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.

Gogol on Stage

I joined my library book club mid-term (in January), when they started reading Bulgakov (see here, here, and here) but in the fall they had read Gogol, of whom Bulgakov had been a great admirer. So it was through that channel that I heard about the performance of Disappearing Acts: Stories of Nikolai Gogol at the Piven Theater Workshop.

I'd read Gogol on several occasions, though none very recently, so I prepared by re-reading the two stories to be performed, "Overcoat" and "Nose." Gogol is far more readable than I generally think of him as being. (Do you ever unconsciously retain false impressions of a book, author or genre that somehow prove impervious to repeated contrary experience? For example, I always think I enjoy southern literature far more than I ever end up actually enjoying it when I read it, and I always forget how much I like science memoir until I read another one.)

The plays turned out to be exceptionally good. The performance was held in a tiny theater in a cultural center up near Northwestern University - the house probably seats around 50, with the seats and stage at grade with one another. Definitely one of the more intimate theater experiences I've enjoyed. The stories were dramatized in-house (I think), and were performed in a storytelling style, with the ensemble taking on the functions of both narration and portrayal, which the cast worked well.

"We all come out of Gogol's 'Overcoat'," Dostoevsky is often quoted as describing his own generation of Russian writers; the modern response is usually that this is more evidently true of the generation that included Beckett and Kafka. It's not hard to see the Kafka in Gogol (or, properly, the other way around), particularly when reading Gogol with Kafka-on-the-brain, as I've been. Noses don't just vanish and assume false identities any more than traveling salesmen wake up transformed into june bugs, for example; it's also not hard to imagine that G. and K. could have related well to each others' home bureaucracies. But the resemblance was especially vivid with Gogol on the stage - with the overcoat not just emotive, but actually anthropomorphic.

I'll definitely be going back to read more Gogol now - and, I hope, back to Piven next season.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

Three by Austen

I'm way, way behind in posting Decades Challenge reviews, though only slightly behind in reading - for a while I was only in the mood for essays, and then I got sidetracked re-reading McCall Smith's von Igelfeld stories (highly recommended). Even with that, I've got plenty of other reviews to catch up on, so I better get started.

The first piece I chose for the Decades Challenge was Austen's Lady Susan, written around 1795, though not published until 1871 (by her nephew, with his memoirs of Austen and several other unpublished pieces). Also published in the same volume are two unfinished works, The Watsons (c. 1804), and Sanditon (c. 1816). Taken together, and with Margaret Drabble's insightful introduction, the three short pieces present a ready comparison of Austen's work at the beginning, middle and end of her career.

Lady Susan. Austen apparently never sought to publish Lady Susan during her lifetime, but clearly liked the piece well enough to finish and edit it. It's an epistolary novella, with a title character who's a bad lady indeed. In fact, the character of Lady Susan is probably what most sets this piece apart from Austen's other work. In her six novels, Austen certainly depicts wicked characters, and describes evil deeds (see George Wickham, John Willoughby, Henry Crawford), but never directly portrays genuine vice; Lady Susan's character, by contrast, is represented quite blatantly in her own correspondence. So the social criticism here is sharp, not subtle, as in Austen's later works - but the effect is so distinct that it reads as a wholly different technique that Austen may consciously have abandoned, rather than an immature version of her later voice.

Had this piece been worked up into a full-length novel, I doubt it would be regarded as Austen's best - the plot is too melodramatic - but certainly it would hold its own against the others.

The Watsons. Of the three pieces, The Watsons most resembles Austen's better-known works. It is generally believed that Austen simply abandoned the work when her father died in 1805, and the condition of the prose is rudimentary, with vague outlines, in places, of action and dialog. But the country-house setting and society, as well as the voicing, pace, characterization, and even some of the plot, are reminiscent of Emma and Mansfield Park.

The story opens with Emma Watson (clearly, Austen didn't encounter a great variety of names in the society of her too-brief life) returning to her family home after being raised by a wealthier relation. She's immediately whisked away to a country ball in the company of beneficent neighbors, and falls in with the party of the local Great Family, among whom are multiple potential suitors of varying moral fiber. Utterly conventional Austen, yes, but we're talking 40 pages of first-draft. The characters show promise, and it would have been interesting to see what she'd done with them.

