Possession

A. S. Byatt’s Possession was a marvelous read. When I read it, at the age of 30, I was surprised that no one had told me about it before. And when I later recommended it to some people I have called friends for years now, I was distressed to find that they had already read it and loved it, but never told me. If I were a literature prof, I would make it required reading for my classes, just for fun. It somehow succeeds in being a satire of literary criticism as well as an unabashed epic romance.

I think I will prove my nerdiness once and for all by admitting that I was immediately won over by the following lines in the opening paragraph:

The librarian handed [the book] to Roland Michell, who was sitting waiting for it in the Reading Room of the London Library... Roland had the small single table he liked best, behind a square pillar, with the clock over the fireplace nevertheless in full view. To his right was a high sunny window, through which you could see the high green leaves of St James’s Square.

I knew at once that this was the book for me and that this character was someone I would happily follow. However, characters reading in libraries admittedly can’t sustain a plot forever, so all this romance and mystery soon develop. Mystery is great; romance annoys me a little bit.

Every winter, he tells the tale of Merlin and Vivien, always the same tale, never the same telling.

Sometimes the fairy and the magician are true lovers, whose reality is only this dreamed chamber, which she, with his complicity, makes eternal stone of air. Sometimes he is old and tired and ready to lay down his burden and she is a tormenting daemon. Sometimes it is a battle of wits, in which she is all passionate emulation, a daemonic will to overcome him, and he wise beyond belief, and impotent with it. Tonight he was not so decrepit, nor yet so clever―he was ruefully courteous, knowing that her time had come, and ready to take pleasure in his eternal swoon, or dream or contemplation.

We are always shaping our lives into stories. It is the same tale (as Sabine notices in this passage) and the end is always the same, but still we have a certain liberty in drawing the form of the narratives we tell ourselves about our lives. We can make a good life into a captivity or a demon into an idol. The romantic love story is one pattern that helps us perform these conjurings in our minds.

Our charming government

I never thought I would be singing the praises of the recent postage rate hike, but if I hadn’t had to buy some make-up stamps today I would have missed a great pleasure. I bought two packs of fifty one-cent stamps from a postage machine and they appeared in the most elegant form, folded accordion-style and sealed in a tiny wax-paper envelope with a sticker. To think, people who pay their bills online will never see or feel this.

Above: Pepe fingers the packet, to reveal scale. The photo does not, however, capture the exquisite density of the packet. You must buy one yourself.

Also, I am meaning to post soon about two books: Possession by A. S. Byatt and Instruments in the Redeemer’s Hands by Paul David Tripp. I just haven’t had the time to write something that does them justice. Maybe I should just say I loved them both and highly recommend them, in case I don’t succeed in posting anytime soon.

A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush

This book is realism and escapism thrown together in a strange soup, nonchalance spiced with melodrama, a brew of every flavor of bizarreness and impropriety. Eric Newby tells us the tale of taking off with a friend for remotest Afghanistan in the 1950s with allegedly little experience and preparation. He calls for no sympathy; tragedy is dismissed and pleasure denied. The reader must suspend disbelief at practically every turn.

We all know the feeling of doing something foolish and escaping the consequences. Newby seems to want to present his adventure as such a case, but there is clearly some understatement of his qualifications. He is funny, but I felt like he was trying too hard to deprecate their achievements. It got annoying. Even the reader who does not know their backgrounds as outdoorsmen and adventurers cannot question the determination of these two men. Newby describes disasters, disappointments, and pain, without self-pity. Somehow the account seems scrupulously honest and blatantly unbelievable at the same time. I suppose that is its charm.

That two men went to immense trouble to have this largely meaningless adventure was a consolation to me. Perhaps I wouldn't want to work closely with Eric Newby, but his carefree humor and his crazy story are enjoyable. I am all for stodginess and responsibility, but I can't help admiring, from afar, the courage of some of our planet's more oddly-dimensioned souls. Besides, anyone who would ride a bike around the office is a friend of mine.

Newby died late last year.

There is no rose

I finished The Name of the Rose and wanted to start over again. It has everything the soul could possibly want: northern Italy, fantastic monasteries, monastic murders, underground passages, fog, secret libraries, rafts of manuscripts, a riot of languages, codes, maps, labyrinths, herbalists, unicorns, hunchbacks, traps, fires, poisons, Gregorian chant, crypts, clues drawn from handwriting, ox’s hearts, midnight trysts, dreams, doodles, heresies, allusions, anachronisms, and fried cheese.

