Leonard Seet, Author of Magnolias in Paradise

Leonard Seet's New Novel: Sharper Mind Darker Dreams

2020-01-10T11:00:00.001-05:00

Excelsior Publishing will be releasing Leonard Seet’s latest novel Sharper Mind Darker Dreams in November 2020.

From the author of Magnolias in Paradise comes Sharper Mind Darker Dreams, a tour de force science fiction thriller of a self without a past, a tale of lost memory and elusive love in a dystopian wasteland. A man loses his memory and must travel through a bizarre world to find his identity. He navigates among layers of dreams, synthesizing them into his reality. Through prose that evokes an eerie atmosphere, Seet blends neurobiology and AI and twists the meaning of being alive, to create a journey into human consciousness and psychologically designed reality.

Sharper Mind Darker Dreams is a 150,000-word sci-fi and the first in a potential series. In prose that evokes an eerie atmosphere, the author blends neurobiology and AI and twists the meaning of being alive, to create a journey into human consciousness and psychologically designed reality. As in Tad Williams’ Otherland, a man loses his memory and must travel through a bizarre world to find his identity. But like Douglas Hall in Daniel F. Galouye's Simulacron-3, the protagonist questions whether his world is real. Instead of roaming through several layers of simulations, here the man navigates among layers of dreams, synthesizing them into his world. And like Joe Chip in Philip K. Dick's Ubik, he continues to live after having died, but instead of being suspended in “half-life,” he lives as a “half-man.” Science fiction for readers who enjoy complex characters and mesmerizing writing as much as intricate plots.

Leonard Seet is the author of the novels Meditation On Space-Time and Magnolias in Paradise. His short fiction have appeared in Duende Literary Journal, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, and Pilcrow & Dagger. The story “Black-Naped Oriole in Hokkaido Snow” was a podcast winner at Pilcrow & Daggar and he received honorable mention in the Writers of the Future Competition for “Don't Be Afraid of the Black Rain.”

David Mitchell's Cloud Altas

2019-12-09T15:26:00.000-05:00

In Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell tells the six interrelated stories, each with a distinct voice and style, using a symmetric structure: 1-2-3-4-5-6-5-4-3-2-1.

The Pacific Journal Adam Ewing, as the title implies, is a journal of the protagonist’s adventure in the Pacific. Reading the story is like reading one of Joseph Conrad’s stories, with the European colonists dominating over the natives. Dr. Goose, Rev. Horrox and the first mate Boerhaave, epitomes of greed and callousness and the sense of entitlement, could be villains from The Heart of Darkness or Lord Jim.

The Pacific Journal Adam Ewing

Letters from Zedelghem is an epistolary about Robert Frobisher’s coming of age, and he could be one of Stendhal or Flaubert’s protagonists, charming his way through life until he meets his match.

Letters from Zedelghem

Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery is a mystery written in multiple third-person POV and it is a John Grisham style thriller about a reporter stumbling into documents that reveal a nuclear plant’s safety issues. The company’s executives would do anything to conceal the problems. The hunger for energy drives the greed and ruthlessness of these executives. The Pelican Brief comes to mind.

Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery

The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish written in a first-person POV is a humorous account of the title character’s adventure in a retirement home, a twist on One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Only through such an ordeal could this callous and cynical publisher learn to appreciate life.

The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish

The Orison of Somni-451 is a sci-fi about a fabricant server’s rise to self-awareness. The interview between the Archivist and Somni-451 reveals the sickness of the consumer-oriented society and the encroachment of technocracy. Reminiscent of A Brave New World and Oryx and Crake.

The Orison of Somni-451

Sloosha’s Crossin’ an’ Ev’rythin’ After is a first-person POV dystopian tale of survival in Hawaii. Humanity comes full circle from savagery to civilization back to savagery, as if, after Nea So Copros, society could only descend into barbarism. Again Oryx and Crake comes to mind.

Sloosha’s Crossin’ an’ Ev’rythin’ After

The six tales would just be interesting stories, if written by six writers, but David Mitchell manages to cross genres—from mystery to sci-fi and from historical fiction to literary fiction—and integrate the stories through common human predicaments into a teleological vision.

Cloud Atlas, more than great storytelling, is a postmodern study of text. In Sloosha’s Crossin’, an aged Zachry tells a yarn, where truth mixes with fiction, to a group of children. His son finds an orison which when warmed would create a hologram of Sonmi-451 telling her story, which is The Orison of Sonmi-451. And in Orison, Sonmi-451 watches a movie about a twenty-first century publisher called Timothy Cavendish. That movie is The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish. In Ghastly Ordeal, Timothy Cavendish receives from an author, the manuscript of Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery. In Half-Lives, Luisa Rey comes across Sixsmith’s letters: Letters from Zedelghem. And finally, in Letters, Robert Frobisher finds Adam Ewing’s journals in the famous composer’s house. And so, we go from yarn to stored data, to cinema, to novel, to letters, to journal—a journey through various communication media. In the spirit of Italo Calvino and other postmodern writers, Mitchell creates several levels of texts, and thus various levels of fiction. Since the aged Zachry is an unreliable narrator, we would question his yarn’s truth, as his son was doing so. The orison as stored data recounts an earlier historical period and might be true. Or is it, given the story of Orison is a setup to manipulate Sonmi-451? The movie The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish is fiction within fiction but since it is based on the life of the title character, the story may be true within Somni-451’s world. Half-Lives, Letters, and Pacific Journal are various levels of fiction within the novel Cloud Atlas.

