The Sandman

The second story in our first Hoffmann discussion was "The Sandman" (1815), which is shorter and rather different from "The Golden Pot" - it still has elements of fantasy and horror, but can't really be called a fairy tale. Nathanael, another student, is visited by a peddler he's sure is a horrific figure from his childhood, his late father's friend Coppelius, who would cruelly tease and insult him and his siblings when they were young.

In a letter to his friend Lothar, Nathanael describes how, at the end of the evening, his mother would morosely announce that "the Sandman is coming," and it was time to go to bed. When young Nathanael asked, she explained that "the Sandman is coming" is just a way of saying, "you children are tired, so it's time to go to bed," but he didn't believe her - because, lying in bed, he could hear someone come into the house with heavy, dragging footsteps. When he finally gets up the nerve to explore, he discovers that the guest is Coppelius, come to engage in alchemical experiments with Nathanael's father. Nathanael suspects that Coppelius is responsible for his father's death in a strange accident, but at least the frightening old man was out of their lives.

Nathanael is deeply disturbed by the seeming reappearance of Coppelius at his door, but Lothar and his sister Clara (who, as it happens, is engaged to Nathanael) encourage him to be reasonable, not be consumed by the fright he's had, not to dwell undully on the sad childhood events recalled to mind. Clara's level-headed counsel:

If there is a dark power which malevolently and treacherously places a thread within us, with which to hold us and draw us down a perilous and pernicious path that we would never otherwise have set foot on - if there is such a power, then it must take the same form as we do, it must become our very self; for only inn this way can we believe in it and give it the scope it requires to accomplish its secret task. If our minds...are resolute enough to recognize alien and malevolent influences for what they are and to proceed tranquilly along the path to which our inclinations and our vocation have directed us, the uncanny power must surely perish in a vain struggle...

The poetically-minded Nathanael tries to heed this advice, and when the peddler returns he lets him in and buys a little spy-glass from him. When he looks out his window through the spy-glass, he sees and immediately falls in love with the girl across the street, Olimpia. But there's something decidedly...unusual about Olimpia that the enchanted Nathanael just can't see. Has he fallen to the terror of Coppelius after all?

Nathanael, like Anselmus in "The Golden Pot," possesses the poetic heart of the Romantic ideal, but the two stories seem to draw rather different conclusions about the value and meaning of a life so inclined. I'm definitely curious about the rest of the stories on the schedule.

The Golden Pot

This year the library book group is all about the Germans, and our first readings are the stories of E.T.A. Hoffmann. Hoffmann (1776-1822) was a major figure in German romantic literature, though he was also a notable composer, artist and lawyer. His stories have characteristics of horror, fantasy, and fairy tale, and feature imagery of mirrors, eyes, lenses, and mechanical devices - he's credited with writing the first detective story (Mademoiselle de Scudéri), and was the author of "The Nutcracker and the Mouse King," which, of course, provided the inspiration for Tchaikovsky's Christmas ballet.

"The Golden Pot" (1814) is a literary fairly tale. The clumsy (and whiny) student Anselmus of Dresden has a run-in with an apple-seller who happens to be the very picture of the fairy tale hag-witch. She curses him cryptically, and he walks away, tripping over things and complaining about his life, until, in the shade of an elder tree, he has a strange vision of a crystal voice and a blue-eyed snake.

As Anselmus begins to fall in love with the snake, he's drawn back to earth by his friend Sub-Rector Paulmann, who's urging him to take a job transcribing mysterious ancient manuscripts in the library of the eccentric Archivist Lindhorst. Apparently, for all his clumsiness, Anselmus is noted for his beautiful hand. Anselmus accepts the job, and strange things begin to happen at the Archivist's house - including the reappearance of his beloved green snake.

Meanwhile, Sub-Rector Paulmann's daughter, Veronica, has her sights set on Anselmus, having heard that he's destined to be an important civil servant some day. Veronica enlists the help of the old witch to ensure that Anselmus will be hers.

The story was kind of hard going for the first 50 pages or so - it grabbed my interest at the point in which one of the Archivist's daughters explains to Anselmus the magical back story, and it finally becomes clear that something definitive is happening. But even then, the lines between good and evil were unclear; it was uncertain whether the reader should be rooting for Veronica or the green snake to win Anselmus's affections, or whether the evil force was the Archivist or the old woman. This uncertainty stands out, because, of course, moral ambiguity is not normally a characteristic of fairly tales.

At the very least, Hoffmann retains the fairy tale happy ending, and all around, I was pleased with the first story.

Downtown Owl - Chuck Klosterman (2008)

I don't know what possessed me to pick up Downtown Owl for my most recent trip downstate. Though I haven't read Klosterman's nonfiction extensively - the cover of Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs makes my skin crawl, even though I rather liked the limited selections I've read. And I instinctively cringe from tales of small town life. So often they end up "heartwarming," or else they try so hard not to be "heartwarming" that they turn positively apocalyptic. Also, I suppose my inner narcissist takes offense at the presentation of narrowness of experience as a near-virtue - does living in Europe as a teenager make me a bad person? And my inner introvert is terrified by the thought of knowing the same 800 people for 70 years.

