Book Seventeen: On Beauty, Zadie Smith
Let me begin by saying I was very skeptical about this book. A few years ago I had started White Teeth, Smith's first book, and had to put it down after the first chapter because I just found it utterly incomprehensible, so full of slang and references and its own cleverness that I could barely make out a story lurking behind all the mess. Well, maybe I'll have to give White Teeth another shot (and I'll have to, it's on THE LIST), because this book blew me away. It was by far one of the most engrossing and straight up interesting novels I've read in a long time; one of those that you literally cannot stop reading. I was at a cabin on the lake with a bunch of my friends and they were bouncing off the walls wanting to ski and ice climb and other assorted awesome things, and even with the prospect of all of that, the thing I wanted to do most was sit on the couch and devour this book.
Overall, the premise of this book is pretty simple: it's a story about a family. Howard Besley is a British professor of art history now living in suburban Massachusetts with his big-hearted wife Kiki and his three children, Jermone, Zora, and Levi. This is a book that deals with a lot of thorny issues simultaneously - race, sexism, infidelity, identity, privilege, academia, lust (just to name a few) but somehow, the writing doesn't come off heavy handed or preachy. It's a completely believable, human account of these issues with a seamless plot that is original, engaging, and overall, interesting. Even with everything else crammed in there, at the end of the book the thing you remember most is the characters, in all their triumph and weakness.
So I have to write about four other books after this, so I'm only gonna pick my favorite of the themes running throughout the book; academia. Throughout the novel we see Howard, a professor, and Kiki, a nurse, struggling to mesh their two worlds. Kiki is a woman of the world, all about the body and the spirit and feeling, while Howard lives completely in his head and subjects his every thought to a slew of rationalizations and deconstructions. A great example of this essential argument here is about art itself. In the Besley's house, Howard, the professor of art history, gets to choose the art, and one hard and fast rule prevails; no portraits. The explanation for this is long and wordy, full of allusions to historians and theories and other crazy academic posturing. Kiki puts up with this, but we see the inherent differences between her and her husband when she goes over a friend's house and falls in love with a portrait the other woman owns. I can't remember the exact dialogue, but when she's asked about why she likes it, she says she just thinks it's beautiful. For Howard, you can't just "like" art because it's "beautiful" - you need a thirty page paper throughly deconstructing everything, and in the end you need to conclude that's it's imperfect and blah blah blah. I thought that interaction and everything else written in a similar vein about the utter insanity that is academia was spot on (though this may be heavily influenced by the current frustration I'm feeling after being trapped in it for so goddam long). I think the very best passage in the book dealing with this is a very short account told from the point of view of a young student of Howard's who loves art in a "childish" manner, and commits the great offense of "liking" a piece of art the class is going to discuss. She comes up with a whole list of explanations for why the painting is wonderful, most having to do with the simple human emotion it evokes, and goes to class confident that she'll finally have something to contribute. But when she gets there, she's drowned out in class discussion by roundabout and wordy discussions on this theory and that theory which serve to make everyone sound very smart indeed, but don't even approach the simple and beautiful opinions secretly held by this poor girl. And, in my opinion, therein lies the simplest conflict of the book: which should prevail: thought or emotion?
In summary: I can't even come close to telling you all the reasons this book is BRILLIANT, so you'll just have to read it for yourself. Deep and insightful and utterly, utterly believable, this is one of my new favorite books, and I promise you won't be disappointed.
Book Eighteen: The Romantics, Pankaj Mishra
There were some good parts of this book - the descriptions of Benaras, for instance, were lovely, and I've always been fascinated by that city, so it was kind of great to read about someone actually living where ancient and modern India collide. Diana West was a fascinating character - the scene after the party when's she's crying on the stairwell is very powerful - and the commentary on the Westerners trying to "find themselves" in India is thought-provoking indeed. But in the end this story is just too gentle and light for it's own good, and left me with nothing deep enough to stick.
In summary: Again, amazon.com is rife with praises for this books "simplicity and quiet narrative", but I'm a firm believer in the old quote by Kafka - "I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us... We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us."
Sorry, Mishra - I'm just not feeling the axe this time.
Book Nineteen - The Awakening
1) Book about a female protagonist written by a woman (!!) pre-1900, always a win.
