The Modern Library List of Books

84. The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen

noreply@blogger.com (Devon S.) — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 20:26:00 +0000

I don’t know how to judge my indifference to this book. Sometimes books are like calf leather gloves in August: sumptuous wonders of craftsmanship and texture that we’d appreciate if only we weren’t too tired, too harried, too dull, too careless, too immature, too hot, at that moment. Sometimes the problem is simply being second act to an indisputable star: I read the astoundingly moving Stoner by John Williams immediately before I read this book. And sometimes books are lauded out of habit – some suitably distinguished person said something wonderful thing about it once and intellectual insecurity have caused people to sing undue praises ever since. Whatever the reasons, The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen left me utterly numb.

Sixteen and orphaned, Portia Quayne is sent to live with her half-brother, Thomas and his socialite wife, Anna, in London. Condemned to wander up and down the Riviera, from back facing rooms to ski chalets in August, it’s the first time Portia will live in a proper house, weighed down by solid furniture and thick draperies, the first time she’ll have a room of her own. Thomas’s father was a spineless sort, and when it became apparent his affair with Portia’s mother would produce a child, he went groveling to his wife, who promptly donned her mantel of moral sacrifice, putting Thomas’ father on the first train to Portia’s mother. Ashamed he lost the home he’d loved, Thomas’ father couldn’t bring himself to make a second one, and so he dragged his misfit family around Europe until he died, and Portia’s mother soon followed.

Portia’s arrival shocks the bourgeois rhythm of Thomas and Anna’s childless Regent’s Park townhouse, and although Thomas is not a cruel man, Portia reminds him of all that unpleasantness surrounding his father. Anna, on the other hand, resents Portia’s naivete, and after reading Portia’s diary, can’t shake the moral weight of Portia’s judgment. Aware she’s unwanted, Portia tries to mourn her parents as inconspicuously as possible while learning all she can about her new world.

With few people to talk to beside Matchett, a maid inherited with Thomas’ mother’s furniture who Portia puts to good use filling in blanks about her father, Portia’s inordinate attachment to Eddie, a shiftless opportunist whose flirtation with Anna lead to his employment at Thomas’s firm, is supposed to be understandable. As Portia’s new guardians, Thomas and Anna treat their friendship with grudging amusement: Portia can be trusted and Eddie is harmless.

Unable to accompany Anna and Thomas on their trip to Capri, Portia is sent to the seaside to stay with Anna’s old governess, Mrs. Heccombe. Portia enjoys the seaside and free and easy manner of Mrs. Heccombe’s children, Daphne and Dickie, who let Portia tag along with them even though they’re quite a bit older. However, when Eddie visits her for a weekend, he’s often drunk and inconsiderate, and he hits on Daphne right under Portia’s nose. When Portia confronts him about it, he brushes her off, and she begs him to forgive him.

Which brings us to my problem with this book: Portia’s inexplicable attraction to Eddie is alienating, so much so that her innocence with respect to him almost reads as pathological. This is made all apparent when presented against the other moral innocent slinking around Thomas and Anna: Major Brutt.

Major Brutt is an old friend of Anna’s ex-boyfriend, Pidgeon. When she runs into him outside of the cinema, she invites him home with the family for a drink and he accepts with pleasure. Just back from the war, he’s in London looking for work. Comfortably installed in the Quaynes’ drawing room, he’s openly thankful for their invitation. He speaks freely of his loneliness and the difficulty he’s been having securing work, seemingly unaware that for them his troubles are little more than an unwelcome appeal for help. When he takes Anna’s offer to drop in anytime at face value, we blush for him, while hoping he finds his way; when Portia takes Eddie’s half-hearted marriage proposal to heart, we can’t help but shake our heads, baffled.

Eventually all artifice is exposed when Portia learns Anna has been reading her diary and Eddie has known all along. She runs off to Major Brutt’s hotel, refusing to return until Anna and Thomas make some grand gesture; they send the maid to fetch her.

Portia’s story should be moving, but there is an dissonant airiness to this book; episodes are layered one over the other, like translucencies, without ever generating weight, at least not for this reader. Perhaps one day, when I’m feeling particularly affronted by the cruelty of polite society or nostalgic for a time when I was innocent in the ways of men, I’ll pick it up again and give it a second go. Until then, I won't just it too harshly; just another case of calf leather gloves in August, I suppose.

85. Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad

noreply@blogger.com (Devon S.) — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 22:13:00 +0000

Let me ask you ask you a question, who is morally worse: a person who commits an act thinking it will cause hundreds of deaths, but which in fact causes none; or a person who commits an act that inadvertently counts its casualties in the dozens? In other words, what matters more in determining moral culpability –intentions or consequences? How you answer this question will determine how you feel about the fate of the titular character in Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim.

Marlow, known to many a college student as the narrator of Heart of Darkness, returns here with yet another tale. Jim, the son of a parson who “possessed such certain knowledge of the Unknownable as made for the righteousness of people in cottages without disturbing the ease of mind of those whom an unerring Providence enables to live in mansions”, is first mate aboard the Patna, a steamer “as old as the hills, lean like a greyhound, and eaten up with rust worse than a condemned water-tank”, a ship charged with transporting 800 Muslims pilgrims across the Indian Ocean to the Red Sea. The journey promises to be an easy one, and Jim, “penetrated by the great certitude of unbounded safety and peace” enjoys the privilege of being a white man in the Eastern ports. However, the “great calm of the waters” proves to be misleading, and when the ship strikes something in the middle of the night, the panicked captain and crew convince themselves a bulkhead has been breached, the Patna doomed to sink. The problem is: there aren’t enough lifeboats for the 800 passengers with their “faith and hopes”, their “affections and memories” and sounding the alarm would surely invoke a stampede that would endanger their lives. Disgusted by what is happening, but unaware of a solution, Jim watches as the captain and a pair of engineers struggle to launch a lifeboat, effectively abandoning the passengers in their charge. Jim stands, steeling himself for death, but at the last moment, with a “strange illusion of passiveness”, he steps over the legs of a dead man and jumps ship to join the other deserters.

As it turns out, the Patna is rescued and towed into port by a French gunboat, its 800 passengers bewildered, but safe. An inquiry is held, and Jim, the only one brought before the tribunal – the captain has fled, the two engineers have been hospitalized – is forced to give testimony that shames him to the core.

Stripped of his license, and no longer able to work aboard a ship, Jim would have certainly been destitute if Captain Marlow, a man with connections throughout the Eastern ports, hadn’t recognized him as an industrious and affable man, a man whose moral fiber belied his desertion of the Patna. Through hard work and good sense, not mention a genial manner, Jim manages to excel in whatever position –manager of a rice mill, water-clerk for various ship-chandlers – Marlow manages to secure for him. However, whenever anything, however slight, threatens to expose his role in the Patna incident, Jim takes off.

About ready to give up on Jim, Marlow appeals to his friend, Stein, a merchant with trading posts scattered across the South Pacific. Stein agrees to send Jim to manage a far-flung outpost in Patusan, an inland region plagued by tribal wars. Jim is elated; it’s a fresh start, an opportunity for adventure, to make his own life, to break out of the shackles of shame slapped on his limbs after the Patna incident. Through industry, and diplomatic skill (helping the Bugis people to oust Sharif Ali and his clan, Jim effectively limits Rajah Allang’s, the opium-addicted nephew to the Sultan, power). Jim brings stability to the long-suffering people of Patusan, and he is embraced as a community leader.

As people once told tales about the Patna, and Jim’s disgrace, the people of Patusan now tell tall tales of Jim’s courage and strength, and where Jim once thrust his chest out to counter his shame, he’s now buoyed with pride at his position, and all that he’s accomplished in this isolated backwater. When Marlow visits Patusan, many a curious villager inquire what keeps a white man like Jim from his proper home. Marlow is forced to explain how Jim’s character flaws make him ill-suited for his homeland, yet his audience is incredulous.

But when a pack of pirates, lead by the treacherous Gentleman Brown, arrive in Patusan intent of pillaging the community, Jim, having cornered the pirates, elicits a promise of retreat in exchanges for guaranteed safe passage down the river. On Jim’s honor, the Bugis agree to let the pirates pass, but when the pirates double-cross Jim, at the urging of his long-time rival, Cornelius, the chief’s son, Dain Waris, is killed. Jim is devastated; he failed to protect his community and in doing so, lost a good friend. Jim pays for this failure with his life.

For all his good intentions, Jim’s mistake ultimately costs many lives, and so it seems the morality of the Lord Jim universe is one of consequences. Considering that we can never know another person’s intentions, it isn’t entirely crazy to judge moral culpability by consequences alone; it’s impossible to know another person’s mind, and just as we only know Jim through Marlow’s speculation and anecdote, other people must remain, like Jim, “forever an enigma.”

However, I found it troubling that Jim was so quick to claim responsibility for consequences that didn’t seem his to claim. The Bugis died not because Jim brokered Gentleman Brown’s peaceful passage, but because of Gentleman Brown and Cornelius’s evil ways. Conversely, it’s hard to mitigate Jim’s responsibility for his desertion, even as he pleads passivity in the act of desertion.

Of course, the question – intentions vs. consequences – stated as such, is too simplistic. Morality is a messy business that doesn’t lend itself well to universally applicable rules or categorical imperatives. We can easily imagine a moral situation where intentions tip the scales, and another where what matters is the result. That is, moral culpability cannot be extracted from context and is essentially socially determined.

And here we get to the brilliance of this book.

Shame is a social phenomenon. Arguably, one does not feel shame (as opposed to guilt) in the absence of an onlooker, and while it’s Jim’s shame that drives him from job to job, not once does he speak of his guilt, prompting Marlow himself to wonder about the guilt in his heart. And just as his disgrace in the eyes of others sends Jim skulking from job to job in the Eastern ports, it is his approbation in the eyes of others that ultimately revives. And so perhaps it is only fitting that his final act, as judged by the ones so ready to revere him, is what ultimately does him in.

But while I found myself marveling at the entangled intricacy of these themes, I had difficulty losing myself in this book; Jim and his adventures felt like pop-up devices animated solely to serve an exploration of moral philosophy, and while I found myself thinking a lot about the ideas in the book, those same ideas pushed me out of the story; a worthy, thought-provoking read, definitely, but the flatness of characters keep this, in my opinion, from being a truly great book.

86. Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow

noreply@blogger.com (Devon S.) — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 19:58:00 +0000

My advice as you open this book (or read this review): go here and crank up some ragtime (and be sure to scroll down to marvel how Jelly Roll Morton takes it all the way to jazz with his Jelly Roll Blues). Ragtime, the melodious offspring of blackface cakewalks and patriotic marches, perfectly captures the optimism and energy of America in the early 1900s, a time of growth and prosperity hitherto unheard of; a time when coal miners took on the capitalists for safer work conditions and fair pay, and won; a time when a single, socially- minded photographer, documenting immigrant ghettos, took pictures powerful enough to move a president and serve as evidence of the necessity of improved housing conditions for the poor; a time when American entrepreneurs amassed more wealth than some European monarchy, through little more than hard work and talent. However, it was also the era of Jim Crow legislation and the venomous prejudice that made it impossible for a black man to materially enjoy his success, say, by driving a shiny new Model T Ford – but more on that later. For now, close your eyes and let the “the clusters of syncopating chords and the thumping octaves” of Scott Joplin’s music conjure the jerky movements of early film reels, images of men in boaters disembarking from trolleys, double-time, crowding city streets, or images of half-mad inventors pedaling pumping flying machines, contraptions so bulky and cumbersome, one can’t help but be thankful they never got off the ground.

Although too many people, unprotected by social safety nets or workplace regulations, lived and worked in squalor, the first decade and a half of the twentieth century brought with it a general sense of hope and optimism, and it’s the paradoxes of this period, the progressive enlightenment and conservative barbarism, the frosty rationality and fuzzy superstition, the fervent patriotism and homicidal anarchy, that E.L. Doctorow builds his 1974 masterpiece, Ragtime, around.

Set in New Rochelle, NY and New York City, the book centers on an upper-class family known only by their roles in relation to a young male observer: Mother, Father, Mother’s Younger Brother, Grandfather. And while they could stand-in for any of a certain type of family – well-off, white, entrepreneurial – they are remarkable, in all their anonymity, for they ways in which they burst out of type, in spite of themselves: Father, a manufacturer of patriotic paraphernalia, tags along with his flags on Arctic expeditions, something of a hobbyist explorer; Mother, radically progressive without knowing it, befriends Sarah, the black mother of the illegitimate baby Mother finds buried in the garden, and ends up raising the black child as her own; Younger Brother builds bombs to aid a series of rebels after his heart is broken by the infamous Evelyn Nesbit, wife of the morphine-addicted sadist and millionaire, Harry Thaw. In what was billed as ‘The Crime of the Century’, Thaw famously blew off the face of Nesbit’s long-time lover, the architect, Stanford White, in the roof-top garden at Madison Square Gardens.