Cloud Atlas is a modern masterpiece where the aesthetic form matches the intriguing stories. And the reader will continue to reflect on the human condition long after she has finished the book.

I saw the movie starring Tom Hanks and Halle Berry around the same time I read the novel and I prefer latter over the former. The movie, which changed various stories’ endings, destroyed the beauty of the novel. I recommend reading the book rather then seeing the movie.

Yellow Roses for Samantha

2019-12-09T15:00:00.000-05:00

Three women struggle with their lives after losing their children through a school shooting. Missy checks into a sanitarium, Jessica finds comfort in the arms of Missy's husband, and Linda takes a bottle of sleeping pills. "Yellow Roses for Samantha" is a tale of the search for hope and renewal amid tragedy.

Yellow Roses for Samantha

Ted Chiang's Stories of Your Life and Other Stories

2018-11-24T22:14:00.000-05:00

TedChiang has some very imaginative and thought provoking stories in his volume Stories of Your Life and Other Stories. We can see Borges’s influence in stories such as “Tower of Babylon,” “Division by Zero,” “Seventy Two Letters” and “Hell is the Absence of God.” “Seventy Two Letters” also reminds us of stories by Umberto Eco. Chiang’s science fiction gives due to science but he creates worlds based on pseudo sciences and forces the reader to think hard about their implications.

Tower of Babel

“Division by Zero” is a fascinating inquiry into the incompleteness of mathematics (Gödel’s Theorem). What happens when a mathematician finds out that the system of mathematics isn’t consistent, that the foundation of everything just gives way?

“The Story of Your Life” dwells into the nature of time via relativity: that time is just another variable like x, y, and z. What if we can perceive the span of time (as a continuous segment rather than discrete points) as we do in space (as a span of space rather than a single point)? Something like Henri Bergson’s continuous time.

In “Seventy Two Letters” a scientist and an inventor try to save the human race using artificial insemination and the power of name to animate or give life (like the breath or word of God). Chiang added an assassin and a cabalist just for fun.

Space-Time Curvature

“Hell is the Absence of God” is a thoughtful study of suffering and devotion. How would we respond to various blessings and misfortunes? After a misfortune, one turns to God while another away. One is troubled when she is healed and could no longer evangelize. Another wants to be the mouth of God but he receives neither blessing nor misfortune, as if he doesn’t exist. Then Neil Fisk, “though it’s been many years that he has been in Hell, beyond the awareness of God, he loves Him still.”

In “Liking What You See: a Documentary,” students in a school vote to decide whether to mandate a device to eliminate the appreciation of physical beauty. Is it fair or unfair to put everyone on a “level playing field” where beauty has no advantage? What about other attributes such as mental and physical skills?

Greg Egan's Permutation City

2018-08-25T21:34:00.000-04:00

Permutation City is smart and delightful, and messes with the reader’s mind. This novel of virtual reality with multiple levels of simulated word is an example of great world-building.

1. Start with basic science.

2. Change a few principles and laws to create pseudo-science.

3. Build a world based on this new pseudo-science.

Greg Egan creates the new world by laying down the new principles and laws, and challenges the reader to take the journey into the unknown. As a result, he gives credit to science and makes pseudo-science a key character in the story, rather than just using some fantastic science as the background, or as an excuse to a story that could happen in many other settings.

The True Believer

2018-05-19T20:36:00.002-04:00

Eric Hoffer wrote in the 1940s about the mass movements such as the rise of the Bolshevists, the Fascists and the Nazis, but he seemed to be describing the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the Arab Spring, and the current populist movements such as Brexit.

Demonstration in Tunisia

We may say that he was a prophet, but more accurately, he had isolated the ingredients that make up mass movements. He understood that mixing discontent for the present and hope for the future breeds a desire for change. He understood that a person plunges into a mass movement to dissolve his/her hated self and to replace it with a grand and almost immortal collective self. He understood the psychology of those who would tend to become followers, as well as those who would seize the chance to lead the movements. He discovered the phases of mass movements and the types of individuals who would lead, from the intellectuals to the fanatics to the pragmatists. He discovered self-sacrifice and unifying actions as the key ingredients to sustaining and advancing mass movements.

BREXIT

Hoffer’s The True Believer is required reading for our age, when populist movements dominate the global arena. It will give us insights into the who, what and how of these mass movements, insights that would help us navigate through our times.

Thinking Fast and Slow

2018-03-03T20:20:00.000-05:00

Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow, reveals many of the fallacies in our thinking, whether we are ordinary men and women or scientists, statisticians and policy makers. He partitions the thinking self into two entities with the generic names System 1 and System 2. System 1 is the intuitive part of our thinking self: the part that after training executes skills spontaneously; the part that generates impressions, feelings, and inclinations, which when endorsed by System 2 become beliefs, attitudes, and intentions. System 2 is the analytical part, which checks System 2 through critical analysis but which is often too lazy to act.

