Book Seven- Heart of Darkness

When I read this book the first time I only underlined one sentence.

"And this also," Marlow said suddenly, "has been one of the dark places of the earth."

I think that pretty much sums it up. When I read this book the first time it was for school and I was racing to get it done so I could go out or watch TV or write an essay or something, and when I read very very fast I don't really remember specifics, just a general impression, and in my memory this book was dark tangled trees and white teeth and silence and a snatches  of conversation that got nowhere and served no purpose. Now that I am finally free of finals and home for a little while, I could curl up with this book and read it properly, no rush.

What can you say about Heart of Darkness that hasn't been said a thousand times in a thousand high school English classes? The nature of savagery and civilization, the racism, the insanity, the "horror?" There is no question that it is a brilliant book and deserves to be a classic. Conrad deftly conveys the idea that modern man is a stranger to his own Earth, and although the book can get a little too long-winded or clever for its own good, you do walk away with a vague sense of dread at the end, and I think that's what Conrad wanted all along. It is this sense of fear that is the true strength of the book, and what I related to the most in it.

Now, I'm a pretty well traveled person, I've slept in my car or in the dirt more times than I'd care to admit, and I've been to places I consider pretty remote (though definitely not as remote as colonization-era Africa). And I will tell you, there is nothing like walking in a silent, dark forest at night to destroy any ideas that nature has been tamed. There is some....I don't know. Some kind of presence there, that makes you feel so small and uneasy. Something force that has been operating far longer than you could ever imagine and is utterly indifferent to you.

I felt that again, reading this book, especially the part where Marlow follows Kurtz into the forest, with the drumming and fires and dark shapes in the foliage, "the heavy, mute spell of the wilderness.....the awakening of forgotten and brutal instincts...the memory of gratified and monstrous passions." "You will be lost," Marlow says to Kurtz, trying to keep him from going farther. "Utterly lost." But I think both men understand that Kurtz wants to be lost, that he has already gone over the precipice, and now there is no coming back.

In summary: If Joseph Conrad can make me afraid of the dark when I am sitting on an comfortable armchair in my living room with a bright winter day outside, then I consider that a job well done.

Book Six- Atonement

Oh, Atonement. This is one of those very very rare books that I saw the movie before I read the book, and I remember watching the movie with disappointment (I think I was under some sort of impression that it was a chick-flick, which IT WAS NOT, WOW) but then I read the book and it put the movie in a whole different light. I re-watched the movie recently found it amazing, of course. It's funny how that can happen. The one scene where Robbie has just given Briony the wrong letter and she runs off into the fields, and the music is twanging on wrong notes in the background and the typewriter noise starts up and you see him just barely cock his head, and the the whole scene seems to take a deep inhale and the camera sweeps over and centers just on his back, how stiff it is, and everything goes silent. And then he realizes, you can see him realizing it, the pivoting moment that causes the ball to tip and sets everything rolling towards the inevitable...wow. Sorry for the gushing, that scene is just so brilliant in the movie, I even called my flatmates over and made them watch it. 


ETA: OH JESUS HERE IT IS. It so perfect, I can't even...with the letter tapping and everything! He's so cocky, he has no idea what's coming to him, but you can see when he realizes, just gets a glimpse of the slope he's standing on the edge of...oh, just watch it.


Letter Scene from Atonement (CLICK HERE)



Anyway, this is about the book, not the movie. Ack, my feelings about this book are all mixed up right now. If I went into it I would talk a lot of destiny and fate and the sickness of war but I don't want this to sound like a book report, that would be horrible and completely scrub this amazing book of it's remarkable melding of hope and hopelessness, which is what I loved about it at the end. 


