2021 reads, #75. DID NOT FINISH. This book suffers from the same problem as that history of George Handel in London volume I recently marked as DNF an2021 reads, #75. DID NOT FINISH. This book suffers from the same problem as that history of George Handel in London volume I recently marked as DNF and turned back into the library as well; that after thinking, "Hmm, that looks interesting" when first stumbling across it at Wowbrary, once I got it home I realized that I'm not actually interested enough in the subject to get through a 400-page book about it, and so it ended up sitting in my room for an entire four months without me ever getting past the 50-page mark. That's a shame, because this is actually very well-written, done in the kind of witty, highly literary style of fellow "geographical biographies" like Bettany Hughes' Istanbul: A Tale of Three Cities and Peter Ackroyd's London: A Biography. If you have the patience for it, I actually recommend it, despite me not getting even close to finishing it myself. ...more
2021 reads, #59. DID NOT FINISH. The little I read of this biographical look at German Baroque composer George Handel's time as a court musician in 172021 reads, #59. DID NOT FINISH. The little I read of this biographical look at German Baroque composer George Handel's time as a court musician in 1700s London was pretty interesting; but what I've come to learn is that I'm just not that interested in the detailed minutiae of his life, and so after having the 400-page library book in my possession for literally four months now and still finding myself only at page 50, I'm reluctantly giving up and turning it back in. Don't let my abandoning of it make you think that it's bad, because it's not; but sister, make sure you really, really want to know about the day-to-day life of Handel before you pick it up yourself. ...more
THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote
Currently in the challenge: Martin AmisTHE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote
Currently in the challenge: Martin Amis | Isaac Asimov's Robot/Empire/Foundation | Margaret Atwood | JG Ballard | Clive Barker | Philip K Dick | Daphne Du Maurier | William Gibson | Michel Houellebecq | John Irving | Kazuo Ishiguro | John Le Carre | Bernard Malamud | China Mieville | VS Naipaul | Chuck Palahniuk | Tim Powers | Terry Pratchett's Discworld | Philip Roth | Neal Stephenson | Jim Thompson | John Updike | Kurt Vonnegut | PG Wodehouse
When I first started my completist read of spy novelist John Le Carre earlier this year, I decided to skip the first two books altogether and start with his third, The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, because of online reading guides claiming that the first two books are more like murder mysteries that happen to feature spies, instead of spy novels themselves. But after reading that third book and being blown away by it, then only learning later that it features Le Carre's indelible nine-book hero George Smiley, and builds on top of plot points found in the first two books, I then realized that I was really going to have to backtrack and take those on if I want to make this a truly enlightening experience. And indeed, I'm glad I did, because his actual first novel, 1961's Call for the Dead, is the debut of Smiley and a deep look at his character and what makes him tick, making it required reading for fans of the later, more popular Smiley tales like Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Honourable Schoolboy and Smiley's People.
In fact Smiley makes more sense here for me in his debut than in any of those other tales I've already witnessed through their movie adaptations; he's essentially an aging holdover from when "spy agencies" were first being invented and was thought of more as experimental intelligence-gathering operations. These agencies before World War Two (including the OSS in America, precursor of the CIA) were mostly filled with clever little nerds, doing clever little things while smoking their pipes and reading philosophy books; but after these agencies became so popular during the Cold War, all the morons and bureaucracy of the rest of the military came with them too, rapidly turning into the "Dilbert"esque dysfunctional office environments that Le Carre has now spent a career making vicious insults about. This first book sees Smiley at his youngest (the nine books age him at the real rate that the volumes actually came out), in late middle age and doing routine background checks around the "Circus" (MI6 headquarters) where he works; after a recent interview subject goes berserk and apparently kills himself despite seeming quite calm while talking, Smiley finds himself in a much more explosive situation than he was expecting, even while first starting to juggle the relationship between the Nerds and the Suits at MI6 which would eventually define the entire Smiley series.
A tiny whip-fast novel that I read from cover to cover in a single day, certainly it's true that this is much smaller and more humble in scope than his more mature novels, but it's still a spy novel through and through, and begins a straight throughline of a single character and consistent plot within a persistent universe that lasts all the way until the 1990s. That makes it worth starting at the beginning if you've decided to be in it for the long haul, because all the Smiley novels are built on the foundations before them, until you get to the very beginning here where it's all laid out clearly for the first time.
In which a law-school bro, who thinks he's less douchy than all the other law-school bros because he goes whitewater rafting every summer, dude, gets In which a law-school bro, who thinks he's less douchy than all the other law-school bros because he goes whitewater rafting every summer, dude, gets a study-abroad opportunity in Amsterdam and decides while he's there that he's going to write a journalistic expose about the prostitutes of the red-light district, not by doing anything sensible like taking out an ad looking for interview subjects or working with an existing advocacy group, but by walking around at midnights directly soliciting the women in their windows while they're in the middle of trying to work; then immediately "falls in love" with the very first prostitute who will give him the time of day, doing such creepy things as buying her jewelry to commemorate their first afternoon coffee, and non-consensually holding her hand on the sidewalk whenever they walk from one interview location to another, eventually insisting that they have a "special connection" when after three months of constant harassment he finally wears her down enough to agree to an afternoon interview in her apartment, then promptly throws the manuscript into a locked drawer for twenty years afterwards so that it won't create any problems for him in his new job as (of fucking course) an entertainment lawyer in Los Angeles.