It is strange to admit how close my world is to the one in the book. When I moved here I pretended I was embarking on a monastic life, enfolded in the protective robe of the Church. I would dedicate my days to her service, walking the pretty halls of the church building and plying my trade in a humble office. I would do the closest available thing to illuminating manuscripts: edit the church’s newsletter and supply decorative graphics to promote her events. In fact, my newsletter archives would be a parochial equivalent of the chronicles of Bede.

It’s turned out to be a satisfactory life for me. I feel tolerated, even appreciated, at work and free to pursue my solitary interests at home. I understand that the romantic expectations I have described in the previous paragraph will raise many questions for some readers, like the opening of a novel that is certain to depict the starry-eyed main character’s fall from innocence. What about the nasty church politics that anyone working for the church must inevitably face?

First of all, I am not that starry-eyed. I would rather affirm what is good and leave the nasty fights to the people who care about that kind of thing. For now church politics is a responsibility I am grateful not to have to engage in. I have brushed against it from time to time and find that the battles in my denomination today are ludicrously similar to the politics described in Adso and William’s delightful conversation about heresy.

“The trouble is,” I said, “I can no longer distinguish the accidental difference among Waldensians, Catharists, the poor of Lyons, the Umiliati, the Beghards, Joachimites, Patrines, Apostles, Poor Lombards, Arnoldists, Williamites, Followers of the Free Spirit, and Lucierines. What am I to do?”

This book is both wonderful and vexing because I believe the author delights in confusion and complexity. Innocence, knowledge, faith, skepticism, love, lust, sensation, cogitation, laughter, devotion, experience, reason... Everything important is taken and turned around in the hand and deeply felt and playfully examined. Both the naive Adso and his rational master are innocent in different ways, and the ending of the story is... what can I say without giving it away... powerful.

Here is an example of the interactions between the two that fill the book with its special joy. Adso and William escape the labyrinth and see the stars at the end of one long night.

“How beautiful the world is, and how ugly labyrinths are,” I said, relieved.

“How beautiful the world would be if there were a procedure for moving through labyrinths,” my master replied.

Maybe it says something about me that I adored the book, despite or because of its stubborn refusal to assign a final meaning to anything.

The Kite Runner

This book was gripping and emotionally captivating. However, cynic that I am, I found myself questioning it for that reason. I have never liked being emotionally manipulated, and after crying several times towards the end, and sensing that tragedies were being piled upon tragedies, to the point of disbelief, I began to feel like I was being toyed with. When discussing it together, several of us felt rather insulted by the lengths to which the author goes to underline his significant moments. Things seemed artificial.

Well, what is any story if not artificial? The author does what he does well, we agreed. He arranges events in a meaningful way and tells a great story of guilt and redemption. If some of the literary coincidences were cheesy, the main character was certainly realistic and fully drawn, we agreed, and the ending, while melodramatic in its artistic touches, was ambiguous and far from obnoxiously triumphant.

I was annoyed, however, with the way the supporting characters were devices to advance the plot of the main character’s life. I suppose I am speaking principally of the wife here, who I think was unforgivably used, but the most important secondary character also seemed to have little human depth. Because they were not fully evoked as characters, I felt like they missed an opportunity to speak something of their own perception of the world.

I have a problem with mixing literature and life. Nabokov says that the shallowest kind of reading of all is identifying with the characters. I don’t really care for that statement. I tend to judge stories with the full panoply of ethics and common sense that life wears, and perhaps I deck out real life with too many romantic expectations.

In real life, when you’re going through something painful, the most annoying thing to hear is “It’s always hard.” Always? What do you mean? Don’t tell me I’m acting out the umpteenth iteration of a timeworn formula. What I am experiencing is the only grief, the only tragedy, the story that has never been told and the emotion that no one else in all of time will ever feel.

So, back to The Kite Runner: perhaps it wasn't so much the fact that it provoked emotions in what I considered an unfairly artificial way as the fact that it calls into question all the other books I have read and loved that have made me feel a certain way. I begin to fear that if I reread just about any of my most beloved children’s books―for example, those wonderful Newbery Medal winners that make you feel so grown-up and full of delicious sadness and glory and heroism―today, I would see through all its plot development and literary devices and realize that the things I felt then were illegitimate and invalid and that the things I feel now must not be valid either, because they will pass away and turn into something else, and I am in fact living the plotted life with fewer and fewer chances of being surprised or delighted again.

Happy inefficiency

“It is seldom the efficiency of a writing system or script that determines its longevity and influence, but rather the economic power and prestige of those using it” (Fischer).