A few quick impressions:


- It is incredible how well McEwan writes children, especially children like Briony. I was that child. I was a young writer and so caught up in my own cleverness and convinced that no one ever in the history of the world had had these deep thoughts like mine and once everyone realized how revolutionary I was they would be shocked and/or awed. This line especially, "Was everyone else really as alive as she was? For example, did her sister really matter to herself, was she as valuable to herself as Briony was? Was being Cecilia just as vivid an affair as being Briony? Did her sister also have a real self concealed behind a breaking wave, and did she spend time thinking about it, with a finger held up to her face? Did everybody, including her father, Betty, Hardman? If the answer was yes, then the world, the social world, was unbearably complicated, with two billion voices, and everyone’s thoughts striving in equal importance and everyone’s claim on life as intense, and everyone thinking they were unique, when no-one was." I thought about that all the time when I was a kid, even now. Funny how with Briony it seems so innocent, until it becomes sinister. 


-The multi-view narrative works so well, especially at the beginning. You can see just how clever everyone thinks they are and how well they have it all figured out (especially Emily, who really is completely clueless) and how none of them, not one, can see the truth for what it really is, preferring to stick to their own narrowly understood view of the world. So Briony becomes the one guilty of letting  her imagination drastically change real life, but really they are all guilty of it, even Robbie and Cecilia. 


-The war. Whenever I read about war I can only think how- how can men keep going like that, no hope, no order, flushed of their humanity, ready to die at any instant? And how do they keep doing it? His prose is so heartbreaking here- Robbie in the basement, with his strange, heavy baggage, and telling Nettle he needs to stay on for a bit, take care of some business...


-Luc Cornet. Books don't usually make me cry.


-The end is perfect. Swings it all around full circle. Briony got them into the mess by wanting to believe in fate and plot and an orderly balance of right and wrong. She got into it because she believed in villains and heroes and happy endings, and we see in the middle how she has come to reject all these things so throughly. But at the end, she uses them once more to lend out tiny measure of happiness to a stupid, senseless, tragic story. The last thing she can do to atone. Is it a worthless gesture, a cheap trick?  Maybe. But it does make us feel better, if only for a moment. Then Ian McEwan breaks our hearts all over again. He's just so damn good at it! 


In summary: Watch the movie, read the book, and if you're like me you will cry a little and stay up way too late reading it and even possibly realize what a precocious little child you were. Just read it.

Book Five- The Death of Ivan IIyich

Another day, another book to aid my procrastination. The Death of Ivan Illyich is another one of those books I had to read in some far-away classroom and haven't picked up again since. It's strange, a lot of the art I've encountered recently has dealt strongly with the themes of death- a recent movie I watched, the Iron & Wine song "Die" I've become obsessed with, and this book. Reminders of death are always skirting around us, yet we choose to see them as harmless, nothing more than entertainment. And that's kind of the whole point Tolstoy tries to make, isn't it? That those of us living see death as some kind of faraway thing, which cannot intrude without our permission. We do our best to shut our eyes and ears to it, but it comes all the same, as Ivan Illiych discovers. Whenever I recall this book, it calls to mind a piece of art by Damien Hirst, a famous British modern artist. The art itself is a dead tiger shark preserved in a tank of formadelhyde, but what gets me isn't the shark itself, but the title of the piece, "The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living."

The book itself is a very quick read-  a retelling of the "successful" life of Ivan Illyich, his industrious career, his marriage to an agreeable woman, his nice house full of trinkets and antiques. But when he falls ill, none of this seems to matter anymore, and slowly slipping into death's embrace, he is forced to reconsider the purpose of his entire life.

And what a sad book it is! To realize -on death's door - that,

"his scarcely perceptible attempts to struggle against what was considered good by the most highly placed people, those scarcely noticeable impulses which he had immediately suppressed, might have been the real thing, and all the rest false..."

Well, let's hope that none of us feels that way, when Death comes for us. Here, Tolstoy makes several points that might seem obvious to modern readers but which were surely very wild indeed for nineteenth century Russian society. In a little novel about the death of an unimportant man, Tolstoy manages to deftly put aside the desire for power, money, rank, and all the trivialities of high society, and instead assert that, for Ivan Illyich at least, sucking the pit of a wild plum in childhood was truer happiness than anything else that had followed. However, Ivan Illyich dies shortly after realizing this, and cannot act on this newfound revelation. But the question remains: if he had recovered, would he have changed his ways, or is death necessary to reveal truths which have been buried within us for a lifetime?