Regardless, I did pick it up, and I'm glad I did. The story is set in 1983-1984 in very-small-town Owl, North Dakota (Klosterman grew up in ND in a town of 500-some residents). It consists of a description of ordinary life there through the eyes of three rather different residents: Mitch, the relentlessly normal 16-year-old high school quarterback; Julia, recently transplanted from Milwaukee to teach public school social studies; and Horace, 73-year-old widower and member of the local coffee klatch.

Naturally, it's full of other colorful characters, like the reluctant former football star working on his brother's buffalo farm, and the football coach/English teacher with the twin bad habits of giving male students embarrassing nicknames and getting female students pregnant.

The main theme on the minds of all the main characters is common knowledge - the fact that, in a small town, there's so much that "everyone" knows, so much that everyone has "always" known. But what do they know, really? What's the truth? And what does all that common ground really mean for the community? The three central characters look at these questions from the perspective of the kid who doesn't fit in, the newcomer, and the lifer, respectively. As the school principal said, "This is what being alive feels like."

A Short History of Tractors in Ukranian - Marina Lewycka (2006)

With its vaguely absurdist title, this caught my eye when it was first published, but I just got around to listening to it on my recent business trip downstate.

Synopsis: Nadia, an English sociology professor of Ukranian descent, is beside herself when she finds out that her 84-year-old immigrant engineer father, Nikolai, is planning to remarry - especially when she discovers that the bride-to-be is the voluptuous and scheming 36-year-old Valentina, freshly arrived from Ukraine. To protect her eccentric father from Valentina's machinations and her maniacal pursuit of western luxuries and a British passport, Nadia must join forces with her estranged, class-conscious older sister, Vera. In the process, Nadia comes to understand better how the experiences of living under Stalin's rule and through World War II - experiences that English-born Nadia, the postwar child, didn't share with her parents and sister - have shaped her family and their relationships. Fortunately, her husband Mike is there to listen to her father, oblivious to the abuse he's receiving at the hands of the hateful Valentina, talk on and on about his latest project, a book about the role of Ukranian engineering in the history of tractor technology.

The book is full of reminders about how much pain can lie under the surface of a life, with the immigrant experience offered up as a case study. It's also painful to the reader, much of the time, to watch Nadia and Vera struggle to protect their father against his transparently trashy new wife. In the end, sympathy turns up in the strangest places.

Tempest-Tost - Robertson Davies (1951)

I honestly derive more pure enjoyment from reading Robertson Davies than almost any other fiction-writer I know, so I've lately adopted a trilogy-per-summer campaign, akin to the Austin-in-January tradition I observed during the years I lived in Massachusetts. 2009, apparently, is time for Salterton.

My superficial reaction to Tempest-Tost is: I'm glad theater isn't my thing; the society would be dreadful.

But, of course, the delight of Davies is the cast. Here we have:

• Mr. Webster, wealthy estate owner who's grudgingly lent his garden to the Salterton Little Theater for their pastoral production of The Tempest.
  
  
• Freddy, his 14-year-old daughter, who's an aspiring oenologist going through a high Anglican phase.
  
  
• Griselda, his 18-year-old daughter, who's more beautiful and less stupid than her little sister suspects, and who has snagged the role of Ariel.
  
  
• Hector Mackilwraith, 40ish math teacher (with a secret passion for Griselda) who's turning out to be a simply dreadful Gonzalo.
  
  
• Roger, a cad whose attentions to Griselda make Hector heartsick.
  
  
• Solly Bridgewater, who would also be after Griselda, if only he could get out from under the thumb of his overbearing invalid mother.
  
  
• Tom, the Welsh gardner, who's resigned himself to spending most of July undoing the violence that the thespians are committing against the lawn.
  
  
• Nellie Forrester, the officious social climber sitting in in state over the Little Theater.
  
  
• Professor Vambrace, Nellie's chief enabler and co-tyrant.
  
  
• Valentine Rich, Salterton's native daughter who's found professional success in New York's theater scene, and has somehow gotten roped into directing this motley crew.

Mix these folks up in rehearsals, cast parties, and the occasional bit of personal intrigue, and it's simply delightful.

The Devil Takes Moscow

I've been trying to figure out how to write about The Master and Margarita for a while now. It was the final title we read in the library book group this spring, and quite challenging. Fairly considered Bulgakov's unfinished masterwork, it's highly critical of Soviet society and thus wasn't published until 1966, 26 years after the author's death, and even then in a censored edition. Copies were circulated underground among members of the intellectual classes long before that.

Synopsis: One unseasonably warm April, a mysterious foreign magician, Wolland, arrives in Moscow. His retinue: a ghostly Master of Ceremonies with a cracked pince-nez; a vile, fanged demon-type; a large, talking black cat with a mean vodka habit; a naked witch. Hijinks ensue; then hysteria; then terror, as the foreigner turns out to be the very Devil, and a Moscow that has lost its ability to believe in either God or Satan must cope with a visitation by actual evil.

A leading literary figure is decapitated by a streetcar; a young poet is declared insane; a theater manager finds himself mysteriously transported to Yalta; Wolland's single magic performance rains chaos (and eventually fire) on the city. Meanwhile, in an autobiographical gesture on Bulgakov's part, a writer (The Master) whose finest work is an abandoned novel about Pontious Pilate, lives in ignominy, and his lover (Margarita) sells her soul to Wolland to assuage the Master's disgrace.

