Tag: reading

The Other

I’d thought as a long-time fan of horror that I was at least aware of all the classics of the genre. Until a few months ago I’d never heard of Thomas Tryon’s The Other, and what I read about it intrigued me sufficiently that when I was able to score a digital version for under 2 bucks I jumped at the chance. The novel was quite an unpleasant surprise.

There’s something particularly disturbing about a child who is pure evil. And when it’s a twin the creepiness is dialed up a few notches.

Niles and Holland Perry lead a bucolic life on a rural estate in New England. They play together and put on dramatic shows and do magic tricks. There’s something off about Holland however; he is more than mischievous, and his behavior descends from adolescent rabble-rousing to cruel and reprehensible acts. Their grandmother Ada is a Russian immigrant who fled the Bolsheviks. She tells them folk tales and bits of family lore from the old country–and introduces them to The Game, which is a sort of hypnotic regression wherein the observer becomes entangled mystically with the observed. Needless to say, The Game comes to have dire consequences for the boys.

Tryon has skills. He writes elegant and sophisticated prose. I’d place him based on this one novel right up with Shirley Jackson and M. R. James as a writer of literary merit beyond genre category. The structure of the novel has a few layers of narrative, and it took a bit of sussing out to realize the clever and unreliable games Tryon was playing. Very Turn of the Screw trickiness afoot here.

But despite its merits as a work of literature, this is still a horror novel, and it delivers the goods. I didn’t see The Twist until it came, which was a great surprise, and I was floored by the utterly appalling climax.

Playground

Richard Powers’ latest is another complex and tightly structured novel spanning nearly a century. There are two primary narrative strands woven together like a double helix, one first-person stream relayed by Todd Keane, an early social media and AI innovator from Chicago, and the other a third-person tale focused on Evelyn Beaulieu, a French Canadian whose father develops early deep diving technology and who becomes herself a famous deep sea explorer and renowned scientist. We jump back and forward a bit in time between these two strands as the characters each end up based in California for their work and eventually they find themselves meeting in Makatea, a tiny island in French Polynesia.

It is a credit to Powers’ strengths as a novelist that he can manage to hold all this together geographically and temporally. Despite the weight of its themes and its saturation with multiple branches of scientific inquiry, Playground manages to be a pure delight, an engaging and thoroughly breezy read.

Todd Keanes comes from wealth. His father is a hardscrabble financier and trader who builds a fortune. Todd ends up at the elite Jesuit private school from which his father graduated, and there he meets Rafi Young, a brilliant and militant young Black scholar and poet who won a scholarship endowed by Todd’s father. The first-person narration by Todd is our window on Rafi’s world–his tragic family situation, his financial struggles, his absolutely unique genius. The two challenge each other intellectually and play chess at first and then Go. It is their interest in games and gaming that give Todd the inspiration for his eventual social media platform Playground, which makes him a billionaire. Rafi’s burning creativity provides a lot of the ideation behind Todd’s innovations, and Rafi’s interest in a Russian philosopher who believed humans would inevitably discover or invent a technology of immortality is hugely influential on Todd’s eventual AI push. But as often happens to intense youthful friendships, Todd’s and Rafi’s falls apart as they head off on different paths–Todd to Silicon Valley, Rafi into graduate work in the Humanities. Rafi also meets and falls in love with a young artist from Makatea.

One of Todd’s earliest passions was the ocean, said passion first fired when he read a book by Evelyn Beaulieu called “Clearly it is Ocean.” Evelyn’s story begins when her father tests out a deep diving apparatus by putting her inside of it and throwing her into a deep pool at an engineering facility. After this she begins using his gear to explore the ocean and becomes many firsts: first woman accepted into an exclusive graduate oceanography program, first woman to join a months-long diving expedition, one of the first women to live in an underwater facility run by NASA. Like Jacques Cousteau, she is a lyrical documenter of the deep. And like Richard Attenborough, she sees in her lifetime the dire impact of humans on the environment and creatures she loves. We see her struggle with being a wife and a mother when her primary motive is her work, and how challenging it is to escape the traditional boundaries set on her gender by centuries of patriarchal thinking. It is one of Evelyne’s great realisations through her decades of diving and close observation that sea creatures spend a lot of time playing. Play recurs over and over as a major theme in the book, and for Evelyn and Todd their work is more play or a challenging game than it is drudgery.