In summary: A quick read, but not a light one. Memento mori, and happy Saturday!

Book Four- 1984

So. 1984. I was forced to read this book for school when I was about fifteen, but I haven't re-read it since, and I forgot what an utterly terrifying book this is. Apocalyptic literature is one of my favorite genres and I've read all the classics in it, but before this re-reading I wouldn't have listed 1984 among my favorites.  I liked the book when I read it in school, sure, but I think the first time I read it I was too young to really understand its significance. All I remember from the first time around is being really frustrated by the ending, which made absolutely no sense to me. But now reading from a (slightly) more mature standpoint, I can see that the ending is the real terror of the book. You are confronted on all sides by an insane society, and to retain your own sanity, you must go insane with it. The book is full of paradoxes like this, and that's what makes it so difficult to wrap your head around - that kind of society is so alien towards us, and yet we understand how it could come to be. 

I was especially interested in the themes of insanity and relativity in this book, because it's something that comes up a lot both in my studies of neuroscience and religion, especially eastern religions (yes, I have a strange, strange double concentration in biology and religion, something which is great for books like this!) Winston is constantly struggling with the very concept of reality - if something cannot be touched, held, or examined (like the past) is it real? Or is a flawed projection from our own minds? If I say I saw a bluebird on the tree, and you agree that it is there, I accept that the bird was there. However, if five minutes later I ask you about it, and you deny it ever existed, I being to doubt a past that I personally witnessed. If personal past is can be made to seem mutable, impersonal past might as well be a fairy tale. And if I persist in believing the bluebird was there, even if you insist that it was not, then I begin to doubt not only reality, but my very sanity. The incredible loneliness of this "minority of one" - that is the struggle Wilson must face, and ultimately succumbs to. 

Orwell's prediction may have been averted (for now) but what he truly succeeds at is the creation of a society which, theoretically, cannot be defeated. I was reading this book and trying desperately to think of a way that resistance could be mounted, humanity regained, any of it, and every time was countered just as Wilson was. The only hope lies in what are sometimes called "human impulses" - that is, to strive for freedom and love and kindness above all things, and to resist the kind of evil perpetuated by the Party on instinct. However, if what the Party is saying is correct, there is no such thing as this base human nature, only an endlessly programmable machine that can be wired to accept power and hate as replacements for softer emotions felt by previous generations. This is another question that science and religion has struggled with - is man the proverbial "black box", who can be broken down and reassembled as easily as a computer, or is there some inherent nobility in him, some remnant of the divine? Orwell seems to take the former viewpoint, but others have not been so pessimistic. You could find plenty of evidence for both sides, but that's a debate for another day. 

Whew. Really started to wax poetic there for awhile. God, I miss English classes. In summary: 1984 is brilliant and bleak and terrifying and let us all be happy that we do not live in an insane totalitarian universe where our government wants to stick people's heads in rat cages. Or do we? Hmmm.....

Book Three- Cat's Cradle

Short one today because I have a) somehow thrown out my back, b) am buried up to my ears in work and c) Vonnegut is one of those authors I can't really write coherently about without dissolving into a puddle of glee.

I have this memory of when I was younger hearing my parents gushing over the fact that my older cousin wanted Jefferson Airplane cd's and Kurt Vonnegut novels for Christmas. From the way they were talking, you'd think they were planning a parade to announce to the world just how proud they were of their nephew's astounding good taste. So when it came time for me to start reading Vonnegut, the bar was set pretty high, and he didn't disappoint. What I love about him the most, I think, is how his personality shines through whatever he writes, and he doesn't have to use fancy phrases or metaphors or flowery prose to get his point across. Reading his books are like having conversations with hilarious, often deranged friends, but he still manages to make poignant comments of the absurdity of modern life that hit home when you least expect it. I would have loved to have met him.

