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.

Long My Motto

You cannot judge the importance of things by the noise they make. ... And these things that have mattered for thousands of years are not going to be snuffed out because some stink merchant in his laboratory invents a new kind of mischief.

Good-Bye Mr. Chips, James Hinton (1934)

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).

Illiteracy in the Library?

In search of a bit of Lenten reading, I went online last night to check whether my local library's copy of the new Barbara Brown Taylor book was checked in, and found this rather unexpected message where the search field should have been:

Due to the Adult Services renovation, the Nonfiction, Audiobooks on Cassette, Reference, and Paperback collections will be inaccessible until further notice.

The implicated renovation is phase 2 of a full overhaul of the building interior. Last spring they revamped the foyer and circulation area, and if the course of that project is an indication, this one should be done well and in good time - "until further notice" is perhaps a melodramatic choice of words, since the whole thing is scheduled to take something like six weeks.

But really, the entire adult nonfiction and reference collections will be completely inaccessible? That's kind of embarrassing.

I'm slightly reminded of my local library back in Massachusetts. The library I primarily used was in a larger, adjacent town, since the town where I actually lived was a bedroom community with a handy location but only 2,000 residents. The public library in the little town willingly advertised itself as, and I quote, "strong in popular fiction." Sigh.

A book meme

This meme lifted from Bookgirl's Nightstand this morning...

One book you’re currently reading: Forty Ways to Look at Winston Churchill by Gretchen Rubin (of The Happiness Project)

One book that changed your life: perhaps not changed, but dovetailed nicely with change in progress: When Life and Beliefs Collide, by Carolyn Custis James

One book you’d want on a deserted island: Depends how long I'd have to be there...but maybe Sophie's World?

One book you’ve read more than once: The Scarlet Letter, to pick one at random

One book you’ve never been able to finish: my most dramatic abortment was of Daniel Quinn's Ishmael, but I have no intention of ever trying to take it back up. I've also been interrupted in my reading of Portrait of a Lady more than once, though not for lack of desire to finish.

One book that made you laugh: most recently, The Lump of Coal by Lemony Snickett

One book that made you cry: Where the Red Fern Grows, but I was, like, 12.

One book you keep rereading: Girl Meets God, by the inimitable Lauren Winner

One book you’ve been meaning to read: The End of the Affair by Graham Greene, to name one of many.

One book you believe everyone should read: How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler (with limitations)

Finally,
Grab the nearest book. Open it to page 56. Find the fifth sentence…

That's entirely meaningless because Oxford will never, ever sell them, to anyone, for anything, any more than the Louvre would or could sell the Mona Lisa.

-Why You Should Read Kafka Before You Waste Your Life, James Hawes, regarding the valuation of the University's Kafka collection at GBP 100,000,000.

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.

2008 Tally

The Tally for 2008: 28. 28? Hm. Less than usual, but that's ok. I passed through a couple of seasons this year in which I couldn't seem to finish anything, or nothing held my interest, or my mind and time were overly occupied by one thing or another in real life, or for one reason or another I just couldn't read. At any rate, here's the list

Read in 2008

• The Yiddish Policemen's Union - Michael Chabon (2007)
• Trespassers Will Be Baptized - Elizabeth Emerson Hancock (2008)
• Larry's Party - Carrol Shields (1997)
• Gertrude and Claudius - John Updike (2000)
• The Periodic Table - Primo Levi (1975)
• Special Topics in Calamity Physics - Marisha Pessl (2006)
• Spiritual Formation As If the Church Mattered - James C. Wilhoit (2008)
• The Now Habit - Neil Fiore (1989)
• The Renaissance Soul - Margaret Lobenstine (2006)
• The Third Man - Graham Greene (1950)
• Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog) - Jerome K. Jerome (1889)
• How Proust Can Change Your Life - Alain de Botton (1997)
• Plato and a Platypus Walk Into a Bar: Understaing Philosophy Through Jokes - Thomas Cathcart, Daniel Klein (2007)
• The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger (2004)
• Possession - A.S. Byatt (1990)
• A Broom of One's Own - Nancy Peacock (2008)
• Miracle at Speedy Motors - Alexander McCall Smith (2008)
• God Is Closer Than You Think - John Ortberg (2005)
• Table for One - Camerin Courtney (2002)
• Readings: Essays and Literary Entertainments -Michael Dirda (2000)
• Portuguese Irregular Verbs, The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs, At the Villa of Reduced Circumstances - Alexander McCall Smith (2003)
• Bel Canto - Ann Patchett (2001)
• The Careful Use of Compliments - Alexander McCall Smith (2007)
• Lady Susan, The Watsons, Sanditon - Jane Austen (1795, 1804, 1817)
• Book by Book; Notes on Reading and Life - Michael Dirda (2005)
• Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell - Susannah Clarke (2004)
• Devil in the White City - Erik Larson (2004)
• The Know-It-All - A..J. Jacobs (2004)

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.