I have no hope of doing this justice - it's difficult to describe, and is something of a favorite among students of Russian literature, with its many layers of social commentary and political criticism and Christology and Faustian themes. The annotation provided in this 1995 translation by Diana Burgin and Katherine Tiernan O'Connor is exquisite and enlightening. It's a piece that will surely deserve to be revisited.

Thinking About Kafka

I had a large coupon and store credit to spend at Borders back in December, so I decided to give myself the Christmas gift of purchasing entirely at whim. (For fun, I also had my self-present gift wrapped.) The sparkly that caught my eye that day was James Hawes's Why You Should Read Kafka Before You Waste Your Life. (And seriously, check out that cover. Can you blame me?)

Titled Excavating Kafka in Britain, this book is Hawes's attempt to debunk the "K-Myth," the author's name for the mystique that surrounds the idea of Kafka even in the minds of those who have never read him - that image of mysterious, bleak, tortured Orientalism, conveyed as much by piercing stare of the iconic 1905 portrait as by that Z-and-two-Ks virtually engineered to tantalize westerners.

A few aspects of the K-myth Hawes wishes to debunk:

• Kafka was a neglected genius in his lifetime. (According to Hawes, Kafka played the contemporary literary scene rather masterfully, though he did chose to withhold rather a lot of his work from publication during his lifetime, for various reasons.)
  
  
• Kafka plodded away at a dead-end job, and struggled to find time to write. (Hawes: Kafka was a government lawyer with an unmistakably upper-middle-class salary.)
  
  
• Kafka was tormented by fear of sex. (Hawes: Kafka maintained a rather expensive pornography habit and was a connoseur of Prague's better brothels.)
  
  
• Kafka was destructively honest about himself to the women in his life. (Hawes: Kafka was a manipulative jerk with all of his multiple girlfriends and fiancees.)
  
  
• Kafka takes us into bizarre worlds. (Hawes: Kafka's settings were biting and obvious caricatures of the Hapsburg world that any of his countrymen would have recognized. Except for the whole cockroach thing - and that was a literary construction.)

Like other pieces of populist expose, Why You Should Read Kafka exagerates its own originality and, perhaps, significance. Though I've read some Kafka over the years, I'd never read a great deal about him, nor studied him in depth, but I was still familiar both with what Hawes terms the K-myth, and, casually, with several of the arguments against it.

In an extreme example, Hawes tries to point out that the opening image of The Metamorphosis, in which the story's hero wakes up to find himself transformed into a giant insect, was lifted directly out of the opening passage of a major work of Goethe, a central piece of the German literary canon, and that, in a century of Kafka scholarship, nobody has noticed this before. Not only is this as far-fetched as it sounds, I can attest that it isn't true, since I've certainly heard that before, and I'm no scholar of Kafka or Goethe.

I admit that these criticisms should have implications in terms of the book's credibility, but they're strangely easy to forgive, presumably on some combination of the following grounds:

1. They're all the kind of exaggeration that's familiar enough in works of popular, rather than rigorous, scholarship.
   
   
2. The general thrust stays believable - really, the whole Kafka-mytique is so over-the-top romantic that anyone with sense should know to doubt it.
   
   
3. The presentation is rollicking good fun.

If nothing else, reading this did get me curious about Kafka and his influences and has got me reading and re-reading his work. More on that later, no doubt.

Corduroy Mansions

Sam at Book Chase brought my attention to Alexander McCall Smith's latest concept work, Corduroy Mansions, which was published weekdays in serial format through February on the website of The Guardian. Serial publication isn't new to McCall Smith, who's been publishing the 44 Scotland Street series daily in The Scotsman for several years now - I'm not sure how long, exactly, but as of this year there will be 5 novel-length volumes compiled. I was interested, since I do like McCall Smith's work very much, and 44 Scotland Street is probably my favorite of his series, but also because I'm fascinated by his volume of output - counting the serials, I think he's producing 4-5 novels a year lately, plus children's books.

Corduroy Mansions bears a strong resemblance to 44 Scotland Street. Both tell the stories of the residents of the various flats in their eponymous addresses, but that's just the beginning. They also share plenty of themes - art, wine, grown children - and characters - narcissist, lovable eccentric, dog whose carni-centric thoughts the narrator can read.

One interesting feature: each installment was posted both in text and audio, the audio being read by British actor Andrew Sachs - remember the Spanish waiter from Faulty Towers? And he was good.

I enjoyed it, because it certainly carries that McCall Smith charm, that brainy coziness that makes his fans so fiercely loyal. In the final accounting, hard-core McCall Smith fans will appreciate this, while acknowledging it's a bit derivative; casual readers, particularly those of his other serialized work, will find it more of the same; and novices are advised to seek out his other, somewhat stronger, pieces first (and heaven knows there's enough of them).

Heart of a Dog - Mikhail Bulgakov (1925)

This was the second short work for our February group discussion, and though it was a faster read than The Fatal Eggs, it was also much darker.

Synopsis: Sharik, a mangy Moscow mutt, is taken in and nursed to robust health by Professor Preobrazhensky, a physician. The dog is bright, affectionate, devoted to his rescuer...until the operation, in which the Professor and his assistant implant Sharik with the testicles and pituitary gland salvaged from the body of a petty criminal, lately killed in a bar brawl.

Miraculously, Sharik survives the surgery, and rapidly begins to take human form - he begins to speak, walks on hind legs, loses his fur, wears clothes, reads Engels. Sharik becomes more and more human with time; or, rather, he becomes more and more the caricature of the vilest, most vulgar proletarian, terrorizing the home and lives of his creators.

