Tuesday, January 31, 2023

My Books of 2022


January-February 2022.  I began the year with Celestial Mechanics, a novel by William Least Heat-Moon, whose nonfiction books River Horse, Blue Highways, and Here There Everywhere I thoroughly enjoyed.  However, this was disappointing.  The first 50 pages were interesting, engaging, but then it became tedious, pointless.  Next came James Purdy’s Narrow Rooms, a book not for everyone to be sure; filled with sordid homoerotica blended with outlandish, Puritanistic Christian fundamentalist sadism. Everyone in this book is nuts! I’m a big fan of Purdy, he is usually incredibly funny and a great storyteller; Narrow Rooms should have been left in the back room behind the boiler.  Amor Towles’ The Lincoln Highway was so disorganized, irritating, such a disappointing follow-up to the beautiful Rules of Civility and the extraordinary A Man in Moscow, that I can’t believe it was written by the same man.  David Sedaris’ A Carnival of Snackery is typical and greatly appreciated Sedaris.  He cracks me up on every page. 

 The Eyre Affair from Jasper Fforde is a brilliant trip through literature and a future science fiction world that once you get past the expected absurdity of the Future, you’ll be fine.  Lots of tongue-in-cheek politics.  I cannot wait to read Lost in a Good Book, his second of the Thursday Next novels.  He’s also a very good photographer; I follow him on Instagram.  The Danger Tree by Olivia Manning, of whom I am extremely fond, is part of the Levant Trilogy, which follows the Balkan Trilogy, during the WW2 years (this time in Egypt).  I love Olivia Manning’s books.  If you’re hooked on the precipice of the Anschluss through the aftermath of El Alamein, you’ll like these trilogies which take you away from the usual landscapes of France, Britain, and Italy and drop you into Rumania, Greece, and then the Beirut-Cairo-Alexandria huddle.

March 2022.  The Death of Vishnu by Manil Suri is a whirlwind, or as the Kirkus Reviews puts it, “An amalgam of early Naipaul and R.K. Narayan, with just a whiff of Kozinski’s Being There. A highly likable, if oddly conceived and assembled, debut novel.”  Up Against the Night by Justin Cartwright.  The late Mr. Cartwright has become another one of my Go-to’s, that is, whom do I turn to for a lesson in how-to-write at 12:30 a.m. when I can’t go to sleep?  Like so much of the books I read, there is an escape element, and my Go-to’s keep me tucked into an eclipse of the world, dark and comfortable.  With Cartwright, we’re naturally in South Africa, in and out of the tumult and political/social warrens of which many Americans don’t pursue.  He “...casts a sardonic eye on a London expat who’s trying to uncover, if not openly parade, his Afrikaner heritage.”
 
The Battle Lost and Won by Olivia Manning is another lovely book by herself--whom I mentioned above--filled with restless officials, officers, academics, and refugees, soulfully battling “...the climate,” says the character of Harriet, “[it] changed people; it preserved the dead, but it disrupted the living.”  I have been an ardent fan of John Gardner since the late 1970s, and I was so happy to have found our misplaced copy of The Sunlight Dialogues (1972) and to have given it

another try (my first attempt, while still in my twenties, fizzled) at digesting this metaphysical, humorous, cultural, political, crime-infused mammoth of a novel.  I couldn’t stop talking about this book.  John Gardner was a living treasure, that’s all I have to say.
 
The Sum of Things is the final book in the Levant Trilogy (Olivia Manning again); and I’m not going to tell you anything about this book because I loved it and it is a stand-up finale to the prior volumes in Manning’s “Fortunes of War” series (which spans the two trilogies).
 
April 2022.  Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin is a bit challenging and unconventional, and I like her work, so don’t get me wrong. You have to pay attention to what you’re reading. It is a “strange futuristic tale that dramatizes in unusual fashion a nameless woman’s obsession with a science-fiction writer whose imaginings blithely mirror and exploit his ‘power’ over her.”
 
Whew! I made it through the third volume of The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell, 1943-1945, which I started a couple years ago.  I would march alongside Orwell any day, any time.  He is as skillful a writer as he is brilliant a mind.  Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun teaches us an immense historical lesson, Biafra’s lost war of independence from Nigeria.  This novel is exciting, filled with unimaginable hardship, as well as the deceit of love in competition with the war crimes committed by the Nigerian government, with the complicit self-appreciating role played by the British.  This is really a good book.
 
Richard Powers is one of my favorite writers, and he blew my mind with The Overstory (2018); and Bewilderment is no slouch let me tell you.  During a Trump-like administration, a widower who is an astrobiologist, and his son who is diagnosed with any number of shades of Asperger’s, OCD, ADHD, seeking a treatment with an experimental, neurological therapy amid the environmental and political crises that mark our country.  Claire Messud’s novel The Burning Girl is so excellently written, just like her latest and just like her earliest, both of which I’ve read and enjoyed tremendously.  “...The Burning Girl is a complex examination of the stories we tell ourselves about youth and friendship, and straddles, expertly, childhood’s imaginary worlds and painful adult reality—crafting a true, immediate portrait of female adolescence.” (W.W. Norton & Co.)
 
Putting the Rabbit in the Hat is a memoir by the talented, versatile Scottish actor Brian Cox.  It made me laugh constantly, and his gossip (for which he does beg pardon many times) is hilarious and naturally insightful.  If you like him in “Succession” and have liked him in the film “Manhunter” (with William Peterson) among other great movies, you’ll find this book very entertaining. 