Decision Tree

Whenever System 2 fails to check System 1, there is likely to be errors in our judgment, decisions, and thinking. Kahneman, through his research throughout the years with colleagues, discovered these thinking errors including heuristic and biases such as putting too much emphases on low probability events, being influenced by how a statement or question is framed, giving more weights (in terms of probabilities) to incidences that we are familiar with or that are dramatic, ignoring base rates and focusing only on the representative features of event or person to decide probabilities. Other fallacies are overconfidence through the illusion of understanding, where through hindsight we create artificial items for success (successful companies, CEOs, startups, etc); through the illusion of validity where the environment is so “noisy” that practitioners have difficulty mastering the skill (stock picking); through neglecting the outside view (the base rate) and only focusing on what is in front of us. Also, we make bad decisions because we are not the rational individuals that utility theory, decision theory, and other economic theories presupposes (we don’t maximize expected utilities because emotions such as fear from System 1 interferes).

Normal Distribution

In general, System 1 is useful in our day-to-day lives since the shortcuts that we have developed over our lifetimes saves time and mental energy. However, at key moments, we must recognize that these shortcuts will harm rather than help us. By pointing out these fallacies, by turning these “unknown unknowns” into “known unknowns” Kahneman has alerted us to the tendencies for us to prejudge, to under-plan, to ignore the bird’s eye view, to select the wrong path, etc. Now that we are aware of the danger, we must design formal structures or informal alarms to guard against these fallacies. Since they affect personal finance, individual happiness, as well as national policies and international economics, we can’t afford to avoid them. Overcoming these fallacies will improve our individual, national, and global wellbeing.

Timothy Snyder's On Tyranny

2018-02-24T19:47:00.000-05:00

Dachau Concentration Camp

In On Tyranny, Timothy Snyder draws lessons from Nazi Germany and Stalin’s and Putin’s Russia to guard against the tactics of totalitarian regimes. These regimes have similar maneuvers to maintain their grip on their people. Of particular interests are examples of Putin’s government trying to sow discord in France, Germany, the Ukraine, and the US through fake news in social media as well as traditional ones.

Joseph Stalin

Jean-Paul Sartre’s The Imaginary

2017-12-09T20:14:00.002-05:00

In the tradition of Rene Descartes, Jean-Paul Sartre in The Imaginary added his insights into the philosophy of mind through his analysis of the imaging consciousness. In particular, his discussions on the differences among perception, conception and imagining identify the nuances among these modes of consciousness. Though he didn’t have as much empirical data from neurobiology as we have nowadays in the age of AI, his ideas provide some fundamentals of the philosophy of mind that help us understand about how we form images in our minds. Recommended for those interested in the philosophy of mind as well as existentialism.

Thoughts on Irvin Yalom’s The Spinoza Problem

2017-11-25T20:54:00.002-05:00

Spinoza

In The Spinoza Problem, Irvin Yalom contrasts the courage and confidence of Spinoza with the insecurity and pettiness of Alfred Rosenberg. Spinoza’s curiosity took him beyond his cultural and customs, and even his community when he was ex-communicated. Yet, his freedom to think his own thoughts brought him joy unspeakable. On the other hand, Rosenberg, through he sought to create a ideology of the master race, of which he was a member, his emotions rose and falls through others’ view of him. In particular, he sought the approval and praise of Hitler, but the latter only used him and never respected him. And members of Hitler’s inner circle shunned and scorned Rosenberg. Both Spinoza and Rosenberg left their marks in history, one leading latter generations to rise above superstition and muddled thinking, the other contributing to the death of millions. History can judge them by the fruits they bore.

The Nuremberg Trial

Mastering Point of View in Fiction

2017-10-17T17:25:00.000-04:00

(Since Bloggingauthors.com has removed my article "Mastering Point of View in Fiction," probably archived it, I reproduced it here for readers.)

Beginning writers tend to have trouble with Point of View (POV). The most frequent problem is shifting from one POV to another in the middle of a sentence or a paragraph. Often, just the awareness of the POV is enough to fix the problem. From writing my novels and short stories, I can appreciate the challenge to discipline the mind and focus on the view from which I am writing. But like other disciplines, practice will improve the awareness of POV.

First Person Point of View

In the first person point of view, the readers are inside the head of the narrator and view the events from her perspective. In fiction, the perspective is usually from a character’s orientation, whether that be the protagonist or another character. In an autobiography, it would be in the author’s orientation.

The major advantage of the first person point of view is that the reader can identify and sympathize with the narrator. The reader knows her thoughts and would tend to accept her opinions through the intimacy of this point of view. The writer could share the narrator’s thoughts and feelings without having to resort to speech and action. And he can experiment with various writing styles to match the narrator’s thought patterns. Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time is an example of dazzling prose written in the first person point of view.