And it's not just Younger Brother rubbing elbows with celebrities; throughout this book, the whole family has connections of varying importance with historical figures: Mother serves Harry Houdini lemonade when his car breaks down in front of the house; a heartbroken Younger Brother takes to following Emma Goldman and her revolutionaries around; Father helps to end a standoff in J. Pierpont Morgan’s house. And while this anonymous family plays its bit role in history, cultural trends bring the major players together: J. Pierpont Morgan tries to interest Henry Ford in joining his secret society founded on Egyptian-flavoured occultism; Harry Houdini impresses a mistaken Archduke Franz Ferdinand as the inventor of a flying machine; Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung happen upon Evelyn Nesbit at a street art stall devoted to silhouette art.

Meticulously researched, this book alludes heavily to historical facts, however, Doctorow’s deft hand keeps the narrative from sagging under the weight of it all, and just as no historical account can ever be free of interpretation, Doctorow’s wonderful prose, however deceptively declarative, is steeped in judgment. For example:

At palaces in New York and Chicago people gave poverty balls. Guests came dressed in rags and ate from tin plates and drank from chipped mugs. Ballrooms were decorated to look like mines with beams , iron tracks and miner’s lamps. Theatrical scenery firms were hired to make outdoor gardens look like dirt farms and dining rooms like cotton mills. Guests smoked cigar butts offered to them on silver trays. Minstrels performed in blackface. One hostess invited everyone to a stockyard ball. Guests were wrapped in long aprons and their heads covered with white caps. They dined and danced while hanging carcasses of bloody beef trailed around the walls on moving pulleys. Entrails spilled on the floor. The proceeds were for charity.

Or elsewhere:

[Harry Houdini’s] audiences were poor people – carriers, peddlers, policemen, children. His life was absurd. He went all over the world accepting all kinds of bondage and escaping. He was roped to a chair. He escaped. He was chained to a ladder. He escaped. He was handcuffed, his legs were put in irons, he was tied up in a strait jacket and put in a locked cabinet. He escaped. … He escaped from a sealed milk can filled with water. He escaped from a Siberian exile van. From a Chinese torture crucifix. From a Hamburg penitentiary. From an English prison ship. From a Boston jail….He was buried alive in a grave and could not escape, and had to be rescued . . . Today, fifty years after his death, the audience for escapes is even larger.

For all the hubris and optimism of the early 20th century, these were far from perfect times, and Doctorow embodies some of the good (the success found by disenfranchised groups in the arts) and the bad (virulent racism) in the character of Coalhouse Walker. Coalhouse, a black musician, doomed by his well-groomed confidence and articulate manner, is the father of the baby Mother found in the garden. When Mother and Father take Sarah and the baby into their home, Coalhouse drives out every Sunday from Harlem, his shiny red Model T Ford glinting through the streets of New Rochelle like a flickering flame. This is too much for the men of the Emerald Isle Engine, a volunteer fire brigade, and when Coalhouse fails to show them the deference they feel due, they destroy his car. After Sarah is killed during her misguided attempt to appeal to the government for help, Coalhouse’s sets out for revenge, bringing New Rochelle to its knees in terror.

The tragedy of Sarah and Coalhouse is the tragedy of that first decade of the 20th century - Lady Justice had yet to be blindfolded -- the era, like its music, a mashup of pride and shame, of patriotic marches and blackface cakewalks, but with war rumbling across Europe, optimism deflated and “the era of Ragtime had run out, with the heavy breath of the machine, as if history were no more than a tune on a player piano.”

87. The Old Wives' Tale by Arnold Bennett

noreply@blogger.com (Devon S.) — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 20:50:00 +0000

The Old Wives’ Tale by Arnold Bennett is a surprisingly dark novel about the anguish and suffering inherent to human life. We live, we love, we suffer, we die. And ultimately, whatever success we manage to achieve is transient, not leaving much more than the shadow of a smudge on the world: it took not even two generations for Mr. Baines’ fabric store to be walled off from his attached home and sold after his death, and a large sign – with his name on it, no less – (something he railed against during his lifetime, considering such ostentatious self-promotion gauche) to be hung out front.

But as the title suggests –taken literally as the tale of two old women, rather than as a piece of unsubstantiated medical superstition – is the story of the Baines women. More specifically, this is the story of how the particular hardships and disappointments of two sisters, Constance and Sophia Baines, influence their innate character.

The Baines are an upper-middle class family of drapers in a provincial England town at the beginning of the 20^th century. Mrs. Baines laments “deeply on the martyrdom of her life” for although she’s always “endeavoured to be kind, just, patient [and] knew herself to be sagacious and prudent,” fate saddled her with an invalid husband and one willful daughter who elopes to Paris with a scoundrel salesman, and one steady daughter who marries wisely, but beneath her. What Mrs. Baines comes to realize in the twilight of her life, and what Bennett illustrates through the lives of Sophia and Constance, is that while fortunes may be made (and inherited) disappointment and suffering are unavoidable aspects of the world. In Arnold Bennett’s world, frustrated desires are the order the day.

The headstrong and beautiful Sophia longs to see the world outside of Bursley and can’t imagine a life more horrible than following in her mother’s shoes as the matron of the family shop. She wants a career of her own (her mother is scandalized when, for a brief time, Sophia insists she be allowed to train as a teacher), a career that will preferably take her to London. When the widely-travelled Gerald Scales comes to town on business, Sophia can’t see him for the spoiled creep that he is. To her, Gerald is a cultured sophisticate, the perfect man to teach her the ways – to show her –the world. As it turns out, Gerald is also an unconscionable seducer, and after a secret correspondence, he convinces Sophia to run away with him to Paris. Not completely lost to passion, Sophia insists they marry in London.

For better or worse, the couple live the hotel -life of restaurants and parties in Paris. That is, until Gerald’s money runs out and Sophia refuses, by this time aware that her husband’s a scoundrel, to hit up her family for money (whom she’s been ashamed to contact all these years), and Gerald leaves her. For Sophia, this is more of a blessing than a curse, and circumstances find her the proprietress of a boarding house that soon, thanks to her strong character and business sense, prospers.

Constance, on the other hand, lives a life not much different from her mother’s. She marries a reliable, if unadventurous, man: her father’s former assistant, Samuel Povey. Their young love dims to companionship that, while not passionate, is amiable and satisfying. Anyway, both are far too devoted to their only child, Cyril, for romance.When a grown Cyril moves to London to pursue his artistic education, poor Constance is more devastated than she was by her husband’s death, and having already sold the store, she’s left alone in Bursley with nothing to do but fret about her rheumatism and the insolence of her servants.

Although Sophia and Constance live lives as different as their characters, as they’re reunited in middle-age, Bennett shows us how, while materially comfortable, both have led lives unfulfilled. That both Constance(through inheritance) and Sophia (through resourcefulness) are wealthy is key to understanding something particularly striking about this book: Bennett seems to be suggesting that at its source, the inherent disappointment of the human condition is social.

That is, no one suffer from unrealized personal ambitions. Mrs. Baines is plagued by her daughters’ disobedience and the loneliness of life married to an invalid. Daniel Povey, the most popular man in town, is shamed by an alcoholic wife who sends him, literally, to the gallows. Sophia’s disappointment comes from the realization that she’s married a scoundrel who deprives her of a family. Constance’s particular regret is that the one love in her life – her son, Cyril—treats her with a casualness and disregard that can only be called cruel.

In fact, Cyril is the only Baines who can properly be called happy, or at the very least, unconcerned . He’s also the only character who hasn’t hung his hopes and expectations on the behavior of others, and while his career as an artist doesn't seem to be going anywhere, he doesn't seem much to care. But then again, perhaps what we mistake for happiness is youth that has not realized what's in store, for as Bennett writes of Sophia as she ponders Gerald’s corpse:

The manner of his life was of no importance. What affected her was that he had once been young, and that he had grown old, and was now dead. That was all. Youth and vigour had come to that. Youth and vigour always came to that. Everything came to that. . .The riddle of life was killing her, and she seemed to drown in a sea of inexpressible sorrow.

Much has been written about Bennett’s detailed realism –famously maligned by Virginia Woolf—but I’d argue that there is a delicious irony in Bennett’s inordinate preoccupation with physical details: Bennett makes as much of a wall, or a window, or a door as we make of inconsequential particulars in our own lives, and the impatience we feel at reading all this description – when used in service of such bleak themes as the disappointment inherent to human existence –brilliantly reminds us of the unimportance of the mundane details we seem to let overrun our own lives.

88. The Call of the Wild by Jack London

noreply@blogger.com (Devon S.) — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 15:15:00 +0000

I'll be honest: I wasn't looking forward to this book. Arctic adventures. Dog sleds. The struggle for survival. I had flashbacks of required reading from my Canadian childhood: Lost in the Barrens by Farley Mowat. This isn't to knock Mowat; it's been over twenty years since I read him, but at 10 years old, I resented having to read about boys and wolves and snow when I could be reading something lovely, like Anne of Green Gables. Not to mention, I'm a decidedly urban person – I've never been camping, never slept in a tent – and so, it's little wonder, I was less than enthusiastic to read a book about a working dog's life in the Yukon.

But, that's the great thing about this list: I discovered that I hated books I thought I would've loved (Sophie's Choice, I'm looking at you), and surprisingly enough, I ended up really enjoying The Call of the Wild.

Buck, a St. Bernard/Scotch Shepherd cross, enjoys a civilized life on Judge Miller's sprawling estate in the sunny Santa Clara Valley. Confined to neither house nor kennel, Buck ruled over all – vineyard, orchard, and house – relishing his status as king of the homestead. That is, until he's cruelly abducted by an insolvent gardener: the gold-hungry hordes streaming north have left a shortage of strong dogs in their wake, and Buck is sold to a trader.

Thrust into a world he's unprepared for, Buck quickly learns staying alive means keeping on the right side of the “law of the club”. But, Buck is a smart dog and he wisely submits after a vicious beating by a “dog breaker”. Other dogs arrive, and Buck watches as some are successfully broken, while others, too stubborn for survival, are just plain beaten to death. He also watches men, both good and bad, arrive with cash and leave with dogs. Eventually, Buck is sold to Canada Post, to run mail to the burgeoning northern settlements.

Buck's new masters, Francois and Perrault, are two French-Canadians, who for some distracting reason speak only broken English to each other. Pedantic, maybe, but every time they tied their tongue in knots speaking English (Dat Buck, heem pool lak hell. I tich heem queek as anyt'ing), I wanted to shake London down and ask: why, oh why aren't they speaking French?! The simple fix would have been to make one of them English Canadian.

While running with the dog team is grueling, Francois and Perrault are fair masters, wise to the way of dogs, and Buck soon emerges a leader. Although hard, Buck learns to like the work. Unfortunately, the mail must be delivered, and the Canadian government has no time to rest its dogs, so after running 5000 kilometers in five months, in Arctic conditions, Buck is sold to a group of incompetent, ill-equipped prospectors. What they lack in common sense, they make up for in cruelty. They overfeed the dogs, only to leave them to starve to death (literally) in the harness when the food runs out. Baggy skin sacs of bone, too weak to move, the dogs are beaten to death when they collapse from exhaustion. It is from these conditions that John Thornton rescues Buck.

As Buck is London's ideal dog, John is London's ideal man, living a life in accord with nature. John knows the language and needs of the animals around him and Buck, for the first time in his life, knows what it is to love a master. John and his companions, Pete and Hans, live in harmony with their environment. They travel light through uncharted territory, eating when they catch something, going hungry when they don't. While they pass many seasons in this uncharted wilderness, Buck dreams the dreams of the canine collective unconscious, huddled around the fire with cavemen, chasing down prey in the woods. Eventually, his instincts lead him to his old brethren, the wolf, and while he disappears from camp for days at a time, as long as John's alive, he can never cut his ties to the humanity: he loves John too much.

Although, at times, London runs the risk of sentimentality, his prose can also be surprisingly beautiful:

And closely akin to the visions of the hairy man was the call still sounding in the depths of the forest. It filled him with great unrest and strange desires. It caused him to feel a vague, sweet gladness, and he was aware of wild yearnings and stirrings for he knew not what. Sometimes, he pursued the call into the forest, looking for it as though it were a tangible thing, barking softly or defiantly, as the mood might dictate. He would thrust his nose into the cool wood moss, or into the black soil where long grasses grew, and snort with joy at the fat earth smells; or he would crouch for hours, as if in concealment behind fungus-covered trunks of fallen trees, wide-eyed and wide-eared to all that moved and sounded about him. It might be, lying thus, that he hoped to surprise this call he could not understand. But he did not know why he did these various things. He was impelled to do them, and he did not reason about them at all.