Eva’s Eye (the first of the Inspector Sejer Mystery series) by Karin Fossum, a Norwegian writer with the acuity and talent of an expert police procedural novelist kept me captivated.  Please forgive me if you don’t “see it,” but I don’t usually veer to the mystery novel genre, having only read a few by Henning Mankell, Stieg Larson, Sjowall & Wahloo, and friends.
 
I’m a regular at Colm Toibin’s literary hideaway, and The Magician, a novel-biography of the great Thomas Mann, I think was quite good.  I know some bishops of higher thought and cultural mountaintops who step on the low-culture turtles think the book was lightweight; well, they’re wrong.
 
May 2022.  Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children: Yet again, she is a master writer and thinker.  I liked this book very much.  Ah, The Moons of Jupiter by my old friend the Goddess, Alice Munro, as wonderful as any collection of hers can be.  Nina Revoyr has written a fantastic, page-turning book called The Age of Dreaming, “...loosely based on a scandal of Hollywood’s silent era. [Reading time is] 1964, and the protagonist, aged 73, is content to dwell in prosperous obscurity, monitoring his real-estate investments and hiking the Hollywood Hills. But troubling memories of his days as a controversial movie star resurface when a journalist interviews him about his flaming youth and leading ladies.” (Kirkus again) I think it would make a good short Netflix series.  I mean, what have you got to lose Netflix?
 
Reading Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans is like drinking gin in mile-high Colorado while walking around on crutches and taking Vicodin: I’d rather not.  Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (Roy’s first novel since The God of Small Things [1997]) is a tender, yet confusing, strange tale with ghosts interloping between gender identity, religious and political tension, and God knows what else.  I thought it was worth the read, but not nearly, not nearly as clear and beautiful a narrative as The God of Small Things.
 
June 2022.  Doris Lessing’s The Real Thing: Stories & Sketches, I’m giving a passing grade only because she is more powerful than a steaming locomotive and I don’t want to upset the delicate balance of my universe.  Rock Springs by Richard Ford: now this is some book of short stories; Ford can write the shirt off your back

and you’d thank him for it, ask him to be your friend; they are really, really beautiful stories with a backdrop of the Northwestern US, and a time before the national disintegration.  Kirkus Reviews say he’s a cross between Raymond Chandler and Ernest Hemingway. No, I don’t think so. I think he’s just Richard Ford and we should stop all this meandering down Comparison Street.
 
Driving Mr. Yogi: Yogi Berra, Ron Guidry. Baseball’s Greatest Gift by Harvey Araton is charming, hilarious, deeply moving.  Most everyone in my intimate circle (just about six or seven people or so) have read it.  Child of All Nations (volume 2 of the Buru Quartet) by one of my Indonesian heroes, Pramoedya Ananta Toer, is adventurous and heartrending as you drown in the arch cruelty of Asian colonial history (Dutch in this case).  I liked Kate Atkinson’s Case Histories (from the Jackson Brodie series), has three interconnected mysteries. I recommend it.
 
July 2022.  Silence by Shusaku Endo “... tells the story of a Jesuit missionary sent to 16th century Japan, who endures persecution in the time of Kakure Kirishitan ("Hidden Christians") that followed the defeat of the Shimabara Rebellion.  It has been called "Endo's supreme achievement” and "one of the 20th century's finest novels.”  Written partly in the form of a letter by its central character, the theme of a silent God who accompanies a believer in adversity was greatly influenced by the Catholic End?'s experience of religious discrimination in Japan. It was made into a film in 1971, 1996, and 2016; the last one by Martin Scorsese.
 
I’m a big fan of William Boyd.  In 2021, I read Brazzaville Beach while recovering from a broken ankle/leg at the home of my sister Robyn in Colorado.  Waiting for Sunrise is about a handsome young English actor who has a sexual problem: He cannot ejaculate. Which is why our protagonist is in Vienna in the summer of 1913: He’s a patient of an English psychoanalyst with a crackpot theory, Parallelism. He needs his problem cleared up before he marries his fiancée, a lovely leading lady of the stage. Soon enough, our hero discovers that underneath Vienna’s decorum runs a “river of sex.”  It’s not necessarily as lurid as Kirkus reports, but it is one hell of a story.
 
August 2022.  Late Call, by Angus Wilson, is about “Sylvia Calvert [who] is all at sea in her son's house in Melling, a residential area of Carshall, the West Midlands new town to which she and, seemingly incidentally, her damaged husband Arthur have come to live. Upstairs, their bedroom is ...yellow, a particularly strident, mustardy tone chosen by ...their late daughter-in-law. ...This setting proves particularly unforgiving when their own homely items, scuffed wooden furniture and upholstered easy chairs in powder-blue rep and chintz, arrive. 

Wilson's unsettling novel Late Call (1964) is, to my knowledge, the only work of fiction to be set in a postwar new town.” (Gillian Darley, The Guardian). You might think it’s kind of dated, but so am I.  Angus Wilson was a very important writer in the UK, and should not be overlooked nor forgotten.
 

Zachary Leader’s The Life of Saul Bellow: To Fame and Fortune, 1915-1964 is monumental, about our titanic American Nobel-prize winning writer who died April 5, 2005.  We deal with the very early years, and it’s fascinating.  I just finished (1/30/23) reading volume 2, which has been a mind-blower to say the least.  Zachary Leader’s prose has sometimes confusing antecedents for his pronouns, but you get around it; the life he presents, although complex, is nevertheless inspiring to me.  River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze by Peter Hessler is such an interesting fish-out-of-water (I don’t like that phrase but it’s apt) memoir by an American in the Peace Corps in a town in Central China, a couple decades ago.  Brilliant in its discovery of what we in the U.S. would need quite some time getting used to.
 
