Cowabunga Kwanzaa, and a Notice

To Whom It May Concern,

Happy Sundry Winter Solstice Festivals, and please note a new post in October (!). I'd started writing a review for Marshall N. Klimasewiski's Tyrants in October, and hadn't finished it until now due to ennui. The review of Midnight's Children is likely to be my last post before 2010, so enjoy.

I've thought of reviewing individual short stories in the blog, which would certainly provide content and move things along.

Will return in 2010, hopefully with more content of the non-book review variety.

Midnight's Children

Who the hell am I to judge Midnight's Children? Not only did Salman Rushdie's novel win the Booker Prize, it won the Best of the Booker, marking it the finest of the 41 novels to be awarded said prize. (Of course, the Best of the Booker was chosen by online and text message voting, with 7800 people casting votes, so maybe it's not the indicator of quality one would think. Not that I didn't enjoy the novel -- Midnight's Children was an entertaining story, an introduction to the history of India (certainly not the final word, but my knowledge of Indian history prior to this was based mainly on Wikipedia articles), as well as much more than literary junk food. (And what is literary junk food? For me, my most recent dosage came in the form of this: Super Bowl Bound
by William Campbell Gault -- I remember reading this at age 12 and it being lots of fun, and I recently managed to acquire a copy. Total escapism.))

Being the contrarian that I am, I'd love to debate how as to whether this actually is the best novel to receive the Booker Prize. Unfortunately, this is the only winner of the Booker Prize that I've read. I suppose I'll have to rectify that at some point, several of the prizewinners are on my "to read" list. (This is ordinarily the part of the blog post where the author asks for recommendations. However, as far as I am aware, no one reads this blog.)

Self-indulgent digressions aside, Midnight's Children is absolutely worth reading, as it is regarded as Rushdie's finest novel. It follows Saleem Sinai from his birth at the moment of India's independence from Britain (the stroke of midnight, August 14th, 1947), through his childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood. Saleem's life loosely mirrors that of the young nation, although most of his actions do not affect his countrymen -- he even spends a time living in Pakistan. The novel culminates in the Emergency, with Indira Gandhi's seizure of powers as well as some severe consequences for Saleem. (The novel isn't kind to Indira* -- her son Sanjay Gandhi is referred to having 'labia lips' every time he is mentioned -- in fact, 'labia lips' appears in the novel more than his given name.) This irreverence wasn't without repercussion for Rushdie, however -- Indira sued him for defamation, not due to her depiction in the novel, but due to one sentence, that I repeat here:

"It has often been said that Mrs Gandhi’s younger son Sanjay accused his mother of being responsible, through her neglect, for his father’s death; and that this gave him an unbreakable hold over her, so that she became incapable of denying him anything."

This line has been excised from my edition of the novel due to the terms of the settlement (which are apparently still in place despite Indira's death? This gives me the opportunity to use my favorite of the internet acronyms, IANAL) is happily provided by Rushdie himself (along with some background, and the sentence's proper place in the text) in his preface. There's not much that bothers me more than such textual edits, so it's nice to know such a sentence was meant to be in place.

*Ordinarily, I wouldn't refer to a historical personage by their first name, but "Gandhi" is so associated with Mohandas Gandhi (no relation), that I feel here I must make a distinction.

The Third Policeman

Written after At Swim Two-Birds, Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman is not as fantastic or chaotic as the previous work -- lack of focus only shows up in the copious footnotes, regarding a fictional Irish polymath named de Selby, whose theories are revealed to progress from eccentric to insane as the novel unfolds.

The book is apparently intended to be read as a straightforward murder-mystery, but a major fact preventing this from occurring is revealed in the Introduction (in the form of quotation from a letter written by the author). While this doesn't spoil the big reveal entirely (because it's still an interesting journey), it does take a little air out of the tyres.

Our narrator is an unnamed simpleton who inherits his parents' farm and public house, and is convinced by his co-tenant (due to their poor means) to murder a wealthy, miserly landowner. This act results in the co-tenant hiding the dead man's cashbox, which causes the narrator to make himself and his co-tenant inseparable: "the situation was a queer one, and neither of us liked it."

These events then lead to the narrator encountering the man he had murdered in the latter's house, discovering a strange country right down the road from where he had lived, conversing with his soul, meeting some very odd policemen, and riding an atypical bicycle, among other fantastic occurrences and adventures.

Overall, The Third Policeman is an engaging, surreal work, but not necessarily the best introduction to Flann O'Brien, nor his best work (of course, this is my humble opinion, not the critical consensus). (Some critics disagree here -- Hugh Kenner is quoted in the Wikipedia article on this as writing ". . .There's no killing a piece of mythic power like that," in his essay The Fourth Policeman (which is available via Google Books, and is worth reading after digesting the novel)). The book's ending produces a wry smirk, and is that not reason enough to pick it up?