I had no idea that the Korean writing system was not just another logography, but rather an ideal script. The characters systematically represent the sounds of the language, much like Tolkien’s Fëanorian script. I didn’t realize there was a working example of this in our messy world. It took the edict of King Seycong in 1446 to replace the hand-me-down Chinese logographs his country was using, which were inadequate to represent the Korean language, with what Fischer calls “the most efficient system ever devised in the history of writing.” It is attractive as well.

It’s strange how we take our writing systems for granted. Of course we would write English with the Latin alphabet... But countries have switched from Arabic systems to Roman systems to Cyrillic systems at the whim of their emperors. If it happened to us, it probably wouldn’t be that big a deal. We adapt.

English spelling is notoriously awkward. But diglossia―having a written language that is essentially a different language from the spoken one it is supposed to represent―is the natural result of time’s passing, and the whole world lives with it to various extents. There are benefits to the way written language tends to stay the same while spoken language mutates. We still easily understand Shakespeare’s texts, even if he wouldn’t recognize the sound of his words in our mouths.

At least our script has had a systematic relationship to spoken modern English across the centuries. The poor Japanese conquer scriptological insanity to become literate. From what I can understand, they borrowed a script (Chinese characters) that did not necessarily correspond to the sounds it represented in Japanese and could not convey all the grammatical information that Japanese words had to convey (this was the same thing the Koreans were dealing with before King Seycong). The Japanese continue to use Chinese characters, but tack on a couple other scripts to indicate inflectional endings, grammatical particles, glosses, and speech sounds. They can write their language using any one of the scripts, but apparently they prefer to mix them. The Roman alphabet can also be used.

One can always find a silver lining in one’s circumstances. Having all the Chinese characters is kind of like our having homophones like bear and bare; the script contains information that the speech does not, and Japanese, like Chinese, is full of homophones.

Many populations besides the Japanese function with an ill-fitting script. Yet few nations shackled by language become Boston Tea Partiers in response. Part of it is powerlessness, of course, but could it also be that we love our languages for their absurdities, not despite them? “Written language, so East Asian writing teaches us, is not subordinate to spoken language,” Fischer says. I talked earlier about the the aesthetic pleasure of Chinese characters. The idea that a well-formed character has merit in itself, aside from its linguistic function, fascinates me.

Many important things in life are inefficient: art, love, sports, children. Fischer says, “It is well known that because of its writing system, Japan forces its young to endure many more years of education―placing demands on its young people and at great cost to the state―than are necessary in other countries. Yet this may also explain, if only in part, Japan’s manifest success. One thing is clear: in no way has Japan’s writing hindered the intellectual growth of its users.”

In a different way, French culture has proved to many of us that it’s worth taking time to do small things well. We are still left with the question of which small things to choose.

Forests of symbols

I’ve been reading Steven Fischer’s A History of Writing ever since Christmas and finally finished it. It’s sort of hard to follow (I think he could have used a more systematic editor), but it has prompted much reflection on the nature of writing.

Writing fascinates me. Learning new alphabets is fun; handwriting is important enough to experiment with and remodel from time to time. Letters are exciting. Living in another era, I would have been temperamentally inclined to credit the myths that described writing as a sacred gift from the gods.

In truth writing probably began with accountants, who made knots in ropes, scratched notches on sticks, or inscribed clay tokens to symbolize unwieldy animals. It was when the marks they made assumed a phonological significance apart from the objects they represented that this became complete writing. Fischer emphasizes that this was a groundbreaking technological innovation, not an evolutionary process. He suggests that complete writing was invented only once in all history: a rare idea indeed. All the diverse instances of it around the world, from the most awkward to the most ingenious, are variations on the unique idea of complete writing that popped up in Sumer around 3700 BC:

1. Its purpose is communication.
2. It consists of artificial graphic marks on a durable surface (or electronic medium).
3. It uses marks that relate conventionally to articulate speech.

It is not that unromantic that we owe accountants for the concoction of letter magic. After all, what is a story but an account? In French, a compte rendu is a summary of something you’ve heard. And a conte is a pure fairy tale.

To populate our tales (a word that used to mean counts, just like tallies,) we need all the races of letters―gothics and grotesques, romans and moderns and humanists, capitals and uncials and minuscules. We delight in their anatomy of bowls and crossbars, ears and crotches, legs, arms, apices, vertices, tails, terminals, hairlines, stems, spurs, and spines. Not to mention heng, shu, and the other limbs I haven’t learned yet, to make beautiful creatures I mentioned earlier.