Mosby’s Memoirs and Other Stories by Saul Bellow. “Six very various short stories, involving lifestyles and searches of one kind or another. Only in the title story are there some of the abrasive, dissonant vibrations of Herzog, as an elderly and quite parched professor on a Guggenheim remembers and ruminates, trying "to avoid the common fate of intellectuals," spooked by aspects of his own death in life.” (Kirkus).  Not my favorites by the Master, but ruminating and dissonant vibrations are right up my alley.  I liked very much Shusaku Endo’s When I Whistle, one of Endo's most unusual and powerful novels set largely in a modern hospital, with themes and scenes that are eerie to say the least.  A jaded businessman has a chance encounter with the doctor son of his best friend at school, and memories are stirred of a former love interest of that friend, a miss Aiko. The son of his friend proves to be contemptuous of the outmoded values of his father's world and ruthless in pursuit of success at his hospital.” (Google Reads). I can’t tell you more without giving away significant plot points.
 
September 2022.  The Dogs of Riga by Henning Mankell: A lifeboat floats ashore at the coast of Skåne, Sweden. Inside are two dead men who've been murdered. Policeman Kurt Wallander is assigned to the case. The men are identified with the help of the police in Latvia. One of the Latvian officers, Detective Liepa, travels to Sweden to assist the investigation, but when he returns to his home country he is mysteriously murdered. A Multitude of Sins by Richard Ford--Yes, another book of short stories by himself.  A multitude of consequences on the sin of adultery.  A very good book, no matter what Kirkus insists about it.  In Kennedy’s Brain, by Henning Mankell, we have “...alone in his Stockholm apartment, a mother finds her son overdosed on sleeping pills. An obvious suicide, say the police. 56-year-old archeologist Louise Cantor, home on a break from a dig in Greece, knows better. Her son was 25, vital, optimistic, fully engaged in life.”
 
Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age by Kenzaburo Oe. 
“A remarkable portrait of the inexpressible bond between [a] father and his damaged son, Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age is the work of an unparalleled writer at his sparkling best.”  Very, very interesting novel.  I’m running on the same train as Oe and Endo.  Happy-Go-Lucky by David Sedaris will remind one of his earlier book Calypso, which I thought was extremely poignant, delivering crazy humor and loving last rites for his mother and sister.  This book deals largely with the recent death of his 96-year-old father, who is an irreverent character beyond belief, but you can’t stop reading about him.  The Webster Chronicle by Daniel Akst (whose St. Burl’s Obituary [1996] I totally loved) is hot and cold for me, mostly because it started out as a hopeful work of art, but then it turned to a journalistic issues-oriented narrative dealing with nightmares that are so out of control in our country, especially those of education and child abuse (the reading time is Reagan era), mob rule, assumed guilt (see the McMartin Preschool case in Calif.), that it makes for an uncomfortable reminder of the huge volume of stupidness in our country, the sheer unstoppable idiocy of the populace before social media, Neo-Cons, and Trumpers grabbed hold of our necks.  Reading this book made me feel as if I’m living under an recurring avalanche, with brief periods of breathing space, only to find it’s going to get worse after the latest deluge clears.
 
October 2022.  What a relief to reenter the world of spies and the true story Agent Sonya: Moscow’s Most Daring Wartime Spy, the great Ben MacIntyre’s book about Ursula Kuczynski who rose through the ranks and handled people like Klaus Fuchs and living in places as diverse as Shanghai, Poland, Switzerland, and England.  Ursula shows up in several of my already read memoirs and histories of Soviet-era spying.  She was a marvel of a woman. 


George Johnson’s Fire in the Mind: Science, Faith, and the Search for Order is a remarkable book, sending me from one microcosmic molecular frenzy to another.  For instance, a common thread in the book: “...neuroscientists have been trying to show that consciousness is simply an emergent property arising from brain cells, whose behavior can be explained with chemistry, the grammar of molecules and atoms.  So, while some scientists are trying to reduce matter to consciousness, others are trying to reduce consciousness to matter.”  That’s probably one of the simplest sentences you’ll find.  It’s a wild book.
 
I have enjoyed Julia Glass’ previous work, and A Widower’s Tale is consistent with Glass’ complex plots and memorable characters.  This book proceeds in some curve-ball strikes, and I found it “...an irresistible pastoral tragicomedy.”  The third volume of the Buru Quartet, Footsteps, by Pramoedya Ananta Toer, he’s one of my guys remember, could have been a great book like the first two in the Quartet, but instead it was rampant with dogma, didactics, and the drawn-out social torture of caste systems and pre-WW2 Dutch colonial cruelty. 


The Collected Stories of Reynolds Price is a beautiful, huge, wonderful book.  I came late to reading Price, and can’t wait to branch out into his other works.
 
November 2022.  Mickelsson’s Ghost by John Gardner is a great book.  I’ve already mentioned that Gardner is a treasure, and this book, for me, re-solidifies his prominence.  I loved this book.  I haven’t given up on Orhan Pamuk, but his Nights of Plague sure comes close to that desperate act.  I have not really got with any of his novels after he won the Nobel Prize.  I’m sorry to say that.  It’s like he’s a totally different person from who wrote My Name Is Red and Snow and The Black Book.
 
Remembering and A World Lost by Wendell Berry are books I’ve already quoted from in a previous post, and I can’t stress enough about how enamored I am of Berry and his beautiful writing.  His land is peopled by some of the most memorable in my reading history.  The Last Judgement by Iain Pears is a good murder mystery with tongue-in-cheek narration and fast-paced adventure within the art world, that is, stolen art.
 
