Steven03tx's 2013 Reading Log - Vol. III

On my Reading Shelf - Current and future reading
I've tried to structure my reading into categories with the vague goal of reading at least one book per category per month (with generous allowances for tomes). The books shown in larger size are the ones I'm actually reading at the moment.

Classics of Western Civilization
In chronological order and re-reading anything read more than 20 years ago

       

Science Fiction
A reading list based on the bibliography in Anatomy of Wonder and taken chronologically

       

Other
Includes Reading Globally, Author Theme Reads, Literary Centennials, and miscellaneous reading.

         

Index to My 2013 Reading
(Book titles are touchstones that link to the work page. The date read is a link to my Club Read post.)

anonymous - Njál's Saga - February 10
  - Lazarillo de Tormes - June 25
  - The Homeric Hymns - August 23

Ackroyd, Peter - Hawksmoor - February 26
  - London: The Biography - August 18
Antoni, Robert - As Flies to Whatless Boys - August 17
Arbuthnot, John et al. - Memoirs of the Extraordinary Life, Works, and Discoveries of Martinus Scriblerus - May 13
Bâ, Mariama - So Long a Letter - July 31
Bacon, Francis - New Atlantis - September 14
Balzac, Honoré de - Eugénie Grandet - March 9
  - The Girl with the Golden Eyes - March 11
  - A Harlot High and Low - February 21
Baxter, Stephen - The Time Ships - July 1
Bergerac, Cyrano de - Voyage to the Moon - September 22
Bernhard, Thomas - Correction - March 22
Blanchot, Maurice - Death Sentence - July 14
Brontë, Charlotte - Shirley - July 21
Burney, Fanny - Evelina - May 6
Campanella, Tommaso - The City of the Sun - September 13
Camus, Albert - The Myth of Sisyphus - July 7
Carpentier, Alejo - The Lost Steps - August 16
Cavendish, Margaret - The Blazing World - September 25
Coetzee, J. M. - Life & Times of Michael K - July 25
Conrad, Joseph - Under Western Eyes - March 17
Csáth, Géza - Opium and Other Stories - January 3
Dabija, Nicolae - Mierla Domesticita: Blackbird Once Wild, Now Tame - January 4
Davies, Norman - The Isles: A History - February 23
Deloney, Thomas - The Pleasant History of Thomas of Reading - May 6
De Quincey, Thomas - Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Other Writings - September 8
Dickens, Charles - Hard Times - June 14
Diderot, Denis - The Nun - March 24
Duong Thu Huong - Paradise of the Blind - April 8
Duras, Marguerite - The Sea Wall - July 10
  - Hiroshima Mon Amour - July 11
  - The Sailor from Gibraltar - August 4
  - India Song - August 13
Esquivel, Laura - Like Water for Chocolate - March 18
Ferguson, Will - 419 - July 28
Finley, Karen - Shock Treatment - August 23
Flude, Kevin - Divorced, Beheaded, Died... The History of Britain's Kings and Queens in Bite-Sized Chunks - May 25
Foigny, Gabriel de - The Southern Land, Known - September 29
Franzen, Jonathan - Freedom - July 20
Frayn, Michael - Skios - March 30
Gaskell, Elizabeth - Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life - March 13
Godwin, Francis - The Man in the Moone - September 15
Gombrowicz, Witold - Ferdydurke - March 29
Grabinski, Stefan - The Dark Domain - March 19
Hernández, José - The Gaucho Martín Fierro - January 21
Hodgson, William Hope - The House on the Borderland - March 21
Hugo, Victor - The Toilers of the Sea - January 29
Jerome, Jerome K. - Three Men in a Boat - February 8
Johnson, Samuel - The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia - June 28
Kingsley, Charles - The Water-Babies - March 20
Kosmac, Ciril - A Day in Spring - March 17
Lee, Laurie - Cider with Rosie - April 23
L'Engle, Madeleine - A Wrinkle in Time - March 16
Leppin, Paul - The Road to Darkness - February 4
Lewis, Saunders - Monica - March 21
Lewis, Wyndham - Tarr - June 29
Lottman, Herbert R. - Albert Camus: A Biography - August 28
Lunch, Lydia - Paradoxia: A Predator's Diary - May 15 (no review)
MacDonald, George Phantastes - September 7
Mackenzie, Henry - The Man of Feeling - July 30
Maupassant, Guy de - A Life: The Humble Truth - March 31
  - Bel-Ami - May 27
  - Pierre et Jean - May 28
Miéville, China - Iron Council - April 24
More, Thomas - Utopia - September 13
Morgan, Kenneth O. - The Oxford History of Britain - April 9
Ondaatje, Michael - The English Patient - January 7
  - The Cat's Table - April 16
Orwell, George - Animal Farm August 5
Pályi, András - Out of Oneself - January 9
Pelevin, Viktor - Omon Ra - May 4
Poe, Edgar Allan - Complete Short Stories of Edgar Allan Poe - August 14
  - The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket - August 20
Richardson, Dorothy M. - Pointed Roofs - May 7
  - Backwater - May 30
  - Honeycomb - July 4
  - The Tunnel - September 18
  - Interim - September 30
Roncagliolo, Santiago - Hi, This Is Conchita and Other Stories - April 6
Royle, Trevor - The Wars of the Roses: England's First Civil War - May 23
Sarduy, Severo - Firefly - January 13
Schnitzler, Arthur - Lieutenant Gustl - July 15
Scholder, Amy, et al. - Lust for Life: On the Writings of Kathy Acker - September 19
Scott, Sir Walter - Rob Roy - April 21
Stevenson, Robert Louis - Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde - August 6
Stewart, George R. - Earth Abides - April 29
Strindberg, August - The Ghost Sonata - April 18
Tolstaya, Tatyana - The Slynx - January 21
Verne, Jules - A Journey to the Centre of the Earth - May 26
Wang Anyi - The Song of Everlasting Sorrow - January 9
Waterfield, Robin - The First Philosophers: The Presocratics and the Sophists - September 20
Wells, H. G. - The Time Machine - May 9
  - The War of the Worlds - June 21
Zola, Émile - The Kill - March 5
  - La Reve (The Dream) - March 23
  - Pot Luck - April 22
  - The Ladies' Paradise - August 18

2013 Statistics

Summary of Books Read
105 - books read
82 - novels
3 - plays and screenplays
7 - short story collections
2 - poetry collections
1 - mixed prose and verse collections
1 - epic verse
5 - history
1 - biography
2 - autobiography
2 - essay collections
1 - philosophy

Authors
83 - different authors
54 - authors new to me
77 - books by male authors
22 - books by female authors
4 - books by anonymous or unknown authors
4 - anthologies and books by multiple authors

Books Read by Author's Nationality
36 - English
21 - French
12 - American
5 - Scottish
3 - Polish
3 - Canadian
2 - Hungarian
2 - Russian
2 - Austrian
2 - Cuban
2 - Greek
1 - Moldovan
1 - Chinese
1 - Argentine
1 - Czech
1 - Icelandic
1 - Slovenian
1 - Welsh
1 - Mexican
1 - Peruvian
1 - Vietnamese
1 - Swedish
1 - Spanish
1 - South African
1 - Senegalese
1 - Trinidadian
1 - Italian

Books Read by Original Language
58 - English
22 - French
6 - Spanish
3 - German
2 - Hungarian
2 - Polish
2 - Russian
2 - Latin
2 - Greek
1 - Romanian
1 - Chinese
1 - Icelandic
1 - Slovenian
1 - Welsh
1 - Vietnamese
1 - Swedish
1 - Italian

Books Read by Decade of First Publication
2 - classical era
1 - 13th century
3 - 16th century
6 - 17th century
1 - 1740s
1 - 1750s
2 - 1770s
1 - 1790s
1 - 1810s
1 - 1820s
3 - 1830s
4 - 1840s
2 - 1850s
3 - 1860s
2 - 1870s
8 - 1880s
3 - 1890s
4 - 1900s
7 - 1910s
3 - 1920s
2 - 1930s
4 - 1940s
5 - 1950s
3 - 1960s
2 - 1970s
6 - 1980s
13 - 1990s
7 - 2000s
7 - 2010s

The Time Ships by Stephen Baxter
First published 1995

 

The Time Ships, a sequel to The Time Machine, was published 100 years after H. G. Wells's classic novel. The author, Stephen Baxter, copies Wells's style and tone, though the sequel is several times as long as the original and goes in a different direction thematically.

The story begins exactly where The Time Machine leaves off. The Time Traveler (whose name is still undisclosed) has returned from his journey to the distant future, has told his story to his unbelieving friends, and is about to disappear forever into the dimension of time. This time, however, he is speaking directly to the reader instead of through his amanuensis, the "Writer." His purpose in repeating his journey is to rescue the innocent Eloi woman Weena from the clutches of the evil Morlocks--her presumed fate after he lost track of her during his running battle with the Morlocks near the end of The Time Machine. Here, and not for the last time, we see the sensibilities of the 1990s intruding on a story based in the 1890s. To H. G. Wells's protagonist, Weena was little more than a semi-intelligent, adoring pet, and not the subject of romantic feelings.

After some hasty preparations, the Time Traveler once again sets forth into the the future. But he is soon dismayed to realize that the future into which he is traveling is not the world of the Eloi and Morlocks. It is a different future altogether, and it becomes more different the further he goes. He is left with the realization that his own actions in bringing back news of the distant future has changed the course of history itself. This leads, after more adventures in this new future, to an attempt to go back in time to keep himself from inventing the time machine in the first place and wreaking such havoc on history. But this attempt goes awry and leads to a further series of journeys forward and backward in time exploring the alternate pathways of Earth's history.

H. G. Wells used the original time machine to explore the idea that human society and the human organism were evolving together. He demonstrated how the division of the population into a leisure class and a working class could lead to the evolution of two incompatible cultures, and eventually two entirely different species. His novel also showcased recent scientific discoveries and theories about geological and stellar evolution, putting the history of mankind into the context of a larger, grander history of the universe itself.

Baxter's sequel does not develop Wells's social ideas, and he shows human evolution driven more by technology than economics. Instead the focus is more on the notion of causality and parallel realities. Any reader of science fiction is familiar with the paradox in which a traveler goes back in time and takes an action that prevents his own birth. Baxter's explanation is that this isn't a paradox at all, but the generation of new stream of reality that coexists with the old. So the tone of The Time Ships is much more technical than that of The Time Machine. There is also a bit of an anti-war theme, which it may have inherited from the 1960 movie in which Rod Taylor, as the Time Traveler, is dismayed to find a 20th century which seems perpetually at war. In one alternate history explored extensively in The Time Ships, World War I continues at least until the 1940s, and time travel itself becomes a weapon of war.

Though Baxter departs significantly from the predominate theme of The Time Machine, he does pay homage to H. G. Wells in one way. Throughout the The Time Ships the Time Traveler encounters mysterious apparitions of a being he calls "The Watcher." His physical description of this creature exactly matches that of the Martians in The War of the Worlds.

The Time Ships is an excellent and entertaining novel, but the focus on technology and scientific theories make it clearly part of the science fiction genre and of less interest to the general reader than H. G. Wells's The Time Machine. So while I would recommend it highly to any SF fan, it is not likely to interest those whose forays into SF are limited to the likes of Wells, Huxley and Orwell.

There's an interesting parallel scenario in two of the novels I've read this year.

In Earth Abides by George R. Stewart a small, random group of people survive a global pandemic that wipes out all but a handful of the human race. They are faced with the task of surviving in an increasingly hostile and unpredictable world as the artifacts and conveniences of their civilization wear out or are used up.

In The Time Ships a band of time travelers is marooned in the pre-historic past with only a few damaged remnants of their technology. They must also try to survive in a world that is alien and hostile.

In each of these scenarios there is one individual who realizes that the key to survival is the retention of the attributes of civilization--scientific knowledge, political principles, cultural ideas--that will keep his companions from sliding backward into barbarism. He takes it upon himself to become a teacher and motivator. In one of these novels he succeeds; in the other he fails. And the one who fails is the one who had the greater time and resources at his disposal. So we have two contrasting views of human nature, one saying that knowledge alone can't lift a society above the level of sophistication dictated to it by economics and technology, the other saying it can.

What an interesting reflection. Reminds me of the academic lifeboat competition. What cultural knowledge should survive?

Yes that is an interesting comparison and also made me think of the lifeboat exercise.

From your last thread - good review of Lazarillo de Tormes, I have that on the pile somewhere so will have to try to dig it out.

Also a tempting review of Rasselas. I've seen that one mentioned before but I think yours is the first review that made me want to read it.

I wasn't familiar with the academic lifeboat exercise, but these are certainly interesting topics to reflect on.

Honeycomb by Dorothy Richardson
First published 1917
Third novel in the Pilgrimage sequence

 

"There was a life ahead that was going to enrich and change her as she had been enriched and changed by Hanover, but much more swiftly and intimately."

Miriam Henderson, the author's alter ego in her series of autobiographical novels, was raised a member of the gentry, but must seek employment because of her father's bankruptcy. After tutoring in Germany (which she loved) and teaching lower middle class girls in London (which she did not love), Miriam is now, in 1895, embarking on a career as a governess in a country home. It is an undemanding position with employers who are relaxed and companionable. But what is most important to Miriam, it is a life enriched by beautiful surroundings.

Aided by beauty (as she was by music in the first volume and books in the second), Miriam is finally able to transform herself from an insecure teenage girl to a mature, independent woman. "Beyond the horizon, gone away for ever into some outer darkness, were her old ideas of trouble, disease and death. Once they had always been quite near at hand, always ready to strike, laying cold hands on everything. They would return, but they would be changed. No need to fear them anymore."

Miriam's symbolic rite of passage into her independent adulthood--many modern readers will cringe at this--is when she first smokes a cigarette in front of others. It marks her not only as an adult, but as a woman of progressive, perhaps even radical, views. Indeed, Miriam is increasingly angered by the way the men around her treat women as their mental inferiors (and by the way the women acquiesce to it). Contemplating marriage, she says to herself:

"Men are all hard angry bones; always thinking something, only one thing at a time and unless that is agreed to, they murder. My husband shan't kill me . . . I'll shatter his conceited brow--make him see . . . two sides to every question . . . a million sides . . . no questions, only sides . . . always changing. Men argue, think they prove things; their foreheads recover--cool and calm. Damn them all--all men."

The ellipses in the above quote are in the original. Richardson uses them extensively in the stream of consciousness passages which are the bulk of the novel. Compared to the first two novels of Pilgrimage, Honeycomb is bolder in style, and the language is increasingly beautiful and rich in imagery. The themes of feminism and individuality are also more pronounced, making this Richardson's most rewarding and enjoyable novel yet.

Previous novels in Pilgrimage:
Pointed Roofs (1915)
Backwater (1916)

The principal character in Honeycomb (see review above) makes an interesting observation based on her experience teaching the children of the poor and tutoring the children of the wealthy: The poor may not get a better education, but they get a more truthful one. Nothing has to be hidden from them, be it political theory, history or religion. They don't have to be protected from the truth or from hearing all sides of an issue. It isn't permissible, however, to teach rich kids things that will upset them or anger their parents. This was 1895. It may still be true to some extent today.

I am intrigued by your review of Pilgrimage I. Did you enjoy the other two books as much as this one? I am adding to my wishlist.

Excellent review of Honeycomb steven. I clicked on to the pilgrimage series and was amazed to find so few people with these books, especially the individual editions.

I am not so sure there are many governesses around today to teach the rich kids, however with more parents having an interest in what their children are taught in schools and in some cases having a say in the curriculum, then teachers might have to be very careful what they choose as subject matters for teaching.

#12 - I've enjoyed all three novels, but I thought Honeycomb was slightly the best so far because of the more practiced and picturesque writing style and the greater depth of theme.

#13 - I added the individual editions to my library as such so I could review them individually, but the series has been mostly published in four omnibus volumes. It looks like fewer than 40 members own the entire series (or have it wishlisted), though 129 own the first volume.

No, I don't suppose there are many governesses left, but at least where I live the rich tend to send their kids to private schools that are run by churches, so they get a more conservative education than the poorer kids who go to state-run public schools even if that wasn't the parents' intention when selecting the school. Which isn't to say that our state schools aren't heavily influenced by churches and conservative politicians, but at least they still teach Darwin, which most church-run schools wouldn't do.

It's interesting, too, that the protagonist in Honeycomb doesn't consult with her employers on what they want their children taught; she just makes the assumption that since they are wealthy and privileged it isn't safe for her to introduce egalitarian and socialist ideas or other progressive topics. This is similar to the way people avoid bearing bad news to persons in power, even if that person desperately needs and wants to hear such news as timely as possible. Wealth and power repel the truth even when there is no such intention on the part of the wealthy and powerful--I think this may be what Richardson is saying.

I think the whole issue of education of poorer kids is really complicated. For one thing, teachers are paid so little in the US that many teachers haven't studied extensively in the area they're teaching (this is especially true for the sciences, but also pertains to other areas). Further, since public schools are funded largely by property taxes (at least here in the northeast, although not in NYC itself), wealthier school districts can have nicer schools, smaller classrooms, more specialized teachers, etc., than poorer schools. Finally, if you lean towards conspiracy theory, as my sweetie does, it can be argued that the disinvestment in education in this country going back decades at this point is designed to keep the electorate, especially the poorer and more rural electorate, uninformed (so that they'll vote against their interests by voting for Republicans).

Interestingly, in NYC, many poor parents try to send their kids to parochial schools run by and subsidized by the Catholic church, even though they aren't Catholic themselves. They value the quality and seriousness of the education (and the keep the kids off the street aspect) and put up with the religious angle. However, the NYC archdiocese has been closing schools (and churches) because of their own not undeserved financial problems.

14 Interesting comments on why the governess teaches the children as she does. Sounds logical to me, altho there have also been things written about the opposite behavior, i.e. working class nannies purposefully educating the children in the opposite direction from their parents. Interesting stuff.

Here is Sacramento, some research showed that teachers in lower income neighborhoods taught in a more authoritarian style while in better neighborhoods more democratic methods were used, teaching students how to think rather than memorize and spit out. Many of these teachers came from the same teaching school, where they were taught to use the democratic methods. When asked why they changed in the lower income schools, they said that they started out the other way but the students had no respect for them until they started behaving in a more authoritarian manner. Interesting stuff. This is not something they were doing on purpose - just everyone reacting according to their own socialization.

>13 baswood: Part of the reason might be that they are difficult to find. I ordered Volume I from amazon after reading steven's review, only to receive an email about two weeks later telling me it was unobtainable. It wasn't available on other sites either. That would leave the second hand dealers, where there is a huge range of prices. It also leaves me wondering why amazon lists a book they can't get, when they are quite keen to let customers know there are "only two copies left" of other books. I will keep looking as I have enjoyed the reviews.

On equalities in American education, I would suggest reading Jonathan Kozol's Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools. It was written in the '90s, but I don't suspect things have gotten much better.

The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus
First published 1942
English translation by Justin O'Brien 1955



If there is no God--if life is finite, without meaning, and sometimes unbearable--why shouldn't we just commit suicide? This is the grim question with which Albert Camus begins his essay on the absurd. Camus rejects suicide, however, first by confronting the assumption "that refusing to grant a meaning to life necessarily leads to declaring that it is not worth living." A life that is acknowledged to be without meaning is, by his definition, an Absurd life. "Does the Absurd dictate death?" Camus argues that it does not.

The Absurd man knows that "seeking what is true is not seeking what is desirable," and will accept despair rather than "feed on the roses of illusion." He depends on his courage and his reasoning. He lives to experience life and to contemplate it free of the shackles of convention or guilt. Existence "is not a matter of explaining and solving, but of experiencing and describing." Life, the author says, "will be lived all the better if it has no meaning."

But does the Absurd man have the right "to behave badly without impunity?" Reassuringly, Camus answers that "The absurd does not liberate; it binds. It does not authorize all actions.... The absurd merely confers an equivalence on the consequences of those actions. It does not recommend crime, for that would be childish, but it restores to remorse its futility. Likewise, if all experiences are indifferent, that of duty is as legitimate as any other. One can be virtuous through a whim."

In making the above arguments, Camus draws on the work of other philosophers and novelists. He frequently cites Kierkegaard, Shestov and Nietzsche. Not having much background in philosophy, I found some of these passages hard to follow. But his references to the works of Dostoevsky and Kafka were very illuminating.

In his conclusion, Camus recounts the Greek myth of Sisyphus, the immortal who was condemned by the gods perpetually to roll a stone uphill, only to have it roll back just before reaching the summit. Sisyphus, he maintains, accepts that his position is hopeless, but scorns the gods by smiling as he retreats back down the hill to have another go at that rock. This revolt is his victory, for "there is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn." The Myth of Sisyphus is both profound and compelling. Even if it doesn't appeal to you as a personal philosophy, it wonderfully illuminates the literary works of Camus and many other modern writers.

Other works I have read by Albert Camus:
The Stranger
The Plague

Fabulous review of The Myth of Sisyphus, Steven. I'm both eager and a bit reluctant to get to it, but I'll probably read it in September, along with The Stranger.

Great review. Oh how it takes me back. Part of me wants to reread it and part of me is afraid to, like doc. I

Enjoyed your Camus review.

Rebecca, you wrote: "Interestingly, in NYC, many poor parents try to send their kids to parochial schools run by and subsidized by the Catholic church, even though they aren't Catholic themselves."
The same is true near me, in San Francisco. SF public schools are so-so (unless you can get into Lowell). However, I suspect Catholic schools in SF are somewhat different from the ones in Texas...

