Go Tell It on the Mountain

There are live wires when dealing with any political (or politicized) topic in art.  When discussing race, religion, and sex, an author runs the risk of oversimplifying the issue, of sacrificing honesty to present the topic in a falsely positive or negative light.  Moreover, when two of these topics appear in the same work, one may be sacrificed to the other.  For example, Ralph Ellison is interested in race and power in Invisible Man, and he has little to no interest in how gender plays into that mix.  As a result, the female characters make fleeting appearances at best and generally fall flat, skipped over for the Ellison's larger interest.  Any one of these topics, then, is difficult to handle honestly, and with each added topic in the same work, the difficulty increases exponentially.

James Baldwin pulls off the amazing feat of handling not one, not two, but all three issues of race, religion, and sex without sacrificing any issue to the other two, all the while being honest about all three.  The result is an incredibly insightful representation of the lives of African Americans in the mid-20th century.


Go Tell It on the Mountain is the story of John Grimes.  It is a coming of age story as John travels from boyhood to manhood all in the course of the day of his 14th birthday.  In the first chapter, we meet all the major players of the novel: John, his brother Roy, his father Gabriel, his mother Elizabeth, his aunt Florence, and a young man at the church whom John greatly admires, Elisha.  We learn that Gabriel is not John's birth father, but that he has helped raise John since John was a baby.  We learn that John is a quiet boy whose heart is filled with anger towards his father, who is a deacon at their church and a strict disciplinarian.  We learn that Gabriel does not seem to like John, preferring his natural son Roy (short for Royal), though Roy has as much contempt for his father as John does.  In the final section, while at a church prayer service that night, John finds himself on the threshing floor having the religious experience that brings him into adulthood in the eyes of the church. But it is the middle section that colors our understanding of and hopes for John, for it is in the middle section that we learn the histories of Florence, Gabriel, and Elizabeth.  These stories are like overlapping short stories, and they provide the context for John's climactic experience.




In another novel, John's rising up from the threshing room floor would mark a moment of transition symbolizing a great rebirth.  But in Baldwin's hands, John's entrance into adulthood and religious revelation are not simple moments to be celebrated.  Nor are they defeats for John.  They are complicated experiences, and we are all too aware of the complexities.  When John goes home after the service, we do not expect his life to change.  We are all too aware of the rough road ahead.


One of the things I admire about this book is how it has a cumulative effect, like when your eyes adjust to a darkened room:  you find certain objects and lights immediately, and then bring more and more into view as you understand the objects you see and search to make sense of the shapes that are only just coming into view.  The first thing you see in this book is religion.  Every character in the novel struggles with the Christian faith and the Baptist church.  For every character, the religion provides both moments of anguish and moments of peace.  Baldwin sees the church as a powerful force, as destructive as it is positive, and for his black community, it is the center of power.  Gabriel himself is powerful, physically and spiritually.  But that show of power is coupled with the powerlessness of his actions--Gabriel cannot control his son, couldn't save his first son Roy, couldn't lift Deborah up as he imagined, and can't stop John from having his revelation.  This powerlessness masking itself as power is echoed by the presence of White America in the novel.  In both the South and the North, Baldwin's focus is on African American communities, but on the outskirts of those communities are the violent actions of whites:  Deborah's rape, Richard's brutalizing, Roy's stabbing.  These events are never the focus, but their pressure is felt in every thing else that happens.  Baldwin captures all this seamlessly, and it's only in actively thinking about the stories of the various characters and where their lives meet that the connections start revealing themselves.


I was most struck by Baldwin's depiction of his female characters, Florence, Elizabeth (and even Esther and Deborah).  They are every bit as complex as the men, and they are crucial to Baldwin's complete depiction of the black community he is discussing.  These women are not cowed by the threats thrown at them in the guise of religious guidance.  They are strong and insecure and looking for something they can't find.  You feel for everyone, even when you don't like them.  The book is, in short, a perfect study in character.

This is the first Baldwin novel I have ever read.  I have read and loved many essays and always respected him as a thinker and as a writer with the ability to get at the heart of things in a poetic and profound manner.  His novel writing is every bit as impressive, and I look forward to reading more of his novels when this project has come to its completion.

Man Oh Invisible Man!

When Ann and I first started this project two and half years ago, we looked through the list and noted which books we had already read.  When I got to Invisible Man, I hesitated.  I thought I had read the book, but I wasn't sure.  If I had read it, I thought I liked it.  If I hadn't, then it was something I always wanted to read.

I know for certain now that I had not read it, because if I had, I would have remembered such an incredible novel.  Holy moly!  Like Grapes of Wrath, this is a perfect novel in my eyes.  Even though the book is nearly 600 pages long, it never once sags or drags.  It comes out firing with a riveting and poetic prologue, introducing us to the narrator, smart, angry, and possibly a little bit crazy, living in his secret hole beneath New York City. We are instantly aware that this is a book about character, about politics, about race, about the relationship between individuals and organizations.  And like Orwell, Ellison never lets his political art become more political than art.  This is first and foremost a work of imaginative fiction, beautifully written and constructed with the tightness of a drum skin.

In an ideal work of fiction, character is plot and plot is character.  What happens is decided by the character we follow and the decisions he makes (as well as the decisions that are made for him).  Similarly, the character is constructed by the events that unfold around him and batter him about.  In Invisible Man, plot and character are inseparable.  On the one hand, it is an intricate character piece, and on the other hand, it is a heavily and tightly plotted story.  Moreover, it is the very specific story of one specific character, but the novel resonates because it is simultaneously the story of a generation of American black men in the 1940s and '50s, and beyond that it is also simultaneously the story of all Americans.  In the end, Invisible Man is a story about the individual and his place in society.  (I use the male pronoun there purposefully, since the novel is not overly concerned with the struggle of women.)  The Brotherhood is a specific organization, but the narrator's experiences with the Brotherhood are laden with meaning beyond that specific relationship.  The narrator is on a search for self-discovery, because "if I discover who I am, I'll be free," and like one of his professors said of Stephen Dedalus,

[his] problem, like ours, was not actually one of creating the uncreated conscience of his race, but of creating the uncreated features of his face.  Our task is that of making ourselves individuals.  The conscience of a race is the gift of its individuals who see, evaluate, record . . .  We create the race by creating ourselves and then to our great astonishment we will have created something far more important:  We will have created a culture.

Ralph Ellison tackles exactly how difficult it is to create "the uncreated features of our face" in a world where we are not seen for who we are, in a world where people don't see beyond your clothes or the color of your skin.  We are all invisible to each other when our inner eye tells our physical eye what to see.  And on top of that, the organizations and groups that exert their forces upon us don't care at all who we are.