2) Main character Edna is so many kinds of awesome. She's not gonna take any nonsense from anybody. If she wants to go out swimming naked and befriend the antisocial pianist and have grand parties and buy a house, well you better believe she's gonna go right ahead and do that shit, no matter what her boring husband says. And if she wants to engage in the sheer lunacy of going on walks by herself and canceling her social calling hour, well then by Jeeves, she's gonna shock society while she's at it. As one of my good friends would say, in terms of 19th century Southern culture, she is a total baller.
3) Now my allergy to old books has caused me not to be too well versed on the subject, but my roommate who studied this book in school assures me it's one of the earliest and frankest portrayals of female sexuality in literature. As in, girls wanna get it on too, and not always with their misogynistic husbands. Shocking.
4) Did I mention that Edna was a badass?
Only con: the ending. If you don't want to be spoiled don't read on, but my impression of Edna's character did not see her as the kind of woman to metaphorically throw herself off the cliff once her beau rejects her. Girl should have just cried a little, straightened out her skirts and marched on, if you ask me, but I guess I can't have it all with this book.
Summary: You go, girl.
Book Twenty: The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien
Ah, this book has a special place in my heart. I read pretty prolifically even when I was a kid, but I until I was about sixteen I had a general hatred for any book I was forced to read for school. This was pretty understandable, I think, given that the stuff they were making us read were "classics" like Othello and the Odyssey (don't even get me STARTED on my deep and abiding hatred for the Odyssey. I once wrote an entire essay about how big of a dick Odysseus was and Virgil did the grand epic about a thousand times better. End of story.) Anyways, I was generally pretty sick about talking about "coming of age" and "historical narratives" and then, thank blessed God, a miracle occurred. The first good English teacher I had had in about five years assigned us to read this book.
This book manages to hit a whole list of things I love in modern literature: it's short and packed with visceral imagery and hits you like a boot to the chest. It's gory without trying to shock and thoughtful without being preachy and funny without losing any of its seriousness. I just love O'Brien's writing style so much; it's just so matter-of-fact and accessible, while still packing quite the emotional punch. My little brother, who can count on one hand the number of books he's bothered to read and not just spark-noted, actually liked this book. That right there says something about the genius of O'Brien's writing style.
Ah, there are so many parts of this book that I love; the part when he's thinking about escaping to Canada, the coed in the jungle, the endless circles in the pickup truck around the lake. I've obviously never been in a war but I feel like I gained some understanding of it by reading this book. I mean, what do all soldiers coming back from war say? It's terrible, too terrible for words, but it's not like that all the time. Sometimes it's boring and sometimes it's funny and sometimes it approaches a high and dreamy kind of beauty that few can understand. The Things They Carried captures all of this and more and brings it to us in book that you can read in a day.
One last thing: the book is written as if it's a memoir of O'Brien's own time in the war, and only at the end does he reveal that most of what's been recalled there is made up. People in my English class went absolutely apeshit over this. They felt betrayed that the stories they had been reading hadn't actually happened, that O'Brien didn't shoot that young Vietnamese man and that he didn't even have a daughter. I, for one, could not understand what the problem was. I mean, we read fiction all the time and it's not any less powerful because it's made up, because all really good literature, fiction or non-fiction, manages to do the same thing: evoke real emotion in the reader. Does a story lose that power if it's not, technically, "true?" I don't think so. Maybe I didn't mind because at that point I already considered myself a writer and I knew that even if the story you were telling wasn't true, it still could help you understand and could still help you heal. By setting something down in a story you give it order, give it sense, give it meaning. As O'Brien himself says at the end of the book, "I'm skimming across the surface of my own history, moving fast, riding the melt beneath the blades, doing loops and spins, and when I take a high leap into the dark and come down thirty years later, I realize it is as Tim trying to save Timmy's life with a story."
In summary: At times hilarious, terrifying, sad and reflective, this is the book about war that has nothing to do with politics and grand heroic gestures- it's about the humans down there in the mud trying to make sense of it all. Read it, read it, read it.