As I read this wonderful story of Buck's progression through civilized, natural and spiritual/mythical modes of existence, I realized something mildly disturbing about myself: I am deaf to the call of the wild. I couldn't imagine a life more horrible than John's– hunting for food, braving the elements. And, perhaps more significantly, the “kill or be killed” law of the jungle terrifies me. I'd surely share Curly's fate: the happy dog made friendly overtures to a husky who proceeded to rip off her face. Perhaps, my fear of violence is just an indication that I've been successfully socialized (no psychopathic tendencies, here), but I worry about my (lack of) relationship to the natural world, especially if London's to be believed, and it is to be passed through to reach the spiritual/mythical.

I think a camping trip is in order. I'm off to tell my boyfriend: we need to buy a tent. I'm sure he will (or won't he?) be thrilled.

89. Loving by Henry Green

noreply@blogger.com (Devon S.) — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 16:30:00 +0000

Henry Green's Loving is an honest, hard to classify, tale about the relativity of privilege, set among a group of British servants in the middle of WWII. In keeping her Irish castle open and staffed, Mrs. Tennant does her part to preserve an endangered lifestyle. When her old butler Eldon dies the rascally footman, Charley Raunce, takes over. While Raunce lacks the solicitude and discretion to be a worthy successor to Eldon, the war has left Mrs. Tennant with a poverty of choice. When not chasing the pretty maids, Kate and Edith, around, Raunce is busy working out ways to nickel-and-dime the accounts. Raunce is objectionable enough to be banned from both nursery and kitchen by nanny and cook, Mrs. Swift and Mrs. Welch, respectively. Unfortunately, the head housekeeper, Mrs. Burch, doesn't have her own domain to ban him from, and so her life is one long sigh of endurance. Not that Raunce is bothered by any of this. The less he has to do with the elder women, the better; they confirm what he's always suspected – women sour like milk. Especially unmarried ones. And amid much ado about aristocratic infidelities, imminent invasion, and a missing sapphire ring, the plot centers around the coupling off of the still-marriageable Edith and Kate.

Green has been called a writer's writer's writer; whatever that means, it seems to imply undue difficulty, but I loved his style. Green's prose, while not exactly crisp, is concentrated, even cold, and his point-of-view almost objective. That is, he rarely delves into the minds of his characters, never allows them interior monologue. That his characters live and breathe is a testament to Green's wonderful gift for dialogue.

At its best, Loving falls the way of a farce. From the servants' paranoia that Mrs. Tennant has fled Ireland abandoning them on the cusp of invasion, to the lisping insurance agent who visits the house, to Raunce's ridiculous treatment of him, to the even more ridiculous way he handles the whole business when Mrs. Tennant finally comes home: it's all just absurd enough to be hilarious.

But, for all the laughing and loving, Green has avoided romanticising his servant class by endowing them with a realistic perspective of their own. Romanticism is a luxury of the aristocracy. It's for the rich to exclaim over the beauty of daffodils (while Raunce kicks one down a passage in the servant's hall), to guild animal heads as fixtures, to furnish a drawing room like a cow byre, walls draped with silk, the furniture painted gold. Saved from industrial servitude and the assembly line, spared the certain death of war, these aren't the Romantic's idealized peasants, spiritually rich and at one with the land. Rather, they're just as engrossed as their employers with affairs of the wallet and heart.

Positioned in an wealthy house, eating meat and milk while others starve, with a supply of silk stockings and scarves, the servants are too privileged for the peasant's peace without a classical education to compensate. In other words, they've given up the natural nobility of the peasant, without gaining the cultural nobility of the gentry. For them, the nature is neither spiritual nor guilded. It's just another aspect of the world to contend with or exploit. While the Tennants bring jewelled representations of nature inside, the chef's little nephew, Arthur, knows the truth worth of an eggshell in a field is as a hiding place for the missing sapphire cluster. In one of my favourite scenes, the nanny, Mrs. Swift, tells the Tennant girls a fairy tale about birds while in the dovecote in front of them (as little Arthur points out) real doves fornicate and murder.

However, petty and ridiculous, one can't help but sympathesize with the servants, just as one can't help but feel for Mrs. Tennant by the end of the book; in her own way, she's just as appealing as Edith, and perhaps more so than Raunce. And whether the ending is actually happy or sad – for it is startlingly ambiguous – Mrs. Tennant will suffer. I couldn't help but feel bad about that. But perhaps that's just my sentimental longing for a Romantic world.

90. Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie

noreply@blogger.com (Devon S.) — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 13:51:00 +0000

Salman Rushdie's magical masterpiece, Midnight's Children is a bumping, bouncing allegory – not unlike a ride on a first generation Tata bus – of India's first 30 years of independence. Intelligent and intense, it is also a playfully funny book. However the prose, much like the zippy zing of India herself, can be overwhelming for the Western reader. I find the best way to approach Rushdie is to take a deep breath and plunge right in. It might be a struggle at first, but once you stop fighting the foreign rhythms, the language washes over you, and bobbing to the surface, there's just time enough to catch your breath before you're rip-roaring along in the white-water rapids of Rushdie's storytelling, exhilarated. In short: this is one hell of a book.

It's midnight on August 15, 1947: India emerges an independent nation and in that first hour, 581 children are born. Born amid the hopes and dreams of their newborn nation, these 581 are as diverse – Muslim, Hindu, Jainist, Sikh, Christian – as they are magical. Time travel. Alchemy. Shapeshifting. Mirror-travel. Dynamic hermaphrodism. Strewn across the country, these pint-sized superheros are connected in the mind of a telepathic boy, a boy born on the stroke of midnight, Saleem Sinai.

Saleem believes his midnight-birth ties him to India's future. He also believes it gives him the right to lead their magical coalition – The Midnight's Children Conference. Problem is, no one can agree on their obligations to their country. Should they isolate themselves from political concerns and live together, in peace, in a magical commune? Or are they bound to direct India into a bright and prosperous future? And is this bright and prosperous future Communist? Socialist? Capitalist? Hindu? Muslim? Sikh?

There's also another problem: Saleem isn't the only baby born on midnight. In the same Mumbai hospital, a well-to-do Muslim woman gave birth to a son, Shiva, at the same moment that a Hindu woman from the slums gave birth to Saleem (and died for her effort). But, a radically-minded, love-stricken nurse, Mary Pereira, switched the babies, and so the well-to-do Muslim woman took home Saleem, while Shiva was sent off to the slums with his freshly widowed father.

Shiva scorns Saleem and his Midnight's Children Conference. He scorns Saleem's optimism, his Western sympathies, his democratic tendencies, and where Saleem is diplomatic and impotent, Shiva is war-mongering and fertile. They are the two sides of India's newly minted coins, and although Saleem starts out life in Lord Methwold's British estate, complete with cocktail hour and caged budgies, while Shiva fights for his life in the slums, as India's fledgling democracy falters and Indira Gandhi desperately struggles to maintain her rule, the fortunes of India's midnight sons reverse, and Saleem slips into a destitute life in magician's ghetto while Shiva rises in status, a gentleman soldier.

As Indira Gandhi circumvents the democratic process, issuing what will be a 2-year State of Emergency, granting herself sweeping powers and the right to rule by decree, Shiva's son, Aadam is born, and Saleem, his effective guardian, realizes that the era of the India's midnight chidren just about over.

We, the children of Independence, rushed wildly and too fast into our future; he, Emergency-born, will be is already more cautious, biding his time; but when he acts, he will be impossible to resist. Already he is harder, stronger, more resolute than I: when he sleeps his eyeballs are immobile beneath their lids. Aadam Sinai, child of knees-and-nose, does not (as far as I can tell) surrender to dreams.

As Saleem's 31^st birthday approaches, he stews that last of his story into 30 chutney jars. Preserving the story of the midnight children like pickles, Saleem is preparing to step aside, to hand over history-making to the next generation, to children like Aadam, and Shiva's many anonymous children. But Saleem's wise enough to leave one empty jar – the future chutney– because he knows that tomorrow's story is one he cannot tell. Subsequent generations of midnight children will be the ones who determine how it all turns out.

Reading Midnight's Children I was reminded of the many Englishes in the world. Not that I needed much reminding: as a Canadian I speak an English that is neither American nor British, while owing much to both. And the English spoken in Jamaica is not the English spoken in Ireland is not the English spoken in Singapore is not the English spoken in Nigeria is not the English spoken in South Africa is not the English spoken in Australia and so on. However, these differences of grammar, idiom, vocabulary, and rhythm mostly disappear in literature. Considering language alone (while ignoring setting for example), J.M Coetzee and Peter Carey and John Banville could all be neighbours. Get them in a room together and the rhythm of their language (to say nothing of their accents) places them. There is a case to be made for a greater reflection of these diverse Englishes in the literary establishment. Perhaps the greatest legacy of this book -- with two Bookers and a James Tait Memorial Prize - is that it gave Indian English literary voice.

91. Tobacco Road by Erskine Caldwell

noreply@blogger.com (Devon S.) — Wed, 05 May 2010 19:28:00 +0000

This was the first book on the list that I really scratched my head over. Sure, I hated Sophie's Choice, but William Styron was an important figure in 20^th century literature – not the least for his role at The Paris Review – and Sophie's Choice was his best-selling book. Valid reasons or otherwise, at least I understood. But, with Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road, I haven't got a clue.

Tobacco Road tells the story of an impoverished family in Depression-era Georgia: the Lesters. The Lester patriarch, Jeeter, is a feckless, selfish man, who happens to have descended from a family of cotton farmers. However, through the generations, the family's been so reduced that now Jeeter's barely a sharecropper: he lacks the resources and credit to acquire the seed needed to actually plant a crop. Jeeter Lester is a farmer in his mind, alone.

In fact, he wastes away the days dreaming about farming while felling the blackjack, that grows rife on his farm, to sell as firewood for a pittance in Augusta. Fortunately, most of Jeeter's 17 children have left home, leaving him with only two mouths to feed – Ellie May, 18, and Dude, 16 – besides his wife, Ada's, and his own. His mother also lives with them, but Jeeter doesn't feed her when he can help it. Instead, she's left to scrounge for scraps like a dog.

Actually, extreme poverty has reduced all of the Lesters to little more than dogs. Their hunger is so desperate that it isn't safe for Jeeter's son-in-law, Lov Bensey, to pass by the farm with a bag of turnips on his shoulder. Lov knows that he probably won't make it home with his bag of turnips full, but sexual frustration gets the better of him: it's been nearly a year since Jeeter sold his 12 year-old daughter, Pearl, to Lov for seven dollars, but she's proven to be a less than willing bed-mate, a less than affectionate wife. Lov has tried to, alternately, bully and woo her, but is now so desperate he's considering force, and so he takes his chances with the turnips to get Jeeter's opinion on the wisdom of tying Pearl down. Literally. The Lesters eagerly watch Lov approach, and by the time he reaches the farm, they are frantic with hunger, luring him and his turnips off the road like pack-animals closing in for the kill. What ensues (a more or less, successful attempt to seduce the sack away from him) is either a darkly comic set-piece or a heart-breaking portrayal of rural poverty. I wasn't quite sure.

It is precisely this confusion that ruined this book. While there's little in the way of plot (Jeeter doesn't do much; Ada pines for a fashionable burial dress and some snuff; Pearl runs away; Ellie-May takes her place with Lov; Dude marries Sister Bessie, a whore-turned-preacher twice his age, they buy a car, in place of food or seed, then, summarily destroy it; Jeeter burns his land, in preparation for seed his doesn't have, and succeeds in burning down his house), there's less in the way of pathos. Caldwell presents the sharecroppers as victims of progress, kicked when they're down by landlords and bankers. Caldwell would have us believe that Jeeter's stubborn refusal to take job in town is noble, but I couldn't help but see it as dumb. Perhaps, the problem is that I was never really convinced that Jeeter, with all the land, all the seed, all the guano, in the world would actually get off his butt and farm. Or perhaps, my inability to feel for Jeeter was the result of being made to feel like a sociopath for much of this book.

No, really.

I read decidedly unfunny things (Grandma Lester being ran over, repeatedly, with the new car; Dude's response to killing a black man on the road) and yet found myself laughing. Don't get me wrong, I have no problem with dark humour, but when the priming is unclear (is this really a joke?), I was left feeling uncomfortable.

Otherwise, the book is written competently enough. Not, top-100 material, but if South Park meets Hee-Haw sounds appealing, then you might want to check it out. Unless, of course, I'm wrong, and it wasn't supposed to be funny at all. But, if that's the case, I should probably seek some psychiatric help.