I won’t go into the profound final fifth of the novel to avoid spoilers, but there are some surprises and interesting ambiguities. If you’re familiar with Ray Kurzweil a few strange and confounding discrepencies in the novel, nearly along the lines of magical realism, might become more clear. These involve the dates characters died, and whether they are actually alive in a traditional sense of being alive during parts of the story. Also, if you’ve read any Philip K. Dick, particularly the novel Ubik, you may grasp what is implied about some of the characters and indeed the setting of Playground’s climax. Also there are some Doctor Frankenstein allusions when we discover exactly to whom–or to what–Todd Keane has been narrating his tale.

There is some truly gorgeous writing about the ocean in this novel. One sequence about a cuttlefish is particularly lovely. It struck me as familiar, and sure enough Powers lists in his sources Peter Godfrey-Smith’s Other Minds as the genesis of that scene. I read the book a decade back, and can’t recommend it enough. I should also note that this novel is the second I’ve read lately featuring the astonishing development in AI and its ability to defeat the best human players of chess and Go, the first being Benjamin Labutut’s The Maniac. Sign of the times, I guess?

I’m also pleased to note that Playground features a female scientist, as did Powers’ previous masterpiece The Overstory. At a time when dark forces in the USA are insisting that women in leadership or highly skilled professional roles must be “DEI hires,” and that women should focus instead on birthing and raising children and stay at home, it is important that writers continue to show otherwise.

Cities of the Red Night

I’ve read a handful of Burroughs novels and also Casey Rae’s entertaining and informative William S. Burroughs and the Cult of Rock ‘n Roll. I think this is easily my favorite novel by the Beat icon. It is ridiculous, absurd, wholly pointless, unrepentently filthy, and a great deal of fun.

In Casey Rae’s examination of Burroughs I learned about his “cut-up” method of creation, splicing and collaging multiple texts and ideas together from disparate sources to forge something new. Cities of the Red Night samples deep cuts from across the 20th century: we get Crowley sex magic, pulp noir and sci-fi and horror, Mexican archaeology, chasms of time and ancient gods and civilizations borrowed from H.P. Lovecraft, political chicanary and revolutionary rhetoric, lots of guns and cannons and far-out weaponry, drugs, viruses, and oodles of hot gay sex featuring an asphyxiation fetish.

What is the novel about? Well, there is a doctor fighting a viral outbreak, and then a private dick investigating the disappearance of a young lad whose head ends up in a crate bound for Peru, a pirate revolution in Colombia and Panama, a war between humans and mutants in ancient vanished cities, conspiring conspirators doing conspiracies…it’s about so much it’s practically about nothing. Some of the characters shift from modern era New York to thousands of years ago and then to the jungles of 18th century South America before suddenly getting onto a starship in the distant future. At one point a main character wakes up in a rehab clinic and it appears the entire novel was a hallucination; but it might actually be that he could access actual reality in his comatose state and he’s only waking up into the shared illusion we call reality.

I mean it doesn’t matter what it means or if it means anything at all. Enjoy the ride!

I will note that I’ve likely read a couple thousand novels, and that this one has more ejaculations than all of the other novels I’ve read combined. And that includes a couple long books by the Marquis de Sade, so it’s an impressive number of money shots. So the novel could perhaps be classed as a sort of cartoonish pornography. Keep that in mind if you choose to read it.

A Day in the Life

Woke a bit before 6 am this morning. Drank coffee outside on the porch and read an essay in Harper’s by Lydia Davis. She’s an author I’ve encountered many times in journals and magazines, and I’m pretty sure I have a story collection or two of hers somewhere? At any rate she’s writing about observation and the compulsion to write about her observations. She’s got a singular style and voice in her fiction and non-fiction, and does a lot of translation from the French–in fact I’m sure I read an essay by her about French translation at some point. I’m distracted while reading and observing our two cats who are climbing on me one minute, then chasing lizards the next. Lydia Davis is observing cows in her essay, and while I’m reading I hear a horrible guttural stegasaurus groan which I can assume is one of our goats even though it’s a new sound. The male has climbed along a narrow ledge atop a wall which has a metal chain-link fence built into it, at the top of which is a kiwi vine. While standing stretched out full length on his hind hooves to nibble kiwi leaves his hooves slipped off the wall. I rush over to find him being strangled by the kiwi vines with his horns stuck in the fence. I free his horns as he re-positions his hooves on the wall and immediately he is contentedly munching kiwi leaves again as if nothing happened.

At about 8 am guests who’ve rented one of our gite appartements–The Studio–check out. They are two cyclists off to their next destination after a one-night stay in Treignac. I pause my reading to strip down the bed and turnover the apartment for the next guests. Just as I finish hanging the clean sheets and towels from the washer our next guests arrive. They’ve rented The Loft gite for a daytime sleep-over as they are driveing some horrid 24-hour route. They check in at 8:05 and are planning to leave at 5pm. I wonder if they are actually going to sleep or if they are going to fuck. It’s our first overday stay as opposed to overnight stay. And, to complictate things we have a check-in in the same apartment 45 minutes after they are planning to leave. Things will be tight. We are used to it, however, as business has been brisk this year since January.