The first person point of view tends to reveal the narrator’s subjective rather than objective account of the events and the reader has to depend on her honesty. In the extreme, the narrator may be deceptive, often unintentionally but sometimes intentionally. Creating an unreliable narrator is one of the major reasons for using the first person point of view, not only to create twists in the plot but also to build a multi-dimensional character. The butler in Kasuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Days is such a narrator.

Epistolary fiction is a special case of the first person point of view writing where the reader sees the letters that the narrator addresses to various other characters. An example of such fiction is Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

So far, I have described the single angle first person point of view, i.e. a single narrator. But it is possible to have multiple first person point of views where, for example, each chapter of the book is from a different person’s point of view. The advantage of this technique is that the reader can understand and sympathize with more than one character. William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury is such an example.

Third Person Point of View

In third person point of view, the author separates the narrator from the viewpoint character. The narrator, who the reader usually couldn’t identify, would not be in the story. Even though the reader may see the events from the viewpoint character’s perspective, the narrator describes those events. There are various third person point of views depending on access—the penetration into the viewpoint character’s mind.

Third Person Objective Point of View

In this point of view, the reader sees the characters’ actions and hears their dialogue and can only infer from them the players’ thoughts and feelings without direct access to their mind and heart. Some call this the camera perspective, a video camera capturing the sights and sounds. The audience would watch and listen to the characters and deduce their thoughts and feelings. The reader almost never feels the presence of the narrator, just as the audience almost never thinks about the cameraman. The advantage of this POV is precisely that the author wouldn’t have to reveal the characters’ thoughts except through their actions and words. If the author is skilled in showing the characters’ behaviors, the reader can use her imagination to derive the thoughts. Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is an example.

Third Person Limited Point of View

In this point of view, similar to that of the first person, the reader can access a character’s—usually the protagonist’s—thoughts. But the narrator is different from the viewpoint character. Like other third person point of views, the narrator is usually unnamed and unknown. The reader never knows him except through his prose style. The advantage of this POV is that the author can adjust the narrative distance between reader and character. The reader can be as intimate with the character as in the first person POV or almost as distant as the third person objective POV. And the author can use her own writing style rather than that of the viewpoint character as in first person POV.

As in first person point of view, the author can use many angles in this POV. For example, she can write each chapter of the novel in a particular character’s limited POV. The advantage is that the author can describe events without having to rely on a single viewpoint character being present in all of them—a useful tool for plot-driven novels.

Third Person Omniscient Point of View

In third person omniscient point of view, the reader has the God-perspective, that is, he is in all the characters’ heads all the time. The reader not only has access to all the actions but also all the thoughts and feelings. The advantage is that the author can describe vistas with unique angles and summarize events across time that can move the reader like no limited perspective can. This POV was popular in the previous centuries as in Henry Fielding’s novels, but is less so among contemporary writers. However, a master, using this POV, can dazzle the reader with his prose.

Form and Content

The writer would look at the content and the narrative structure to choose the appropriate point of view. When I read Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, I couldn’t imagine these novels written in another point of view without destroying their haunting moods. We can write most stories in more than one point of view but given the content and the author’s goal, we should rank the POVs and choose one on the top of the list.

Thoughts on Andre Gide’s Strait is the Gate

2017-09-30T19:00:00.000-04:00

Le Havre

Strait is the Gate is a story of love between a man and a woman. But it is a love beyond the love of a man and a woman. They sought “mental love,” which is akin to divine union: the love through union with God, the fellowship of the Father and Son and Holy Spirit. They sought a love without happiness, a love too elusive between two mortals, a love at once holy, pure and sublime, which our mortal passions would likely taint. In the end they must give up the love between a man and a woman, to reach for that holy and pure love without joy and passion. Andre Gide, through his personal struggle between puritanical virtues and personal happiness, created a thought-provoking story about love, which challenges the reader to assess the variations of love.

Andre Gide

Journey to the End of the Night

2017-05-20T19:25:00.004-04:00

In Journey to the End of the Night, Louis-Ferdinand Céline jabs at war, colonialism, the U.S., the medical profession and anything that comes along the way. His writing style, its coarse language and cynical humor, reflects his irreverence toward norms, and animates his contempt for society and pessimism toward the human condition. The book starts like Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, hammering at the futility of war, where wide-eyed youths waste their lives fighting for the ambitions of bureaucrats and return with disillusion, wrecked health, chronic unemployment and alienation from society. When our antihero Ferdinand Bardamu goes to Africa, we feel like reading Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, which exposes cruelty and inhumanity in colonial outposts and multinational enterprises’ exploiting the natives for profit. Bardamu’s travel to the U.S. and struggle to stay alive remind us of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, where the business conglomerates exploit cheap laborers, squeezing every ounce of life from them, to maximize profit and shareholder value. In our antihero’s return to France, we recall Knut Hamsun’s Hunger and any number of Honoré de Balzac’s works, with the masses struggling to eke out a living. In the novel, the characters lie, steal, and even kill to survive and live anyway they could. It’s rats fighting each other for scum.