92. Ironweed, by William Kennedy

noreply@blogger.com (Devon S.) — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 17:50:00 +0000

William Kennedy's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Ironweed, proves that mother was right: you can't judge a book by its cover. Literally. My copy is exactly similar to the dour beige cover that heads this post, and as I picked it up, I wasn't sure if that wrinkled man, in his rumpled fedora, represented William Kennedy (in lieu of a back-cover author photo) or Francis Phelan, the down-and-out protagonist of the book. Either way, I opened it with very specific expectations. It wasn't just the gloomy palette or that, to my mind, lopsided mugs hint at a rough-and-tumble life. Nor was it the fact that fedoras (with or without pencils and PRESS cards) are the official uniform of hard-drinking, chain-smoking reporters (circa 1920), schlepping around cameras with exposed flashbulbs, and that my all-time favourite, 20's-era reporter was Ernest Hemingway, who filed stories at my hometown paper, The Toronto Star. It was the aggregate muck of these associations, coupled with the first sentence of the back-cover blurb: “Francis Phelan, ex-ballplayer, part-time gravedigger, full-time drunk, has hit bottom,” that convinced me I was in for a hard-luck tale told in a masculine, muscular prose.

I was wrong.

And I was stunned. I felt like the reader in Italo Calvino's if on a winter's night a traveller, who finds himself constantly surprised by his mis-bound book, so big was the chasm between what I expected and what I got.

Sure, in summary , the story is wretched enough: Francis Phelan, pro-ballplayer turned alcoholic bum, is so racked with guilt for his role in the accidental death of his infant son that he abadoned his family 20-odd years ago. Hoboing has taken him across the country and back again: right back to his hometown, Albany, and a jail cell. Francis is picked up on an outstanding warrant (election fraud), and when the story makes the papers, filial duty brings his son, Billy, down to the jailhouse to bail him out. Stuffing some money in Francis' hand, Billy makes it clear that Francis is still welcome at home. Francis spends the next few days lingering around town, digging graves, hauling junk, ostensibly collecting money to secure a bed for himself and his girlfriend, Helen, while mustering up the courage to make an overdue visit home.

I know: it sounds like a gutter tour, snapshots of a wasted life. But, from the very first page it was apparent: Ironweed is a fantastical exploration of the redemption of the soul.

Francis's mother twitched nervously in her grave as the truck carried him nearer to her; and Francis's father lit his pipe, smiled at his wife's discomfort, and looked out from his own bit of sod to catch a glimpse of how much his son had changed since the train accident.

Dead people, lighting pipes in the graves, looking on? This was magical realism! My literary prejudices rose up, full-force. Certain milieus seem perfectly suited for magical realistic treatment. The Colombian rainforest (One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez). African-American life, post-Civil War (Beloved by Toni Morrison). Literary society in Soviet Russia (The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov). They all have something – intensity, sorrow, absurdity – to support the fantastical. But Albany, New York? Granted, I've never been there, but I couldn't stop thinking about the Walden Galleria. No wait, that's Buffalo.

But, Francis has (unwittingly) chosen a special time wind up in Albany: All Saint's Day. It's a time when the barrier is said to be thin between the worlds and the dead walk the earth; a phenomenon Francis can't escape from, for everywhere he turns, it seems he stumbles upon a ghost. Harold Allen; the scab Francis killed during a strike with a rock. The Fiddler; Francis' friend, who had his skull split open by a soldier in the strike. Aldo Campione; a horse thief, who fell from a moving train while running from the cops.

Of course, not all of Francis' shades have been felled by violence. There are his newlywed parents and his married neighbor, Katrina Daugherty. Katrina was a woman of elegance, charm and generosity. She was also “a caged woman with a rabbit in her teeth”, and responsible for Francis' sexual awakening. The scenes involving the two of them of are among the most moving in the book. And while Katrina is otherworldy in life, so she is in death: a profusion of dandelions cover her grave, so strange and spectacular as to attract tourists.

But, as lovely as Kennedy's prose is, and as moving are his characters (especially Katrina and Helen), we mustn't forget: Francis roams Albany for a reason. In the first pages of the book, Francis visits his infant son, Gerald's, grave. It is the first time he has thought about his son's death, the first time he has acknowledged his guilt. Gerald, for his part:

imposed on his father the pressing obligation to perform final acts of expiation for abandoning the family. You will not know, the child silently said, what these acts are until you have performed them all. And after you have performed them you will not understand that they were expiatory, anymore than you have understood all the other expiation that has kept you in such prolonged humiliation. Then, when these final acts are complete, you will stop trying to die because of me.

And so, as we follow Francis, and watch him do good, along with the bad, we're never really sure how the sum tallies up. When Francis finally makes his visit home, he's welcomed with open arms, but forgiveness isn't enough to keep him there. Strangely, it is the lingering heat of yet, another murder, that brings him home, we think, for good. Tainted redemption, to say the least.

But then, perhaps we, like Francis, are not to understand, how exactly it was, that he redeemed his soul.

93. The Magus by John Fowles

noreply@blogger.com (Devon S.) — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 18:04:00 +0000

It's hard to do The Magus justice in a 1200-word blog post. The plot is complicated, the themes, complex, and for what it's worth, it's better read with minimal preliminary exposure. It's also hard to whole-heartedly praise The Magus. It's plausible that someone could walk away from it feeling manipulated and confused. Me, I am ambivalent. At times, I found myself invigorated in a way I haven't been by a book in years. Yet, I also grew weary of the gravitas, impatient with the twisting plot. I blame it on my aching bones; I should have read The Magus ten years ago.

In my late-teens, early 20s, I was obsessed with Hermann Hesse. I read and re-read books, like Demian, Steppenwolfe, The Glass-Bead Game, with a near-religious excitement that I've known with only a handful of writers, before or since. Hesse, influenced by Eastern philosophy, was a psychological explorer, and his fiction examined how the human psyche, in a very real way, shapes our possible experience, and limits our knowledge, of the physical world. The Magus is a psychological adventure of a similar vein, however, instead of a metaphysical tale of transcendence, Fowles is asking us consider the nature of human freedom, and what it means to embrace it in our dualistic world.

Human freedom, like much of our experience, when manifested, has a double aspect; true freedom involves both the body and the mind. To illustrate this Fowles asks us to consider the following situation.

A group of 81 innocent men are being held prisoner by Nazi soldiers in occupied Greece. A soldier puts a gun in one of the prisoner's hand and asks him to kill an ^82nd prisoner. If he does, the other 81, including himself, will be set free. If he doesn't, all 82 men will die. What should this man do? If he doesn't kill the 82nd man, is he responsible for everyone else's death? But, what if he does kill the 8^2nd man? Is he responsible for his death? Is he justified in ending another man's life? If, after the war, he is somehow brought to trial, it's our intuition that, at the very least, his responsibility is mitigated. He didn't have a choice, we'd say. If he didn't kill that man, 81 other people would have died. One might even go so far to think of this man as a hero; he overcame his aversion to murder, he killed one man to save 81 others.

In this situation, there's no doubt; the man's physical freedom is limited. But what of his mental autonomy? Can he really be made to do what he doesn't want to do? By killing that man, doesn't he choose to value his life (and 80 others) over one? Whether, this is right or wrong is not the point. By making that choice, he participates in, and affirms the game of the Nazi soldiers.

But, what if, he doesn't play? What if he looks the soldier in the eye, and says, 'Do what you like with us, but I will not pick up that gun, nor will I feel guilty for what you choose to do'? The man, who steadfastly refuses to play, without guilt or hesitation, is a man, who when robbed of his physical freedom, knows that he has to hold all the more tightly to the freedom still left to him: his ability to choose.

The man who may (or may not have) refused to play this game is Maurice Conchis, a rich and mysterious recluse who sets out to show a young (physically free!) Brit, Nicholas Urfe, the shackles that bind his mind.

Nicholas, for his part, is drifting through life, trying his darnedest to avoid being anchored down. A graduate of Oxford, orphaned during college, tired of teaching in East Anglia (and desperate to extract himself from a romance that's becoming too complicated), Nicholas appeals to the British Council. As luck would have it, a position has opened up for an English teacher in the Lord Byron School, on the small Greek island of Phraxos. Nicholas applies, but it is already late August (the post starts in October); he doesn't expect much. To pass the time, he takes up with a pretty (and somewhat entangled) Australian girl named Alison. While Alison quickly falls in love with him, Nicholas is relieved to escape when he finally learns he got the post.

Island life is a bit quieter than anticipated. With not much else to do, Nicholas spends his leisure time walking around, and tracking down information about a recluse he had been warned about named Maurice Conchis. One day, he ventures off the beaten path, and stumbles upon a mansion hidden from the cove. It is here that Nicholas first meets Maurice Conchis.

Maurice invites him to tea, and Nicholas is struck by Maurice's enigmatic manner. Nicholas had been warned not to get involved with Maurice, but Nicholas is starved for cultured company and intelligent conversation, and so he gladly accepts Maurice's invitation to spend a couple of days on his estate the following weekend.

That invitation is Nicholas' call to adventure, and every weekend, situations (scripted and otherwise) unfold, as if part of a game. Nicholas becomes yet another epic hero, like Hercules, Jason, and Perseus, asked to fight his way to meaning and his adult place in the world.

The problem is, Nicholas is stubborn and stunted. His mind is yoked to the conventions of his country and class. He slogs through life, just one of the pack, and he's most comfortable when people do what is expected of them. And so when, Maurice, twists (and twists and twists again) the trajectory of his little game, Nicholas is unable play his part in the game(or walk away!). He fails to understand the archetypes he encounters, fails to learn what he can from them. Instead, he falls in love with them, chases them, tries to possess them. His longing is inappropriate, but he won't be denied, and soon he is obsessed with what is irrelevant – tracking down the truth.

Of course, Nicholas' questing is not for naught. He returns from his underworld to claim a prize (of sorts). Trouble is, by the end of the book, I didn't feel that Nicholas had earned it at all; he had only partially learned his lesson. It's here, that as a hero's journey, The Magus fails. Or perhaps, that's the point – Nicholas is a failed hero.

Fowles packs a lot in his punches, and his front-and-center allusions, unfortunately, have the effect of turning people off of this book. From Greek mythology to Shakespeare to Carl Jung to Sir James George Frazer (and I am sure many more that I didn't pick up on), it's easy to think that Fowles packed too many ideas into one (albeit 668 page) book. But something about all those ideas is exciting, and captured for me, the best thing about this book.

I remember when I discovered Tolstoy. I peppered all my undergraduate philosophy papers (quite unfortunately) with minimally relevant references to the Russian writer. It wasn't that I was showing off; I'm sure my professors didn't give a damn whether I had read the Russian classics or not. I was just excited. I was amazed by the universality I had found in Tolstoy's 19^th century Russia. Much to the annoyance of my professors and friends, I was excited to share Tolstoy's insights, which I saw everywhere I turned.

For me, The Magus is a book written from that magical period in early adulthood, when we still believe in the power of ideas, when philosophy still has the power to better our world. Sure, it's slightly immature and ambitious, but there is a real sincerity, a real reverence for ideas here, that, on my better days, when my bones don't ache, I know I'd do well to hold on to.

94. Wide Sargasso Sea, by Jean Rhys

noreply@blogger.com (Devon S.) — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 18:59:00 +0000

I wasn't sure what to expect when I started Wide Sargasso Sea. On the one hand, I had always found the title wonderfully poetic (the Sargasso Sea is a seaweed-covered region in the North Atlantic where many an ancient ships used to get stuck, for weeks, due to the circling currents that surround the Sargasso's perpetually calm waters) , and Jean Rhys, who was Creole and an alcoholic, who had been a showgirl and – briefly – a prostitute, intrigued me. Actually, I've always been fascinated by women of the underclass – the whores, the addicts, the criminals – who, abused and abandoned, managed to bring soulful beauty into the world, despite their miserable lives. To me, Jean Rhys was the Edith Piaf of literature.

On the other hand, I have a visceral repulsion for fan-fictiony books. I'm not exaggerating; I feel an almost physical disgust when I stumble across books like How Heathcliff Found His Way Back to Wuthering Heights (yup, that's a real one) or Mr. Darcy Takes A Wife: Pride and Prejudice Continues. Of course, I am in no way disputing the artistic power of allusive works – when the touch is light and writer, skilled and playful. However, more often than not, these companion fictions are unimaginative stories told in sub-standard prose; an embarrassment.

Needless to say, I approached Wide Sargasso Sea with ambivalence, but I closed it surprisingly pleased. While Rhys was clearly a fan of Jane Eyre, and Charlotte Bronte, one can imagine how Jane's racially charged description (a discoloured face – a savage face; the fearful blackened inflation of the lineaments!) of Rochester's first wife, Bertha Mason, provoked and challenged Rhys:

. . .a woman, tall and large, with thick and dark hair hanging long down her back. . . At that moment I saw the reflection of the visage and features quite distinctly in the dark oblong glass. . . [They were] fearful and ghastly to me--oh, sir, I never saw a face like it! It was a discoloured face--it was a savage face. I wish I could forget the roll of the red eyes and the fearful blackened inflation of the lineaments! . . .[She]... was purple: the lips were swelled and dark; the brow furrowed: the black eyebrows widely raised over the bloodshot eyes. [She reminded me] . . .of the foul German spectre--the Vampyre.