With picayune pecunia we assemble the words that form our armies of arguments. We can take nothing for granted in our accounting. The tale of writing is rich.

Here Be Dragons

For someone who had always pictured Kings Richard and John of England as cartoon lions, Sharon Kay Penman’s book was an enlightening read. I thought John was especially well portrayed. I want to read more about Eleanor of Aquitaine.

For me the great value of this book was in the details about life in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. For instance, they spread rushes on the floor as a sort of carpeting, and changed them when they needed to be changed. I might try that one of these days. It might beat vacuuming.

The most shocking thing for me was that they only had one meal a day in Wales, in the evening. I would have died. I was comforted that it was a significant adjustment for the main character, too.

Pictured above is one of several small scenes I encountered upon coming home yesterday. My guest―a delightful friend who sows beauty and poetry wherever she goes―had posed my penguin with his wing in the almond jar. She’s also the kind of guest who replaces certain disapproved-of items in your pantry with higher-quality or less-toxic varieties. It cracks me up. I appreciate her audacity... and generosity.

This reminds me of one of my favorite scenes in The Book of Lights by Chaim Potok. But I don’t want to spoil the scene for people who haven’t read it. What do I do? I guess I will have to keep quiet. Some kind of blog.

Coming into the Country

I've praised McPhee’s writing before. His language is felicitous and sometimes startling.

Describing salmon in an Arctic river:

Looking over the side of the canoe is like staring down into a sky full of zeppelins. (p. 6)

He has a subtle and rewarding wit that plays out over the pages.

The grand theme of the book, and one much to my liking, is “the country.” If I were to write my dream novel, it would be one where settings were like characters. I’m not sure how this would be done. People are usually bored out of their skulls by the stuff I write and ask for plot development. So I read McPhee.

The sight of the bear stirred me like nothing else the country could contain. What mattered was not so much the bear himself as what the bear implied. He was the predominant thing in that country, and for him to be in it at all meant that there had to be more country like it in every direction and more of the same kind of country all around that. He implied a world. He was an affirmation to the rest of the earth that his kind of place was extant. (pp. 61-62)

In the society as a whole, there is an elemental need for a frontier outlet, for a pioneer place to go—important even to those who do not go there. (p. 436)

It’s true; I think. Nothing frees the soul quite like knowing there's somewhere to go, that like Huck Finn we can light out for the territories if things go wrong around here.

Many of the characters in the book are fiercely self-reliant.

I once asked [Ed Gelvin] if there was anything that could go wrong around his place that would cause him to seek help from elsewhere. He looked off into the distance and carefully thought over the question—this compact and gracefully built man of fifty or so with thick quizzical bifocals, a shy smile, a quiet voice. Finally, he said no, he guessed there wasn’t. (p. 233)

I find this all extremely appealing. I have always loved survival stories. I have welcomed the chance to learn new skills, just in case I ever might need them. Personal responsibility is one of my highest values.

There is a lot of talk of community these days, especially in my current social milieu, and who can deny its importance? I owe everything to my family and friends. It’s foolish to trust yourself and rely on yourself. We don’t see clearly, and we need correction. I couldn’t last a minute outside Eagle, Alaska, and all my fantasies of surviving like Robinson Crusoe are silly. Most of us need help frequently.

But it is important to do everything you can do to be a strong and responsible human being. That’s how you make a contribution to society. I have tons of admiration for the industrious, energetic people in this book who take care of themselves and have the power to be generous to others.

Teach me, O Lord, the way of your statutes;
and I will keep it to the end.
Give me understanding, that I may keep your law
and observe it with my whole heart.
Lead me in the path of your commandments,
for I delight in it.
Incline my heart to your testimonies,
and not to selfish gain!
Turn my eyes from looking at worthless things;
and give me life in your ways.
Confirm to your servant your promise,
that you may be feared.
Turn away the reproach that I dread,
for your rules are good.
Behold, I long for your precepts;
in your righteousness give me life!

The Secret Agent

Conrad appears to have gotten some criticism for the “sordid surroundings” and “moral squalor” of this tale. Yet when I discussed it with some friends, we all admitted that we had an impression of comedy and even absurdity, not horror. Sure, the plot is scary and tragic, but he treats it in such a way that you are never really scared, just kind of incredulous, and scornful of all the characters.

I know I have read at least one article or review of this book that said it was an illuminating read in connection with September 11. But the mood of the book seemed incompatible with that type of terror.