To be fair, David Wienir's book is actually better than what I just described, which at least has the virtue of being a clear-eyed historical document about the state of Amsterdam's red-light district in the late 1990s, a pre-EU, pre-9/11 age when everything was still cheap, Americans were still beloved by locals, and far-right conservatives hadn't yet taken over the Dutch national consciousness. I wanted to start my review the way I did, though, because if you find any of the above statements to be repulsive, there isn't a single chance you're going to like this often infuriating book, a culturally tone-deaf memoir that's a virtual blueprint for everything the #MeToo movement is complaining about these days. Wienir stumbles his way through the red-light district, committing gaffes left and right and then rightly assuming that his winning aw-shucks smile and his ownership of a penis will get him out of any trouble his frat-bro antics might get him into; then when his three-month slumming field trip is over, he goes straight back into the married suburban upper-middle-class no-repercussions life he knew all along was waiting for him, making a series of empty promises to all his new international vagabond friends and then promptly abandoning them the moment this intimacy parasite got what he was looking for from them. Those like me with an interest in learning how the mechanics of Amsterdam's red-light district actually work will find sections in this book that will scratch that itch; but all others are wise to stay far away from this virtual paean to oblivious white-dude entitlement....more
DID NOT FINISH. Although this book certainly takes on a fascinating conceit -- that it was actually Alexander the Great's father, Philip II, who laid DID NOT FINISH. Although this book certainly takes on a fascinating conceit -- that it was actually Alexander the Great's father, Philip II, who laid most of the groundwork for Alexander's later famous exploits, while it was his generals after his death who did most of the hard work of establishing the "Hellenistic World" that Alexander usually gets the credit for -- unfortunately, like a lot of history books about Classicism, this feels like the publisher took someone's dry, tedious doctoral thesis and slapped a pretty cover on it, with the text getting into so much minutiae about minor regional chieftains and the endless skirmishes that led to their defeats that a general reader like me will soon find themselves bored out of their skull. I actually made it further into this book than I was expecting, about halfway altogether, but I too eventually gave up out of sheer tedium. ...more
I have to admit that I didn't actually finish this book, even though I enjoyed the parts I read; and that's because, even though the book deals with tI have to admit that I didn't actually finish this book, even though I enjoyed the parts I read; and that's because, even though the book deals with the ultra-fascinating subject of the Nazi Party and their obsession with the occult, looking not just at the war years but at everything in the entire German culture from the Victorian Age until the '30s that led to this kind of obsession, the book itself is actually written in the dry, reference-filled style of an academic dissertation, and I could only take about a hundred pages of that before the tedium finally got the best of me. Worth picking up just for the look at the events that led to the rise of the Nazis in the first place, but you'll need a bigger tolerance for academic writing than me if you expect to get all the way through it. ...more
Now that I'm no longer reviewing 200 contemporary novels every year for the CCLaP website, 2018 has been giving me a chance to go back and read a lot Now that I'm no longer reviewing 200 contemporary novels every year for the CCLaP website, 2018 has been giving me a chance to go back and read a lot of classic books I've never gotten around to reading before; in January, for example, I finally took on what's now known as The Berlin Stories by Christopher Isherwood, which started life as the two short novels The Last of Mr. Norris and Goodbye to Berlin, which aren't actually novels at all but rather collections of related short-story-style vignettes. It's mostly known now for being one of the first books to explicitly examine the growing threat of the Nazi Party in the 1930s, a first-person survey of the creative chaos of Weimar Germany that was used as the source material for the '70s musical Cabaret; and while, yes, the book does mention Nazis here and there, I was surprised to learn when finally reading it that it's much more a deep, poetic examination of complex character, a look by Isherwood at the fascinating, complicated real people he was surrounded by during his youth as an openly gay liberal artist, during a brief window in Germany's history when such a thing was openly tolerated.
As such, then, Isherwood's sensitive writing covers everyone from the wilting hothouse flowers of the former aristocracy he was hired to teach English to, to the petty criminals now attracted to the burgeoning Communist Party (and the manipulative intellectuals who were their supervisors), the charming rogues who ran Germany's thriving inter-war black market, and the many still-closested homosexuals who used all these devices as a way to facilitate then hide their illicit gay affairs. Yes, Nazis pop up in the middle of these shenanigans on a regular basis; but Isherwood's point was much more to focus on these particular people themselves, in prose that is both plain-spoken and wonderfully dripping in Romantic melancholy, the equivalent of watching a teenage girl in a white dress stand in the middle of a rainstorm, patiently waiting for a lover who will never arrive. Come for the delicate examination of the social experiment that produced Weimar Germany; stay for the look at the violent right-wingers who ruined it all. ...more
Logging the last of my 2017 reads today so that they'll count towards this year's Reading Challenge totals. Full review coming in early 2018.Logging the last of my 2017 reads today so that they'll count towards this year's Reading Challenge totals. Full review coming in early 2018....more
(As of June 2017, CCLaP is selling a first edition, first printing of this book at our eBay store. Below is the write-up that accompanied the auction (As of June 2017, CCLaP is selling a first edition, first printing of this book at our eBay store. Below is the write-up that accompanied the auction listing there.)
