconventional manners and mores we are ostensibly to see the foibles of our own. Drawing also on Thomas More's Utopia and predating Huxley and Orwell, Butler attempts what others have done, or will go on to do, much more successfully.

The beginning is bogged down in exposition and the adventures and aspirations of a poorly drawn protagonist. This man stumbles upon the Erewhonians and becomes their, albeit well-treated, captive. He details the oddities of Erewhon, from their aversion to machines and progress, to their severe punishment of physical ailment, to their nominal forms of religion. Butler employs thick, ambiguous metaphor and his voice is often indiscernible. At points it is hard to determine whether he is mocking society through his protagonist, or mocking the protagonist himself as society. I wouldn't doubt it to be both. Butler attacks from so many sides that he seems to prevail on none.

Altogether I think I missed the boat on the satire. In fact, I think that boat set sail when Butler died. Much of his wit now seems inapplicable, having faded along with the Victorian times it set to skewer. The book's inability to transcend time is, in all probability, its chiefest shortcoming.

Butler himself, from what I can gather, was a tortured, confused man swept up in the prevailing winds of turn-of-the-century intellectualism, unable to find a tenable basis in either religion or materialism, and so, being neither hot nor cold, as it were, was incapable of forming definite beliefs, resulting in a literary work as muddled as his mind.

The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston

2006-11-17T13:10:00.000-08:00

I checked out this book solely because it was included in the College Board's list of 101 great books, at which list, for lack of a better, I have been chipping away dutifully for nigh on two years now. I thought, perhaps snobbishly, that this book would be merely a requisite representation of the Chinese woman that fulfilled some sort of multicultural quota, and maybe there are elements of that involved in the book's place in the College Board's heart, but Kingston's work is a decent piece of literature in its own right.

Kingston retells the tales her mother mesmerized her with in her childhood in sparse, bare English that evokes the fine, linear simplicity of the art of feudal China. She gives the eponymous woman warrior her own voice, allowing her to narrate the story of her training by a mystical old couple who give her the abilities to avenge the mistreatment of her people. Kingston slowly introduces facets of her own life and eventually moves entirely to talking of her family and their transition to life in America.

Kingston is at her finest when she is recreating the world of her ancestors. Her story-telling is just as riveting as her mother's must have been for her. The legends and fables, moreover, are fresh and unusual to unaccustomed Western ears. If the book were composed only of these, it would make for excellent bedtime reading.

When she draws parallels to her own life and compares her own experiences, there Kingston approaches profundity. I've come to wonder lately if that isn't what all literary fiction is- elegant attempts to make connections. Across ages, across cultures, across categories; within a book, within a concept, within a single sentence. For what is an allusion, but a connection between antiquity and modernity; a metaphor, but an abstract connection between two concrete entities?

The book's impact wanes when Kingston enters the narrow, crowded streets of San Francisco's Chinatown and her early years. She laments the disparagement of the female in her parents' culture, and she depicts the generational conflict between the elders born in China, and their offspring, who are beginning to assimilate into the new country in which they were born. It all lacks the poetic force the ancient stories contained.

But maybe that is where Kingston was going. Her contemporary life seems somehow insufficient when viewed through the lens of the past. The old meets the new, the East meets the West, and yet here we are, by time relentlessly pushed forward.

The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan

2006-11-12T20:11:00.000-08:00

So I was listening to NPR (my philosophy is that if my media is biased in the opposite direction, when I hear something I like, I can trust it to be true) and I caught an interview with the author of this book. I couldn't resist; I find contemporary nutrition research absolutely arresting. Pollan, a journalist by trade, investigates the actual origins of the foods we eat, beyond the grocery store.

He begins in an ostensibly random place- a cornfield in Iowa. Much of the supermarket can be traced to this state, not only in overtly corn-based products, but also in anything containing citric acid, glucose, fructose, maltodextrin, sorbitol, xanthan gum, modified cornstarch, and MSG, among other things that habitual ingredient-list readers like myself would readily recognize. High fructose corn syrup, of course, is everywhere. Almost all animals raised for consumption are now corn-fed. Break down the molecular composition of the average American, and you will find corn.

That is just a small portion of what Pollan serves up. There is a lot to this book, but the essential message is that we as a nation are producing and consuming plants and animals in ways they were not designed to be used. According to Pollan, we could save untold amounts of money in all sorts of areas- from health care, to fossil fuel use, to fertilizers and pesticides, to government subsidies- if we would allow a system based on the natural growth cycles of our food.

Pollan's worldview is decidedly evolutionary, but even he admits the fallibility of science. "The problem is that once science has reduced a complex phenomenon to a couple of variables...the natural tendency is to overlook everything else, to assume that what you can measure is all there is, or at least all that really matters," he says in a statement that has implications outside the field of nutrition, and that speaks volumes about the shortcomings of materialism.

Moreover, Pollan profiles Joel Salatin, a "Christian libertarian environmentalist" who maintains an entirely self-sustaining farm on a few hundred acres in Virginia. Salatin's cows eat grass, their natural diet; his chickens eat the insects and larvae that come with cows and in doing so fertilize the pasture. His pigs turn the farm's waste into rich soil that feeds the garden. "'All we need to do is empower individuals with the right philosophy and the right information to opt out en masse,'" Salatin insists, likening his cause to the homeschool movement. Pollan is enthralled with the concept, and I'd have to agree.

Pollan's tone is sometimes overreaching but mostly elegant and accessible. He is methodical and scrupulously detailed. He is areligious, but he is compassionate to Christians and even presents one as his ideal food producer. It's a terribly informative book and I am quite glad I read it.

Act One by Moss Hart

2006-11-08T16:48:00.000-08:00

Maybe it's the lofty editorial pretensions I harbor, but Moss Hart's autobiography, hailed by its back cover as "the dramatic story that captured a generation," seems not so much a refined, time-honored classic as much as the early draft of a rough, albeit worthy, manuscript. Hart's story in itself is captivating, and the immediacy and authenticity of his telling quality stuff, but a firm, guiding hand such as George Kaufman's could have made this book that much better. For Kaufman was the catalyst to Hart's career, and there is no little irony to be found in the fact that this excellent but improvable narrative climaxes with the drastic revision of the author's first literary success.

Hart begins this book in his childhood, tracing the thread of theatre that has wefted throughout his life. He travels through his impoverished adolescence and chronicles the development of his embryonic attempts at plays, climaxing with veteran playwright Kaufman's collaboration on his first quality play and concluding with its acclaimed debut on Broadway. It's a decent ghetto-to-glamour account, and Hart deftly fashions himself into a protagonist to be sympathized with and cheered on.

"It was astonishing to find how much of what we had written was unnecessary," Hart says of Kaufman's subsequent revisions to his play. If only Kaufman had applied his red pencil to this autobiography. Hart's prose is mired in unneeded words, rough cliches, stilted dialogue, repetition, inconsistencies, and contradiction. In one place he writes, "a historic," and later, "an historic." He asserts that he has "never really heard" the laughter of the audience for he is always "listening ahead for the next line," but then goes on to describe his elation at the sound of that very laughter.

Hart also spouts universal truisms left and right, as an old, rich, successful, self-satisfied man ruminating over his life can only be expected to, I suppose. "It is always a little dismaying to discover that the truth, as one explores it, consists largely of a collection of platitudes," he avers. Whether or not this "truth" is itself true I cannot say, but Hart certainly believes it.

So sometimes I had to restrain myself from marking up the library copy I read with notes in the margin. But like I said, it was a good story, and my interest rarely flagged. Moreover, I learned much about playwrighting and the creative process. The other morning I read an article in which a tv show producer commented,"If this were a play, we'd still be in previews," a reference which would have been entirely lost on me had I not read this book.

Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton

2006-11-01T21:55:00.000-08:00

So one day I was watching, of all things, a Catholic channel on TV, because some learned men were discussing G.K. Chesterton and his major works, and my curiosity was piqued. One man, a professor at a Catholic college, expressed his admiration for Orthodoxy and recommended it as an introduction to Chesterton's religious writing. So here I am.

Chesterton makes it clear his is not an argument of apologetics; rather, he is concerned solely with the moral and philosophical implications of belief in Christianity, for, he says, "having found the moral atmosphere of the Incarnation to be common sense, I then looked at the established intellectual arguments against the Incarnation and found them to be common nonsense." From what I can surmise, Chesterton's basic foundation for his beliefs stems from this: he has observed life is a certain way, and Christianity, of all possible belief systems, fits most perfectly this perception of his, so therefore Christianity is true.

It's a legitimate position, if not entirely fact-based. When Chesterton attempts to access factual information, he strays into archaism. Trying to establish a basis for supernatural occurences, he makes a case for contemporary appearances of ghosts, and he says "science will even admit the Ascension if you call it Levitation." Unfortunately, I don't think "science" will readily admit even levitation anymore.

Chesterton was a Catholic, and his writing retains elements of some of the extra-biblical features of such a faith, from constant reference to "the Church" as means of salvation, to saint-worship, to excessive reverence for priests and nuns, to all but condoning the atrocities of the Crusades. Nevertheless, he does accept Quakers, whose beliefs must have been vastly removed from his own, as true believers. He did not seem to consider salvation achievable through Catholicism only.

Chesterton emphasizes his conviction that of all worldviews, Christianity is the only one with any claim to humor and joy. I appreciated his reasoning. I've always entertained privately the belief that existence is inherently funny. Satan, Chesterton maintains, fell from taking himself too seriously, while "[t]here was some one thing too great for God to show us when He walked upon our earth; and I have sometimes fancied that it was His mirth."

The writing is quite pretty, undoubtedly, and the philosophical points no less so. Chesterton's poetic approach to finding the meaning of life is refreshingly novel. Some of his arguments are outdated, and parts of his book are trivial and extraneous, but the essentials remain pertinent, poignant positions on what it truly means to exist.

The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron

2006-10-29T16:05:00.000-08:00

A superb narrative, absorbing powers of description, penetrating psychological analyses of a worthy protagonist, even some disparagement of the South- Styron did a good job, apparently good enough to win a Pulitzer. The story begins and ends with the day of Nat Turner's execution, and in between Turner tells of how he ended up in a jail cell awaiting death.

Though a slave in the 1800s, Nat is capable of lucid English that surpasses the quality of the white illiterates,' for he was taught to read and write and cipher while growing up in a relatively kind master's household. This lends the account a surprising, gratifying intelligence not common to fictionalized slave narratives.

Nat's education infused him with deep religious convictions, and into his adulthood his knowledge of the Bible guides and sustains him. He fashions himself into a sort of slave reverend, and his comprehensive study and interpretation of the Old Testament prophets convinces him he is called to lead a slave rebellion, a purging of the whites, in a manner similar to that of the biblical heroes' own revolts. The horrendous effects of living a life that legally belongs to another man drives this introspective intellectual to bloodshed.

Nat carefully dissects his emotions and motives- from discovering, as a little boy, that the words on canisters represented what was inside, to being unable, even in the heat of the moment, to murder his master- and effectively traces the development of his rebellion from its roots to his execution. Styron's meticulous, evocative use of description complements his comprehensive presentation of Nat's inner dialogue. His images are present and confident without becoming painfully obvious or self-conscious. Achieving this alone is worth a Pulitzer. The palpability of his narrative raises concerns only when Styron dips into the more ignoble aspects of Southern life in the 1800s. The graphic nature of some of the Southerners' exploits is not so pleasant to experience. But of course, as is so often the case, that is the point.

Nat Turner's merciless extermination of scores of whites is morally complex. Spartacus-like, he vanquished his oppressors in an almost certainly futile bid for freedom. But what else could he have done in a society in which he could never have gained such no matter what he did? The murders are undoubtedly repugnant, but slavery just as much. The South's continual oppression of an entire race of people and their descendants was the catalyst for the suffering and inequality from which we still feel the effects today.

The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

2006-10-24T16:00:00.000-07:00

This second time around, I feel like I actually got the book. The first time I read it, I was rather sidetracked by the content issues, but was able to access some sympathy for Holden Caulfield and his disillusionment. I impulsively bought my sister a copy for her birthday, and later decided I should reread it to find out what exactly compelled me to do so.

I was surprised to discover what an excellent character Holden Caulfield truly is. An English teacher of mine, whom I didn't particularly like (I had, through serendipitous events, two English classes at the time, and while one teacher adorned every essay I wrote for him with glowing inked praise, this other one rarely gave me perfect rubric scores and, though constructive I'm sure she tried to be, criticized my writing quite often), once dismissed him as "annoying" and "whiny," but I found his dissatisfaction with life and the status quo entirely understandable. He is veritably drowning in "phonies," as he terms them, poseurs attempting a facade of normal, sane existence who in fact alternate between degeneracy, immorality, deceit, narcissism, and greed. Holden, while by no means without faults, refuses to be party to their pretences.

He is actually a terribly compassionate, thinking boy. Holden reads, engagingly and well. Moreover, he mulls over books at length afterwards. He also feels deeply the discomfort of others, whether it be some dowdy tourist women, his poor roommate, or two traveling nuns. The mundane tragedies of daily life are not lost on him. They move him in a manner his unfeeling compatriots cannot or care not to comprehend. It's no wonder then, that such a sensitive boy would retreat from the pretension, the peeling veneer of geniality, the utter "phoniness" of the miniature universe of prep school.

Holden's attitude towards religion and, in an interesting parallel, girls also, is troubling, complex, and yet, approaching healthy. Of ministers Holden is wary, for their obviously put-on preaching voices make him doubt their sincerity. He fancies himself an atheist, but harbors a regard for Jesus. If someone could just sit him down and explain it all to him...