Night in Paris

As the title indicates, our antihero, and his friends and acquaintances, journeys through the dark night of life, in the hope that the end would come soon and the darkness would end. Toward the end of the novel, his friend Robinson, after all his suffering and failure and disillusions, chooses death to end this night. This novel, based on Céline’s life, reveals his disgust for society, government, and humanity.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline

George Orwell's 1984: Dystopian Society of the Future. Or the Present?

2017-05-06T19:30:00.000-04:00

"Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four."

Winston Smith works in the Ministry of Truth creating “alternative facts.” Under Big Brother’s omniscient eyes, he tried to ignite his only freedom, the freedom to believe in “obvious” truths, to separate facts from “alternative facts,” but by the novel’s end, at the café Winston was unsure what two plus two would make, a sign that O’Brien had successfully reintegrated a “lost soul” and Winston had become like his friends and neighbors, unable to question and thus unable to revolt. What sends shivers down our spines is not the various tortures O’Brien performed, but after these tortures, Winston’s total capitulation-mind, body, and soul-to Big Brother. When the mind kowtows to external authority and ceases to reflect and question, then the individual had successfully metamorphosed into a machine.

Winston, by editing previous documents to create “alternative facts” and conform to Oceana’s present position, such as whether Eurasia is friend or foe, had helped the regime’s guardians, who like O’Brien believed “who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past,” censor news and mold the citizens’ minds. Censor the media, control sources of knowledge and the government controls what people think. It is the classic feature of totalitarian regimes. We see this in Russia and North Korea alike. Oceana, like other totalitarian regimes, also turned to the indispensable tool, fear, to chisel its citizens’ minds and hearts to its agenda’s shape and form. To stimulate fear and rouse its citizens to a common cause, it would when necessary create fathom enemies, either Eurasia or Eastasia, even though these totalitarian regimes also had similar ideologies, or rather, like Oceana, no ideologies. This sense of ultra-nationalism is another key feature of totalitarian regimes as seen in Nazi Germany and current day North Korea. Fear of a common enemy unites the citizens and detracts from the dictator’s encroachment upon freedom. A common doom gives the dictator much leeway. To that end, worshiping the dictator as God is a requirement of totalitarian regimes. As the Germans worshipped Hitler, so the citizens of Oceania bowed before Big Brother.

Oceania Society

Under 1984’s dystopian sky, Winston must bow, not only because of Big Brother’s overwhelming power and presence, but also because of Winston’s inability to form any ideologies. Even though he wanted to think freely, he lacked the training and thus the analytical mind to counter O’Brien’s offenses. In the end, his mind followed the path of least resistance. We see this in North Koreans trained from birth to worship their leader as God and to blame all woes on foreigners.

George Orwell

Orwell’s 1984 is a dark apocalypse of sub-human society where homo-sapiens had replaced machines to operate an efficient hierarchy, an apocalypse where man and women have ceased questioning “intuitively obvious truths” and just regurgitate government slogans. What is terrifying is that we continue to have such regimes in our world even in the twenty-first century. The warning of 1984 is a reminder that we can regress just as we can progress and if we don’t mind our steps, we may revert to the past.

Keigo Higashino’s The Devotion of Suspect X

2017-01-15T18:30:00.000-05:00

When Yasuko Hanaoka’s ex-husband shows up to exhort money, she and her daughter kill him. Her neighbor Tetsuya Ishigami, a high school math teacher, volunteers to help dispose of the body and divert the police’s attention. What results is a scheme to deceive the police into solving the wrong crime.

A dead body whose face is smashed to hide the identity shows up near the river and Detective Kusanagi must identify the murder and find the perpetrator. On reaching a dead end, he solicits his friend and schoolmate, physics professor Dr. Manabu Yukawa, to sift through the clues and red herrings. Thus, pinning the two masterminds against each other.

In The Devotion of Suspect X, Ishigami and Yukawa try to outwit each other in this cops and robbers game. What Yukawa couldn’t fathom is the depth in which Ishigami is willing to devote himself to and ultimately sacrifice for Yasuko. This mystery is among the handful of mystery novels whose plots surprise me. And though I wish the key characters have more depth, the plot more than compensates for that flaw and the sparse prose pushes the plot along without extraneous verbiage. Smart and powerful. I almost wish Ishigami could triumph over Yukawa.

Albert Camus's The Stranger

2016-12-24T18:30:00.000-05:00

Meursault, an alien not of France or Algeria but of the world, shot the Arab and after the man had fallen, pumped four more bullets into the body. The sun made him do it just as if El Nino toppled the financial markets and urge disgruntle employees to shoot their colleagues and managers. He showed the same nonchalance toward a possible promotion, his mother’s death, his making love with Marie the first time, his neighbor Salamano’s beating the dog, and his friend Raymond’s beating his wife as toward killing the Arab. During the trial, contrary the social convention he offered no convincing motive and refused to defend himself against he crime.

To prevent him from contaminating society, from spreading meaninglessness and detachment to others, the jury found him guilty of callousness and condemned him to death for being a stranger to his mother, his lover, his friends, moral codes, social norms, and cultural conventions.

Arzew, Algeria

For the generation after WWII, for the survivors after the stench of Hitler and Stalin and the taste of Aushwitz, Nanjing and Hiroshima, what could be more seductive than embracing absurdity and thrashing humanity?