December 2022.  William Boyd’s Any Human Heart is a masterful novel that tells, in a series of intimate journal assemblages, the story of Logan Mountstuart—writer, lover, art dealer, spy—as he makes his precarious way through the 20th century.  This book is clever and laughter-producing.
 
Loot and Other Stories by Nadine Gordimer is something of a blur to me, even while I read it. There is an insistent experimental writing methodology that I couldn’t get with; I don’t know if I’d recommend it even to the off-beat quirky reader.  Early Autumn by Louis Bromfield is an excellent American novel about

the deep roots of classism in New England (particularly Massachusetts) and the depressing fate of women in a white man’s world, just after World War I.  WASPs rotting on the vine is one way to look at it.  But again, Bromfield is an outrageously gifted writer.  Australian writer Peter Carey’s Theft: A Love Story was a very good read; it often had me laughing out loud (figuratively, because I was reading it late at night). The Guardian says “...[it] will get right up your nose.”  It is humane, passionate, and filled with “high mischief.”  It was published in 1926 and won the Pulitzer in 1927.
 
Uncivil Seasons by Michael Malone is a pretty good police story, and as I understand it the first in the Justin and Cuddy series. 


It can be gritty, Sam Spade-ish, and dated, but nevertheless, it’s a very good read of a “whodunnit.”  When the World Was Steady by Clair Messud takes place mostly in Bali and England, and is a book filled with a woman whose marriage has ended, a “crew of international misfits and smugglers”, and a sister and mother trying to find meaning on the other side of the world.  It reinforced my banner raising of Ms. Messud.  Also, she and her husband James Wood were close friends of Saul Bellow and they show up very well and golden-like in Leader’s Bellow biography, part two.  Well, Haruki Murakami’s Wind/Pinball, two novellas, his first official works of literature, were not in my comfort zone.  I might have liked them if I were 19. I really liked A Wild Sheep Chase, a humorous and well-done mystery; but these two novellas I suppose were something he had to get out before he could blossom.  And blossom, I believe, he did. 
 
 
 
 

Wednesday, January 11, 2023


Wendell Berry, in 2017

What is it like to read a Wendell Berry novel (or short story)?

     It's stopping every six paragraphs of so, or after a full page of dialogue, because you start to feel lonesome and guilty for something you haven't necessarily done and it's that not having done it that makes you lonely and culpable, implicated in the worst way before people, family usually, who are unfortunately dead.  This is what Mr. Berry knows about you.  About me. 

Photo by Guy Mendes

     Whenever I read his books, I get the sentimental self-conscious (and any other S-word you can think of) sensation that he's tilting his head and mentioning you in his words.  No other writer, besides Iris Murdoch or maybe William Goyen, or maybe John Powys, has ever made me feel so self-conscious, so simultaneously engaged and distracted from the page, because of the page.  I should probably add John Gardner, Dawn Powell, and maybe Saul Bellow to that encomium triad.  Maybe Alice Munro, Larry Brown; maybe C.P. Snow, John Le Carre, Camus, Gide.  See what happens? I'm already getting sentimental, self-conscious (about making sure who I'm including, so as not to offend), and sad again.

Mr. Berry, many years ago in his writing studio
                                                                                                                

                                                                                                                                                    Photo by James Baker Hall



"...and in the shade where we rested the water darkened, rippling a little as it passed the boat. The whole calm of the river moved down and past us and on, as if it slept and remembered its direction in its sleep."

          (Nathan Coulter from Three Short NovelsWashington, DC: Counterpoint Books, 2002, p. 76)






"He had become a special case, and he knew what he thought of that.  He raged, and he raged at his rage, and nothing that he had was what he wanted.  He remained devoted to his lost hand, to his body as it had been, to his life as he had wanted it to be; he could not give them up.  That he had lost them and they were gone did not persuade him.  The fact had no power with him.  The powerlessness of the fact made him lonely, and he held to his loneliness to protect his absurdity.  But it was as though his soul had withdrawn from his life, refusing any longer to live in it."

[Andy Catlett, dealing with the depression and anger after losing his hand in an agricultural (machine) accident, crushed inside a corn thresher.]

                        (Remembering, op cit., p. 147)




"What have I done with the time?  Remembering as if far back, he knows what he did with it.  He stood up there in the room like a graven image of himself, telling over the catalogue of his complaints.  There is a country inside of him where his complaints live and do their work, where they invite him to come, offering their enticements and tidbits, the self-justification of anger, the self-justifications of self-humiliation, the coddled griefs.  This is happening to my soul.  This is part of the life history of my soul."

                        (Remembering, op cit., p. 152)



"But he reminds himself of himself.  Something else is raging at him....  Yes, you sorry fool., be still.  For the flaw in all that dream is himself, the little hell of himself."

(A World Lost, op cit., p. 277)




[I love that phrase, "...the little hell of himself."]





The excerpts above are but a blink, a minuscule sampling of Mr. Berry's beautiful, engaging writings.  Of the 50+ books written by him, I have read the following: Nathan Coulter, A Place on Earth, The Memory of Old Jack, Jayber Crow, Andy Catlett Early Travels, Remembering, A World Lost, and currently am reading That Distant Land (a book of short stories).  Of them all, so far, my favorite is The Memory of Old Jack, followed by Jayber Crow.


I so encourage you, Reader, to check him out.


Saturday, June 18, 2022

Speaking well of Ford, Orwell, and Toer


Continuing with my embryo tradition of "the gleaning of great mentionables," that is, what I refer to in previous posts as my sharing great quotes and points of view, recollections, musings from the nonstop procession of literary gods and goddesses whom I have been reading, see Feb. 26, I have for you here Richard Ford, George Orwell, and Pramoedya Ananta Toer.