As for girls, Holden is controlled almost entirely by his physical inclinations. Still, he desires not to take advantage of them, and realizes that his most meaningful relationship with a girl involved almost no physical contact at all. Holden is altogether in transition, navigating, almost directionless, the end of adolescence towards adulthood. His deep pity for mankind keeps him afloat. He's missing, of course, a satisfactory answer for existence, and this might be the root of his inability to cope with the world around him.

I guess this is what I wanted my sister to experience- Holden's frustrations and disillusionment, the common ground that scores of teenagers have identified with. After all, she's had her share of "phonies."

Death in Venice and Seven Other Stories by Thomas Mann

2006-10-23T17:59:00.000-07:00

Mann's work was recommended to me enthusiastically, with a "just don't think too hard" caveat tacked on. I always considered my approach to literature rather dilettantish anyway.

This book is a collection of Mann's turn-of-the-century short stories that explore themes of the genius in art and intellect within a motif of the German at home and abroad. The stories share threads of recurring elements, illuminating the essential aspects of Mann's own creativity.

"Death in Venice," "Tonio Kroger," and "Disorder and Early Sorrow" were the only stories whose merits outweighed any untoward content. The other five, while undoubtedly well-written and with some merits of their own, alternated between sordid and dull, and so I am unable to give them praise that is not heavily qualified.

"Death in Venice": On a trip to Venice, an acclaimed author sights a young, attractive Polish Adonis of sorts, and, overwhelmed with the beauty of his countenance, forsakes reason to follow him for weeks on end. The boy's comely features send the man into philosophizing reveries on the nature of literary expression and the creator and his creation. "Thought that can merge wholly into feeling, feeling that can merge wholly into thought- these are the artist's highest joy," he muses during his undaunted pursuit.

There is irony in Mann's name, for he examines extensively the emasculation of his linguistic artist. His protagonist asks, "[D]o you believe that such a man can ever attain wisdom and true manly worth, for whom the path to the spirit must lead through the senses?" This man's decidedly effeminate nature detracts from the intellectual insights he has, and he clearly tries to justify his unwholesome affection for the young boy under a guise of aesthetics. More's the pity.

"Tonio Kroger": Again the androgynous artist appears. Dark-complexioned Tonio Kroger lives the fitful, melancholy passion of the litterateur, silently envying the blue-eyed blonds who surround him in their blissful ignorance. He considers his artistic gifts a curse inherited from his mother's temperamental Italian blood, contending that he was not destined, but doomed, from birth, to create. However, a trip to Denmark gives him the presence of mind to accept and even revel in his love of the "blond and blue-eyed, the fair and living, the happy, lovely, and commonplace."

"Disorder and Early Sorrow": A professor and his young daughter experience a presentiment of later sorrows that inevitably come when she dances with one of her older brother's friends on a lark at a party. The five-year-old feels an indefinite sense of the envy and longing that accompany rejection when she has to go to bed and her humoring partner reunites with his date. Her father observes it all with a helpless pathos.

This was the purest of Mann's stories, exquisite in its sorrow, tender in its telling, noble and unwavering in its feeling. He was at the top of his form here.

Mann is splendid when he conducts esoteric discussions of Life and Art, as it were, but he often becomes mired in the disturbing and the unsavory. It's unfortunate, for he is a consummate writer.

He Who Thinks Has To Believe by A.E. Wilder-Smith

2006-10-16T14:08:00.000-07:00

What a title, right? I've finally found someone who approaches the world in a manner I can accept. Wilder-Smith begins with just the sensory information to which every human being is privy, and he follows a logical line of reasoning to conclude that what the Bible says is truth. He attempts no emotional appeal, guilt trip, or sentimentality. In fact, as a professor of pharmacology, he insists that "try[ing] to 'believe' emotionally" leads to "dangerous emotionalism and hysteria," for it rebels against one's ratio, or sense of rationality.

The primary section of the book deals solely with a parable of an undiscovered tribe of "Neanderthalers." These "honest, thinking people" are able to reason from the evidence that natrually surrounds them and deduce that there must be a Creator, and He must desire reconciliation with them. When some explorers discover these people and try to enlighten them with assertions of a materialistic worldview, the Neanderthalers poke holes in their theories and hold steadfastly to theism, augmenting their beliefs with Christianity when they encounter a Bible.

The second part discusses the finer points of Wilder-Smith's theology. I'll attempt briefly to sum up the gist of his arguments. Because of the information present in matter, and because life never comes from non-life, we can conclude that a higher consciousness created the world. Because the creator is never less than the creation, we can conclude that this higher consciousness is personal as we are personal. Because this higher consciousness (for all intents and purposes God) is personal, we can conclude He desires interaction with us. Because genuine interaction requires one to be on the same wavelength of another, God has to manifest Himself as a man to achieve this interaction. Because of the historical accuracy, fulfilled prophecy, textual logic, and willing martyrdom of those involved, we can conclude that the Bible's account of such a manifestation is true.

There is more to it, but that is the essence of what Wilder-Smith posits. I found such dispassionate logic intensely gratifying. I'm sure someone could muster up a rebuttal to some of his points, especially those which he admits surpass the realms of human understanding, but spontaneous generation is still unsubstantiated, and surely the information coding of genetics cannot be left to chance. As Wilder-Smith says, "chance [is] an antipode, an antithesis of thought." Design comes not randomly.

Wilder-Smith lifted an onus of inability from my shoulders. I've been trying to legitmately, logically, articulate my claim to Christianity in a lucid, comprehensive fashion for over a year now, and it was not until Wilder-Smith's book that I found someone capable of doing so.

The Elements of Style by William Strunk, Jr. and E.B. White

2006-10-15T15:28:00.000-07:00

I was fortunate enough to acquire this revered manual for a dollar at a thrift store. The library wouldn't let me check it out, for they categorized it as a reference book. It's a surprisingly slim volume, under a hundred pages. The authors adhere to their own exhortations of brevity. They were condescending and affected at times, even as they instructed the reader to avoid such tones, but their composition advice is worth taking.

Much is review of the basic courtesies, as they'd have it, of the writer for his reader. Communicating effectively is the composer's essential goal. "Clarity can only be a virtue," White insists. They iterate the rudimentaries of grammar, punctuation, and the like. Strunk, especially, espouses brevity. The less said, the better. White is inclined to agree, and so am I.

I felt chastised on a few counts, such as the subject of qualifiers. Apparently, my use of "rather" is rather unnecessary and weak. "Interesting," too, is taboo, denounced as being unspecific. Not-positives, moreover, such as "not honest" or not important," should be replaced with positive assertions: "dishonest," insignificant."

One instruction, which I'd never heard before, resonated loudly with me: "Write with nouns and verbs," White says. "The adjective hasn't been built that can pull a weak or inaccurate noun out of a tight place." I'd always assumed all parts of speech were created equal, but upon reflection, White's adage rings wise. I assure you, I'll make a conscious effort in the future to write thusly.

Strunk and White have a few idiosyncratic preferences. They consider thanking someone in advance to be bad form, and the word "respectively" to be largely unneeded. White says the word "thruway," phonetic spelling and all, will become an established term. I think his prediction was a bit off. I don't know if I've ever heard anyone say "thruway," and I can't say I could define it properly.

The authors do seem to be striving for a thoroughly early-20th-century, modern-1950s, sterilized tone with much of their advice, but who could begrudge them that? It was the early 20th century. But with that said, some of the manual's assertions may be grounds for reconsideration. The pervasively ironic tone of the post-(post?)modernist now employed by many writers sometimes involves a slight variance in acceptability. How's that for qualifiers?

Despite all the admonitions to take the reader into account when writing, White closes with this: "The whole duty of a writer is to please and satisfy himself, and the true writer always plays to an audience of one." I can say that, barring a few assigned essays, I have always inclined that way; to what end I don't entirely know. Certainly some interesting (I don't care; I like the word) Young and Sharp Submissions.

Beowulf by Anonymous; translated by Seamus Heaney

2006-10-13T22:23:00.000-07:00

What more appropriate book to commence a blog with than Beowulf? Below is my impression, as it were. You can view it, and many, many others, from here: http://www.geocities.com/dualphilology/beowulf.html

As the first surviving work in the English language, Beowulf has been elevated to a place of almost mystical reverence in literary circles. Tolkien was a foremost scholar on the epic poem, and the influences he derived from it form the very foundation of his own attempt at Northern European mythology. Indeed, the very grammatical structures of his invented languages, the questing motif, the treasure-guarding dragon, even the name Eomer, can be traced to Beowulf.

It has been said before, but it loses no truth in repetition: Beowulf speaks to a very fundamental, archetypal, germane (both literally and figuratively) set of emotions. The epic hero vanquishes his foes and rules triumphantly for many years, meeting his own end in a spectacular display of hubris, destroying his enemy even as it destroys him, dying a glorious death. Stories with these elements are found throughout the world's cultures, for honorable warfare has been an intrinsic desire of mankind, or mannas cynnes, as the Old English renders it, since its inception. Such values become a manner of survival for early, isolated people in a hostile environment.

I enjoyed the story, without a doubt, but more than that, I revelled in the poetry. Heaney's translation was superb, a delightfully readable versification that retained an archaic sensibility. Moreover, the original Old English was printed alongside, allowing me to trace the elements of Germanic roots that remain in our speech today. "Modor" (mother), "twelfye" (twelve), "wundor" (wonder), were all discernible; some such as "under" or "gold," have not changed at all.

First Post

2006-10-13T22:10:00.000-07:00

I've decided to establish a blog to complement my fledgling website: www.geocities.com/dualphilology. Like how I used the correct version of "complement"? It's a collection of literary impressions, and I created it because I thought the Internet was curiously lacking in this area. I read a book, and then I write about it. I've been doing so for like a year and a half now, and I've amassed quite a cache of musings. A singular vocabulary, too.

Lorna Doone by R.D. Blackmore

2006-10-03T09:02:00.000-07:00

While written in the late nineteenth century, Lorna Doone encompasses more than a decade of the 1600s in rural England. John Ridd is a farmer's son who, after a chance encounter with a young Lorna, becomes utterly enthralled with the girl and spends years pursuing her. She is ostensibly a member of the Doone clan, a family of terrors responsible for, among others, the death of John's father. Nevertheless, John purposes to persist in his wooing.

Carver Doone, who would have Lorna marry him, barricades her in her home without food for days. John rescues her and establishes her in his home. It is eventually revealed that Lorna is, in fact, a daughter of nobility who was raised by the Doones after they murdered her family, in order to gain her inheritance by marriage when she came of age. John foils all that. He leads a rebellion against the Doones, overthrowing their reign of the countryside, and he marries Lorna.

The book is rather lengthy, but I relished the comprehensiveness. In the beginning, I found John slightly distasteful, his continual self-deprecation and false modesty making a poor hero for a romantic adventure, but as I read further I discovered the humor in it all and engaged myself wholeheartedly in the story. Because it was so long, the book involved many, many plot twists, some of which were inevitably improbable. Still, I suppose it comes with the literary territory.

That Lorna was held in such a high position of impeccability did bother me a bit. Her beauty is her primary virtue, and John spends pages and pages extolling her hair, her eyes, and her figure. When he is not praising Lorna's unparalled, unimpeachable gorgeousness, John drones on about her tender-heartedness, her unflagging faithfulness, her modesty, her magnanimity—basically, her inability to do wrong. This, of course, forms an unattainable level of feminine perfection that can only be anathema to myself. I am a flawed individual, and so prefer to read about flawed individuals, especially as I have never met anyone who was anything but.

I can see how it fits into the comedy motif, though. For, of course, no one is perfect, and that John actually thinks Lorna is can only be played for laughs. While the novel had many humorous components, it had its share of poignant moments as well. Indeed, it was altogether a decent book. That it is rather obscure despitre its relatively recent inception may be due to the flaws I found in it. But Lorna Doone is essentially a good story, and a worthy work.

Murder in the Cathedral by T.S. Eliot

2006-09-18T10:27:00.000-07:00

I like T.S. Eliot. He's a poet I can almost understand. by attempting to infuse his literary works with elements of spirituality, he espouses a cause to which I am sympathetic. Here, he dramatizes the murder of Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, in December 1170. Eliot holds a deep respect for Becket, essentially canonizing the man in literary form.

As it is a play, the sound of the words is what takes center stage. From alliteration, to rhyme, to rhythm, to parallel construction, Eliot employs them all, creating the fundamentally poetic prose that is his signature. Soaked with profundity and implication, the play emphasizes Becket's momentous stand against his king in favor of his God. "I have been a loyal subject to my king. Saving my order, I am at his command," Becket declares to his would-be murderers, four knights who have cornered him in the cathedral.

Becket's inner conflicts are integral parts of the story. The first occurs before the period the play covers. He adopts an outlook of spiritual-mindedness upon assuming the position of Archbishop, which alienates his sensual friend the King and begins their schism. Within the time-frame of the play, Becket is visited by four tempters who attempt to capitalize on his weaknesses and dissuade him from holding fast to his convictions. He withstands them. "The last temptation is the greatest treason: To do the right deed for the wrong reason."

But Eliot's, and Becket's, misplaced Catholic beliefs impose themselves intermittently. Becket calls upon some saints to pray for him, and his congregation almost idolizese him, bemoaning his eventual death while thanking God for another saint to whom they could pray. Still, Becket proclaims he is "[a] Christian, saved by the blood of Christ," and it may be safe to assume that they were both believers.

The intellectual presentation of a religious protagonist is altogether encouraging. Such a treatment seems, in a manner, to bolster Christianity's legitimacy. Here an author is no longer decrying the state of affairs and positing existence as meaningless as he formerly did. Rather, he is celebrating the truth that he has found and rejoicing in one of the heroes of his faith. With this play, he invites us to join him.

