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."