The Drunkard's Walk

The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives illustrates the difficulties of writing a popular book on statistics: before getting to one's point, one must spend several chapters introducing concepts in successive layers, to build a foundation for the reader to understand the eventual point. Leonard Mlodinow does this here, with the first nine of the ten chapters building the foundation for the tenth. Although such a narrative structure could prove awkward and threaten to capsize, each of the ten chapters here are engaging, filled with historical anecdotes, and clearly explain the concepts and tenets of statistics and probability. Unfortunately, the final, eponymous chapter, while the realization of all the concepts discussed previously, feels almost truncated, because since the author spent nine chapters getting us to this point, it feels like its assertions could be fleshed out over several more chapters, rather than being terminated where it is.

This is certainly a good starting point as a popular introduction to statistics -- although many of the concepts introduced are counterintuitive, they're explained and fleshed out relatively quickly and easily -- I particularly enjoyed the chapter on Bayesian probability in this regard. While not nearly as mathy as it could have been -- the mathematics of probability are glossed over (none of those hideous upside-down 'u' symbols) -- The Drunkard's Walk does feature paragraphs liberally sprinkled with numbers. The only issue here is that any math is free form, and some pages read like giant word problems. Rarely is everything tied together neatly with equations, which can make for necessary re-reading. However, as a popular primer, one would be hard-pressed to do better. (A slightly more in depth look at similar themes is available in Chances Are . . . by Michael and Ellen Kaplan.)

Tyrants

Marshall N. Klimasweski's Tyrants is an uneven collection of short stories, likely due to the stories being written over the course of several years. "Jun Hee" was first published in 1991 in The New Yorker, and "Nobile's Airship" was first published in 1999 in The Yale Review. I'm assuming that some of the stories are more recent than that, but I'm not going to check. Klimasewiski does not provide initial publication dates in the acknowledgments, and I don't feel the need to plug story/author names into Google (and it's not in the edition notice either. So it goes.)

"Nobile's Airship", which opens this collection, is unquestionably a highlight -- it follows Ugo Lago, a Fascist journalist, and his experiences in the days leading up to Nobile's expedition, as well as his experiences while accompanying said expedition. The shock of foreign culture and climate, his solitude as a passenger on a zeppelin, and how superfluous a writer rather than a (sailor? aeronaut? crew member?) is on an airship are very well conveyed. A coda of airship accidents and the end of Nobile's life is also well done. My major issue is the lack of punctuation for speech used here, which makes the text marginally more difficult to read. Since Klimasewiski's other stories do use quotation marks, I have to assume that this is a recent affectation that I cannot support, regardless of what Gertrude Stein may think. (Two novels that I have read and enjoyed that did not use quotation marks -- The Tango Singer, by Tomas Eloy Martinez, and Death with Interruptions, by Jose Saramago. Of course, that may be a function of the translation, and either of those gentlemen can write circles around Mr. Klimasewiski.) Regardless, "Nobile's Airship" is a fine story, but unfortunately not much of a harbinger of what is to come.

Following "Nobile's Airship", we have a trio of stories concerning a man and his relationship with his fiancee and her parents, taking his son in tow to a lovers' rendezvous, and finally the son's experiences with women and his memories of the father. These are crap, crap, and crap. This is followed by a surreal story about a woman's experiences with Stalin during the Second World War, which is a step up from the previous three stories, but isn't any great shakes. That's followed by another trio of stories, concerning a couple's relationship, and the stresses caused by being from different backgrounds, illnesses of parents, desires and dreams. I'd say this trio is a step up from the previous trio, but it fails to grab me. The final story is "Aeronauts", which I can't decide if I like or dislike -- it's not so much a story as it is a series of out-of-sequence short acts, as if from a play, interspersed with letters and commentary from the principals. It turns out that this story depicts a real personage, and much of the dialogue and letters are historical record, but fiction is interpolated into his life to color his acts appropriately. So what in actuality is poor planning, becomes in fiction a romantic and desperate beacon. While I did like the execution, I'm unsure if this cheapens the life of the historical personage depicted.

I really wanted to love this collection, especially after the beginning of "Nobile's Airship", but I just can't. I may be alone here -- the reviews on both LibraryThing and Amazon are largely positive, as are other reviews around the web. While there's some good stuff here (the opening story, parts of the other stories), this collection fails overall to make much of an impression on me. The title of the collection is meant to evoke how people act in the shadow of an autocrat, which helps the stories concerning Mussolini and Stalin, but the stories fall flat on their faces when confronted with the softer and more subtle tyrannies of sex and domesticity. There is material here to like, but I can't say that I'll be picking up Klimasewiski's next novel, unless I read something to change my mind in the interim.