So I've read the majority of his novels by now and although my favorites are without a question Deadeye  Dick and Bluebeard, they are not on THE LIST OF DOOM and so I'll put off re-reading them for awhile. Cat's Cradle would be my least favorite, I think, but it is completely and utterly saved by Bokononism, the greatest fake religion of all time. Ever since I first read this book I was completely in love with the concept of a karass and all of the other tenants of Bokononism. I could sit here and summarize how Vonnegut plays around with the very ideas of religion and human destiny, but instead I'm going to leave you with this quote:

"Jesus once said, "Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's". Which Bokonon paraphrased, "Pay no attention to Caesar. Caesar doesn't have the slightest idea what's really going on."

 In summary: Ice-nine kills, Vonnegut is sorely missed, nice nice very nice.

P.S - Here, have this Fox News commentary on Vonnegut's death for a laugh. Favorite part: "[his work was] too filled with scatological humor, cosmic coincidences, and self-admitted "sci-fi mumbo-jumbo" for him to enjoy stately induction into the great pantheon of American writers."

FOX News Kurt Vonnegut Eulogy

Yeah, that Midwestern guy with the big glasses, he's funny and all, but he's not a real writer -- wait, what? He's got four books on the list of 1001 greatest books of all time? And there's nothing on the list by Glenn Beck or Bill O'Reilly?

Yeah, suck on that, Fox News.

Book Two- The Curious Incident of the Dog In the Night-Time

So I have about a zillion things to study for, so obviously I just spent the last two hours reading this book. I'm just gonna keep trucking through the titles on the list that I own until I can make it to the library, and this book seemed like it would be a nice, quick afternoon read.

This is a story about Christopher John Francis Boone, who lives with his father in England, loves astronomy and maths, and has a pet rat called Toby. He is also autistic, and the book - a "murder mystery" he is writing about the death of a neighbor's dog - is written entirely from his point of view. This is actually one of the few books I own that I didn't buy for myself. My mother bought copies of this book for my entire extended family one Christmas because I have a cousin who is autistic, and after she had read it she thought it was something all our relatives needed to read and understand. I'm glad she did, because this is really a remarkable little book.

Without a trace of preachiness or sentimentality, Haddon paints the picture of someone who is, really, just a boy going through troubles any fifteen year old might face; conflicts with classmates, divorced parents, and confusion about the future. That Christopher is autistic doesn't impede the story, it just forces us to view the events going on with a slightly different lens. Some parts of this book are just so lonely and sad, but in a way that turns our normal experiences of these emotions on their head. For instance, Christopher feels lonely when he's with other people, because he can't understand their emotions and he becomes confused when they act in anything other than expected ways, and this confusion is something he doesn't want and can't escape as long as these other people stick around. He knowns perfectly well when he's feeling terrible, but can't understand that emotion well in relation to other people. It creates this interesting paradox where we, the reader, are peering out from Christopher's eyes and can see the pain the other characters are feeling, but Christopher himself cannot. A good example is from the beginning of the book, on the night after the neighbor's dog Wellington has been murdered and Christopher has been arrested. This is the first time we get a glimpse of some of the demons Christopher's father struggles with, but all of this is lost on Christopher himself.

"At 2:07 a.m I decided I wanted a drink of orange squash before I brushed my teeth and got into bed, so I went downstairs to the kitchen. Father was sitting on the sofa watching snooker on the television and drinking scotch. There were tears coming out of his eyes.
I asked, "Are you sad about Wellington?"
He looked at me for a long time and sucked air in through his nose. Then he said, "Yes, Christopher, you could say that. You could very well say that."