That problem, the problem of discovering who we are, sounds airy and philosophical, but Ellison keeps his novel grounded in details and the specific world that scrapes against the narrator.  But the theoretical, the philosophical, hovers right behind the physical in all things in this novel.  Every description does double duty, both anchoring us in the physical moment of the scene and alluding to the meaning of the image.  Take this passage, in which the narrator finds himself alone with a beautiful white woman who has designs on our protagonist.  She is on the phone and they are standing in her bedroom:

I nodded, seeing her turn without a word and go toward a vanity with a large oval mirror, taking up an ivory telephone.   And in the mirrored instant I saw myself standing between her eager form and a huge white bed, myself caught in a guilty stance, my face taut, tie dangling; and behind the bed another mirror which now like a surge of the sea tossed our images back and forth, back and forth, furiously multiplying the time and the place and the circumstance.

Ellison wastes not a single moment, not a single image, and not a single word.  It is truly stunning to read, and I found myself wanting to read slower and slower to feel each word and image move between the fingers of my mind just to admire their texture and power.

Finally, this book, perfect in its execution and elocution, would fall flat were it not for its unflinching honesty.  This novel tackles so much about our world, and it does so with a crazy sense of control.  I never once doubted that Ellison had thought this novel and its subject matter through down to every detail.  But for all that confidence and deft handling of his material, Ellison has no pat answers to the dilemmas his narrator faces.  The mystery of life is perfectly articulated and poignantly unsolved.

If you are only going to read a handful of books from this list of 100, Invisible Man should be at the top of your list.

The Dance Continues - Book II of A Dance to the Music of Time

The second book of A Dance to the Music of Time is called A Buyer's Market.  This novel follows Nick's first few years out of college.  He is living in London and working at a publishing house that publishes art books. 

I found the second book much more enjoyable than the first, probably because I knew what to expect and was not holding it up against Catcher in the Rye.  Taking it for what it was, I was able to slow down and enjoy the clever controlled phrasings of the author and submerge myself in the narrator's world.  The characters from the first novel continue to dance in and out of Jenkins's life, and there is a definite sense of building.  These first three novels appear to be Act I, in which the world and characters are being established before the second act comes to rattle them all up.

I can't say that I have any clearer idea what the novel is about, or what Powell is saying about the world around us.  I have the vague notion that Powell is pointing to the time between the two World Wars as a transitional time in modern culture.  The upper-class propriety of the university-educated boys in the first novel was punctured by the upward mobility of Sunny Farebrother and Widmerpool, and those issues of class seem even more prominent in this second book.  Sunny and Widmerpool were still part of the dinners and dances of culture in the first book.  Here, the main figure who frames the novel is Mr. Deacon, a painter who had some exchanges with Nick's parent when Nick was a boy.  Running into him as an adult, Nick gets on friendly terms with Deacon and their worlds overlap, bringing Nick into a more solidly middle-class environment.  Deacon and Gypsy Jones are like characters out of a Dickens novel, fun but not entirely scrupulous, and they make the sense of the social order seem less stable and more fluid than before.  I feel, in short, that class is at issue in the novel, but what in the end is Powell's interest is still a mystery to me.

I do love the idea of making an epic story out of what seems a rather mundane set of circumstances.  Due to Powell's careful construction, I have full faith in his ability to bring all the disparate narratives (which will certainly be getting still more disparate) together in meaningful ways down the road.  There is an impressive tightness in the layering of incidences that suggests a formidable discipline at the core of the novels.  Just as an example, the figure of E. St. John Clarke is raised by Widmerpool in the opening chapter when he discusses a bit of art criticism published in the papers.  Clarke is again mentioned in passing at a party in a following scene, and crops up one or two more time before we learn that Members (one of Nick's acquaintances from university) is a secretary to Clarke.  So even though the man himself never makes an appearance, he haunts the conversation of the novel.  By doing so, along with similar careful references, Powell feels in complete control of his story, like a Pynchon without the added level of absurdity.

I am also interested in the sense of time in the novel.  The past and present co-exist like a picture book with overlays.  As Jenkins encounters a new experience he tells us both what he thought at the time and that such thoughts were the product of the too narrow experience of youth.  Later, he assures us, he will be able to look back at this moment and understand what was really at issue.  As he says at the end of the second book,

This is perhaps an image of how we live.  For reasons not always at the time explicable, there are specific occasions when events begin suddenly to take on a significance previously unsuspected; so that, before we really know where we are, life seems to have begun in earnest at last, and we ourselves, scarcely aware that any change has taken place, are careering uncontrollably down the slippery avenues of eternity.

This is one of the reasons, I think, that the novel feels weak in plot at this stage.  These are moments that have gained significance only in latter years of the narrator's life.  These were not the tales he would have told a year after their happening, but they are the tales that lay the groundwork for where his life is to take him.  At this point, I can gladly be patient for the story to build and take me someplace meaningful.

Before I go, I would like to pose a question to my non-existent co-readers.  What is up with the individual titles in this series?  How is the second book A Buyer's Market?  Who is buying?  Who is selling?  And what is being sold?  Deacon's art?  His antiques?  Memories?  And what was questionable in the first novel, A Question of Upbringing?  These titles make no direct reference to what's happening in the novel, and I can't help but feel that they are some type of clue to Powell's root concerns in the novels.  Any help would be appreciated.

I will pick up the series when I reach 1955.  For now, it is on to Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man.

A Dance to the Music of Time - Twelve Times!

The '50s look to be a hard decade on this list.  I don't mean that the books look more challenging than usual, but that there are a few surprises.  First, I saw that The Lord of the Rings was listed as one book, even though it was published as three.  But I suppose that is a fair grouping, since Tolkien intended it to be one book and wrote it as such. So, the authors of this list managed to fit 102 books, into their list of a hundred.  Imagine my surprise then, when I was looking up the next book on the list, A Dance to the Music of Time, and discovered that this title is actually an epic collection of 12 books!  Moreover, they were not written as one book.  Volume One, A Question of Upbringing, was published in 1951, the second book in 1952, the third in 1955, all the way up to the last book being published in the mid-70s.  So now we are up to 113 books.  They are tricksy!

 The whole of the novel, I am told, follows our narrator, Nick Jenkins, throughout 50 or so years of his life.  The books appear to follow strict chronological order, and this first book, A Question of Upbringing, begins somewhere in the 1920s at Oxford for the three years Jenkins is at university.  And while Jenkins is a first-person narrator, and while the book follows his life, it is less about him than about all the people he encounters.  He is very much like Isherwood's camera in The Berlin Stories.  (Actually, that's another book that was built out of two books!  That puts us at 114!).

According to an interview with the Paris review (http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/3475/the-art-of-fiction-no-68-anthony-powell), Powell knew he wanted to write a very long piece of fiction.  Here's how he explains it:

 Well, this is rather a long story. You see I haven't any great talent for inventing plots, and indeed it seems to me that even the best writers are inclined to churn out the same stuff in eighty thousand words, although it's dressed up in a different way. And so I thought that there would be all sorts of advantages for a writer like myself to write a really long novel in which plots and characters could be developed, which would cover this question of not doing short-term plots—doing rather larger ones, in fact. But of course I didn't know at the beginning quite how long all this was going to be . . . I knew there would be a great number of novels, and about, I suppose, halfway through I realized that I should have to do at least three about the war. Well, having done six before, it seemed the obvious answer to do three to end it up with, because I think it's quite a good idea to have some sort of discipline imposed on yourself in writing, and therefore I deliberately wrote the last three with the idea of ending it up and doing the neat twelve volumes. But I have to admit that in 1951 I didn't know there'd be exactly twelve.