After checking in the new guests I hear the guttural scream again, and the male goat is once more dangling in the air with his throat tangled in kiwi vines. I free him once more.

I sit again and finish the Lydia Davis piece and then polish off the rest of the magazine. I realize I rarely write about day-to-day stuff anymore the way I used to on a previous and much more successful blog. Has my Muse deserted me? Have I lost interest? On the desk in my office is a pile of language books I put out back in February–I was adamant that I was going to do a daily study/writing routine and that immediately fell apart. Perhaps I’ll get it back together in the fall after tourist season quiets down.

A History of France

I wanted to refresh my general knowledge of French history before focusing in detail on a few eras, regions, and personalities. A History of France seemed a good place to start. John Julius Norwich had written quite readable histories of Byzantium and European monarchs, and his father Duff Cooper was Churchill’s liason with the Free French during WW2, and later was Ambassador to France from the UK. I thought this book merited a try.

There is way too much history in this short and readable history. We start with Julius Ceasar and his campaigns in Gaul, and progress through 2000 years up to Charles DeGaulle. But this is a fun read, written by a lifelong Francophile, and it did what I hoped it would–reminded me of the proper sequencing of early monarchs and refreshed my knowledge of the 100 years war and 30 years war and the long deeply intertwined relationship of France and England. The cast of characters is immense of course, and Norwich is particularly good at bringing them to life, from Eleanor of Acquitaine and her sons to Joan of Arc to Napolean 3.

I must say that even immediately upon finishing the book I can’t differentiate all the King Louises and King Charleses. There are too many of them to remember. But Norwich brings them to life and situates them in the context of their times and analyzes their impact on the entirety of French and European history.

Like many English (and Americans) of his era he seems to truly admire but also to have not inconsiderable contempt for Charles de Gaulle. But a historian worth his or her salt can hold two contrary opinions in his or her mind at once and still manage to get the job done. I had to laugh out loud when De Gaulle tells Churchill that the French people regard him as a reincarnation of Joan of Arc, and Churchill says “we had to burn the first one.” History is so much fun, except when you have to live through it.

The Rector of Justin

Brian Aspinwall becomes at age 27 a teacher at a prestigious private boys’ school in New England. He is recruited suddenly in 1939 to fill in for a master who has gone off to Canada to enlist in the RAF. It is primarily through Brian’s diary that we learn about the school Justin Martyr and its famous founder Reverend Francis Prescott. Immediately Aspinwall is awestruck by Prescott and comes to admire him and his accomplishments. He seeks to understand what makes Prescott and his world-class upper crust school tick, and The Rector of Justin takes off.

Aspinwall seems surprised to learn that Prescott is an intellectual and a progressive given the focus on sports, strict discipline, and religious tradition at the school. But many more surprises await. As the novel unspools we learn from other sources who come into Aspinwall’s orbit. Eventually Aspinwall is given files and documents by others and he takes on the task of possibly writing Prescott’s biography.

The book is breezy and warmly inviting, despite its substantial and ethically weighty themes. I found it an absolute pleasure. The characters are all interesting, and in particular the Rector himself. There are hints that Justin Martyr was founded out of some dark repressed desires. The WASP identity of the school proves problematic later on as Prescott has an epiphany about the kind of people running the board at his school, and the true values of the wealthy and influential class who send their kids to Justin Martyr. I could in fact trace many of the concerns Reverend Prescott has about his students and their morals down to the ethical catastrophe in current US politics.

Because the novel is from the 60s but set in the 30s and 40s we get groovy stuff intellectuals were into at the time, like Freud. The novel is saturated by Henry James but is not as dense and soupy as The Master’s.

I’d previously read only one other novel by Auchincloss–The Book Class. I remember quite liking that one but nothing about it has stuck with me after 3 decades. I do recall that both novels were given to me by Dan Bouchard in a box of remainders in perhaps ’94? I still have one more book by Auchincloss on the shelf–a collection of short fiction. I look forward to it.

Sula

Sula is a magnificent read, a short novel but a richly realized world. We spend almost a century in Bottom, the Black neighborhood of Medallion, Ohio. Two families entwine in the narrative–one-legged Eva Peace serves as matriarch of one. She manages a thriving bungalow of sorts, a chaotic and haphazard structure akin to the Winchester House in complexity. There are family members, hangers-on, boarders, mountain people, addicts, crooks, working people and feral kids in the Peace home. Eva’s daughter Hannah raises her kids amidst the tumult. One of her kids is Sula.