Sanditon was the manuscript on Austen's desk (figuratively) when she died in 1817, and its rough form is similar to that of The Watsons. It resembles Persuasion primarily in its acknowledgment of a changing world, and the mortality (gasp) even of Regency conventions. Rather than an established town around the ancient estate of a family of long standing, Sanditon is an emerging resort town of the sort the Victorians would come to love. There Austen places an ambitious mix of characters - the progressive, garrulous Parkers, oldblood Lady Denham, new money from West Indian estates, and...tourists. Clearly, Austen, for all her seclusion, narrow society, and distractions of failing health, saw the world changing. I wish she'd been around a bit longer to let us know more clearly what she thought of it all.

Bel Canto - Ann Patchett

As with a love affair, the battered heart needs time to recover from a good work of fiction.

I made reference to this Michael Dirda quote in my last post, and yesterday I lived it when I finished Bel Canto. If you've read it, you know that the ending, though not a surprise, comes down forcefully. Battered is exactly how I feel, and I can't quite bring myself back to fiction right now, even stuff I've already got in progress.

Synopsis: In a bid to attract industrial investment, a nameless South American country hosts a 53rd birthday party for one Mr. Hosokawa, Japanese opera afficionado and president of a Sony-doppleganger. To persuade him to accept the invitation, they invite his favorite soprano to perform. At the end of her performance, a troupe of terrorists emerges from the HVAC system to kidnap the host country's president. Unfortunately, the president had skipped the party to watch his favorite soap opera, so the terrorists find themselves with a few hundred surprise international hostages of the slightly- to moderately-powerful variety.

Any reader who wasn't born yesterday knows that untenable hostage situations just don't end well. And it's the dread birthed by this knowledge, in constant contrast with the transcendence of beauty that permeates the story, that tears at the soul.

Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell - Susannah Clarke

It took me a few tries to get through this. I don't ordinarily give a piece of contemporary fiction so many chances, even on audio, and I think I only did so with this one because the blogosphere has been resonant with vague enthrallment over it for the last several years, I'd heard the ending was to die for, and the story was in fact interesting enough. It was still far longer than it needed to be - forgivable once you plow through it, but likely to lose a lot of readers along the way.

How to describe it? Magic, mystery, mysticism, manipulation, madness, secrecy, suspense, surprise, jealousy, power, love, war - all in a tasty candy coating. And I mean that in the best possible way.

The ending was well done. Thought the actual events of the story become increasingly mystical and frenetic, the narrative becomes more and more measured, deliberate, disciplined. The final pages leave you wanting more - which is interesting, when most of the book's significant bulk leaves you wishing for a bit less.

The footnotes are a delight - but moving Brussels to Nebraska was sheer brilliance.

Love Over Scotland - Alexander McCall Smith

"I cannot afford to have a romance with a pirate, she said to herself. Not at my stage of life. I just cannot."

Summer Reading Redux

A brief rundown of the salient selections from this summer's out time:

Me Talk Pretty One Day - David Sedaris - I was getting overwhelmed by the moving thing and wanted something to laugh at. The first half was boring. The second half was good. It's disturbing how funny such messed up people can be. Moving myself this summer, I loved the parts when he was working for the Marxist moving company in New York. A quote on brooding on poetry:

If a dead poet on the other side of the world could describe my feelings with such precision, I had to accept with humility that my love was not exceptional, that I had invented nothing, that everyone falls in love in more or less the same manner.

The View from Saturday - E.L. Konigsburg - Mom the Librarian recommends children's literature on a regular basis. This one was great. I loved every single character. My Sister the Blond Artist and I listened to it on the drive from Rustingham to Chicago.

First Among Sequels - Jasper Fforde - I'm afraid this franchise may be spent. Pity, because it was so much fun. This one is set in 2002, around 15 years after Something Rotten.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - J.K. Rowling - Way fun. Fast paced. Nice work, Jo! I also thought the Order of the Phoenix movie was quite well done - they finally found the adaptation code. Good thing, too, since that book had, what, 6,000 pages?

Only Connect (Part 2)

My Howard's End essay has been going nowhere for far too long, so I'll settle for a quote list instead.