First, from the Indonesian version of Albert Camus, we have Mr. Toer's Child of All Nations.  Below, the narrator reflects on witnessing the sailing away of his young, beloved wife:

     The sun was moving slowly, crawling like a snail, inch by inch across the heavens.  Slowly, slowly--not caring whether the distance it had traversed would ever be traversed again.
     The clouds hung thinly across the sky, unwilling to release even a single spray of drizzle.  The atmosphere was gray, as though the world had lost its multitude of colors.
     The old people teach us through their legends that there isa mighty god called Batara Kala.  They say it is he who makes all things move further and further from their starting point, inexorably, towards some unknown final destination.  A human blind to the future, I could do no more than hope to know.  We never even really understand what we have already lived through.
     People say that before humankind stands only distance.  And its limit is the horizon.  ...There is no romance so strong that it could tame and hold them: the eternal distance and the horizon.

What killed me is the sentence "We never even really understand what we have already lived through."  I just love it.  I'm more than halfway through the novel, the second in his Buru Quartet.  It is not an easy, simple, humane life that Toer writes about, this turn-of-the-century (1901-ish) Dutch-conquered land of the future Indonesia.

From Richard Ford's book of short stories, Rock Springs.  This is a selection from the last story in the book, "Communist."  It's the narrator's response to a question his mother asks, that is, if she is still very feminine, she's 32, but she needs his truthful approval.

     And I stood at the edge of the porch, with the olive trees before me, looking straight up into the mist where I could not see geese but could still hear them flying, could almost feel the air move below their white wings.  And I felt the way you feel when you are on a trestle all alone and the train is coming, and you know you have to decide.  And I said, "Yes, I do."  Because that was the truth.  And I tried to think of something else then and did not hear what my mother said after that.
     And how old was I then? Sixteen. Sixteen is young, but it can also be a grown man.  I am forty-one years old now, and I think about that time without regret, through my mother and I never talked in that way again, and I have not heard her voice now in a long, long time.

What wrested my heart was the mention of the geese, that he "...could still hear them flying, could almost feel the air move below their white wings."  I've heard them, the mammoth glides of geese in their v-formations in Colorado, not just their honking but their wings.  And my sister Robyn has felt the air displaced, while walking or working in her garden, by the thousands that have flown overhead, east and west, constantly.  So it really resonated with me.  I highly recommend Rock Springs.

From George Orwell, in a piece he wrote toward the end of the war in Europe, from As I Please: Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters:

     So long as one thinks in short periods it is wise not to be hopeful about the future.  Plans for human betterment do normally come unstuck, and the pessimist has many more opportunities of saying "I told you so" than the optimist.  By and large the prophets of doom have been righter than those who imagined that a real step forward would be achieved by universal education, female suffrage, the League of Nations, or what not.
     The real answer is to dissociate Socialism from Utopianism.  Socialists are accused of believing that society can be--and indeed, after the establishment of Socialism, will be--completely perfect; also that progress is inevitable.
     ....Socialism is not perfectionist, perhaps not even hedonistic.  Socialists don't claim to be able to make the world perfect: they claim to be able to make it better.  And any thinking socialist will concede to the Catholic that when economic injustice has been righted, the fundamental problem of man's place in the universe will still remain.

I loved this little bit.  I have many socialist tendencies, and I know sometimes everyone goes too far somewhere, but like Orwell says, they "claim to be able to make it better" not perfect.  And that I adhere to.  I also loved the little bit about pessimism.

Well, thanks for listening, and leave the light on for me, will you?




Saturday, February 26, 2022

Speaking Well of Muriel Spark and Glenn Gould

A fabulous by-product of reading biographies is the gleaning of great mentionables, great quotes and points of view or recollections that though not yours you get to claim in a way because you've read the book, you've "done the work," at least, in some fashion.  No? Yes?

What's the point of reading a book if you can't revel in it, if you can't praise it and talk about it to the point of exhaustion, that is, when appropriate?  I just finished Jasper Fforde's early novel, The Eyre Affair, and posted the cover and my gushing about it on Instagram.  It's what one does! Yes? No? And during my sojourn in Colorado, if I was going to be awake until the wee hours of the morning because of pain medications and my broken ankle and shattered shin, I might as well (and I did) use those hours to good advantage by taking delight in Horace Afoot by Frederick Reuss, Brazzaville Beach by William Boyd, The Square by Marguerite Duras, The River Between by James Ngugi, and A German Requiem by Philip Kerr.

So, preamble aside, let me boast the renowned Canadian classical pianist, Glenn Gould (1932-1982).  The 1989 biography by Otto Friedrich was a fascinating experience, to say the least.  For instance--

    “I’ve always had some sort of intuition,” Gould once said, “that for every hour you spend in the company of other human beings you need X number of hours alone.  …isolation is the indispensable component of human happiness.”