Of course, everything in SF will melt down fast if CCSF closes.

Great review of The Myth of Sisyphus Steven. That final essay on the myth of Sisyphus I found particularly enlightening. It is a wonderful essay,

Jonathan, I think the schools in Texas Steven was referring to are probably mostly fundamentalist Protestant, not Catholic. But interesting about SF.

In addition to regular parochial schools there are a number of non-parochial Catholic schools here that are extremely conservative. My sister sent her kids to one. But most of the the private schools are Southern Baptist, Church of Christ, etc. as Rebecca says.

I can't stop thinking about your Camus reviews but I also am a little wary.

The Sea Wall by Marguerite Duras
First published 1950 as Un barrage contre le Pacifique
English translation by Herma Briffault

 

The Sea Wall is the first of three autobiographical novels Marguerite Duras would write about her teenage years in Indochina. She lived both in Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam) and on a small coastal rice plantation in what is now Cambodia. The latter is the setting for this novel.

The author's alter ego is named Suzanne. She lives with her mother, referred to only as "Ma," and her older brother Joseph. Ma and her husband had immigrated to Indochina in 1899, lured by the government's promise of easy wealth. The husband had died soon after Suzanne's birth. Later Ma had applied for a land concession, and been granted 100 acres of supposedly prime rice land. Too late, she had discovered that all but five acres of it was inundated by the sea every monsoon season. Ma had gone deeply into debt building a sea wall to keep out the salt water, only to see it collapse the very first year.

The story takes place in the early 1920s when Suzanne is 17, her brother 20. The trio are subsisting on wild game, fish, and the little rice they can manage to grow while Ma staves off her creditors and nurtures the hope of somehow rebuilding the sea wall. She pins her hopes on Suzanne, whose beauty is bound to attract a rich husband some day. Their dreams seem about to be realized when Monsieur Jo, the spoiled son of a wealthy colonist, falls in love with Suzanne. But he has no intention of marrying her, and Suzanne makes no secret of the fact that all they are after is his money.

The Sea Wall is a bleak novel. Its unlovable characters are condemned to poverty, not for lack of energy or ambition, but for a lack of vision. Ma doggedly fixates on the sea wall as her only hope and on marketing her daughter's virginity as the key to realizing it. Her two children think only of escape, but are incapable of breaking with the daily routine to find a way out.

The first half of the novel is sharply focused on the family and the affair with Monsieur Jo. In the second half, however, Duras broadens the vision to include the native population of the cities and countryside. There are gut wrenching scenes of poverty, disease, and injustice with the youngest being the ones who suffer the most. In addition to a tense family drama, the novel becomes a bitter indictment of colonialism.

Duras re-told the story of her youth in her most famous novel, The Lover, but with substantial changes in both plot and style. The Sea Wall more closely resembles the writing of Louis-Ferdinand Céline with its hard-boiled, grim and nihilistic tone.

Other works I have read by Marguerite Duras:
The Square
Moderato Cantabile
The Arternoon of Mr. Andesmas
Ten-Thirty on a Summer Night
(above four collected in Four Novels)
The Ravishing of Lol Stein
The Vice-Consul
Destroy, She Said
The Malady of Death
The Lover

The Sea Wall sounds promising. I am adding to my wishlist.

Hiroshima Mon Amour by Marguerite Duras
Screenplay with synopsis and notes by the author, as well as stills from the film
Filmed 1959, first published in book form 1960
Translated by Richard Seaver 1961

 

A French woman and a Japanese man meet in Hiroshima where the woman is playing a part in a film "about Peace." Though both are happily married, they fall in love with each other and spend the night together. In the morning she tells him she must leave Japan the following day, and they will never see one another again. "You saw nothing in Hiroshima. Nothing," he tells her. "I saw everything. Everything," she insists. Their conversation is interwoven with horrific images of the atomic bomb and its aftermath.

As the day passes and the filming ends, the man persists in seeing the woman and extracting the details of a personal history that has made her suddenly so melancholy. During World War II in her native city of Nevers, she fell in love with a German soldier. As the Allies advanced upon the city the soldier made plans for her to escape to Bavaria with him, but on the day they were to leave he was shot by a resistance fighter. He died in her arms. She was accused of collaboration and had her head shaved. Insane with grief, she was locked in a cellar for months.

What this script does is give us two powerful images of war and its impact: the very public horror of Hiroshima, and the intense private tragedy of the woman of Nevers.

The book gives us Marguerite Duras's instructions to the director and background sketches on the characters. Frequently she gives options for how a scene should be shot or alternative dialogue, and footnotes tell us which choices the director, Alain Resnais, made. The numerous photographs are well-chosen to illustrate how her directions were implemented and they give a good feel for the film overall.

THAT sounds intense!

Excellent reviews of the Marguerite Duras books Steven. I have seen Hiroshima Mon Amour, but a very long time ago.

Death Sentence by Maurice Blanchot
First published 1948 as L'Arrêt de Mort
English translation by Lydia Davis 1998

 

That the title of this novel is wonderfully, but differently, ambiguous in both French and English is highly indicative of its contents. "L'Arrêt de Mort" in French can mean both a legal judgment of death and the end of death. In English "Death Sentence" commonly also means a judgment of death, but it can also be construed to mean a written or spoken sentence that is about death. The fact that meaning is entirely dependent upon the interpretation of language, to the extent that our living and dying is dependent upon language, is interwoven throughout Blanchot's short novel.

The novel, written in the first person by an unnamed narrator, consists of two segments. In the first segment, taking place in 1938, the narrator tells of his relationship with a young woman named "J" who is dying of lung disease. J and the narrator discuss, among other things, her death, her suffering and her wish for suicide. At one point J's doctor insists on discontinuing her morphine shots because her condition is too frail. J screams at him, "If you don't kill me, you're a murderer." Ambiguous ideas about death and its meaning abound in this book. In reference to J's plea, the narrator says "Later I came across a similar phrase attributed to Kafka."

The second and longer segment of Death Sentence takes place in Paris during World War II, though the time and place may be of no significance. From the opening sentences, the narrator alerts us that the telling of the story is going to determine what the story is:

"I will go on with this story, but now I will take some precautions. I am not taking these precautions to cast a veil over the truth. The truth will be told, everything of importance that happened will be told. But not everything has yet happened....

"Even now, I am not sure that I am any more free than I was at the moment when I was not speaking. It may be that I am entirely mistaken. It may be that all these words are a curtain behind which what happened will never stop happening.... But a thought is not exactly a person, even if it lives and acts like one."

The events of this part of the novel, which involve encounters and conversations between the narrator and three different women, are dreamlike, discontinuous and enigmatic. The narrator's thoughts continue to be about death and suicide, but even more about language, silence and solitude. The language can be perplexing, but no less poetic: "...but this solitude has itself begun to speak, and I must in turn speak about this speaking solitude, not in derision, but because a greater solitude hovers above it, and above that solitude, another still greater, and each, taking the spoken word in order to smother and silence it, instead echoes it to infinity, and infinity becomes its echo."

I can't claim to understand everything Blanchot is saying in this novel, but it offers some intriguing interpretations. One is to consider it as metafiction with the narrator speaking, not as the author of a book, but as the book itself. For ideas live, change and develop in the mind, but as they are put into language and written down on paper their development ceases. In a manner of speaking, they die. Creation and death are the same, and language is what makes them so. In a postscript the author says, "These pages can end here, and . . . will remain until the very end. Whoever would obliterate it from me, in exchange for that end which I am searching for in vain, would himself become the beginning of my own story, and he would be my victim."

Nice reviews of the Duras novels and Death Sentence, Steven. I've added The Sea Wall to my wish list.

Maurice Blanchot is new to me I'm embarrassed to say after looking him up. This sounds like an intriguing novel, worth more than one reading. Thanks for the introduction to a new author and the thoughtful review.

Lieutenant Gustl by Arthur Schniztler
First published 1900 or 1901 (sources disagree) as Leutnant Gustl
English translation by Richard L. Simon 2003
Previously translated as None but the Brave

 

Told entirely as a stream of consciousness, this short (59 pages) novella puts us in the title character's head for a period of several hours. Gustl is an officer in the Austro-Hungarian army out for a night's recreation in Vienna around the turn of the 20th century. He is attending a concert for which a fellow officer has given him a free ticket. "How long is this thing going to last?" is his first thought. In between checking out the girls in the box seats, he thinks ahead to the duel he will be fighting the next morning. He isn't worried; this isn't his first. Gustl's mind also wanders to the problem of the Jews--there are too many of them in the Army, he thinks.

Waiting in line at the coat check after the concert, eager to find that girl he thinks was giving him the eye, Gustl makes an impatient remark to the large man in front of him. The man turns, grabs the hilt of Gustl's sword with a powerful hand to keep him from drawing it, and calls the young lieutenant a fathead. Gustl is too stunned (or frightened?) to react as the man walks away. But it's now too late. He has been publicly shamed and did not retaliate. There is no way to recover from such a disgrace. As he blunders out into the night, Gustl realizes that the only honorable option is to commit suicide.

Gustl's rambling thoughts give us a compact but vivid picture of aspects of fin de siècle Viennese culture. The novel satirizes the army in particular with its self-destructive honor code, its tolerance of social and sexual escapades, and its pervasive antisemitism. There is also a sense of the fragility of human fate where a single word can destroy a life or reprieve it. Schnitzler was a trained psychologist, and his portrait of this young man is both convincing and entertaining. The use of stream of consciousness was ground-breaking, yet it's delightfully easy to read.

Glad you enjoyed Lieutenant Gustl, Steven. I did not think many people were going to read that, but I suppose it's on the 1001 list.

Death Sentence sounds so . . . French, I guess! Not sure that's one for me, or the Schnitzler either, but I enjoyed reading about both these unfamiliar (to me) authors.

Lieutenant Gustl sounds like an example of one of those occasions where we limit male behavior to a stereotype that is so often overlooked. (I mean the fact that we talk a lot about how we limit female behavior, but not as much as we talk about how we limit male behavior and HOW THAT IS HARMFUL.

Death Sentence sounds quite intriguing. Like SassyLassy I had never heard of Blanchot, but I mean to rectify that.

Nice review of Lieutenant Gustl, Steven. I looked for a free e-book of it, but I could only find the German edition of it. Where did you get your copy of it?

Great reviews of Death Sentence and Lieutenant Gustl. Particularly interested by the Schnitzler book and curious as to why there has been a modern translation,

#39 - I purchased it new from Amazon two years ago. It looks like it's out of print now. They have used copies, but it's rather expensive for such a tiny book.

There are several collections of Schnitzler's stories and novellas in print, but as far as I can tell none of them contains Lieutenant Gustl. His major work is a novel The Road into the Open, but his most well-known piece is the novella Dream Story because it was the basis (very loosely, I suspect) of the Kubrick film "Eyes Wide Shut."

There's at least one earlier famous film based on a Schnitzler story--Max Ophuls' La ronde. Beautiful movie. (Won't sit well with prudes--concerns linked sexual affairs, with a person from one encounter continuing into another with a new partner, until the "chain" completes into a circle.)

Schnitzler is (or was, or ought to be) known well enough even in the Anglo world that the historian Peter Gay titled one of his books Schnitzler's Century. He is the first writer of the sunset of Austro-Hungary; stylistically innovative (the inner monologue in this novella predates Anglo modernism), anticipating all the great themes of the 20th century--neuroses sexual and historical, antisemitic savagery, modern anguishes of every kind.

Gustl's story is about the death of the Austro-Hungarian empire, sclerotically incapable of transformation into anything but dust. An officer but not a high-born aristocrat, Gustl is the victim of the caste system that trained him to ape the style of the long-dead aristocracy, in military dressage to love affairs to how one responds to insults. He is a relic of a strange kind--a counterfeit relic, just like Austro-Hungary had become a counterfeit empire. The middle class, the petty bourgeois, the city, the parliament, the businessmen, the financiers, had long burst the confines of the medieval hierarchies, had emptied them of real meaning. You think you're a prince because you were taught to imitate princes, then a shopkeeper comes along and calls you a dumb kid--and you see yourself for the first time in your life for what you really are--what everyone else can see you are. A useless dumbbell, a dunce fed on fairy tales, a fake with a code of honour but no right to that honour.

It's interesting how often this theme is taken up by precisely Austrian Jewish writers. Aristocracy, aristocratic mode of being was explicitly out of bounds for Jews, and yet all education was based on extolling it (a mentality that survived well past 1918). Nobility of birth conflated with nobility of soul, of moral worth, clearly set Jews the Jesus-killers and Jesus-deniers, Jews the landless Gypsies and usurers, apart forever. If you were noble in any sense, or aspired to be noble in any sense, you despised Jews. This must have placed incredible strain on both the intellectual and daily life of people. At least, dozens of Jewish writers keep coming back to it--for instance Ernst Weiss (like Schnitzler a medical doctor), Joseph Roth, Leo Perutz... All have written novels* about the downfall(ing) of Austro-Hungary through the characters of Austro-Hungarian officers undergoing catastrophes. (I would add to them Miroslav Krleza, who although not Jewish, and educated in military schools himself, as a member of the "lesser" Slav population of the empire acutely felt his "outsider-ness" and directly tackled the absurdity of the system.)

But Schnitzler was the first.

*Die Flucht ohne Ende, Radetzkymarsch, Boëtius von Orlamünde, Wohin rollst du, Äpfelchen...

#42 - ...with a code of honour but no right to that honour

That's an excellent way of putting it, and an idea that applies in many other cases as well. Thanks for the background on Schnitzler.

Freedom by Jonathan Franzen
First published 2010

 

Freedom is the story of an American family from the 1970s to the writer's present day (2010). It is a novel thematically broad in scope and rich in insight.

The story opens with a portrait of the Bergman family of Minnesota. They seem almost too good to be true. Walter is an environmentalist working on important conservation projects. His wife Patty, a former college basketball star, appears to be the ideal happy homemaker and neighbor. Their two children, Joey and Jessica, are bright and successful. The Bergmans are an idealized example of liberal, socially and environmentally responsible, urban gentry.

But there are dark clouds looming. Joey will soon desert the family to move in with his girlfriend's redneck family next door. Patty is still haunted by her infatuation with Richard Katz, the rock musician who is Walter's best friend and whom Patty often wishes she had married, and Walter's idealism will soon be challenged by corruption and compromise.

The novel's narrative focus moves back and forth in time and from character to character. This allows the reader to see relationships and issues from multiple perspectives. On the large scale, Freedom chronicles the shift in American values from the bold, liberal idealism of the '70s to the cynical, materialistic conservatism of today. At the personal level we see individuals shaped by their environment and upbringing with children, more often than not, turning out to be the antitheses of their parents' personalities and values.

The theme of "freedom" is woven throughout the novel, but never pounded upon. It is represented in the yearning for independence by children and spouses. It is also a word used by opposing forces: the environmentalists wanting land free of exploitation, the corporate interests claiming the economic freedom to exploit. What is freedom to one person or group is all to often seen as a transgression by another.

The characters in the novel are, if not typical, at least convincing, and sufficiently complex that the reader can sympathize with, or be infuriated by, each of them. Like all of us they combine grand visions and pure ideals with petty prejudices and self-destructive behavior. Franzen's portrait of America over the last 40 years is written from the perspective of an embittered '70s liberal. Being one myself, I see it as ringing true. Conservatives will probably have a different opinion of the novel.

Other works I have read by Jonathan Franzen:
Corrections

Freedom sounds just up my street, great review steven.

Shirley by Charlotte Brontë
First published 1849



"Pantheress! beautiful forest-born! wily, tameless, peerless nature! She gnaws her chain; I see the white teeth working at the steel! She has dreams of her wild woods and pinings after virgin freedom." With these words an admirer describes Shirley Keeldar, the co-heroine of the novel titled Shirley. She is the heiress of a substantial estate. Her parents wanted a boy, so they gave her a man's name and something of a man's independence and temperament. (That "Shirley" has been ever since a girl's name is due to the popularity of Charlotte Brontë's novel.)

The other co-heroine is Shirley's closest friend, Caroline Helstone. Raised by her uncle, the local rector, Caroline is more the typical Brontë heroine, hiding her passions, her intellect, and her opinions behind a quiet, devout and dutiful exterior. But in female company both she and Shirley express surprisingly strong views on the role of women in 19th century England.

"Men, I believe, fancy women's minds something like those of children. Now that is a mistake."

"...I feel there is something wrong somewhere. I believe single women should have more to do--better chances of interesting and profitable occupation than they possess now."

"Men of England! look at your poor girls, many of them fading around you, dropping off in consumption or decline; or, what is worse, degenerating... reduced to strive by scarce modest coquetry and debasing artifice, to gain that position and consideration by marriage which to celibacy is denied."

Nor was marriage always desirable; of one girl's prospects the author says that she, "...inverting the natural order of insect existence, would have fluttered through the honeymoon a bright, admired butterfly, and crawled the rest of her days a sordid, trampled worm."

Caroline Helstone and Shirley Keeldar live in a small Yorkshire community named Briarfield (perhaps modeled on the Brontë home of Haworth) which boasts a fabric mill as its sole industry. But times are hard. It is 1811 and the war with Napoleon has resulted in a trade embargo that is now extended to America, crippling the English economy. The mill's manager, Robert Moore, is undaunted. An immigrant from Belgium, half French and half English, Robert is a distant cousin of Caroline's and a man who will figure in the love lives of both women. To cut labor costs in an attempt to stay afloat, Robert imports machinery to automate his mill. But this eliminates precious jobs, and there are riots. The machinery is destroyed. Robert rebuilds and battles on, in a scene the author says is being played out all over England.

Brontë is even-handed in her treatment of labor-management disputes, showing sympathy with both positions. She is unequivocal, however, in regard to the idea that some can claim superiority by birth over others. The aristocracy is seldom mentioned in the novel, but satirized viciously when it is. One lady candidly admits that the best English governesses are the illegitimate daughters of English lords:

"...we need the imprudences, extravagances, mistakes, and crimes of a certain number of fathers to sow the seed from which we reap the harvest of governesses. The daughters of trades-people, however well educated, must necessarily be underbred, and as such unfit to be inmates of our dwellings, or guardians of our children's minds and persons."

Charlotte Brontë began writing Shirley, her second published novel after Jane Eyre, in 1848. In September of that year Charlotte's brother Branwell died from a complex of problems brought on by heavy drinking. Two months later, Charlotte's younger sister Emily died of tuberculosis in the same room in which the sisters did all their writing. In May of the following year the youngest sister, Anne, died of the same disease.

After Anne's death, Charlotte resumed her composition of Shirley. A discernible loss of focus in the middle of the story may be a consequence of this hiatus. In the later chapters, Brontë has her three principal characters, Caroline, Shirley and Robert, each go into a decline due to illness or injury. Each comes near to death or fears it. But Charlotte could bring them back to life and health with her pen, something she could not do for Branwell, Emily and Anne.

"You held out your hand for an egg," she wrote, "and fate put into it a scorpion." With the scorpion clenched defiantly in her fist, Charlotte Brontë wrote a bold and beautiful novel.

Other novels I have read by Charlotte Brontë:
Jane Eyre
Villette

Shirley sounds wonderful. Very nice review. I am adding to my wishlist.

Jonathan Franzen is one of the new-ish Brooklyn writers I have an irrational prejudice against (although I think he doesn't actually live in Brooklyn, but I lump him with them anyway -- irrationality again). I probably should rethink that.

Do you have a bias against Brooklyn itself, or is it something else these writers have in common? Who are some of the other writers?

Not a bias against Brooklyn per se, but the "hipness" focus of some of the younger writers there. It is irrational, as I pointed out, but there is Jonathan Safran Foer, in particular, who has always irritated me, and I'm sure there are others I'm blocking out right now!

I do agree with you on Jonathan Safran Foer.

The Corrections left me cold, but your review of Freedom has me thinking I should probably try him again, although I had no interest in this book before now.

Great review of Shirley, that tells me it is time to read it again.

What Sassy said.

I won't miss out on Shirley for very much longer. What a great review.

Isn't Franzen past fifty? Hardly a callow youth.

I'm glad to see you liked Freedom, Steven, makes me look forward to it even more.

Yes, Franzen is 53. I had looked it up earlier because I suspected that he had made the three principal characters in Freedom his own age, and that was the case.

#51 The only thing that makes me feel better about Jonathan Safran Foer is that he's married to Nicole Krauss, whose Great House was breathtaking.
I also sort of group Gary Shteyngart in this category, although I'm not at all sure if he lives in Brooklyn.

Life & Times of Michael K by J. M. Coetzee
First published 1983

 

Life & Times of Michael K is set in a version of apartheid South Africa in which a civil war is raging, though between whom and over what is never explicitly stated. Michael K is a gardener living in poverty in Cape Town with his mother. Michael is severely harelipped and somewhat simple-minded, though he is often taken to be more mentally impaired than he really is. The mother, who is dying, asks her son to take her back to the farm where she grew up. Unable to obtain the necessary travel permits, Michael smuggles his mother out of town in a hand cart. She soon dies, however, and Michael is left with her ashes to carry to a place he knows only by her description. He becomes a solitary fugitive, living off the land, until he is captured and sent to an internment camp.

The first thing that strikes you about this novel is that there is no mention of race whatsoever. We assume that Michael K is black simply from the way he is treated, just as we assume those in authority are white. This is a story set in South Africa and obviously reflecting the apartheid system, yet it clearly isn't the South Africa of past or present. By distancing the narrative from any specific time or issue, the author lets us see Michael K as an individual struggling against the establishment, not as a representative of an ethnic group or political cause. His physical and mental peculiarities make him an outsider even among his fellow outcasts.