In fact, that may be Eliot's larger purpose. The nameless "Chorus" plays the part of the audience to the drama that unfolds, mirroring the actual audience and reacting as, I am sure, Eliot would have us as spectators react. In the concluding speech, the Chorus cries: "Forgive us, O Lord, we acknowledge ourselves as type of the common man...whofear the hand...the fire...the fist...less than we fear the love of God."

Writing about Literature by B. Bernard Cohen

2006-09-14T10:18:00.000-07:00

What an absolutely liberating book. I just started reading and could not stop. Mr. Cohen was a college professor, and he wrote this to assist students in composing effective essays of literary criticism. He discusses the basic theory of it all, and examines practical examples. He comes off a bit pretentiously sometimes, and I am not entirely sure if his credentials are sufficient for such an overarching treatise; but then, my credentials are not such that I was pass judgment on him, and so I have decided his is an authority to which I can legitimately defer.

"The elusiveness of any literary text can be one of its chief virtues," Cohen writes. "...[M]any literary works are so expansive and suggestive that they are subject to many interpretations." He insists that the student's interpretation of a given work can be just as valid as a professional literary critic's, if it is coherent, well thought out, and supported by textual evidence. Cohen gives examples of both effectively and poorly written essays and excerpts, citing strategies that can help one craft successful analyses.

Much of his advice is common sense, stuff I intuited years ago but which is comforting to hear coming from an expert. He is also quite realistic. "...[A] beginner cannot be expected to deliver revolutionary pronouncements," but he can draw his own conclusions. This was an incredibly gratifying statement for me, for to know that a professor accepts the limited capacities of his students relieves me of a scholarly burden.

Fascinatingly, Cohen mentions that "one has to realize that an author is not always aware of everything he puts into his story or poem," though one has to be careful not to read too much into a given work. From whence comes the basis for this view I do not know, though I think it may be Freudian in origin- and therefore now illegitimate?- because of the author's many references to psychology and its effects on literature in the 20th century. Nevertheless, it must be one that has pervaded literary criticism for some time now, and it certainly explains much.

Like The Britannica Book of English Usage, this manual answered many of the standing questions I never thought I could quell. It also provided me with excellent ideas on how to go about a literary analysis. Most of all, it strengthened my confidence in my ability to write. Mr. Cohen broke it all down in a manner I completely understood, giving my an unobstructed view of the path towards decent work.

The Britannica Book of English Usage

2006-09-11T09:11:00.000-07:00

I've always had lingering questions about minor aspects of language, and this book went a far way in quelling some of my concerns. I know I did not absorb all of the excellent information it held, but it will make a splendid reference guide. I underlined most of the important stuff anyways.

I laughed right from the beginning. During a discussion of the origins of our language, I found this gem: "Among the great languages, French closely rivals English in perversity." Of course, it is speaking of arbitrary spelling conventions. But the delineation of the genesis of English was entirely absorbing, as were the sections on grammar, punctuation, and writing.

The grammar tutorial gave me names for many conventions I did not know how to label, and clarified some issues upon which I was fuzzy. It underscored the importance of maintaining an active voice whenever possible, praised the "Oxford comma" (the optional one that can go before "and" in a list), and insisted on hyphenating compound adjectives, all matters of usage that I recently employed, tentatively but, thankfully correctly, when editing another's essays.

The introduction to the pronunciation guide featured this comment: "...there is no accentless pronunciation any more than there is a flavorless coffee or an odorless perfume." This effectually obliterated any delusions I'd ever had about "talking straight," as I've always termed my own accent, which is comparable to the "Network Standard" held as an example in this book.

Besides the excellent advice and illuminating lists of allusions and foreign phrases, the writing section included a gratifying paragraph on Christianity. Speaking of Christianity's ascendancy over Greco-Roman myth, the book stated, "One of the reasons for the ultimate triumph of Christianity...was the fact that...it dealt with the...spiritual needs of the time in a more rational manner than did its rivals." The text is carefully equivocating, to be sure, but it essentially states that Christianity has elements of rationality. Score one for the home team.

There is so much more to this volume. It is a reference book, but I found it exceeedingly readable. On the whole, I seem to be in line with standard usage, and I am sure whatever I am lacking can be easily remedied. I'll end with this quote: "Our language derives much of its force and speed from its hard consonants and crisp word endings. To ignore these qualities with...an exaggerated drawl is to insult the magnificence of our English tongue."

Chesapeake by James Michener

2006-09-02T11:49:00.000-07:00

I can't remember the last time it took me an entire month to get through a single book. Possibly Tom Jones. Anyways, Chesapeake is the history of the Chesapeake Bay area from the 1500s to the 1970s. Needless to say, this is an incredibly long time span, and it accounts for the extreme length of the novel. Beginning with Native Americans and progressing to the first settlers, Michener's plot focuses mainly on three men and their descendants, though he intermitttently narrates the stories of others whose lives are intertwined with the primary characters, even digressing to follow a family of geese during their migration.

The characters are surprisingly varied, considering the sheer number of them. Michener's foremost virtue may be his ability to achieve myriad perspectives and personalities in an agreeable facsimile of real life, all the while weaving his narratives into a cohesive whole. Social issues, from racial equality to religious freedom to the environment, are explored through the actions and experiences of the citizens. Michener often champions his cause by way of the Quakers, for whom he seemed to have a profound respect. The carrying of the plot through the lineage of families provokes reflection on the nature of legacies, the pervasiveness of the "sins of the fathers," and the brevity and insignificance of the individual in light of history.

When one 20th century descendant of a founding Chesapeake family said to another, "I do a little genealogy" and mentioned she'd found that their families had been connected in the past, and I had just read some nine hundred pages describing the illustrious intrigues of their forebears that these modern-day people would never know about, I stopped. I myself, by virtue of being alive, am descended from just as many people whose stories I will never hear. I don't even know the respective occupations of all my grandparents. Forget the intimate details of their lives, or anyone preceding them. What a wealth of knowledge I will never be privy to.

Chesapeake was ultimately about the land. Though its inhabitants are central to the story, each character is brought on the stage only briefly, as if the person himself were not as important as the part he played in forming the society of the Chesapeake Bay area.

Utopia by Thomas More

2006-08-25T10:15:00.000-07:00

Scholars are divided on this book, and so am I. Some say More is actually espousing an ideal way of life, while others insist it is all moral allegory. I'm afraid I cannot tell. More was a devout Catholic, and rather intolerant of other religions, and so the vague communal faith of the Utopians seems entirely imcompatible with his beliefs. But for what, then, did he write the book.

The Utopia is an island in some inscrutable place. Its inhabitants are housed, fed, clothed, and employed by the government. In return, they work diligently eight hours a day. They're moderately well-educated, and encouraged to attend instructional lectures in their spare time. Gold and jewels are despised and used for chamberpots and such, and no one seems to mind not owning anything because they want for nothing necessary. Church attendance is compulsory, but the service is inter-faith, for various beliefs abound, their only common thread being a monotheism.

For, the whole of the societal structure depends upon the individual's belief in a benevolent higher power. As More readily admits, no man would work toward the good of the whole his entire life if he didn't have any spiritual incentive, any afterlife impetus. As long as the Utopians believe that their cooperation is in their best interests, they will continue to do their respective shares.

The state holds a terrible amount of power in Utopia. Travel is restricted; marriage is regulated. Every aspect of the citizens' lives is dependent upon the government. Though each is guaranteed food, shelter, and steady work, the arrangement is neither desirable nor feasible. At the end of the day, it is all no less that state-controlled slavery. Freedom, even an impoverished freedom, as Frederick Douglass said, is surely better than this.

Individual ownership is one of the chief desires of man. As I heard a pastor recently say, "The early Christians did not preach Communism. Communism says, 'What's yours is mine.' Communalism says, 'What's mine is yours.' The early Christians practiced communalism." Philanthropy should be born of an intrinsic motivation to give, not by the state's insistence. The motive to do good, in fact, in completely eradicated when sin and virtue are determined by authority, when unquestioning compliance is all that is asked of the individual.

So why did More write this book? Perhaps, in the pre-Marx world, a communism seemed plausible. Or perhaps More was entirely aware of the shortcomings of his invented society, and intended it only as a backdrop upon which to present his carefully veiled critiques of his contemporary life. For my part, I hope for the latter.

The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli

2006-08-03T10:11:00.000-07:00

Machiavelli actually served as an excellent converstion starter. I read the entirety of the book over the course of a few days, sitting in a coffee shop in Idyllwild. I was asked twice if I were reading The Prince for fun, once by an innocuously middle-aged man who said, "You don't see people reading Machiavelli very often," and once by a slightly formidable biker, replete with leather and tattoos, for whom a penchant for literature would not be one's primary inference.

I was also asked by a scruffy, long-haired local boy, if it was "cool."

"Yeah," I replied. "It's about how to gain politically in 16th century Italy." He just nodded.

That is essentially what the book is about, but much of it has more universal implications. Machiavelli proceeeds systematically, giving common-sense advice to any who would seek to achieve and maintain a position of power. He draws on ancient and contemporary sources to serve as examples, both of what to emulate, and of what to avoid.

I found myself agreeing with much of what he says, except for his exhortation to follow a path of immorality when it would further oneself politically. Of course, it makes sense to do so when one's sole goal is political gain, but it is folly to consider that one's chief end.

At any rate, Machiavelli had many points which are as applicable now as ever. He said that "knowing afar off...the evils that are brewing, they are easily cured," and he describes a times when the Romans declared war on Philip and Antiochus "for they knew war is not to be avoided" and they preferred to fight them in Greece rather than in their own country. Has anyone ever used Machiavelli to defend the Iraq War? Sounds like praise of the pre-emptive strike to me.

His wisdom can be applied to the personal life as well. "The first impression that one gets of a ruler and his brains is from seeing the men that he has about him." And, "there is no other way of guarding one's self against flattery than by letting men understans that they will not offend you by speaking the truth."

The Prince was terribly accessible and delightfully applicable. I probably won't be invading any countries any time soon, but if the occasion arises, I know whom to consult. There was a sufficient amount of everyday advice to make this book a profitable read even for a mere citizen.

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee

2006-07-29T10:20:00.000-07:00

The title of this book caught my eye one day in a thrift store in Idyllwild. It was so melodic and enigmatic, with a hint of bitter irony. I flipped the cover open and discovered the splendid black-and-white photographs that grace the beginning and complement the narrative. I decided the book was fully worth 50 cents based on these merits alone.

As it turns out, the book has its own intrinsic value. Agee was sent by the magazine he worked for to the South in 1936, to profile some farmers there. His resulting manuscript was far too long to be printed in a magazine. He was eventually able to acquire the publishing rights and find a publisher. What the book is, is hard to categorize. Agee details every element of the lives of three tenant farmer families- from the nature of their liveliehood, to the foods they eat, the houses they live in, and the clothes they wear. But more than this, he delves into the psychological aspects of the desperate poverty in which they exist.

Interspersed between the intricate descriptions and intimate discussions of the farmers' lives, are Agee's musings on the essential nature of existence in general. It is all a fascinating window into his philosophies and beliefs, and though the book purports to be about tenant farmers, it is truly about Agee. He has a fierce regard for humanity, and it pervades his work. He has a fixation on sexuality, and this too permeates his writing. It is not uncomfortably prominent, though.

Despite some objectionable metaphors and peculiar agnosticism, Agee's narrative held me fully spellbound. I actually enjoyed reading this book, and so I know it was due entirely to Agee's adept handling of the English language. His prose was truly masterful. The fact that I was held rapt from beginning to end is testament to this.

The beauty of this book was its greatest merit. Agee's words mesmerized me in this sort of literary splendor. I've never had a reaction quite like this to a work of literature. Often for me the content obscures the quality of the writing, but this time the technique surpassed the subject, rendering it rather incidental. I felt as if I could say to Agee, "Okay, I can get with you on this one. I'll suspend my disbelief for you. I can dig it." It was an unparalled experience.

Raise High the Roof Beams, Carpenters and Seymour, An Introduction

2006-07-20T11:50:00.000-07:00

I'll admit it; I'm a bit of a bibliophile. I was in a thrift store in Idyllwild and I saw this beautiful worn navy clothbound book with delicately ivory-aged pages and barely discernible gold lettering on the spine, and I impulsively emptied my wallet of its change. I try not to be so shallow, but sometimes my book-love gets the better of me. The typeset is gorgeous.

The text itself wasn't too bad, either. I did Catcher in the Rye, failing to be scandalized by the language and coming away from it merely with a strong sense of pity for Holden Caulfield. This book was rather different. Salinger crafted essentially a lengthy character study, the view of a man through the eyes of his brother. The first section introduces Buddy Glass, a young soldier on leave during World War II attending his brother Seymour's wedding. Seymour never shows at the ceremony, and Buddy finds himself in a traffic jam with unfamiliar wedding guests. They abandon their taxi in favor of Buddy's apartment, have a drink, and disperse. All throughout the story, Buddy reminisces and muses over his brother.

This strain is continued in the next section, the official "introduction" to Seymour. The Glass family had a history in entertainment, and all the children appeared regularly on a radio quiz show. They were rather precocious, with a penchant for languages. Seymour was in college at sixteen and teaching at twenty. He was a prolific poet and philosopher, with the typical Oriental sympathies of the mid-twentieth-century intellectual. He ended up eloping with the bride whom he stood up that same day, and he committed suicide six years later.