I love that.  Then there's this recollection of Leonard Bernstein's, as per Friedrich--

    Glenn Gould’s The Goldberg Variations had appeared when Bernstein's wife, Felicia, was pregnant with their first son. While she had to wait out the last month during a New York heat wave, that record became their “song.”
    Yet Bernstein's most vivid personal memory of the young Gould came slightly later, when they were preparing to record the Beethoven C minor Concerto, and Bernstein invited the pianist to dinner at his place in the Osborne apartment house, just across from Carnegie Hall.
    “He was all bundled up,” Bernstein recalled, sipping on his Scotch and soda and taking another cigarette from his silver cigarette box, “and he had an astrakhan hat over some other kind of cap, doubly hatted, doubly mittened, and endlessly muffled and muffiered. And Felicia said, ‘Aren’t you going to take your hat oft?’ He said, ‘No, no, that’s all right, I’ll keep it on.’
    “A few minutes later, she asked me, in an aside over drinks, whether this was a religious matter with him, and I said ‘As far as I know, it isn’t!’ So she brought it up again to him and said, ‘Really, I think you ought to take your hat off, if you don’t have any reason for having it on, because it’s very warm.’
    “And you know, he did. And when he had taken his hat off, Felicia said, ‘But this is impossible!’ I mean, he had--this was a mat of hair, soaking wet, and just unnourished, and no air. It was hair that hadn’t breathed in God knows how long. And while I was fixing drinks or something, she lured him into the bathroom, sat him down at a stool and cut his hair. And washed it, and combed it. And he came out looking like some kind of archangel, radiant, with this beautiful hair which one had never seen the color of, quite blond, and thinning, haloed-ish. It was really a very beautiful thing to see, what she did, his acceptance, equally beautiful, and the result, which was thrillingly beautiful.”

And then let me boast a quote or two from the Scottish novelist Muriel Spark (1918-2006)--

"…[it is] the moment of illumination which every artist experiences at one time, a kinship with that primitive order of religious revelation.  That is the paradox of inspiration--the incredible and the impossible are felt to be present and therefore (for what is more actual than what we feel?) are credible and possible.  If such an experience, a mystical revelation, is “unutterable,” if the inspiration itself cannot be conveyed, the work of art which is its flower will probably spring where the seed is sown.  The poem will have an organic connection with its physical origin, and the pattern of events and their movement at the visionary instant will be translated symbolically until in the end the work itself becomes the real thing and the events the symbols of it."

Well, that got me.  Then, from her biographer, Martin Stannard, this piece--

"...her poem “Chrysalis” describes how she and Derek Stanford had, one London winter, placed a chrysalis in a matchbox and “in cold spring” been at first puzzled to discover a butterfly in their room. The reader is invited to celebrate release, transformation. Muriel, or Muriel’s spirit, is figured as “the pretty creature” emerging from the hard “broken shell,” “whispering about the curtain,” and then out of the window, away from the “small violence.”


It's the "small violence" that really moved me.


                        

Bibliography:

Stannard, Martin. Muriel Spark: The Biography, New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2010.

Friedrich, Otto.  Glenn Gould: A Life and Variations, New York: Random House, 1989.

Sunday, February 20, 2022

During a snowfall, looking out at my sister's backyard.

How I Spent My Winter Holiday With a Fractured Ankle and Broken Shin Bone








December 23, 2021. My sister Robyn and her son, Kenji, and myself.  A trip to the "Flatirons," part of Green Mountain, in the Colorado Front Range of the Rockies, above Boulder, Colo.* 

In the words of a very funny and annoying TV character, "On my behalf," I didn't know we were actually going hiking, and so just wore my sneakers.  At 3:00 pm, I texted Joe Savino my whereabouts, as we'd climbed to 7,000 feet.  I was exhausted needless to say.  "Take it easy," said Joe, "stop if you begin to lose your breath.  This is a 'no hero' holiday!" His words as true as they were I heeded, but...

By 3:46 pm we'd made it to the top of the Flatirons.  We rested, looked around at the gullies and preponderance of trees, Kenji explained why we can populate Mars within his lifetime.  I was skeptical.  Knowing how we've had trouble landing on Mars with robotic ships, sending humans into space for years with no technology to get them back is a huge problem.
Kenji explaining


At 4:37 pm, Robyn texted Joe that I had slipped and hurt my ankle.  "[The] Team is coming up, everything is okay."  Like what would that mean?  The Team?  It was the Rocky Mountain Rescue Group (RMRG), based in Boulder, Colo.  It was impossible for me to stand let alone walk down the mountain.

At left, a photo taken by Robyn just after she got me to sit up and away from the sliding dirt and stones and pine needles.  I'd already had two brushes with fainting, and I'm as pale as a ghost.  Pathetic man, waiting for the cavalry.

Just after sunset, the RMRG, numbering about 17 professionals (from ER doctors, fire fighters to EMS techs, nurses) showed up with a stretcher, blanket, inflatable caste, and ropes. 






They subsequently escorted Robyn and Kenji down the mountain ahead of me so as to enable them to utilize the trail as best as could be expected since it was dark.


I was strapped into the stretcher, helmet placed on my head, covered in an orange blanket with two mountaineers on either side of the stretcher, two in the front, and one in the back; supported by others "behind the scene" with rope tied around boulders and thick tree trunks; they lifted and began to transport me down between the first and second hammers of the Flatirons.  

It was phenomenal the way they managed, between slipping and losing traction among the bushes and huge rocks, but I was never dropped; at times I was suspended at a right angles, but never felt in danger of displacement.  My view was continuously the night sky and branches and twigs from trees we "flew" through. The downhill trip lasted about two hours; my rescuers Dan, Mike, Trixie, Ashley, Carissa, Josh, among others brought me safely to the ground.  They transposed the stretcher upon a one-wheel mechanism and rolled me along the mountain's bottom, packed dirt, and rock to the waiting ambulance and other emergency vehicles.  And of course Robyn and Kenji.