So why should a serious book collector pay any attention to a volume that's less than ten years old, by an author who has otherwise not proven that she has any lasting power within the literary industry? Because Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat Pray Love may in fact turn out to be the absolute perfect book to chronicle for future historians exactly what it was like to be a middle-class white suburban American female in the years following 9/11, a period that is bound to become a point of obsession for those in the future studying the US's rise and fall as a global superpower. A reluctant suburbanite who had just gone through a bitter divorce, the mid-thirties Gilbert found herself in the early 2000s mentally adrift, a confessed "self-help junkie" who was trying every gimmicky piece of advice that landed her way, being force-fed a diet of anti-depressive medication against her wishes but too afraid of the alternative to stop them. Within such a moment of mid-life crisis, then, she made the radical decision to sell all her things, get rid of her New York apartment, and spend a year doing nothing but traveling to what she called the "three I's" -- Italy (to indulge a random desire to learn the language), India (to delve more seriously into her recent conversion to Hinduism), and Indonesia (specifically to Bali, to spend four months as the personal assistant to a "village elder" she previously met during her job as a globe-trotting magazine journalist).
The results of this year-long trek are charming and infectious, and it's no surprise that the book remained on the NYT bestseller list for a whopping 187 weeks straight, later made into a high-profile movie produced by Brad Pitt and starring Julia Roberts. And that's because Gilbert cuts through the usual "chick-lit" filler here, having the courage to take a cruelly hard look at her mistakes and her weaknesses, and showing how spending a year letting go of every expectation she had had about life was ironically the best thing she could've ever done for that life. It's a call for simplicity, spirituality and anti-materialism that resonated profoundly with tens of millions of women in the same position as her, which says a lot about the point of runaway consumerism and moral bankruptcy the US had reached by the beginning of the 21st century; and it doesn't hurt that the book is also laugh-out-loud funny at points, moving sometimes to the point of tears, and just so happens to hit all the usual beats of a typical romantic comedy but this time in real life. A perfect gift for a fan of the book who wants to have a closer relationship with the original text, this first printing in flawless condition is being offered at a price specifically for young beginning collectors, those looking to add important titles to their library now when no one else is thinking of them, to ripen and age like a fine wine into the valuable commodities they'll one day be. ...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)
I've long had a fascination for Esperanto, the "global second language" that got invented in the late Victorian Age, flourished among the far-left political parties of Early Modernism's Communist era, and had its last big hurrah among the hippies of the countercultural age. (For those who don't know, Esperanto was deliberately designed to be the easiest language to learn in the entire history of the subject, with the goal being that everyone on the planet would eventually know it as a second language to their local primary first language, as a way of bringing about true global communication without everyone on the planet having to learn every 25 years the latest "language du jour" of whatever hegemony just happened to be dominating the rest of the world during any particular generation.) And so I had an immediate interest when recently coming across Esther Schor's new examination of the subject, Bridge of Words, which is an engaging hybrid of a book -- every odd-numbered chapter examines a piece of Esperanto's fascinatingly checkered history, while every even-numbered chapter looks at Esperanto as it exists as a still popular and functioning language in the 21st century, taking on everything from the people who choose to learn it and why, to a detailed analysis of the language itself and how exactly it works.
And indeed, this book is chock-full of interesting stuff I never knew before about Esperanto, not least of which was that it was invented in the first place by an Eastern European pre-Nazi Jew who had briefly been a part of the "Zionist" movement that eventually led to the formation of modern Israel; and that the language itself has complicated ties to the 20th-century struggles of Jewish identity, reforming the Yiddish language, and the Utopian Socialism dreams that went so hand-in-hand with such people back in those years. And this is not to mention the life that the language took on for itself away from these subjects as well, including its embrace by the '60s counterculture mentioned before, as well as it being seen as a way in the '50s to counter the xenophobia of Joe McCarthy's "red scare" Communist witch hunts. So it's a shame, then, that Schor's own writing style often gets in the way of this book being more enjoyable than it currently is; an Ivy League academe and full-time poet, she often gets too high-falutin' in her examination of Esperanto in all its myriad forms, having the tendency in a lot of places of writing in a nearly incomprehensibly academic way that will go over the heads of most general readers (yours truly included). Still very much worth your time, Bridge of Words is nonetheless unfortunately not as good as it could've been, which is why it's getting a score today that doesn't quite reflect the interest that just the subject itself naturally generates on its own.