If Sharik (who, as a man, improbably dubs himself Polygraph Polygraphovich Sharikov) is the slovenly Plebian, Preobrazhensky embodies the bourgeois ideal, living comfortably, operating his practice, wishing only to be left alone by his local committee. Little wonder, perhaps, that Heart of a Dog wasn't published in Russian until 1987 (at which time it apparently made no little splash).

Reading these two works has made me rather more aware and curious about the political change through the earliest years of the Soviet era - we in the West have an impression of that period as one of uniform bleakness, when, really, they were packed with nuance and tumult. Definitely looking forward to the final Bulgakov work on the syllabus, The Master and Margarita, and our group discussions.

The Fatal Eggs - Mikhail Bulgakov (1926)

First book for the library book group. I had to smile when I bought this one, since the frog is kind of a personal symbol (for complex reasons I'll have to explain some other time - but seriously, isn't he cute?).

Synopsis: The scene is Moscow, 1928 (the near future, at the time of writing). Stalin is comfortably installed and is even starting to solve those niggling, post-revolutionary annoyances like the urban housing crisis. One Professor Persikov, zoologist, indifferent to politics and all other concerns outside the bounds of biology, is innocently studying his frogs when he inadvertently discovers a powerful new form of light.

The "red ray," as he dubs it, violently accelerates cellular growth - in the light of the ray, organisms grow at lightning speed, to enormous sizes, reproducing to the point of almost instantaneous overcrowding, at which point they turn to devour each other.

I did mention that Bulgakov was an anti-Soviet satirist, yes? Good.

In between interviews with state journalists, spent carefully dissimulating the significance of his discovery, Persikov runs a few rounds of red ray experiments with his frogs, then writes to an American zoologist to order some more interesting specimen - specifically, a selection of eggs from several of the larger species of snake native to North America.

Meanwhile, back on the farm...a poultry plague is ravaging the Russian countryside, killing every chicken within hundreds of square miles in a matter of days. To remedy this, the government sets up a state farm, commandeers a few of Persikov's red ray chambers (over his frenzied objections) and orders a few cases of chicken eggs from the West.

Two shipments of eggs. One Soviet bureaucracy. Care to guess what happens?

Naturally, the reptile eggs go to the state farm, and the hen eggs to the infuriated Persikov. A few shots of the red ray, and little villages across Russia are suddenly being terrorized by forty-foot-long rattlesnakes. Oh, yes.

One thing I'm curious about, that I hope comes up in our discussion, is the actual social position of the research scientist in early Stalin-era Russia. There's never been a place or time when the practice of science hasn't been politicized (usually, though not always, to the chagrin of the scientists themselves), and I'd like to know more about how that played out under the unique circumstances of that era.

Soviet Sci-Fi

I've had a few brief experiences participating in book groups in the past, and since moving to Chicagoland, I've made a few attempts to find a group to join. This is easier said than done, if you're going in blind - it's not as though there's some national internet repository for matching up would-be book groupies (?) to each other - and the few possibilities I've been able to follow up with haven't worked out.

So recently I decided to take advantage of mid-term sign-up for one of the groups sponsored by my local library. This one seems fairly serious, with a focus on hefty-ish fiction and a leader who formerly taught literature in Russia. (I had to draft the grammar of that last phrase several times. Russian former literature professor? Former Russian literature professor? Russian former professor of literature?)

Apparently, they spent last fall on Gogol, but the readings from now though May are all Mikhail Bulgakov. I can't say I previously knew much about Bulgakov (1891-1940) beyond his name. He was born in Kiev to Russian parents. Both his grandfathers were priests, and his father was a theology professor, but Bulgakov himself trained as a doctor and served in a medical capacity in World War I and the Russian Civil War.

Eventually, Bulgakov abandoned medicine to devote himself to literature, but, being a critic of the Soviet regime, found his hands tied by censorship within a decade - this despite having Stalin himself as a particular fan. In fact, rather than granting permission for Bulgakov to emigrate, Stalin found him work as a theatrical satirist. Still, much of his work of lay unpublished in a desk drawer until long after his death, at age 48, from inherited kidney disease.

Our February discussion will cover two shorter works (around 100 pages each) - The Fatal Eggs and Heart of a Dog - both works of science fiction, in its earlier sense; that is, more Jules Verne than Star Trek. I've started on the first, and so far, it's promising.

(Note: The plaque in the photo is installed at the Bulgakov museum in Kiev. I think. Half the site was in Russian.)

The end of 2008

I've been wanting to properly review all of these, but it's not going to happen - but they're all worth a real mention, so here are the last few crumbles from 2008.

1. Gertrude and Claudius - John Updike, 1991

I've occasionally been known to ironically summarize the works of John Updike - all of those I've read, at least - with the single sentence, Everybody spends all their free time committing adultery. The title characters of this novel being the King and Queen of Denmark - yes, of the Prince Hamlet tale - so I suppose it doesn't really break with the theme. Updike tells Gertrude's story from the time of her girlhood betrothal to King Hamlet up to the point where Shakespeare's version picks up. The book is written in three parts: in the first, Updike uses the character names as they appeared in an early account of Danish myth; in the second, as they appeared in a later later adaptation; and in the final section, as Shakespeare presented them. Accordingly, the telling of the story moves starts out with an atmosphere of dark, Nordic, barely post-pagan savagery, and gradually adopts the Renaissance sensibilities that color Shakespeare's telling.