You use the intellect, but you no longer care about it. That I call stupidity.

Ah yes--she had been a good woman--she had been steady. He chose the word deliberately. To him steadiness included all praise.

"Don't brood too much," she wrote to Helen, "on the superiority of the unseen to the seen. It's true, but to brood on it is mediaeval. Our business is not to contrast the two, but to reconcile them."

It is the little things one bungles at. The big, real ones are nothing when they come.

The businessman who assumes that this life is everything, and the mystic who asserts that it is nothing, fail, on this side and on that, to hit the truth.

‘Nothing matters,’ the Schegels had said in the past, ‘except one’s self-respect and that of one’s friends.’ When the time came, other things mattered terribly.

The importance of human beings has been vastly overrated by specialists.

We're off to flee the lizard, the horrible lizard with claws...

Wicked, by Gregory Maguire

Synopsis: The life story of the Wicked Witch of the West (of Oz), told under the premise that Baum's version of the story was mythologized propaganda originating from supporters of the tyrant Wizard.

Surprising - that's the best word. Given the premise, I expected it to be more...farcical, I suppose. But Maguire was more imaginative than that.

Slow to start - the first third wasn't engaging at all. But the rest of the story is human, with parts even verging on the literary. No work of genius, of course, but it left me intrigued, which is an interesting feeling.

Only Connect (Part 1)

On Beauty - Zadie Smith (2005)

Synopsis: Howard Belsey is a mediocre British academic teaching at a standard-issue liberal arts college outside Boston, where he lives with his African-American wife and their three nearly-grown children. Through a series of events, based on those of Forster’s Howard’s End; the Belseys become entangled with the family of Montague Kipps, Howard’s academic an political nemesis. The complications of these relationships give each character the opportunity to search for – or reevaluate – his identity.

The search for identity is indeed the central focus of this book, the key motive for every major character. As Smith herself expressed it in her Bookworm interview with Michael Silverblatt, On Beauty is, "full of people terrified of becoming less of who they are by pursuing what's most meaningful to them." Each one is trying to reconcile what he is with what he has been, or what he wants to be.

Howard’s three children exemplify this strongly, as they seek the values around which they will form their lives. Jerome, the bright eldest son of this humanist household, is drawn to a life of faith. Daughter Zora is driven by her desire to join the intelligentsia, and asserts her intellectual credentials with insecure desperation. Levi, the youngest, is drawn to a culture he perceives as more authentic for a young black man, though in the process he rejects the authenticity of his own life experience and obsessively romanticizes life on the street as experienced by those with whom he imagines kinship. At the same time, Kiki, their mother, looks back from the other end of life and tries to figure out what her life has been about – a black woman married to a white world; a woman of passion thrown among intellectuals.

Meanwhile, Howard is consumed by his own identity crisis. Having escaped into academia from the physical and mental poverty of his Cockney youth, he still flees his past over thirty years later. He rejects the red-blooded, passionate values of his upbringing to such a degree that he withdraws into a totally cerebral way of life. He abandons the idea of relating to the world in terms of feeling, even pleasure, or aesthetic; everything must be either conceptual, or unforgivably banal. In trying to reconcile with his wife over a past infidelity, the best approach he can come up with is:

…the onus is on me, I know that. It’s for me to – to – explain my narrative in a way that’s comprehensible…and achieves an…I don’t know, explanation, I suppose, in terms of motivation… (p. 204)

Howard is threatened by the emotional demands of reality, and therefore removes himself from reality into a conceptual world. He withdraws from those who have engaged reality, even though it alienates him from his own wife and children. Kiki confronts him,

This is real. This is life. We’re really here. This is really happening. Suffering is real. When you hurt people, it’s real. When you **** one of our best friends, that’s a real thing and it hurts me. (394)

As more than one character points out to Howard, “Basically, you just need to deal with the fact that you’re not the only person in this world.” (390). And in this way, Howard struggles with what Smith calls “the big question of fiction”: Do other people exist in the same way I do?