But this book is so much more than a Jane Eyre prequel; it is complex tapestry of feminist and post-colonial themes. It is also a marvelous refitting of the gothic-romance genre of Jane Eyre.

While the meat-and-bones gothic tropes are here – madness and magic; death and decay; lost fortunes and leaked secrets – they're rubbed with jerk and given a distinctly Caribbean flavour. In Wide Sargasso Sea, love doesn't blossom in spite of dark-and-stormy nights and otherworldy frights – as is typical of the gothic-romance genre. Rather, it's the romance itself, that is terrifying.

The story traces the transformation of Antoinette Cosway, the Jamaican daughter of slave-owners , to Bertha Mason, the mad woman locked away by her husband in the attic of Thorfield Hall.

The 1834 Emancipation in Jamaica impoverished the Cosways. Antoinette's father was cruel and hated, and after his death, Coulbiri Estate runs to ruin; the newly freed slaves have long memories, and – now they have a choice – the Cosway plantation is a place they'd rather not work. Antoinette's mother, Annette, bears the brunt of their ruined reputation. Abandoned by the whites (Coulbiri is too remote, too isolated, and everyone has problems of their own) and scorned by the blacks, the Cosways – Annette, Antionette, and her disabled brother, Pierre – fall into near-desperate poverty.

Rejected by her mother (who favours and fusses over Pierre), isolated from white children, tormented by the black ones (white nigger, white cockroach), Antionette leads a lonely childhood until her mother marries a rich Englishman, Mr. Mason.

It burns the blacks to see the Cosway widow and the Coulbiri Estate restored to wealth. Before the Cosways were something to laugh at; now they're something to hate. Annette senses the venomous loathing around them and begs Mr. Mason to move the family from Jamaica. But he doesn't understand island life, he thinks her ridiculous; in his opinion, the blacks are far too lazy to be dangerous. Of course, when he realizes that he's wrong, it's too late; his house is already half-burned to the ground.

The family escapes, unharmed, but Coulbiri is destroyed, and when Pierre dies a short time later, Annette's grief overcomes her. She blames Mr. Mason – none of this would have happened, if he had listened to her. Hysterical, she tries to kill him.

Not knowing what to do, Mr. Mason buys his wife a small house, and locks her up, alone, with caregivers. He rarely visits, and has no way of knowing she is being raped and abused. When she dies, it's rumoured she killed herself.

While Mr. Mason travels between the islands, further amassing wealth, Antoinette is sent first to live with an aunt, and then to be educated in a convent. Isolated from a world she finds threatening and cruel, for the first time in her life, she is happy. But when she turns 17, Mr. Mason fetches her to be married.

Mr. Rochester (who is never named) is taken with her beauty, but but he doesn't love her. He's a second son, in need of a fortune. Antoinette, suspects as much, but most of her life she has felt vulnerable, unsafe; she just wants to be protected. It's only after Rochester promises to take care of her, that Antoinette finally goes through with the marriage.

However, within a matter of months, Rochester reneges on his promise. During their honeymoon in Granbois, Domenica, Antoinette, finally safe, lets go of her anxiety, and falls in love with her husband. Rochester is overwhelmed. He finds the landscape and the heat intense, he despises the natives, and is disgusted at himself for feigning love for fortune. When he receives a letter detailing the Cosway curse – Annette's mental illness and Antoinette's imminent hysteria – all his resentment and discomfort coalesces into anger at Antoinette. His blood as hot as the island noons, he seeks his revenge in the loins of a servant girl - loudly, in a room beside Antoinette's.

Antionette acts like any other young woman would – hell hath no fury like a woman scorned – she is furious. Her heartbroken hysteria is all the confirmation Rochester needs; his wife is mad, like her mother. She tries to explain to him, but it's no use. When he returns to England, he locks her up, with a guard/caregiver in the attic of Thornfield Hall.

Of course, after years of being locked in the attic, her ferocious anger gives way to real madness. The book ends with her in the process of liberating herself – by burning down the house.

The horror of Antoinette's situation is Kafka on the homefront, in the bedroom. She is pulled from the convent and thrust into a world – mercenary marriage – that she has had no preparation for. She naively asks for the one thing she wants – protection. In exchange, she gets a cruel husband (a zombie-man: nameless, souless, loveless; an automaton blindly sent out into the world to amass money). When she realizes the situation she finds herself in, she has no money, no rights and no one to fight for her interests. She is her husband's, to do with as he pleases, and he locks her up, a mad woman, first by slander, then by fact.

Come to think of it, maybe Rhys' reworking of the gothic-romance has taken us all the way to blood-chilling, heart-breaking horror.

95. Under the Net, by Iris Murdoch

noreply@blogger.com (Devon S.) — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 17:26:00 +0000

Everyone knows a thing or two about Iris Murdoch: she was promiscuous, bisexual, and sharp; she was the better-more-talented-half of a literary marriage born at Oxford (to John Bayley); in 1978, The Sea, The Sea won her a Booker and in 1987, she was named a Dame of The Order of the British Empire; she was partially deaf and suffered from extreme arthritis. And, of course – she died of Alzheimer's.

In much the same way that people seem to be casually acquainted with the odd fact or two about Dame Iris' life, most people are able to name at least one of the 26 novels she wrote.

Under the Net, published in 1954, was her first. While it has been said to be her only derivative work (she dedicates the book to Raymond Queneau and has openly acknowledged Queneau and Samuel Beckett as influences), in places, her prose strikes me as startlingly original. Her desciptive language is lively; with metaphors that are as inventive as they are apt, Murdoch manages to sneak up on (and capture) the essence of her object. This is especially interesting when taken together with the underlying philosophy of the book.

Don't get me wrong. Under the Net is more sprightly comedy-of-errors than weighty philosophical novel, in part, because our clueless hero, Jake Donaghue, is so affable. But Jake – a talented writer – is lazy. He is perfectly happy getting by on translations of junky bestsellers by Jean-Pierre Breteuil, rather than writing novels of his own. But as a Golden Goose, Breteuil's eggs are often more tin than gold. Fortunately for Jake, his insouciant nature is appealing, and there's always someone around willing to help out with room and board.

However, the book opens as Jake's current welcome has run out. Having just returned from Paris, Jake learns his girlfriend, Madge, took up with the big-shot bookie, Sammy Starfield, when he was gone. An aspiring starlet, Madge knows a golden opportunity when she sees one (Sammy is a big investor in films) and she wants Jake and Finn (Jake's sidekick) out. Jake's not too cut up about Madge; while he liked her well-enough, they were never in love.

Now faced with the unpleasant task of procuring digs, Finn suggests that Jake contact his old flame, Anne Quentin. That is when this story really starts.

It has been years since Jake has seen Anne, and tracking her down brings back slew of baggage and a bunch of old friends. Problem is, Jake has grown none the wiser in the years since he has last seen Anne and Co., and his foolish presumptions take him from a Mime Theatre to a starlet's house (Anne's sister, Sadie) to pub-after-pub searching for Hugo (one of his aforementioned former friends) to swimming in the Thames to Sammy Starfield's flat to stealing a showdog to an on-set riot to Paris back to London to Hugo's hospital bed.

It is here, on the floor, beside Hugo's hospital bed that Jake realizes how wrong he was about what has really been going on. That Hugo should be the one to enlighten Jake is fitting. Their relationship has always been one of mutual enlightenment; they spent hours discussing everything from politics to sex during a residential cold-cure experiment. Jake was so impressed with Hugo's philosophical manner (an objective, ego-less approach) and his lack of theoretical allegiance that he tried to capture Hugo's ideas in a fictional dialogue called The Silencer.

It is Jake's embarrassment at having written the homage and his conviction that Hugo would disapprove that lead him to blow Hugo off. However, Hugo, having read The Silencer didn't recognize the philosophy as his own. Or at the very least, he liked Jake's version much better.

It is this philosophy – on the inadequacy of language and theories to accurately describe the world – that, so favourably, influences Murdoch's prose (remember, that inventive, apt metaphor). Murdoch, heavily influenced by Wittgenstein, wants to explore the inability of human language (and by extension, our theoretical systems) to describe the nature of the world. While language might enable some level of communication about the world (for example, all English speakers have some idea about what I talk about when I say the word 'apple'), it is ill-equipped to accurately encompass the nature of the apple-in-itself. That is, what the apple is in its entirety, not just what it is for me (or any other human observer). We can't help but 'lie' when we speak about the world because we do not have the psychological tools to be completely 'honest'.

And because our language is a by-product of reasoning capacity, our theories (born of both our language and our reasoning capacity) fail to capture the essence of the world. The best we can do is approach the apple-in-itself through metaphor. We can speak of molecules and atoms, of nuclei and electrons, of bosons and quarks, but these are just theoretical constructs, models, metaphors, to wrap our mind around what we can not directly experience or understand. In a way, we are all Jake; we can't help but be mistaken – seduced by the ingenuity of our own theories – into thinking we have an accurate understanding of the world. This is the eponymous net – the limits of language, of our reasoning capacity – that we are all trying to get under.

But like I said, this novel is deceivingly light; there are many scenes that are simply funny (Jake 'stuck' outside Sadie's apartment on the fire escape; Parisian booksellers readying their windows for the winner of the Prix Goncourt winner) or magical (Jake in Bastille Day Paris; his trailing 'Anne' through the Jardin des Tuileries; Jake, Finn and Lefty's late-night swim in the Thames) In this book – like in life – the philosophy is inessential; one can ignore it and still enjoy herself.

96. Sophie's Choice by William Styron

noreply@blogger.com (Devon S.) — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 15:31:00 +0000

After closing what has, perhaps, become William Styron's best-loved book, I spent a long time brooding over the experience, foraging in vain for something nice – however, slight – to say. I know, nothing obligates me to rave, rapturous, over every book; I just feel better when I can find at least one laudable quality, at least one nice thing to say. Perhaps it's because I know writing a book, however horrid, is harder than not writing one at all. Or perhaps it's because I find summary dismissals intellectually lazy, and I'd rather struggle to appreciate something than reject it out of sloth. Or perhaps, I'm still besieged by memories of childhood scoldings, and as my mother, all too often, said: If you can't say something nice, you shouldn't say anything at all. But at the risk of inciting my finger-wagging, proverb-parroting mother, there was nothing – rien, zip, zilch, nada – that I liked about this book. Let's be honest – I hated it.

I hated the verbosity, the thick-thumbed handling of theme, not to mention the overall sloppiness of the prose. So much so, in fact, that if I hadn't committed to reading it for this blog (and you, dear reader), I might have done something relatively rare for me – I might have abadanoned the book. I know, I'm in the minority here; I know that many people consider Sophie's Choice to be a deep and tragic book. Crazy me – I just don't see it.

The problems start with the insufferable diction (we'll get to that) of our narrator, Stingo, a 21-year old virgin from Virginia, and the annoyingly discursive way (while not entirely irrelevant, excisable passages account for about a third of the book) he tells of his friendship with Holocaust survivor, Sophie, and Nathan, her demented beau. It is 1947, and all three live in a boarding house in Brooklyn. Stingo falls in love with the beautiful Sophie, when he comforts her (sort of) after Nathan flips out. Wild-eyed and crazy, Nathan eventually tears off, but not before landing some low blows (insults, not punches) on Stingo. As strange as this first encounter is, it's stranger still when Sophie and Nathan – ecstatic and contrite, respectively – show up, beach towels and picnic basket in hand, at his door the following morning.

To Stingo's credit, he has his doubts; Sophie and Nathan have a relationship that is obviously dysfunctional. Why get involved? But Sophie is the primary object of Nathan's abuse, and if she can forgive him so completely, who's Stingo to hold out? It isn't long before Stingo, Sophie and Nathan are the best of friends. Nathan is a gracious and generous genius; Sophie, a sweet, non-imposing doll, and Stingo hankers after Nathan's praise and approval, just as he pines for Sophie's love. This, in spite of the fact that Nathan intermittently goes off his rocker, upbraiding them both cruelly, and beating up Sophie.

All this summer-love drama is interspersed with flashbacks of Sophie's former life (as apparently told to Stingo) . Through Stingo's rambling narration (Styron's irritating way of generating suspense) we learn that Sophie's father was an Anti-Semitic professor of law in Krakow. He married her off to an equally bigoted man she didn't love. Under the thumbs of both her husband and her father, Sophie helps produce and distribute anti-Semitic propaganda – pamphlets promoting the Final Solution. While Sophie is repulsed by her father's ideas, she isn't above keeping a pamphlet on her person, presumably a 'Get Out of Jail Free' card in Nazi-occupied Poland. While her pamphlet fails to impress (when she finds herself in a situation to use it), her Aryan beauty and flawless German are enough to earn her privilege when she is sent to Auschwitz, with her two children, for stealing a ham. Placed in the stenographer's pool, she is exempted from the deadly physical labour; later, she is sent to work for Commander Hoss himself.