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)
There seems to be a trend in history books these days that I'm all for, which is to de-emphasize the date-focused tradition of battles and emperors to instead "paint a portrait" of what daily life in those days must've been like for the average citizen; take Bronwen Riley's The Edge of the Empire, for example, which examines the Roman Empire's far-flung colony of Brittannia (or modern-day Great Britain) by picturing what the trip there must've been like for its newly appointed governor in 120 AD, Sextus Julius Severus, as he made his way with his retinue from the center of Rome itself all the way to the northern wasteland of Hadrian's Wall. This then gives Riley an excuse to look at all kinds of interesting topics that would relate to such a trip, from the roadways and shipping lanes that had been established by then, to how such traveling groups kept themselves fed and housed over such a long distance, the way the countryside's culture changed as you traveled farther and farther away from Italy, what exactly was built by the Romans in these far-off spots and what was co-opted from the pagans who were already there, what kinds of things were valuable enough in those locations to be imported back to people in Rome, and what kinds of things needed to be exported from Rome out to them. It's a surprisingly short book, only 200 pages once you remove the bibliography and notes; and this lets it move at the lively pace of a contemporary novel, certainly not a book for serious academes but a perfect volume for armchair historians like you and me. For those who are interested in learning more about this endlessly fascinating period of human history, but don't feel like trudging their way through a thousand pages of "Caesar This" defeating "Minor That," this comes strongly recommended, a brisk and fact-filled look at what European travel was like in an age before jetliners, ocean cruisers or even paved roads.
Out of 10: 8.8, or 9.3 for amateur history buffs ...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)
So why have you not seen any new book reviews from me in something like a month now? Because I've been spending that entire time slogging my way through one single book, the 600-page SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome by British historian and sometimes archaeologist Mary Beard, and wanted to go nice and slow so that I would really absorb everything that she says here. And she talks about a lot of stuff here, not a history of the Roman Empire per se but a history of Rome, the city, during the years when it was an Empire; although that's a bit misleading, because she starts all the way back at the city's semi-mythical founding (traditionally set at 753 BC, but most likely more like 1000 to 1500 BC), and then ends only at 200 AD, the date that the Empire gave full citizenship privileges to every single citizen on the planet.
And Beard has an additional complication in her book as well, which is that she hopes to examine not just the lives of the ultra-rich and famous that most histories of Rome concentrate on, but to shed some light on what daily life must've been like for all the normal everyday citizens as well, the wives and slaves and tavern owners, of whom there is barely any physical evidence and almost no written records; and that's where her experiences in archaeology come into play, examining the latest digs from both Rome itself and its far-flung outposts to give us perhaps the best view yet at what it was like to actually exist and live within the Roman Empire, whether that was at its height around the time of Christ or way back when Rome was nothing more than a series of huts being ruled by a competing series of barbarian-like tribes.
In essence what Beard shows is that Rome has always been a city of slow and steady transition, not frozen in "eras" like we usually think of the Empire but rather a fluid progression from chieftans to group rule, to a proto-form of democracy, to a slow and steady corruption of that democracy, to an eventual dictatorship as the Empire grew too large for a small group of consensus-builders to handle. And in the meanwhile, she brings great insights into living conditions within Rome itself over this approximate millennium that her book focuses on, the kinds of things Romans did for fun, how exactly urban life was set up back when a million people lived together without indoor plumbing or a police department, as well as extended looks at the ways the various colonies influenced and had a pull over what normal life was like in the capital as well. Plainly written but chock-full of actual information, this is not a book you can easily skim through; but if you give yourself the time and energy to do a thoughtful reading of the entire thing, armchair historians will find it a rewarding and insightful experience, a sort of "people's history" to serve as a great companion to all those dusty endless lists of emperors and the wars they officially fought.
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)
As regular readers know, I have mixed feelings about slow-moving, heavily character-based stories; but when they're done well, in a way that I can easily engage in, like is the case with Darryl Pinckney's Black Deutschland, such novels tend to be some of my favorite reading experiences of the entire year. A deliberately rambling tale that's presented much like how a person might tell a story over beers at a bar -- that is, in no particular order, with certain mentions triggering digressions from completely different periods of their lives -- this is the story of a young gay black intellectual in the 1980s, raised on Chicago's southside but who has a Romantic-with-a-capital-R fascination with pre-unified Berlin, basically because of falling in love with Christopher Isherwood's old '50s tales about debauchery there and mistakenly thinking that he's going to be able to find the same thing.
Although never laid out explicitly, we get the sense over the course of this book that our hero Jed spent a whole series of summers in his youth traveling back and forth between the two cities, first as a genteel alcoholic (his drug of choice is white wine) who engages in a whole series of sloppily homosexual affairs; but then at a certain point he decides to dry up, at which point he accidentally falls in with a controversial architect from IIT who then pays him to travel to Berlin regularly, now sober and with his job being essentially to write articles that rationalize and justify this architect's sometimes hated plan to build a new "anti-Bauhaus" housing project in that city, where Jed is now forming a new relationship with a once estranged cousin who is a classical pianist in Germany and has her own complicated history with being a "black nerd role model."