 He is right about this novel not having much to do with "plots."  There are only four chapters in the book, each about 60 pages long, and each acting like something of a short story.  We follow his encounters, mainly, with three other boys who were friends or acquaintances his first year at school:  Stringham, Templer, and Widmerpool.  There are things that happen (and some stories are quite amusing unto themselves), but for the most part, Powell focuses on the interplay between characters.  And I'm wishing I had more to say about that interplay.

My enjoyment of this novel suffered somewhat from following fast upon Catcher in the Rye.  Caulfield's narration in Catcher is so alive and fresh and wild, that Jenkins's proper English and detached tone felt leaden.  Both novels were about young men away from home at school, but Holden's adventures and encounters were much more gripping.  As it is, I'm not even sure what the significance of A Dance to the Music of Time is, and I have not grasped its greatness yet, or why it is considered such a literary achievement.  Something tells me that I need to read much more to appreciate what the book is doing, so I will leave analysis to later books, which I will read in the order they were published with the rest of the list.  I am about to embark on the second book, A Buyer's Market, and should get a better sense of what Powell is doing from there.

This is what I know for now.  The first novel opens with the narrator watching men work on a street corner where they had made a kind of camp as they work by the hurricane lamps in the growing dark.  The images of these men moving in and out of and around the light makes the narrator think of Poussin's painting, A Dance to the Music of Time:

These classical projections, and something in the physical attitudes of the men themselves as they turned from the fire, suddenly suggested Poussin's scene in which the Seasons, hand in hand and facing Outward, tread in rhythm to the notes of the lyre that the winged and naked greybeard plays.  The image of time brought thoughts of mortality: of human beings, facing outward like the Seasons, moving hand in hand in intricate measure: stepping slowly, methodically, sometimes a trifle awkwardly, in evolutions that take recognisable shape: or breaking into seemingly meaningless gyrations, while partners disappear only to reappear again, once more giving pattern to the spectacle: unable to control the melody, unable, perhaps, to control the steps of the dance.

And that is the image and theme that ties together the next twelve books.  And while I am not in love with the first book, I am hopeful that their will be a reward over the course of the novels, a power built up over time.

Catcher Me If You Can

I hadn't read any Salinger since my college days, and I was excited to get to read him again, as well as a little scared.  My sister had recently attempted to read Catcher in the Rye and had told me that she "just couldn't do it."  I was afraid that Holden wouldn't be the person I remembered, our old friendship strained as one of us moved on in life while the other stayed in his same old circles.

Instead, our reunion was a happy one, and we got on like we had never been apart.  Salinger has an incredible talent for taking hold of a moment and having the details feel simultaneously offhand and poignant, both casual and powerful. 

One of the interesting things I find again and again on this journey through these 100+ novels is how varied the novels are aesthetically, and how much work it is to transition from one work to another.  Each novel is like moving into a foreign country, and the unfamiliar language and customs are jarring at first.  The culture is of course not going to change for your convenience, so you must to the changing if you don't want to be miserable during your stay.  If you're lucky, when it comes time to collect your things and catch the next train, you will be able to feel like you understood and appreicated where you have been.

Sometimes the people in the foreign land are cold and formal and unfriendly, and you never feel like you fit in.   But occasionally, you feel at home from the moment you pull into the station.  The people are warm, the landscape familiar and exotic at the same time.  You understand the language and fall into step with the natives without any effort.  That was my experience coming back to Catcher in the Rye.

Catcher in the Rye is more of a character study than a novel.  Holden Caulfield is the novel.  Moreover, he does not have a character arc; he does not progress or grow through the course of the novel.  He does not learn something that makes him see the world differently.  If you don't like Holden, you are not going to like the novel.  If you are taken in by his charm and depth, however, then you are in for a wonderful experience.

I found Holden to be touching and captivating.  When I read the book in my early 20s, I was struck by the toughness of Holden, his outward signs of worldliness.  He roams the streets of New York like an old pro, smoking, drinking, going to bars, being visited by prostitutes, and walking through Central Park in the deep dark of night.  He seemed to be jaded and too fast grown, looking for the innocence he no longer possessed, to protect the innocence symbolized for him by his sister Phoebe and by the children playing in the rye at the cliff's edge.  His obsession with phonies was a rejection of the false world of adults that he had been thrust into, diametrically opposed to the honest innocence and natural interaction of kids.

On this reading I had the perspective of being older, of having a son of my own, and I felt a tenderness toward Holden that made me love him all the more.  For all his posturing, he is precisely where most 16-year-olds are, in that awkward place between childhood and adulthood.  He himself has the very innocence he seeks to protect.  For example, his wondering about where the ducks in Central Park go when the pond freezes over kills me, as Holden would say.  He has such a genuine love for all the people in his stories, even as he tells you how much he can't stand them.  As much as he critiques the other boys in the various schools he attends, he has something nice to say about everyone.  He even concludes the novel with that sense of loss over all the people he encountered, even the kids he didn't like.  Even his language, which attempts to sound tough, simultaneously  sounds childish and sweet.  Salinger concluded Holden's narrative with him sitting on a bench watching Phoebe ride the merry-go-round, bawling because she "looked so damn nice."  I can't think of a more perfect ending, because I felt just like Holden, only it was he who was on the merry-go-round, circling New York City and the people of the story, reaching for the gold ring, as I sat on the bench worrying about him falling, but not interfering.  As I said earlier, Holden doesn't have a character arc, so it is literally like a merry-go-round that takes us nowhere over the 48 hours that the novel covers,  And like Phoebe, who chooses the same mount to ride after circling the ride, Holden selects the same course of action again and again.

Salinger is a master of his craft, and I find his style to be very powerful.  First-person narratives are always a challenge because you need to be in character and still say something meaningful.  The usual solution to this problem is to have the narrator have a few verbal tics to throw in occasionally and then tell the story you want.  Given how particular Holden's talk is, it should by all rights become overpowering and tiring, perhaps satisfying the needs of a short story, but never sustaining the needs of a novel.  But Salinger makes it work again and again.  And more importantly, he mines the language of youth for its poetry.  Holden has a detail that sums up everyone he encounters.  Jane, for example, never uses her kings in checkers; she just keeps them on the back row.  When Holden's roommate takes Jane out on a date, Holden, being sixteen, has a hell of a time processing his emotions about the possibility of Stradlater making time with Jane.  The inevitable result of Holden's immaturity and powerful emotions is a fight, which ends with Stradlater kneeling on Holden's chest, pinning his wrists to the ground:  "He kept holding onto my wrists and I kept calling hims a sonuvabitch and all, for around ten hours.  I can hardly even remember what all I said to him.  I told him he thought he could give the time to anybody he felt like.  I told him he didn't even care if a girl kept all her kings in the back row or not, and the reason he didn't care was because he was a goddam stupid moron."  These phrases echo like refrains in a song, gaining power and force with each repetition.  Holden just about breaks my heart.