Nineteenth century optimism had crashed into a stonewall; utopia had metamorphosed into the Holocaust; the unlimited possibilities of reason, science and humanity had created the machine guns, the gas chambers, and the atomic bombs. Stranger, welcome to the brave new world!

The Guillotine

Just as a starving child would ignore Zeno’s problem or Fermat’s Last Theorem, so a stranger would neglect the alien faces and tunes, desiring to smell his home soil, to shake his kinsmen’s hands and to hug his "ground of being." In an absurd world, moral, social and cultural contracts would appear frivolous and irrelevant, and those who had feasted upon absurdity may view the world with a different pair of colored glasses and appreciate the Meursault’s methodic actions and orderly world.

When you are among lunatics accusing you of being insane, can you maintain your sanity? What is absurdity but a relative evaluation based on preconceived and accepted norms. Who really is the stranger in the world, Meursault or Marie or the prosecutor or the magistrate or the chaplain?

Albert Camus

In The Stranger, a must-read to understand one view of the human predicament, Camus depicted the post-modern mileau where the Holocaust had dethroned and demythologized reason and science and the mutual critique among various claims to truth and meaning¾religion, politics, science, etc¾would result in a pluralism of absurdities that would provide new insights to humanity.

Miyuki Miyabe’s All She’s Worth

2016-12-10T20:26:00.000-05:00

While Police Detective Shunsuke Honma is on leave after he injured his leg, a distant relative of his late wife appears and asks for help. His fiancée Shoko Sekine has disappeared after a bank rejected her application for a credit card, revealing her past bankruptcy.

Tokyo

Honma’s investigation reveals the woman’s descent into debt, a common problem in Japan’s consumer driven economy. But soon he finds out the fiancée might have murdered the real Shoko Sekine and taken over the woman’s identity. When he digs out the imposter’s background, he realizes that her family’s financial problems had driven her to assume the new identity.

Tokyo Stock Exchange

Though the pace is slow and parts of the novel can be taken out without much loss, the search for the identities and backgrounds of the two women is interesting. But what really holds the story together is the problem associated with debt-driven consumer-oriented economy, the common link between the two women, the real and the fake Shoko Sekine. The desire to escape from debt, driving their lives to the sad ending. The issue is as relevant today as it was in the 1990’s.

Miyuki Miyabe

Jean-Paul Sartre's No Exit

2016-11-12T19:56:00.000-05:00

“Hell is other people.” What if hell is not an inferno but being trapped in a room with people who judge and condemn you? In Sartre’s play No Exit, three condemned souls must stay with each other for all eternity, watching, condemning, torturing one another. Garcin seeks understanding from Inez for deserting the army but only receives her judgment. Estelle, who killed her newborn baby and caused her lover to commit suicide, seeks Garcin’s affection to define who she is, but only receives his snub. Inez tries to seduce Estelle, but only scares the latter. They seek redemption through others but only receive condemnation. For Sartre, that is the picture of hell, and hell exists not in the afterlife but here in this life.

Jean-Paul Sartre

The most poignant moment in the play is when the door is opened, but Garcin doesn’t leave the room to escape his hell. He remains to persuade Inez to accept his cowardice, his betrayal of his country and his wife. This is Sartre’s vision of the contemporary person, unable or perhaps unwilling to escape his hell for fear of taking on the responsibility of defining his own person. As Erich Fromm has said, freedom can be frightening when we have to accept the responsibilities associated with that freedom. Ultimately, for Sartre, hell is when others, friends and family, career and leisure, society and culture, religion and government, define who we are.

Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone deBeauvoir

Magnolias in Paradise

2016-10-22T19:30:00.000-04:00

Leonard Seet brings his intelligence and wit and gifts as a writer to a broader audience in "Magnolias in Paradise" in a gritty, realistic novel... narrative style... reminiscent of the narrative technique of "As I Lay Dying" and "Charming Billy." Mainstream audiences will appreciate the intelligence of the narrative of this book in this genre, which is so often short-changed by lesser lights just out to make a buck. Seet has reinvented himself as a writer in his evolution from his deeply rich, engaging and inspirational books about spirituality to the rough ride on the mean streets of "Magnolias in Paradise." ...you'll definitely be engaged by this novel.
-David Lentz, author Bloomsday: the Bostoniad

"This book is immensely readable and is packed with fast paced actions and cliff hanging chapter endings."
-Ashok Shenolikar, Author of What Did You Say Your Name Was?

In Paradise, No One is Innocent

Ernst arrives at the Paradise train station with fifty-thousand dollars to ransom his sweetheart, and while looking among the crowd for the young man with a magnolia, a beggar seizes his bag of cash and escapes through the revolving door. Chasing after the rascal, he slams into his contact--his girlfriend's lover in town. Now, he must beat his love-rival to the money and rescue her before the deadline.