The other family is Helene Wright’s–Helene was raised by her grandmother. Her mother was a prostitute in New Orleans and granny pulled her out of that drama and brought her up. Helene’s household is calm and organized and there is a sheen of middle class respectability. Her daughter Nel is raised in a tidy and peaceful environment and has adopted the virtues and social mores of the community.

Sula and Nel become best friends. Sula is adamant that she will never be bound in any way by the constraints of her community or its judgments and expectations. She will be free and her self will be unimpeded in its development and evolution by anyone or anything. Nel on the other hand is willing to tow the line and to do what’s right. They have a relationship where one is centripital and the other centrifugal, forces working together to flesh out a beautiful and adventurous childhood.

I recall a scene in Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw when well-mannered Flora is playing in the dirt and makes sexually suggestive gestures with sticks–shortly afterward the Governess has her first encounter with the apparition of Miss Jessel. There’s a similar scene in Sula where Sula and Nel are playing in the dirt and digging holes and burying things in the holes and the girls are frustrated and dis-satisfied in their game but manage somehow to conjure up a horrible event in an almost magical ritual. The reactions of each girl to this event have lasting impacts on the course of their lives.

Eventually Nel does what one is supposed to do in Bottom; she gets married and starts a family and focuses her energies on her children, her husband, and their home. On the day of Nel’s wedding Sula leaves town for ten years. When she returns she will be judged and scape-goated for the sins of her town and its inhabitants.

But what are morals and virtues if they simply hide hypocrisy? What are the consequences to true human freedom when small-town values are oppressive and retrograde? Sula, through her refusal to conform and to follow the niceties, becomes for Bottom an easy target for projection–she absorbs all the guilt and hostility and judgments of the town’s inhabitants. But is Nel really superior to Sula morally? What does genuine friendship entail? What are the costs of motherhood and are they compatible with true freedom? Is a life sacrificed for the benefit of others a worthy life? Bottom learns a lot about itself through Sula’s sad fate, and pays a heavy karmic debt.

Recent Reads

I’d read 100 Years of Solitude about 30 years ago and was absolutely flabbergasted by it. Immediately one of my life goals became “get your Spanish into adequate shape to read more Garcia Marquez but in the original language.” I managed to have some conversations with locals in Spanish on a couple trips to Colombia, but alas never got my skills up to reading novels.

So I caved in and read Love in the Time of Cholera in English. I was a bit concerned with the high bar set by the other novel that this would disappoint–quite the contrary. I think it’s superior. Where 100 Years is a bit of a “loose, baggy monster,” Cholera is fit and trim. The magical realism is dialed down substantially but not the magic of the description, characters, settings…such a dense and humid world to inhabit for too short a time. A rich, sweaty, mournfully sexy book. It truly captures the decayed glamor of old South American colonial cities and the rich mix of cultures and classes. Exquisite!

Aw, it’s nice to revisit those care free days of childhood–distant, aloof parents, perverse games, pointless wasted hours at school, the challenge of disposing of corpses…

Not sure how to categorize this one. A bit of Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, a bit of Poe’s Fall of the House of Usher, a bit of 90s pornography.

Four siblings are left alone in a strange castle-like house in the midst of an abandoned urban tower block development when their parents die in quick succession. Instead of the lush natural setting of Eden (or the isle from Lord of the Flies) they inhabit an unnatural cement garden, where only stinging nettles force their way up through cracked concrete to bake in the sun. Without the internet or even TV there is not much to do except go feral.

McKewan can write, and this short gloomfest is arresting and disturbing in equal measure. It probably says something about me to admit that I found it somewhat humorous, the way Rober Coover’s story The Babysitter is humorous. Kids left to their own devices act like adults–and are equally fucked up.

I recently read an article in the NY Review of Books about Ford Madox Ford. Had previously only read The Good Soldier, which is astonishingly good. Thought I should perhaps tackle another of his, but didn’t feel quite up to Parade’s End, which has sat its fat self on my shelves since 1994 without being opened.

So I decided to search the author’s name and pick up whatever book the owlgorithms first suggested. Owltimately it was The Brown Owl, which proved an entertaining little owlegory. Though written for kids it has a sophistication and wit about it which owlevates the book above mere “young adult” fiction.