The point of this book, though, is not to follow along with this timeline, but rather to sink luxuriously into the complex characterization and inner thoughts of all these people, and to lounge like a fellow intellectual in their high-minded conversations about art, love, post-war Europe and American urban blight. Granted, that's a slow and long process that will drive some people crazy -- for example, I usually burn through two to three books every week as a CCLaP reviewer, yet this 300-page book took me nearly a month of daily reading to get through, just because the story is so dense and rich and needs to be sipped rather than gulped. If you have the patience and inclination, though, you'll find an immensely rewarding tale that utterly transports you to a time and place most of us would never find ourselves in our own lives, giving us a look at brainy people of color as they flit and flirt their way as expats among a world of European artistes who treat them like sexy space aliens. For those like me who think they can get into a story like this, it comes strongly recommended, and will likely be making our best-of-the-year lists at the end of 2016.
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)
To be fair, the new dual biography Dietrich & Riefenstahl is both really well done and a great concept for a book; two German women of around the same age, both in the entertainment industry, and who even lived on the same street at one point in the Weimer Era, the fact that their lives took such wildly different directions after the rise of fascism (Marlene Dietrich turned her back on Nazism and moved to Hollywood, where she became a huge success among Allied audiences, while Leni Riefenstahl embraced Nazism, turned to avant-garde cinematography, and became just as huge a success among Axis audiences) says loads about Europe during the war, the historic split between left and right politics at the time, and the heartbreaking decisions that all Germans were forced to make in those years. No, the problem is that, at 600 densely packed and dryly written pages (which would easily be 900 pages under a normal layout), this was simply way more information than I was interested in, making the book a slog that I sort of gave up on about halfway through. A great title for those with a special interest in the subject, it's unfortunately a little too daunting for those like me with only a passing interest, and it should be kept in mind before picking it up.
Out of 10: 7.0, or 9.0 for those with a special interest in this subject ...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C (Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)
Although there's nothing particularly outstanding about Mike Robbins' The Nine Horizons, travel fans will want to pick up a copy anyway, simply because it's such a solid and strong example of a classic travelogue based on real experiences. Split into nine chapters detailing nine trips the British author made throughout the 1980s and '90s, this has the formal tone of an older travel writer like George Orwell, a certain primness to the proceedings that helps keep the sometimes outrageous stories about exotic locations in check; and I must admit, it's fascinating to read so long after the fact Robbins' political observations about certain areas of the world that were once hotbeds twenty or thirty years ago but no longer are (or are sometimes hot again for entirely different reasons, like his entertaining account of a pre-Arab-Spring Syria). Although not a genre-crossing "must read" even for people who don't particularly like travelogues, it certainly should go in your to-be-read list if you are, an illuminating and well-done series of vignettes that kept me quickly turning pages until I was done.
Out of 10: 8.3, or 9.3 for fans of travel writing ...more
CCLaP's newest book drops May 17th! It's a downbeat spy thriller in the vein of Graham Greene or John FTC DISCLOSURE: I am the publisher of this book.
CCLaP's newest book drops May 17th! It's a downbeat spy thriller in the vein of Graham Greene or John Le Carre, set in the very last days of Communism in Lithuania, 1989, a morally murky and really gripping tale of murder, betrayal, and revolution. It's unlike anything we've ever published before, so I hope you'll have a chance to pick up a copy! Available as a free ebook download starting May 17th, at [cclapcenter.com/lovesongs], the same page you'll be able to order the paperback or handmade hardback editions....more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this review, as well as the owner of (Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this review, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)
(CCLaP's rare-book service [cclapcenter.com/rarebooks] recently auctioned off a first edition, first printing copy of Sinclair Lewis' 1929 Dodsworth. Below is the write-up I did for the book's description.)
Poor Sinclair Lewis! Once one of the most celebrated writers on the planet, for an unprecedented string of commercial hits in the 1920s making vicious fun of the bored, corrupt, empty-headed middle class of the American Midwest, all of them turned into bestsellers precisely by the self-hating middle-classers he was making fun of, Lewis' career went quickly sour upon the start of the Great Depression, when these suddenly broke middle-classers found themselves being punished enough by life in general, and no longer needed his finger-wagging to produce the painless punishment that was assuaging their guilt throughout the "Roaring Twenties." But now that we're about to approach the centennial celebrations of these early hits, it's time that a new cultural assessment of Lewis be made, and that he be acknowledged as a sharp futurist who has a lot to say about our own times; because in reality you can strongly argue that he was the Jonathan Franzen of his times, a critically adored author (the first American writer in history to win the Nobel Prize, for example) who nonetheless heavily employed the pop culture and slang of his day in order to create devastating indictments against the consumerism, celebrity worship and herd mentality surrounding him, eaten up in the millions by the very people most guilty of the behavior, because they're able to recognize in these indictments every single person they know besides themselves, the problem that led to the Great Depression just as surely as it did in our own times to the 2008 Economic Meltdown.