                                                                            Epilogue

Yeah, yeah, so it's just one more life-changing event: multiple fractures in the ankle, multiple breaks in the tibia or fibula, whatever the shin bone's called.  "You ain't goin' nowhere," said my foot to my already altitude-sick brain.  Crutches.  Nonambulatory.  No cooking and drinking heartily like I promised Robyn and her husband Shane.  No investigating the goods offered by the Great State of Colorado.  But my friends and family came to the rescue, you see.  Aside from keeping me safe and warm and well-fed in freezing Erie, Colorado, Robyn and Shane took great care of me.  No end of good, interesting conversations and catchings up on our segmented, geographically and age-distanced growing up; gaps were filled in; revelations were mystified and laughed about; I lost 37 games of backgammon to Robyn; and then a few visits from my nephews added to a memorable and loving winter holiday.

And I was regaled with boxes of cookies and crossword puzzles from Theresa's sister Linda in New Jersey; a cheese cake from Junior's in Brooklyn, N.Y., sent by the archangel Joseph Centrone; post-trauma cushions and handy medical pants and a warm comfy sweater from sweet Lisa Strong in Culver City; donuts and brownies were sent by my Santa Monica peeps (Theresa & Joe) from Delicious Orchards in New Jersey; and my semi-retired self received a lovely batch of goods from my semi-former workplace, Extraordinary Families.

As of this posting, I've had two surgeries, hopped all over my sister Robyn's house, at times butt-crawling down the stairs and along the shiny wooden floors (see! I'm not ashamed) and finally made it back to Santa Monica, Calif., on Feb. 7th, and "am awaiting sentencing" and x-rays by my local orthopedist, and the prelude to physical therapy.  I have a knee scooter and still need crutches to get around.  My exasperation is continually countered by Joe's quoting: "Some day this war's gonna end."**

From left: Kenji and Robyn; a view from outside Robyn's home; Robyn and me before
 the ascent up the Flatirons.
 



(*) The Flatirons (a/k/a Chattauqua Slabs) consist of conglomeratic sandstone of the Fountain Formation. Geologists estimate the age of these rocks as 290 to 296 million years; they were lifted and tilted into their present orientation between 35 and 80 million years ago, during the Laramide Orogeny. The Flatirons were subsequently exposed by erosion. Other manifestations of the Fountain Formation can be found in many places along the Colorado Front Range.

(**) From Francis Ford Coppola's "Apocalypse Now," spoken by the character Colonel Kilgore.




Monday, January 18, 2021



BOOKS OF 2020: What I Read During "That Awful Year"

I'm not even going to mention what a mind-blowing year 2020 was.  You, Reader, already know.  So my intro paragraph to my Books of 2020 is simple and sweet.  Some of these books I absolutely loved, others I liked; some I did not like at all.



January 2020 began with Michel Houllebecq's Serotonin.  I'm a big fan of Houllebecq, and this is a good book.  But, like the sign in Hermann Hesse's novel Steppenwolf reads, "ENTRANCE NOT FOR EVERYBODY. FOR MADMEN ONLY!" be ready for that. And I'm okay with that. The month continued with Barbara Kingsolver's Unsheltered; an interesting book, but not on my banner list for her work.  It's a long way from The Lacuna and The Poisonwood Bible and The Bean Trees and Flight Behavior.  I'm so spoiled by my authors.  Kindred by Octavia Butler followed; this is an interesting book, seriously harsh to abide alongside science fiction, as it brings backward and forward the plight of African Americans before the Civil War; it's a good book.  I thoroughly enjoyed Life After Life by Kate Atkinson, in which the heroine keeps dying, then dying again.  Even though shifting between time and alternate eventualities, Atkinson does not confuse the reader.  Dolly by Anita Brookner "is a portrait of two women, an aunt and her niece, polar opposites; as usual, the mood is autumnal, verging on wintry." Yes, another Brookner book about isolated women in a hostile world. And I like that kind of thing; I like Brookner's style.  I like the pace.
The Dream Life of Sukhanov by Olga Grushin is one of the best books I read all year.  PW (Publishers Weekly) says "Grushin has imagined both Sukhanov's carefully managed life and his richly troubling personal history with a detailed intensity that fruitfully echoes Solzhenitsyn and John O'Hara."  I think she did it better.  I love this book.


February gave me The Enigma of Arrival by V.S. Naipaul and The Great Fortune by Olivia Manning. I didn't particularly like The Enigma of Arrival, which Naipaul referred to as a novel more than autobiography. The experience was like listening to paint dry in Welsh. The Great Fortune however is the first of the Balkan Trilogy by Ms. Manning, and I found it hard to put down, like something from Masterpiece Theatre but less balmy.

Which brings me to March, and the second and third books of the Trilogy, The Spoilt City, and Friends and Heroes, which did not disappoint, neither in story nor in characters. I can't wait to read Ms. Manning's Levantine Trilogy. John Berger's G. is a strange novel, and rather unsatisfying. I'm not a literary critic so I feel I can use unexpounded adjectives and unclear, prejudicial judgements. I guess I didn't get the point.

And then came April, with Alice Munro's Selected Stories, which began my devotional allegiance to this Nobel Prize winner. I loved these Canadian north stories, mostly of the first half of the previous century, my century, and I couldn't wait to read more. James Purdy's On Glory's Course is one hell of a novel. My penchant for midwestern and/or southern gothic has kept my interest in Purdy for many years. And this book is hilarious, shocking, unbelievable in its social grotesqueness. Give me more. An elegant, informative book by Pete Hamill entitled Downtown provided quite the dose of pre-1990s New York sentimentality and homesickness.

A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami began May.  In the manner of noir novels mixed with absurdist current popular culture, I found this to be a good read.  Don't forget now, I was in month three of our pandemic lockdown, and retreating into books every moment I could get was and still is a relief that I cannot articulate fully.  Jonathan Raban's Passage to Juneau is a strange but edifying account of just that, a boat trip to Juneau, Alaska, and the breakup of a marriage.  Robert Olen Butler's A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain is a collection of short stories that I found intriguing, mainly because they are  about immigrants from Vietnam becoming new individuals in the USA. I liked it very much.