2. Trespassers Will Be Baptized: The Unordained Memoir of a Pastor's Daughter - Elizabeth Emerson Hancock, 2008.

I had to pick this up the moment I saw it in the library, because it belongs to a genre I've long believed to be under-populated: the preacher's kid memoir. (I don't know if that sentiment is because I'd like to write my own, or because I want help defining the situation.) Hancock gets to the heart of the matter of being Raised Right in a first family, and, given the time, place and circumstances, her parents were amazingly awesome. It's a hoot, all rolled up in a familiar blanket.

3. The Yiddish Policemen's Union - Michael Chabon, 2007.

This is...strange. Takes place in a parallel universe in which Israel collapsed in 1948 and the United States offered amnesty to the Jews on an island off the Alaska panhandle (something of the sort was in fact proposed, briefly, in the real world). 60+ years later, the territory is set to revert back to the control of the now State of Alaska, and the Sitka Jews are scrambling to relocate to New York, Mexico, Madagascar. Meanwhile, a hard-drinking cop and his half-Tlingit partner try to solve the murder of the messiahesque, chess pro, junkie son of the local Rebbe/mob boss. Oh, and did I mention the Filipinos? Basically, it's a Raymond Chandler novel in a very odd setting.

Babar, the Elephant

Consuming children's entertainment as an adult is a fraught business. It's got its positive side, certainly - you finally get all the really good jokes in the Disney cartoons, for example. But you can also make discoveries that are hazardous to your understanding of the universe.

I don't often feel the urge to re-read books from my childhood, but recently I developed a hankering for Babar, the Francophone elephant king, so I checked out a few volumes from the library.

(Asides: a) There are a lot more of these titles than I realized. b) The children's room is hard to navigate - everything is too low to the ground for my rheumatically compromised joints. )

I hadn't counted on the three little picture books I brought home being so politically loaded. Let me recount Babar's story for you, in case it's been a while (keep in mind, original publication was 1933):

Little Babar lived with the other elephants in the "forest" (that's how it's translated from the French). One day, his mother is brutally murdered by a white poacher, and Babar runs away to Paris (?). He falls into the good graces of a very old, very rich lady, who becomes his benefactress and takes him to get a suit of clothes in a becoming shade of green, including spats and a bowler. Courtesy of a private tutor, Babar also receives a proper European education.

Eventually, Babar returns to the forest (in the old lady's motor car), where it just so happens that the old elephant king has just died (he ate a poisonous mushroom, and turned the same shade of green as Babar's suit). The elephant elders unanimously decide to make Babar the new king, seeing as how he's become a sophisticated, enlightened European and all. (Yep, we're totally going there.) Like any self-respecting European monarch, Babar then marries his cousin.

Babar sets about civilizing the elephant kingdom, and sets up a capital city with paved roads, modern homes, a school, and an opera house. The elephants dress in lovely western clothes and become doctors and cobblers and mechanics. They learn to read and write and play orchestra music. And then...they all live happily ever after.

Just...wow.

Larry's Party - Carrol Shields

Synopsis: twenty years in the life of one Larry Weller, Winnipeg native, younger child and only son of English parents (an upholsterer of custom coach busses and a housewife).

Larry, an angsty Boomer, a florist who becomes North America's leading hedge maze designer.

Larry marries and divorces twice (a car saleswoman-turned-greeting card executive, then a feminist hagiologist), has one child (a future high school track star), insulates his attic, gets a promotion, moves to Chicago, daydreams, starts a business, becomes successful, owns a tuxedo, travels in Europe, has a mid-life crisis, meets other men named Larry, moves to Toronto, dates a scarf-wearing widow, throws a dinner party.

That's everything that happens, yet it spoils nothing. This series of vignettes defies description. The eponymous party makes the whole endeavor worthwhile.

The Periodic Table - Primo Levi

"There have been courtier philosophers, lens-grinding philosophers, and even engineer and strategist philosophers; but no philosopher, so far as I know, was a wholesaler." - Primo Levi, The Periodic Table, "Arsenic"

I don't know if this happens to anyone else, but there are genre I think I like, that, whenever I actually read them, I remember that I don't (Southern Gothic comes to mind). Likewise, there are genre that I repeatedly forget that I adore. Like scientific memoir.

"Promethius had been foolish to bestow fire on men instead of selling it to them: he would have made money, placated Jove, and avoided all that trouble with the vulture." - "Cerium"

The Periodic Table (1975) is one of several volumes of memoir Primo Levi wrote, but, where the other works focus on the time during and immediately following his internment at Auschwitz, this one describes his life in vignettes related to his chemistry training and career. The chapters are named for and themed around chemical elements (Iron, Mercury, Sulfur) - thus the title. To the extent that chemistry is addressed as such, there's nothing scientifically academic about the work, and, though a reader with no chemistry background might not fully understand some of the activities described, that shouldn't make it inaccessible, as every Levi pulls every detail to serve the humanity of the story.