Buddy is in his forties as he narrates this second section. Hr adores his deceased brother to a point of excess. He considers him an unparalled poet and a foremost thinker of his generation. The reader, or this reader anyway, has little upon which to form an agreement with him. Buddy's rosy rememberances are nice and witty, but involve perhaps too much telling, and not enough showing. Interesting about their relationship, though, is the way Seymour would write notes to Buddy critiquing his writing. They were so very literate, these brothers. Prentiously, delightfully, literate.

Salinger tried very hard here to create a fascinating, memorable character or two, but the sum total left only the slightest impression on me. It was all just so inconclusive. Why is committing suicide so profound? What exactly were Seymour's beliefs, and upon what did he base them? Why did Salinger write this book? The quasi-philosophical meandering intellectualism begins to sound like so much white noise.

What to Eat by Marion Nestle

2006-07-18T12:12:00.000-07:00

Marion Nestle was the nutritionist in Super Size Me who knew what a calorie is, so when I heard her on NPR promoting her new book, I knew I had to read it. What to Eat was as comprehensive as the title would require it to be, but my attention rarely flagged. Nestle's comfort with and command of language surprised me- the book was published in 2006, and my experience with contemporary prose thus far has been less than satisfactory- and buoyed me through to the end.

Nestle's admontion to focus on "fruits, vegetables, and whole grains" has become a mantra of sorts for me. In the book, she examines the various sections of the typical supermarket, and also the supermarket system as a whole. She exhorts the reader to eat food that is as minimally processed as possible. Addressing the usage of pesticides and hormones, she acknowledges that many people cannot afford organically grown products, and so considers buying organic a political rather than health-motivated choice.

Nestle traces the journeys our foods make, and emphasizes the advantages of buying locally grown products. She always bears in mind the cost to the consumer, and insists it is cost-effective to eat healthily. She weaves in anecdotes and personal experiences expertly, and mentions her own preferences often. She devotes a substantial section to hydrogenated oils, and underscores the detrimental effects of consuming such.

The book is altogether quite arresting, and exhaustive. Few areas affect us so broadly as that of the supermarket, and to have its contents delineated is fascinating. It is also comforting to have Nestle assert there are no "superfoods," and that as long as one gets adequate amounts of key nutrients and focusus on fruits, vegetables, and whole grains, there is nothing to worry about except calories. Low-carb, et al. diets work only because calories are restricted. There is no other way to lose weight.

I was delighted overall. Nestle is an excellent writer, not some random person who sat down to write something. Moreover, she is primarily a nutritionist, not a professional writer. If only all authors by trade could write as well as she.

Evelina by Fanny Burney

2006-07-14T08:27:00.000-07:00

Evelina is so old, Jane Austen considered it a classic.That is, in fact, why I actually read the book. What did the illustrious Austen read? What inspired her? I was curious. And now I know, more or less. Evelina is composed entirely of letters written by characters. The eponymous girl is a functional orphan, dismissed by her father before her birth and raised by a kind reverend after her father's death. When she is seventeen, a friend invites her to come to London, and the protective reverend reluctantly acquiesces.

Adventures ensue. Evelina has the misfortune to be considered by all outrageously beautiful, and so she draws all sorts of unwelcome attention. She gets some welcome attention, too, from one Lord Orville. Though he initially finds her insipid and silly, a deeper intimacy with her shows him she is actually quite sensible and upright, any misunderstanding having stemmed from her awkwardness and unfamiliarity with the ways of the eighteenth-century world.

But an interesting qualification comes into play. Evelina writes to the reverend detailed, detailed accounts of everything that transpires (how would we the readers have a story otherwise?), and he advises her as to the path of propriety whenever he can. When Evelina receives an immodest letter ostensibly from Lord Orville, the reverend minces no words in his degradation of the man, and Evelina's regard for him is rendered merely a rose-colored view of a charlatan.

But later on, it is revealed that the letter was forged, Lord Orville is returned to everyone's good graces, and the two marry. It is the intemittent change of opinion that intrigued me. Instead of remaining a paragon of virtue throughout the course of the novel, Orville momentarily becomes almost a villain. It was an excellent twist to the formulaic romance.

But how can I even speak of formula? I have so little experience in literature pre-nineteenth-century, and all my ideas of plot and style have been formed by later works. Evelina could have been wildly pioneering in the field. Perhaps, though, the archetypal romance form is an inherent one, present from the beginning. That would lend me more credibility upon which to pass judgment.

At any rate, Evelina was delightfully readable. I wasn't sure if the prose would be more Shakespearean than Austenian as far as my comprehension went, but my fears were unfounded. The story was exceeedingly decent, and full of excellent asides: "She is not, indeed, like most modern ladies, to be known in half-an-hour..." (Letter LXXV)

Scoop by Evelyn Waugh

2006-06-28T11:52:00.000-07:00

Believe or not, but Evelyn was a man. A rather dashing young man in his youth, from what I could see of his portrait on the back cover. He was also a satirist, often compared to P.G. Wodehouse. Indeed, I found palpable similarities in their manners of style and the characterizations of early-20th-century Britons. Moreover, I think I enjoyed Scoop to the same degree that I enjoyed Leave it to Psmith- mildly, but not profoundly.

William Boot is mistakenly sent as a news correspondent to Ishmaelia, wherever that is. He bumbles through the news reporting process, and the corruption and inaccurate methods of the journalism business are revealed through his naivete. Boot encounters ambassadors, government officials, Ishmaelian citizens, travelers abroad, and fellow reporters, all of whom exhibit a degeneracy that contrasts severely with Boot's own innocence. It is a world of deceit, dishonesty, and acting solely in one's own interest.

The voice of the early 20th century author often falls curiously on my ears. His characters somehow seem puerile, childish, undeveloped, and shallow. Waugh's are a case of such. He tells my something about his character, say, that the German expatriate woman is alluring, but I cannot believe it. In my mind's eye, she appears as scarce more than a little girl. Waugh's descriptions are sparse, and he relies more often on telling rather than showing. This, added to the imbecilic dialogue employed for satire but perceived, albeit unwillingly, by me as inadequate, makes for an unsatisfactory rendering of life.

But satire, I suppose, is not the place for complex character development. Caricatures are a much more effective manner of conveying ridicule. Still, I do love a good in-depth psychological analysis. But perhaps I am too demanding.

My overarching impression of this book is that its satire was once incisive, biting, and accurate, but the things it mocks have since fallen into obscurity. Waugh is lauded all over for said satire, and so I can only assume it was once more pungent than it is now. But such is the nature of humor. Its merits are transient, often confined to one period of history, unable to transcend the limits of chronology. Bummer.

Caravans by James Michener

2006-06-26T07:55:00.000-07:00

The setting was Afghanistan, 1946. A young American, Mark Miller, is stationed there at his country's embassy. He is given the responsibility to discover what happened to a Pennsylvania woman who had married an Afghan man and disappeared. This mission takes him all over the foreign country, and Miller learns of the past, present, and future of Afghanistan as he finds the woman and learns the same of her.

Mark Miller was an excellent character. A Nordic Jew in a Muslim country just after World War II, he had all kinds of splendid issues to work out. He was an able and congenial first-person narrator, a terrific person through whom to experience Afghanistan.

Ellen Jaspar, the Pennsylvanian, was less agreeable. She ran off with the Afghani because she considered the Afghan life as polarized as possible from the apparently vapid one her parents lived and desired for her. But her Afghan husband, notwithstanding his skin color and second wife, turns out to be just as conventional and progress-minded as Ellen's father. So, she runs off with a tribe of nomads, believing theirs to be a life of true freedom and fulfillment. However, even her nomad lover aspires to a position of land-holding power and political clout. Ellen seems to be a queen without a country.

That is where we leave her, too. She is escorted away by the American embassy agents, and that is that. Mark could see the logical fallacies in her philosophy, but he still harbored affection for her. Fine. I suppose that's his prerogative.

Michener's writing was lucid, crystal clear, riveting prose. I thought it superb.

A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy O'Toole

2006-06-21T09:17:00.000-07:00

This book was recommended to me with something to the effect of, "It's like everyone's favorite book but they never remember it. It's a comedy. You'd like it." Intrigued, I checked it out. It was funny, truly funny. There was some objectionable content, but altogether I enjoyed the book.

Ignatius O'Reilly, a large, unkempt man with flashing yellow-blue eyes, lives with his mother in New Orleans. He is rather intelligent but unable to function adequately in society. He desires a monarchy and a return to the ideals of medieval Catholicism. He is a hypochondriac with an abrasive, haughty demeanor, unwilling to work steadily or, in fact, do much more than scribble paeans to history on yellow writing tablets. His mother pressures him to earn something to offset their bills, so he novel is structured loosely around his succession of jobs. It also features the incredible characters of the New Orleans scene that he meets as he wanders aimlessly through the narrative. Eventually he reaches some plane of character development.

The untoward content is mainly found in Ignatius' fearful asexuality. Also, he encounters a group of homosexuals, but that was more funny than anything. Ignatius, devout Catholic that he is, screams, "Perverts!" as he is dragged by two lesbians from a house of partying gays.

I actually liked Ignatius. He spoke proper college English while those around him spewed Louisiana drawls. He was supercilious and eccentrically intellectual. But he was also essentially disgusting, so I could not embrace him wholeheartedly.

But the book was funny. The dialogue was tight and effective. The narrative was at times self-conscious, but mostly masterful and apt. It did poke fun at backwater hicks, after all.

Praise of Folly by Erasmus

2006-06-20T10:20:00.000-07:00

I've always meant to crack open the great works of the ancients. Well, perhaps Erasmus doesn't qualify for an outright ancient, as he was at the forefront of the Renaissance. Still, he predates Shakespeare by about one hundred years, which is fairly old by my account.

Modern translation is a double-edged sword. Any translating alters the voice of the original author, but without it I for one would be unable to read many books in the first place. But despite the inevitably stilted rendering, I was able to catch Erasmus' drift. Praise of Folly is a satire, the title itself a play on Eramsus' friend Thomas More's name involving the Greek word for folly, "moria."

Erasmus plays the devil's advocate and voices the personification of Folly. Folly, dear girl, gives a lengthy oration enumerating her merits and detailing the many places in mythology and the Bible in which she is celebrated. In the introduction, Erasmus, in quite a reasoned, scholarly manner, defends his decision to write light-hearted fare. Apparently he anitcipated criticism. But Erasmus' supposedly recreational treatise is beautifully constructed and executed with an unprecedented degree of complexity. This is said to be Erasmus' most universal, enduring work, which just proves the Arthur Conan Doyle principle- sometimes the stuff one writes for fun will be remembered long after one's most favored work has faded into obscurity.

Erasmus dips into all sorts of ancient influences to prove his farcical thesis, that Folly is to be praised above all other gods. He mentions Plato and Socrates and also draws from lesser-known, at least to me, sources. He uses Bible verses too, and twists them in a bit of scholarly solipsism to fit his premise. He then uses contemporary evidence, pointing out folly in every facet of life, making the case for its necessity to human beings to function normally.

I really like Erasmus. He came about right at the commencement of the age of the printed word, and was one of the first people in history to be able to disseminate information en masse. He totally took advantage of this, translating a new, more accurate version of the New Testament. He advocated a return to the study of the works of the early church fathers, rather than that of the scholars of the Middle Ages. He was at the forefront of the Reformation, bringing leverage and perspective to the discussion. He was an intelligent Christian. I'm a big fan of Erasmus.

Leave it to Psmith by P.G. Wodehouse

2006-06-04T11:57:00.000-07:00

Leave it to Psmith more or less ended my Wodehouse honeymoon. I am sorry to say I was not completely enthralled with this book. It was a worthy effort, but sadly not of the calibre that I have come to expect of Wodehouse.

Psmith (the "p" is silent, of course) quits his job as fishmonger and advertises for a new position. He, by a series of fortunate coincidences, becomes wrapped up in the affairs of Blandings Castle, a country estate with more than its fair share of eccentrics. Mr. Keeble, who lives there, wants to procure some money for his impoverished stepdaughter, but his new wife won't let him touch anything. So, his nephew devises a plan that involves stealing a pricey neckalce from the wife, selling it for the money, and buying her a new one. Psmith, and a pretty girl hired to catalogue the library, join with them.

Hilarities ensue. Except that they're not really that hilarious. The story relies too much on coincidence and hyperbolic personalities. Psmith was an interesting guy, but though the book bears his name, the narrative does not dwell on him as much as it ought to have. Two minor characters, Americans, were downright annoying and a narrative waste of time. Professional criminals engaged to one another, they bantered banally and spoke gratingly. The girl ruled her fiance, and their relationship was sickeningly trite.

The caricature motif grows old quickly. No one in the real world is like any of these characters, and if someone happens to be, he certainly is not surrounded by others as outre as himself. And chance happenings are rare by definition. The ridiculous amount of coincidental events disappointed me. I would have hoped Wodehouse was creative enough to compose a plot with even just a fascimile of reality.

Eats Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss

2006-05-19T12:05:00.000-07:00

The title of this brief punctuation overview is the punchline of a joke, involving a panda and a gun, that highlights the importance of the aforementioned language conventions.. I identified easily with the author's convulsions at the sight of prominent punctuation errors, and sympathized with her reasons for writing this book. However, I did not personally benefit from it much, for I was aware of most every aspect of usage that she discussed.

Truss's perspective, though, was refreshing. She described perfectly the lonely, blighted existence of a grammar "stickler" and assured me that I am not alone. I also appreciated her clarification of language, and the English language especially, as not a rigid construction of hard, set rules, but as an ever-evolving system of communication. But of course, that is not to say that because the conventions of language are flexible and changeable, they can be ignored completely. Rather, punctuation is essential, and a common set of rules necessary, for discourse between the writer and the reader to take place.