The book is quite different from Heart of Darkness or Lord Jim. I read those a long time ago, but I don’t remember much humor in those books. I loved Heart of Darkness as an angst-ridden adolescent. I sought out Lord Jim as an angst-ridden college student. The Secret Agent, however, is laugh-out-loud funny at some points, and impossible to ever really take seriously.

However strange this book was, Conrad is a consummate artist, and we were all impressed by his brilliant decisions about when to disclose what, what to disclose at all, and what to have take place offstage. The book was finely crafted.

I am generally more gullible than suspicious as a reader, and I grew in compassion for the characters, who were initially presented with quite a bit of irony and amusement. My friends who read the book did not seem so moved. I found things to admire about most of the characters. Seeing Conrad deal so thoughtfully with a domestic relationship was interesting for me, since I was only previously familiar with his nautical settings. There was a melodramatic scene with gas lamps and a grotesque cabdriver that I enjoyed very much and everyone else seemed to think was dumb.

The Fellowship of the Ring

This is at least the fourth time I’ve read this book. It’s nice to go back after a few years and still be charmed and delighted. A lot of people think of strange creatures and battles when they think of Tolkien, but what I was impressed by this time was the human subtlety among the characters.

He turned to Strider. “Where have you been, my friend? Why weren’t you at the feast? The Lady Arwen was there.”
Strider looked down at Bilbo gravely. “I know,” he said. “But often I must put mirth aside. Elladan and Elrohir have returned out of the Wild unlooked-for, and they had tidings that I wished to hear at once.”
“Well, my dear fellow,” said Bilbo, “now you’ve heard the news, can’t you spare me a moment? I want your help in something urgent. Elrond says this song of mine is to be finished before the end of the evening, and I am stuck. Let’s go off into a corner and polish it up!”
Strider smiled. “Come then!” he said. “Let me hear it!”

“I want your help in something urgent” seems incongruous at first look. One might judge Bilbo for being insensitive or completely out of touch. This happens often with the hobbits’ speech.

“Strider looked down at Bilbo gravely.”

Much has already been made of the unacknowledged work of Strider and the Rangers to protect an obscure country full of ignorant people. This is a huge, beautiful theme of the books. But there’s more going on here than just Strider graciously overlooking the errors of a bumbling, sheltered, homely hobbit who has been thrust into the world-changing activities of ancient and noble people.

With Tolkien, not all that is being thought is not being spoken. The hobbits know more than they let on, and they have virtues of their own. Here Bilbo is being funny, lightening Strider’s load, and Strider gets the joke. There’s a deeper understanding between people who have learned to trust each other’s character over time.

I think playing with all kinds of levels of seriousness like this, all at once, is great writing.

Arthur & George

Never read a book if you can discern the reason you’re reading it. Was I unfairly enticed by the idea of Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, taking on a real-life mystery? I like a good plot as much as the next woman, and I enjoyed Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot, so I thought, here we have an author I like, a situation that intrigues me (I own, and have read, The Complete Annotated Sherlock Holmes, which is a delightful example of people taking fiction way too seriously, and yet, what’s wrong with that? There are a lot of worse things to take seriously), and a setting I want to read about (I mistakenly thought the book would take place in Edinburgh).

Well, I was disappointed. Even if one had no expectations from the author and no misapprehensions about the setting, I can’t imagine how the ending could fail to disappoint. And maybe my taste is not subtle enough, but I found hardly any of those extremely interesting ideas that fill Flaubert’s Parrot.

I blame the literary craft. Was Barnes trying to follow a novelistic scheme taught in a writing class or a how-to-sell-your-book workshop? I kind of doubt it, because it wasn’t all that gripping, but it seemed much more conventional than Flaubert’s Parrot. Let’s forget Arthur and George and revisit the book I actually liked.

Flaubert’s Parrot seemed imperfect to me. It didn’t seem like a very cohesive book. I think it took on way too many ideas and didn’t fully develop them. But, in the end, I think I like that better. You read the stuff he says and you think, “Hey, I love what he said. I want to hear more.” Whereas if an author has fully developed his themes, you don’t really want to hear more.

I loved the way Barnes expressed Flaubert’s philosophies in Flaubert’s words and in his own. There were many captivating ideas about writing, which was a well-developed theme of the book. This is great:

Do the books that writers don’t write matter? The imagination doesn’t crop annually like a reliable fruit tree. The writer has to gather whatever’s there: sometimes too much, sometimes too little, sometimes nothing at all. And in the years of glut there is always a slatted wooden tray in some cool, dark attic, which the writer nervously visits from time to time; and yes, oh dear, while he’s been hard at work downstairs, up in the attic there are puckering skins, warning spots, a sudden brown collapse and the sprouting of snowflakes. What can he do about it?