Dodsworth was the last of these great hits, released just a few months before the stock market crash of 1929, and in a nutshell can be called "Lewis meets Henry James;" centered around Sam Dodsworth, the fifty-something founder of the hugely successful car manufacturer in Zenith* who has just sold the entire thing to a thinly disguised General Motors, now that he's "retired" his forty-something wife convinces him to go on an old-fashioned Grand Tour of Europe, just like rich Americans have been doing since the Victorian Age if they want to consider themselves truly cultured. (And note, by the way, that this would be the last period in history that this would be true, one of the many elements that makes this almost more important now as a historical document than as a piece of popular fiction; after the destruction of Europe and the ascendency of America at the end of World War Two, the global headquarters of culture quickly shifted to the US and specifically New York, and it suddenly became passe among rich Americans to take European grand tours anymore.) The simple plot, then, follows the same structure as so many of Lewis' novels from the '20s; our narrator starts as the living embodiment of whatever Lewis is trying to criticize (in this case, the business-focused, proudly ignorant American, forced on an unending parade of interchangeable cathedral visits and appalled by the lack of modern creature comforts now taken for granted in nearly every large American city), but after being exposed to the good things from that new environment (including, as always, the potential love of an enticingly independent modern woman) he slowly becomes a convert, just to be shunned by his former peers as pressure to "return to the fold."
And as mentioned, this is perhaps why collectors are best off thinking of this as an important historical document, rather than to focus on its admittedly only so-so quality as a novel; because given that Sam's payment for Dodsworth Motors would've likely been just a little cash but a whole lot of stock, it's fascinating to realize that in the real world, he would've been bankrupted just a few months after the events of this book take place, and that he suddenly would have a whole lot more to worry about than pompous Brits, brash expats, and how all those dirty artists in the Left Bank were always getting in his way. That's the treasure of this book in general, that it's a snapshot of a moment in history right before an unexpected period of tremendous upheaval, with none of the characters (nor even the author) even remotely aware that such upheaval is about to take place; note for example Sam's ho-hum attitude towards the pre-power Fascists he meets in Europe, or how one of the biggest sources of conflict is whether Sam is going to accept the high-powered VP position of the new conglomerate at home next year, or blow another million on staying at five-star hotels across the Continent for yet another year, a much more historically naked treat than any revisionist "winds of change" novel written after the fact. Lewis' fans in his own lifetime turned on him for this, but it's time that we restore the respect and fame he deserves for being such an astute prognosticator; and with this copy of Dodsworth being auctioned at a deliberately low starting bid to encourage an actual sale, this is a fine choice for a collector who wishes to "beat the odds" before this re-lionization of Lewis takes place next decade.
*For those who don't know, Lewis set many of his novels in the fictional Midwestern state of Winnemac, which was supposed to be sorta southish of Michigan and sorta northish of Indiana and Ohio; and Winnemac's version of Detroit or Cleveland or St. Louis was the industrial powerhouse of Zenith, where so many of his stories specifically take place. In fact, in Dodsworth Lewis makes almost a science-fiction author's amount of insider references to his now expansive alt-reality, name-dropping in casual conversations such former characters as George Babbitt and Elmer Gantry. ...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)
Regular readers know that I'm in the process of getting through Philip Roth's remarkable nine-book autobiographical "Nathan Zuckerman" series, a slew of novels written from the 1970s through early 2000s that essentially record the entire history of the Postmodernist Era, by looking very pointedly at Roth's own life as a major tastemaker of these Postmodernist decades. And in fact for a long time, the short 1985 novella The Prague Orgy was the official endcap of what was known then as the "Zuckerman Trilogy" (consisting of The Ghost Writer, Zuckerman Unbound and The Anatomy Lesson), although the reason it's getting such a short write-up today is because there's simply not much to it; more a glorified short story than a standalone book, it tells the tale of Zuckerman traveling to an academic conference in '70s Communist Czechoslovakia, where in usual style he falls in with an absolutely insane femme fatale, gets dragged to a group-sex party held by one of the bright lights of the Czech intelligentsia, and eventually runs afoul of the local secret police, getting whisked away in the middle of the night and unceremoniously dumped on the first plane back to America. An interesting little ditty for what it is, it can nonetheless be charitably called the least essential Zuckerman book of the entire series, and can be pretty easily skipped unless coming across it in the famed '80s four-book compilation known as Zuckerman Bound; and this finally leads us to what's the most exciting part of the entire Zuckerman series, when in the '90s Roth started using this character merely as an everyman narrator for what is widely considered the best books of his career -- 1997's American Pastoral, 1998's I Married a Communist and 2000's The Human Stain. Expect write-ups of those to slowly start appearing here over the next year. ...more
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)
The CCLaP 100: In which I read for the first time a hundred so-called "classics," then write reports on whether or not they deserve the label
Essay #49: Anna Karenina (1877), by Leo Tolstoy
The story in a nutshell: One of the novels to cement Russia's reputation for thousand-page epic family sagas, Leo Tolstoy's 1877 Anna Karenina (originally published serially in the three years previous) centers around a series of generally liberal upper-classers living in the aristocratic outskirts of St. Petersburg: there is the couple who start our story, for example, roguish fratboy and charming lothario Stepan "Stiva" Oblonsky and his wife Darya (or "Dolly"), infuriated by his constant flirting but not willing to give up her upper-middle-class lifestyle; then there is Stiva's sister Anna, a married "bohemian bourgeoisie" living in the big city, and Dolly's sister Kitty, bubbly-headed and just out of school, who happen to both form new romantic relationships at the same time -- in Kitty's case, a traditional on-and-off courtship with family friend and "gentleman farmer" Kostya Levin, while in Anna's case, a torrid affair with haughty intellectual Alexi Vronsky, which they both admit is wrong but go ahead with anyway, because of the popularity at the time among their Romantic-Era friends for passionate, wrong-headed affairs in the name of "true love at first sight."