Bah, I was thinking about writing this post and I didn't want it to turn into one of those, "I know someone with autism let me tell you about their struggle" sobfests, but apparently I'm go right ahead and do it anyway. Aside from my cousin, I've known a lot of autistic kids because I worked at a camp that had an unusually high percentage of autism cases, especially Ausbergers. Now, I worked at this camp for a long time and saw all manner of kids- kids you would never, ever know had been diagnosed with anything on the spectrum and kids who would burst into tears if the breeze blew the wrong way. Now, one of these kids, let's call him Mark, was my camper for a few summers and I grew to be incredibly fond of him. He was the sweetest kid you could ever imagine. There were a few struggles, of course; he didn't really like it when we played sports and he obviously wasn't great at interacting with the other kids, but they were shockingly good with him (I say shockingly good because these were twelve year old boys, and in my experience there aren't a lot of things twelve year old boys are great at besides being smartasses and hurling balls at each other). When he didn't want to play with the other kids, he and I would play this game where we'd ask either-or questions- for instance, would you rather have green skin for a month or a third ear for a year?

Well, this book made me think of Mark for obvious reasons, but what it reminded me of especially was how scared I was when I first started working with him, like everything I did could be this catastrophic mistake. I was so cautious, at first. I sort of tip-toed around him, like he was this live bomb that could go off anytime,  and I think that's how a lot of people feel around kids with any sort of autism- like you either need to know exactly what you're doing or stay the hell away. And I won't lie, there were a few times, even after we had known each other for awhile, where I would do something wrong- touch him on the shoulder by mistake, or make a joke he didn't understand - and things would go badly for a little while. But god, he was a bright, friendly kid, and you just had to talk to him for a while to see that. I still remember Mark as being one of the best campers I ever had, and not because he was an autism success story, but because he was a genuinely amazing boy.

Anyways, that's enough about that. Final words: I liked this book a lot on the reread, the math problems still kind of go beyond me, and it's a great chance to poke around inside a different mindset for awhile. And if I remember right,  this was the first book that introduced me to the idea that all the elements in our body are the leftovers from exploded stars, and that is a freaking amazing thought, so bravo, book!

Book 1: Kafka On the Shore

So I lied. I was totally intending to read Never Let Me Go first, but I won't have a chance to get to my local library for a week or two so I just decided to re-tackle some of the books I already owned. And I'm so happy I did. I had the perfect day yesterday sitting on the new couch in my apartment, reading and drinking some tea and watching it snow out the window and reading this utterly insane book.

Kafka On the Shore is a story about a 15 year old boy, Kafka Tamura, who runs away from home and goes to live in a library. There he falls in love with the head librarian, a private women with a mysterious past, and begins to grapple with demons of his own history. Along the way leeches fall from the sky, there are regular conversations with stray cats, Johnnie Walker makes a flute, we find out a lot about Beethoven, the past bleeds into the present and a lot of sex is had is had by all.

Let me begin by saying that I think Haruki Murakami is a genius and he's always been one of my favorite authors. The Wind Up Bird Chronicle, which is also on this list, is my favorite book of all time. After reading that book, I tackled some of his other works, including Kafka on the Shore.  I remembered the basic plot and that I had enjoyed it the first time, but it was well worth the second rereading. When people find out that my favorite book is the Wind Up Bird Chronicle, they usually say they've never heard of it and ask what it's about, and my response is usually, "I haven't really got the foggiest idea." The same is true for Kafka On the Shore- I loved it and couldn't stop reading it, but if you asked me to sum up all the metaphors and symbolism and literary throwbacks and strange, strange connections, I wouldn't have a clue where to begin. And that what I find so refreshing about all of Murakami's works- you can't just put everything in a neat little box and call it a day. His writing doesn't have to make sense, because sometime life is just like that - utterly random with no deeper meaning, at least not one we can see right away.

I was curious to see if anyone else could find some overarching themes in the book, so I did a little research and found out that on his Japanese site, Murakami allowed fans to ask questions about the book. He received over 8000 questions and personally answered about 1200 of them, but that didn't really seem to clear anything up. He said about it,

"...the secret to understanding the novel lies in reading it multiple times: "Kafka on the Shore contains several riddles, but there aren't any solutions provided. Instead, several of these riddles combine, and through their interaction the possibility of a solution takes shape. And the form this solution takes will be different for each reader. To put it another way, the riddles function as part of the solution. It's hard to explain, but that's the kind of novel I set out to write".