The surname "K" is an obvious reference to the works of Franz Kafka, as is the fact that the government headquarters is referred to as "The Castle." Just like K in Kafka's novel The Castle, Michael K is an individual struggling to make sense of a system that contradicts itself at every turn. But unlike Kafka's K, Michael K eventually thwarts the system by withdrawing into his own identity and refusing to act or interact. Eventually it is the Castle which becomes baffled and frustrated trying to figure out K.

Other works I have read by J. M. Coetzee:
Dusklands
Waiting for the Barbarians
Disgrace
The Master of Petersburg

Steven, you keep adding books to my wishlist. I haven't read anything by Coetzee. Is this a good place to start?

Colleen, it wouldn't hurt to start with Life & Times of Michael K, but I'll have to say it's not my favorite of Coetzee's works. It would help, though, to have read Kafka's The Castle and The Metamorphosis first, as there are themes derived from both works.

My personal favorite by Coetzee is Disgrace, but it is a work some find painfully harsh. Waiting for the Barbarians is one I like as well, and is an early work and a good place to start. It has some things in common with Life & Times of Michael K, but is set in a nameless and timeless country and deals more with abstracted feelings and attitudes of societies as well as individuals.

Dusklands, Coetzee's earliest published work, is actually a pair of novellas--very political and very violent--about the Vietnam War and apartheid.

My least favorite is The Master of Petersburg in which Coetzee takes his own grief over the death of his son and reflects it in a story of Dostoevsky making a secret trip from foreign exile to Petersburg to grieve for his dead stepson. Yet there was no such death or trip, and Dostoevsky wasn't particularly close to his stepson anyway, so it bothered me that Coetzee would so misrepresent an historical figure.

If I may interject--Coetzee is one of my big faves--I would suggest Youth as the first Coetzee, it's just a perfect book. Boyhood is excellent as well, but it's interesting to observe the narrator away from South Africa (although it's never really "away", he carries it around within him like a blessing and a curse).

Steven & Lola, thank you for the suggestions. I will start looking after vacation.

I've only read Disgrace, and it kind of put me off Coetzee, although I read it so many years ago I don't really remember why, but it certainly wasn't because it was "painfully harsh"!

The Life and Times of Michael K sounds a little contrived, not sure I want to read it.

It's more likely just my poor description that makes it sound so. It did win the Booker Prize.

That's a great poor description. : ) You left me very interested in that Coetzee. Not sure why I haven't read him yet.

I'm catching up from way back, from your previous thread. As usual enjoyed all your reviews, but especially appreciated Freedom, which I hope to read sometime (which includes a fictionalized Daved Foster Wallace). Terrific reviews of Shirley and the Snitzler book (and, Lola's post is terrific too.) The Sea Wall too. I'll stop there. I will try to keep up now.

Nice review of The Life and Times of Michael K, Steven; I liked it, and Disgrace, as well. I bought The Childhood of Jesus last week, and I'll read it soon.

Steven, I enjoyed your review of Life and Times of Michael K. Coetzee is one of my favorite authors, although I found Here and Now: Letters (2008-2011 somewhat disappointing (my review still to come). But in one of his letters, he references his naming of the character K:

Through a supreme act of poetic power, Franz Kafka has given a letter of the alphabet allusive (connotative) force. Robert Calasso's recent book is called simply K. We look at the jacket and we know what it will be about.

I once called a character K (Michael K) as a stroke to reclaim the letter of the alphabet that Kafka had annexed, but didn't have much success.

Interesting comment, but it seems to me that he only reinforced Kafka's claim by using the term "the Castle" for the seat of authority.

Orhan Pamuk also borrowed Kafka's "K" in his novel Snow. The setting is "Kars." The title is "Snow," which in Turkish is spelled "Kar," the chief character is named "Ka," which is all like a line on a graph pointing to "K."

419 by Will Ferguson
First published 2012
An Early Reviewers selection

 

In Calgary, Canada, a man drives his car over a cliff hoping (in vain) that the life insurance settlement will compensate his family for his losing everything they owned. He is just one of many victims of a type of fraud known as a Nigerian 419 scheme. His daughter, Laura, and the rest of the family later sit in stunned disbelief as the police explain how her father was lured in by e-mails promising a rich reward for helping a person in need. They are also astonished to learn that there is nothing the police can, or will, do to pursue the defrauder. When asked about taking action as an individual, the police advise strongly against it, saying that it's almost impossible to recover the money, and that going to Nigeria is very dangerous. "What if it's not about the money?", Laura asks.

For a number of years I worked as the manager of an IT department, and it was my job to educate the employees in my organization about these 419 schemes, most, but not all, of which originate in Nigeria. (The number "419" refers to a Nigerian penal statute.) I have seen many variations of the initial fraud message, and I have had highly educated people take the first steps toward disaster, only to bring copies of their correspondence to me for reassurance before taking the final bait. They are always dumbfounded to learn that nothing can be done about these fraud attempts. So I am speaking from some personal experience when I say that Will Ferguson has perfectly captured not only the modus operandi of the schemers, but the psychology of the prospective victims. It's unthinkable that intelligent people would fall for such frauds, even after having been warned, but they do.

Laura is a copy editor and highly attuned to patterns in English usage and common mistakes. She will use her skills to track down the man who caused her father to take his own life. She will go to Nigeria. We know this from the beginning of the novel because Ferguson's narrative is broken into dozens of short chapters shifting back and forward in time and from place to place, and we have seen Laura arrive in Lagos before we know why. But Laura's quest for retribution is actually not the predominate theme of the novel. 419 gives us a panoramic portrait of Nigeria through the eyes of three Nigerians, one of whom is the defrauder himself.

One of the others is a young woman named Amina from the arid northern savannas where Islamic law is in force. Expelled from her village for an unwed pregnancy, she undertakes a perilous journey across a parched land, begging, stealing, and scavenging among garbage for food.

The third Nigerian, and in some respects the central character of the novel, is Nnamdi, a boy from a fishing village in the mangrove swamps of the Niger River delta. Through him, and over the course of several years, we see the impact of oil exploration and drilling on Nigeria. Forests are bulldozed, crops destroyed, rivers poisoned, and the air and water turned foul by what one villager calls "the devil's excrement." Oil companies from Europe and America operating free of environmental controls and government oversight turn the delta into a sewer and take unconscionable risks. Corruption spreads, the farmers and fishermen become beggars or criminals, while the rich hide in fortified compounds and drive armored limousines.

The author gives us a vivid and sometimes horrifying picture of Nigeria: its ethnic diversity, economic disparity, and chaotic violence. Homeless children scavenge in raw sewage in the shadow of gleaming office towers. Young men sabotage oil pipelines in the hope of being hired by the oil company to clean up the mess they made. There are riots for fuel in a country rich with oil, and the army and the police fight one another. Interwoven with the Nigerian scenes, the story of Laura's quest for vengeance maintains an edge-of-your-seat tension.

The weakest aspect of 419 is that some elements of Laura's story beg for further development. Her plans seem to depend all too often on the unlikeliest of several possible outcomes, as though the ending is pulling the story to it. But the broader scope of the novel, its depiction of today's Nigeria, and the insightful portrayal of the psychology surrounding the 419 fraud schemes make this a book I highly recommend.

419 sounds interesting, Steven. I am always amazed that people can be so taken in by schemes to take their money. I even received an email one time from my "niece" saying she was in a foreign country (can't remember which one at the moment), that she had lost her money and couldn't get in touch with anyone to help her. She had just posted a picture of her son's baseball game on Facebook, so I knew immediately that it couldn't possibly be her. But even if it could have been, I would have done some checking before just wiring money.

That sounds like a fascinating book, Steven.

Sounds too much like a thriller for my tastes, but your review is terrific and informative.

Sounds like a fascinating read!

Still waiting to read this book, winner of Canada's Giller Prize for 2012. I will certainly read it now after reading your review and recommendation.

#71 - Colleen - I posted my review and other comments on another online forum, and one of my online friends there replied with this story. It sounds exactly like the scenario with your "niece" only with more details:

'We have a friend here, an elderly gentleman, professor emeritus of international economics. When they were vacationing in Cyprus, they received a "phishing email" telling them that their something account (email or some such thing) was going to be shut down if they did not update their information. So, this highly educated smart man, enters all his info. Within minutes his email is hacked and directed to their own email address. They start sending out emails to everyone on the professor's address book. We all got an email saying "I am stranded in London airport without passport or money, please send me money to this bank account." Here in Canada, we all alerted the friends of the professor (most people had understood what it was anyway) and no one sent money. But one lady in Cyprus believed it and sent 500 dollars. An hour later she received another email saying that more money was required. That's when she got suspicious and thought of calling the professor.'

#73 - Dan - I wouldn't have given it a second glance either for the same reason, but I recognized the title from a list of Giller Prize winners. From the reviews I've scanned it looks like people who thought it was a thriller were disappointed in it, saying it was boring.

419 sounds excellent. Many of us have been targeted by these scammers and so this story should really hit the spot.

The Man of Feeling by Henry Mackenzie
First Published 1771



Following one of the literary conventions of the time, The Man of Feeling is introduced as an accidentally discovered manuscript. It is a biography of a young acquaintance of the writer's named Harley. The man who discovered it, an English curate, saw no value in it, and has used most of the pages as wadding for his fowling piece. This explains why we are given only fragments--19 chapters that begin with Chapter 11 and end with Chapter 46, and some of them incomplete.

Harley is a country squire, just come of age. His parents are dead, but his aunt lives with him. In the chapters preserved we see him fall in love, only to be later frustrated in love. He then sets out to London on a matter of business and along the way encounters a variety of characters: beggars, swindlers, card sharps, a misanthrope, a prostitute, and a wounded veteran. He even visits Bedlam, London's asylum for the insane. His reactions to each are often naïve, but always marked by sympathy and a desire to understand rather than to judge.

Parts of the novel are satirical (especially the visit to Bedlam), and parts are political, but for the most part it is a treatise on feelings. Novels of "moral instruction" telling you how to act were common in the 18th century. This is a novel demonstrating how one should feel, not what one should do. Harley drops tears of compassion on almost every page, and is never hardened by experience.

For the modern reader these case studies in compassion are nothing new, and the novel as a whole is rather sappy and uneventful. The author, Henry Mackenzie, was an admirer of the works of Laurence Sterne, and there is some resemblance between The Man of Feeling and Sterne's A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy. But Mackenzie's work is not the equal of Sterne's. The part I enjoyed the most was not about Harley and his feelings at all; it was the disabled veteran's diatribe against British imperialism in India. To profit by trade with the Indians was fine, he said, but nothing justified deposing their rulers--however despotic they may have been--and taking over another country.

The Man of Feeling was very popular in its day. It is a book I would recommend chiefly for its historical significance, and since it's very short and a free ebook, little investment of any kind is required. It would be best to approach it as you would a book of maxims or fables with no expectations of plot or character development.

I see that The Man of Feeling is listed in the 1001 books you must read. I will approach with caution

So Long a Letter by Mariama Bâ
First published 1980 as Une si longue lettre
English translation 1981 by Modupé Bodé-Thomas

 

"Fate grasps whom it wants, when it wants. When it moves in the direction of your desires, it brings you plenitude. But more often it unsettles, crosses you. Then one has to endure." A woman's struggle and endurance against fate and unfairness is the theme of this short novel in the form of a single, long letter. The writer of the letter is a Senegalese woman of fifty named Ramatoulaye. She is writing to her former classmate and lifelong best friend Aissatou. The occasion is the recent death of Ramatoulaye's husband, Modou.

Ramatoulaye describes briefly the funeral rites, but when she addresses her own feelings she is led immediately to the great resentment in her life: that Modou had recently taken a second wife. She recaps how this came about, and weaves into the story Aissatou's own personal history. Aissatou's husband, Mawdo, has also taken a second and younger wife. But Ramatoulaye is quick to point out that Mawdo did this only under pressure from his own family, whereas Modou's second marriage was a personal caprice. Modou fell in love with his own teenage daughter's best friend, and showered gifts upon the girl's mother so that she would be forced against her will to marry a man at least thirty years her senior. After thirty years of marriage to Modou, and having borne him twelve children, Ramatoulaye feels betrayed, not just by her husband, but by the male sex in general and the society it has built.

Mariama Bâ's novel is a statement of personal loss, grief, and perseverance, but it is also a manifesto for the cause of women's rights in Africa and elsewhere. She takes on the issues directly, saying "Nearly twenty years of independence! When will we have the first female minister involved in the decisions concerning the development of our country?" And later: "Instruments for some, baits for others, respected or despised, often muzzled, all women have almost the same fate, which religions or unjust legislation have sealed." The key issue is polygamy in Islamic states, but she also addresses arranged marriages, equality of education, political freedoms, inheritance laws and customs, and recognition for the economic value of homemaking services.

Aside from its feminist message, So Long a Letter offers an interesting look at how ancient traditions and modern values clash in today's Africa, even among the most highly educated and empowered classes. The characters in the novel are all university-educated professionals living in relative comfort, so the injustices of which Bâ writes are not to be overcome by money or education. I can't help but wonder, though, what Modou's side of the story would have been had the author allowed him to tell it.

Sounds interesting, Steven.

You find the most compelling books. This one sounds really interesting. I take your point about Modou.

So Long a Letter describes a social arrangement that few of us in the Western World have direct experience of and so as a document it sounds very interesting. I can understand the sense of betrayal that many people would feel when their partner takes up with a "younger model", but having a second partner could be better than a divorce, where there is usually a complete break up of the home.

The author mentions that Islam tells the husband that he should visit each of his wives' beds in rotation. In the novel, Aissatou's husband, Mawdo, does so. (He keeps the wives in completely separate households, as does Modou, and shuttles from house to house.) But Modou simply moves in with his teenage bride and abandons Ramatoulaye and her children. He contributes to their support, but does not visit them. This angers her as much or more as his taking a second wife. Her abandonment is a public disgrace, and she is left to manage a household and raise a family on her own while still working full time. Her situation is much like that of a divorced wife receiving child support, but she is still economically tied to her husband and subject to his wishes, and she isn't free to have social relations with, much less marry, another man.

This year's birthday haul (all from my wishlist):

Capital of Pain by Paul Eluard
Terence: The Comedies
The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis
Putting My Foot In It by Rene Crevel
The Human Country: New and Collected Stories by Harry Mathews
Tyrant Banderas by Ramón del Valle-Inclán

Happy birthday!

I've had Tyrant Banderas on my TBR for a while, and I read some Lydia Davis years ago, but the others are new to me.

Happy happy birthday!

Happy birthday, and happy reading!

Maybe we could institute a new birthday thing, like thingaversary, where you get one book for each year. It might even act as a sort of consolation for yet another year and no one would ever have to reveal how many books they received. Based on >85 StevenTX:, Steven would be the best read six year old ever.

Happy birthday!

Congrats. keep on reading Steven

Thanks all. One book per year of age sounds great to me, but one per decade wasn't bad.

Happy birthday! That's a nicely eclectic mix of titles.

I like the idea of one book per year, although it would be a lot by now, so I'd probably go with the one per decade. Of course, nobody gives me books . . . but I could buy them for myself as a present.

Belated Happy Birthday, Steven! I enjoyed your reviews of The Man of Feeling and So Long a Letter.

The Sailor from Gibraltar by Marguerite Duras
First published 1952 as Le Marin de Gibraltar
English translation 1966 by Barbara Bray

 

The Sailor from Gibraltar is both a story of sexual obsession and an extended existential metaphor. The narrator (who never gives us his name) is a French civil servant on vacation in Italy with his girlfriend. Faced with returning to a meaningless job and living with a woman he does not love, he seizes upon the tale of a rich American woman whose yacht is anchored off the Tuscan coast. This woman, so the story goes, is sailing the world in search of her lost lover, a sailor from Gibraltar. But she takes on other lovers in the meantime, picking them up in one port, dropping them off in another when she gets tired of them. The narrator contrives to meet this woman (who turns out to be French, not American), sends his girlfriend packing, abandons his job and his luggage, and sails away with nothing but the clothes on his back as the new lover of the woman who is searching for the sailor from Gibraltar.

"Looking for someone is like everything else: to do it well you must do nothing else, you mustn't even regret giving up any other activity, you must never doubt for a moment that it's worthwhile for one man to devote his whole life to looking for another."

Anna, the rich woman, follows tips sent her by agents (former lovers) from all over the world in search of her runaway sailor. They crisscross the Mediterranean, then voyage to West Africa and finally the Congo on tips that he has been seen running a gas station one place, smuggling diamonds somewhere else.

Anna admits that she is almost relieved when each lead turns up false and the quest can go on. Does she even want to find sailor at this point, or is the search all that matters? "Sometimes it's not what you desire the most that you want, but the opposite--to be deprived of what you desire the most."

Passing at night into the Atlantic, the narrator muses, "We left the Rock behind, and with it the disturbing and vertiginous reality of the world... She turned at last and looked at me. 'Suppose I'd invented it all?' she said. 'All of it?' 'Yes.' 'It wouldn't make much difference,' I said."

The meaning of life--"God" if you wish--is never something we find, only something we look for. Life's purpose is only the journey, not the destination.

Anna asks the narrator at one point what he will do with the rest of his life, and he replies that he will write an American novel about their time together. Why American? Because in American novels they drink whiskey, and he and Anna are drinking it then. They both drink a lot, in fact, and the narrator's moments of sobriety are very few. In style, content and setting Duras's writing here much resembles that of Ernest Hemingway, and there are several references to Hemingway in the novel itself. I found even more similarity between The Sailor from Gibraltar and the work of Duras's American contemporary, Paul Bowles.

hmmm The Sailor sounds good.

Enjoying your reviews.

Animal Farm by George Orwell
First published 1945
Second reading

 

This novel is too well known to need another review. My grandson had just read this as a summer reading assignment for high school, and since I hadn't read it since high school myself, I decided to re-read it. When I first read it, it was at the height of the Cold War, and it was presented as a novel about the evils of communism. It isn't that at all, of course, but rather about how Stalin and his followers betrayed the ideals of communism.

I wonder what today's teens can make of this story when they are now generations removed from the era it reflects and haven't yet had any classes in world history or political science that would give them important background. It probably comes across to them as just a moral fable on the evils of selfishness and bullying.

What did your grandson say about it?

#99 - He hasn't said much, and I wanted to re-read it before I asked him about it. He hates to read, so I don't expect that he got much out of it. The only thing he likes about school is football. (He's actually a step-grandchild; my genes are not responsible for this!)

He's supposed to read Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde next, so I'll probably read that one tomorrow, though I read it only a few years ago. My following his reading is probably of little benefit to him, since he resists talking about books anyway, but it impresses my wife that I do it and buys me a few indulgences when the Amazon bills come in.

Excellent review of Shirley. I read about 150 pages into it and then abandoned it because of relocation (I did not bring the book along). I have loving memories of the book and would have to start all over.

100 that's cool that you do that though. LOL at indulgences.

Great review of The Sailor from Gibralter which sounds like a book that I would really enjoy. Perhaps because it is an extended existential metaphor, then I could persuade myself I need to read it as a link to Albert Camus. Anyway enough of the justification for buying yet another book; its going on next months "to buy" list.

I know that I have said this before, but you are dangerous for my wish lst.

Impossible quests, sailors, whisky, existentialism, what a great sounding book, even if possibly for all the wrong reasons.

That sounds like a decent high school reading programme for once. I only read Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde for the first time about three years ago, but was very impressed by Stevenson's portrayals

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
First published 1886
Second reading

 

My grandson's other summer reading assignment. It will be quite a challenge to a vocabulary honed on twelve hours a day of Spongebob Squarepants. He will probably go into it expecting something more like its modern derivative, the Incredible Hulk, and be disappointed that Mr. Hyde doesn't go around smashing stuff.

One of the common misconceptions about this story is that Jekyll represents "good" and Hyde "evil." Jekyll is not, by his own admission, "good." He relishes the sins and pleasures* he enjoys as Hyde, but is tormented by fear and guilt. The serum allows the evil side of Jekyll to operate unfettered by qualms or remorse. But as Jekyll he is fully complicit in Hyde's sins, hiring a separate flat and a housekeeper for Hyde's convenience. There is no formula for isolating Jekyll's good side (nor does he seem interested in finding one).

* What are Hyde's secret pleasures? I suspect we are expected to infer that Jekyll is homosexual. He is a middle-aged man with no wife, children, or female acquaintances. Hyde is allowed to act out what, in Victorian England, were unmentionable desires.

I am assuming that Animal Farm and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde will be part of the lesson plan for the coming school year? What is his year? The books could be a great jumping off point for interesting discussion.

#107 - He will be in the 9th grade. I suppose they cover the summer reading in class at some point, but I don't know when or to what extent. Getting details about school out of a teenager is like interrogating a captured spy. They are convinced you only want this information so you can use it against them somehow.

>108 StevenTX: So far, i've had two granddaughters in high school. The first graduated in June with excellent grades in mostly honors and AP classes, and will be starting college in a couple of weeks. The second, is a self professed geek. She attends a high school that specializes in math and science. Her first year was stellar with all honors courses. They have both been fairly good about talking about their classes. But only if you ask. Next up is only twelve, and if you ask what she did in school today, the answer is usually "I don't remember". So the phenomenon isn't limited to high school.

> 109

Perhaps the littlest feels intimidated by her older siblings' legacy. When my mom was in school, teachers always expected her to be just like her very academic older sister. My mom disliked school and stopped formal education after a few community college courses. (I took after my dad, lol.)