Punctuation can alter meaning drastically, as Truss wittily exhibits. For instance, is the Bible verse:

"Verily I say unto you, today you will be with me in paradise"

or should it be:

"Verily I say unto you today, you will be with me in paradise"?

Terribly important points of doctrine hinge on that comma, whose position is indiscernable because the ancients had no punctuation. Soul sleep or instant entrance into heaven? Punctuation is crucial.

Truss hashes out the nuances of usage and concedes that in some instances, the correct way is a matter entirely of taste. That is a comfort to me, for I punctuate mainly by ear; that is, I use whatever sounds right when I am reading silently.

I think the possessive apostrophe is one of the majorly abused conventions, and also one of the most clear-cut ones to define. Misuse of apostrophes irks me as much as it did the author.

I am glad I read this. It got me thinking deeply over my grammatical habits, and it reinforced for me the desperate importance of proper punctuation. The book was nicely concise, and I would recommend it heartily to the English language's habitual offenders.

Conversation: A History of a Declining Art by Stephen Miller

2006-05-18T12:02:00.000-07:00

My first conclusion about this book came in the beginning chapters, where I was struck by the shortcomings of the author's style. Rather than a pleasant, accessible, conversational tone that would have been awfully appropriate for a book on conversation, Miller had a high school-essayish sort of approach, with an attempt to sound learned and proper coming off as more pretentious and amateurish than anything else. I, of course, live in mortal fear of falling to the same fate, but that is beside the point. I am not an elderly man positing myself as a witty, expert conversationalist.

Miller, in fact, came off rather snobbishly. I understand his righteous intellectual anger at the state of reasonable, rational discourse in America, but dismissing all Bible-believing Christians as unconversable was fairly harsh. Many of them might be unable to hold an intelligent conversation, but certainly not all of them, thank you very much.

Miller was often tedious, too often really. His haphazard history of conversation was not particularly enlightening, though his piece on Spartan society gave me something to think about. Apparently in Spartan society boys, from a young age, were consigned to the army and assigned an older "mentor," in a form of state-sanctioned pedophilia. Fascinating stuff. Anyways, the opinions of Hume, Johnson, Montaigne, et. al. on every subject, including each other, failed to excite much interest in me.

The modern history was nothing I did not know already. Kids instant message instead of talking face to face. Texting is destroying the language, whittling it down to nothing. Political rhetoric is emotionally charged, making it nearly impossible to reason out issues rationally. But I don't think the conversational landscape has any more weeds now than it ever did. Just because Miller's golden age - the 1700s in Britain - had a few intellectuals espousing the joys of discourse, it doesn't mean the society's state as a whole was rosy.

In a culmination of inadequacy, Miller ends on a dour note. One should never do so in such a book, even if it is justified. A pessimistic outlook is an insult to the reader, essentially telling him that even though he now has all this information and is as enlightened on the subject as the author, he is not capable of improving the general situation. Like, "This is the way the world is, and there is nothing you can do about it." My deepest desires are for arresting conversations, and I'm not giving up just because Stephen Miller is. Though they have been few and far between, I have had excellent conversations before, and I expect to have some more in the future. All hope is not lost.

Jeeves in the Springtime by P.G. Wodehouse

2006-05-17T11:56:00.000-07:00

Coming up with original comments to make about books in a series that are so similar to one another is hard. Wodehouse just has a knack for not fixing what isn't broken. I had to check my pronunciation of his last name. It is "wood-house," as in Emma. Because I typically come across new authors over the Internet or in books, I don't always hear names, and I need to take care of my pronunications, for it could turn embarrassing. I was fortunate I never referred to Albert Camus and Marcel Proust before I learned how to pronounce them. They were French, though, so I suppose I have an excuse. My British pronunications are usually spot-on, though one does have to watch for the worcestershires and gloucesters and whatnot.

Anyways, I can make at least one new observance here. Jeeves in the Springtime was a collection of some of the first Jeeves and Wooster short stories. The characters seemed rather embryonic in form, at least compared to what I had read and seen beforehand. In the first story of the book, Wooster becomes acquainted with Jeeves, and they have a few fallings-out before Wooster acknowledges Jeeves' mental superiority. Herein lies the basis upon which the other stories are built.

In the eponymous story, Jeeves is engaged, disengaged, and re-engaged, in a Wooster-ish fashion that I found detracted from his normally aloof, unadulterated ethos. I prefer Jeeves to be the uninvolved, almost asexual manservant he appears to be in the later works. It adds to the delightfully confounding dichotomy of the superior man subservient to his inferior. It would seem that Jeeves has no other ends, that he desires to attain nothing else in life, but the satisfaction of his employer. It is this distinct irony that perpetuates the humor in these books.

So there you have it. Some quasi-intelligent musings on my gym literature. I couldn't do cardio without it.

The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins

2006-05-08T08:46:00.000-07:00

The Moonstone began rather slowly, "mawkishly" even, as someone on amazon.com described it, with a sensational account of the theft of the eponymous stone from a sacred Hindu temple. The story then skips to a succession of first-person narrators, each relating their part in the mystery that surrounds the presentation and subsequent disappearance of the Moonstone on a young lady's birthday.

The narration gains traction as the novel progresses. Many characters are woefully two-dimensional, but somehow this did not diminish my delight in the book. By the middle of it, I was actually reluctant to put the book down, a rarer and rarer experience for me. No, the characters were not credible, nor was the plot, but I was entertained nonetheless.

And perhaps that is exactly why I was entertained. It has always been a maxim of mine that good fiction consists of ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances, or extraordinary people in ordinary circumstances. Ordinary people in ordinary circumstances are beyond boring, and extraordinary people in extraordinary circumstances can sometime be a bit over the top.

I am sure there is something wrong with my fiction-is-only-as-good-as-the-level-of-entertainment-it-provides philosophy on literature. Nevertheless, I shall persist in it until I can convince myself of something more intellectually forthright.

But it was a fun book. The Moonstone, at least, can only be worth as much as it entertains, for by any loftier measure it would not register very highly. Still, T.S. Eliot did call it "the first, the longest and the best of modern English detective novels," which has to lend the book some credibility.

The Warden by Anthony Trollope

2006-05-01T08:57:00.000-07:00

I don't know who or why or how or what, but I just did not like this book. I suppose it was a character study. That is often a good way to say a book was plotless and incredibly boring- as this was.

Perhaps I am not doing The Warden justice. It did have a romance, and the prose was not nearly obscure. It is just that everything was so flat. The book was like a children's primer. Of course, it did not help that my edition had a rather large font and cute little illustrations.

The Warden is a clergyman appointed to oversee some aging, retired field workers. A young activist-type decides the Warden is paid too much, and that more of the money he receives should go to the old men. So the kid conjures up a lawsuit. Unfortunately, he loves the Warden's daughter, and she pleads for him to give up the suit. Alas, it is too much for the Warden. He resigns his post, the girl marries the young guy, and everyone is moderately happy at the end, except for the old men, who have lost the best master they could have over greed for money they never got.

"Pedestrian" is the best I can do to describe the book. "Dull", "flat", "uninteresting" are close contenders. What more is there to say? I am sure the book had some sort of merit as social and political commentary at some point, but now even I, an unabashed Anglophile, can derive little of enjoyment from it. It is so hard to say intelligent things about a boring book

Don't Eat This Book by Morgan Spurlock

2006-04-22T12:03:00.000-07:00

Subtitled "Fast Food and the Supersizing of America," this expose of sorts written by the guy who ate only McDonald's for thirty days and filmed his ordeal, kept me entirely enthralled. I've retained an overarching disdain for fast food for many years, and Spurlock's testimony and barrage of facts only fortified my aversion for the stuff. Indeed, I disregarded the title and devoured his writing.

Spurlock jumps conversationally through the many facets of processed food, citing studies and experts and weaving in his own expericences and observances. He thoroughly destroys any appeal McDonald's could have for anyone, tracing the demise of its food quality, detailing the ingredients and the processes they go through, and demonstrating the inability of the average American to eat there constantly, burn off all the calories he consumes, and receive all of the nutrients he needs.

Spurlock goes even further into America's nutritive deficit. He scrutinizes the meat industry and its infatuation with hormones, antibiotics, and cutting costs at the expense of quality. He visits schools and finds many have cut P.E. while offering lunch fare no more nutritious than fast food. He examines the shelves of grocery stores, decrying the abundance of hydrogenated oils and high fructose corn syrups. He meets gastric bypass patients and marvels at how the world's one billion overweight inhabitants mirror the one billion starving ones.

The book is filled with devastating facts. An obese corpse being cremated fills the incinerating room with the smell of McDonald's as it burns; a man forgets a hamburger in his pocket one spring and finds it next fall in perfect condition; one McDonald's CEO dies of a heart attack and the man who replaces him dies of colectoral cancer. It is disgusting.

Spurlock's basic exhortation is for people to eat real food. Real, honest-to-goodness food that has no filler and that actually spoils. What is more, he calls for people to exercise and burn more calories than they take in. It doesn't take much to be healthy.

I have become more stringent lately, trying to maintain a standard of purity about what I consume. Even restaurants make me leery. I want to know exactly what is in everything I put into my mouth. Because of my resolve, I enjoyed the book that much more. I felt like I was on Spurlock's side. My only quarrel with him is over his sometimes too-leftist politics. The government can only be responsible for so much. Citizens need to make the effort to educate themselves, rather than have information dictated to them.

My Life and Hard Times by James Thurber

2006-04-19T09:48:00.000-07:00

Short and sweet. Thurber recounts incidents from his early life through to his post-college days, leaving off there for "the confusions and the panics of last year and the year before are too close for contentment."

The book is divided into self-contained commentaries in essay form. One describes "The Night the Bed Fell." It is an absurd account of a series of event blown entirely out of proportion. Another, "The Day the Dam Broke," is much the same. In both stories, the eponymous events never actually take place; rather, they are perceived to have, and so, choas ensues.

The stories are all entertaining and well-written. Thurber retains the qualities of his journalistic profession with a straightforward and concise style aimed to keep the reader's attention. He joyfully commemorates the colorful characters of his family and his fellow citizens of Columbus, Ohio. If anything, the book was too short. I completed it within two cardio sessions at the gym.

I am rather divided over Thurber's illustrations. They are certainly iconic, a style unto themselves. They're like life reduced to its most basic elements- childlike in execution, but endowed with an adult sensibilty. But they remind me of rendering problems I've had when attempting to portray something from real life accurately on a page, something about the perspective and proportions and whatnot. Still, the antithetical nature of his drawings is quite appealing.

Swann's Way by Marcel Proust

2006-04-18T10:11:00.000-07:00

Turn-of-the-century French experimental literature: not one of my favorite genres. Not by a long shot. But I saw Proust's work alluded to twice in the Wall Street Journal, and it was another book I could cross off my College Board-recomended list of novels to read before college, so I committed to perservering through Swann's Way, the first installment in Proust's monumental trilogy, In Search of Lost Time. I will not, however, be perservering through the latter two any time soon.

I have little love for stream-of-consciousness writing. Unfortunately for me, that is exactly what this entire book is comprised of. Proust's narrator recounts his entire childhood after the taste of a madeleine and tea sets off his memory. As a young boy in late 19th-century France, he grows up in the countryside and the narration meanders along with him. Detailed, detailed, detailed descriptions abound, with many involving flowers, which I found rather effeminate. The childhood narration is interrupted by the section "Swann in Love," which involves an acquaintance of the boy's family and takes place before he is born. "Swann in Love" is merely a chronicle of Swann's desperate, possessive obsession with some courtesan-type woman. She is shallow and promiscuous, and what Swann terms his "love" for her, is really just a desire to subdue and control her, to make himself "indispensable" to her.

The novel then switches back to the young boy, who grows to love Swann's daughter in much the same way Swann loved that woman. He has married her in the meantime, and the girl is the product of their union. The end of Swann's Way is not a decisive conclusion, for the story continues in the next two volumes.

I am sure the text suffered in translation, for it has that inordinately stuffy tone common to foreign works. Even the style that survives hinders the readability, though. Proust's sentences are endless, and one forgets the subject by the time one reaches the verb. The descriptions, which describe everything into oblivion, are tedious and pointless. There is little to call a plot, which eliminated any motivation I may have had to continue turning the pages.

I can see some merit in Proust's ability to represent elements of the human experience, especially the concept of memory association. Just as Swann was flooded with memories when he heard Vinteuil's sonata, so have I been ambushed by particular songs. But it was just such a long book, and I do not agree with the underlying philosophies behind it. I don't see a purposeless pleasure-seeking existence as particularly profound. Or correct.

How Right You Are, Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse

2006-04-16T11:54:00.000-07:00

Truly, there is something to be said for reliable consistency, for serial continuity. When one runs across delightful characters whom one is loath to part with, who can express one's joy when one discovers there is so much more where that came from?

I know I am being slightly verbose here. But perhaps there is no better way to expound upon the merits of How Right You Are, Jeeves, for verbosity is in fact one of the more endearing aspects of the protagonist and his associates. I revelled in the early-twentieth-century British vernacular. The accents from this period give a distinct impression of rapidity of speech, and this text conjures up that sound. It is almost as if the book is meant to be read quickly, and that is, of course, how I always go about it.

The characters' antics are beyond ridiculous, but that is all part and parcel of the Wodehouse ethos. Bertie Wooster is inevitably involved with a woman he was previously engaged to, or at least thought to have been engaged to. He usually has a lovestruck friend, and an aunt makes an appearance. Wooster gets tangled in others' affairs, and Jeeves is there to untie the knots. It's all here.

