Moby Dick

The nice thing about reviewing a classic is that it needs to introduction. Most people are familiar with Ahab, with "Call me Ishmael", with the fact that Moby Dick is "the White Whale", with the Pequod as the name of the ship, with Queequeg and his harpoon, among other plot points. (Actually, those are probably all the plot points I was familiar with, prior to reading.)

Perhaps what I was most apprehensive about when I started this book was that I'd heard there were long passages concerning the execution of some of the more mundane tasks about a whaleship, that Melville had apparently lifted wholesale from someone else's treatise on the subject, that dragged on and bogged down the narrative. I didn't find this to be the case -- due to the novel's original episodic nature, chapter breaks are frequent, so one isn't stuck with descriptions of the tryworks (where the fat is rendered into oil) for too many pages. And of course, this is mostly a new subject to me, so a little general background is both informative and helpful. While the frequent chapter breaks do move the action along, what I did find a little trying was Ishmael's (Melville's?) attempted classification and categorization of the cetaceans, and the sperm whale (obviously) in particular. But again, this wasn't too long or too frequent.

One of the often remarked upon parts of Moby Dick is the symbolism. Of that, I have little to say other than "it's here." It's not subtle, but that's a good thing. What I do like is Melville repeatedly hammering home the inevitability of the end. (Which, again, not subtle).

What else is there to say? This is a classic for a reason.

McSweeney's 43

McSweeney's 43 is a collection of short stories and non-fiction by various authors, with a supplement of writing from the new nation of South Sudan. (For some reason, I never got McSweeney's 42.)

None of the writing in 43 really stuck with me -- in addition to the letters to the editor, there are four short stories and two non-fiction pieces. The non-fiction pieces are more interesting  than the short stories -- "The Texan from Gaza Does Yoga in Prison," is a young woman's account of her experiences with her father in prison for supporting terrorism. It's a bit meandering, though, and trails off rather than builds to a conclusion. Maybe that isn't a fair observation to make about an account of a close relative's imprisonment, though.

The other non-fiction piece follows the Libyan Revolution in Tripoli.

The fiction from South Sudan is more interesting than the fiction in 43 proper. It mostly concerns village life, although the first (and one of the better) stories is about leaving one's village to avoid arrest. In the introduction, it's emphasized that the region is still young and developing, so there isn't quite anything yet that "illuminates its culture and experiences." Perhaps one of the writers here will provide that.

The Whispering Muse

One of the nice things about family or friends traveling to foreign countries is that sometimes they'll bring you books back, which is how I acquired The Whispering Muse.

This novel by Sjon tracks the journey of Valdimar Haraldsson, an eccentric Icelander who possess unorthodox theories of human origins and development. Haraldsson had published a journal called Fisk og Kultur, which detailed

". . .my chief preoccupation, the link between fish consumption and the superiority of the Nordic race."

 Through writing a letter of condolence after the death of a friend, our protagonist is invited on a cruise of a merchant ship owned by the friend's father. The second mate on the ship happens to be the mythological figure Caeneus, and thus our story begins.

Haraldsson is an absolute bore -- his chief preoccupation aboard the ship is the lack of fish on the gourmet menu he's served at dinner. After dinner, his companions eagerly await the stories Caeneus tells every night, which are retellings of his heroic deeds while sailing on the Argo with Jason.

Sjon alternates between Haraldsson's banal observations and thoughts (in which Haraldsson displays lack of comprehension and insight) and Caeneus' increasingly involved mythological ramblings.

Despite (or perhaps because of) Haraldsson's banality, this isn't designed to be a realistic novel, although it isn't magic realism, either. We get several minor plot points that are raised and not expanded upon, and other plot threads that are simply dropped. The resolution is abrupt, and not quite satisfying.

I'd heard this compared to the works of Italo Calvino, and while I wouldn't put it at the same quality, I can see the resemblance. A quick read.

McSweeney's 41

McSweeney's 41 is a collection of short stories, short non-fiction, and some work by Australian Aboriginal writers. I was worried that this would be uneven, but that's not the case at all -- everything in here is top notch.

The first story in here is a Thomas McGuane account of a fishing camp in the wilderness, with two former best friends who are well on their way to becoming estranged. It's depressing and darkly funny.

McGuane is the only author here I was previously familiar with (although I do recall seeing review for the novel excerpted here, John Brandon's A Million Heavens), but everything here is polished.

Other stories I'd single out for praise are Aimee Bender's "Wordkeepers", Jess Walter's "The Wolf and the Wild,", and Ryan Boudinot's "Robot Sex."

The non-fiction ("A Land Rush in Iran" and "What Happens After Sixteen Years in Prison?") are both well done, if a little meandering.