Read earlier this year an analysis of the Arthurian myths by Emma Jung and Marie Louise von Franz, followed in short order by H is for Hawk. H is for Hawk is a memoir of dealing with the death of a parent while training a hawk and reading T H White’s memoir about training a hawk. All of this brought me round to the realization that I’d never read White’s Once and Future King novels. So I started with The Sword in the Stone. Didn’t much like it. Merlin is too ridiculous, the story is too silly, everything is far too cute. I can see why Disney made a film out it, because it’s tailor made for them.

Despite not enjoying the first volume, I plowed ahead into volume 2 of The Once and Future King. Didn’t like this one even less. Guess I’m too old. I prefer dour, profound old Tolkien to this stuff.

Exit Music

John Rebus is close to retirement. In fact, only days away from turning in his warrant card. A dissident Russian poet is found bludgeoned to death and Rebus and his partner Siobhan Clarke are off to find the killer. As a result they explore the underworld of early 21st century global politics. Big banks are in collusion with Labor and Nationalist politicians and local gangsters to milk Russian oligarchs of their cash. Scotland is aching for independence and the oligarchs find it an attractive place to avoid possibly drinking radioactive tea or falling mysteriously from a high window onto a Moscow street.

Rebus wonders what counts as corruption and illegality when the entire economic and political system is shady. As he tries to unravel the case he ponders his own ethically questionable past doings and wonders if he’ll simply spend retirement in the pub gradually softening himself with malt.

Another murder complicates things. Rebus and Clarke are now no longer detectives in a local precinct police squad; they are George Smileys working in the shadows to uncover an international conspiracy.

Or perhaps not? Maybe there is less there there than appearances suggest. As they work the case Rebus begins the process of handing the reins over to Siobhan as much as possible. She is at once frustrated by his tactics and deeply saddened to be losing his wisdom and experience, but finds herself ready to take over the team.

I jumped into this 17-novel series at book 15 and only read that one and the final volume, but enjoyed them thoroughly. Good pop lit with a cracking plot and sufficient depth and complexity to keep me intrigued. The characters are not one-dimensional types but are fully fleshed out. And Mr. Rankin can indeed write a good sentence. If detective novels and police procedurals are your thing you might want to read these.

Fleshmarket Close

We were sitting at the local watering hole a few weeks back and mentioned to friends from the UK that we were going to visit Edinburgh this summer for the first time. Immediately one said “Oh, you must read Ian Rankin before you go. I’ll lend you a couple!” Sure enough a day or two later her significant other dropped off two novels at our front door on his way home from work. Fast service!

I’ve not read many detective novels or police procedurals or mysteries–I’ve dabbled in noir now and again, and did read the first Simenon Maigret novel in French last year. But I figured it would be an interesting way to get a taste of Edinburgh in advance without relying on Rick Steves for once, so I dived right into Fleshmarket Close.

I was a bit concerned to begin reading a series at about volume 23 or 24, but the novel stands alone quite well. The detective central to the story is John Rebus, who is being pushed aside by his superiors and sent off to pasture in a shoddy department in a squalid neighborhood. Rebus is an attractive type, familiar from the genre–a gutsy guy, tough-minded, unsophisticated in his tastes and not academically inclined, but eclectic. He likes an enormous variety of niche music from jazz and folk to punk and techno. He likes a pint and a malt perhaps too much, and has an ex-wife and estranged daughter who probably featured prominently in earlier volumes. He’s read Dostoevsky. He tends to intuit things other detectives miss, and instead of thinking linearly about a crime he builds up a huge amount of context and finds all sorts of intricate leads to trace. This frustrates his superiors but he gets results.

In Fleshmarket Close the murder of an immigrant leads to a thriving underworld of criminality involving drugs, Irish milita, human trafficking, slumlords, racism, salacious and carnivalesque right-wing media, celebrity lawyers, and pornography. Rebus and his younger partner Siobhan Clark eventually piece together a vast conspiracy. It’s quite satisfying, and Edinbugh is a character in the story just as much as Baltimore is a character in The Wire. In fact, this novel has some substantial similarities to The Wire Season 2. And, I’d note, Edinburgh as portrayed in this novel has some similarities to Baltimore.

It’s fun to see Detective Rebus struggling with “woke” culture as it began to accelerate, and to note his adapting to “new” tech like laptops and mobile phones and DNA tests. And of course it’s interesting to read a pre-Brexit UK novel which shows a lot of the media agitation which led to anti-immigrant and anti-EU sentiment. Rebus comes from Polish immigrant stock himself and he is not pleased by where he sees Scotland and the UK headed. I’d certainly recommend this to fans of the genre, who might perhaps prefer to start with the first novel instead of one of the last? But also to those who don’t really read this sort of novel as an interesting look at the dark underbelly of a famous tourist destination.