Book Twenty One: Steppenwolf, Herman Hesse
THIS BOOK! I LOVE IT SO. I first read this book when I was in high school and a lot of it, pretty much the entire story, got past me. It's remarkable how a few years can change your impression of a story like this. When I first read it I was going through my angsty teenage "fuck society and its pretensions" kind of phrase- you know, writing a lot of very incendiary poetry and disapproving of the cars my parents drove and reading Beat literature and generally feeling superior to everyone in existence. Ah, the teenage years.
Anyways, what I thought was very interesting is that my version of the book contains a short intro by Herman Hesse himself, which he had apparently written to clear up some misconceptions about the message. He was shocked by how many readers- young readers, especially - saw his book as nothing more than an attack on modern society and a depressing tale about its toll on poor old Harry, the troubled saint. I found this hilarious, because that was exactly the read I got on it the first time. Rereading it now, I wonder how I could have ever mistaken the story for any of those things. And you know what? I bet I'll read this a few years down the line and change my opinion again. That's the great thing about re-reading, I guess....we all get older and (supposedly) wiser.
Anyways, Steppenwolf starts as a book about a wretched old man, Harry Haller, generally being miserable. Poor Harry is under the impression that happiness will always elude him because his soul is split in two - the man, Harry, who loves company and society and high-minded ideas, and the wolf of the Steppes, a beast who bares its teeth at all modern comforts and pleasures and would prefer to roam about in the wilds and howl at the moon. Because of the warring nature of his two spirits, Harry is always in torment. Lots of torment. In fact, the whole first half of the book is torment, but don't give up in the face of the endless onslaught of woe, because the book gets so, so much better with the introduction of the lovely Hermine. Hermine is everything Harry is not- young and pretty and full of life and romance, free with herself and not afraid to engage in common pleasure like (gasp) dancing the foxtrot. Harry, who had always thought himself above such things, finds himself drawn into her mysterious world despite himself, and a chink of sunshine manages to enter his dreary life. But Hermine has a secret of her own, and this all culminates in the wildest party you've ever seen or heard about, where all the pieces fall into place.
One of my first new relevations about this book is that it's (not so secretly) Buddhist! Given that I couldn't tell Buddhism from Judaism when I first read that book I guess it's not so surprising that I missed it the first go round, but I'm didn't pay a bunch of money for all those university religious classes for nothing and you can't sneak it by me this time, Hesse. When they mock Harry for mistakenly believing his soul is one, unchanging individual - well, that's pretty much straight out of an intro Buddhism class. Eventually, Harry sees himself for what he really is - an ever changing conglomerate of countless versions of himself which flash in and out of existence and are at their heart no different from the souls of anyone else he knows. Even Hermine and Paulo and Maria are a part of him, the same as him. Escaping of suffering also figures keenly in this book, and as Harry finds out, suffering cannot be escaped by sinking further into it, but only by realizing that everything is transient, and that both earthly suffering and earthly joy pale in comparison to the "laughter of the immortals." I guess I shouldn't be surprised, given that Hesse wrote every Westerner's favorite Buddhist text, Siddhartha, but it was kind of fun to discover all of that lurking just out of sight!
Anyways, I love this book. The Magic Theatre sequences are among the most brilliant and wonderful passages of any novel I've ever read. The scenes in All The Girls Are Yours, especially, stick with me long after reading. Harry looks back over his entire life and sees that if he had taken himself a little less seriously and let a little spontaneity and risk enter into his solemn world, he could have experienced hundreds and thousands of joys which he had only dreamt of (plus, had a lot more sex). Harry realizes he has spent his whole life clinging onto glimmers of what he perceived to be deeper meaning, but the immortals and Hermine teach him that even the worst, basest, cheapest parts of life are worth experiencing, and that by always being afraid of living incorrectly, one never lives. As Mozart chides Harry, "...enough of the pathos and death-dealing. It is time to come to your senses. You are to live and to learn to laugh. You are to learn to listen to the cursed radio music of life and to reverence the spirit behind it and to laugh at its distortions. So there you are. More will not be asked of you."
In summary: Wild and twisted and sensual, this book will start out making you want to never get out of bed. But if you're not laughing at life at the end, then give it a few years and try again. Maybe you'll learn what Harry learns: Life's a bitch, so learn how to dance.
DONE. Off to make some food and study. Next I'm gonna read House of Leaves, which always makes me a little more afraid of the dark. Until next time!