I have gone on long enough, so I will spare you my thoughts about Catcher in the Rye as a first criticism of the American Dream and feeling of optimism that grew throughout the 50s as the American economy grew stronger and stronger (that bit about needing your luggage to not be better than your roommate's is brilliant!).  We won't talk about his red hunting hat or his crying when Phoebe gave him her Christmas money, or Phoebe's playing Benedict Arnold in the school play.  Feel free to talk about those things yourself, or anything else that struck you about the novel.

The Lion, the Witch and the What What!

We made it to a new decade!  1950!  24 years down, 56 to go!

And now we have made it to C.S. Lewis's classic The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (without the Oxford comma!).  This is the first children's work in the bunch, and I think it is the only one, and its presence in this list gives us a little insight into what puts a novel into the top 100.  For my taste, any of Roald Dahl's works is better written, more entertaining, and more riveting than this book, but none of Dahl's novels made the cut.  This could just be a matter of taste, but I suspect it has to do with the classic standing of Lewis's piece.  I touched upon this angle to Time's selection of novels when discussing Hammett's Red Harvest.  The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is a watershed novel, a standard against which every other children's story of adventure is measured.  The book is such a part of our cultural language and thought that it practically demands placement in the list.

I don't have much to say beyond that observation because a ton of type has already been spent on this book that I couldn't possibly say anything new.  Surprisingly, this is the first time I have read the book (I wasn't much of a reader as a kid--I saw the cartoon that aired on TV).  And I was surprised by how I wasn't in love with it as I read it.  There were some fantastic passages and perfect descriptions.  The entire scene in which Aslan sacrifices himself was powerful, the best scene in the book.  The description of the statues coming back to life like a flame taking to newspaper ("stone folds rippled into living hair"!), was perfectly evocative.  But a couple things left me scratching my head.  Father Christmas?  Really?  A ton of fairy tales have that moment when the hero is given a gift that will turn the tide down the way, so Lewis is in a fine tradition here, but Santa Clause?  And while I loved the phrase "always winter and never Christmas," I can't endorse the appearance of Santa.  And why was Susan given a bow if she never makes use of it.  The horn is a fine gift and gets a blow, but Susan definitely got shafted in the gift-giving department (and in the plot department over all, I say).

And that ending?  Really?  The kids grow to adulthood in the kingdom as kings and queens, not missing their mother or any other family.  Okay, I guess I could see that; they have each other after all.  But then they tumble through the wardrobe and find themselves kids again?  Who wants to go from being twenty-something and independent to a teenager?  From a king to an 8th grade kid?  Count me out!

Desert-ed

As I've noted many times in these entries, I know very little about most of the books I am reading here.  And I am perpetually amazed at my inability to see where any of these novels end up.  See my last entry about Greene's The Heart of the Matter for a perfect example of an unexpected turn.  I'd like to think that my failure to predict has nothing to do with my being an inattentive or weak reader.  Instead, I think that it is because I don't know what the novel is about until the ending twists my neck along with the plot.

It will not surprise you to learn, then, that Paul Bowles throws me for yet another loop with his novel The Sheltering Sky.

At the start of the novel, Bowles sets up the characters, their competing desires, and the tensions that will fuel their interactions.  Port and Kit are independently wealthy New York intellectuals who are traveling in Northern Africa to see some part of the world untouched by the war.  The couple is estranged sexually, though they still have many affections for each other and appear to be best friends.  Port is searching for something genuinely not European or American, something original, something primal.  Kit, while very like Port, would much rather be in Italy or France.  Neither likes the heat, the people, or the Europeanized city that they begin in, but Port wants to move deeper into the Sahara desert, fascinated by its raw wildness.  Port wants a solitary experience, but he wants Kit to share it with.  Kit is a believer in omens and sign and does not care to glimpse into the power beyond them.  Even the recounting of dreams shakes Kit to her foundation as she fear what's at the route of them.  In one of the happier moments, Port and Kit rent bicycles and go riding out to the dunes, where they park and watch the sunset.  For Kit, "Sunset is such a sad hour."  But for Port, "It was such places as this, such moments that he loved above all else in life. . . .  And although he was aware that the very silences and emptinesses that touched his soul terrified her, he could not bear to be reminded of that."  He hoped she "would be touched in the same way as he by solitude and the proximity to infinite things," but of course, they merely terrified her.  But for this critical difference, the two seem very well suited to each other, and both overthink their actions and reactions and fail again and again to make the connection they want.

Complicating matters is their traveling companion, Tunner, a good looking man several years younger than they who was captivated by the couple and gladly followed them to Africa.  He is a perfect foil for Port.  Tunner appears to be shallow with a surface of kindness and good-spiritedness that drives Kit crazy.  The other Eurpean characters are Mr. Lyle and the woman he claims is his mother. 

It is among these characters and their interaction that the stage is set, and foolishly I thought the stage was set for interpersonal drama.  We have a love triangle (Tunner has a crush on Kit, and the two have a shared night in a train car while Port has traveled ahead with the Lyles).  We have growing tension as the group travels deeper inland away from civilization that they understand and amenities they are used to.  Mr. Lyle turns out to be a thief and makes off with Port's passport, and when Port takes Kit further inland without his passport to avoid meeting Tunner who is returning with his passport, it seems that they couple is bound for trouble.  Will the couple work things out?  Will the love triangle resolve or explode?  Will the missing passport and the inability to prove his identity land Port in trouble with the authorities?  On that final bus ride into the Sahara, port becomes ill, and we wonder will the lack of hospital care force Kit and him into a precarious position?

And just as everything is set up, as all the questions are floating before the reader, the plot crumbles in our hands.  Port dies after an extended period of delirium.  And after hiding the fact of Port's death, Kit steals off into the desert in the middle of the night.  The entire last portion of the novel follows Kit as she encounters strange Arab merchants who take her for a lover and then a wife, disguising her as a boy.  Then after she escapes, she encounters another Arab whom she takes for a lover before he steals all her Francs.

What?!

I did not see that coming.  And it's at that moment, that I always need to re-approach the first two-thirds, the setting up of the story.  Either the writer panicked in the middle of his book and went running off in a blind direction, or the points he built up earlier were not about what I thought they were about.  And sure enough, it becomes apparent that Ports infidelities with Marhnia and his obsession with the blind dancer are not about his infidelities any more than Kit's is.  The girls are that true experience with another world that Port is questing for.  Meanwhile Bowles is letting us know what Kit is like faced with the limits of her knowledge.  Tunner is there not to set up a love triangle, but to propel Port into the desert where he can die alone in a tete-a-tete with the nothingness of being.  That moment is what the novel builds too.  In fact, we are given hints that this is where we are going from the very beginning.

In the first chapter, Port wakes from a nap, and Bowles describes the moving in and out of nothingness, into and out of the room around him, and Port's calm.  This scene is echoed in Port's dying scene in which he enters and leaves the room, balancing between something and nothing.  Losing Port, Kit must face the ugliness of existence and the loss of her only love.  Her experience is further tainted by her guilt and anger, and the result is something of a psychotic break.  Her fear of the nothingness of death is greater than her fear of life and she wanders out into the world no longer afraid wanting to forget all her experiences and knowledge.