The farcical allusions are hilarious. A dachshund is described as "sound and fury signifying nothing," a reference which I readily understood after a lengthy study of Macbeth in school earlier this year. Wooster also employs a singular device of abbreviation, declaring, "[I] buried my f. in my h." when he was distraught, "f." being "face" and "h." being "hands." I've never encountered such a thing, nor do I believe I ever will. The fashion of writing seems to be a delightful little Wodehouse original.

The plot was rather meandering, but it defers to the characters and dialogue. The conversations are rapid-fire and truly comic. The characters play off of each other as if they were performing a sketch. The lines are concise, polished, and air-tight, snappy and clean. Wodehouse was a master of bons mots.

The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov

2006-04-05T09:14:00.000-07:00

The Cherry Orchard was a Russian play representing the fall of the country's serfdom. An old family, whose lineage dates back interminably, has lost its fortune. To avoid backruptcy, they are forced to sell their sizable home and land, including the beloved cherry orchard. The auction comes about, and the highest bidder is a man whose own ancestors were subservient to the affluent family's for just as far back as they can remember. He had begun life as a peasant, but had slowly amassed enough wealth to buy out the lords of the land.

The new owner begins razing the orchard as soon as the impoverished former owners depart. The sound of axes falling offsets the sobs of those leaving. For them, the cherry orchard was the embodiment of their prosperous past, a monument to deceased relatives who still seem to inhabit it. Now all of that is gone, their aristocratic birthright usurped by some low-blooded upstart.

All right. That is enough of that. Less esoterically, I thought the play incredibly tedious and was unable to conjure up pity for the protagonists. Of course, that is part of the inherent flaws involved in merely reading a play, silently, to oneself. The voices of the characters are muted and distorted by the one in the reader's head. The aesthetic is non-existent, for in writing for the stage the playwright omits the detailed narrative of the novel. Essentially, the effect is ruined. Translated works, too, retain a tincture of formality and lose the original sound and rhythm the author intended.

Bachelors Anonymous by P.G. Wodehouse

2006-04-04T11:53:00.000-07:00

I am shocked that it took me so long to discover Wodehouse. That such wonderfully accessible British humour should have evaded my notice until recently is incomprehensible.

Bachelors Anonymous was quite short, and relatively modern, as it was published in the 1970s. A playwright falls in love with a reporter, but is continually hampered in his wooing by circumstances and members of the eponymous self-help group. Modelled after Alcoholics Anonymous, Bacherlors Anonymous attempts to keep its members from becoming ensnared in the perilous trap of marriage.

Ridiculous plotlines ensue, with a serendipitous inheritance, fortuitous encounters, and coincidental connections. But Wodehouse mocks his own story even as he tells it, comparing the lives of his characters to extraordinary romance novels and the like with a self-awareness that is delightfully refreshing.

It is all conducted in exquisitely good taste. The bachelors are automatically assumed to be celibate. No one does anything more than kiss. It is as if they all live in a marvellously sanitized, detached, innocent world. That seems to describe, in fact, the entirety of Wodehouse's literary world. It is a happy, wonderfully safe place rife in humour, good will, and well-being.

The Lady and the Unicorn by Tracy Chevalier

2006-04-02T12:13:00.000-07:00

The author of Girl With a Pearl Earring doesn't fix what isn't broken, as it were, as she tackles another masterpiece of art history. I am glad, however, that I had no concept of the eponymous work in The Lady and the Unicorn when I read the story, for it was much prettier in my mind than it is in real life. The work is a tapestry, a symbolic depiction of seduction woven in garish reds and blues and yellows, with impersonal, stylized figures and a general simplicity that I found too primitive to be engaging. Reading the book, I imagined a lush, complex composition so realistic it was absolutely arresting, which was due largely to Chevalier's descriptions.

Because the tapestry was all about sex, the novel was, too. I found it extremely titillating, if rather risque. Nicolas des Innocents, the designer of the tapestry, conquers all kinds of women as he travels between Paris, where he lives, and Brussels, where the tapestry is woven. His patron's daughter falls in love with him, and he captures her likeness in the work. He also includes his patron's wife, a tragic, unloved woman who failed to produce a male heir. In Brussels, Nicolas loves the weaver's blind daughter who, to avoid an unsavory marriage, sleeps with him and gets pregnant. Her story is quite touching. Nicolas adds her to the tapestry.

The narrative point of view jumps from character to character, but not haphazardly. Rather, it begins with Nicolas, and moves through a roster of characters twice before ending again with Nicolas. I thought it a beautifully fluid way to proceed.

The tapestry is declared a success in the book. I viewed it on the Internet, and was not as enthralled. But it was an engaging story. Of course, Chevalier did write some of the novel from a male point of view, an action of authoresses that I find inexcusable in its presumption and incapable of producing a male character free of effeminate or idealistic elements. Still, much of fiction is entirely fantasy. I'm afraid I am going to lose my opinions in qualification.

The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

2006-03-30T09:47:00.000-08:00

It took some mulling, but I believe I have alighted upon the meaning of this work, or a portion of it at least. Gregor Samsa lives with his parents and sister and provides for them through a rather grueling job in sales. But one morning, he awakes to find he has morphed into a sort of giant beetle. He is repulsive like this, and so confined to his room. His family scambles to support themselves, taking jobs and letting out a room. The boarders discover the "vermin," and threaten to leave. The distress of the situation, coupled with the malnutrition he has incurred from depression, kills Gregor. The family finds him shriveled up, and they are relieved. They discover that, because of their jobs, they are fairly well-off and can now get a smaller apartment to save even more. The sister has become a useful, beautiful young lady, and the future is filled with hope for all.

I think the moral, or message, or point, or what have you, is that though Gregor felt he was an indispensable provider for his family, he was in fact stifling them, and they could not truly flourish until he was gone. He was almost no better than vermin before his transformation, and it needed only the metamorphosis to make this apparent to all.

But somehow I feel that doesn't quite encompass all that this novel is meant to convey. I suppose I should have read the textual criticism in my version more closely. Much of it is filled with "greatest book of this century" sorts of sentiments. Naturally, I'd like to know why. I was fairly surprised at the brevity of the work. I'd imagined it to be much longer, and that is why I did not pick it up for quite a while. In fact, what prompted me to read it was a Final Jeopardy question I saw on my trip to Ohio. It referred to the first paragraph, and I could not for the life of me come up with even a decent guess. I certainly did not want that to happen again.

Well, now I've read it, and have at least cursory knowledge of it, if not an extensive understanding. If nothing else, I'll be able to answer that question on Jeopardy.

The Necklace and Other Short Stories by Guy de Maupassant

2006-03-29T08:49:00.000-08:00

It is a funny thing, the enduring elements of literature. What remains relevant and what loses its immediacy to obscurity is often separated by finely drawn nuances. Certainly in this collection, the potently pertinent and the disappointingly antique are inextricably intermingled. De Maupassant apparently invented the modern concept of the short story, and many of those featured in this book display a universal sensibility.

"The Necklace" follows a young woman who belongs to the middle class but believes she deserves better. She borrows a rich friend's necklace and loses it, then buys a replacement on credit, and works for a decade to pay off the debt, only to discover the original was only worth a fraction of the one she bought. Thus, a woman whose previous aspirations were meaningless, works for years for something equally meaningless. The uppity upstart gets what she deserves.

A melancholy narrative tells of the stifled, uncontrollable affections of a middle-aged spinster- the tragedy of her existence, and her tragic end. An uncomfortable horror story of sorts chronicles the deterioration of a man haunted by an invisible being. Here we begin to find bits of antiquity. The story makes all sorts of "metaphysical speculations" that could only have been made in the nineteenth century.

Other stories focus on Franco-Prussian conflicts, peasant life, and prostitutes, the profundity of which is entirely lost on me. What someone hailed as technically the greatest short story ever written, "Boule-de-Suif," or "Ball of Fat," had no special merits that I could see. A rotund prostitute refuses to sleep with the occupying Prussian captain, but her compatriots, desperate to escape, convince her to override her patriotic scruples. The end finds them on a departing wagon, the prostitute, now shunned by all, weeping. I failed to sympathize with the protagonist. But from what I understand, de Maupassant was obsessed with prostitutes, and seeing how as he died from syphilis, he evidently had a deep sympathy for them.

Incidentally, de Maupassant seems to have actually gone crazy from the disease. He was committed to an asylum, and he died there. A fascinating end for an author, I must say.

Some of the stories really dragged, while others kept me going with a sort of morbid fascination. I do not believe a single story had a redeeming ending, but of course, that is too much to ask. I must merely content myself with a superb command of language and an emerging sense of irony.

I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith

2006-03-25T09:38:00.000-08:00

I have to say, I identified with the protagonist in the beginning. Seventeen-year-old Cassandra is an aspiring writer who adores Austen and the Brontes, but finds little in her life to inspire her own literary contribution. Our similarities, however, ended with the first chapter. Cassandra lives in an old castle in England in the 1940s, with her author-turned-hermit father, nudist model stepmother, bored and dreaming older sister, studious younger brother, and a deceased servant's orphan son who loves her in his simple and unworthy way.

The owners of the castle, two conveniently handsome, engaging brothers, come to claim their inheritance, and all their lives soon become intertwined. Rose, the older sister, becomes engaged to one of the brothers, Simon. But as Rose discovers she does not truly love him, Cassandra discovers she herself does. Unofortunately, Simon does not feel the same about her. But after Rose elopes with the younger brother Neil, Simon impulsively proposes to Cassandra. Nevertheless, she refuses, knowing he would never love her as he loved Rose.

Symbols and elements of loneliness are prevalent. Cassandra finds herself alone quite often. Sometimes she welcomes it, and sometimes she does not. The denouement leaves her single. The book is not a chronicle of courtship, but a coming-of-age sort of thing, a showcase of development that follows Cassandra as she acquires the qualities that will ultimately enhance her adult life. She finds independence, and apparently she is the better for it.

Cassandra briefly explores religion but concludes it is just a way to avoid the events of life. The town vicar is described as baby-faced and golden-haired, as if he had never grown up and never really lived life. Cassandra's conclusion is mystifying to me. Why God is avoidance, rather than solace or purpose, is not truly established.

Cassandra begins as a worthy protagonist, but she devolves into someone less worthy of the reader's sympathy. She blunders through servant son Stephen's emotional attachment to her, she pursues her sister's fiance, she analyzes everything into oblivion, and she continues tediously and self-centeredly until the end. For most of the book, she is unhappy, and there is not celebratory ending to countermand that. One American brother comments on how melancholy England seems to be, much as the novel as a whole is. But perhaps that is the author's aim- to capture the melancholy of adolescence in a searingly accurate manner.

Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse

2006-03-23T11:58:00.000-08:00

I loved the title, so as my introduction to Wodehouse I selected Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves. Wodehouse's name was mentioned on amazon.com lists and in Arthur & George, which piqued my curiousity. I am quite glad I discovered him.

Apparently with this book I jumped right into the midst of a very funny series. Bertie Wooster is an English gentleman in the early 20th century, and Jeeves is his encyclopaedic butler. Wooster gets himself into compromising situations, and Jeeves gets him out through his veritable treasure trove of knowledge and his relentless deadpan delivery.

The story is almost incidental beside the rollicking narration. Wooster's first-person voice is a linguistic exercise in absurdity. He begins adages but never finishes them, he uses fabricated abbreviations liberally, and he toys with conventional usages.

The supporting characters are merely two-dimensional caricatures of anything resembling real people. In this way, Wooster appears to be the epitome of sanity in a mad world. It is a very funny world, all the same.

Serendipitously, I came across a Jeeves and Wooster DVD at the library. I was not aware any such thing existed. The DVDs feature episodic adventures of the duo, and the series is as excellently done as the books. The characters are captured perfectly; Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry are incredible.

Arthur & George by Julian Barnes

2006-03-20T12:01:00.000-08:00

I enjoyed the aesthetic qualities of the author's quintessentially British name, and selected this book partially on that basis. Julian. Very nice.

The book itself was definitively British, often endeavouring to establish the nature of a "true Englishman" and then differentiate the main characters from such a definition. Arthur, of course, is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, painted as I am sure he truly was- worlds away from his ubiquitous protagonist. It is such situations that make me wonder whether genius is actually an autonomous, lightning-strikes-once sort of individual entity that manifests itself in all kinds of forms.

But that is a separate consideration. George is the Indian-Scotsman whom Arthur really did exculpate from a wrongful conviction. The book deals with the trial and the events surrounding the ordeal. The plot was well-paced, and the narrative was absorbing. Barnes examines Doyle's increasing fascination with spiritism, and he treats such a silly belief as respectfully as possible. Of all the belief systems out there, why Doyle would alight on such a ridiculous one is baffling.

George was a very sad character, but as the author was certainly bound by history's outcome, the character must have been very close to the real man. The book is rather melancholy and inconclusive, but it provides an insightful analysis of the man behind Holmes. Barnes is a talented narrator and he has crafted a contemporary book that features a superb use of language, a complex plot, and a thoughtful composition.

Tristan and Iseult by Rosemary Sutcliff

2006-03-17T10:17:00.000-08:00

Sutcliff skillfully wove this retelling of the epic legend. She retained an element of archaic sensibility, while writing in language the modern reader has no trouble understanding. Kudos to her for that.

The story itself is fairly captivating, as it would almost have to be considering how long it has lasted. It forms an instantly recognizable archetype: young, beautiful lovers estranged forever because of circumstances and destined to end tragically. Romeo and Juliet, anyone? I suppose such plots capture audiences because of their uncertainty and suspense, and the exquisite sadness of it all. I think there is also some schadenfreude in seeing insanely privileged individuals suffer for their own folly.