Now, at that time, there did not exist polyethylene, which would have suited me perfectly since it is flexible, light, and splendidly impermeable: but it is also a bit too incorruptable, and not by chance God Almighty himself, although he is a master of polymerization, abstained from patenting it: He does not like incorruptable things. - "Cerium"

Certainly, as a quasi-chemist (a chemical engineer, actually, but I have to pass for a chemist occasionally) with a literary bent, I love to get this view of someone like Levi, but the fascination of this perspective goes deeper than shared education. Levi is the object of any number of descriptors: novelist, essayist, critic, resistance fighter, Holocaust survivior. But, and this is what's so fascinating, what was his main occupation, for most of his work days, for most of his life? The trade he chose in his youth to pursue? Chemist. And not a chemist like Levoisier, or Linus Pauling, or Peter Debye, people who discovered groundbreaking phenomena or won Nobel Prizes or got obscure units of measure named for them. Levi was an industrial chemist - mostly, he solved problems in paint formulations when the product wouldn't dry properly.

Better to remain on the Earth, playing with the dipoles... - "Potassium"

I find this incredibly inspiring. Modern popular philosophies of fulfilment suggest that actualized existence can only occur when one aligns the maximum possible number of daily hours with the most rarefied calling to which one can attain. In other words, you can get life to work, if only you demand the freedom to live in unreality. It's good to be reminded that ordinary usefulness doesn't preclude greatness.

Now on my cubicle wall: To be a consultant is the ideal work, the sort from which you derive prestige and money without dirtying your hands, or breaking your backbone, or running the risk of ending up roasted or poisoned: all you have to do is take off your smock, put on your tie, listen in attentive silence to the problem, and then you'll feel like the Delphic oracle. You must then weigh your reply very carefully and formulate it in convoluted, vague language so that the customer also considers you an oracle, worthy of his faith and the rates set by the Chemists' Society. - "Nitrogen"

Additional Quotes

On the trade:

• ...all the values satisfied the specification, indeed were equal among themselves: 29.5 percent, not one percent more, not one less. I felt my inner being as a chemist writhe, confronted with this abomination. - "Chromium"
  
  
• The trade of chemist (fortified, in my case, by the experience of Auschwitz) teaches you to overcome, indeed to ignore, certain revulsions that are neither necessary or congenital: matter is matter, neither noble nor vile, infinitely transformable, and its proximate origin is of no importance whatsoever. - "Nitrogen"
  
  
• I must also mention another peculiar and beneficent consequence of [customer service]: by pretending to esteem and like your fellow men, after a few years in this trade you wind up really doing so, just as someone who feigns madness for a long time actually becomes crazy. - "Uranium"
  
  
• I was more interested in the stories of the solitary chemistry, unarmed and on foot, at the measure of man, which with few exceptions has been mine. - "Silver"
  
  
• I also know that, more often mania prevails over common sense, and alongside five sensible precepts or prohibitions lurk ten senseless, useless ones, which nobody dares rescind only out of mental laziness, superstition, or morbid fear of complications. - "Silver"

On the war:

• We thought what all humiliated Italians were then thinking: that the Germans and Japanese were invincible, but the Americans were too, and that the war would plod on like this for another twenty or thirty years, a bloody and interminable but remote stalemate, known only through doctored war bulletins... - "Gold"
  
  
• Neither in us nor, more generally, in our generation, whether "Aryan" or Jew, had the idea yet gained ground that one must or could resist Fascism. - "Potassium"
  
  
• During those days, when I was waiting courageously enough for death, I harbored a piercing desire for everything, for all imaginable human experiences, and I cursed my previous life, which it seemed to me I had profited from little or badly... - "Gold"

On rabbits:

• Rabbits are not attractive animals. They are among the mammals most distant from man, perhaps because their qualities are those of humanity when humiliated and outcast: they are timid, silent, and evasive, and all they know is food and sex. - "Phosphorus"
  
  
• Those rabbits, by order of the commendatore, lived each in its own cage, males and females, in strict celibacy. But there was a night bombing which, without causing any other damages, bashed all the cages, and in the morning we found the rabbits intent on a meticulous and general campaign of copulation: the bombs had not frightened them at all. - "Phosphorus"

On humanity:

• ...man is a centaur, a tangle of flesh and mind, divine inspiration and dust. - "Argon"
  
  
• He had studied medicine and had become a good doctor, but he did not like the world. - "Argon"
  
  
• In school they loaded me with tons of notions which I diligently digested, but which did not warm the blood in my veins. - "Hydrogen"
  
  
• ...we were at the age when one always has the need, instinct, and immodesty of inflicting on one another everything that swarms in one's head and elsewhere (and this is an age that can last long, but ends with the first compromise) - "Iron"
  
  
• That the nobility of man, acquired in a hundred centuries of trial and error, lay in making himself the conqueror of matter, and that I had enrolled in chemistry because I wanted to remain faithful to this nobility. That conquering matter is to understand it, and understanding matter is necessary to understanding the universe and ourselves... - "Iron"
  
  
• Today I know that it is a hopeless task to try to dress a man in words, make him live again on the printed page. - "Iron"
  

Special Topics in Calamity Physics - Marisha Pessl

This book caught my eye when it was first released - with that title, how could it not - but whenever I noticed it come up in discussion (mostly online), it seemed to be getting dipolar reviews. I was still curious, but didn't act to indulge that curiosity until receiving the recommendation of a friend - not a gushing, frenetic recommendation, but a hint that there might be a good deal in this book that I'd personally find entertaining. Entertaining it was, but flawed.