This is reminding me of my Zen Buddhism class. Oh, Murakami, you clever bastard. Let me talk about how much I love you some more.

First off, I cannot get over how refreshing his characters are. Murakami writes people not as they are, but as they should be- all the trivial small-talk boring details stripped away and just these characters that cut to the very marrow of what human beings should be. His characters are all very strange and direct and he is completely unapologetic about it. For instance, in this book Oshima starts out as just receptionist at the library who takes Kafka’s backpack every day, but Murakami has no trouble transforming him into this mysterious-transsexual-green sports car driving-hemophiliac-mountain dweller, all in the space of a few pages, and it still doesn’t feel over the top.  It makes you think that the people you know might be like this, boring and presentable on the top, but each with these wild secrets hidden inside them, just out of reach. 

And his dialogue, oh, it’s so crisp and beautiful. In true Japanese form there is never a word out of place, and every passing comment hints at some hidden meaning. It  makes me think of those times when, very rarely, you can have a perfect conversation with someone else, maybe a close friend or maybe a stranger.  It feels like you are no longer talking around each other but are talking with them, working together somehow to arrive at some deeper conclusion that you couldn’t have reached alone.  You'll be trucking along, reading up a storm, and then they'll just be a turn of phrase that stops you in your tracks.  For instance,

“That’s why I like to listen to Schebert while I’m driving. Like I said, it’s because of all the performances are imperfect. A dense, artistic kind of imperfection that stimulates your consciousness, keeps you alert. If I listen to some utterly perfect performance of an utterly perfect piece while I’m driving, I might want to close my eyes and die right then and there. But listening to the D major, I can feel the limits of what humans are capable of—that a certain type of perfection can only be realized through a limitless accumulation of the imperfect. And personally, I find that encouraging. Do you know what I’m getting at?”

Ah, I'm a sucker for this kind of thing.

In conclusion: Haruki Murkami is an evil genius, I hardly understand anything that's going on, but I think it is beautiful and strange and haunting and well, well worth the journey. 

Introduction, or I Choose Funny Ways to Put off Studying for Finals

Well, we all do stupid things. Sometimes you it's leaving the house without a raincoat, or lying to the border patrol about all the cheap liquor you're hiding in the trunk. But if I can pull off this stupid thing, then I will be one pleased (and well-read) idiot.

I call your attention to THE LIST.

Now, this has been attempted by many people (including a couple people on this very site!) but I have reason to believe that I might actually succeed at reading all 1001 books on this list, and here are a few reasons why-

1) I love to read. I'm one of those kids that asked for books for Christmas instead of barbies or ponies or whatever else it is that normal children want.

2) I am a very very fast reader. I can read a typical book (let's say, 250ish pages) in about 3 hours, if I really put my mind to it.

3) I am currently in university pursuing a rigorous degree and therefore do not need any excuse to procrastinate in crazy ways.


Here are my guidelines:

1) I've already read about 50 of these 1001 books, but I will read them again as I pass them, because many of them I read a long time ago and only once and haven't the faintest idea what they were about.

2) The list is divided into 5 sections: 2000's, 1900's, 1800's, 1700's, and pre-1700's. I very much prefer modern books to what I refer to as "olden-timey" books, so to prevent myself the insanity of reading thiry-odd 1700's books in a row, I've decided to not to read the books in order and instead to read the first one from each section, then the second, then the third, etc. When I run out of titles in a section, I'll skip it and move onto the next section.

3) This is allowed to take me a very long time.

The purpose of this blog is basically so I can record this milestone in the unlikely event that I do pull it off and so I can write down my reactions to the books. I read a lot, like I said, but sometimes I read a book once and then forget everything about it. It would be nice to have some sort of record, I think.

So first up: Never Let Me Go, Kazuro Ishiguro!