This is Sophie's golden opportunity, and Sophie tries to seduce Hoss to gain her freedom, or at the very least, the freedom of her son. Unsuccessful as a seductress, she whips out her weapon of last resort – her father's pamphlet– but Hoss is unmoved, and Sophie is returned to the general pool of stenographers.

As a prisoner, Sophie falls from hyper-privileged to merely privileged, and by the time Stingo gets around to telling us about Sophie's horrible choice – the presumed reason for her invariably self-destructive behaviour – it's hard to care. Over a million people endured unfathomable deprivation and torture at Auschwitz. In this house of horrors, Sophie's comparatively plush experience reads as vacuous and dull. It doesn't help that Sophie, offers up nothing but the most superficial and banal account of her thoughts and feelings while incarcerated there. Here, I think Styron missed a real opportunity; Sophie, an Aryan Catholic, ambivalent toward both the Germans and the Jews, could have been an interesting vehicle to explore the realities of the Nazi occupation and the Holocaust. However, to carry such a tale, Sophie would need to be more than the vapid doll – the perennial victim – that she is in this book.

Sure, Sophie is irritatingly one-note, and the pointlessly digressive structure makes you want to throw the book across the room, but this is all velvet and silk – it barely chafes – when compared with Styron's bloated prose.

I recalled once more (how many times had I summoned their sound?) the pellucid indecencies Leslie had uttered, and as I did so – the view-finder of my mind reshaping each crevice of her moist and succulent lips, the orthodontically fashioned perfection of the sparkling incisors, even a cunning fleck of foam at the edge of an orifice – it seemed the dizzyiest pipe dream that this very evening, sometime before the sun should fulfill its oriental circuit and rise again on Sheepshead bay that mouth would be – no I could not let myself think about that slippery-sweet mouth and its impending employments.

Orthodontically fashioned perfection of the sparkling incisors? The sun should fulfill its oriental circuit? Slippery-sweet mouth and its impending employments? Goodness! Do we really need adverbs and adjectives to describe Leslie's teeth? And what's wrong with 'sometime this evening' or 'I could not let myself think about all the things that slippery-sweet mouth would do'?

Zaorski popped up now down the street, appearing as if from nowhere, astonishingly, like some blond genie, – a half-starved-looking, limping, florid-faced, broomstraw- haired man with jittery concern in his pale eyes.

What's with all the adjectives? I don't know Zaorski any better for them, and by the time I get to the end of the sentence, I just feel bruised.

Then suddenly the mist from his sweaty torso reeked in her nostrils like rancid meat and she heard herself give a gasp at the very instant that he yanked her body against his own.

Aren't 'in her nostrils', 'she heard herself give a gasp', and 'at the very instant', unnecessary or redundant? I mean, rancid meat doesn't reek in your ears, and if she heard herself, she must have just 'gasped'. And why do you we need 'at the very instant'? What's wrong with 'when' or 'as'? I know – now I am just being cranky. But it's hard not to be; the whole book is like this.

But after all this mud-slinging, I think I should mention, one relatively (here, all praise is relative) interesting thing about this book– Nathan. Nathan's bizarre behaviour engenders genuine suspense; one can't help but wonder what is wrong with him. And while I hoped Morris Fink's conjecture would turn out to be right (and Nathan was a golem), I'd only have bet on mental illness or drugs. Turns out, its both (overkill, I know); Nathan is a paranoid schizophrenic with a penchant for benzedrine and coke.

Too bad Styron didn't tell us Nathan's story, take us into Nathan's head. Sure, it might have made for a crazy ride, a chaotic trip, but at least the narrative impetus wouldn't have been so contrived. And honestly, there was little Styron could have done to make this book any worse.

97. The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles

noreply@blogger.com (Devon S.) — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 15:12:00 +0000

What can I say. I loved this book. Vivid prose. Exotic locale. Existentialist themes. I stayed up much too late to read it, enchanted – entranced even – only to wake up with bags under my eyes and vague memories of desert-sun dreams. The Sheltering Sky, by Paul Bowles, is an incredible story of two people wrestling with (and running from) their freedom, as they rush about between desert towns, chasing a specter as ephemeral as the sand djinn themselves – their love for each other.

Port and Kit are an American couple, who moor themselves in North Africa, to get “as far as possible from the places that had been touched by the war.” Each hopes that the trip – a plunge into an unfamiliar culture in an unforgiving climate – will help them find their way back to each other, but after twelve years of marriage, they are a well-travelled pair (Europe, the Near East, the West Indies, South America), and it is unlikely the extreme conditions will be enough to kindle their love. In fact, all this travel has made them tiresome; they're a bit too self-righteous regarding their ethnological insight. They are travellers, rather than tourists, Port is fond of noting:

[The tourist] accepts his own civilization without question; not so the traveller, who compares it with the others and rejects those elements he finds not to his liking.

Oh how fashionably intellectual, and this being 1945, you know Port and Kit have a library full of Jean-Paul Sartre at home. They are that couple, so complacent in their off-the-beaten-path lives, they can indulge (and suffer) their third-wheel travel companion, Tunner, even with all the “acting and formula-following in his behavior.”

As a traveling troupe, they are hardly the consummate trio. Not to mention, that even in the best of circumstances, three, all too easily, can be a crowd. So we're hardly surprised that before long (but not soon enough – by that time, Tunner has already slept with Kit), Port is scheming to “lose” Tunner in the desert.

Luckily for Port (or unluckily, but more on that later), he makes the acquaintance of an unsettling pair, the Lyles. The Lyles (they travel as mother and son, but their late-night bed-hopping habit leaves everyone guessing) have a car. But they are also obnoxiously xenophobic (francophobic, especially) and loud. However, Port condescends to accept a ride with the Lyles to Boussif, while Kit, repulsed by the pair, opts to follow, by train, with Tunner. While Port quickly comes to rue his decision to ride to with Lyles (imagine your own personal Jerry Springer show, trapped in a car in a scorching desert), Kit and Tunner, after multiple bottles of champagne, have drunken sex on the train.

In Boussif, Kit, repentant and disgusted with herself, does everything she can to avoid Tunner. Port, by now suspicious of Tunner's intentions toward Kit, is starting to think about getting rid of him. However, the trio travels intact to Ain Krorfa, where they're met with swarms of flies and putrid conditions. Tunner's delicate sensibilities are offended, and Port takes advantage of Tunner's disgust to convince him to ride on with the Lyles (who have unexpectedly ended up in Ain Krorfa, as well) to Messad.

However, Kit and Port aren't taken with Ain Krorfa any more than Tunner is, and they make arrangements to get out of there as soon as possible. They don't get far, before Port realizes his passport has been stolen (by Eric Lyle). When it is recovered in Messad, Tunner sends word that he'll bring it to Port in Bou Noura. But rather than wait for Tunner, Port decides he doesn't need/want his passport, and in a panic, scams his way (his wife, he says, is gravely ill) onto a sold-out bus to El Ga'a . A panicked Port dragging a confused Kit to the bus station is laugh-out-loud funny, but the humour here quickly turns dark – it is Port who, in fact, is gravely ill, and he suddenly succumbs to the fever he's had for days. He grows increasingly delirious as the couple nears El Ga'a. In El Ga'a, Port, barely conscious, is left in a camel stall while Kit tries, unsuccessfully, to find them lodging (the locals are fearful on a meningitis epidemic). With the help of an Arab, Kit arranges passage to Sba on the back of a fruit truck, where she spends the next few weeks sequestered on a military base, nursing Port, delirious with typhoid – to no avail. Port dies.

Tunner finally catches up to Kit - just as Port dies - but this is far from the end of his troubles. Kit's subsequent disappearance (she runs off with a caravan, spends weeks as an attic-bound concubine and then weeks as a fourth-wife, before she escapes her 'husband', to be rescued by nuns and shipped back to the American embassy) keeps Tunner in the desert, searching for Kit.

One of the most impressive things, for me, about this book (besides the wonderfully evocative prose) was the way Kit and Port came to represent opposing psychological possibilities. They are nihilists; both have peeked behind the veil, behind the sheltering sky of morality and general values, and both have peered into the “absolute night” beyond. And while Kit is terrified by anything that so much as hints at that infinite void, Port is exhilarated and awed by anything that reflects our solitude and the meaninglessness that prevails human life.

Thrown into a life without explanatory blueprints or a grand plan, we must carve out our own existential purpose. Sure, there are plenty of people (and social institutions) content to hijack our lives and determine our that purpose for us. But relinquishing our freedom to create our lives is to reject the one thing that makes us human – our ability to choose. To do so, is to live life as a beast of burden, an animal in the service of others. Port seems to understand this, roaming the world as he pleases, unbeholden to profession, family or homeland. When he discovers his passport is gone, he is secretly thrilled by the idea of circling the shifting, featureless desert, a no-man without name or home. And while he, outwardly, stands tall under the burden of his freedom, he can't help but wonder if his wandering life is, in fact, a coward's life.

How many times, his friends, envying him his life, had said to him: 'Your life is so simple.' 'Your life seems always to go in a straight line.' Whenever they said the words, he heard in them an implicit reproach: it is not difficult to build a straight road on a treeless plain. He felt what they really meant to say was : 'You have chosen the easiest terrain.' But if they elected to place obstacles in their own way – and they so clearly did, encumbering themselves with every sort of unnecessary allegiance – that was no reason why they should object to his having simplified his life. So it was with a certain annoyance that he would say: 'Everyone makes the life he wants. Right?' as though there were nothing further to be said.

Kit, on the other hand, seems to be doing everything she can to renounce her freedom. Constitutionally indecisive, she reads omens for hours before committing herself to act. Problem is, she knows the universe takes no interest – and gives no guidance – in her actions. Her portentous hand-wringing is just wishful thinking, and Kit knows that nothing, out there, can relieve her of her responsibility and freedom.

But that doesn't stop her from submitting, as much as possible, to the will of others. She lives her life for Port, being everything and anything he wants her to be. She tours the world with him, without much input or complaint. And her near complete desire to forsake her freedom means that in the absence of Port, she can't help but succumb to the will of others. Although undesirous of him, she lets Tunner seduce her on the train, and after Port dies, she completely surrenders to her body to Belqassim and another man, who rape her.

It is this desperate need to have her existence determined for her that accounts for the bliss she finds locked away in an attic – Belqassim's concubine – and later, locked away in a room, as his fourth wife. Life with Belqassim is easy; she succeeds in losing her freedom, nothing but obedience is required of her.

However, such utter surrender to the will of another is in itself a choice. Perhaps the bravest, in some ways, incomprehensible of choices – the voluntary annihilation of self. And so, we shouldn't be surprised (although I am) when Kit walks away from the American embassy agent, disappearing into the pulsing crowd in Tangier. Because isn't doing exactly what you want, however outside of character, however incomprehensible to others, the ultimate embrace of freedom?

98.The Postman Always Rings Twice, by James M. Cain

noreply@blogger.com (Devon S.) — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 13:58:00 +0000

The Postman Always Rings Twice is a hundred pages of sinewy prose. Published in 1934 – a peak period in the evolution of the hardboiled crime genre –the book signaled the literary arrival of journalist, James M. Cain, who came to be known as the father of fiction noir. While Dashiel Hammett and Raymond Chandler had already perfected the detective stories that came to define the hardboiled niche, Cain wrote from the other side, foregoing tales of investigators solving crimes, preferring, instead, to center his stories around tramps (and their femme fatales) committing them. While the sordid nature of his stories was shocking to some – The Postman Always Rings Twice was banned for “obscenity” in Boston and Canada – the amorality was merely a reflection of the social upheaval America had already undergone. With unemployment a whopping 25% in 1933, popular sentiment was a nasty brew of outrage (at the banks) and desperate impatience (with the government's failure to help; the first New Deal initiatives were only beginning to be implemented in 1933 ). With materialistic mores of the roaring '20s no longer suited to the realities of Depression-era life, people began to question the values associated with capitalist progress and consumption . As capitalist democracies crumbled into fascist bastions all over Europe, Americans projected their own disillusionment and dissatisfaction onto a slew of celebrity criminals. John Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd, Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker – all household names, lauded as righteous rebels and Robin-Hoodesque rebalancers of wealth. With such pervasive idealization of the outlaw, it's little wonder that A Postman Always Rings Twice, with its criminal anti-hero – a feature that would come to characterize the noir genre – was a popular success.

