Miscellania

Read while my access to the blog was limited:

Luigi Pirandello's Short Stories Link
Roberto Bolaño's The Return and The Insufferable Gaucho Link and link
Murray Kempton's Part of Our Time Link
Daniel Okrent's The Rise and Fall of Prohibition Link
Fyodor Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground Link

Pirandello is a noted short story master, and here's only a small selection. I found these a bit uneven -- there's four sections: "Sicilian Tales", "Tales of Humor and Irony", "Tales of Frustration", and "Tales of Anguish and Hope". I found the first two sections had the stories that were most to my liking (particularly "Sicilian Tales), and the latter two were pretty poor, in my opinion. "The Umbrella" is a particularly bad offender here. Many of the latter stories were very cloying.

Bolaño's two short story collections here are both excellent; The Return is a bit more conventional, while The Insufferable Gaucho features several slightly longer pieces. Standout works in The Return include "Joanna Silvestri" about a South American porn star spending time with John Holmes before his death, "The Prefiguration of Lalo Cura", about tracking down a forgotten porn actor, and "The Return", which although is not about pornography, is about necrophilia. The Insufferable Gaucho has "Police Rat" which seems to take place in one of Kafka's universes, and "Alvaro Rousselot's Journey", about an author confronting a foreign filmmaker who adapts his works without credit. This isn't too different from the other works of Bolaño's that I have read, and that's not a bad thing.

Part of Our Time is a book I had had to buy for a class some years ago. It was out of print, but I was able to easily find it on Amazon. It's back in print these days, which is a fantastic thing -- this is an even-handed, non-hysterical look at what drew several men (and women) to unions, to socialism, to communism. Published in 1955 (!!!) it's a fascinating look back at the conditions of the thirties, and how these workingmen responded to them. Kempton covers some familiar names (Alger Hiss, Paul Robeson), and some unfamiliar ones (Joe Curran, J.B. Matthews). This is an extremely frank and thoughtful work, which has made me want to seek out other pieces of Kempton's, as well as wonder about the Red Scare in general -- I was under the impression that work of this tenor wasn't done on anything remotely Left during that time period.

Daniel Okrent's Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition is, like the previous, a fascinating look at a period of history I had been unfamiliar with. It's a little less academic than Kempton's work, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. Unfortunately, unlike Kempton, who breaks up each narrative into a separate chapter, Okrent moves chronologically, which is probably the most logical way to cover the period, but can lead to leaping back and forth. Still, it's a great look at a period in American history that I've often seen skipped over. One memorable moment is a quote from Senator Morris Sheppard of Texas: "There's as much chance of repealing the 18th Amendment as there is for a humming bird to fly to Mars with the Washington Monument tied to its tail."

Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground is very short, but not quite an easy read. Unfortunately, as the translator's foreword notes, the only text we have had been significantly edited in order to be initially published, and Dostoevsky chose to keep the edits in subsequent printings. An introspective rant, written as a polemic against mid-nineteenth century Russian intellectuals, this is significantly less intimidating than some of Dostoevsky's longer novels, and has inspired me to pick one of them up soon.

Snow Crash

Neil Stephenson's Snow Crash is a novel that's consistently been both praised and recommended to me. As page-turning science fiction novel, it's tough to find a peer for this. While the plot isn't quite as complex as Stephenson's later work, such as Cryptonomicon, in that the narrative is not skipping back and forth in time, there's still enough threads to tie together to keep the story engaging.

Yes, Stephenson names his main character Hiro Protagonist (how the fuck do you think that's pronounced), but the humor is otherwise mostly dry, which is a good thing in a science fiction universe -- too much silliness isn't a good thing in such an artificial world. In re: artificiality, some of the computer discussion is hopelessly dated, but the novel was published in 1992. So it goes.

Despite how dated much of the referencing is, the Internet as conceived by Stephenson (referred to in the novel as the Metaverse) is, if not a realistic vision of how the Internet developed, an interesting vision of an alternate reality. The Metaverse seems like a cross between the Internet as people use it and Second Life. The introduction of Sumerian mythology/history/general culture in the later plot is even more interesting, but since most of us are unfamiliar with anything beyond the basics and possible The Epic of Gilgamesh, it's tougher to double check on the fly. (Yes, this is exactly the sort of question that the Internet is useful for answering)

Very entertaining and fun sci-fi novel that ties together several diverse threads at the end, even if some of those threads are a little simplistic. (The glossolalia comes across as bunk, and the Sumerian as human machine language particularly.) A great diversion, but I'd recommend Cryptonomicon before this.

A Farewell to Arms

Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms is one of those books I probably should have read in high school, but somehow didn't. I finally rectified this recently, and I'm relatively glad I did.

Like all of Hemingway's work, the prose is unadorned and straightforward, lacking florid description, and occasionally leaving off where another writer would feel the need to elaborate. This can lead to a feeling of lack of depth.

The story is concerned with a young American Lieutenant (Tenente) driving an ambulance on the Italian front during the First World War, his relationship with his military contemporaries, and his experiences being wounded and falling in love with a British nurse.