Jonathan, I should have clarified that the twelve year old is their cousin. She is my son's eldest. My seven grandchildren are the offspring of my three children. But you are correct. Every child is different, and their reactions to everything including conversations vary widely.

Sorry, I didn't mean to hijack your thread, Steven. That leap from middle school to high school can be a big one.

Don't worry, Colleen, I love being hijacked. The discussions are always interesting, and I get an impressive message count without lifting a finger.

I really ought to read The strange case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde

Nice reviews, Steven. I haven't read Animal Farm since high school, so I'll have to give it another go in the near future. I'll add The Sailor from Gibraltar to my wish list.

#108

Getting details about school out of a teenager is like interrogating a captured spy. They are convinced you only want this information so you can use it against them somehow.

So funny! And true! (The dire conversations about school my dad would attempt once in a blue moon, and me weighing every syllable...)

India Song by Marguerite Duras
First published 1973
Translation by Barbara Bray 1976
(The title is the same in the French and English editions: the English phrase "India Song.")

 

India Song is a play Marguerite Duras wrote in 1973 based largely on her own 1965 novel The Vice-Consul, which, in turn, used characters from her 1964 novel The Ravishing of Lol Stein. The play was both produced on stage and, in 1975, made into a film by Duras herself.

The drama takes place mostly in Calcutta (now Kolkata) at the French embassy. (Duras says in her preface that she knows full well the embassy would have been in New Delhi, not Calcutta, but she is deliberately imprecise in her geography.) The story centers on the ambassador's promiscuous wife, Anne-Marie Stretter, whose languorous beauty is irresistible to the younger men around her. She and her lovers suffer from a self-destructive despair because of the tropical heat and the human misery surrounding them, especially the leprous beggars who encircle every European compound.

The play is unique in that no words are spoken on stage. In the opening act the players are silent, and all we hear are two disembodied female voices. Voice 1 is fascinated with Anne-Marie and wants to know details of her background. Voice 2 supplies some of the answers, but is clearly in love with Voice 1. In the long second act the players speak, but only when they are off stage. We hear them conversing in an adjacent room, but when they step into sight they are silent. In the final three short acts the female voices return, accompanied by a pair of male voices. And once again the actors on stage are merely posing.

Like many of Duras's other works, India Song combines strong political opinions on colonialism and inequality with a haunting story of erotic obsession. It is well worth reading both the play and The Vice-Consul. The novel has many additional elements not found in the play, but the disembodied voices in the play add a new dimension to the story.

The movie is very worth seeing. An unusual experience, because of the long silent takes and the artificiality of direction and acting.

#117 - I'd like to see it. Unfortunately it's rather expensive.

Complete Short Stories of Edgar Allan Poe
Originally published 1832-1849



I read all of Poe's poetry a few years ago, and have been slowing making my way through his short stories. All I have left unread of his fiction is the novel The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym, which I will read in the coming weeks and report on separately.

Poe's tales of horror and mystery are well known, so I don't need to say anything about them. What's somewhat surprising in reading the full collection is that, on the balance, there is more humor than horror. Many of his lesser-known stories are satires on political, scientific or literary topics. Of course, satire often doesn't age well, which is why these stories are lesser-known in the first place. Nonetheless there is some humor here that can stand alongside that of writers like Charles Dickens and Mark Twain. Poe wrote humorous fiction right up to the year of his death, which gives a brighter picture of the man than the popular image of a writer perpetually sunk in depression and alcoholism.

I have The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings by Poe, which I read through when I bought it. I liked some of the tales, despite the sometimes tortured prose. Most of his poetry was, however, quite awful... I'm sure everyone won't agree with that: 'The Raven' is immensely popular, though I personally can't see the attraction...

Glad to see you reading Poe. I got his complete works on audible. Ah, were there but world and time...

I thought I read the complete Edgar Allan Poe, in editions that had belonged to my grandparents, when I was a child, but maybe I only read the horror/mystery stories and the poetry. Some of these stay with me to this day, like "The Cast of Amontillado" and "Annabel Lee" (a favorite of my mother's).

Annabel Lee is the best!

The complete short stories of Edgar allan Poe must be some tome, full marks for reading them all. Intrigued once more by your Marguerite Duras reviews.

#120 - I'm no expert judge of poetry, but I did enjoy Poe's verse. "The Raven" is probably the most memorized poem in American literature--at least it was required when I was in school.

#122 & 123 - I'm very fond of "Annabel Lee" as well. As I recall, in 9th grade we had to memorize "The Raven" and one other poem, and I picked "Annabel Lee." (I can't recite either one of them now, in case you were wondering, though I do still remember much of Mark Antony's funeral oration from Julius Caesar and a few lines from The Canterbury Tales.)

#124 - It's not all that long--630 pages of short stories in the edition I read. His best known stories like "The Pit and the Pendulum" and "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" are the longer ones; most of his satires are shorter.

The Lost Steps by Alejo Carpentier
First published 1953 as Los Pasos Perdidos
English translation by Harriet de Onís 1956

 

A composer makes an epic journey into the jungles of South America in search of rare native musical instruments but finds, instead, a succession of revelations that transfigure him and his art.

The composer is a man of Latin American origin but multi-national heritage living in what we presume to be New York. His marriage to an actress is failing because their careers separate them physically and emotionally. He has taken a mistress, a French astrologer whom he calls "Mouche." Intellectually they are worlds apart, but their relationship is physically satisfying. When the curator of a museum coaxes the reluctant composer into going in search of a fabled Native American instrument, Mouche insists on going along.

The country to which the composer and his mistress travel is not named in the novel, but in a postscript the author identifies the places visited as composites of actual localities in Colombia and Venezuela. Through various vicissitudes and discomforts, they find themselves journeying as if back in time to ever more primitive means of conveyance and accommodations. More importantly, the human customs, values and beliefs they encounter become more akin to the medieval than the modern. The composer, who begins to gain musical insight from this, is ever more eager to press on. He and Mouche, who misses the comforts of civilization, grow steadily apart. A new woman, Rosario, enters the picture.

Eventually the composer passes from the medieval to the paleolithic, as he comes among tribes so remote that they know almost nothing of the outside world, and are innocent of agriculture, the wheel, and all of modernity. But he sees that they are genuine in a way civilized man has forgotten how to be. We obey customs without bothering to understand their origin or significance, but with the Indians "...not one gesture was made without cognizance of its meaning."

He makes discoveries about himself as well. He passes some tests, but fails others. "I told myself," he reflects, "that the discovery of new routes embarked upon without realization, without awareness of the wonder of it while it is being lived, is so unique, so defies recapture, that man, puffed up with his vanity, thinks he can repeat the feat whenever he wishes, master of a privilege denied to others." But he who turns back and later seeks to recapture the miracle of discovery will find "the setting changed, the landmarks wiped out, and the faces of the guides new."

The Lost Steps is told in language as dense, fragrant, and verdant as the jungle itself. This moving and insightful novel is full of aesthetic insights and reverence for the natural world, not just in musical terms, but in visual modes as well. "A day will come," the composer tells us, "when men will discover an alphabet in the eyes of chalcedonies, in the markings of the moth, and will learn in astonishment that every spotted snail has always been a poem."

---

Those of us who mostly buy used books sometimes find that the volumes we read have interesting histories of their own. I bought this 1968 Penguin paperback at a used book store in Austin, Texas. Inside it is stamped "City Bookshop Georgetown." Since Georgetown is a nearby suburb of Austin, I naturally assumed that was where it had originally been sold. But when I started reading it, on the title page I found the owner's name and "Georgetown, Guyana." So this book set in South America has actually been to South America.

I loved The Lost Steps when I read it several years ago. Glad you did too.

Excellent review of The Lost Steps, Steven. I bought it after reading Rebecca's review and yours moves it further up the TBR pile. Interesting story about your copy.

Oh I'm going to need to read that. What a wonderful review. Interesting by the way that the alphabet HAS been found on butterfly wings. I also loved the story about the book's previous owner. How fun!

In fact, I have a poster of the alphabet on butterfly wings. Here's an image of one that looks a lot like the one I have:



You can see more by searching for "alphabet butterflies" and clicking on Images.

How fascinating! I just assumed it was a metaphor. Thanks for posting that. (Next you're going to find "Annabel Lee" on a spotted snail, right?)

As Flies to Whatless Boys by Robert Antoni
To be published in September 2013
An Early Reviewers selection

 

As Flies to Whatless Boys is Robert Antoni's imaginative recreation of what he presents as a part of his own family history. In 1845 the William Tucker family of London immigrates to Trinidad with other members of what is called the Tropical Emigration Society. Their leader, a German named Etzler, proposes to set up a utopian socialist community where most of the work will be done by an amazing self-propelled machine of his own invention called the Satellite. A number of poor families, and a few more prosperous idealists, invest their life's savings with Etzler and set sail for Trinidad. Whether Etzler was a fraud or delusional, they never learn, because soon after their arrival they are abandoned on an isolated strip of land that is mostly mud and fever-ridden mangrove swamp.

The novel has several parallel narrative threads decades apart. In 1845 William Tucker had a 15-year-old son, also named William but called Willy, who immigrated to Trinidad with him. He is the principal character of the novel. But we first meet him in 1881 when he is preparing to return for the first time to England. He is telling his own son the story of how he and his family came to Trinidad, and the poignant story of his first love.

Interspersed with the father/son scene in 1881 and the story Willy is telling about 1845 there are whimsical pieces of correspondence between Robert Antoni himself and a Miss Ramsol, the director of the Trinidad & Tobago National Archives, concerning the research Antoni is doing into the Tucker family, his ancestors. Antoni is making no headway with the obstinate Miss Samsol in his request to use the office photocopier, notwithstanding the fact that the two are carrying on a torrid romance after hours.

In 1845 the romance is between 15-year-old Willy and Marguerite, the 18-year-old niece of one of the wealthy emigrants. Marguerite is mute, born without vocal cords, but it is their social difference that stands between the two. Willy's machinations to get to Marguerite before they sail, on the long voyage across the Atlantic, and in their early days in Trinidad are both humorously inventive and romantically touching.

At five points in the novel there are notes with links to websites which supplement the text. Not all of these were available yet, as the book has yet to be released to the public, but those that were active brought up beautifully done video clips showing images from Willy's dreams.

The title is a Trinidadian version of a quote from King Lear: "As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods / They kill us for their sport." The strange and capricious working of fate would be the principal theme to the novel. I found this a very entertaining novel, unpredictable, often funny, and occasionally moving. I'm not sure that it is necessarily an accurate portrayal of Trinidad in the 1840s or of the experience of utopian settlers in general, especially when the author has his characters using anachronistic terms such as "blitzkrieg" and "seat belt." The use of multiple narrative lines, however, added value to the novel, was never confusing, and helped keep it interesting to the end.

Two more great reviews steven. The Lost Steps goes straight on to my too buy list. (I am already wondering where my second hand copy of the book will originate from as I will try and get the penguin edition with that excellent front cover).

That is a great cover for The Lost Steps. This is the cover of the edition I read.



I like it, but it isn't as dramatic.

Interesting review of the Antoni book, which I had never heard of.

The Ladies' Paradise by Émile Zola
First published 1883 as Au Bonheur des Dames
English translation by Brian Nelson 1995

 

“The silk department was like a huge bedroom dedicated to love, hung with white by the whim of a woman in love who, snowy in her nudity, wished to compete in whiteness. All the milky tones of an adored body were there, from the velvet of the hips to the fine silk of the thighs and the shining satin of the breasts.”

In such sexual terms, Émile Zola repeatedly describes the merchandise on display in Paris’s first and greatest department store, “The Ladies’ Paradise,” or simply “The Paradise.”

The fabrics and articles of clothing are designed to appeal to all the erotic senses. A pair of leather gloves smells “like an animal in rut which has landed in a girl’s powder box.” Women plunge their hands into bales of silk and piles of lace, their rapture reaching an orgasmic intensity which translates into a frenzy of spending. The shop floor, seen from above, was a “sea of bosoms bursting with life, beating with desire.” And at the end of big sale “the customers, despoiled and violated, were going away in disarray, their desires satisfied, and with the secret shame of having yielded to temptation in the depths of some sleazy hotel.”

The setting is Paris in the 1860s during the extravagant, materialistic years of the Second Empire. The owner and manager of The Paradise, Octave Mouret, is one of the two principal characters of the novel. An ambitious young widower of modest origins, he has built The Paradise up from a simple draper’s shop to become the marvel of Paris through his audacity and his merchandising genius.

The other principal character, Denise Baudu, appears on the scene as an orphaned teenage girl from the provinces throwing herself and her two brothers unexpectedly upon the charity of her uncle. But the uncle, the owner of a small fabric store across the street from The Paradise, is in the process of being driven out of business by competition from the monster store and can barely feed his own family. Facing starvation, Denise winds up working as a shopgirl in the very store that is ruining her family. Here the pretty teenager soon attracts the eye of the lustful Mouret, a man as accustomed to manipulating women into his bedroom as he is to enticing them onto his sales floor. But Denise, he finds, does not share the casual sexual attitudes of many Parisiennes. Instead he discovers in her a strength and intelligence that both frustrates and inspires him.

The Ladies’ Paradise is a novel in Zola’s “Rougon-Macquart” series. The series relates the fortunes and misfortunes of an extended family during the Second Empire period. Many of the titles focus on the influence of heredity and environment on the character of family members, but that is not so much the case here. Octave Mouret, the Rougon-Macquart descendant in this case, is not as much the subject of the novel as the institution he has created. (He actually first acquires The Paradise in Zola’s previous novel, Pot Bouille, translated most recently as Pot Luck.) The Ladies’ Paradise is actually rather short on plot and character development compared to Zola’s other novels.

A major theme in the novel is the effect The Paradise has in driving out of business the small, family owned competitors, which can’t complete with The Paradise’s low prices and sex appeal. One constant contrast is between the brilliantly lit interior of The Paradise and the dark, dingy spaces of the other stores where “the dark shadows were falling from the ceiling in great shovelfuls, like black earth into the grave.” The misery into which the small shopkeepers descend is often depicted melodramatically, yet Zola never suggests that the large department store is evil or unfair, but rather that we are witnessing a natural stage in the evolution of commerce.

It is fascinating to see in this novel the beginnings of retail practices with which we are now quite familiar. The physical arrangement of departments within a store is done for psychological, rather than logistical purposes. Traffic flow in busy aisles is deliberately impeded to create the illusion of bigger crowds and more excitement. A generous return policy encourages impulse buying. With a staff growing into the thousands, the store becomes a community of its own with dormitories, dining halls, and recreation rooms. Cutthroat employment practices are softened in the interest of employee loyalty, and we see the emergence of employee benefits such as onsite health care, maternity leave, and education programs. On the outside there is a new business/government partnership for further development, and we see the buying power of a large retailer begin to control its suppliers.

Octave Mouret explains at one point that he has built his success upon “the exploitation of Woman.” Is the novel demeaning to women by depicting them as so easily exploited--so readily seduced into an orgy of spending? Not necessarily, because what we also see is the increasing power of women in the marketplace as independent consumers. Inside the store Zola shows them growing in power and responsibility as managers, department heads, and buyers (though we still never see a woman supervising a man). Behind the scenes they have additional influence as key investors.

The Ladies’ Paradise is a fascinating and enlightening look at the birth of an institution which is still a dominating force in retail. It can be seen as a critique of materialism and greed, but as such is not as forceful as some of the author’s other works. Nor is the novel particularly strong in plot or character. But Zola’s immense powers of description are on full, sensuous display.

Other works I have read by Émile Zola:
Thérèse Raquin
Germinal
The Fortune of the Rougons
The Kill
The Dream
Pot Luck

Great review of The Ladies Paradise, which I agree is not one of Zola's best but is definitely fascinating for many of the reasons you give.

London: The Biography by Peter Ackroyd
First published 2000

 

Part history, part homage, London: The Biography tells the story of London from its mythical beginnings to the end of the 20th century. The opening chapters, from prehistory to the middle ages, are conventionally chronological, as are the closing chapters from roughly 1880 to 1999. Everything between is thematically organized, though there is a general chronological drift. There are chapters on food, prisons, mobs, children, plagues, trade, fires, smells, sounds and so forth--over sixty topics in all.

Though Ackroyd's history gives the impression of being based on sound research, he writes more from a novelist's perspective about ideas, feelings of identity, and cultural traditions. Most of the quotes he offers come from the fiction or travel writings of literary figures rather than histories and biographies. This is a history that will especially please those with an interest in literature and local heritage; it's likely to disappoint those who want to learn London's place in the larger picture of British or European history.

There are several sections of black and white and color plates, as well as a couple of rudimentary maps. One could wish for more, especially when specific paintings or photographs are mentioned in the text but not included in the illustrations. Instead of footnotes and bibliography there is a twelve-page essay on sources. All of the sources appear to be previously published works; the book makes no claim to include original research. There is an index, but it is not comprehensive. When I tried to find the first reference to Whitehall, I discovered that the term is omitted.

London: The Biography is highly readable, entertaining and imaginative. It is meant for popular rather than scholarly consumption, and its informal thematic organization may frustrate those who want to learn more about a particular period in London's history. The author's love for his subject is obvious and occasionally carries him away. He is apt to see mystical connections where there is only coincidence, and the notion "only in London" is overused. But Ackroyd makes a convincing case that London is not only a great city, but perhaps the greatest, and one whose history and heritage are certainly worth our attention.

Other works I have read by Peter Ackroyd:
Hawksmoor

Wow, it has taken you a while to finish London: The Biography. I will be a while before I grab my copy.

#138 - Yes, but no reflection upon the book itself. I'm a fairly slow reader and tend to read several books at a time, so they all take me a long time. (Some of the books I'm reading I don't even show on "Reading Shelf" because it's embarrassing to admit how long they've been there.) I wanted to read it before my trip to Britain in June, but gave higher priority to broader and more conventional histories. After the trip, with no urgent need to read it, I set it aside until I was reasonably caught up on group reads, etc. It is a large book, though: 801 pages in my edition.

Great reviews as always, Steven! The Lost Steps is high on my TBR list, and I had intended to read it in October, for the Reading Globally South American literature theme, until I realized this weekend, as I was gathering a list of books to read, that Carpentier is from Cuba, not Argentina as I somehow thought. I may still read it this coming quarter anyway.

You liked London: The Biography more than I did. I found it to be a slow and often painful read, but I think it was because it wasn't the book I was hoping to read. It's probably too large to give it another go, but maybe I'll at least re-read a chapter of it before I decide to give it away. I'm glad that you liked it.

Another great review of The Ladies' Paradise following rebecca's. I have this on my TBR, so my question would be, would it matter if I read it before the first novels in this series, which are also there? I have read some of the later books.

London: The Biography is a book I have been looking at but haven't committed to as yet, although I have read several other Ackroyd books. I think after reading your review that I should read it. With regard to Ackroyd and "mystical connections" you might enjoy The House of Doctor Dee

rebecca, I'm glad you mentioned steven's cover of The Lost Steps as that is the one on my edition. However, when I just went to look at it in my book list, I noticed that it had been changed, presumably by the amazon gremlins, so I have corrected it. Thanks.

Sassy, each Zola novel can stand independently. I read some out of sequence first, but am now reading them in the order suggested in this Wikipedia article; it is not the order Zola wrote them in, but seems to be roughly chronological based on when the novels took place, so that the reader can follow characters who appear in more than one novel. I'm only reading the ones in relatively recent English translation, though. Having said that, I don't consider The Ladies Paradise one of Zola's best; the characterizations, particularly of Denise, are weak and the plot also. You might want to read Pot Luck first, because that's where Octave Mouret first appears; it also wasn't one of my favorites, and is a tad melodramatic, but I couldn't put it down.

#141 - Sassy, this Wikipedia article gives you a complete list of the Rougon-Macquart novels in publication order and in the order Zola recommended reading them, as well as valuable information on recent English translations.

I've found that Zola's novels generally stand alone, so it's not critical that you read them in any particular order. However I would recommend that you read Pot Luck before The Ladies' Paradise, not only because Octave Mouret is a key character in both novels, but to see the beginnings of the evolution of The Paradise from a simple silk shop into a mighty department store. Pot Luck is one you should read in modern translation only, because its predominant theme is bourgeois morality (or lack of it), and there are many passages that would have been heavily bowdlerized in the 19th century.

Re Ackroyd: Hawksmoor had lots of mystical connections too, and I enjoyed it very much. I have The House of Doctor Dee and am looking forward to reading it some time, though my reading focus will be elsewhere for a while.

These Zola reviews, multiple by different LT'ers, are quite fun to read through. I think I'll skip Ackroyd's London....Enjoyed catching up. Intrigued by Marguerite Duras and your review of Carpentier's The Lost Steps.

Steven, things have not changed much since Zola's time. While I was in Paris last year we visited one of the big department stores and just as we arrived a couple of very large tourist coaches arrived, which were jam packed full of Japanese (I think) female tourists, most of them fairly young. There was an almighty scramble as they got out of the coaches and headed for the entrance to the store, what happened inside I can only describe as a feeding frenzy as they burst into the cosmetics section on the ground floor. The noise was incredible and we had to go upstairs to escape, fortunately it was even too much for Lynn and we sought our complete escape through a side exit.

Another great review of the Ladies' paradise. I have come to the conclusion that Peter Ackroyd is an acquired taste and it is one I have yet to acquire.

Thanks rebecca and Steven. I have about six Zolas on my TBR: Pot Luck wasn't one of them. To correct that, I just ordered it and naturally I had to order enough for free shipping, so three books later, there I am!

edited to correct touchstone

#146 - I didn't even realize that Rebecca had replied to your question too until you mentioned her name just now. We were obviously writing at the same time, and hers posted first. It's good that we said essentially the same thing!