Frank Chambers, an out-of-work drifter, has just returned to California, from a binge in Tiajuana, stowed away on the back of a hay truck. He's discovered and left to find his own way, not too far from a run-of-the-mill, diner/gas bar called Twin Oaks. As hungry as he is sly, Frank tries to scam himself a meal, but the proprietor, Nick Papadakis, knows a hustle when he sees one. However, Nick also needs a hired hand; for some reason, he can't seem to keep them. Perhaps he's a poor judge of character, perhaps it's the mundane work. But more likely, than not, it's the ignominy involved in working for an immigrant – a Greek – like Nick. Whatever the reason, his hired men never last, and Nick figures a man who is in need of a free meal is a man in need of a job. Frank, however, is not that desperate – he doesn't want to work – and he has no intention of accepting Nick's offer – until he sees Nick's sultry sex-pot wife, Cora, that is. And so Frank decides to kick around for a bit, see how far he can get with her. As it turns out, marrying an immigrant has given corn-fed Cora some issues, and it's not long before the pair are steaming up cars and tangling up sheets as they greedily satisfy their lust.

Cora is miserable, and murder is the only way she out of her marriage. Although Frank has initial misgivings, he goes along with it anyway. Their first attempt is a failure (thanks to surprise cameos by a cat and a cop). Thankfully, for them, Nick recovers with amnesia, and can't remember they tried to pop him off.

For Frank, Nick's convalescence is the perfect opportunity to hit the road, but Cora isn't cut out for life as a drifter; they don't get far before Cora turns around and goes home. Frank continues on, but he isn't gone long before he returns with a hankering for Cora. As chance would have it, Frank is only in the neighbourhood for few hours before he runs into Nick. Although a little peeved that Frank, like the other hired men, left him, Nick is genuinely glad to see him. He immediately sets about convincing Frank to come back to work and invites him along on a trip to San Francisco, hoping to persuade him to stay on the trip. However, Cora is beside herself; Nick thinks it high-time they had a kid. She's desperate; it's now or never - and Frank agrees the trip is the perfect time to try their hand, again, at murder. This time, they're successful.

After a series of legal twists and turns (and betrayals), the couple is cleared of all guilt and released – with $10,000 of insurance money, to boot. They have six months to kill; Cora is forbidden to leave the state as part of her probation. Restless, Frank is chomping at the bit; he wants to hit the road. But that six months is showing Cora that she has what it takes to improve and build Twin Oaks. A wedge increasingly divides the couple, until Cora admits she is pregnant, and Frank resolves to change his ways and settle down. They marry at City Hall and head for out for a day at the beach, to celebrate. However, during a swim, Cora feels ill. As Frank is rushing her to the hospital, there is an accident. Cora is killed; Frank is convicted of her murder and sentenced to death.

This is a slim book and the action is fast, but the intricacy of ideas here is an astonishing testament to the potency of measured prose. The book was published during a time of serious misgivings regarding capitalism and Cain cunningly wove pertinent thematic threads (entrepreneurial spirit, ambition, the pursuit of wealth, the nature of success) into a tapestry of scandal; all the sordid details (the adultery, the murder, the failure of the justice system) stem from ambition and/or the pursuit of wealth.

Consider Nick. He is the American dream, personified. A hard-working immigrant, his belly bursts with entrepreneurial spirit; he sulks at the thought of Frank taking credit for a sign and won't stand for anyone undercutting him on gas. A moderately successful business man, in his silk shirts and suits, his is a story told in documents – naturalization certificate, business license, marriage certificate – all relegated to a scrapbook adorned with American flags and eagles, and curlicues and squiggles in red, white and blue. His suits are just fine enough to score him the finest prize of assimilation - an American wife.

Cora is a smart girl; she has no delusions. As she, so soberly puts it, “You spend two years in a Los Angeles hash house and you'll take the first guy that's got a gold watch.” She wants what she's been socialized to want - “to be something”, “to amount to something” – but she soon learns that all roads don't lead to success, and those that do, aren't open to everyone. An Iowan beauty queen, Cora moves to California fully prepared to capitalize on her looks, and while she hopes to catch a break in Hollywood, she recognizes quickly that that road is not for her. In her world, little opportunity is left, but marriage.

Their marriage, although loveless, should be mutually satisfying. Each is getting something they want: Cora attests to the extent of Nick's assimilation; Nick gives Cora some social leverage as an entrepreneur's wife. But Cora can't help but feel cheated; she's given more than she's gained – her self-respect and what little social power she had as an American-born white (Cora Smith to Cora Papadakis) for the privilege of cooking and cleaning in her husband's diner (rather than someone else's). The imbalance in this equation makes her desperate, and the thought of bearing “greasy” half-Greek children pushes her over the edge.

It's her deep-seeded ambition, her desire “to be something”, that causes Cora to marry a man she doesn't love, and as the strength of Frank's attachment to her becomes apparent, Cora can't fail to see as a new road opening up . While murdering Nick, might bind her to Frank, Frank wants nothing from her, but her. No money. No property. Just her. If she's stuck with him, so be it; she'll be the one in control. No doubt, their initial tryst was was born of desire, but it's Cora's ambitious calculation that allows it to continue and pushes Frank to murder.

“You talk as if it's alright.” [Frank says about her homicidal suggestion]

“Who's going to know if it's alright or not, but you and me?”

It's as if she knows she has little to fear from the justice system, for in this world, justice is meted out, not by considerations of right and wrong, but by insurance companies dodging payouts. Here, the winning side, is the one with more (numerous, effective) insurance investigators; the side that has the most money to lose. And, it's this mercenary hijacking of the justice system that sets Cora and Frank free.

The ambition, the greed, the corruption. Capitalist ills from which is born much of the scandal in this book. And so, it should only be expected, that Frank, a drifter with no property and no desire to trade his labour on the market – the antithesis of a capitalist – would meet his end after embroiling himself with such an ambitious and entrepreneurial pair as Nick and Cora. Perhaps it's naivete (or blind lust) that leads him to believe his attachment to Cora need not weigh him down. But it's evident from the start – she's no drifter and he's no entrepreneur. And as he tugs at her to sell Twin Oaks to tramp the trails with him, she barrells him down with her expansions and improvements. As the business prospers, Cora's feet are firmly fixed, while Frank is sick of it staying put, sick of the very Americaness of it, so sick of “hot dogs and beer and apple pie with cheese on the side”, he could “heave it all in the river.” Yet, he has a chance to escape - to Nicaragua to trap pumas. But he can't go through with it.

This return is to be his final surrender. He is beaten, ready to bow for the yoke, and play by the rules of the system. As they go for a post-nuptial swim in the ocean:

We started back, and on the way in I swam down. I went down nine feet. I could tell it was nine feet, by the pressure. Most of these pools are nine feet, and it was that deep. I whipped my legs together and shot down further. It drove in on my ears, so I thought they would pop. But I didn't have to come up. The pressure on your lungs drives the oxygen in your blood, so for a few seconds you don't think about your breath. I looked at the green water. And with my ears ringing and that weight on my back and chest, it seemed to me all the devilment and meanness, and shiftlessness, and no account stuff in my life had been pressed out and washed off, and I was ready to start out with her again clean, do like she said, have a new life.

However, not more than hour after this cleansing rebirth, he's on his way to jail. Too little to late? Perhaps. Or maybe he shouldn't even have tried to change his ways at all.

99. The Ginger Man, by J.P. Donleavy

noreply@blogger.com (Devon S.) — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 21:23:00 +0000

I put down J.P. Donleavy's The Ginger Man feeling disgusted (mildly), relieved (immensely), thirsty (the Monkey See, Monkey Do syndrome; Beer, anyone?) – and proud. I'd gotten through 348 pages of teenage fantasy run amok. The drinking. The brawls. The women seduced (improbably). The women beaten (gratuitously). Tales of indecent exposure (accidental) and bodily fluids (piss, shit, cum-crusted napkins) as props. It was all just a bit too much. Sure, sticking it to society, with its bothersome obligations – screw the wife, the bills, the kids – can sound like a fun way to live (never-ending parties, rebellious poverty) when you're 18. Just like eating nothing but chocolate for the rest of your life seems like fun, when you're 5. But unless all the banging, bar-hopping and brawls are accompanied by some shrewd insights (or breathtaking prose), it quickly becomes tiresome.

Enter our Ginger Man (as in Run, run, as fast as you can/You can't catch me/I'm the gingerbread man) – Sebastian Dangerfield. World War II is over, and Sebastian, an Irish-American, finds himself studying law at Trinity College, with his British wife, Marion (who he beats) and his daughter, Felicity (who he smothers). A series of stateside expulsions leaves Sebastian estranged (financially and otherwise) from his rich, and ailing, father. Biding his time until his father's death, Sebastian spends his days pawning the chattel from their rental homes, so he can spend his nights in the pub. The Dangerfields move from a house precariously perched on a cliff, after the the back yard crumbles into the crashing sea, to a sodden mass of plywood, where the waste pipe bursts, spewing piss and shit all over Marion. It doesn't take long for Marion to get fed up with Sebastian's infidelity and drinking, and when Sebastian's father sends her a commiserating cheque after she writes to complain about her treatment at the hands of his son, she leaves Sebastian for a respectable house, complete with garden. But Sebastian finds her without difficulty, and against her better judgment, she lets him stay. With one rule. No drinking. Needless to say, it's only a matter a time before Sebastian stumbles home, with the sun, drunk, and Marion packs her bags for her parents' home in Scotland. With his ball-breaking wife and whiny kid gone, Sebastian lines up a series of women willing to feed and clothe him, as he pawns his things (and theirs) for brandy and ale. With landlords and creditors on the hunt, Sebastian convinces a smitten girl, Mary, to send him her life-savings so he can find them a love shack in London. While in London, Sebastian gets the news he has been waiting for ; his father has died. But the joke's on him – his inheritance is to be held in trust for twenty years (until he's 47), at which time, he'll receive an income of $6,000 per year.

And so what's there left for Sebastian Dangerfield to do, but keep on, as he has kept on, with Mary (his conscience got the better of him and he sent for her) and his surprisingly loyal friends, eating, drinking and getting on.

I'll be honest; at first, I wasn't quite sure what to make of this book. The subject matter, admittedly, turned me off, and it obnoxiously defied analysis and classification. To me, the book fell uncomfortably short of the picaresque. Sure, the rambling episodes were funny, and Sebastian Dangerfield, as our hero, was definitely rogue. But where was the social commentary? The satire? This was violence, debauchery and misogyny, merely for its own sake.

But the more I thought about it, the more evident it became to me that that was the point. The Ginger Man is not post-war Ireland's picaresque satire; it's its grotesque carnival.

The grotesque carnival was first described as a literary mode by the great Russian literary theorist, Mikhail Bakhtin. The literary carnival is best understood, not as a critique of the prevailing social order, but as an outlet for the realities (in a way, the literary carnival is a mode of hyper-realism) that society requires one to suppress. Not surprisingly, carnivalesque works often have an exaggerated focus on the body and its processes (remember all that piss, shit and cum), and shocking and/or uncouth behaviours. The point is not to expose a corrupt or faulty social structure, but to give vent to the realities that socialization requires one to suppress. While the literary carnival allows for the expression of taboos, the grotesque nature of that expression keeps the experience safe. Sebastian Dangerfield is a horrid man. He is lazy, drunk, and horribly self-entitled. He beats his wife, tries to kill his kid, and takes advantage of an untold number of women. But we like him, in spite of ourselves, and enjoying his ridiculous adventures is safe precisely because they're so over-the-top. He's too much to be real. The hyper-realism, like a fun-house mirror, paradoxically, morphs him into a caricature, a fantasy.

Besides the fascination with taboos, the literary carnival is also rife with ambivalence. And I can think of no better way to describe Sebastian. He wants peace from his wife and creditors, yet everything he does is conducive to conflict. He wants to relax, find a bit of quiet in a pint, but he can't refrain from insulting someone and starting a brawl. In the same way, Sebastian wants to be worthy of Trinity's hallowed halls, but attending lectures, studying – it's all too much. He wants wealth, prestige and luxury, but he's incapable of proactively bringing it about.

Another aspect of the literary carnival is a sense of wanting, of incompleteness. Sebastian doesn't change, none of his problems (poverty, estranged wife etc.) are resolved, and none of his fatal flaws (drunkenness, misogyny, self-entitlement) finish him off. And that's the point. The literary carnival is a place where vices exist and are given outlet, and that's all. In the literary carnival, narrative resolution and comeuppance don't belong.