To Rule the Waves

Perhaps the most disappointing part of Arthur Herman's To Rule the Waves: How the British Navy Shaped the Modern World is that such a ripe opportunity to use the word "thalassocracy" repeatedly is passed by. (Incidentally, neither Mozilla Firefox's nor MS Word's built-in spell checkers recognize "thalassocracy", which means "rule by sea power", "dominion over the seas", and other such things. Such a word encompasses the height of the British Empire nicely, but the author neglects to use it. So it goes.)

Regardless of the author's choice of vocabulary, this is a (relatively) informative introductory history of the British Navy, its origins, its heroes, and the politics that created and sustained it. The narrative begins pre-Francis Drake, and stretches through the Second World War (an epilogue that gives the appearance of being hastily tacked on covers the Falklands War, in the spirit of one last hurrah.) True to the title, there are several examples and instances where naval action helped give rise to the world we know today, and not necessarily in the military strategy sense -- much of this is focused on navigational tools and charts, and the debt the world's mariners owe to the Royal Navy for the pioneering work done in these areas.

While a single paperback-length volume cannot claim to be comprehensive in scope, there are several subjects that I feel are either glossed over, or not treated with the level of detail that they should demand, even in a non-exhaustive work such as this one. Examples of this include the War of 1812 (mentioned in passing during the passages on the Napoleonic Wars), events of the Second World War (mentioned in passing, but much of the section is focused on geopolitics and the role of America. The Bismarck merits only a paragraph(!)), battleship and battlecruiser design (some information on the merits/drawbacks of British design v. German design, taking Jutland into consideration. Additionally, the failures of British design (and re-design) post-Jutland with respect to the Hood), and impressment (a major cause of the War of 1812, and necessary for Britain to maintain a large navy -- but glossed over here. Herman even attempts to rehabilitate the practice!)

Additionally, the final few chapters and the epilogue read as an apologia for naval aims and goals -- any and all factors leading to Britain reducing its empire, or navy is treated with scorn, regardless of justification. Herman overtly takes political sides in these last chapters, and his position as a naval apologist leads to some unorthodox positions -- while the Royal Navy had been a tool for empire in the past, Herman seems to imply that Britain should have maintained an empire solely as a justification for maintaining a large fleet in being. As a practical statement, this is on shaky ground. As a political statement, it's preposterous. While this book is worth reading if you're interested in an overview of the Royal Navy's history (if, for example, you have no idea what the Glorious First of June is), this is probably worth your time. More serious scholars, however, would be advised to look elsewhere.

The Stories of John Cheever

I recently finished slogging through The Stories of John Cheever. It wasn't so much the length of the book (693 pages) that caused me difficulty, it was the compartmentalization inherent in any collection of short stories -- finishing each story feels like a small victory, rather than motivation to begin the next story. Due to this feeling (lack of page turnering?), I read at least four books concurrently with this collection; alternating one or two short stories with chapters or sections in my other books. As with any short story collection (and certainly moreso for one encompassing an entire career) there's a non-zero amount of chaff here, but at least Cheever's chaff is worth reading once at a minimum. Unlike many retrospective collections, where the first few stories feature the writer struggling and grasping to find his voice, this anthology opens with "Goodbye, My Brother", as excellent a piece of fiction as any collected herein. Other highlights include "O Youth and Beauty!", "The Housebreaker of Shady Hill", "Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin", and of course, "The Swimmer", which comes highly recommended -- every review I've seen of this collection mentions it as a gem, and I have to agree. While at first it was tough to grasp a metaphor after so many straightforward stories, the symbolism shines through in the end. (Cheever does love his Greek mythology, with that takeoff of Narcissus, the title of the later story "Artemis the Honest Well Digger", as well as "Metamorphoses", which is four vignettes that are all overt modern reproductions of Greek myth).

As for his characters, Cheever creates an endless series of WASPs who smoke, drink, womanize, and generally are not particularly deep, although they always seem to manage to find those who are louder, dumber, or more boorish to be embarrassed by. That's not to say that the characters are impossible to relate to, since we are all imperfect. Overall, it's a collection worth browsing, of a bygone generation -- I'll let Cheever's words from the preface close it out:

"These stories," writes Cheever in the preface to this Pulitzer Prize winning collection of stories, "seem at times to be stories of a long-lost world when the city of New York was still filled with a river light, when you heard the Benny Goodman quartets from a radio in the corner stationary store, and when almost everybody wore a hat. Here is the last of that generation of chain smokers who woke the world in the morning with their coughing, who used to get stoned at cocktail parties and perform obsolete dance steps like 'the Cleveland Chicken,' set sail for Europe on ships, who were truly nostalgic for love and happiness, and whose gods were as ancient as yours and mine, whoever you are."

SEMPER ego auditor tantum?

(with apologies)

" . . . but the disk space will still be wasted."