I'm very well acquainted with the strategy of "having" to buy more books to get free shipping.

I too use that strategy to get free shipping! And thanks, re Zola.

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket by Edgar Allan Poe
First published 1838



The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, Poe's only novel, is a nautical adventure with elements of science fiction and horror. It reads like a series of brilliantly told stories somewhat arbitrarily connected and capped by an abrupt and mystifying ending.

The story takes place in 1835-36. Pym, a young New Englander, desires to go to sea with a friend, Augustus, whose father captains a whaling brig. Pym's relatives refuse him permission, so Augustus helps him stow away in the hold. Pym's confinement in the dark, unhealthy hold last days longer than he expects, and he fears he will die there, alone and forgotten. Finally Augustus gets word to him that there has been a mutiny, and that Augustus, because of his youth, had been the only non-mutineer allowed to remain alive on board the vessel.

There follows a succession of adventures involving a counter-mutiny, a storm, a shipwreck, and a prolonged survival ordeal at sea. Pym eventually finds himself on board another ship which is off to explore the Antarctic in the hope of finding some previously undiscovered land where there are seals to hunt or natives to trade with. His adventures have only begun. Each episode in the novel is told briskly with edge-of-the-seat tension. Poe's descriptions are as vivid and rousing as any nautical adventure I have read.

At the time of Poe's writing, a number of European and American expeditions had attempted to determine if there was an Antarctic continent. Most had been turned back by ice. Two or three explorers had only recently come upon dry land within the Antarctic circle, but were unable to determine if these were the shores of a continent or just isolated islands. There had been some reports or rumors that the waters actually grew warmer as one approached the pole, leading to speculations about hidden tropical civilizations. Others believed that the Earth was hollow, and that the poles were the points of entry to a second world inside. Poe recaps much of this in the novel, and Pym and his companions make discoveries that begin to hint that some the wildest theories may be true.

The science fiction elements of the novel are found in the "lost world" idea, though this surfaces only in the final chapters. The horror elements are found in the terror of premature burial (a common theme in Poe's short stories) and in the superstitious fear of the reanimated dead. But there is nothing overtly supernatural in the novel.

There are two objectionable aspects to the novel. One is the abrupt and unsatisfying ending which has frustrated and mystified readers since its original publication. The other is the strong presence of racial stereotypes. I found myself, while reading the novel, unable to put it down and wondering why it has been so neglected relative to Poe's poems and stories. The puzzling ending is the answer to that question, but it remains a memorable reading experience.

Very interesting review of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym which I did not know existed until I read your review. The science fiction elements to the story which you say involve a search for a lost world via an entry through the poles had been done before by John Cleve Symmes in his book Symzonia published in 1820. I have not yet read the Symmes book.

I like your new shelves especially your classics of science fiction and fantasy. The Coming Race, She, and Looking Backward 200-1887 are all on my reading shortlist.

# 150 - Yes, I saw Symzonia on your shelf and was tempted to add it to my list as well. I had never heard of it or the author before. My list is going to be mostly SF but will include some fantasy.

The categorized shelf idea is obviously "a la baswood." I hope the additional images don't make for long load times. Let's see how long it holds up. I was tempted to do something pictorial with recently read books as well, but I think my alpha index is much more functional. I've found it handy when I want to locate discussion on a particular book and not just my review.

The Homeric Hymns
34 works by various anonymous Greek poets, 8th C BCE and later
Translation, introduction and notes by Susan C. Shelmerdine 1995

 

The Homeric Hymns are so-called because they are written in the same hexameter verse as the The Iliad and The Odyssey, not because they were written by Homer himself. They came later, from the 8th to 5th centuries BCE. They all follow the same format, beginning with the invocation of a particular god or goddess, and ending with a plea for that deity's aid and a promise to sing another song. Some are very short, 3-5 lines, and have only these two elements. The longest is 580 lines. The longer poems tell something about that god or goddess and are a valuable source for what we know of Greek mythology.

The four major hymns are addressed: (1) to Demeter, telling of her quest for her abducted daughter Persephone and the settlement allowing Persephone to spend part of each year above the ground and the rest of it in the underworld, (2) to Apollo, telling of his birth on Delos and his founding of the oracle at Delphi, (3) to Hermes, telling of his birth and how he stole Apollo's cattle in a bid to be recognized as one of the Olympian gods, and (4) to Aphrodite, telling of her love affair with the Trojan Anchises which resulted in the birth of Aeneas.

The translation by Susan Shelmerdine is exceptional, not only because of her fluid and readable translations, but because of her exceptionally useful introduction, notes and other materials. I don't recall ever reading a book that put as many useful aids in the reader's hands. There is a succinct and informal introduction, maps showing the location of every placed named in the text, a chronology of Greek literature, illustrations of Greek pottery and other arts depicting scenes from the hymns, a genealogical chart of the gods, a pronunciation guide, and an index that doubles as a glossary of persons and terms. In addition, the hymns are lavishly footnoted with notes that are both informative and entertaining. All of these aids and notes are addressed to the general reader, not the scholar, and assume only basic familiarity with Greek history and mythology.

My favorite piece was the hymn to Demeter, principally because the footnotes show how each event in the goddess's quest for her daughter's freedom was recreated in a series of rites known as the Eleusian mysteries. I had heard of these and other "mysteries" before, but this was the best explanation I have read of their content, origin and purpose.

The Homeric Hymns are a relatively minor part of the corpus of ancient Greek literature, but the extra effort the translator put into this particular volume turned it into a major source of information about Greek mythology. It's a shame that this appears to be Dr. Shelmerdine's only published translation.

Very inspiring review. If I had the Homeric Hymns in reach right now, I might even start reading it...actually, when I eventually get around to reading Homer, this sounds like a terrific follow-up.

And very intrigued by your review of The Narratice of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket.

After reading posts #150/151, I scrolled back up to look at your first post. That is a great looking post. I might have to copy this idea from you and Bas. I get just as lost in wonder looking at your book covers as I do looking at my own bookshelves.

What Dan said about the Homeric Hymns, and also about looking at your books covers. As I said on Barry's thread, I'm just not that organized. But I have a technical question: how did you get the spaces between the covers? When I put two pictures next to each other, they run into each other and I've never figured out how to put a space between them.

...how did you get the spaces between the covers?

I use the html character code for a "non-break space" which looks like this:  

I also use it in my index (message 2) to indent a line when I show more than one book by the same author.

And you probably already know this, but some may not. To control the size of the picture you can use the height attribute of the IMG tag. Here's an example of both in use. This makes two pictures the same height and puts a space between them:

<img src=... height=200> &nbsp; <img src=... height=200>

---

Another nice one to know is the "horizontal rule" tag that makes a nice line like the one above. All you do is put the following tag on a line by itself: <hr>

Thanks, Steven; that is a big help and I'm going to mark your post as a favorite so I can find it again. I did know about controlling the size of a picture, but I didn't know about the spaces, or using them for indenting, which has also driven me crazy, or about that nice horizontal line!

Your book covers at the top of your thread look great. So far, I haven't added any pictures to my thread, and maybe I should keep it that way. I spend so much time reading threads on LT that I don't read my books as quickly as I would like to. I think I need fewer things to distract me. :) But I am keeping your post marked so that I can get to your tips. You never know, I may find a way to be more organized.

Shock Treatment by Karen Finley
First published 1990

 

Karen Finley is a countercultural performance artist and writer known for her strident denunciations of sexism, racism, homophobia and consumerism. She is a sex-positive feminist whose use of nudity and explicit sexual language in her stage performances has been labeled obscene by critics. Shock Treatment is an early collection of some her performance monologues, essays and poetry.

The subjects addressed in this collection are varied and include child abuse, sexual stereotyping, racism, poverty, homelessness, objectification of women's bodies, reproductive freedom and materialism. Writing at a time when some religious leaders were referring to AIDS as a punishment from God, Finley compares the treatment of AIDS victims to the Holocaust and refers to the 700 Club as "America's SS." The general tone of her writing is one of despair that that the liberalism and idealism of the '60s and '70s has been replaced in the '80s by yuppie materialism and religious fundamentalism.

Shock Treatment lives up to its name. The text is filled with profanity and contains explicit descriptions of violent and coercive sexual acts including incest, coprophagy, rape and self-mutilation. However, there are also sensitive moments depicting illness, death and grief. As this is just a broad sampling of ideas and opinions, you won't find much depth on any particular topic. Yet there are definitely some thought-provoking comments here, and I don't think any of her pieces has become dated in the 20+ years since they were written.

I don't think I ever heard of Karen Finley, but she sounds interesting.

I've heard of Karen Finley (although not so much in recent years0, but I'm not sure this is a book for me.

Colleen - I hadn't heard of her either until I ran across this book on the clearance rack at a used book store. Ironically, a few weeks later I saw it at a Catholic church rummage sale in my wife's home town. If they'd had any idea what it was, they'd have burned it instead. Finley pulls no punches where the Catholic church is concerned.

For a more literary and somewhat less strident treatment of the same issues I'd recommend Finley's colleague, the late Kathy Acker, especially Blood and Guts in High School. As I see it, Karen Finley is the sizzle, Kathy Acker is the meat. (I'll probably catch hell from the vegans for that one.)

Rebecca - No, I don't think you would care for it based on previous comments, but I'd love to hear your reaction to her piece on New Yorkers. She contrasts people visiting friends in New York ("How can you live like this!") with New Yorkers visiting friends in the sticks (i.e. anywhere else, "How can you stand the quiet!"). She says New Yorkers can be close friends for years, but never visit each others' apartments, preferring to meet in cafés, etc., because apartments are so small, and no one bothers to keep them presentable. Is that true?

Don't tell me that Homeric Hymns was also on a clearance rack. I love the idea of Shock treatment being in a Catholic church rummage sale.

Don't tell me that Homeric Hymns was also on a clearance rack.

It might have been. My "date acquired" field says I bought it at the same used book store a week later, but I don't remember where I found it. Maybe I should start recording somewhere how much I pay for these things.

#158

Thanks for putting that on the map (for me, anyway)!

Steven, the answer to your question is yes and no. A lot of people do meet in restaurants or cafes, but people invite their friends to their homes too. A lot of kitchens are really small, though (mine is, although my apartment is large enough), so it makes cooking for a bunch of people a logistical challenge. I don't keep my apartment very neat, but I've seen plenty of apartments that look as though nobody lived in them they're so pristine. And I've heard one of my friends describe one of her friends who keeps her shoes in her oven because she never cooks, always goes out or gets takeout!

That's funny about the shoes in the oven. Don't they know such spaces are better used for books?

Albert Camus: A Biography by Herbert R. Lottman
First published 1980

 

Herbert Lottman's biography of Albert Camus is a richly detailed and highly sympathetic examination of the writer's life--too much so in both cases for my taste. The book's strongest point is that it shows how much of Camus's life and work were devoted to areas that are apart from his popular image as novelist and philosopher.

Camus was born in Algeria, then a French possession, in 1913. His father was soon to die in the First World War, so Camus was raised by his mother and extended family. As a youth he developed tuberculosis, which chiefly affected his stamina and was partly responsible for directing him toward artistic pursuits. His principal lifetime love was the theater, first as an actor and later as playwright, director and manager. To pay the bills he started work as a journalist, and would continue to do so off and on for most of his life. Camus lived in Algeria, with occasional trips to Europe, until the German invasion in 1940 left him stranded in Paris. Under Nazi occupation he worked openly for a publishing firm while secretly writing for and editing an underground newspaper.

Camus's early political allegiance was to the French communist party. But stories of Stalin's atrocities led to a break with the communists who insisted on maintaining their loyalty to the USSR. This was also responsible for Camus's very public break with his friend Jean-Paul Sartre. For the rest of his life, Camus maintained an independent stance that was left of center, but not communist, and resisted France's alignment with either the USSR or the USA. When the Muslim population of Algeria rebelled against the French government, Camus was torn between his belief in self-determination and his desire to protect the lifestyle of his family and other Frenchmen in Algeria. Much to the consternation of his friends, Camus withheld his voice during the Algerian war.

Lottman obviously felt that Camus's sex life was off limits. Camus was married twice, and was still living with his second wife Francine when he was killed in an automobile accident in January 1960. But he spent much of his time with other women, particularly actresses, often travelling with them unchaperoned. There is also mention of a "ravishing young woman associated with neither his literary life or the theater" who was Camus's frequent companion for the last two years of his life, but the name of this young woman was apparently withheld out of delicacy.

Despite Lottman's enthusiasm for everything he did and said, Camus comes across as less likable than I had expected. He was always sensitive to insult and criticism, and flit from one project to another his whole life. His literary production was rather slim altogether, and even he suspected that the Swedish Academy awarded him the Nobel Prize more for political reasons than for his accomplishments. His best moments appeared to be when he was out of the limelight and not under pressure, when he could be quite unassuming and companionable.

I read this particular biography, not because of favorable reviews, but because it came readily to hand. I'm sure there are better and newer ones that make use of sources that were not yet made available to researchers when Lottman was writing. Lottman nonetheless gives us a wealth of detail on Camus's daily life, but I found the author too quick to defend Camus. There is very little insight into the man and his philosophy. Instead we have details such as the names of his friends' dogs, the itinerary of a traveling companion's maid, and the family history of a blacksmith with whom Camus chatted a few times.

Great review of Albert Camus: A Biography, Steven; I'm sorry to hear that it wasn't a better book.

Well, if I need to know the names of Camus's friends dogs, I now know where to go.

I'm glad I caught up on your reviews, Steven. I wish I had the London book before I went there at 18 for six weeks. I was all too young then to appreciate it.

I need to read those Homeric Hymns myself. I have a speculation about Susan Shelmerdine. See, the author of my Greek textbook is named Cynthia Shelmerdine. Even stranger is that Susan Shelmderdine wrote a Latin book, published by the same obscure outfit who publishes Cynthia's Greek book. Are they sisters? I don't know. It's not exactly a common name.

Very interesting review of Albert Camus: A biography, It must be a little too easy for a biographer to "fall in love" with his subject, especially with a man like Camus who apparently oozed charm. He liked nothing better than to have his latest girlfriend accepted by his other women and in this he was largely successful. It would appear that the Olivier Todd biography is a much better book, but it would be a bit of a chore to read yet another biography.

The girlfriend at the end of his life was the mysterious Mi http://www.independent.co.uk/news/charting-the-amazing-love-life-of-the-amorous-...

#170 - I'd guess they are sisters. Here's Cynthia Shelmerdine on the left, Susan Shelmerdine on the right.

 

The only website I could find that linked the two names was a dog agility club in Maine where two women with their names worked together in a dog show last month. Cynthia teaches in Maine, and we know from the photo I used in the review that Susan likes dogs.

Phantastes: a Faerie Romance for Men and Women by George MacDonald
First published 1858

 

Phantastes is a beautifully-crafted story of a young man's adventures in Faerie Land and the lessons he learns there. Anodos, the narrator, on coming of age is given a key to a cabinet belonging to his late father. When he opens the cabinet a tiny woman appears who tells him he has faerie blood in him, and will be granted his once-expressed wish to enter Faerie Land.

Anodos awakens the next morning to find his bedroom slowing changing into a woodland glade, and his wash basin overflowing to become a forest stream. He follows the stream into a world of mystery and magic, peopled by talking flowers, walking trees, ogres, giants, knights and damsels.

Inside a cave he encounters a young woman apparently frozen into a block of alabaster. She is more beautiful than anything he has ever seen, and Anodos is sure that she will become his if he can only free her from the stone. He can't reach her to kiss her, but on a sudden inspiration he tries song. Sure enough, his singing gradually melts away the stone, but when she is free the young beauty jumps up and runs away. Anodos spends much of his time pursuing this ideal beauty, but is frustrated at every turn.

Anodos's adventures are numerous, bizarre, and sometimes unsettling. There are also several stories within stories, such as one where a young man in Prague attempts to free the woman he loves from an enchanted mirror. Mirrors and reflections figure prominently throughout the novel, with the common question being: "Why are all reflections lovelier than what we call the reality?--not so grand or so strong, it may be, but always lovelier?" And later: "All mirrors are magic mirrors. The commonest room is a room in a poem when I turn to the glass."

Anodos learns that the pursuit of the ideal, be it a woman or a reputation, is a sign of false pride. "I learned that it is better, a thousand-fold, for a proud man to fall and be humbled, than to hold up his head in his pride and fancied innocence. I learned that he that will be a hero, will barely be a man; that he that will be nothing but a doer of his work, is sure of his manhood." He also learns that the joy is in loving, not in being loved.

Most of the images and events in Phantastes have no obvious meaning or message, and appear to be there just to stimulate the imagination. There are some obviously Christian concepts and values, but no overt theological message or allegory. The purpose of the novel may, perhaps, be revealed in this passage:

"But is it not rather that art rescues nature from the weary and sated regards of our senses, and the degrading injustice of our anxious everyday life, and, appealing to the imagination, which dwells apart, reveals Nature in some degree as she really is, and as she represents herself to the eye of the child, whose every-day life, fearless and unambitious, meets the true import of the wonder-teeming world around him, and rejoices therein without questioning?"

I think I have Phantastes: a faerie romance for men and women somewhere on my list of books to read. Not sure what I am going to make of it, but I enjoyed your review.

Sounds like a fun book!

Nice sleuthing work on the Shelmerdines. I feel like we should win a prize or something. Still, how improbably for two siblings (cousins?) to both be classicists.

I enjoyed Phantastes when I read it. MacDonald infused his fiction with theological allegory and had a huge impact on C.S. Lewis and G.K. Chesterton. MacDonald was a universalist (all will eventually be saved, hell is empty), a traditionally heretical doctrine, which is perhaps why he is not read as much as those he influenced. My only complaint about MacDonald's books is their scattered and loose plotlines.

Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Other Writings by Thomas De Quincey
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater published 1821.
"Suspira de Profundis" published 1845.
"The English Mail Coach" published 1849.

 

In the early 19th century opium was as cheap and widely available as aspirin is today, and used almost as freely. Taken typically in a liquid form called laudanum, it was an effective painkiller for persons of all ages, and a cheap intoxicant. Thomas De Quincey first took opium as a youth for an affliction that sounds like a sinus infection. He so enjoyed its effects that for several years he took a dose as a treat every Saturday night. He found it made him more sociable and enhanced his enjoyment of the opera. It was only when he started taking laudanum daily for a chronic stomach pain that he became physically addicted to it. As he took greater and greater doses, De Quincey experienced vivid, exotic and terrifying dreams, some of which he describes in his writings.

De Quincey tells us in no uncertain terms that he is THE expert on opium addiction. He disputes what the medical profession says about the drug. "And therefore, worthy doctors," he proclaims, "stand aside, and allow me to come forward and lecture on this matter." He also lets us know that he was, and is, an unparalleled scholar of the Greek language and as at home in Latin as Cicero. But he seems to have disdained any form of regular employment and spent most of his life in poverty, living off of the charity of a prostitute at one point, and later becoming something of a parasite of the poet William Wordsworth. De Quincey moved frequently to stay ahead of debt collectors, and wrote his Confessions while in hiding in London.

The Confessions are largely a self-justification of his predicament, but there is some valuable insight into the effects of opium from a person who has gone through all stages of casual use, dependency, addiction, and withdrawal. As an example of one of his dreams: "I was buried, for a thousand years, in stone coffins, with mummies and sphynxes, in narrow chambers at the heart of eternal pyramids. I was kissed, with cancerous kisses, by crocodiles; and laid, confounded with all unutterable slimy things, amongst reeds and Nilotic mud."

"Suspira de Profundis" (A Sigh from the Depths) is a sequel of sorts to the Confessions, but one that mostly goes back to fill in details of De Quincey's childhood. His point apparently is to show the raw material for some of his opium dreams, but he doesn't tell us a lot about the dreams themselves. Instead he, once again, seems chiefly to want to impress us with how exceptionally brilliant and sensitive he was as a child. He writes with such a combination of insufferable arrogance and rambling, purple-prosed Victorian sentimentality that it becomes an unintentional self-parody. De Quincey would have us believe that he was in tears when his housemaid killed a spider, and was only consoled when she explained that it was necessary to save the lives of the fifty flies that the spider would have murdered.

"The English Mail Coach" begins with a much welcome bit of humor, as De Quincey describes the public express coaches which he rode frequently between Oxford and London. The coaches held four passengers inside, and three on the roof with the driver. "It had been the fixed assumption of the four inside people," he explains, "that they, the illustrious quaternion, constituted a porcelain variety of the human race, whose dignity would have been compromised by exchanging one word of civility with the three delf ware outsides. Even to have kicked an outsider might have been held to attaint the foot concerned in that operation; so that, perhaps, it would have required an act of parliament to restore its purity of blood."

In the second half of the essay De Quincey gets serious again and describes in detail an accident in which the massive mail coach in which he is riding at the furious speed of thirteen miles an hour overturns a small gig. The horrified De Quincey sees a young woman go flying, and he assumes she is killed (though the coach apparently never stopped). He then describes five opium dreams from later years, each a bizarre and unique variation of that accident.

De Quincey's condescending tone and his rambling, repetitive, but incomplete narrative can be infuriating, but his Confessions do offer valuable insight into the social and psychological aspects of opium use in early 19th century England.

Fascinated by George MacDonald and your review of Phantastes. I don't think I want to read de Quincey, but still enjoyed your review.