It truly is the protagonists' folly that leads to the tragic end. Sutcliff makes a poor case for their uncontrollable ardour for each other, merely attributing it to a moment in which each gazed into the other's eyes and felt some sort of intangible bond. They had no true points of connection that they could not have had with their respective spouses. She is gorgeous and he is handsome, but that does not mean they are irrevocably destined for each other.

Marriage is for procreation and the spurring on of one another towards righteousness, if you've biblical inclinations. It is not just the satisfaction of lust. Pleasure is an essential component, but it is not the only one. Relationships need to be established upon something more than just physical attraction. Not that any of this was given any consideration here. It was a romance, after all. They die in the end. How romantic.

The Black Arrow by Robert Louis Stevenson

2006-03-12T08:32:00.000-08:00

I read the introduction to the book (after I had finished the story so it wouldn't influence my opinion, like I usually do) and I completely agree with it. The Black Arrow was definitely one of Stevenson's "minor works" and not entirely a classic in its own right, but a good story nevertheless.

It is really just a boys' adventure novel- simplistic, fast-paced, and fun, with a convenient moral at the end. Richard Shelton discovers his place in society during the War of the Roses in England in the 1400s. Accuracy and authenticity are not the author's major concerns, as there are numerous curiously prescient allusions to a yet-to-be-born Shakespeare, and many speech conventions contemporary of Stevenson.

Dick, as the protagonist is often called, rescues a young lady from an undesirable marriage, and revenges himself upon his father's murderer. He learns about right and wrong, and the far-reaching consequences of his actions.

The characters are rather simple, and their internal development merely superficial. But it makes for a good leisure read. Nineteenth-century "tushery," or books where authors use "tush" and other uncommon words often, a term Stevenson himself coined, is exceedingly diverting. What was perhaps considered unworthy then is highbrow compared to most of today's escapist fiction.

I found this book to be a lot of fun. The plot kept me turning the pages eagerly to the end. It was much more enthralling than say, Ivanhoe, a similar but infinitely more tedious novel. The adventure was, for lack of a better term, higher- more exciting and epic, like a medieval romantic adventure should be.

The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy

2006-03-11T08:45:00.000-08:00

Thomas Hardy's writing was as dark and melancholy as I'd heard it was, but The Mayor of Casterbridge had a happy ending, and that always redeems a book in my eyes. The story was riveting, and the style was comprehensible. A man, in a drunken impulse, sells his wife and daughter to a passing sailor. The rest of the book chronicles the results of this, the ensuing tangle and and confusion of relations as the years progress, and the final state of affairs after all the threads have been sorted out.

The characters are interesting, but not terribly engaging. Henchard is the faulty man whose overly impulsive nature ultimately destroys him. Elizabeth-Jane is supposed to be the daughter whom Henchard sold, but is actually the offspring of Henchard's wife and the sailor. Elizabeth-Jane, through tenacious self-discipline and a strong sense of propriety, develops into a sensible, well-informed girl. She eventually marries well, forming the happy ending I mentioned before.

Most of the story is the interplay of the various connected people, and it is fun to follow. Because the reader does not form much emotional attachment to the characters, due perhaps to the author's intent, one can just stand a distance and events resolve themselves into a cohesive narrative. A lot of the novel is rather sad and pathetic, but not all of it. Elizabeth-Jane begins with the view that life is mostly a tragedy punctuated intermittently with moments of happiness, but by the end such an outlook is modified a bit, because her situation has become one of complete satisfaction.

A Passage to India by E.M. Forster

2006-03-04T10:28:00.000-08:00

Forster was a fairly insightful guy. A Room with a View involved fascinating character development and apt observances of the human condition, and A Passage to India did too. Still, his worldview was unabashedly atheistic, and his main conclusion was merely a cry for universal brotherhood. Nevertheless, the narrative was enjoyable.

Forster himself seems to enjoy complex relationships and broken engagements, common subjects in the two books of his that I have read. I think he also saw travel as a venue by which a person's character is thrown into relief and magnified. Perhaps, and especially for the early 20th-century Briton, when one is removed from the confines of conventional society, one is able to act how one would without that outside control.

The book gained a new level of realism for me when I dined at an Indian restaurant. The cuisine was fabulous, and it felt as if I could taste and feel the novel, after having read it. Eating unfamiliar food is a singular joy: one does not exactly know what one is dining on, but as it is delicious and exquisitely exotic, it makes for a culinary adventure. So, in that way, I took my own little passage to India, and the experience of the Imperial British visitor became that much more real to me. In fact, I would go so far as to recommend that one should immediately make reservations for the nearest Indian restaurant as soon as one has finished the book. It makes a delicious accompaniment.

Admiral Hornblower in the West Indies by C.S. Forester

2006-02-18T10:44:00.000-08:00

The admirable admiral triumphs again in the penultimate installation of the Hornblower saga. I'll admit I approached this book with trepidation, unsure whether it could attain the level of the previous books, but, barring one minor flaw, I need not have feared. It was a complete success.

Horatio is patrolling the Caribbean, not unlike Commodore Norrington in Pirates of the Caribbean, cracking down on piracy and slave trading. He risks his "honour as a gentleman," but retains it with a fortunate coincidence. He and his secretary are kidnapped by pirates, and they have a delightfully touching scene reminiscent of Sam and Frodo's on the path to Mordor, incidentally what I consider to be the consummate scene of the trilogy.

Horatio and his secretary escape and destroy the pirates. Horatio's wife comes to accompany him home, for his commission is over. Just before they leave, a young man in the marine band refuses to play a note he believes is incorrect, objecting on artistic grounds. For that, he is sentenced to death. Herein lies the sole flaw of the book. For Barbara is distraught over the situation, and when she asks Horatio for money, he does not even suspect that it is to aid the young man's escape. The revelation of her motives serves as the denouement of the novel, but I found it anticlimactic. I had figured it out long before.

Nevertheless, the majority of the book is superb. On the return home, Horatio's ship is caught in a hurricane. In the despair of the moment, Barbara insists she never loved anyone but Horatio, putting to rest his self-doubt on account of her first husband. Horatio saves the ship and most of the crew, and they make it safely to land.

Horatio's final reconciliation with his wife is nice and happy, and his final satisfaction with her after years of philandering indecision is an exceedingly appropriate ending.

One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey

2006-02-03T09:51:00.000-08:00

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was a truly tragic book. Stories of mental wards aren't typically happy, and this one did have bright spots, but it was altogether very sad. Chief Bromden, the narrator, tells the story of McMurphy, a man who gets himself admitted to an insane asylum to avoid a work camp. Through McMurphy's antics, it is revealed that the hospital is not designed to make the patients better. In fact, it often makes them much worse.

McMurphy draws many of his fellow inmates out of their antisocial neuroses. He arranges a fishing trip, which for some is their first outing in twenty years. He defies the controlling nurses, and, as retribution, is subjected to shock treatment and then a lobotomy. This surgery renders him a vegetable, and so Bromden smothers him out of compasssion.

The mercy killing at the end was fairly disturbing, but mostly understandable considering the men and their situation. Much of the inmates' inabilities to function stemmed from a sort of desexing, as Kesey repeatedly pointed out. They were forced to rescind any form of masculinity they may have retained. They were left men in name only, with no power or virility, unable to assert themselves and so unable to live sanely.

McMurphy served as a sort of sacrifice for these men, losing his life in an attempt to restore such to them. I found the story riveting, and I was in suspense until the end. It was excellent, but again, so tragic.

The Tent by Margaret Atwood

2006-01-31T12:11:00.000-08:00

Atwood's name is a fixture on standardized exams and her poetry is prevalent in schools, so when I saw a new book of hers at the library, I thought it would be worth my while to check it out. The chapters of The Tent were short and rife with symbolism. I was relieved to discover each section was an autonomous essay. I thought Atwood may have deliberately designed them to form a coherent whole, and if that were so I am not astute enough to rise to the daunting task of finding the connections.

It was all deep, mutlilayered symbolism, the sort that is so ambiguous, it can be taken and interpreted in many different ways. I have been wondering lately about the nature of profundity. If a piece of literature causes me to think on some esoteric subject, though the author did not outright state such a concept, nor perhaps originally meant anything of the sort, is the author considered to have written something with penetrating insight?

Think on that. In the meantime, my review. I caught some allusions in the book, but I am sure not all of them. Atwood's illustrations were cute, especially the one that played on that art nouveau composition involving Salome.

Some of the essays were fairly graphic. I was disappointed. I think my favorite of all of them was the eponymous "The Tent," in which Atwood reckoned her literary endeavours as a frantic scibbling upon a paper shelter- the only barrier between her and a scary, dark world. It was interesting, if nothing else.

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

2006-01-29T10:16:00.000-08:00

To the Lighthouse was a fascinating, but meandering and melancholy, exercise in stream-of-consciousness prose. The first section of the book introduces the characters, whose lives are intertwined and connected commonly by matriarch Mrs. Ramsay. The inner thoughts of the various characters are revealed intermittently as they all vacation in the Hebrides. There is little outer dialogue, and no indication of a switch in narrator.

An abrupt chapter following this heralds the passage of ten years. Many, including Mrs. Ramsay, have died. The concluding chapter returns to some of those present in the beginning, and accompanies them as thry revisit the vacation home.

The relationships between all these people are hashed and rehashed. Mr. Ramsay is a distant philosopher-type whose children harbor resentments against him because of his emotional coldness. Lily Briscoe is a single painting dilettante for whom Mrs. Ramsay tries unfruitfully to find a partner. Mrs. Ramsay is reputedly beautiful, and she attempts to smooth out the lives of everyone around her. She becomes some sort of symbol of perfection for Lily, and inspires her to paint despite the fact that her work will just rot in an attic some day.

I did not particularly care for any of the characters. I find most complex character studies tedious and pointless. I am not sure I have a complete grasp on what Woolf was trying to say with this, either. I know she had a philosophy describing humans' inability to ever truly know one another, and I can see that here. Her characters would be complete mysteries to the outside observer, but the inner dialogue reveals so much more. I also caught the do-what-you-want-and-forget-posterity thing at the end, which is always a healthy perspective. But I feel like I may be missing something. I feel that way about literature often.

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

2006-01-27T09:40:00.000-08:00

The African-American's experience is so remote from my own. It is not an experience I envy, either: having to overcome racial prejudice, impoverishment, stereotypes, and ignorance. I also find it fairly counteractive to establishing equality when a category is created based on what the author looked like. Geographical or chronological bounds are easier to defend.

I was able to muster up sufficient admiration for this book, though. As my English teacher Mr. Rossi said, the search for individuality is a universal one. The protagonist was more or less understandable and likable. He gets kicked out of college over an indiscretion involving race, and he must fend for himself in post-Renaissance Harlem. He joins up with "the Brotherhood" and tries to help in the fight for equality, but everything turns sour. He finally discovers that the only way he can find his individual identity is through himself.

I thought it was a fine message. I was glad the protagonist did not find his identity in an organization, but rather in a disillusioned solitude. I could sympathize with his attempt to rid his culture of ignorance. I had to write an essay on a famous African-American, so I chose Frederick Douglass, and I enjoyed the correlation in the book between him and the protagonist.

The Zoo Story by Edward Albee

2006-01-23T10:19:00.000-08:00

This is a testament to my English teacher, in that I would never have appreciated this play to the extent that I do if I had not experienced it with him. The Zoo Story is a fairly short play, happening in one act, on one day, near one park bench. It is, in fact, a single conversation between two people. Peter is relaxing on the park bench one afternoon, reading a book, when Jerry comes up and begins talking to him. His comments are bizarre from the beginning. "I went to the zoo today," he starts.

All that follows is basically an unfolding of Jerry's life and how it contrasts with Peter's- one is married, with children, an apartment, and a decent job; the other lives alone, devoid of human connection, finding the neighbor's dog a sorry excuse for a companion.

The story turns abruptly when Jerry tries to start a fight with Peter. It ends with Peter, in self-defense, grabbing the knife Jerry wields, and then Peter standing bewildered as Jerry impales himself upon it, with a thank-you for the assistance.

Jerry is one of those who get lost in society, whose troubled childhood leaves them ill-prepared to deal with the world. Peter is the moderately successful well-adjusted citizen who never truly finds himself uncomfortable. Jerry changes that. He puts Peter in a position of severe discomfort, forcing him to see where Jerry was coming from when he babbled on and on for pages and pages. It was a well-done play, and my teacher's rendition of Jerry was fantastic. I was fascinated by the story for its entire duration.

Persuasion by Jane Austen

2006-01-23T08:50:00.000-08:00

Well, I am very proud of myself. I managed to make the canon of Austen literature last for over a year. But tragically, I have finished the last one. I guess I'll have to start all over again.

Persuasion was superb, both in its predictability, and in its innovation. The female lead loves the male lead, and there is lots of uncertainty until they get together in the end. That is a given. But this heroine is older. She spurned the advances of a young sailor in her youth at the advice of a friend, and now she is "seven-and-twenty" and still single.

The sailor, now Captain Wentworth, shows up again because of common acquaintances, but he has eyes only for younger, livelier girls, not "bloom"-less Anne Elliot. Anne just hangs out doing the whole Austen forbearance thing, and simply by being her normal, tactful, modest self, persuades the sailor to renew his love.

The eponymous concept is also manifest in Anne's decision to initially refuse the offer of marriage. Her friend had persuaded her to change her mind, and this is a major objection for Captain Wentworth.He thinks such a changeable mind exhibits weakness. But, of course, he is soon persuaded otherwise.

It was a very pleasant book. The story gives hope to quiet, untoward, unexceptional-looking girls. Apparently their better qualities will nevertheless shine through eventually. After all, Anne had no less than three potential suitors and certain admirers, in just six months. And, moreover, while in her late twenties in Regency England.

