Scoop by Evelyn Waugh

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.