I've recently read Cocteau's Opium, a collection of short entries and many drawings he made when he was getting off the drug in 1928-1930, and a comparison is interesting. He calls out De Quincey and other "romantic" opiomanes as deluded regarding the "creative" power of intoxication--opium stupefies the mind and the senses, it doesn't invigorate. De Quincey in particular, Cocteau says, succeeded (when he did) in creating poetic visions due to his innate gift as a poet, against the deadening effect of the drug.

Cocteau began taking opium to alleviate social anxiety; he used to feel daily living as a "horizontal fall". And it seemed to work, until he became addicted and paralysed by desire-less stupor.

#179 - Yes, De Quincey's description of heightened sensibility when he was taking opium weekly sounded to me more like the effects of cocaine than opium. From my own experience with opium-based pain killers after surgeries and injuries, I can see how the mellowing effect of a mild dosage might make you think you are sensing more, when actually you are just in a more sentimental state. But I don't see that it would make a person more productive or creative except in cases where it removed the distraction of physical pain.

When he became a daily user, De Quincey said the opium pains had "palsying effects on the intellectual faculties." Over a two year span, he said, he read only one book. Unfortunately he doesn't go into as much detail as we would like on his period of heaviest opium use. There is only about a page of useful description where he says he was in a languorous state and would take weeks, if at all, to answer a letter. But he says nothing about his daily routine or physical activities.

The editor of the Penguin edition, Barry Milligan, points out a number of cases where De Quincey is telling us lies or half-truths. He claims, for example, to have broken his opium addiction at the time of his writing the Confessions, when he had actually only succeeded in reducing his consumption. No doubt the opium he continued to use is at least partly responsible for rambling, disjointed state of his memoirs.

I came fresh from reading Edwinbc's review about the early cocaine industry to reading your review of opium addiction. I think I have got it straight now - I take opium when I want to sleep or mellow out and I take cocaine when I want to get excited.

I have got Thomas De Quincey's essays on my kindle, I will get to them soon.

》

Ha, yes, I included the reference to DeQuincy in the introduction to my review, because I had seen Steven had already posted his review on Confessions of an Opium-eater

I read DeQuincey in college but remember none of it. Not sure I need to reread it. My experience with an opiate-based painkiller after minor surgery (tylenol with codeine) was that it made me so woozy (even with just half a pill) that I decided to just go with the tylenol and have a little bit of pain but be all there (although I certainly understand wooziness would be preferable to serious pain). I don't think I'm cut out to be an opium addict. Great scenes of opium dens in Apocalypse Now, at least in the longer "redux" version I got from Netflix.

Utopia by Thomas More
First published in Latin 1516
English translation by Paul Turner 1965

 

Utopia is simply one of the most important and influential books ever written. Its ideas were then (and for the most part still are) so revolutionary that it can be difficult to believe a man with Thomas More's subsequent history even intended them to be taken seriously.

More wrote Utopia in Latin, the language most widely read at the time by educated persons in Europe. It is also a language independent of place and time, which translator Paul Turner says is ample justification for using informal contemporary English in his translation. The result is highly readable and entertaining, but no less thought-provoking.

The structure of the novel has More himself recounting a conversation he had with a traveler named Raphael who had spent five years living in Utopia, an island roughly 200 miles in diameter located somewhere in the New World. More has all the opinions and observations come from Raphael's mouth rather than his own, obviously to protect himself from being charged with promoting seditious ideas. But while Utopia does satirize a few of Europe's governments and institutions, it is not an attack on any particular person or country, and this is what has kept it relevant over the centuries.

The most radical and most important feature of Utopia is that there is no private property and therefore no need for money. People dress identically and live in identical houses in identical towns. They each work at the trade for which they are best suited, usually the same as their parents. Families are sent in rotation to work on farms, the assumption being that farm work is less pleasant and should be shared by all. Military training is compulsory for both sexes, and the entire town is turned out from time to time for major projects such as roads, bridges, and fortifications. Slavery exists, but only as a form of punishment for serious crimes. All children are born free and equal and raised in identical circumstances.

With no need for luxury goods and no idle classes, productivity is so high that Utopians need work only six hours a day. The rest of the time is devoted to self improvement and recreations such as music. Utopians do their work gladly, for the most part, out of community spirit. But those who might otherwise slack off know that "Everyone has his eye on you, so you're practically forced to get on with your job, and make some proper use of your spare time." Goods are taken to markets and storehouses where anyone who needs something just helps himself. Meals are served in communal halls where the elders are served first out of respect.

There is freedom of religion in Utopia, at least to a point. Citizens are expected to believe in a creator and an afterlife and to attend religious services, but there is no official dogma, and sects are allowed to follow their own beliefs and practices as long as they don't proselytize in public. Atheists are tolerated, but they are considered contemptible and are barred from positions of public trust. That Thomas More would write something advocating religious toleration has always been puzzling, since he later ordered heretics burned at the stake and gave his own life in defense of the supremacy of the Catholic Church. More also mortified his own flesh by wearing a hair shirt despite having written in Utopia that it was as important to be kind to yourself as it was to be kind to others, and that it was ridiculous to suffer unnecessarily.

Women in Utopia are subordinate at all times to their husbands, but may serve in the military and even as priests (provided they are widows). Their role in political life isn't addressed. Considering how revolutionary Utopia is in other respects, it is strangely conventional in sexual matters--probably reflecting More's own prudery. Marriage is for life except in rare circumstances, and any sex before or outside of marriage is severely punished, sometimes by enslavement or death. In a country where there is no private property and therefore no inheritance and no need to worry about legitimacy, where the pursuit of pleasure is considered a laudable goal, and where children are moved from one household to another to learn different trades, such rigid insistence on monogamy seems out of place.

There is much more in Utopia on such things as foreign trade, warfare, education, medicine, aging and city planning. But what comes across most forcefully is the evil of the inequitable distribution of resources which is inevitable in a capitalist economy. The Utopians found one way to address this, a communist solution which many have since tried to emulate, at least in part.

Utopia versus The Republic

More mentions Plato's The Republic once or twice in Utopia and this invites comparison. There are some similarities, but many more differences.

Both are communist societies that abjure private property and money. Poverty cannot exist, as the equitable sharing of resources is guaranteed.

Utopia is an egalitarian society and a democracy, the Republic is neither. The Republic has a strict caste system with a "Guardian" class at the top. Mobility between classes is rare: if you are born the son of a stonemason you will become a stonemason. The Republic is ruled by a philosopher king chosen for life from among the Guardian class. In Utopia there is universal (male? he doesn't say) suffrage, and everyone is eligible for public office. Children traditionally take up the occupations of their parents, but they are not required to.

The Republic has a state religion, but observances are largely ceremonial. Utopia allows religious freedom within a broad monotheistic context, but religious life is interwoven into public life.

Utopia has a very conventional family life and conservative sexual mores. The only unconventional idea is that the bride and bridegroom are shown naked to each other before they are married so they know what they are getting. The Republic has traditional marriage for all classes except the Guardians; they are scientifically bred each year to produce the best possible outcome, and children and parents are unknown to each other.

The Republic is a militaristic state which glories in war. Its highest class, the Guardians, are the warriors. In Utopia all citizens, male and female, have military training, but they prefer not to fight if possible. The gold they accumulate in foreign trade is used principally to hire mercenaries or bribe enemies so that Utopians do not have to risk their lives in battle. They are so averse to bloodshed that the job of slaughtering cattle is done by slaves (who are convicts or prisoners of war, not a hereditary class).

Utopia prizes knowledge, welcomes new ideas, and encourages self study. They aren't afraid of being corrupted by outside influence. In the Republic all arts and ideas that would undermine public morale are prohibited, and this includes all fiction.

I think I would much rather live in Utopia than The Republic.

Excellent review and summary of Utopia Stephen. It is an amazing book especially considering when and by whom it was written. There has been much speculation that the book was never meant to be published and was intended to be a satire of the political/social situation in England/Europe at the time and was meant to be of limited circulation to a few of Mores friends and they certainly thought that it was a joke, but as you say it would have been near suicidal for More to have had the book printed as a serious tome on political though at the time. All things considered it is a very curious mixture.

It still makes an excellent read today and can still be thought provoking. Of course it could also be considered as one of the earliest if not the earliest books that can be placed in the science fiction genre.

Great comparison with Plato's Republic which I have not read. You can put my name down for Utopia, just need to know where it is.

The City of the Sun by Tommaso Campanella
Written in Italian 1602, first published in Latin translation 1623
Unattributed and undated English translation from Project Gutenberg

 

The City of the Sun is a very short utopian novel written by a man who took his ideas very seriously. He wrote the novel while in prison for having tried to establish a community based on the concepts he was now describing.

The fictional framework for the story is sparse and simple. A Genoese sea-captain has returned from a voyage and is relating his discoveries to his host. He tells of a previously unknown land he discovered near Taprobane (Sri Lanka) that lies directly on the equator. Coming ashore the Captain is met by a party of armed men and women and escorted to their capital, the City of the Sun.

The City is built on a hill, rising in concentric walled rings like a giant wedding cake. Within each ring are built houses that look to the Captain like palaces and are interconnected by graceful arches and aerial walkways. The walls themselves are profusely decorated with images and artifacts that represent the accumulated wisdom of the inhabitants. At the summit of the city is an open plain large enough for the entire population to congregate, and at the very center an open-air temple surmounted by two great globes depicting in full detail the earth and the heavens.

The nation is ruled by a priest whose title is "Hoh." He is accounted the wisest among the citizens and is elected by life. Serving under Hoh are three high magistrates: "Power" (in charge of military affairs), "Wisdom" (responsible for the sciences), and "Love" (domestic affairs, education and agriculture). They are also elected for life. Under each of these is a hierarchy of elected magistrates with more specialized functions. Hoh, Power, Wisdom and Love are all men, but the lesser magistrates are a mixture of men and women. All residents over age 20, male and female, are eligible to vote and do so in a grand Council meeting where the entire population is assembled around the temple.

The City is a communist society where there is no private property, no money, and no family structure. Reproduction is under the control of a magistrate. "He sees that men and women are so joined together, that they bring forth the best offspring. Indeed, they laugh at us who exhibit a studious care for our breed of horses and dogs, but neglect the breeding of human beings." Men and women may share each other's company as they please, but unauthorized sexual intercourse is severely punished. Children are nursed by their mothers for two years, then taken away and raised in classes by tutors. They are sorted into various occupations according to their aptitudes, with the brightest becoming scientists and astrologers, the simplest being sent to work in the farms.

Citizens dress in identical garments and are assigned to communal housing by sex. They are moved every two years. Men and women eat together in large dining halls while listening to lectures on scientific topics. Learning is a passion for them, and the city walls are their text books. Children study by walking the circumference of the City and reading the walls, and this helps keep them physically fit as well. The nation is so obsessed with physical fitness that seated pastimes such as chess are forbidden.

Though the City has only just been discovered by Europeans, they have been aware of Europe for centuries and have sent explorers to all corners of the globe, learned every human language, and accumulated the wisdom of every culture. They have technologies far in advance of any other nation, including ships that move without oars or sails, and their military is both fierce and a source of great pride to the City.

The City of the Sun is a work full of novel and sometimes quirky ideas. One wishes Campanella had filled in more details, especially on the lives of average citizens. He obviously drew upon both Plato's The Republic and Thomas More's Utopia for some aspects of his City, but was more radical than either in his social organization. At the same time, as a lifelong believer in astrology, Campanella added a mystical aspect to his utopia that to a modern reader seems totally out of synch with its scientific accomplishments.

For Barry and anyone else interested in early science fiction, a new series of ebooks was apparently released just this week as the publication date on all that I've checked is 10 Sept. 2013. The US price for the Kindle versions is $3.99 each. I've purchased one of them, and inside it was this listing of the full series. Of course some of these were already available as free ebooks, but it's worthwhile just having the list itself.

The Ron Miller Science Fiction Classics Collection

PART I: THE CONQUEST OF SPACE

The Archeology of Space Travel (space travel books from the 18th and early 19th centuries)

The Life and Astonishing Adventures of John Daniel (1751), Ralph Morris, illustrated
Voyage to the Moon (1827), George Tucker
Journeys to the Moon (includes "The Moon Hoax" by Richard Adams Locke, "The Unparalleled Adventures of Hans Pfaall" by Edgar Allan Poe and "Journey... to the newly discovered Planet Georgium Sidus" by "Vivenair", illustrated
Trip to the Moon, Lucian of Samosata
Iter Lunaire (1703), David Russen
A Voyage to Cacklogallinia (1727), "Samuel Brunt"
Gulliver Joi (1851), Elbert Perce, illustrated
The Consolidator (1705), Daniel Defoe

Trips to the Moon

Daybreak (1896), James Cowan, illustrated
The Conquest of the Moon (1889), Andre Laurie, illustrated
Drowsy (1917), J.A. Mitchell, illustrated
The Moon Conquerors (1930), R.H. Roman
A History of a Voyage to the Moon (1864), "Chrysostom Trueman"
The Moon Colony (1937), William Dixon Bell, illustrated by Ron Miller
To the Moon and Back in Ninety Hours (1922), John Young Brown, illustrated
Pioneers of Space (1949), George Adamski
A Christmas Dinner With the Man in the Moon (1880), illustrated

Flights to and from Mars

Doctor Omega (1906), Arnould Goupin (translated by Ron Miller), illustrated
To Mars via the Moon (1911), Mark Wicks, illustrated
A Plunge Into Space (1890), Robert Cromie
A Trip to Mars (1909), Fenton Ash, illustrated
War of the Worlds (includes The Crystal Egg and The Things That Live On Mars), H.G. Wells. Illustrated
Gulliver of Mars (1905), Edwin Arnold
Across the Zodiac (1880), Percy Greg

Journeys to Other Worlds

The Moon-Maker (includes The Man Who Rocked the Earth) (1916), Arthur Train and Robert Wood
A Trip to Venus (includes "Daybreak on the Moon") (1897), John Munro
A Honeymoon in Space (1900), George Griffith, illustrated
The Brick Moon (includes "On Vesta" by K.E. Tsiolkovsky) (1869), E.E. Hale
A Columbus of Space (1894), Garrett Serviss, illustrated
Extract from Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven (1909), Mark Twain
Zero to Eighty (1937), "Akkad Pseudoman" (E.F. Northrup)
Aleriel (Voice from Another World, 1874 and Letters from the Planets, 1883), W.S. Lach-Szyrma, illustrated
A Journey in Other Worlds (1894), J. J. Astor. Illustrated

Deutsche im Weltall (Germans in Space)

By Rocket to the Moon (1931), Otto Willi Gail, illustrated
The Shot Into Infinity (1925), Otto Willi Gail, illustrated
The Stone From the Moon (1926), Otto Willi Gail, illustrated
Between Earth and Moon (1930), Otfrid von Hanstein, illustrated
Distant Worlds (1932), Friedrich Mader, illustrated
A Daring Flight to Mars (1931), Max Valier

Space Travel for Junior Space Cadets

Through Space to Mars (1910), "Roy Rockwood" (Howard R. Garis)
Lost on the Moon (1911)), "Roy Rockwood" (Howard R. Garis)
Rocket Riders Across the Ice (1933), Howard R. Garis, illustrated
Rocket Riders in Stormy Seas (1933), Howard R. Garis, illustrated
Rocket Riders in the Air (1934), Howard R. Garis, illustrated
Adrift in the Stratosphere (1937), A.M. Low, illustrated

Jules Verne

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Jules Verne, translated and edited by Ron Miller. Illustrated
A Journey to the Center of the Earth, translated, annotated and edited by Ron Miller. Illustrated
Off on a Comet!, Jules Verne, edited by Ron Miller, illustrated
From the Earth to the Moon (includes Around the Moon), Jules Verne, translated and edited by Ron Miller. Illustrated
The Purchase of the North Pole, edited by Ron Miller, illustrated

Science Fiction by Gaslight

The End of Books (1884), Octave Uzanne, illustrated by Albert Robida
Under the Sea to the North Pole (1898), Pierre Mael, illustrated
Penguin Island (1908), Anatole France, illustrated by Frank C. Pape
The Crystal City Under the Sea (1896), Andre Laurie, illustrated
The Earth-Tube (1929), Gawain Edwards (G. Edward Pendray)

PART II: FIREBRANDS OF SCIENCE FICTION

Heroines

Three Go Back (1932), J. Leslie Mitchell
The Flying Legion (1920), George Allen England, illustrated
The Island of Captain Sparrow (1928), S. Fowler Wright
Eve’s Diary (1906), Mark Twain, illustrated
Fugitive Anne (1904), Rose Praed, illustrated
Lentala of the South Seas (1908), W.C. Morrow
The Girl in the Golden Atom (1923), Ray Cummings
Maza of the Moon (1929), Otis Adelbert Kline

Bad Girls

Atlantida (1920), Pierre Benoit
Out of the Silence (1928), Erle Cox

Swordwomen

The Lost Continent (1900), C.J. Cutcliffe-Hyne
The Legend of Croquemitaine (1874), Ernest L'Epine, illustrated by Gustave Dore

Not Quite Human

The Beetle (1897). Richard Marsh, illustrated
Carmilla (1872), J. Sheridan LeFanu
The Lair of the White Worm (1911), Bram Stoker, illustrated
The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins (1751), Richard Paltock, illustrated
The Sea Lady (1902), H.G. Wells, illustrated
Angel Island (1914), Inez Haynes Gilmore
The Future Eve (1926), Villiers de L'Isle-Adam, illustrated
The Coming Race (1871), Edward Bulwer-Lytton

New Atlantis by Francis Bacon
First published in Latin 1624, in English 1627
Unfinished

 

"We sailed from Peru, (where we had continued for the space of one whole year) for China and Japan, by the South Sea..." With no more preamble than this, Francis Bacon begins his account of the discovery of the remarkable island nation of Bensalem. The narrator never introduces himself, and we don't even know his nationality, only that he and his shipmates are Europeans.

After weeks of contrary winds and storms, the ship is desperately in need of provisions, and many of the crew are sick. They are in previously unexplored regions when they come upon a large island or continent and enter the harbor of a fine city. The inhabitants, who seem to be fluent in several European languages, warn them off, saying they want nothing to do with strangers. But when the explorers explain their desperate plight, they are given reluctant leave to re-provision their ship. The islanders finally begin to warm up to them when they learn that the narrator and his companions are devout Christians.

They learn that the island nation is called Bensalem, and that it already knows everything about Europe even though the Europeans know nothing about it. The narrator is invited to make inquiries about Bensalem, and his first question--which pleases his hosts to no end--is how they came to be Christians in such a remote part of the world. Their answer is that a miraculous ark brought them a copy of the Bible shortly after the resurrection of Christ. This remarkable Bible could be read by anyone in his own language and contained books of the New Testament that hadn't actually been written yet.

Explaining further the history of their land and how they came to know so much of the world, they say that "about three thousand years ago, or somewhat more, the navigation of the world, (especially for remote voyages,) was greater than at this day." This was the time of Atlantis, another name for the Americas. Atlantis actually had two civilizations, one in Mexico and one in Peru. They were the enemies of Bensalem and had attempted to conquer both it and Europe. But a massive flood destroyed both Atlantean nations, and the survivors reverted to barbarism. Bensalem, meanwhile, chose to remain unknown to Europe and China, but for centuries has sent spy missions to all parts of the globe collecting all the cultural and scientific knowledge of the world.

Inquiring after their social life, the narrator learns that the people of Bensalem are thoroughly devout and chaste. Prostitution is unknown, adultery is rare and severely punished, and "as for masculine love, they have no touch of it." The native goes on to tell the narrator: "I have read in a book of one of your men, of a Feigned Commonwealth, where the married couple are permitted, before they contract, to see one another naked." This is a reference to Thomas More's Utopia, the forerunner of Bacon's novel. The citizen goes on to say that in Bensalem they have improved upon this system by permitting only a female friend of the bridegroom to see the bride in her bath, and vice versa.

The pride of Bensalem is its institute of scientific research known as Salomon's House. The narrator is permitted an interview with one of the Fathers of Salomon's House, and he is told of the wonders that they have discovered or developed. They include: improved crops and livestock developed not only by breeding but by spontaneous generation from inanimate matter, artificial light, hearing aids, telephones, human flight, submarines, and more. (Of course I am using modern terms for what Bacon describes by function.)

At this point the novel comes to an abrupt end. We learn nothing about the government of Bensalem except that it has a king. They apparently use money, but that's all we can deduce about their economy. Of their personal lives we learn very little except that they are devout and chaste Christians and they honor the male heads of large families with a special ceremony. As a utopian novel, New Atlantis is quite disappointing. It appears to be nothing more than an idealized version of Bacon's own culture. But what stands out in the novel is the litany of scientific advances, most of which wouldn't be realized for centuries. It's remarkable that almost everything Bacon imagined has come true in some form or another.

Great collection of Utopian reads. I still think that Thomas More's is the one for me, but I plan to follow in the footsteps of the intrepid explorer and read the other two.

The Ron Miller Science fiction Classics collection is a real treasure trove. Thanks for posting the list, I spent half of last night checking out the titles. Many are already free in the public domain and I have added them to my reading list. This is all great fun.

Fascinating series of Utopian reviews, Steven. The Science Fiction Classics Collection list is also very interesting. I was surprised to see Anatole France's Penguin Island on the list, simply because of his status as a Nobel Laureate. I recently obtained the Kindle edition of that book to fill in a gap in my Nobel reading. Now I am curious whether any other Nobel winners for literature have published works that would be considered science fiction.