There are entries I’ve planned for this blog that are right now puckering and sprouting snowflakes. It’s weird how something completely irrelevant to this world (are any of the posts I do actually post relevant to contemporary existence?) can still have an expiration date.

And even though I was frustrated by the woefully inadequate development of the narrator’s own history, I think it was vividly described in mentions here and there:

And you do come out of it [mourning a death], that’s true. After a year, after five. But you don’t come out of it like a train coming out of a tunnel, bursting through the Downs into sunshine and that swift, rattling descent to the Channel; you come out of it as a gull comes out of an oil-slick. You are tarred and feathered for life.

The reader knows next to nothing about this death. But sometimes it’s best just to say a little bit. It has more impact. You get an idea of what’s happened, but not too much. You never really get to the bottom of it. Life is like that too. I won't even get started on what he says about love. I want to include one last quote about reading. I’ve had conversations like this that raise similar questions about the pointlessness of writing. I have what I think are good motivational answers, but I just want to share the beautifully expressed question for now.

Some people, as they grow older, seem to become more convinced of their own significance. Others become less convinced. Is there any point to me? Isn’t my ordinary life summed up, enclosed, made pointless by someone else’s slightly less ordinary life? I’m not saying it’s our duty to negate ourselves in the face of those we judge more interesting. But life, in this respect, is a bit like reading. And as I said before: if all your responses to a book have already been duplicated and expanded upon by a professional critic, then what point is there to your reading? Only that it’s yours. Similarly, why live your life? Because it's yours. But what if such an answer gradually becomes less and less convincing?

Satanic Verses

I feel a little bit bad posting this and pushing Tree's lovely cockroach post down the page, but I suppose she'll appreciate having someone else post something.

The topic is a book, of course - The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie. I liked it; I'd say it ranks second out of the Rushdie books I've read, better than Shame and Midnight's Children, not as good as Haroun and the Sea of Stories which is just phenomenal. Rushdie, as usual, has an amazing ability to do what he wants with the English language, to use it in nontraditional ways that really leap off the page. Unfortunately, as with all his other books except for Haroun, the plot is mostly arbitrary, doesn't make much sense, and seems to serve as only a backdrop for the verbal pyrotechnics.

The device I liked in the Satanic Verses is that the book is told mostly in omniscient third person, with the very occasional first person note from the narrator, who turns out to be Satan and only intervenes occasionally. This strange narrator's presence is important in the book but done very subtly.

If, by chance, you want to know what was going on in this book, why the death threats, but don't want to commit to reading the whole thing, I strongly recommend reading only the section-larger-than-a-chapter titled "Mahound." It is the best part of the book, explains why Muslims might be offended, is more or less self-contained, and does not give away much of the plot, so if you decide later you want to read the whole novel it won't be ruined.

The Once and Future King

This book didn’t seem as great the second time I read it. It’s depressing when that happens.

First, I don’t enjoy fiction that tries to teach politics and philosophy.

Second, T. H. White is very good at showing complex motivations. Arthur is no stainless monarch. Lancelot and Guenever are both heroic and annoying. And White is more generous to the medieval Church than most revisionist storytellers today would be. So why couldn’t he make Mordred a full character? I don’t understand how an author who clearly has the skills to resist this kind of thing could fail so badly in creating this character, the purely evil badguy.

Don’t ever change

Now I’m thinking those mix-and-match high school yearbook epigrams were wiser than we thought. I recently read Now, Discover Your Strengths and look at my life and my personality differently.

Yes, it’s sort of a cheesy business management book, but it’s very encouraging and freeing. It simply says to concentrate on your strengths and not worry too much about fixing your weaknesses. We seem to go wrong when we dwell on those things, comparing ourselves to others, getting insecure and unhappy. Why not just let everyone admit what they aren’t and be satisfied with what they are?

My signature themes, by the way, are as follows:

Input
Learner
Intellection
Context
Harmony

This confirms that I am the Übergeek, which is sort of liberating. I can’t pretend I am some big social butterfly or motivational speaker or glittering demagogue. It was a strange feeling to read the descriptions and recognize myself. Apparently there are other people like me. Maybe it’s normal and possibly good to be the way I am.

As Elijah said to the Rabbi Jochanan, “Must not the Lord of all the earth do right?”

Housekeeping

(See a post and interesting comments on another book by Marilynne Robinson here.)