Austen made some great observations in this book, and I copied down some of the best:

"Anne always contemplated them as some of the happiest creatures of her acquaintance: but still, saved as we all are by some comfortable feeling of superiority from wishing for the possibility of exchange, she would not have given up her own more elegant and cultivated mind for all their enjoyments..." (Chapter 5)

"Anne had not wanted this visit to Uppercross to learn that a removal from one set of people to another, though at a distance of only three miles, will often include a total change of conversation, opinion, and idea." (Chapter 6)

"She felt that she could so much more depend upon the sincerity of those who sometimes looked or said a careless or hasty thing, than of those whose presence of mind never varied, whose tongue never slipped." (Chapter 17)

Lord Hornblower by C.S. Forester

2006-01-18T10:52:00.000-08:00

The war is over! Oh wait, no it isn't. Napoleon somehow escaped from Elba. Oops. Horatio is in France visiting the Count and his daughter-in-law Marie, who sheltered him in Captain Horatio Hornblower, when he is suddenly changed from celebrated, decorated war hero, to fugitive. Horatio organizes a guerilla warfare band, but they are too few, and after a few weeks of running, are disbanded.

Reduced to Horatio, his steward Brown, the Count, and Marie, the group is soon overtaken by Hussars. There is an excellent scence in which Horatio thinks the thoughts of a man destined to die, and then fights like one. It was better than a movie.

Marie dies, which was sad, but really a very convenient way to solve Horatio's lover conundrum. It was a spectacular way to get rid of her, I must say. The morning the Count and Horatio are condemned to die, the hand of fate is stilled. Napoleon has been defeated at Waterloo, and Horatio is, once again, free.

Bush died in the beginning, but I never especially liked him, so I have nothing against Forester for doing away with him. Barbara becomes rather self-centered, abandoning Horatio to host foreign diplomats in Austria. She almost asked for the whole Marie-the-mistress thing. Not that that excuses Horatio's infidelity, of course. Bad Horatio.

Incidentally, the opening paragraph of the book involves Horatio admiring the ceiling of Westminster Abbey as he sat listening to a sermon. It was only the day before I read this that I was showing my sister a picture of that very ceiling in my art history book because it was not only beautiful, but strikingly Tolkienesque. Great minds truly do think alike.

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

2006-01-16T08:52:00.000-08:00

Oscar Wilde was the master of the epigram, the maxim, the aphorism. His characters sometimes held conversations consisting entirely of them. His text is riddled with them, and it is by Lord Henry's that Dorian Gray lives and dies. Dorian is a young, beautiful man whom a painter immortalizes on canvas. When Lord Henry sees it, he comments that the picture will stay the same, though Dorian will age. Dorian is appalled at the idea. He rashly wishes it would be the other way around.

Fast forward some years, and Dorian's wish has come true. Though he adopts Lord Henry's "new hedonism" and spends his time chasing pleasure at the expense of his reputation and numerous people's lives, his countenance is as pure and innocent as ever. However, the painting has become grotesque. Dorian keeps it hidden, even as he tries to conceal his own inner depravity. Eventually, he attempts to destroy the painting, and by doing so, inadvertently kills himself.

Altogether, the book was a disparagement of a life of doing things solely for the pleasure of oneself. Dorian does whatever he wants, and he ends up unhappy and dead. He examines his own motives and discovers that even his attempts to do good are selfish. Of course, Wilde presents no alternatives here, but I hardly expected him to. Just having debauchery and dissipation decried is enough for me. That is not a theme I've often encountered in literature.

The prose was quick-paced, and, as I said, epigrammatic. A lot of people died, which was slightly creepy, but it was a very engaging story. Still, I can always find common ground with the reviewer quoted in the preface: "Why go grubbing in muckheaps?"

The Know-it-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World by A.J. Jacobs

2006-01-08T12:09:00.000-08:00

The title appealed to me. I couldn't help myself; I had to read this book. I did not raise my hopes too highly, because it was written in 2004, and so it does not qualify for the "time will separate the wheat from the chaff" philosophy that I adhere to. So, my experience with the book was not too painful.

The story is a sort of memoir based on the author's actual foray though the entire Encyclopedia Britannica- all 33,000 pages of it. The plot involves the year it took him to get through it, as he simultaneouly joins Mensa, tries out for "Jeopardy!", and actually appears on "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?"

Jacobs includes all sorts of personal information, such as how he feels about his brother-in-law, that lends the story its authenticity, but also makes me wonder how the people featured reacted when they saw themselves on the printed page. Does that lady at the Mensa meeting really want to be portrayed as a loser with no job? Does Jacobs' father want his real-life relationship with his son dissected and displayed before millions of strangers?

I suppose the basis of good writing does lie in its resemblance to reality. Still, I don't think Jacobs even changed any names. But maybe he likes having his whole life broadcast to the world. It is very much like blogging, actually. Slightly narcissistic but sometimes entertaining.

The writing itself was very average, and too much like a journal. The story dragged sometimes, and Jacobs used way too much of the present tense. I hate the present tense. It unfailingly sounds like first-grades narratives do- simple and childish. It is fine for the six-year-olds, but unacceptable for an adult novelist.

In the area of worldviews, the author is an agnostic, but he acknowledges that there seems to be some moral absolutes, and he admires the book of Ecclesiates for its philosophical merit. Go figure.

The Family Reunion by T.S. Eliot

2006-01-08T10:26:00.000-08:00

After a rather extensive research report on his life and works, T.S. Eliot is now officially one of my friends. I mean, his moral and spiritual development coincided so perfectly with my 1920s-centered topic requirement ("From The Waste Land to Ash Wednesday: A Moral Regeneration from 1922 to 1930"). How could I not love him?

The Family Reunion was a play in which a cast of characters related to one another realize that most of their problems stem from the matriarch's desperate and ineffectual, though sincere, attempts to make them happy during childhood. At least, that is how I interpreted it.

Eliot is a truly fantastic writer, no matter what he is writing about. His is the most poetic prose I think I have ever read. I would like to see a play of his performed, to see how the lines are translated upon the stage. Even when his meaning is not clear, Eliot's words are still mesmerizing. In fact, the hypnotic effect is probably heightened by the obscurity. But a play always reads flatly without the human voice to illuminate it. In that way, plays are much like poetry- best when read aloud.

The Stranger by Albert Camus

2006-01-05T10:09:00.000-08:00

Meursault, a Frenchman, gets caught in a murder mess in The Stranger. He shot a man out of self-defense, but during his trial he is judged cold-blooded because of his apparently callous reaction to his mother's death, and so is considered capable of premeditated murder. He is condemned to the death penalty.

A striking aspect of the narrative is how logical Meursault's reaction to his mother's death seems at the beginning. For when it is examined in a courtroom, it really does appear condemning. Meursault was fascinating- a resigned, indifferent individual, concerned mostly with sensual pleasure when concerned with anything at all.

He was one of those who just go through the motions of life, not caring about the past, not anticipating the future. He was quite a peculiar sort of atheist, countering the chaplain calmly, asking what God had to do with anything, quite unperturbed. He really had no concept of God at all. I was as unsure of how to react to such measured indifference as the chaplain was.

Altogether, the story was that of a man's response to his imminent death; or, at least, it culminated in that. Meursault just reasons he was going to die eventually, and if it happened thirty years before he had expected it to, what then? What difference did it make?

And yet, one would think it made all the difference in the world. For how could Meursault know he had got the meaning of life, or the lack thereof, right? Isn't it presumptuous to assume one has absolute knowledge when one has experienced such a neglible fraction of all there is in the universe? Maybe another thirty years would have revealed a more concrete conclusion than that all that there is, is nothing.

The Collected Poems of T.S. Eliot

2006-01-02T10:25:00.000-08:00

Poetry has always been a thing despised by me. But, once again, my AP Lit and Comp teacher's instruction has proved horizon-expanding. We went through "The Hollow Men" when we read Heart of Darkness, and I was intrigued by the depth of meaning manifest within the poem. In my other English class, a brush with The Great Gatsby warranted a five-page essay on a topic from the 1920s. Seeing how as I find most of that decade as vapidly decadent and unworthy of study as F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel itself, I decided to take a risk and immerse myself in a subject completely unknown to myself- T.S. Eliot and his poetry.

The research and composition of my paper was an unprecedented success (my five-minute class presentation was not as wonderful, but that is another story). Though much of Eliot's message was obscured to me on my primary readings, subsequent commentaries, rehashing, and invaluable audio files of the author reading "The Waste Land" undoubtedly as it was meant to be heard, gradually filled in the subtler shades of meaning for me. I was able to trace Eliot's journey from a disillusioned, dispassionate commentator on the dissipation and dismemberment of modern society, to an enlightened, rejuvenated Christian, full of calm hope.

His "Choruses from the Rock" were gorgeous expressions of an intellectual Christianity. "Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word" takes one "nearer to death/but nearness to death no nearer to God." The first chorus contains those lines, and ends with these:

And we thank Thee that darkness reminds us of light.
O Light Invisible, we give Thee thanks for Thy great glory!

Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare

2006-01-02T10:14:00.000-08:00

I'll commence with a caveat: most of my perspective is probably my senior AP Lit and Comp teacher's, so buyer beware.

Twelfth Night was fairly funny. It was largely far-fetched, and really only enjoyable when acted out, but the humor was still apparent in the text. Mr. Rossi's pantomines also helped.

The underlying message was an intriguing one. "Dost thou think because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?" Sir Toby asks Malvolio, the self-righteous Puritan. Can religion and pleasure exist together? Perhaps Shakespeare thought so.

I'm not typically a Bardolator, but I was able to muster up some appreciation for Shakespeare with a teacher to elucidate the finer points and bring to light the essential themes. Maybe, as T.S. Eliot said, Shakespeare is a better companion as one gets older. It might be that youth cannot tackle the Bard on its own.

Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev

2006-01-02T08:37:00.000-08:00

I do not know what the general consensus is on this book. I personally am divided. I am not particularly fond of Russian literature. I got maybe three-quarters of the way through War and Peace before the people at the Jeopardy! tryouts told me to just shelve it and watch the movie, and so I gleefully returned the book to the library. It was that novel that introduced me to the more benign 19th century definition of "make love," so I suppose it had some merit. It's just that I can't forget the picture of the pregnant lady with the "beautiful" downy upper lip.

Anyways, Fathers and Sons was modestly enjoyable. The young Arkady brings home his idol- his nihlist friend Bazarov to meet his family and visit for a few weeks. Incidentally, the footnotes said Turgenev coined the term "nihilist." Arkady eventually loses his illusions of his friend's depths of enlightenment and abandons such a sad, deficient philosophy. Bazarov dies of typhoid fever, still resigned to his beliefs.

Everyone in the book seemed to be controlled by their personalities. Bazarov was congenitally predisposed to universal condemnation, and so he espoused it. Arkady was a simpler, "romantic" type, so he could not adopt Bazarov's mindset. The "intelligent" girl was cloying and unattractive; the beautiful, stately woman could never quite grasp Bazarov's sayings.

One image that has stuck with me is that of Bazarov's final illness. While conducting an autopsy, he accidentally punctures his finger. He calmly waits as infection sets in, and as a doctor, he observes himself and can trace his subsequent demise. To a lesser extent, I can relate, for when I first sense a cold coming on, I can only sit in doleful resignation as the symptoms progress. It may not be life-threatening, but just as Bazarov with his typhus, there is absolutely nothing I can do to halt the virus. So I sympathize with him.

I am not sure what the final judgment on this one should be. The contrast of nihilism and romanticism was intriguing. From what I can tell, the former is shown to be impractical. If that is the author's intent, then I commend him.

Commodore Hornblower by C.S. Forester

2005-12-29T10:48:00.000-08:00

It is true talent that can write the same story over and over again, retaining the essentials, and yet making it all seem completely different. Every time I open a Hornblower book, I know Horatio is going to triumph, I know he is going to distinguish himself, and I know he is going to make it home, and yet the novel is still captivating from start to finish.

Commodore Hornblower followed this wildly successful formula as Horatio traveled to Russia and dined with the Czar, successfully held off French advances in the Baltic, and caught typhus and survived. An extraordinary story, but fun nonetheless.

I think it is Forester's amazing grasp of, if I can say this without sounding pretentious, the human condition, that makes the books so enjoyable. The illustrious adventure is secondary. If the stories consisted merely of Horatio going about his daily life in England, they would be just as enthralling.

The Diaries of Adam and Eve by Mark Twain

2005-12-29T08:35:00.000-08:00

Mark Twain was rather anatagonistic towards religion, and, according to the afterword of this book, he regarded the story of Adam and Eve as merely a fable. While he took some liberties with the story, he was very compassionate to the couple, although he did not have much love for the God who made them.

In The Diaries, Adam and Eve never have any direct contact with their creator. They are basically left to fend for themselves. Twain postulates that because they had no knowledge of good and evil, they could not know that it was evil to eat of the tree, and so they are not to blame for doing so. Herein lies his error. They might not have known good and evil, but certainly they had knowledge of obedience. God told Adam to name the animals, and he promptly did so. They had knowledge of death, for Eve did not eat of the tree until the serpent told her she would not die. In this way, they also had knowledge of consequences. All they were lacking, really, was this knowledge of good and evil, the only one that could hurt them. For once they knew what it was to do wrong, they would.

On another note, the afterword said that much of the story was a picture of Twain's marriage, and of how much he loved his wife. I found that satisfying. Many authors had horrible, or non-existent, relationships. It is pleasant to know Twain had a wonderful marriage, with kids, and an excellent literary career