The Spanish Civil War

I was recommended this work by a poster on a baseball forum, which I suppose is as good a place as any to get history recommendations. Recognized (not just by baseball enthusiasts!) as a comprehensive place to begin study of the Spanish Civil War, it's long(ish), detailed, heavily footnoted, with an extensive bibliography, and revised several times (most recently in 2011) to ensure that it reflects the most up-to-date scholarship on the subject.

Am I enough of an expert on the Spanish Civil War that I can say whether or not this is the best introductory work on the subject? No, of course not. Thomas doesn't trip my bullshit detector, for the most part (which is worth something in a conflict that still arouses strong feelings among late era partisans), and he generally does try to puncture some of the myths told about the conflict. Where he does appear to get a lot of criticism is for glossing over the Spanish Revolution (the anarchist movement in Catalonia, among other places), but I feel he covers this in a decent amount of detail. (Although I will reserve further judgment until I've read some more).

I'd recommend this, potentially to another reader on a baseball forum.

Homage to Catalonia/Down and Out in Paris and London

In Homage to Catalonia, it's easy to see the ideas behind both Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four taking shape. Orwell's experiences in the militia fighting against Franco's coup are similar to Michael Shaara's sketches of Gettysburg in The Killer Angels, in that they're an inset, rather than the complete picture. (Of course, this is significantly more forgiveable in Orwell's case, since he's writing about his experiences, rather than about the scope of the coup and the subsequent war)

If I wasn't aware of the history, I would think that the final third of this book was embellished -- street battles between members of the same side during a civil war? I've seen it argued that the Soviet Union's assistance hurt the Left in Spain more than it helped, and after reading this, it's certainly a perspective I have to take seriously.

Overall, this is a fascinating work, both from its perspective on soldiering in an unfamiliar land, as well as Orwell's analysis of the political situation (which, until the end, he keeps in separate chapters, which is a nice touch if one wants to focus on one or the other). What is obvious to us over sixty years later (that the USSR's purpose in Spain was to advance its own foreign policy, rather than necessarily to help the Republicans) was tragically not so during the war, much to the detriment of the dead.

The second work in this book, Down and Out in Paris and London, shows Orwell's socialism in if not quite an inchoate form, at least not at its final stage of development. The descriptions of the lives of poverty led by waitstaff, tramps, and residents of cheap hotels are real, but the feeling is similar to Pulp's "Common People":

cos when you're laid in bed at night,
watching roaches climb the wall,
if you call your Dad he could stop it all

In short, that Orwell is living like this to have a taste of the life, not because he has no alternatives. This is illustrated when, fed up with working fifteen hour days underground as a "plongeur" (a dishwasher/errand boy), he writes a friend in London, who is able to get him a job quickly, so Orwell is able to leave his (miserable, but not untypical) fifteen hour workday.

The second portion of Down and Out in Paris and London is along the same lines -- when Orwell arrives in London, and is informed that his position will not be ready for a month, he decides to spend the time slumming, sleeping in workhouses and public dormitories. Here, the conditions are truly appalling, and Orwell does meet some fascinating characters. However, he does occasionally slip into lecturing, but that can be forgiven in such a young (at the time) author.

Clearly, Down and Out in Paris in London is no longer quite relevant -- not because no one in major Western cities lives or works in poor conditions, but because the conditions described here no longer exist. It is a worthwhile document of a bygone time, and it's worthwhile to see a young Orwell's ideas taking shape. Homage to Catalonia is, in my opinion, the more significant and interesting work here.

Cloud Atlas

David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas was apparently partially inspired by Italo Calvino's If On a Winter's Night a Traveler, which contains a series of first chapters of novels, all truncated at a cliffhanger. Mitchell takes this device but modifies it, so while there are six separate tales in Cloud Atlas, each has an ending, but also links to the other stories (novellas?). The linked palindromic structure is unique, but it works, particularly because each segment has a different style, which Mitchell segues between effortlessly. His skill here prevents each tale from reading as a pastiche, although the styles are identifiable.

The six tales are, in order: the journal of an American functionary on a voyage in the South Pacific (ca. 1850), the letters of a debauched and disinherited English composer (1931), the travails of a plucky female reporter working to uncover a corporate scandal, written in the form of an airport thriller (ca. 1975), the memoirs of an aging and broke English publisher (ca. today), the interrogation of a clone in a dystopic future Korea (ca. who knows), and a tale around a campfire of a tribesman's life in post-apocalyptic Hawaii.

While the tales (often frustratingly) fail to gel entirely into a cohesive whole, this is one of the techniques that makes the novel work, as it prevents Mitchell from getting bogged down in explaining why or how this happened to Korea, to Hawaii, or exactly what Ewing was doing in the South Pacific, or how reliable of a narrator Frobisher is. This allows him to focus on the characters and the tale at hand, rather than spending too much time setting the scene, which is a hallmark of subpar science fiction.

For such an oddly structured novel, Cloud Atlas is a surprisingly easy read -- the only section that gave me difficult was the central section ("Sloosha's Crossin' an' Ev'rythin' After"), as dialect with liberal usage of apostrophes and colloquialisms tends to make my eyes glaze over and my brain skip past sentences, much like the titular clouds. (Thankfully, the characters don't spend a significant fraction of their time watching the sky and engaging in pareidolia. Symbolism used is more subtle.) An absolutely worthwhile book.