Finally, the four short stories from Australian Aboriginal writers (Tony Birch's "The Promise, Ellen van Neerven-Currie's "S&J", Tara June Winch's "It's Too Difficult to Explain" and Melissa Lucashenko's "Tonsils") are more than worth additions to this collection -- they're as good or better as anything that came before them in this work.

A Random Walk Down Wall Street

There's a lot of information in A Random Walk Down Wall Street, but all that information really boils down to "no investment strategy can reliably beat the S&P 500 index over a long period of time." Malkiel provides numerous examples of this, over a time period ending in 1998. (It's too bad that either there isn't an updated edition through the most recent financial crisis, or the edition I have is older.)

Of course, that's not all that's in this book -- there's a history of some famous financial bubbles (Dutch tulips, British East India Company, the US Stock Market in 1929), and a general primer on the various investment vehicles and financial instruments available. The author also includes contact information for various investment houses, which would be much more useful if this book wasn't fifteen years old.

This seems to be a useful primer on the stock market and investing. I don't really know enough about the subject to recommend it unreservedly, but it seems to be worth paging through for a general understanding of the issues.

The Assignment

Reading the foreword to The Assignment, I reached a passage that made me cringe:

The work is described as "a novella in twenty-four sentences." What accounts for this stylistic idiosyncrasy? In her autobiographical account Charlotte Kerr tells us that, while they were both still thinking about projects based on Bachmann's novel, the couple sat one evening over a bottle of wine, listening to Glenn Gould's performance of the first half of Bach's The Well-Tempered Clavier I. When the last of the twenty-four movements had ended, Durrenmatt rose, turned off the record player, replaced the LP in its case, and said, "So, now I'm going to write the story in twenty-four sentences." (The German word for a musical movement is Satz, which also means "sentence".)

The writer of the foreword goes on to expand on the relation of Durrenmatt to Bach, on music to prose, et cetera. It's not that I object to drawing inspiration from other art forms, or  the relation of a style of writing to a style of music, it's that a self-imposed limitation such as the above would seem to lead to a rambling form of stream-of-consciousness that would be tedious to process and absorb. Fortunately, this is not the case; I found The Assignment to be easier reading that the works of Jose Saramago, who often employs a similar style of pages and pages of one sentence. So while each of the twenty-four chapters here is one sentence only, many are extremely short, (the first three are only two pages each), and even the longer ones remain digestible.

This is an odd novel -- the subtitle is "On the observing of the observer by the observed." This is perhaps best illustrated by the anecdote told by our protagonist's friend, the logician D.: that his house is on a mountain, and he often catches tourists observing it with binoculars, while he in turn watches through his telescope. When they seem him observing them, they become upset and withdraw. Some return later and throw rocks. Everyone in the novel is both observing and observed, and the way this is portrayed in the climax gives that moment a bit of a comic tone. It's an unsettling and easy read.

The Dream Master

This has sat on my shelf for awhile, because although I'm a huge Zelazny fan, I didn't much like the short story that this novel is based on ("He Who Shapes"). It's not that it isn't an interesting premise (it is), or that the prose is pedestrian (it isn't, although I wouldn't say that this is one of Zelazny's better written works), it's mostly that the characters are forceful people without being that interesting. Render, the protagonist, is a condescending asshole, and Eileen Shallot, the other major character, isn't all that sketched out; she's blind, she's strong-willed, she's a doctor.

The premise of the novel is at least interesting -- Render is a neuroparticipant therapist, one who can guide a patient's dreams using a specialized device (called the egg, and descriptions of it echo a return to the womb). Eileen Shallot is training as a psychiatrist, and would like to be a neuroparticipant as well, but due to her blindness, she'd need to become acclimated to sight. She seeks out Render, a leader in the field, in order to become acclimated. After some reluctance (and despite the warnings of his colleagues), he accepts. (It doesn't hurt that she's apparently quite attractive). Everything progresses apace, until we get a confrontation that forces the ending sequence -- which is the most interesting rendering in the novel, even if it feels forced and inconsistent.

Unfortunately, we don't get too many sessions where Render is shaping dreams -- there's a sequence in the beginning, to introduce the technique, and one where Render is recalling a past experience. The sessions with Eileen consist of him accustoming her to colors, landscapes, textures, their surroundings, et cetera. The ending sequence is certainly something, however, and arguably pays the whole technique off.

I suppose my biggest issue with The Dream Master is that Zelazny is trying to write something with echoes of the Greek -- here's a great man brought down by a tragic flaw. But Render doesn't approach greatness (brilliance, yes, but not greatness), and barely manages to rise to likeable. So while his tragic flaw may be arrogance, he's not lacking others, and that's just one reason this is unsatisfying.