Which brings us, to perhaps the most interesting aspect of this carnival – inversion. Carnivalesque works can be described as topsy-turvy, inside-out, upside down. In this world, the low is high and the high is low. This, obviously, applies to Sebastian himself; a rich aristocrat slumming it, in rags, like a pauper. We also see this in his boorish friend, Percy Clocklan, who somehow rises to immense fortune in London, and with his refined (as refined as anyone can really be in this book) friend, Kenneth O'Keefe, who speaks Latin and Ancient Greek, but lives an impoverished life, celibate and half-starved. We see the inversion in the very subject matter of the book; in the ordinate amount of words devoted to drinking and fucking; in the fact that Sebastian thinks of Gregorian chants during sex or prays for an orgasm. But perhaps the most exciting inversion here – one that makes this book worth reading – is found in the prose itself.

Consider the following passage:

Sebastian entering the morning room. Guilty look at the destroyed desk. Miss Frost putting a great platter of sausages on the table encircled with mahogany. There was a tablecloth, back rashers. Bowl of milk and pile of neatly cut bread. Sugar. Plates clean and sparkling, a knife on one side, fork on the other.

or this:

Receptionist with mouth open. Trickle of spittle twisted on her jaw. An instant's hesitation and fear forced a nervous hand to deliver the white envelope. Dangerfield burning with red eyes. A door opening in the hall. Several bog men, watching from the staircase, slipped hurriedly back to seats, caps over hands. A final announcement from Dangerfield.

The prose in these two passages has the immediacy one expects from close, internal narration, like stream-of-consciousness. However, it is objective, outside the consciousness of any character. Throughout the book, the objective plane is characterized by just such prose (fragmented, frequent use of the present participle). However, when Donleavy does delve into a character's consciousness, he does so with prose like this:

I went to a proper preparatory school, preparing for college. I never felt those schools were good enough for me. I was aloof. Never seeking friends. But my silence was noticed by the teachers and they thought that I was a shifty article and once I heard them telling very rich boys to stay away from me because I wasn't a good influence. Then I got older and bolder. A wanton girl who had pock marks on her face and stubs of hair all up her legs when I thought girls' legs were always nice and smooth, took me into the city from the suburbs where I lived and we drank in bars.

or this:

Her stinking hairy tits. I'm not blaming her for her hair around the nipples. That's all right. I just don't like the British, a sterile genital-less race. Only their animals are interesting. Thank God they have dogs. She wants her life sitting on her fanny in India, whipping the natives. Wants Bond Street. Afternoon tea at Claridges. Lady Gawk tickling her twat with a Chinese fan. I'll break something over that woman's face. The way I lose my dignity is dreadful. Worrying about silly misunderstandings. She can leave. I'll tell her to get out. Stay out.

Sebastian's internal monologues are written in a much more structured prose. This, effectively, gives Sebastian a voice, but it also, when held in contrast with the prose of immediacy that characterizes the objective plane, represents a reversal of literary convention, an inversion of sorts, and is perhaps, the most interesting aspect of this book.

100. The Magnificent Ambersons, by Booth Tarkington

noreply@blogger.com (Devon S.) — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 16:07:00 +0000

When I first glanced over this list, I'm embarrassed to admit that I asked myself, more than once, “Who?”. Booth Tarkington (1869 – 1946) won the Pulitizer Prize twice (yes twice!!), in 1919 for The Magnificent Ambersons and again in 1922 for Alice Adams, the same year that he was named “America's Greatest Living Writer” by Literary Digest magazine. That's right, Booth Tarkington was the Phillip Roth or John Updike (well I guess not Updike, since he's dead now) of his time – and I had no idea who he was.

But after reading The Magnificent Ambersons, widely considered his best book (although I'm told there exists a significant minority who'd champion Alice Adams for this distinction), I think I understand why. There's no question about it; Tarkington was a prophet. And not just because he anticipated the social and urban effect of the vehicularization of the U.S.. Sure that's impressive, but he also structured his novel around ideas – theories of cyclical social change – that while considered quaint relics of classical sociology now, didn't gain prominence in sociological circles until more than 20 years after The Magnificent Ambersons was published ( Trattato di Sociologia Generale, by Vilifredo Pareto wasn't published in English until 1935, although it was available in French in 1917; Social and Cultural Dynamics by Pitirim A. Sorokin was first published in 1935). But these ideas – that social institutions (and societal stages) appear and disappear in reoccuring cycles – are too prominent, too integral, not to ground even the most timeless elements in this book. While Tarkington's contemporaries likely came away from this book breathless and goose-fleshed – as one often does after chancing upon a visionary – I can't help but read it as just a good book, of merely historical interest.

The book centers around the eponymous Ambersons, the reigning aristocracy in a nameless, midland town. While the Great Panic of 1873 guts many a coffer, it stuffs Major Amberson's pockets full – and the Amberson magnificence is born. The Major spurs growth in the town by building a luxurious development – the Amberson Addition – complete with cedar plank roads, stone curbs and cast-iron statues painted to resemble stone. As the Amberson prestige flourishes, the Major's daughter, Isabel, blossoms into the town belle. She is courted by both Eugene Morgan and Wilbur Minafer, and Eugene is the betting man's favourite, until an unfortunate and drunken incident, involving a serenade and a kicked-in cello, pushes Isabel into a comfortable, if not particularly passionate, marriage to Wilbur. Georgie Minafer, a spoiled, self-absorbed brat, is the product of this union and since Isabel's brothers prove not be particularly fecund (George never married; Stanley, married with no children), Georgie grows up with the expectation that he' ll be the sole heir to the Amberson fortune.

This, in part, contributes to Georgie's unbearable arrogance. That, and creepy way Isabel worships him. She does everything she can to shield him from the fall-out of his hauteur and insolence, as Georgie basks in leisure, on high, like a little god.

Sure, a measure of snotty conceit is an inherent part of adolescence, and for most of us, it's little more than a phase that rarely leaves any permanent marks. But as Eugene and George Sr. wisely note, time alone is not enough to humble youth. That is something only experience – living in a world of intransigent consequences – can do. But Georgie doesn't live in that world, and as long as Isabel's obsessive devotion keeps him floating along on his cloud, as long as he chooses to “be” things, rather than “do” things, growth and humility are qualities beyond his reach.

However, when world owes you a walloping, it won't be put off forever. When Isabel dies, Georgie is hurtled to earth, forced to fend for himself, without family, friends or fortune. And while we spend the majority of the book suffering (albeit, at times, gleefully) Georgie's arrogance, it's hard not to feel bad for him in his ruin.

Yet, as the story ends, we're left confident that Georgie's fortunes will turn. It's not merely that a bad accident (he was run over by a car) turns his mortal enemy into a benefactor and brings his youthful love, Lucy, to the hospital to watch, dewy- eyed, over his bed. Rather, Tarkington has demonstrated this to be a world of cycles. For the cyclical social theorist, societies do not evolve or linearly progress. Rather, social institutions emerge and disappear, only to reemerge again, albeit in a slightly different form. The impetus that drives these cycles is the tension between satisfying our material needs for survival while meeting the spiritual needs of our inner life. Complicated spirals of work and play, industry and art, tradition and innovation, stir a culture dynamic. In this world, the fall of the Ambersons is neither deserved nor exceptional. Times of prosperity and leisure allow for the development of novel ideas and innovations, which in turn stimulate a period of materiality and work, which brings about new forms of prosperity, ushering in a new age of leisure. And so it goes.

At the peak of Amberson magnificence, it was the Major's cultural insight that the town was ready to pass from a period of materiality to one of ideas and art. He bet, correctly, that the townsfolk, although cultural (and biological) descendants of the pioneers, were just successful enough to be ready to throw off the paranoid frugality they inherited. They were ready to pay more for tree-lined boulevards and public fountains, and the lots in the Amberson Addition sold well, and the flurry of development further cemented the Major's prominence and fortune.

However, the Major's uncanny wisdom would, as it must, give way to gross miscalculation and error. In turn, he misjudges the cultural and economic impact of the automobile and misunderstands the impetus that drives people from detached houses into apartments. He forgoes these investment opportunities to channel resources into the schemes of his perpetually unlucky son, George (in this world, economic savvy is also blessed in cycles; this time around it skipped George).

And as the Major retreats into his “second childhood” and grows increasingly detached from the world, an era of art and ideas nears its end. However, it also fostered a generation of inventors whose innovations spin the town into a period of productivity and work.

It is the emergence (really, the reemergence) of Eugene Morgan, with his ideas on improving the 'horseless wagon' and his daughter, Lucy, that usher this new era into the town. It's Eugene 's turn to anticipate the cultural and social trends of the town; it's his turn to rocket to prominence, as the Ambersons disappear and die out.

However, it's not just social trends that spiral in cycles – personal life does too. Consider Isabel. She passes from the romance of youth into marriage and motherhood, only to find herself struck by romantic love again. Upon the death of her husband, Wilbur, Eugene resumes his courtship, and if it wasn't for Georgie's howls (not to mention the fact that he whisks her away on an extended trip to Europe), Isabel probably would have married again. Here, not only does the cyclical nature of change extend to our personal lives, it approaches near natural law, and woe to anyone (ahem.. Georgie) foolish enough to try to jam the wheel's turn. But don't worry too much about Georgie. He's made of good stuff, we're told, and in Tarkington's world, cycles extend through all aspects of reality. In the words of the Major:

It must be in the sun. There wasn't anything here but the sun in the first place, and the earth came out of the sun, and we came out of the earth. So whatever, we are, we must have been in the sun. We go back to the earth we came out of, so the earth will go back to the sun that it came out of. And time means nothing - nothing at all.

Welcome

noreply@blogger.com (Devon S.) — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 17:54:00 +0000

I'm not much of a list person. In my life, lists generally fall into one of two categories: the 'TO-DO' list or the 'shopping' list, and judging from how long I've put off going to the bank now or how many times I've gone to the store for eggs, only to come home with everything but, I'm not very good at making (or following!) lists. So I figured, if I'm really going to get through the Modern Library "Best Books of the Century" list, I need to be clear about just what it is I'm committing to.

TO-DO lists itemize tiresome things;

clean the bathroom;
dentist, 9am;
bank;
mom-in-law, birthday!

boring things that responsible adults are loathe to leave undone. However, there are only so many hours in a day – only so many hours in our lives, how depressing! – and since no one wants to waste them doing chores, these wearisome tasks have a disturbing tendency to be 'forgotten' in lieu of fun things, like drinking wine, having sex, meeting your girlfriends for a bitchfest. Hence, the need to write chores down. We don't need to list the fun things because few people 'forget' to take a long, bubbly soak in the tub with a glass of Bordeaux. For some reason, I think a 'TO-DO' list is not the best way to think of the Modern Library (ML) list, especially since my 'TO-DO' lists never seem to actually get done. And I never want reading to become a chore. It should stay one of the fun things I don't have to write down.

But is it really better to think of the ML list as a shopping list? I'm sure Random House (the Modern Library is a Random House imprint) hopes so. Consider the taboo of opening someone else's fridge. Fridge interiors are intimate, personal. And not just what's in the fridge – because that's obvious enough – but the organization, the brands, the storage (Tupperware containers vs. washed-out margarine tubs) that say so much. As long as the taboo remains – and fridge doors remain opaque – there isn't likely to be a top-100 grocery list (100 best local-vore, slow-foods?). No one but your closest friends need know you love banana baby food or drink vanilla Ensure. But bookshelves aren't refrigerators and you commit no gaffe by looking them over while your host is somewhere else, dealing with your jacket, fixing you a drink, answering the door. And as you slyly skim the titles on the shelves, admit it, you judge. We all do, just as we all shelf certain books (Ulysses, In Search of Lost Time, The Man Without Qualities) where others can see them, tucking our guilty-pleasures (J.K. Rowling, Danielle Steel, Dan Brown) deep into our bedside drawers. 'Best-of' book lists take advantage of this – here are the 100 best books of the last century and if you don't want people to think you are a complete doofus, you better buy (if not, actually read) at least some. Trust me. These are tough times in the book world, and Random House wouldn't have devoted resources to compiling the list if they didn't expect it to sell some books.

Reading is a transformative experience, one that cannot, and shouldn't be, reduced to another to check on a list or something else to buy at the store. We tend to forget what a privilege it is to enter these other, often wonderful worlds. I'm a writer today just because many years ago, I experienced the magic of books.

Books, like people, are individual and complex, so perhaps that is the key to thinking about this list; a list of complicated characters, something like a guest list. Albeit a guest list for a party far more distinguished than I usually go to, but a guest list, nonetheless. Sure, this party is a WASP-y sausage-fest (but hey, Oktoberfest is fun), and people who should've been invited, haven't been. Where are Beloved and Toni Morrison? Doris Lessing with her Golden Notebook? You have to wonder who they pissed off to get snubbed ( A.S. Byatt – a little Nobel envy, perhaps?). And shouldn't we boycott a party that discriminates against some of the best and most influential works of the last century, just because they weren't originally published in English?

But, no party's perfect. I guess I'm just glad I can work the room, and while I know I won't love everyone, I look forward to getting to know them, before I judge.

Oh yeah. You're invited too.

So let's party on.