The rest of this enormous book, then, is essentially a look at how all these situations pan out -- how for example Kitty and Levin's relationship has its ups and downs but generally proceeds in a traditional and forward fashion, while the act of betrayal that marked the beginning of Anna and Vronsky's relationship eventually casts more and more of a pall, the two eventually shunned by their circle of friends and even finally turning on each other, and with Anna eventually becoming one of those bitter martini-drinking housewives zonked out by lunchtime every day on Valium (well, okay, morphine in her case), leading to this novel's infamously tragic ending. Meanwhile, there are grand European tours to be organized, obsessions to be formed over trendy spiritual advisers, obscure wars to be fought in Serbia, and much intellectual hand-wringing to be done among these upper-class liberals over the future of Russian peasantry, agriculture, and regional political systems, delivering by the end a nearly perfect example of what today we would call a "prestige television series," much like watching the entire complex run of a show like Mad Men or The Sopranos.
The argument for it being a classic: Well, it's not for nothing that, after a downturn in popularity during the 20th century, there are more and more people in the 2000s now proclaiming Anna Karenina to be not only great but literally The Greatest Novel In Human History; and that's because, they argue, along with such other 19th-century proto-Realist pioneers like Gustave Flaubert and Henry James, Tolstoy virtually wrote the rules by which nearly every modern long-form narrative tale now adheres -- the third-person omniscient narration, the equal concentration on character and plot, the habit of using small incidents from real life in a long series of short installments to tell by the end a grand and memorable saga ironically about everyday people, the literal blueprint from which nearly every television drama in history has been based. (In fact, despite being named after her, this book is actually about a lot more than just Anna herself; and much like his other epic masterpiece War and Peace, this domestic version might be better described with a more grandiose title as well, like Love and Hate or Babies and Funerals.)
And he does this, his fans say, using a remarkably light and playful prose style as well, which let's not forget was done right during the height of popularity for the flowery, overblown Victorian/Genteel style of writing, a style that had fallen completely out of favor not even 50 years later but with Tolstoy's naturalistic style still the industry standard even in the 21st century. And then there's the nice formalistic elements that Tolstoy brings to this -- for example, the symmetrical way that the book starts with an introductory chapter followed by a death at a train station, while ending with another train-station death and a chapter of denouement -- plus the precursory version of experimental stream-of-consciousness he inserts into bits and pieces of this manuscript, a self-confessed big influence among such Modernist masters as William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf (in fact, Woolf once called Tolstoy the greatest novelist of all time) -- which when added together makes you easily understand why the argument is so strong for Anna Karenina being one of those fabled "books to read before you die."
The argument against: There seems to be two main arguments among this book's critics: that it is way, way too long (a fact that even most of its fans will admit is true, and a common problem among serial publishing projects of the 1800s); and that its characters are simply too reprehensible to care about, an unending collection of cold, stupid, uppity rich douchebags who spend all their time whining about pointless self-imposed false crises (which interestingly enough I have a response for -- but more on this in a bit). Other than this, the main complaint about Anna Karenina seems to be the same general one made about all these barn-burning epics of the Victorian Age -- that although it's a decent enough book for those who want to commit the extra time and patience to read it, it certainly shouldn't be considered a classic that everyone should read.
My verdict: So after decades of having it drilled into my head that 19th-century Russian literature is some kind of obtuse monster, full of comically tragic scenes of gaunt peasants dying in blood-soaked snowy fields, it was a pleasant shock to read Anna Karenina and realize just how everyday and relatable it actually is, and how in fact it's still incredibly easy to this day to transpose the cultural details of the story into modern-day vernacular without losing any of Tolstoy's original gist. (In my case, for example, I kept picturing this taking place among the upper-class liberals of Chicago's contemporary far northern suburbs, who instead of the opera and horse races all maintain their social circle through an endless series of green-issue fundraisers and cancer runs, with Stiva for example being the head of a wealthy but earnest NGO instead of a government official, and with Levin one of those "trust-fund activists" who decides to build a self-sustaining eco-house and organic farm on his own semi-rural Wilmette property, and who writes one of those nerdy self-righteous blogs about the experience then is surprised when he can't get anyone to read it.) And that, I've come to realize, is the big thing that's been forgotten about Tolstoy in the 135 years since this was first written -- that the whole reason he became so beloved in the first place is because he was such a magically astute observer and recorder of the human condition, able to weave together the complexly inconsistent behavior of most people in a way so that we understand why some others might despise them for it and yet others love them for the same reason.