Blue van Meer is a ludicrously precocious high school senior who has spent her life moving around the country as her father, a political science professor with an interest in revolutionaries, bounced from one semester-long gig at a third-rate university to the next. Her father is a good-natured narcissist, affectionate, but with Pygmalionesque tendencies where his daughter is concerned - he spends dinner conversations, car rides, and trips to Wal-Mart grooming his daughter into an intellectual elitist worthy of his beloved Harvard (and ready to blow her academic competition in each new town out of the water).

The van Meers settle in North Carolina for Blue's senior year, and she falls in with a group of friends ring-led by Hannah Schneider, a part-time teacher at their school with a house full of rescued animals, a penchant for worn clothing, and a mysterious past. The first half or more of the book is devoted to developing this group of relationships by means of a series of quirky coming-of-age vignettes. My favorite: when Blue's new friends coach her on underage bar hopping, and giver her the identity of a college sophomore studying Chemical Engineering, and the advice, "Always say you're seriously into engineering. People don't know what it is, and they won't ask, because it sounds mind-numbing."

The novel changes abruptly with a turn of plot that's foretold in the first pages - Hannah takes the students on a spring camping trip and is found dead the first night. Blue spends the remaining chapters recovering from the trauma and trying to solve the mystery of Hannah's death - including what her father might know about it.

The one thing that can definitely be said for this book is that Blue has an original voice. "Always have everything you say exquisitely annotated," Blue's father instructed her, and throughout her narrative, Blue clings devotedly to this rule (see Special Topics in Calamity Physics, Pessl, 2006, p. 4). Like that. So the novel is copiously annotated with references real and invented. I listened to the book on audio, and didn't find these constant interruptions troublesome, but I suspect it would have been distracting on the page, since there were so many that some pages must have had a dozen notes. I know some have read this as a pretentious display, and I can understand that impression, but I couldn't help but imagine that it must have been fun doing the research. Still, the technique was probably indulged beyond the reader's comfort. Ditto the use of simile - one can only take so much of a single literary device.

More problematic is the lack of cohesiveness. It's not just the plot that twists with Hannah's death, it's the entire narrative. If the mystery was meant to be the tension point of the book, it's weakly resolved, and the first section was overdone - the scene could have been set with far less bulk and lost little of its character. And the second half I can only describe as unnecessarily weird. If I encountered such an extreme change in texture in an older book, I'd be researching the author to find out whether he'd undergone a change in neurological condition in the middle of writing the first draft. That's not to say the second half is bad, or even worse than the first, but it's strange to feel disoriented in the middle of something that's so unusual to begin with.

Special Topics is absolutely filled with fun, quirky (if a little self-indulgent) elements that I enjoyed, but the structure of the novel as a whole was confused. I found myself easily imagining Pessl's style working in a short format - a short story version of Catcher in the Rye meets Sophie's World meets Men and Cartoons. The issues with this book shouldn't be excused for being the work of a young novelist, but, in my view, they aren't enough to make it uninteresting.

Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh

A long-time favorite that I wanted to re-read before seeing the film version recently released in somewhat narrow circulation. I'd forgotten quite how dismal the ending is, and afterward found myself too drained to consume narrative in any form for two days.

The movie was well done and enjoyable, incidentally. Emma Thomson as the mother was SCARY. The thing about adapting this particular story - Waugh wrote these characters with highly nuanced motivations, which would have required unusual genius - or a very, very long film - to portray on screen, so there were some plot shortcuts, the upside of which is that I now know exactly how many different sorts of human subtlety can be substituted by a love triangle (eleven, by my count). I also suspect it caught by surprise any number of the audience who had read the book without realizing how much of it was about homosexuality (don't laugh, you know it happens). All said, though, it still gets two thumbs up. And at least half a thumb is all for Patrick Malahide as the elder Mr. Ryder.

Notable quotes:

Charles's Father: I wanted to talk about Etruscan notions of immortality; he wanted to talk about extension lectures for the working-class; so we compromised and talked about you. (p. 25)

Cousin Jasper: Beware of the Anglo-Catholics - they're all sodomites with unpleasant accents. (p. 26)

Father Phipps, on hair cutting: Nuns do it. (p. 37)

...that unmistakable English church-going pace, which eschewed equally both haste and idle sauntering. (p. 59)

Cordelia: Is there a difference between liking a thing and thinking it good? (p. 92)

Sebastian: It's rather sad to think that whatever happens you and I can never possibly get involved in a war. (p. 101)

Lady Marchmain: Now I realize that it is possible for the rich to sin by coveting the privileges of the poor. ... but I believe that it is one of the special achievements of Grace to sanctify the whole of life, riches included. (p. 126)

Lady Marchmain: It's very unexpected for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, but the gospel is simply a catalogue of unexpected things. (p. 127)

...the cant phrase of the time, derived from heaven knows what misconception of popular science. "There's something chemical between them" was used to explain the overmastering hate or love of any two people. It was the old concept of determinism in new form. (p. 129)

Charles, on Sebastian: He's ashamed of being unhappy. (p. 136)

Julia, on Sebastian: I'm fond of him too, in a way, I suppose, only I wish he'd behave like anybody else. (p.161)

Charles: D'you know, Bridey, if I ever felt for a moment like becoming a Catholic, I should only have to talk to you for five minutes to be cured. You manage to reduce what seem like quite sensible propositions to stark nonsense. (p. 164)

To be married, soon and splendidly, was the unquestioned aim of all her friends. If she looked further than the wedding, it was to see marriage as the beginning of individual existence; the skirmish where one gained one's spurs, from which one set out on the true quests of life. (p. 181)

Cordelia: She was saintly, but she wasn't a saint. No one could really hate a saint, could they? They can't really hate God either. When they want to hate Him and His saints they have to find something like themselves and pretend it's God and hate that. (p. 221)

I regarded men as something less than the buildings they made and inhabited, as mere lodgers and short-term sub-lessees of small importance in the long, fruitful life of their homes.