Fascinating reviews of the various utopias, although I must say they made me shudder, particularly the review of Utopia, since the book has been so influential. As desirable as eliminating poverty is, the idea of everyone wearing the same clothes, forced labor, and people watching you all the time to make sure you toe the line are not only horrifying but so prescient (well, the forced labor and the watching you all the time parts) of what actually happened when communism has been tried.

A book I enjoyed that pokes fun at an attempt at utopia is Patrik Ourednik's The Opportune Moment, 1855

#191 -- There are several Nobelists who have written works classed as science fiction. The most notable is Doris Lessing who wrote a series of five novels depicting an interstellar civilization. The first one is Re: Colonised Planet 5, Shikasta. Her book Memoirs of a Survivor is also science fiction.

William Golding's book The Inheritors is SF.

Rudyard Kipling wrote With the Night Mail: A Story of 2000 A. D..

Sinclair Lewis wrote a dystopian novel titled It Can't Happen Here.

José Saramago's novel Blindness is classified by some as science fiction.

There are probably others; those are just the ones that come to mind.

#192

what actually happened when communism has been tried.

I'd specify--when some versions of communism had been tried, in historical circumstances such as obtained then. I wonder how a communist society might function in the absence of external enemies such as the US--an aggressor crossing oceans and continents to wage war against communists, shown capable of using the worst weapons in history, and abetting, supporting, enabling any kind of tyranny--as long as it's right wing. The fall of Allende was commemorated five days ago.

Going further, how might a communist society function not only without external enemies, imposed war and sabotage of all kind, but if it were actually treated cooperatively, as any other global partner? If, for instance, instead of embargoing Cuba, which was both a humanitarian crime and a politically dumb move, as it only helped boost Castro, the US had allowed free travel and trade with the island?

Communist economies are indeed less profitable--because the workers must be paid liveable wages and provided with security and benefits. This is crazy? Yes, in capitalist logic--the same logic that deems your own people too expensive to insure, educate and employ, at least in anything other than basest service.

I'm thinking we'll be seeing more communist utopias and experiments in the future, not less.

#193

Steven, have you read Edward Bellamy's 1887 Looking backward? It's one of the most interesting utopias I've read, and the nicest so far. He too comes up with "prescient" inventions.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bellamy

#192

It's interesting that the idea of uniform dress has such negative associations. Certainly in dystopian films it is a symbol of the repression of individuality. Elsewhere, as in monastic orders, it is a symbol of piety and selflessness. But More emphasizes its economic benefits: If people would just stop feeding their vanity and obeying the whims of fashion none of us would have to work as hard, and we can all be more comfortable as well. Many of the public schools around here now require uniforms, which I thought would be resented, but most parents seem to like it because of the money and time it saves them, and their kids don't seem to mind it either because it saves them time getting dressed in the morning.

One of the books I read recently, As Flies to Whatless Boys, is also about a utopian settlement, but that aspect of the community isn't explored at all, since the whole thing goes wrong from the beginning because the settlers were being defrauded by their patron.

There were lots of experimental utopian communities established in the 19th century, including one right here in Dallas. I'm sure there were many reasons why they all failed, perhaps not always because the concept was wrong. Communism on a large scale involves a difficult period of transition which no nation has managed to get through, the enmity of capitalist forces, as LolaWalser mentions, being certainly one reason.

Will people work if their basic needs are going to be met anyway? That seems to be the key question. Thomas More says most people will work out of community spirit, but peer pressure is there as a fall back. But that implies a lack of privacy and an atmosphere of distrust. Campanella says people will work enthusiastically out of love for their city. I like Campanella's idea of each person being assigned to the job for which he or she is best suited more than I do More's system (and Plato's) of automatically doing the same thing your parent does. We think we have freedom of employment, but for many of us it's just a matter of taking the first job that comes along so you can afford to live.

I've been wondering if we could implement More's Utopia today exactly as he conceived it. We'd either have to give up a lot of our technology or find a way to integrate heavy industry into his plan. And giving up technology means less food production, more primitive transportation, no refrigeration, etc., so we couldn't support the world population at current levels. It also means giving up much of our medical care (I'd be dead in a month at most). One thing that More made a point of in Utopia is that they imported all their iron by trading handicrafts and surplus food with nearby nations. This allowed More to dodge the problem of having to set up mining operations, which certainly would have been a job no one would have volunteered to do, so it would have to be done by slaves. His use of slaves to do other sorts of disagreeable job is another sort of dodge. You can't depend on a steady supply of criminals to do the dirty work, especially if your society is so nice and well-ordered that people don't misbehave. So you wind up lowering the threshold until you're enslaving people for crimes like jaywalking just to balance your labor force.

#194

No, I haven't read Bellamy yet, but he's definitely on the list.

>193 StevenTX: Interesting. I have read Blindness but didn't really think of it as science fiction. I will have to seek out some of the others. Thanks, Steven.

Google doesn't know of any utopian communities existing today, but perhaps if you were living in Utopia you wouldn't advertise the fact.

The Man in the Moone by Francis Godwin
Written in the 1620s
First published posthumously 1638

 

The Man in the Moone is an early work of science fiction that is remarkable for how accurately the author Francis Godwin, and Anglican bishop, understood and conveyed many of the scientific principles of astronomy and interplanetary travel.

"O Reader prick up thy Ears, and prepare thyself to hear the strangest Chance that ever happened to any Mortal," says Domingo Gonsales, a diminutive Spaniard who says of himself that "my Stature is so little, as I think no Man living is less." Having killed a man in a duel, Gonsales is compelled to leave Spain and his family behind. He goes on a trading voyage to the East Indies and meets with great success. Returning to Spain in 1599 a wealthy man, he takes ill and is put ashore on the island of Saint Helena in the South Atlantic.

After a long but successful recovery, Gonsales discovers on Saint Helena an unusually powerful and intelligent but tame variety of swan. On a whim, he invents a type of harness which allows teams of swans to carry a burden from one point of the island to another. Excited at the prospect of being the first man to take to the air, he rigs a chair for himself and--thanks to his small size and weight--finds that the swans have no trouble carrying him aloft. A series of adventures and emergencies ensues, ending with Gonsales's using his swans in a desperate attempt to escape with his life.

The swans, having a mind of their own, take Gonsales straight up through the clouds, and it isn't long before he realizes they are heading for the Moon! It turns out that this is their customary pattern of migration. In twelve days the intrepid Spaniard is landed on the Moon and greeted by a party of Moon Men.

Assuming that there would be breathable air and moderate temperatures both on the Moon and in the space between Earth and Moon is Godwin's big mistake. Otherwise he gets most things right, if a bit out of proportion: the diminished gravity and eventual weightlessness as his craft coasts most of the way between the worlds, the fact that the Earth would appear larger from the Moon than the Moon does from the Earth, the phases of the Earth as seen from the Moon and the illumination of the Moon by earthlight during the solar night, the lighter gravity on the Moon and the fact that this would allow plants and animals to grow to larger sizes, and more.

The Moon people welcome Gonsales as soon as they realize he is a fellow Christian, but that's all the author has to say about religion. The entire Moon--most of which is covered by ocean--is a single kingdom ruled by an aristocracy based on height. The taller a Moon Man is, the smarter he is and the longer he will live. Short Moon people are looked down upon socially as well as literally, and extremely short children are abandoned on Earth in exchange for tall Earth children. (Gonsales assumes this happens somewhere in North America because the Moon Men all heavy smokers and must get their tobacco on these child-swapping trips.)

The Moon is a paradise of peace and contentment, but not for any reasons that might be exported to the Earth. Food grows in such natural abundance that they don't need to work for it, and there is no jealousy because "their Females are absolute Beauties, and by a secret Disposition of Nature, a Man there having once known a Woman never desires any other."

Godwin wrote at a time when the Catholic church was still opposing Copernican astronomy and putting men like Galileo on trial, so it's curious that he made the hero of this pro-Copernican work a Spaniard and presumably a Catholic. Though Godwin's Lunar civilization has some of the characteristics of Thomas More's Utopia, The Man in the Moone can't be considered much of a work of utopian fiction since the reasons for the Moon's happiness are unique to that world and wouldn't apply to Earthlings. Nor does this novel appear to have a satirical purpose. But it is an amusing adventure story that displays a remarkable astuteness in working out the implications of scientific theories that were then very new, controversial, and imperfectly understood.

Enjoyed these Utopian reviews and discussion. Roger Bacon is a major figure in the Scientific Revolution - not because he made any scientific advances or had any important knowledge advances, but because he promoted scientific investigation before and at the dawn of the revolution. Science Deified, Science Defied discusses New Atlantis in some detail and points out he Bacon separates out religion from all the other aspects of the society. All of his interesting ideas are materialistic and essentially do not need religion at all. It's in New Atlantis that he first successfully promoted natural investigation and observation and hands on (and extensive) experiments to advance knowledge and control of nature. This was unique. He comes up repeatedly in The Trophies of Time as well, but not specifically for New Atlantis.

Bacon separates out religion from all the other aspects of the society

Yes, that's very true. While there are expressions of religious piety throughout The New Atlantis, the church seems to have no oversight of the scientific community at Salomon's House, and some of the experiments there would certainly have been considered heretical in Bacon's day--especially the creation of new species of plants and animals by combining the traits of other species too different from one another to breed naturally.

Gasp - anachronistic Darwinism!

And to make it worse, they probably use stem cells!

The Man in the Moone sounds tremendous fun another addition to my list.

Just noticed those books on your reading shelf from the Ron Miller Science Fiction classic series.

Just noticed those books on your reading shelf from the Ron Miller Science Fiction classic series.

Yes, I bought a couple of them and have added most of the titles tentatively to my reading list if they weren't already there. In the case of Defoe's The Consolidator I'm just using their cover image, since it was already a free ebook.

I've been toying with the organization and contents of the Reading Shelf, and will probably continue to do so.

Seeing all the moon-travel stories, have you read Lucian's True history, possibly the great-great- n x great-mommy of them all?

There's space travel AND aliens.

#205, No, I haven't read True History yet. The works of Lucian are in my "Classics" queue, though, so I'll get to him eventually. (I'm giving the moon a bit of a rest now anyway so I can catch up in some of my other reading projects.)

I've spent the last couple of days catching up on your thread and what an adventure it's been. Since you tend to read several books on the same theme before moving on, reading your thread is like taking mini courses on various topics. Very much enjoyed the segment on utopias. I've read both Republic and Utopia, but needed the refresher your reviews offer. I also liked reading about old high school standards Animal Farm, which I need to revisit, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Duras is an author I keep meaning to explore; your reviews are a nice prompt. Although reading swathes of Steven is enjoyable, I hope to keep up from here on in.

#195 I've been thinking about the uniform dress issue, and I think it depends. When people wear a uniform for a particular job (e.g., airline pilot, military officer, priest, etc.) or for a school, I think it helps them identify with a particular role that they have chosen, and thus doesn't appear onerous and in fact may be pleasing. And (with the exception of priests?), they have the opportunity to wear their own clothes when they aren't at work or in school. But I think when people have to wear a uniform for reasons not of their own choosing, and don't have the opportunity to wear clothes that suit their personalities at any time, it is oppressive and destructive of individual taste. (This goes for prisoners as well as people in dystopias.)

By the way, I meant to mention another book I read in the past year: The Stammering Century by Gilbert Seldes which, as I said in my review "portrays a series of 19th century revivalists, religion/cult creators, founders of idealistic communities, temperance proponents, spiritualists, medical quacks and more -- mostly in their own words and those of their contemporaries." It's a strange book about strange people, but it does describe some attempts at utopian communities in the US.

Oh THAT was so fun! I especially enjoyed the comparison in 185.

It is seriously comical to see the differences Catholic school kids manage to make in their "uniforms".

I'm thinking it's not so much which system, communism vs. capitalism that works, but that we're just looking at human nature. I think either one could work without the greed. I think communism wouldn't work for me because I'm not interested in working up to my ability. I prefer less clothes and more books and time to read for example. I would LOVE a uniform. I guess I do that in a sense but there are occasions when I don't like the feeling of not fitting in. Back to the individual vs. crowd issue.

Interesting conversation.

Thanks Lisa, Merrikay and others.

On uniforms: At my granddaughter's elementary school they are required to wear uniforms, but pupils can buy stickers that they can wear for a day with any outfit they wish. Freedom is for sale, and the rich get to stand out even more than they would if there were no dress code at all. I'm the only one around who seems to see it that way, though.

OUCH! That would bother me also. My children's school had free dress day monthly or more often as a reward for all. Still, it was a day where the rich stood out.

The Tunnel by Dorothy Richardson
First published 1919
Fourth volume in the Pilgrimage sequence

"I'm so sorry for you. I hate humanity too. Isn't it a lovely day? Isn't it? Just look."

Such jarring juxtapositions of despair and euphoria are found throughout Dorothy Richardson's fourth autobiographical novel, The Tunnel. It portrays events in Richardson's life starting in 1896 when she moved to London's Bloomsbury district. Miriam Henderson, her alter ego, is 21 and for the first time in her life completely independent. "Her mind was alight with the sense of her many beckoning interests, aglow with the fullness of life." She has taken a job as a dental secretary, a position she loves despite the meager salary. But it is in her friendships and the contacts they bring that Miriam begins to blossom. She meets H. G. Wells (called Hypo Wilson in the novel), and finds that though she disagrees with almost everything he says, Miriam is so fascinated by the confident way he expresses himself that she can't wait to hear more. Her enthrallment is dangerous, she thinks, so she avoids him.

Feminism is a recurring theme. Miriam takes delight in the freedoms associated with being a New Woman. She smokes, she buys a pair of knickers, she rides a bicycle, she goes unescorted to the theatre, and she attends scientific lectures. Yet Miriam's every encounter with a man becomes a reflection on the unfair position of the female in society. Thinking of how science categorizes women, she is driven to thoughts of suicide: "There was no getting away from the scientific facts . . . inferior; mentally, morally, intellectually, and physically . . . her development arrested in the interest of her special functions . . . Woman is undeveloped man . . . if one could die of the loathsome visions . . . I must die. I can't go on living in it . . . the whole world full of creatures; half-human. And I am one of the half-human ones, or shall be, if I don't stop now."

At other times, Miriam is more sarcastic: "The knowledge of women is larger, bigger, deeper, less wordy and clever than that of men. Certainly. But why do men not acknowledge this?" She refers often to the language of women as something different than that of men, something men can't understand. Language becomes its own element in the novel. "All that has been said and known in the world is in language, in words . . . all the dogmas of religion are in words; the meaning of words change with people's thoughts. Then no one knows anything for certain. Everything depends upon the way a thing is put . . . language is the only way of expressing anything and it dims everything."

Richardson's style continues to evolve. Most of the novel is now in interior monologue, with few passages of dialogue and even fewer of description. The chapters are snapshots at irregular intervals, and we must often infer what has happened from clues in Miriam's thoughts and moods. The Tunnel isn't at all difficult to read, but there are a few confusing moments when new characters spring into Miriam's consciousness without introduction. As this is a realistic autobiographic work, there is no conventional plot structure or symmetry to the novel. It is simply one phase in the life of a young woman who reflects upon herself and everything around her.

Excellent review of The Tunnel. It certainly brings to the fore the difficulties for a woman who wanted to be independent at the turn of the century.

Great review of The Tunnel, Steven.

Interesting! I wasn't familiar with Dorothy Richardson, but she certainly seems to tie in with your H. G. Wells reading.

Lust for Life: On the Writings of Kathy Acker
Edited by Amy Scholder, Carla Harryman, and Avital Ronell
Published 2006



Not speaking the language of literary theory or being familiar with the writings of Martin Heidegger and Michel Foucault, I didn't get as much out of this anthology as I had hoped. Two of the essays focused on the author's relationship with Kathy Acker, and said more about the author herself or himself than Acker. Two were quite informative. But the other four essays went mostly over my head. One might also have expected an introduction summarizing Acker's life and career, but there was none. Nonetheless there was some useful insight to be found, and even though each essayist approached Kathy Acker and her work from a different direction, there was consistency in their conclusions.

Acker regularly used textual devices such as repeating the same paragraph or inserting random text using the "cut-up" technique inspired by William S. Burroughs. Her stories are fragmented, discontinuous, and inconclusive. Her characters sometimes suddenly and inexplicably change gender. Peter Wollen see in this "an example of how a literary technique could be given a political twist as a mode of resistance, envisaged as a way of subverting the control system inherent in verbal discourse..." To Robert Glück the purpose is "to keep the reader off balance.... Rather than drawing conclusions, developing identifications or thematic connections, that is, making judgments that lead to knowledge, Acker creates a reader who is lost in strangeness. She pitches the reader into a welter of contradictions that do not resolve themselves, but replace each other continuously: a text that hates itself but wants me to love it...." What this also does is to distance the reader from the narrative by refusing to allow him to engage himself with plot and characters and instead refocus the reader's attention on the author herself. Leslie Dick says that Acker's work is so disturbing because "it's not just the violence, the self-mutilation, the incest, the pain. It's that her text won't let us read in the way we automatically like to do."

One way in which Acker focuses attention on herself is by interjecting herself personally, and especially sexually, into the narrative. Nayland Blake sees an affinity between Acker and the other artists of her generation (visual and musical as well as literary) in the way she "combined formal editing strategies that had previously been used to produce an effect of intellectual distance with the content of overwhelming intimacy." To Blake, Acker's pornographic interludes have the urgent effect of "bringing me back to the desire to be in the land of make-believe." So there is a constant tension between the distancing effect of unconventional style, and the attractive effect of erotic content. To Barrett Watten, "Sexuality is not necessarily liberation in Acker; rather it is the energetic disturbance of a wound and an attempt to repair it."

Other themes addressed are Acker's treatment of identity and her persistent borrowing (plagiarism, piracy) of other writers' text. As noted above there are recurrent references to Heidegger and Foucault, as well as Nietzsche, Freud, Bataille, Sade, and a host of other influences. Acker's themes may be contemporary and her language brash and profane, but her ideas are thoroughly grounded in a deep study of literature and philosophy.

Persons with an academic background in contemporary literature will, I'm sure, find this collection of essays most rewarding, especially if they are also familiar with the philosophers cited. Without that kind of a background myself, I found quite a bit of it to be obscure, but I did gain enough insight into the work of Kathy Acker for it to have been worthwhile.

It's interesting that I had never heard of this author until reading one of your earlier reviews, and then yesterday she came up as a recommendation on Amazon.

I do admire you for tackling the criticism, and for reading Acker at all!

Great find, Steven. I wonder how many readers Kathy Acker had during her life-time. I would have a look at any of her work, but like other members, have never heard of this author.

Sounds like an interesting if frustrating critical companion, Steven. I tried to read Empire of the Senseless when I was quite young, and I didn't really "get" it, but I wouldn't mind trying Acker again sometime. Hopefully you'll have some reviews of her works again soon.

Interesting review of Lust for Life: On the writings of Kathy Acker I would have thought it would be difficult to write an essay on such an unconventional author and on someone who is almost contemporary, bound to be "difficult"

Hopefully, I can pick up some of your SF readings, later. You are nicely paving the way.

The First Philosophers: The Presocratics and the Sophists
Introduction, notes and translation by Robin Waterfield
First published 2000

 

Western philosophy was born in Greece in the 6th century BCE. It is no coincidence that this is when the Greeks became a literate culture, as writing is an essential prerequisite to the transmission of complex ideas. Unfortunately the original writings of philosophers before Plato have perished; all we have are fragments quoted in other works and the commentaries of others on their ideas. These "Presocratic" philosophers are still no less important to the development of Western thought than Plato, Aristotle, and the others who built on their ideas.

The Sophists were a group of teachers active in Athens at the time of Socrates and Plato. They tutored upper class young men and gave lectures, all for a fee. In training men for political and legal careers, they emphasized being able to argue either side of an issue, not necessarily finding the truth, so they were often ridiculed as mercenary teachers of elocution and rhetoric rather than great thinkers. The term "sophistry" is still used derogatorily. Yet many of them produced works of original thought as well, and deserve to be ranked as contributors to our intellectual heritage.

Robin Waterfield, the translator, has organized the bits of surviving information about these men into two categories: fragments (their own words, usually quoted or paraphrased by someone else), and testimonia (comments by other classical philosophers and historians on their ideas). Each philosopher or school is in its own chapter, Presocratics first, then Sophists. Each chapter has an introduction of several pages summarizing the philosopher's ideas and contributions. The fragments and testimonia are then arranged in a sequence that logically presents the source material for that person. The fragments and testimonia are numbered and cross-referenced to the introduction, so you can either read the essay first, then the source material, or read each fragment or testimony as it is mentioned in the introduction. There are end-notes to explain names and obscure references.

I found the organization of this book to be perfect in the way it clearly distinguished the ideas of each philosopher, explained them in a clear and readable manner, pointed out which ideas were original and which had been passed down from a predecessor, and clearly distinguished what the philosopher had himself said from what was attributed to him.

Philosophy in the 6th and 5th centuries BCE was a much broader field than what we now associate with the term. It included not only abstract thought and the nature of knowledge, but religion, astronomy, physics, biology and medicine. There is great variety in what the philosophers represented here chose to write upon:

-- Anaximander of Miletus, for example, developed a theory for the origin of life that we would be tempted to call proto-evolution, as he imagined all life coming originally from the sea.

-- Zeno of Elea grappled with the idea of infinity and finally concluded "If every existing thing is infinitely divisible into parts, then either nothing exists or everything is one." He also famously argued that motion is impossible! Because before you can reach your goal you must reach the halfway point...then the halfway point of the remaining distance...then the next halfway point...and so on. Since there are an infinite number of halfway points, it would take an infinite amount of time to move even the shortest distance.