In June, I finished Iain Pear's An Instance of the Fingerpost, it is a big book, which like Neal Stephenson's wide expansive novels, is so intricate and fascinating, you honestly end up giving yourself to the 17th century, and gladly so, in order to right the wrongs of the characters' misfortunes. I also read another book in the Islam Quintet by Tariq Ali: Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree. Again in the vein of a family saga, I like this book very much; the history of Islamic people in Spain after the Christians have retaken control of the Iberian peninsula is one not often broached thoroughly in our schools when we study Western Civ of the 15th century. (Sorry, that sentence sounds pedantic.) Another book of short stories, Istanbul Noir, edited by Mustafa Ziyalan, portrays some pretty weird, comical yet bizarre predicaments in the seedy parts of modern Istanbul. As the title suggests, it involves murder, sex, religion, and revenge constantly.

In July, another volume in the Islam Quintet, The Stone Woman by Tariq Ali, joins my small pantheon of one of the best books I read all year. Istanbul shortly before the end of the 19th century, and again a family saga in the midst of the Ottoman Empire's pending collapse.

August. Hilary Mantel's The Mirror and the Light, the continuation of her Thomas Cromwell trilogy, gives us more and fresh insight into the fierce insanity of Henry VIII and his courtiers and the disposability of men and women at the drop of a hat. Beautifully written. Wendell Berry, as you may recall from my reading transports during 2019, kept the "my favorite writers" banner going with Andy Catlett: Early Travels. Naturally it makes sense to read the books that came prior to this one. Also in August, I read Boris Akunin's Sister Pelagia and the White Bulldog, a mystery in the same vein as Akunin's Czarist Russian hero Fandorin, but this time in a small provincial town peopled with ambitious Orthodox priests, vicious government bureaucrats, and outrageous potholes of the aristocracy. Not as good as his Fandorin books.

Elizabeth Kolbert's The Sixth Extinction is a fascinating and horrifying book about, well...we are the Sixth Extinction my friends. And what with the last four years of an administration in D.C. that gave no thought to global warming and polluting rivers and raping forests and destroying wetlands, what do you expect? I would have said, yes, and I do, that our time has come. Except, now, we have some chance of reversing the idiocy of climate change nay-sayers. Naturally, I won't be around for the planet's turnaround. But it's a good book.  L.P. Hartley's 1953 novel The Go-Between has always been one I'd been meaning to read since early college days; as PW says, "A combination of knowing and not-knowing is this novel's driving force." My God it could be so frustrating at times.

September began with Peter Taylor's The Old Forest and Other Stories. Writing in the NYT, Robert Towers said: "Although he is younger than the others, Peter Taylor belongs essentially to that generation of writers - John O'Hara, John Cheever, and the early Irwin Shaw - whose names, glimpsed at the end of a New Yorker story in the 1950s, flashed like a red signal to the casual peruser of cartoons and ads: Stop skimming! Go back. Read." These are important stories, and often they hurt, so get ready to be uncomfortable. And finally I regain myself with another volume of Alice Munro's work, Family Furnishings: Stories 1995-2014, every bit as wonderful as the Selected Stories.

October. Kem Nunn's The Dogs of Winter is a very good book; an unusual kind of mystery; riveting (in case you need that word). Says Simon & Schuster, "it is a portrait of two men and an appealing yet troubled young woman set against an unforgettable background of stark and violent beauty." I followed that up with yet another best book of the year: The Overstory by Richard Powers. I couldn't get enough of this book; its ecological slant, its condensing of time, and its brilliant scientific and horticultural tagalongs are in a word breathtaking. Yes, I said it. Breathtaking. It is so relevant now I can't emphasize more strongly. Cuba and the Night by Pico Iyer (one of my heroes) is so depressing a narrative about such a depressing place as Castro-era Havana, you don't know how you're going to finish it. You could finish it, because it could have been interesting.  But it wasn't.

November gave me Beautiful Ruins, Jess Walter's charming novel about Hollywood and a little village on the coast of Italy, about 1961 and the current era--a good read.

In December it was roundup time. I finally finished Lydia Davis's The Collected Stories, and now I no longer have to read anything else from her again. I thought this book was a fraud: flash fiction, one sentence stories, tongue-in-cheek fancy clever monotonous condescension, and I really think you should just move on. The Orphan Master's Son by Adam Johnson is a wonderful book. It's about North Korea during the time of the current dictator's father, and it is often extremely difficult to take, but once you do, it's well worth the time. I love this book. Martin Stannard's Biography of Muriel Spark is an excellent read, at times hilarious and at times unnerving. If you like her work, you'll find her life a bit bumpy. Robert Harris' An Officer and a Spy tells the furiously frustrating story of Capt. Alfred Dreyfus and the French nation's despicable anti-semitism. It's told from the point of view of an investigating officer trying to piece together many forgotten clues and vicious betrayals. Yes, it will give you a little angina pectoris, because you cannot believe that things have changed so little over Time. And last but not least, Muriel Spark's The Mandelbaum Gate. I love what PW says about it: "The story, per se, has more physical activity than any she has written and it can and may be read as an intrigue with touches of the absurd. Sometimes it's as chimerical as a Dead Sea scroll. But always it has grace, humor and a lively astonishment." And it's such a pleasure to read. And that's true. I recommend that you have a glass of water standing by whenever you read it though; you're in the Middle East don't forget.