Now what happens to her after that is either reality or purely fantasy.  It is gripping and bizarre, but my brain kept revolting against what it was being fed.  I do love the ending however, where Kit re-encounters "civilization" a broken woman who belongs neither among the living or the dead.

The moral of the story (my story, that is) is that we often mistake our misreading of a book for the mis-writing of the tale.  We need to be willing to assume that the writer told the exact tale that he or she wanted to tell, and our anger and frustration that it did not go where we thought it would go (and wanted it to go) is not to be blamed on the book itself.  Part of our job as reader is to wrestle with the text and pull out the meaning that's there.

If you can experience The Sheltering Sky for what it is and not get caught up in what it is not, you are in for a real treat.

The Matter at the Heart of the Heart of the Matter

Graham Greene's The Heart of the Matter is all about Scobie, the high-ranking police official of an unnamed African community in the British Empire.  How the reader responds to Scobie and his philosophies is how the reader responds to the novel as a whole.  I found myself in a complicated position when thinking about Scobie because always at the back of my mind I was trying to divine what Greene himself thought about Scobie.

As readers, we almost always look for the author's attitude toward his or her subject, and we normally don't have to look that far.  We know pretty early on that Orwell is not a fan of Big Brother.  We know that Isherwood is not a fan of the Nazis and that he is deeply in love with all his characters.  We know how the author's feel because they make it so easy to like some characters and so difficult to like others.

Greene, on the other hand, is incredibly subtle with his character.  Other characters pass judgment on Scobie, but they are not reliable evaluators of the man.  Wilson, for instance, hates Scobie for a number of reasons, and his declaration that Scobie does not love Louise or anyone but himself are hardly worth anything.  Louise loves Scobie, and she also feels that the only person Scobie loves is Scobie.  Helen feels the same at times, but Louise and Helen are his lovers, and it is unclear how far they see into Scobie's character.  So it is left to us to determine what kind of man is Scobie.

Perhaps he is a good man who falls into a web of lies and deceit that eventually undo him both morally and physically.  Yes and no.  This is definitely the story of Scobie's decline, but to see the crux of the matter as the political intrigue that pretends to be at the heart of it all is to miss the larger point.  I initially thought it was just such a book, one about the political world around Scobie that conspires and pressures him into an ever-tightening circle.  The book has all the trappings, and Greene lays them out brilliantly.  Scobie is an upstanding man.  His compassion for a father and fellow Catholic leads him to do his first immoral thing, burn inconsequential letters instead of handing them over to the censors.  His desire to give his wife what she desperately wants leads him to take out a loan from a crooked Syrian, putting himself in Yusef's debt.  At the same time, Wilson is in town as a spy, who shortly has it in for Scobie because Wilson falls in love with Scobie's wife and embarrasses himself by letting Scobie witness his tears.  While Louis is gone, Scobie takes on a lover, and in an effort to please her, he writes a compromising letter that is intercepted by Yusef's men and used to blackmail Scobie into breaking the law by smuggling diamonds for Yusef.  The Louise returns unexpectedly and Scobie cannot break it off with Helen or his wife and feels he must keep his deception up.  As everything gets tighter, Scobie goes to the one man who knows all his secrets, and tells Yusef his worries.  When Ali, Scobie's servant and companion is killed, Scobie has no one to turn to.

That's great writing! Right!?  That's a crazy good web of problems for poor Scobie to stumble into one turn of the screw at a time!  I'd swear this book was a kind of thriller, and I enjoyed myself immensely through the first two-thirds of the book as thing ratcheted up for our protagonist.  But then, after Ali dies, the screws stop turning altogether.  No one breathes down Scobie's neck.  Yusef disappears.  Wilson quits hounding him.  The outside concerns vanish, and we are left with only the internal worries and pressures of Scobie and his Catholic beliefs.  The build up was false and was never about what it seemed to be about.  We are like Wilson, who confronts Scobie only to be told, "The things you find out are so unimportant."  Because what we quickly learn is that the mad descent of Scobie's morality, all those pressures acting upon him, were there primarily to put his mortal soul in danger, not his personage.  The final third of the novel is about the safety of his soul, not his skin.

Now as readers we are charged with the task of evaluating Scobie's logic and attitudes about God and salvation.  Up to the final third, I had not given Scobie's personality much thought.  He was my protagonist.  He was a decent guy.  He seemed pretty level headed.  He thought and felt deeply, even if we didn't agree on everything.  But once I was done with the novel, and I was left trying to figure out the importance of what finally happened, I had to go back and study him closely--I had to study him closely to find out if Greene left me any clues.

In the end, I don't know.  And to be blunt, I don't know because I am not Catholic or even religious.  Clearly Greene wanted this to be thought of and discussed even among Catholics (especially among Catholics?).  But as with other Catholic novels on this list (and there seems to be a lot of them--Death Comes for the Archbishop, The Power and the Glory, Brideshead Revisted), I cannot trust my own instincts to interpret the novel because my assumptions and beliefs can run perpendicular to those of the authors.  Nevertheless, we are allowed and invited to make analysis (and even judgments) no matter our religion, so I will forge ahead.

After re-approaching Scobie at the close of the novel, I found that I glossed over his attitudes toward his fellow human beings.  At first I loved his obsession with pity, because it was such a unique concern:  "He had no sense of responsibility towards the beautiful and the graceful and the intelligent. They could find their own way.  It was the face for which nobody would go out of his way, the face that would never catch the covert look, the face which would soon be used to rebuffs and indifference that demanded his allegiance.  The word 'pity' is used as loosely as the word 'love':  the terrible promiscuous passion which so few experience."  And I loved what seemed like a generosity of spirit: "Here you could love human beings nearly as God loved them, knowing the worst."  I dismissed the notion expressed by Wilson and Louise and Helen that he loved no one but himself.  But as Louise expressed that very sentiment to Father Rank in the final pages of the novel, the Father responds, "And you may be in the right of it there too."  Did Scobie love anyone else, or was he only able to feel pity and responsibility?  And in spite of his glorification of pity, pity is a lopsided emotion, one that places the pitier in a position of superiority over the pitied.  Scobie's detachment seemed to me more and more pathological.  His affair with Helen, which was odd even on the first read through, just seemed odder as he never had a moment of pleasure with her.  He went from non-committed to responsible and full of pity.  He put himself in a position of power over his wives when he says that he "formed" them in his school, that he turned them into miserable creatures.  The more I looked at Scobie, the more he seemed to have a God-complex, a conviction that he was the only one who saw things as they were.  He even compares his suicide to Jesus's crucifixion.

Perhaps Greene intended this re-interpretation of Scobie, or perhaps he meant his reader to be suspicious of Scobie from the start.  Or perhaps, he felt that Scobie was in the right, that he saw things accurately.  What Greene wanted, we can never know, nor does it really matter in the end, because a work of literature is far more than intention.  In it's consumption, the novel fuses with our DNA and is rewritten in our brains and comes out as a new thing, a synthesis of the original words and our interpretations, perceptions, and feelings.