The Life of Pi - Yann Martel

Synopsis: Pi Patel, a boy with profound curiosity, creativity, and spiritual appetite, grows up in an Indian village where his father owns and runs the local zoo. The major features of Pi's boyhood are the zoo animals, religious practice (his enthusiasm leads him to adopt both Christianity and Islam and practice them simultaneously alongside his native Hinduism), and the political unrest of 1970's India. When Pi is 16, his parents decide to emigrate to Canada, and book passage on the Japanese cargo ship which is also transporting the bulk of the zoo animals to American zoos. Four days to sea, the ship sinks inexplicably, and Pi finds himself adrift in the Pacific for many months, with an adult male Bengal tiger his only companion.

Enthralling, no question. Delightful, even. The above is so brief largely because I wouldn't want even to attempt to capture the spirit of the thing. It made me smile out of sheer pleasure.

But there's one significant problem, which I've observed to be common to many modern tales of protracted survival - where are the big questions? Pi has lost everything and everyone; survival is unlikely; life has been extracted from the context of the universe.

What is the purpose? What is the meaning of life? Where is God? Who is God? What is God? Is there God? Why has this happened? Why am I here?

These are the questions that face human beings in those times when crisis has eliminated all the distractions of life beyond subsistence. But Pi never expresses such thoughts in his narrative, a fact that is made even less plausible by the exaggerated religious fervor attributed to him in childhood. "I want to love God," young Pi tells his parents, attempting to explain his adherence to three world religious at once. So how does he relate to God in his months adrift? Martel makes passing mention of regular prayer and spiritual crisis, but for the most part, the faith and religious passion that were so central to the development of young Pi as a character vanish with the sinking of the freighter.

I can only speculate as to the reason for this failing - I know nothing of the author, his background, or his spiritual perspective beyond what I surmise from the postmodern expression of the book. But I suspect it's the result of a common lack of understanding, at present, of the spirituality of "organized religion". To any person of genuine faith, Pi would never ring true. One who had sought God in the way Pi was portrayed doing in the early chapters could not satisfy his spirituality with only an emasculated ritual of Mass and Salat when he found himself so utterly alone. He would be angry, like David. He would be demanding, like Job. He would be asking the big questions.

Clean Filth

Bridge to Terabithia wasn't one of my huge childhood favorites - I think I must have been born too much city-mouse to connect characters who purport to be real country people (as opposed to idealized country people from another century). Opening a book with a phrase like, "hot as popping grease" is not the way to this Bibliophile's heart. So I have no concrete plans one way or the other to see the lately released film. But it looks like all the copies of the book (including the audio versions) are checked out of the Suburban Selfimportantville Regional Library System, which I take to be a good thing.

I recently spoke to my mother, who works as the head children's librarian at the Rustingham Public Library. Apparently, a woman came into their children's room in dismay over Bridge to Terabithia - the book - which, recall, was published thirty years ago. "I can't believe a book like that won an award! I mean, someone dies in it!"

Alright...

So no awards for Dickens. Steinbeck. Hemingway. Conrad. Dumas. Hugo. Ibsen. Shakespeare, for heaven's sake.

Christianity Today published an interview with Katherine Paterson last month for the movie release, which included the following exchange:

CT: There's a trend lately to provide books and films for Christian
audiences that are "safe for the whole family." Perhaps your books have been
challenged because they're not necessarily "safe" for children.

KP: Well, don't give them the Bible, because it's certainly
not a safe book. Safety and faith are different things. If you want everything
to be safe, then you can do without imagination. If you're so afraid of your
imagination that you stifle it, how are you going to know God? How can you
imagine heaven?

Indeed.

There's always been a constant stream of meaningless drivel of all descriptions from the media, but traffic has increased lately in the subgenre I've come to think of as Clean Filth. Clean Filth comprises all those entertainments created with no mind to anything but inoffensiveness - ignoring reality, taste, culture, and depth alike. Fun for the whole family. Wholesome. Advocated by those religious media barons who make their fortunes capitalizing on other people's (preferably uninformed) moral indignation.

Not that there isn't plenty to outrage and grieve in the moral baseness of so much of the media today. I do believe that some day world society will have no choice but to acknowledge that such things matter. But other things matter too. In having an eye only to morality - and a limited understanding of morality, at that - leaves portals for so many more forms of damage. There's never a thought to the intellectual danger presented by culture devoid of ideas or meaning, "clean" or otherwise.