Anthony: Charm is the great English blight. It does not exist outside these damp islands. It spots and kills anything it touches. It kills love; it kills art; I greatly fear, my dear Charles, it has killed you. (p. 273)

Charles: Why is it that love makes me hate the world? (p. 276)

Julia: Living in sin, with sin, by sin, for sin, every hour, every day, year in, year out. Waking up with sin, bathing it, dressing it, clipping diamonds to it, feeding it, showing it round, giving it a good time, putting it to sleep at night with a tablet of Dial if it's fretful. (p. 287)

Cara: His heart; some long word at the heart. He is dying of a long word. (p. 318)

Julia: ...the bad thing I was on the point of doing, that I'm not quite bad enough to do; to set up a rival good to God's. (p. 340)

Possession - A.S. Byatt

One line review: That must have been a lot of work.

Notable Quotes:

We are a Faustian generation, my dear - we seek to know what we are maybe not designed (if we are designed) to be able to know. (p. 234)

The whole of our scholarship - the whole of our thought - we question everything except the centrality of sexuality - Unfortunately feminism can hardly avoid privileging such matters. Sometimes I wish I had embarked on geology myself. (p. 242)

And then, really, what is this arcane power we have, when we see that everything is human sexuality? It's really powerlessness. ... Everything relates to us and so we're imprisoned in ourselves - we can't see things. (p. 276)

At some point in their history their self-value changed into - what worries you. A horrible over-simplification. It leaves out guilt, for a start. (p. 277)

So the human imagination mixes and adapts its current preoccupations may ingredients into new wholes. (p. 278)

At my life, the way it is - what I really want is to - to have nothing. An empty clean bed. I have this image of a clean empty bed in a clean empty room, where nothing is asked or to be asked. (p. 290)

More Abiblia

I've been too quiet here. Too quiet for my own satisfaction. I want to be here - but for some reason I'm blank on putting thoughts on paper (er, silicon?).

I'm in the midst of another season of "I just can't finish ANYTHING I start reading." I suspect there's some more broadly-based discontent at work; whatever it is it's agitating.

And what I do finish I'm finding it hard to write about, despite the fact that that’s the entire point of bothering to blog. It depends on what I’m reading. What more is there to say about a classic like Three Men in a Boat (let alone, The Great Gatsby)? Or about a highly regarded and broadly exposed contemporary bestseller like The Time Traveler’s Wife (let alone, Possession)? And it isn’t only a prideful resistance to exposing my own banal reflections to scrutiny that keeps me quiet. It’s also my natural gravitation to the universal, the contextual, the 30,000-foot perspective, rather than the personal, the specific, the immediate. And the place of The Great Gatsby in the universe seems like well-covered ground, even if it were a topic I were better qualified to meaningfully discuss.

Then there are the times when I can't seem to muster the energy to mold my thoughts into cohesive prose - though another reason for being here is to force myself to do exactly that.

Though I know these reservations have merit, they hold me back from doing what I’ve set out to do. Excess noise might be the path to value. I just have to find a more inspiring track to ride for a while. I've got a few ideas.

Housekeeping and the Literary Art

A Broom of One's Own - Nancy Peacock

Confession: I'm quite bad at cleaning. If you read my other blog, you may have gathered as much. If I were to pursue a career in the arts and needed to support myself with a day job, I'd do much better as, say, a pet sitter, or a high school calculus tutor.

Not so novelist Nancy Peacock, who, even after publication of two books continued her work as independent cleaning lady to make ends meet. In this quirky memoir, Peacock reflects on the intersection of life as housekeeper and author. I came away with great respect for her tenacity - in addition to the frustrations inherent to any service job (please, flush the toilet before the cleaning lady comes) and the uncertainties of a writing career (how many rejection letters can I collect this week?), she fought the discouragement of her literary peers' discomfort with her circumstances and lack of formal education, and the feedback of elderly clients who enthusiastically informed her that her books weren't nearly as good as Bridget Jones' Diary.

Still, she points out the advantages of her situation. A writer benefits from time alone, but away from the page; manual distraction is healthy for the narrative; you can learn a lot of useful stuff in other people's houses. Between the anecdotes and reflections contained in the book's essays and the interviews and advice from the author at the end, I imagine this book could be an encouragement to the aspiring writer who's willing to face reality - Peacock is honest about the struggles and disappointments of her literary career thus far without descending into languid cynicism. And it's that last part that I most respect these days, cynic though I am myself.

Incidentally, I've never read either of Peacock's novels, and after finishing this book checked for them at my local bookstores (I won't suggest this was the aim, since I just finished praising lack of cynicism), but didn't find them anywhere. I'm not sure they sound like quite my thing, but I'm curious, and I'll keep an eye out.