1984 - Interactive Reading Group - Take 1

Hey Y'all!  We are trying something new here, so let's jump in and see how this goes.

The next book on the list is 1984, which is a phenomenal book, and a book that everyone should read and most people want to read, so I am hoping to have some people play along.  I will post my regular blog about the novel when I have completed reading it this time through, but before then, I am starting this thread to let anyone who wants to to make comments about the book.

So all you have to do to play is click on the comment area below and leave a comment.  It can be anything you want: something you love about the book, a great sentence, a cool idea, a diatribe on Orwell's use of pronouns--I don't care!  If you think it and want to share it, throw it in there.  It's a reading/discussion group for anyone who wants to play.  I've made a few comments below to get thing rolling.

I myself will be absent for the next week or so (I promised the family I would read the last two books in the Hunger Games series so they can discuss it openly!), but then I will be back and in full swing.  Feel free to discuss amongst yourselves.  Go get your copy of the book and dig in!

Under the Volcano: or, Why We Read

I am a freelance videographer who works primarily for the legal industry. I have nothing that resembles a work schedule, as every day I am working at a new location. I also hate to be late, so I get everywhere obnoxiously early, and I always have a book with me to read while I wait in the car to go inside and set up my equipment. After the equipment is up, I generally have a little time before everyone else arrives to read a little more. I will often get questions from attorneys and deponents about what I'm reading, what it's about, etc.

Last week, I was in a deposition for which the doctor was late (as they usually are), so I read while the attorneys sat in awkward silence. One of the attorneys asked about the book, so I said, "It's Under the Volcano, by Malcolm Lowry." No one has heard of it. "It's about an alcoholic living in a small town in Mexico in 1938. The entire novel covers the last day of his life, Dia de los Muertos. His wife who left him has returned to try to work through their problems, and his younger half-brother, who is a jack-of-all-trades idealist who has been working as a journalist is also in town." Oh, they say, non-committally. Is it any good, they ask. "Hmm. It is very good, but very challenging. Each chapter follows one of these three characters and we spend a lot of time in their minds, and since the main character is an alcoholic, things can be very jumbled in his mind and even in his perception of what's happening. It's not light reading, but it is beautifully written." More non-committal nodding and a set of eyebrows raised in sympathy. The one attorney turns to the other and says, "I don't like to work when I read for fun. I don't read much as it is, so when I do, it needs to be easy." I laugh and nod, because I understand exactly what they mean. When we read, we are all looking for an experience of some sort. Sometimes we want high drama, sometimes funny characters in funny situations, sometimes something non-fictional that teaches us something new about the wold or some part of it we didn't know about. Sometimes we want a fast plot with some turns and an ending that strikes us because we never saw it coming, but looking back we think that we should have. Then again, those are all elements of story that are not unique to books. Movies can give us those same experiences. And who ever says to herself, I want to read something in which very little happens plot-wise, in which we spent a great deal of time in characters' heads, and which is very demanding of my mental attention? Why do we read at all, and why would we read a book like Under the Volcano?

There are two things that make the novel unique as a storytelling form. The first, of course, is the use of language. Novels have the unique ability to describe the world, people, actions, motivations, thoughts, and emotions in words, to put down in a graspable form all the vagueness that bumps into us as we stumble through this life. The author can capture a feeling, a mood, a thought and make us understand the inner workings of our own minds and our neighbors' minds. The second thing that novels can do, and this is obviously a direct offshoot of the first, is spend time inside a person. Films and TV are great at action and decisions, but getting inside a character's head is a limited thing when working with a visual medium. In film, you learn about character through her actions. In literature, the author is not limited to action (though a good author will always use action too); she can directly tell us the character's thoughts, feelings, and contradictory impulse.

It is no coincidence that the modern novel became increasingly internal and abstract as the film industry grew larger and larger. Reality was being portrayed and covered just fine in the pictures, so novelists took advantage of the unique traits of their trade and plumbed the depth of the human mind and soul like no other medium could.

And that brings us to Lowry's Under the Volcano. Under the Volcano is in the tradition of Joyce's Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Under the Volcano is literature, with a capital L. Reading this novel is not a casual affair; it is work. It provides many moments of great pleasure through its language, its use of symbols, its honesty, and its insight--but it cannot be said to be "fun." When I began this novel, I had no idea that is hailed as one of the great works of English literature. (Sure the cover says something to that effect, but it seems like a lot of covers do!) But it didn't take me long to feel that a very competent mind was putting this story together. The language is incredibly rich, and while it is more convoluted than is my usual preference, the sentences are beautiful, and when concentrated on, make perfect sense. Every sentence feels worked over, like it has something crucial to say. Some writing moves through us like water--it's refreshing and enjoyable while we are drinking it, but it leaves us with no lasting impression, it keeps us alive, but it gives us no nutrients, nothing for the body to convert into energy. These sentences are filled with good stuff, but as such, they demand an incredible amount of attention. The brain has no room to wander, to work on other events of the day that have already or are yet to come. And the brain is a restless animal, unaccustomed to being tasked with singular focus. It wants to multitask, and Lowry's novel won't let it, at least not if you want to follow the story. I had to reread the first chapter in its entirety twice (and some portions thrice) to feel like I had a firm grasp on the world and events of the novel.

And it's not just the sentences that are challenging. This is one of the most referential novels I have ever read, and it offers explanations for none of the references. Set in Mexico in the late 1930s, you need to know about Mexico's history, economic and political. Hugh, the half-brother, has traveled the world and served as a journalist in revolutionary Spain and Stalin's Russia. And Europe is of course popping with the early stages of World War II. Layer on top of those things untranslated passages in Spanish and phrases in a dozen other languages along with cultural and literary references from the history of world literature. I found myself reading through Wikipedia nearly every day to understand the politics and factions throughout the book.

The amazing thing, and the thing that makes this novel so incredible, is that Lowry actually feels in control of all this information. Each reference has purpose and weight--not the vain flexing of intellectual muscles, but the artistic placement of structural features in an impressive landscape. Everything has its place, and it can be a marvel to behold. The repetition of playbills, of the film Las Manos de Orlac, of the dead Indian and his horse branded with the number 7: Lowry's symbolism beats like the syncopation of a dozen drums that all make up the rhythm of this story. And his ability to portray Geoffrey's mescal-rattled brain is worth the price of admission alone.

When I finish a novel like this (not that there are many like it at all), I do not derive the same joy that I do when concluding a more plot-driven novel, or a character-driven novel. Those praises I have given to other books on this list do not apply hear, for I did not end emotionally drained or charged, taken to some height by the struggles of a character. It is a much more intellectual state of wonder for me. For those of us who embrace this sort of novel, why do we do it? Why do we submit ourselves to its demands and its challenges? Perhaps we take them on for the same reason that some people scale Mount Everest. We do it to say we've done it, to conquer something monumentally larger than ourselves, and to push ourselves to do something we don't entirely feel up to. And I would venture to say that the rewards are similar. We gain not just personal satisfaction in our inner strength and determination, but we are rewarded with beautiful sights and sublime visions. And yes, sometimes we are too frostbitten, bleeding, and torn up to appreciate the sights at the time, but we have the memories of our visit and can say, "I was there, and I saw wonderful things."