The depiction of Tenente's paramour, Catherine Barkley, is either Hemingway's image of an ideal woman (wise, but unable to contain her passion), or a male dream (continually asserting what a 'good girl' she is, existing only to please her man). Or perhaps both. Her conversations with Henry are insipid, although that's the fault of both characters. Whether this is Hemingway's style, his lack of feel for women, or my poor ear for early twentieth century conversation remains to be seen.

The novel features judicious use of profanity, that has been excised (by the publisher) from my edition. I'm unsure how to feel about this -- the language is not quite archaic, but it would be jarring to see "shit", "fuck", and "cocksucker" (the three excised words) interspersed with clearly out-of-date dialogue.

Overall, an extended meditation on death in war, how deaths in battle become statistics, but that doesn't make the deaths of those we love any easier. A worthwhile novel, and one I'm glad I finally got around to reading.

The Tin Drum

Yet another winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Gunter Grass' The Tin Drum is a novel that I'd already like to reread; this is due to the novel's complicated and subtle rhythm, designed to evoke the titular drumming. Grass frequently lays out passages that swell and build in intensity, as in a cadence. Such writing must be a bear to translate, and Breon Mitchell covers some of the steps he took in his re-translation, including working with Grass.

Our protagonist is Oskar Matzerath, who is a classic unreliable narrator -- the story is written as his memoirs, composed while he's imprisoned in a mental institution. Oskar has spent his entire life as a dwarf; he claims that he hurled himself down a flight of cellar stairs on his third birthday to retard his growth,
which is a claim that we should treat with skepticism if Oskar was not chosen to represent the German people.

Later, after his (presumptive) father's death, Oskar resolves to grow. He doesn't reach normal adult height, though -- becoming a hunchback, with limited stature. Again, suggesting that Germany's political state is not quite normal. Oskar almost achieves normalcy, though -- his mother had promised him a tin drum on his third birthday. When Oskar receives this gift, he's entirely taken with it, and it defines him. He's never without it until the death of his (presumptive) father, where he throws it into the grave.

While there's a lot going on in The Tin Drum, it's an easy and engaging read. The novel is broken up into three books, each with a different focus and tone, but again, engaging. Would recommend.

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.

Interpreter of Maladies

I really wanted to hate Jhumpa Lahiri's debut collection, Interpreter of Maladies. All these neat, precious stories where everything is tied up with a bow at the end. (Maybe I was just upset because the eponymous story in the collection is about an interpreter who works for a doctor, rather than some sort of shaman). Fortunately, I was not able to -- the stories flow quite well, as the limpid prose is eminently readable, and Lahiri makes it easy to become invested in her characters.

Having previously read Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children helped me avoid too much culture shock towards Lahiri's Indian characters and settings, but she does an excellent job at making the exotic familiar -- all of Lahiri's characters are easy to relate to, and as such, there comes familiarity with the things, foods, and customs that they are familiar with.

Despite their ease of reading, I have little desire to revisit these stories. They're all the sort of work that I'm glad I read, but there's little pleasure to be had here, in re-reading. I'd love to be proven wrong, but this is an experience to have once. The characters are good to have met, and the craft is to be admired, but there's little memorable or to be reflected upon.

One thing I wish I could remember -- in "Sexy", an American (of non-Indian extraction) asks an Indian what the Taj Mahal is like, and is told: "The most romantic spot on earth. An everlasting monument to love." I wish I could remember what work I'd been exposed to said of the Taj Mahal "it's a tomb" to emphasize how misguided the desire to build one for a living woman was.

A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again

David Foster Wallace's book of "essays and arguments" is, if nothing else, a fantastic way to enrich one's vocabulary. Luckily, reading Wallace is much more than a lexical exercise -- he's engaging, wryly funny, insightful, prone to digression, and given to self-examination and introspection. In other hands, the consistent footnotes and self-glossing could be distracting, but all of these essays flow quite well.

The collection is without a unifying theme, although there are two essays on tennis -- one on Wallace's experiences as a regional junior player from roughly twelve to eighteen (from twelve through fifteen, he was "near great"), and the other on Michael Joyce, at the time ranked in the 80s in the world. The latter is dated several years later, and Joyce so impresses Wallace that Wallace resolves not to mention his experiences on the junior tennis circuit, where he (Wallace) had been highly ranked in his small corner of Illinois.

The capstone and eponymous essay uses copious footnotes, and is an extremely in-depth followup to the previous essay on the Illinois State Fair (a magazine had sent Wallace to the Fair the previous year, and had liked the results so much that he was sent on a luxury cruise to attempt to duplicate his hyperliterate-fish-out-of-water act). Unfortunately, it's also the only essay in the collection where Wallace moves from wry observer to neurotic complainer, as his interactions with the crew (and his reflections upon these interactions) display paranoia. He is able to laugh at himself, but it's a little unsettling.

Overall, this is an extremely engaging and diverse collection of essays. While two (television and literary criticism) can be a bit dense, they're all worth reading. It's also interesting to see the differences in style -- the early essays lack footnotes, the television essay uses them for their ordinary intended purpose (cites), the Lynch essay uses them extensively (and is delivered in vignetted form), and the title work uses them on nearly every page, with occasional sub-notes (!). Extremely engaging and thought-provoking.