Challenging

I started 2008 with the intention to participate in the Decades Challenge, but various turns of life took my reading in other directions (or temporarily stopped it entirely), so I decided to bow out, rather than driving myself crazy over a game.

But I want to expand my book blog reading, so in 2009 I think I'll try to follow through on some challenges. There are enough of them that dovetail with what I'd be reading anyway, and I guess what I need is undemanding networking.

Linked from Bookgirl's Nightstand is this challenge clearinghouse maintained by Wendy, where I found a number of possibilities:

• Read 12 books from your public library.
• Read a selected number of books you own.
• Read 6 books in translation.
• Read books linked thematically by title.
• Read from A to Z (title or author).
• Read a few classics.
• Read those books that Yann Martel keeps sending to Stephen Harper.
• Read Chekhov stories.
• Decades (again)

The first three, especially, should be almost effortless, though I'm quite fond of the Chekov one as well.

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.

Mohler on Books

Al Mohler isn't a regular on my reading list (to put it mildly), so I'm not quite sure how or where I came across this blog entry on reading a few months back. Apparently, Mohler is a lifelong voracious reader: "I took books to high school athletic events when I played in the band. [Heap coals of scorn and nerdliness here.]" He offers six resonant suggestions for structuring one's reading life, including:

1. Maintain regular reading projects. Mohler describes his own ongoing projects in several categories; I do this, to some extent, and always mean to be more intentional about it. On average, I have something going in some particular subset of "Literature," Theology or Spiritual Practice, and Essays & Criticism.

3. Read all the titles written by some authors. The list of writers deserving of this attention will be exclusive, and not the same for everyone. A few who make the cut for me: Somerset Maugham, C.S. Lewis, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Robertson Davies, Jane Austen, Eugene Peterson.

5. Allow yourself some fun reading, and learn how to enjoy reading by reading enjoyable books. I can't add an iamb to Dr. Mohler's sentiments:

I like books across the fields of literature, but I really love to read historical biographies and historical works in general. In addition, I really enjoy quality fiction and worthy works of literature. As a boy, I probably discovered my love for reading in these categories of books. I allow some time each day, when possible, to such reading. It doesn't have to be much. Stay in touch with the thrill.

6. Write in your books; mark them up and make them yours. This is a divisive issue among bibliophiles, I haven't yet gained consistency in my own practice. In high school, where we weren't allowed to leave a mark in our Permabind classics, I developed an elaborate but highly effective note-taking system involving post-its and loose leaf paper, the particulars of which I don't clearly recall. Nowadays, Book Darts are my best friends (if you ever want to really confuse the TSA staff, stuff your paperback full of them before getting on a plane). Plenty of marking systems have been proposed by various authors (Steve Leveen of Levenger among them), and I hope to review a few here.

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"
  

A Few Fun Items

Caught this Guardian blog about authors and their pet cats. But more notable is this video linked by a commenter. As if I needed more reason to like Alexander McCall Smith...he has a Siamese cat.



This one is lifted straight from Stefanie yesterday, but it's amazingly fun. A little web quiz to help you find your own, personal Dewey Decimal class. After trying various permutations of my real and false names, this was my recurrent result:

Mella DP's Dewey Decimal Section:

801 Philosophy & theory



Class:
800 Literature


Contains:
Literature, criticism, analysis of classic writing and mythology.



What it says about you:
You're a global, worldly person who wants to make a big impact with your actions. You have a lot to tell people and you're good at making unique observations about everyday experiences. You can notice and remember details that other people think aren't important.

Find your Dewey Decimal Section at Spacefem.com

Variations included 211 - Concepts of God, 168 - Argument & Persuasion, and 527 - Biochemistry. I guess they all work kinda.

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.

Sounds Intriguing #2

Lately noted:

Via The Millions: The Elegance of the Hedgehog - Muriel Barbary. Crabby female concierge is a closet autodidact. Translated from the French.

An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England - Brock Clarke. Apparently the arson was an accident...?

Spotted in the Library's New Books section: Sacramental Life - Spiritual Formation through the Book of Common Prayer - David A. DeSilva. Liturgical sympathies are (and have been) on the rise in unexpected circles, which fascinates me.

Via Sam: The works of Katherine Anne Porter.

Via Lots of Places: All The Sad Young Literary Men - Keith Gessen. Allegedly sympathetic but not maudlin account of the post-undergrad intellectual deflation.

Found in a several-months old email to myself; I clearly cut-and-pasted it from somewhere, but I've no idea where or why:
A History of Western Philosophy by Bertrand Russell, The Executioner’s Song by Norman Mailer, Sophie’s Choice by William Styron, or Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

A Great Idea at the Time - Alex Beam. A comic critical expose' of the mid-century Great Books movement and its eminent champion, Mortimer Adler.