Brideshead Revisited

I had no idea Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited was a religious novel when I picked it up. In fact, I had no idea it was a religious novel until about 50 pages from the end of the book.

When I last met Evelyn Waugh, I was reading A Handful of Dust, a novel in which religion played no part. I was expecting Brideshead Revisited, then, to be something similar, a sort of comedy of the lives of the wealthy in the British countryside. The characters would be similar to real people, but they would be exaggerated to comic effect.

While the characters did indeed make me laugh with their behavior, they were remarkably well developed in Brideshead Revisited. Waugh strove for something much more realistic, and he of course did a wonderful job. Yes, both novels are set in British estates, and both novels deal with the ways of the upper classes, but the content beyond that is starkly different, and I much prefer Waugh's efforts in his later work. The world is so colorfully created, and the characters are delicious in how they act and react to each other.

The big similarity between the novels is their structure. I was in shock for the entire final third of A Handful of Dust as Last wandered through the jungles and died a horrible death. Up to that point, I had thought the novel was about one thing only to discover that it was about something else entirely. I had the same experience in reading Brideshead Revisited. Up until the final section, I thought Waugh was saying something about families and relationships, the way things rise and fall, and how we shape each other. While I was aware that the Catholic belief of the Flytes was important to the novel, I thought it was a device to separate the Flytes from other families, and a tool for talking about the way that religion can pull people apart instead of giving them peace. Then I read the final section and discovered that Catholicism is at the heart of the novel, and that it is held to be something winning. And Sebastian, who was the center of the first half of the novel, becomes little more than a footnote. We hear of him, but never encounter him again. Waugh is very talented at playing with and thwarting my expectations, and possibly yours too.

In the end, we have a novel in which three men have profound encounters with religion and find God when they need him most. Sebastian, bereft of everything, and scraping along the rough bottom of existence, finds God through Kurt, his German friend who allows Sebastian to fulfill a service to someone else, to live beyond himself. Lord Marchmain, a man who never cared for Catholicism, crosses himself on his deathbed, and finds God when he is on the precipice of death. And Charles Ryder, our narrator, goes through the whole novel a non-believer. When he opens the novel he has lost his last love as he realizes that he and the Army have grown apart like estranged spouses. Then in flashback, we see him lose everything else, from Sebastian to Julia. He finds prayer in Marchmain's death scene as he thinks of Julia; he prays for a sign for her sake, to comfort her. And ironically, in answering his prayer, the good Lord separates Julia and Charles forever. Then as the epilogue closes, Ryder stands a shell of a man. He has lost all human love and now all love for the army. It is no coincidence that Ryder is a painter of architecture. He embraces the things created by man, not by God. Even when he visits South America, he paints not the landscape, but the fallen buildings there. Even Anthony Blanche sees his paintings are essentially the same thing. So there Ryder stands at the end of the novel, thinking about the man-made thing that has meant the most to him in his life, Brideshead. He contemplates that the builders had no idea the live their creation would lead. And that brings him to the chapel and the light that burns therein, for there is another creator who knows exactly where his creations go. And the upnote that Waugh ends on is Ryder finding peace in this discovery. Ryder has found God.

There are of course plenty of other characters who would be worth analyzing, but restrictions of time and space in this short blog prevent me from diving into. The minor character that intrigues me most is Nanny Hawkins, the childhood Nanny who dwells in the attic space of Brideshead. Throughout the 20 years that the novel covers, Nanny is forever in her attic window, simultaneously in touch with all the goings on and way out of touch with what's happening below her. She has a view of all, but her eyes are weak. I wonder if she is not some version of God in this novel. And I wonder what it would mean in she were. I don't know if Waugh had a difficult relationship with God. I learned through Wikipedia that he, like fellow countryman Graham Greene (whose The Power and The Glory also deals with Catholicism and the difficulty of believing), Waugh converted to Catholicism as an adult and embraced it fully. So are we supposed to be critical of Ryder's and Sebastian's profligacy of youth? Are we supposed to feel for Lady Marchmain, who is the whipping-girl for all those who have trouble with God? And how odd is it that Lady Marchmain's death comes and goes without fanfare while Lord Marchmain gets and whole section devoted to his dying? If Nanny is like God, then is her fellow counterpart Ryder's father, whom Ryder notes is like Nanny in that they are the only two people who never change. How problematic is Father Ryder as an analogy for God?

A talented writer can take what a more common writer might turn into a tract and turn it into something grand and beautiful. Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh have taken a subject that threatens to be made into a sermon and make art out of it, just as Orwell can take a political tract and make a living, breathing story. This was another gem to be discovered thanks to this reading list. Something tells me that Waugh and I would have nothing to talk about if ever we met, and from what I have read about him, I don't even think we would get along. So how talented must he be to create a world and characters, and breathe life into those very things, and weave a story out of them that pulls me in completely when my world view is so different from his? That is the power of literature and art. That is why we read.

We Are All Berliners

The 31st book on our list is Christopher Isherwoods The Berlin Stories. The book was placed at number 31 because it was published in 1946; however, The Berlin Stories is made up of two books: The Last of Mr. Norris, published in 1935, and Goodbye to Berlin, published in 1939. Both books take place in Berlin in the first few years of the 1930s, during which time there was a power struggle in Germany between communists and fascists, and the end of which resulted in Hitler's rise to power. This political backdrop makes for a fascinating stage on which Isherwood tells his stories.

The Berlin Stories is probably most famous today as the source for the Bob Fosse film Cabaret and Liza Minelli's portrayal of Sally Bowles. I have not had the good fortune to see the film, but I did have the pleasure of looking at reviews of it. Even better still, I saw comparative reviews of it and the 1955 adaptation of The Berlin Stories called I am a Camera. Presumably the reviewers had not read Isherwood's book because they spoke of Julie Harris's Sally Bowles as not being energetic enough and Laurence Harvey's Isherwood of not being gay enough.

But the Isherwood of The Berlin Stories (known as William Bradshaw in The Last of Mr. Norris) is not openly gay. His desires and cravings do not enter into the stories at all. He is a narrator that provides actions and reactions to the characters he meets, because in spite of the political backdrop, the novel is first and foremost a character study. And Isherwood's sense of character is what makes the book so enjoyable.

From Mr. Norris to Frl. Shroeder to Otto, Herr Schmidt, the Baron, Sally Bowles, to the most minor or characters, Isherwood brings them all to life. And who they are comes to us through their interactions with the narrator, who while remaining constant himself, means something different to each of them. Isherwood makes this relationship clear by having each character call him something different. To Frl. Schroeder, he is Herr Issyvoo, to Fritz and Sally he is Chris, to Otto and his family, he is Christoph, etc. I love the way Isherwood allows his narrator to have a life of his own and simultaneously allow other characters to pour themselves into him. There is a genuine love that Isherwood feels for all the characters he invents (or recreates from the real people he encountered in his time in Germany), and that love makes them all vibrant, fragile, lovable, and as close to alive as paper people become.