When you read delightful writing by a somewhat neglected and very unconventionally-raised child narrator, you wonder if it’s fair to enjoy it. You can’t help feeling guilty as you laugh at the absurdities.

There were now many of these cans on the counters and the windowsill, and they would have covered the table long since if Lucille and I had not removed them now and then. We did not object to them, despite the nuisance, because they looked very bright and sound and orderly, especially since Sylvie arranged them open end down, except for the ones she used to store peach pits and the keys from sardine and coffee cans. Frankly we had come to the point where we could hardly object to order in any form, though we hoped that her interest in bottles was a temporary aberration.

Ruth is a strange narrator. She usually seems unbelievably detached, but sometimes she seems so hopeful it hurts:

There would be a general reclaiming of fallen buttons and misplaced spectacles, of neighbors and kin, till time and error and accident were undone, and the world became comprehensible and whole....For why do our thoughts turn to some gesture of a hand, the fall of a sleeve, some corner of a room on a particular anonymous afternoon, even when we are asleep, and even when we are so old that our thoughts have abandoned other business? What are all these fragments for, if not to be knit up finally?

It’s not exactly a gripping plot, but I found myself reading just to see what she would say next. The book is absolutely beautiful. I would highly recommend it if you can handle such beauty along with some disturbing yuckiness (I don’t mean anything graphic or violent. It’s hard to explain. It’s more of a philosophical uneasiness). But that seems to be the problem with beauty in this world in any case, doesn’t it?

Catching up too

The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman.
Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder.

I learned about Philip Pullman while the movie version of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was in theaters. He is, according to an article I read somewhere, the atheist answer to C.S. Lewis, a writer of children's books for parents who do not want their children polluted by the lies and hypocrisy of religion. The results are quite good and entertaining; I can recommend The Golden Compass (the first in a trilogy called His Dark Materials) even to those who do not want their childred polluted by the lies and hypocrisy of atheism. The story is well-crafted and suspenseful, the characters are thick and believable, and it is a very fun book to read.

Mountains Beyond Mountains is about the life of Dr. Paul Farmer, a doctor and global health advocate who works ridiculously hard to care for those in the world on the wrong side of "the great epidemiological divide." His story is inspiring and more than a little uncomfortable; Farmer's story has the effect of making you feel guilty, indicted by your wealth and privilege. Reading the book you get the feeling that you aren't doing enough, worse, can never do enough, to earn the medical care and public health you enjoy on your side of the great epi divide. Kidder's prose is not ostentatious but still delightful to read; he draws you in to the true story, reveals not just the actions of his protagonist but also his motivations. The focus is always on Farmer, but Kidder gives you just enough of his own experiences and feelings to put the events and feelings into a friendly human perspective.

A small and fairly contrived connection between the two books: In The Golden Compass, the Church is always evil like Mordor is evil in The Lord of the Rings; there is no moral complexity, no admission that maybe some religious people are pretty okay some of the time. In Mountains Beyond Mountains, though Farmer's work is amazing and is rightly the focus of the book, in his story there are others who are important, in particular an Anglican priest in Haiti and a Catholic priest in Peru, who are not just helpful but completely essential to Farmer's success. So in Pullman's fiction, the Church is always hurting and oppressing; in Kidder's nonfiction, the Church is sometimes working very hard to heal and to save.

Catching up

I.
I read The Remains of the Day a while ago, since I had a copy of it and was compelled by Nerzhin's post about Ishiguro. This is a deeply sad, fascinating book.

When the narrator writes, you get the idea of a detached intelligence maneuvering a separate physical entity. Mr. Stevens doesn't talk about getting out of the way; he speaks of moving his "person" into a more convenient location.

Whenever he comes close to expressing his own real feelings, Mr. Stevens slips into the third person. "Naturally, one disapproved of the dismissals." One cannot underestimate the difficulty some people have admitting they have feelings -- and this is what makes the book's ending so powerful. When Mr. Stevens says a sentence that would be banal and idiotic coming from anyone else, it's devastating. One wonders if the author wrote the whole book to show how much meaning that one trite phrase could have in the right hands.

This book could be read as a condemnation of someone who suppresses their feelings. That seemed to be the impression of my peers when we saw the movie in high school. But I think, in a way, Mr. Stevens's professional convictions are actually very strong feelings that get out of hand. It's not that he's cold and rigid; he just gives his heart away to the wrong thing. He was as irresponsible, in his stodgy loyal way, as every starry-eyed romantic youth.