Magnolias in Paradise, which writer David Lentz compared to William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, is a crime novel and the first in a potential series. As in Larry Brown’s Father and Son, good confronts evil in a southern town. And as in Joe R. Lansdale’s Cold in July, an ordinary man gets sucked into a conspiracy, with psychopaths terrorizing a small town and FBI agents going after a corrupt sheriff. In the end, the man must take the law into his hands. But in this case, ending in tragedy. Here, he combined Will Christopher Baer’s surreal settings and mentally unstable villains, with Brian Evenson’s literary minimalism and heroes cursing their knowledge.

All Quiet on the Western Front: Book Review

2016-09-17T07:30:00.000-04:00

Remarque's Modern Classic on the Horror of War

The horror of poisoned skin and flesh, mangled arms and legs, whistling shells, hopeless moans, and ubiquitous filth complemented the sterile wall between Paul Baumer and his father and mother and sister when he was on leave. The war had destroyed his youth and any hunger for sunlight, twitter and soft skin. When he turned the schoolbook pages, he realized all the texts’ fragrances sweet or pungent had fled into the misty dawn. His past had fallen away and his future withered, leaving him in a limbo of body parts, scorched earth and bomb fragments. Only when he returned to the trenches could he feel at home. But when he looked into the enemy’s eyes, he would see himself, a soldier fighting for a country that would no longer recognize him, a future that would expel him, and a new generation who could not understand him.

W.W.I. Trench

Remarque depicted not just the horror of W.W.I but that of all wars, no matter how noble and inspiring the rhetoric. Whichever side triumphs, the soldiers on both side will lose; he will lose his youth, his innocence and his belief in human decency. All Quiet on the Western Front is one of the, if not the, greatest war novel.

Erich Maria Remarque

Thoughts on Bram Stoker's Dracula

2016-09-11T19:05:00.000-04:00

In Dracula, Bram Stoker, amid the rising demand for women's equality, tried to portray Mina as the new breed of woman who has "come of age." She is an assistant schoolmistress and therefore might not have to depend on a man. She could use the typewriter and therefore sought to better herself. But in the end, she subordinates herself to Harker and only seeks to support him with her skills. Her mentality confines her to be a "proper" lady in Victorian England. So, she remains the ideal for the nineteenth century man, who seeks a wife to support him in his enterprises. Furthermore, Stoker portrayed all the other female characters, Lucy and the "Brides of Dracula," as objects of sensuality. So, the spirits of the times confined Stoker's vision of women even as he sought to be more enlightened and through his novel, he reflected much of that period's cultural norms.

Vlad the Impaler

Stoker's portrayal of Dracula reflects the fear of "enlightened" Western Europe toward the "unenlightened" world. During the period just before W.W.I., Europeans were worshipping reason and science as the golden fruits of Enlightenment and they believed in the unlimited potentials of mankind. They had not experienced trench warfare, the depression, the holocaust or the atomic bomb. But the unenlightened world was mysterious and threatened to destroy European achievements. The Balkans was seething with disasters and indeed history shows it to be the spark that ignited the World War. Of course, not only the Balkans. Africa and India and China, wherever the British and the Europeans had their presence, these lands were also mysterious, their customs threatening. Western Europe must enlighten these cultures and overcome their superstitions and darkness. Dracula, the foreigner from a strange land, epitomizes the evil that lurks around enlightened Western Europe. And in killing Dracula, Dr. Van Helsing and his band was destroying the darkness that threatened centuries of Western European enlightenment.

Bela Lugosi as Dracula

In reading Dracula, we begin to understand more about Bram Stoker's values and perceptions, which he might not have been aware of, and also more about the fears and anxieties in late nineteenth century Great Britain, and other Western European countries. That understanding will allow us to reflect on our fears and anxieties and access how much we have progressed a century later.

Bram Stoker

William Golding's The Lord of the Flies: Innocence Lost

2016-09-03T19:00:00.000-04:00

Of the required readings in high school English classes, I liked The Lord of the Flies the most. Its depiction of innate evil helped me understand the nature of humanity. And though institutions can and do oppress the defenseless, the creators have designed these structures to maximize their (the creators') gains at the expense of others. So in the end, the nature of the systems reveals the nature of humanity.

William Golding in The Lord of the Flies shows how innate evil surfaces when civilization's rules and moral codes no longer suppress human impulses, a view that Freud would probably take issue. For Golding, social norms and civil laws construct rather than suppress humanity. Jack represents the beast that seeks self-gratification at the expense of others; while Piggy the reasoning that has led humankind from darkness to enlightenment. When Jack and his group destroy the conch, a symbol of law and order, and steal Piggy's glasses, a symbol of reason and science, they were asserting savagery over civilization, much like the barbarians ransacking Rome and leading Europe into the Dark Ages.

Ralph tries to maintain a semblance of civilization, but Jack lures more and more members from the group and of those who stand by him, Piggy is killed and the twins Sam and Eric are tortured until they submit. In the end, Jack has to run for his life and only when the naval office arrives, when the instruments of law and order reassert themselves, does he escape death. He could not save himself anymore than he could Piggy.

A bleak picture of humanity William Golding has painted. We would like to believe that children are innocent and that society baptizes them into evil. When children kill other children, we would like to find the parent or teacher or school or church that has corrupted them. And often enough, we do find it. But Golding reminds that there is more fundamental source of evil.