-- Pythagoras, known chiefly as a geometer, explored the nature of the soul and believed in reincarnation. He preached vegetarianism and, for unknown reasons, the avoidance of beans. His disciple Empedocles of Acragas wrote emphatically: "Wretches, utter wretches, keep your hands off beans!"

-- Empedocles also gave us the theory of the four elements--earth, water, fire, and air--which Aristotle later developed and which remained state-of-the-art knowledge for two millennia.

-- The amazing Atomists, Leucippus and Democritus of Abdera, using no instruments but their intellect, developed the atomic theory that is still the basis for our understanding of the universe: All matter consists of combinations of a few basic elements comprised of tiny, indivisible particles separated by empty space. You have to read the ideas of their predecessors to realize how truly revolutionary a notion this was at the time. They also correctly described the formation of the earth, stars and planets from spirals of material in a vacuum condensing into solid bodies. They knew that the sun, moon and stars were solid bodies just like the earth, and postulated the existence of other worlds, other moons, and other suns. Centuries before Galileo they theorized that some worlds could have several moons and even multiple suns.

-- Protagoras the Sophist declared that "Man is the measure of all things." What he meant by this, though, was not our concept of Renaissance humanism, but the idea that what we know of the universe and ourselves is based entirely on the evidence of our senses, and one man's senses are as valid as another. If I say the vase is red and you say it is green, then it is both red and green; it has no intrinsic properties, and there is no such thing as an absolute truth. All is perception.

The above are just samples of the often profound but sometimes laughable ideas presented in this marvelous volume. Robin Waterfield's writing and translations are superb. Best of all, you can enjoy this book with no background in philosophy whatsoever, because this is where it all begins.

This is fascinating, and thanks for a great review. It's probably a book I will never get around to reading, but I appreciate learning about these people and their ideas.

Best of all, you can enjoy this book with no background in philosophy whatsoever, because this is where it all begins. Sounds like this ones for me. excellent review.

Voyage to the Moon by Cyrano de Bergerac
First published posthumously 1657
Undated English translation by Curtis Hidden Page

   

Suspecting that the moon is just another world like the earth, and that its inhabitants have visited us, the adventurer Cyrano de Bergerac devises not one, but several means of paying a return visit. His first attempt is based on the known fact that dew is attracted to the morning sun. "I attached to myself a number of bottles of dew, and the heat of the sun, which attracted it, drew me so high that I finally emerged above the highest clouds." But this has him headed for the sun, not the moon! He realizes his error and releases enough dew to return to earth.

His final attempt, one that is more accident than intention, involves a contraption with rockets attached to it so that they fire in stages before falling away. Cyrano is left drifting through space and heading for a fatal impact with the moon, but he is fortunate enough to come straight down into the Garden of Eden where his landing is softened by the boughs of the Tree of Knowledge.

The Garden is tenanted by a handful of prophets who explain to Cyrano how Adam and Eve came to be expelled to the earth. Cyrano is about to learn the greatest mysteries of all, when it is his bad timing to make a rather crude joke involving the Almighty. The prophets don't share his sense of humor, so he is expelled to wander the surface of the moon.

The moon people are giants who walk on all fours. Their speech resembles the music of the flute. They take Cyrano to be some sort of monkey, so he is captured and used to entertain passers by. He is rescued finally by a being who is one of the natives of the sun. Sun people don't have bodies in the way can understand, so they animate the bodies of the recently dead of other races. This particular sun man says he has spent much time on earth as a teacher and adviser, most recently with Tommaso Campanella (author of The City of the Sun). He takes Cyrano to the moon's royal palace where he becomes something of a pet of the king's daughter. There he meets a Spaniard named Domingo Gonsales, whose voyage to the moon by swan-power was decribed in Francis Godwin's book The Man in the Moone. Gonsales had returned to the moon because "He had not been able to find a single country where the imagination was free."

Cyrano finds the culture of the moon people to be in many ways the opposite of Europe's. They venerate the young, and the father becomes a servant to his son. They do not use money, but pay their bills with poems. They've found that smelling food gives one more nutrition than eating it, and avoids those excretory complications. They honor the body and have made virginity a crime. The higher rank a person holds, the fewer clothes he wears; royalty and sages go about naked. It is a mark of honor to expose one's genitals, and when Cyrano says that in his country men of rank wear swords, they are indignant: “O little man, how insane the nobles of your world must be if they pride themselves on a tool used by executioners, one that is made only to destroy and that is, in the end, the sworn enemy of all that lives. And they hide, on the contrary, a part of the body without which we would not exist, one that is the Prometheus of every animal and tirelessly repairs the weaknesses of nature! How unfortunate a country is where the marks of generation are ignominious and those of annihilation are honorable!" Christianity gets much of the blame for this, as one moon man observes: "I am indeed astounded at how much the religion of your country is against nature and is jealous of all the pleasures of men."

If Cyrano de Bergerac is remembered for anything these days, it is for the size of his nose. Moon people also have large noses. They say that "a large nose is a sign on the door of our face that says 'Herein dwells a man who is intelligent, prudent, courteous, affable, noble-minded and generous'." Boys born with a short nose are castrated so there is no chance they can pass on their unfortunate infirmity to another generation.

Of the many scientific and technical theories discussed in this novel, it must be noted that Cyrano de Bergerac invented the idea of the audio book and the iPod. Lunar people do not have a written language, but record their books on miniature devices like music boxes. Cyrano was given several of these books, and marveled at how he could "read" without occupying his hands or his eyes. "I attached the books to my ears as pendants and went for a walk in town."

Near the end of the novel Cyrano has a debate with a young moon man who is an atheist. Among the moon man's arguments is the observation of God that "if he gave me a mind incapable of comprehending Him, it wouldn't be my fault but His, since he could have given me one capable of doing so.” Cyrano the character defends the faith, but it's fairly obvious from all that has come before that Cyrano the author is more interested in the arguments against God than those in favor.

Voyage to the Moon is quite entertaining and inventive. It's obvious from his reference to earlier works that Cyrano de Bergerac sought a place in the growing body of utopian science fiction, though he doesn't offer any radical new social ideas. His novel is a broad satire of religious narrow-mindedness and puritanism, and many of his barbs still hit their mark today.

Voyage to the moon sounds like wonderful satire. Excellent review Steven: it's on my list.

"Virginity a crime, a mark of honour to expose ones genitals" I wonder what Cyrano was drinking.

Wonderful review. I'm really enjoying your science fiction reviews especially since I'm unlikely to read most of the books myself.

Another thumbs up for a great review. I admit that like Rebecca I am unlikely to read some of the SF books you read, your reviews are always interesting and entertaining.

"Virginity a crime, a mark of honour to expose ones genitals" I wonder what Cyrano was drinking.

I don't know, but I think at least a couple of our Congressmen must've gotten into it.

Cyrano must have been a hoot to hang out with. Ha, ha.

Great review of Voyage to the Moon, Steven.

Steven how true! LOL

That must have been a fun book to read!

I don't know, but I think at least a couple of our Congressmen must've gotten into it.
Oh, so that's what happened! :)

The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing-World by Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle-on-Tyne
First published 1666

 

The Blazing World is perhaps the earliest published work of science fiction by a woman. It's ironic that a book with its title should have been published in London the same year as the Great Fire of London, but only a coincidence.

Margaret Cavendish was a member of the English court and a patroness of the sciences. She published under her own name a wide variety of works on philosophy, science, drama, poetry, and the novel The Blazing World, which was intended to showcase some of her ideas on science and political philosophy.

The novel begins with the story of a merchant who falls in love with a high-born lady. He knows that because of his lowly station he can never openly declare his love for her, so out of desperation he abducts her and carries her away in his ship. The ship, however, is caught up in a great storm and blown into the polar regions where no ship has sailed before. The cold is so intense that everyone freezes to death, "the young Lady onely, by the light of her Beauty, the heat of her Youth, and Protection of the Gods, remaining alive." The ship was "not onely driven to the very end or point of the Pole of that World, but even to another Pole of another World, which joined close to it."

In the new world the derelict ship encounters a group of bear-like men, who rescue the lady and treat her kindly. Sailing south, the bear-men turn her over to some fox-men, and by such stages she eventually comes to the palace of the Emperor who rules this world. By this time she has learned their language. The Emperor (a human) falls in love with the lady, marries her, and gives her full power over his world as his equal. The Empress's first project is to form academies of the arts and sciences and call for a report on the state of scientific knowledge in her new realm. "The Bear-men were to be her Experimental Philosophers, the Bird-men her Astronomers, the Fly- Worm- and Fish-men her Natural Philosophers, the Ape-men her Chymists, the Satyrs her Galenick Physicians, the Fox-men her Politicians, the Spider- and Lice-men her Mathematicians, the Jackdaw- Magpie- and Parrot-men her Orators and Logicians, the Gyants her Architects, &c."

Almost half of the novel consists of the reports of these various advisers and the ensuing debates between them and the Empress. There isn't much plot here, but it's a good overview of the state of scientific knowledge in mid-17th century Europe. The Copernican view of the solar system was still under debate. The telescope and microscope were both new inventions. As for the nature of the multiple conjoined worlds, it seems that there are an infinite number of worlds connected at their poles like pearls on a string. Each has its own sun, moon and stars, varying from one world to the next in configuration and brightness. The stars of the new world are so bright that it never knows darkness, and is therefore called the Blazing World.

After conferring with her scientists, the Empress meets with the immaterial spirits who dwell in the air. She learns how souls can move from body to body, and even from world to world. When she decides she needs a personal scribe, they recommend a certain Duchess of Newcastle from another world. (It is only at this point that we realize that the world the Empress originally came from was not our own.) So Margaret Cavendish's soul is fetched from England, which is how she came to learn of the events she relates in her book. She and the Empress become great friends, and continue to pay soul-visits back and forth between the two worlds. When news comes that the Empress's home country back on her native world is on the verge of being conquered by its enemies, they confer on how to send military assistance from world to world. There's a marvelous passage where they consider sending a host of immaterial spirits to reanimate the recently dead and create a zombie army, but they eventually rely upon a more "conventional" expeditionary force of fish-men, worm-men, and bird-men.

As far as the Duchess of Newcastle's utopian vision is concerned, it can be summed up in two words: absolute monarchy. The Blazing World is the happiest and most peaceful of worlds because it is ruled by one man and his consort. Their closest advisers are all eunuchs, and their palace is an unassailable island fortress. Strangely, the author has very little to say about the role of women in society, and her heroine seems content when her advisers tell her that in their world the women are not allowed to attend religious services, but stay home "For Women and Children most commonly make disturbance both in Church and State."

The Blazing World is not very entertaining as a novel, but it is still an interesting specimen of its era and certainly a landmark in women's fiction.

Sounds fascinating, although I'm not sure it will creep to the top of my TBR pile anytime soon.

Excellent review of The Description of a New World, Called the blazing-world. This is one of the very earliest books that could be labelled as Science Fiction and it sounds to be full of invention. I like the idea of multiple conjoined worlds connected at their poles and I wonder if this was an original idea from Margaret Cavendish. Another one for my reading list.

I like the idea of multiple conjoined worlds connected at their poles and I wonder if this was an original idea from Margaret Cavendish.

Unfortunately she doesn't elaborate much on the idea. All she really says is that there are an infinite number of worlds, and that at least these two are joined at the poles. The Empress commands her subjects to seek out a physical passage to the Duchess's world (our Earth), but nothing is said about where they are to look for it. The idea of pearls on a string is my way of visualizing it, but she may have had something entirely different in mind.

At least one of the presocratic philosophers I read postulated an infinite number of worlds, each with its own sun and moon(s), but they weren't interconnected. Others postulated that each atom of our world was a universe of its own, while our universe is just an atom in a much larger universe, ad infinitum.

Whether it was the first or not, Cavendish's notion of multiple similar worlds is definitely the forerunner of the modern science fiction idea of parallel universes occupying the same space and time but different realities.

What Lisa said, in #236!

The Southern Land, Known by Gabriel de Foigny
First published in French 1676
English translation by David Fausett 1993

 

Gabriel de Foigny was a French Franciscan monk who was defrocked at about age 36 for licentious behavior. He fled to Calvinist Geneva where he renounced Catholicism and took up a career teaching and writing. But his expectation that Protestant authorities would be more open-minded than Catholics was disappointed when he was persecuted for heretical ideas, drunkenness, and sexual misbehavior. His response to this was to write The Southern Land, Known, which is a very strange combination of utopia, dystopia, and religious allegory.

The story is told by Nicholas Sadeur, who was born at sea to French parents but shipwrecked and orphaned by a storm off the Spanish coast. Sadeur is an hermaphrodite, with both male and female organs, but he self-identifies as a man (and I will follow the author's lead in using the male pronoun). As a young man, Sadeur is kidnapped by pirates. Their ship is wrecked, and he is rescued by merchants bound for the East Indies. After visits to the Congo and Madagascar, the merchant vessel is driven south and westward across the Indian Ocean. It, it turn, is wrecked not far from the shore of the rumored great southern continent, the Terra Australis, or Australia. Sadeur is the only survivor, and after battling giant carnivorous birds, he is taken in by the natives of this exotic land.

The Australians are manlike, but eight feet tall with six fingers and toes and an occasional extra set of arms. Like Sadeur himself, they are all hermaphrodites--a fact easily ascertained because they wear no clothing. He later learns that his intersexuality, as well as the fact that he was washed ashore naked, saved his life. The Australians despise "half men" and consider clothing a form of blasphemy. They don't even need coats because Australia is a land of perfectly mild climate where it never even rains. Fruit is so plentiful (notwithstanding the lack of rain!) that the natives never need to work. They don't even have houses, since they sleep just fine on the open ground. Nor are they bothered by pests, since insects and disease are unknown in Australia.

When it comes to the social, political and religious institutions of the Australians, it is difficult to tell at times whether Foigny wants us to admire the Australians for their peaceful efficiency, or laugh at them as parodies of Calvinism. In religion, for example, the Australians practice a form of pantheism that holds all life sacred, yet they make it a crime to discuss their religious beliefs, and they make desperate war against the neighboring kingdom of non-hermaphrodites. They hate their carefree lives so much that they almost always end them in ritual suicide--a practice so compelling that the law requires them to produce at least one offspring before they are allowed to kill themselves, otherwise the race would have long ago destroyed itself.

Exactly how the Australians reproduce is another forbidden topic, and Sadeur never learns the answer even though he lives among them for 35 years. When Sadeur shows signs of sexual arousal, his hosts threaten to put him to death. There is a suggestion that the hermaphrodite condition of the narrator and the Australians may be a commentary on the poor treatment of women in Europe at that time. Sadeur "was forced to admit that the great empire that the male had usurped over the female was rather a form of tyranny than a just cause."

Foigny's Australia is a carefree communist utopia, yet it is made carefree largely by impossibly benevolent surroundings and the absence of sexual tension. The inhabitants' response to their seemingly perfect existence is to despise it, yet by censorship and xenophobia they prevent any possible new ideas or challenges that might make life bearable. It is a strange world indeed. Like most utopian fiction, the bulk of the novel is devoted to description and debate, but there are some fine action scenes in the opening and closing chapters.

A final note: In 1692 a second edition of The Southern Land, Known appeared in French. It was severely abridged to remove sexually explicit passages, some of the more extreme violence, and potentially heretical religious ideas (whether the bowdlerization was by Foigny himself or someone else is unknown). This edition was translated into English and was the only English edition available until David Fausett's 1993 translation. The 1692 edition is also still being published in French. If you want to read the author's uncensored work, be sure to get the original 1676 version.

What an unusual book. I must say that it sounds quite fascinating although not my usual fare.

What Lisa said! How on earth do you find these books?

#241-242: I've discovered that the secret to stress-free reviewing here on LT is to read books that no one else has ever heard of or is likely to read. That way no one can challenge what I say or blame me for being led into a purchase they may regret. :)

But to answer your question, most of the books on my science fiction reading list come from the reference work Anatomy of Wonder, which I am taking in chronological order. Most of them are free or inexpensive ebooks. The Southern Land, Known was an exception, but I found an inexpensive used copy on Amazon.

Utopian fiction was something of a fad in the 17th century, and what I've read so far represents just a fraction of the total. I'm about to move into the 18th century when authors like Daniel Defoe, Voltaire, and Giovanni Casanova joined the ranks of utopians.

Interim by Dorothy Richardson
Serialized 1919, first book publication 1920

Interim is the fifth novel in Dorothy Richardson's autobiographical opus Pilgrimage. It's a fairly short work and spans about eight months of the life of Miriam Henderson, Richardson's alter ego. True to its title, this is not a period of great change in Miriam's circumstances, but there is considerable development in her social life and outlook.

At the beginning of the novel, Miriam is rather forlorn, saying things to herself like "Life has passed me by; that is the truth. I am no longer a person." And: "Nobody knows me. I grow more and more unknown and more and more like what people think of me." But change comes about when the rooming house in which she lives becomes a boarding house, and tenants begin to socialize every evening instead of staying alone in their rooms. Most of the tenants are young, single men--doctors and artists--who take an interest in Miriam. She, in turn, begins to grow in confidence and in her ability to express herself in public. The turning point comes one evening when Miriam more than holds her own in a friendly argument against three doctors. Yet it seems that Miriam still doesn't trust men enough to consider a closer type of relationship with one.

Interim is not a novel that in any way stands on its own, and I found it the least interesting thus far of the series. Yet ironically it earned Richardson a much wider and international audience when it was serialized in the American magazine Little Review alongside Joyce's Ulysses. And while largely uneventful, it does contain some of Richardson's most beautiful language, such as this passage describing London as a storm approaches:

"She set out from the house of friends to meet the darkened daylight . . . perhaps the sudden tapping of thunder-drops on her thin blouse. The street was a livid grey, brilliant with hidden sunlight."

Ah, all is revealed. I wondered where you were discovering some of these books. I have Anatomy of Wonder on order. Excellent review of The Southern land Known and how little Australia has changed since the seventeenth century.

The short biography at the start of your review goes some way to explaining how Gabriel de Foigny came to write his book, but it must qualify as the weirdest Utopia of the seventeenth century. Great to have a review of it.

...how little Australia has changed since the seventeenth century

I've never been to Australia or met an Australian as far as I can recall, so I'll have to take your word for it that they're all eight foot tall hermaphrodites who go around naked.

Anatomy of Wonder has been through several editions. The latest, which is the one I have, is the 5th edition dated 2004. Of course if you're primarily interested in the earlier works then it may not matter which one you buy.

I've discovered that the secret to stress-free reviewing here on LT is to read books that no one else has ever heard of or is likely to read. That way no one can challenge what I say or blame me for being led into a purchase they may regret.

I love it! Unfortunately I get most of my book recommendations from LT, so they are books more widely reviewed. Alas.

Nice reviews of The Southern Land, Known and Interim, Steven.

Going way back up, great review of Utopia and thoughtful comparison with The Republic. Is the idea of Utopia being in the science fiction genre a relatively new one? I always thought of it as a political science classic...maybe it's time to read it again. I'll have to look for The Southern Land, Known. I'd been thinking of rereading Gulliver's Travels and they sound like a good pair to read together.

Is the idea of Utopia being in the science fiction genre a relatively new one? I always thought of it as a political science classic...

Why can't it be both political science and science fiction? Actually I think many definitions of science fiction would exclude Utopia, but it is still a huge influence on the genre.

ETA: Be sure to get an unexpurgated copy of Gulliver's Travels. I was amazed and delighted when I re-read it myself and discovered the parts that they wouldn't let us read as kids.

I can't go to your new thread yet, too much to talk/think about here. I love these books you have been working through.

The First Philosophers goes straight to the wishlist. Great recommendation.

Fascinated by Margaret Cavendish and sad she hasn't come up much in my history of science/scientific revolution books I'm reading (I think I have heard the name, but can't tell you where)...but then I haven't yet found a summary history of the scientific revolution that I have been able too get through...

Australian in 1676...this has me scratching my head. I knew Cook wasn't the first to reach it...but...this is like 100 years before him...

Still, I'll leave anatomy of wonder to you and Bas...

#243 - I love your first paragraph here.

Now on to vol IV

The Dutch sighted Australia very early in the 17th century and landed there about 1616, I think; they charted much of the coast of (the now) Western and South Australia and the Northern Territory over the rest of the century. William Dampier was the first Englishman to arrive, in 1688.

So by the time de Foigny was writing, there had been lots of time to make up wild stories about hermaophrodites. :)

Thanks lyzard!

Terra Australis means "the Southern Continent". It was a hypothetical landmass supposedly covering the whole of the South Pole area. None of the explorers and travellers before James Cook had any idea they were dealing with what is now known as the continent of Australia. They either thought that they had found parts of the southern continent or islands which were not part of it.

Foigny was not writing about Australia. His book is a fantasy about the hypothetical landmass, which is why he could let his imagination run wild.

Foigny was not writing about Australia. His book is a fantasy about the hypothetical landmass, which is why he could let his imagination run wild.

Yes, but he calls it "Australia" in the book.

>255 StevenTX:

Throughout the 17th Century, authors incidentally and inconsequentially used the name Australia for various islands and landmasses in that vast area; these references must be read to mean Terra Australis (incognita). Foigny's addition connue (known) only has meaning in the context of the title, viz. La Terre australe connue, c’est-à-dire la description de ce pays inconnu jusqu’ici, de ses moeurs et de ses coutumes. Australia only means "land in the south" but should not exactly be used to equal Australia as we know it now.

My comment is only to set right Dan's comment: Australian in 1676...this has me scratching my head. I knew Cook wasn't the first to reach it...but...this is like 100 years before him...