Much has been said already about who Isherwood creates, namely those people living on the fringes of society: the poor, prostitutes, con artists, bartenders, gay men and woman. This choice of characters no doubt reflects his own tendernesses, but it also aligns with the political environment in which he sets his novel. The main power struggle in both novels that make up The Berlin Stories takes place between the Nazis and the Communists. This conflict is more apparent in The Last of Mr. Norris, in which Norris and the narrator both join the Communist group for their own reasons. The leader of the Communists, Ludwig, is an incredibly charming man who seems to always be smiling and always know more than anyone else in the room. We learn near the end of his story, that he knew Mr. Norris was selling information about the Communist party, but he doesn't care about the betrayal. To him, the Communist party has room for everyone, even traitors. I kept waiting for something ugly to be revealed about Ludwig, but nothing ever was. Ludwig, and the communist party in turn, were the opposite of the Nazi's in Isherwood's novel. The Nazis are clearing house, attacking everyone who is not like them, while the Communists have open arms, and no matter who you are you have a place and a purpose; not matter who you are, you are welcome.

By 1939, when Isherwood published Goodbye to Berlin, the extent of the Nazi's hatred had revealed itself and the problems with Communism were also more apparent, so the second story is even darker in its political portrait. This political setting is, I think, what allows this collection of character stories to be so successful. There is not much of a plot in each of the stories, but there is a consistent and solid world that ties them all together, and the political happenings help give each story its own movement. Even though I never knew where a story was heading, I always felt like it was going somewhere, and the ride was always a good one because the world and the characters were so captivating.

This is not a roller-coaster of a ride kind of novel. This is not what they call a page-turner. But it is a novel that moves, that has a pace, and that provides a wonderful experience to the reader. If you are a reader who prizes character over action (but one who still demands a story in which those can exist) then you should plunge right into The Berlin Stories!

A Book More Equal than Other Books

How many overtly political novels can you think of that are embraced and praised by people of every political persuasion? Conservatives, liberals, capitalists, socialists, and even communists? George Orwell's Animal Farm is amazing because everyone loves it, and everyone loves it because it is amazing.

I can't imagine that I have anything new to say about this book or that anyone needs a review of it, so I will be brief. To me, the book is embraced by all because it breaks down so completely and so simply the means of manipulation that one group uses to control another. Before the invention of the photograph, how horses physically ran was a mystery. Their feet flew too fast to see, and it was popular to debate in the second half of the 19th century whether all four hooves of a horse were ever off the ground at the same time. It wasn't until Eadweard Muybridge took photos and put together a display that the case was settled. George Orwell does something similar with power and manipulation. And we can all appreciate the analysis and see it at work around us even today, no matter who is the force attempting to manipulate.

Squealer is the perfect media machine, creating numbers to "prove" what is not true, rewriting history freely and faulting the animals' bad memories and pernicious lies for the misunderstanding, and gleefully justifying why the ruling class needs special treatment "or else Jones will return." We see this combination of "facts," historical revision, and threats coming from all sides in order to gain our consent for a system that is not in our interest. Similarly, the animals don't have the wherewithal to argue against the lies, and even when they do, the distractions of the bleating sheep destroy that moment of potential protest. Our collective amnesia about the past is a common complaint today, and we see evidence of the "distractions" that pull our mind from the thing we should be focusing on. The right complains of the left employing these tactics, and the left complains of the right, and we all feel like the "lower animals" suffering in a system that is geared entirely against us.

Orwell, a literary hero of mine, manages to combine a direct and powerful writing style with a comprehensive political understanding and brings it all together with an unerring sense of story. At no point does his novel become a political tract. It is always a story first, and an incredible story at that. Stalin and Trotsky are just names in history books today, but Napoleon and Snowball will live forever.

All the King's Men

This blog was originally intended for those reading along with the list that kicked this journey off. According to this original vision, my entries would be one of many and a conversation would arise between blogs as our different impressions and interpretations came together. To that end, I was only too happy to include spoilers in my entries so that we could discuss the books in as much specific detail as possible.

It now seems that I am the last man standing, as it were, and the few who read my posts read them as a kind of book review. Because of this change, I will be spoiling as little as possible in my following posts. If anyone out there wants to discuss things in detail, please make comments, get down to business, and I will meet you there!

Robert Penn Warren is an amazing writer. I had seen the black and white film version of All the King's Men, but I had never read the book before. It is of course common place to note that a book is better than its cinematic counterpart, but I don't always feel that that is true. If a book is heavily plot-driven, it can typically be made into a successful film because cinema loves action and doing; it can show that vividly and powerfully. My impression of All the King's Men from the movie is that the book is about Willie Stark, the country bumpkin who rises to power as the Governor of an unnamed state, and who then confuses his ambitions for power and for doing good. It is a story of the rise and fall of one man and all the collateral damage that creates. Indeed, even reading the jacket cover of my edition, that is the story that it summarizes.

I was surprised then to find almost halfway into the book that the narrator is not simply Watson to Stark's Holmes, but that he is the very center of the novel. The richness of this story is the richness of the narrator's observations and feelings. The extent to which this is an amazing book, and it is indeed an amazing book, has everything to do with Jack Burden's self-loving, self-loathing, caring, uncaring relationship with himself and the world he operates in. Robert Penn Warren brings everything he has to this book and touches upon so many aspects of humanity that I have no idea how he found anything else to write about in the 40 years of his life that followed the publication of this book.

Jack Burden is straight out of a hard-boiled detective novel. He is world-weary and wise and shocked by nothing. He talks the tough talk and doesn't get emotionally attached. And he watches everything and everyone to see which way things go. The difference is that Jack isn't out to make a buck or save someone's life. Moreover, he has failed relationships with everyone in his life, including himself. And the novel reveals those relationships and Jack's every impulse in amazing detail while never once feeling like the pace of the novel is sagging. Hell, the greater portion of one chapter (and the chapters in the book are rather long) is given over to retelling the story of the life, love, and trials of a distant relative during the civil war who was the subject of Jack's dissertation when he was a graduate student of history. It has nothing to do with Willie Stark and yet everything to do with the concerns of the novel and the relationships that boil at its center.

This novel is about good and bad and the good bad people can do and the bad good people can do. It's about the utter uselessness of concepts of good and bad when applied to people. The novel manages to do what so many other storytellers have tried and failed: it presents individuals and society in all its complexity. When others attempt such a thing, you are often presented with a big blob of a mess, everything entangled and meshed, muddy and shadowed. Robert Penn Warren deftly shows the sides of people without destroying the individual impressions, like light shining on a multifaceted gem, the gleam bouncing off one facet sharply without denying the presence of the other facets. In fact, the mere presence of that facet speaks of all the other facets that share a side with it. It is an amazing thing to see.