Of course, in the novel, Golding didn't consider that social norms and moral codes are also human constructs, and at times, their designers have hidden agendas. Individuals can and do exploit the legal, financial and political systems to benefit themselves. And although, unlike olden times, now the law applies to everyone, some can better protect themselves against exploits while others can sneak through loopholes. Still, The Lord of the Flies gives great insight into the human heart.

William Golding (from Dutch National Archives, The Hague, Fotocollectie Algemeen Nederlands Persbureau (ANEFO), 1945-1989)

Nathaniel Hawthorne 's The Scarlet Letter

2016-08-21T19:00:00.000-04:00

Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter depicts the dynamics of guilt and shame in seventeenth century Massachusetts Bay Colony's Puritan society, but we may find similar forces in communities where established social norms direct members' behavior.

Hester Prynne has to wear the scarlet letter "A," a symbol of shame, for committing adultery. The town fathers seek to enforce the Puritanical code through shame and alienation from the community. But grounded in her identity, Hester stands tall and calm on the scaffold and refuses to acknowledge the power of the town fathers or of the social nrom. Throughout the novel, we see her directing her destiny: helping the sick and the poor, seeking to leave Boston with her lover, returning from Europe wearing the scarlet letter, not as a symbol of shame but one of defiance.

On the other hand, her lover, the minister Arthur Dimmesdale, avoids shame, because Hester refuses to name him, but guilt torments him so much that his health deteriorates. His guilt may have come from having an affair with Hester, though her husband is presumed dead, or from allowing her to suffer alone. Whatever the reason, the same power that Hester refuses to acknowledge crushes and ultimately destroys him. So, while Hester embodies shame without guilt, Arthur does guilt without shame. He has internalized the Puritanical system such that internal punishments may exceed any external ones.

Massachusetts Bay Colony

The contrast between Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale is an interesting study in human character. While some in society respond more to external punishments, other avoid transgressions for fear of internal ones.

Salem Witch Trial

The Massachusetts Bay Colony, like other communities, uses both external and internal forces to direct behaviors. But one problem comes from government merging with religion, and the legal code, besides protecting individual rights, enforces morality. Laws and punishments curtail behavior and therefore have vital roles in society, but they cannot "create good people." Whenever, we force people to be "good," the result is either conformity or rebellion, not "goodness."

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Another problem: though Hester's husband is presumed dead, the town fathers punish her for having an affair and consider it adultery because she is legally married to him. And she probably couldn't get a divorce. So, here the legal code traps wives whose husbands have passed away and they become widows for life. So legalism can be dangerous.

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

2016-08-06T16:00:00.000-04:00

I grew up watching Frankenstein (the monster), along with Dracula and the Wolfman, on TV, but Mary Shelley's novel is, beyond a tale of horror, a literary work where the narrative and themes are as important as the plot. The framed narrative allows the reader to understand Dr. Frankenstein's worldviews as well as those of Captain Walton and the monster. We can compare Captain Walton Dr. Frankenstein and see their similar ambitions and sense of adventure in conquering nature and we can contrast their final decisions. Then, we can contrast the monster's outer monstrosity with Dr. Frankenstein's inner one. Perhaps it is fitting that we refer to the monster as Frankenstein; in a sense Dr. Frankenstein is a monster.

Shelley, through the story, warns against the danger of pursuing knowledge, the possible disaster from abusing that understanding, and specifically scientific knowledge, to satisfy one's ambitions. In this sense, Frankenstein is a typical science fiction.

The Frankenstein Monster

That Shelley wrote this compelling novel when she was eighteen testifies to her imagination and literary power. Frankenstein, perhaps the first science fiction, is a literary classic that sheds light into the nature of humanity.

Mary Shelley

Knut Hamsun's Hunger: A Psychological Novel

2016-07-17T18:34:00.000-04:00

In Knut Hamsun's Hunger, the narrator and protagonist roams the streets of Kristiania (Oslo) and searches for food and later lodging. A writer of questionable success, he submits his writings to a journal but rarely gets the story accepted. Without money, he often doesn't eat for days.

As we read the novel, we dwell into the mind occasionally delusion of a man trying to maintain his dignity in poverty. Though he had no food, he gives money to children and vagrants. And though he fancies a girl, he feels unworthy of her. His unstable state of mind reminds us of Raskolnikov in Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment. And indeed, Hunger is as much a psychological novel as Dostoyevsky's classic work but it dwells into the unstable mind in greater details.

Kristiania (Oslo)

Through the novel, Hamsun comments on Oslo's coming of age and on civilization crossing into the twentieth century. The narrator's interactions with others reveal the alienation in a modern city. His plight and despair, and his suffering and struggles are those of modern men and women. In the end, he leaves Kristiania, a symbol of his escaping from the modern life.

Knut Hansum

Hunger is a powerful tale of the currents of history sweeping individuals off their grounds of existence and tossing them into an ocean of despair. Even now, more than a hundred years later, we confront similar challenges and the novel remains relevant. The question was and is: how shall we respond to such challenges?