This butler is not all pitiable. One admires his analysis of his life and his place in the world. He was so painstaking and careful in his expressions, and I thought he was admirable in his beliefs about dignity and greatness. It just all went really wrong.

II.
I recently finished The Great Influenza, recommended by a doctor on my employer's Avian Flu Task Force. It was very interesting, and I brushed up my knowledge about hemagluttinin and neuraminidase, which was getting decidedly rusty (oh, all right, my knowledge of them before this book was null. But I am looking for an excuse to bring them up because they're the H and the N in H5N1, which I think is worth knowing. And they have really cool shapes).

I was sort of disappointed by the framing of the story. I kind of thought it was the story of the disease, and thus at the end we would have some exciting description of how we found out what we know now about the flu. During the entire pandemic of 1918-1919 they never figured out exactly what it was, and that seemed to be one of the elements of suspense. But then when they actually do discover it was a virus it's mentioned almost as an aside in a couple paragraphs with no fanfare and no dramatic descriptions of test tubes or bunsen burners or lab coats or anything.

I could have done with less of the sensational writing about the political atmosphere, although I suppose it's better to get mildly annoyed and keep reading than be bored out of one's skull and never finish the book. The author does well with suspenseful hooks to make you want to read on.

It's weird that such a boring and normal disease could still be such a threat. I'm not living in desperate fear of the avian flu, but it's clear that we really don't have that much control over influenza whenever it may mutate into an especially destructive form, as it does from time to time. But it will still be only one of an endless variety of ways to die. We can be comforted by that.

Gilead

Gilead by Marilynne Robinson is literary fiction of the good kind, with little plot to speak of, full of introspection and character study, but masterfully written and ringing true to life. I was reminded of Leif Enger's Peace Like a River, which is also highly recommended. Both books have Christians at or near the center of the plot, and, without hitting the reader over the head with theology or preaching, speak some profound words of truth. I do not know if either author is a Christian, but I would call both Christian works. (Wheaton graduates say together: "All truth is God's truth.")

Gilead takes the form of a journal written by a preacher, John Ames, who has married late in life and fathered a son, whom he knows he will not live to see grow up. So he writes the journal to his son, trying to tell him all at once what most fathers would be able to tell their sons gradually over time. Of course, life does not stop while John writes, and we see him struggle with friendships, forgiveness, jealousy, and worries both weighty and petty as he goes through life. There are many jewels of quotes, which I wish I had written down. As I said before, this is highly recommended, a book to savor.

Out

"Out" begins in a soulless situation, a lunchbox factory in industrial Tokyo, and it goes downhill from there. Four women who work together at the factory have become friends, partly out of necessity, because it's a grinding environment - men (the men who work in the factory are resident aliens, from Brazil) and women share a changing room where they dress in their work outfits (like scrub suits). Before going on the factory floor they're twice checked for contamination, clean their hands raw with scrub brushes, put their hair in weirdly shaped hats. They stand six hours straight on concrete, working constantly to keep up with the automated assembly line - one job per person: smashing down the cold blob of rice that's plopped out of a tube, over and over; or spreading out the slices of fish, over and over; or whatever. They can't go to the bathroom without first asking for a replacement, and it may be hours before the replacement arrives.

We don't find out until much later, but one of the women had worked in a more upscale place, a savings and loan, until she realized she would never get a higher position, no matter how competent she was, simply because she was a woman. This woman, Masako, becomes the main character in the book, taking charge of the grisly situation the four friends get into.

The book opens with Masako, on her way to work in the factory, thinking, "I want to go home." The thought surprises her, because she doesn't know what home is, let alone where. The things she does in the story ultimately seem like a kind of rebellion - anything, no matter how vile, is better than the hopeless life she leads as a proper woman in Japan. The ending chapter is almost surrealistically violent - but Masako walks away from it free, completely cut off from her past.

I was surprised by this book; it shattered any images I'd had of Japan-as-bonsai, cherry blossoms, silk, politeness. I had lunch with a Japanese friend after I read it - she says it's still true, even in modern Japan, that women are expected to accept situations that are deadening to their hopes. There really are lunchbox factories like that. And it's not just women; evidently Japanese society is undergoing huge changes. "Out" caused a sensation in Japan. It's possible to find an interview online with the author, Natsuo Kirino (accent on the first syllable of each name: NA-tsu-o KI-ri-no) where she talks about Japanese youth using violence as an escape from the traditional societal system.

I'm not recommending this book. It isn't enjoyable to read. But it is thought-provoking, and caused me to reflect on the factors that lead to human choices.