That's why, for example, the facile nature of these characters doesn't bother me nearly as much as others; because yes, although the elaborate code of inherently hypocritical etiquette that the upper class have been imposing on themselves for centuries now is certainly silly and pointless, it's fascinating nonetheless, and in the right person's hands it can be riveting to see how such made-up issues can affect the very real emotions and life decisions of the people involved. And when it comes to this, by the way, please know that Tolstoy had a very specific agenda in mind: after all, this was written right at the beginning of the author's later phase in life as an ultra-radical liberal activist, anarchy pioneer, and born-again Christian, pushed in this direction in late middle-age among other reasons because of his growing disgust over the tolerance and outright encouragement among the bored upper-class for moral relativity and bad behavior, and with the highly autobiographical "real-world romance" of Kitty and Levin clearly meant to be a better choice than the "screw you, we're in love!" histrionics of Anna and Vronsky. And it works, too, which is the real genius of Tolstoy, and why he's still so surprisingly relevant even two centuries later; just to cite one of dozens of examples I could mention, just look at that whole section in the middle where Levin's drug-addicted bohemian brother ends up messily dying of consumption in a squalid hovel deep in the city's artistic district, of how it brings out this fearless, surprisingly headstrong side of Kitty that Levin never knew she had, an understanding of and tolerance for the dark side of life that he never realized she was capable of, and of how this single week-long event profoundly and permanently changes and deepens the formerly surface-level "put her on a pedestal" attraction he has for her. If this isn't one of the most brilliant looks at the random, unexpected ways that intimate relationships mature and grow over time in the real world, I don't know what is.
Ultimately I found myself agreeing with what another reviewer at Goodreads.com had to say about this overlong but highly worthwhile novel, how it's much like visiting Paris for the first time: that despite probably having heard a lot already about the city before going, and even recognizing most of the major landmarks during the train ride in, you never truly experience Paris until the first time you actually take a walk in one of its neighborhoods, turning a random corner at dusk just to stumble accidentally into a forgotten millennium-old sun-kissed plaza full of ball-playing kids and seniors sipping coffee. And that's why it's ultimately still worth reading Anna Karenina, even if you do have my official permission to skip straight over any section that starts debating the relative modern worth of the feudal serf system as a legitimate economic model; because it is literally one of those proverbial "great books to get lost in," one of the novels that helped inspire that term in the first place, an exquisite if not quiet pleasure that you will never experience simply by reading a plot recap and character list. It's a chore to be sure, but I found this to be a fine example of a traditional literary classic, a book still well worth your time whether you're eighteen and new to the world of complex adult emotions, or eighty and a weary veteran of them. It comes highly recommended today, despite admittedly having some problems.
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com:]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of (Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com:]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)
The CCLaP 100: In which I read for the first time a hundred so-called "classics," then write reports on whether or not they deserve the label
Essay #47: All Quiet on the Western Front (1929), by Erich Maria Remarque
The story in a nutshell: Originally published serially the year before, Erich Maria Remarque's 1929 All Quiet on the Western Front concerns the events of World War One a decade previous, and in particular the insanely long battlefront running almost the entire length of western Europe that the war became most known for, in which both sides lined up millions of soldiers along an unmoving border that stretched literally from Scandinavia to Spain Belgium to Switzerland, where over the course of four years the armies died in numbers scarcely ever seen in human history before, because of clueless generals applying 19th-century strategies (like endless frontal assaults and thousands of miles of defensive ditches) to a war full of 20th-century technology (like machine guns, barbed wire, biological weapons and a lot more). Much like Oliver Stone's Platoon, then, Remarque's book is not known so much for its plot than for its astute and unblinking look at the actual warfront environment, establishing for the first time many of the elements that eventually became staples of war fiction -- the chaotic terror of the actual fighting, the maddening monotony of the non-combat times, the pure randomness of war-related death, and the moments of surrealistic humor that can nonetheless be regularly found within such environments. Although it's tempting now to dismiss the novel as a series of cliche-filled vignettes, it's important to remember that this was the title that created many of these cliches in the first place -- a book that spelled out the very horrors that returning soldiers found impossible to share with friends and family, which is precisely why their friends and family devoured the book so voraciously when it first came out -- all told through the filter of our introspective teenage hero Paul Baumer, as over the course of half a decade he watches literally every person he went to high school with eventually get killed, with even Baumer himself succumbing in a random and unremarkable way by the end.
The argument for it being a classic: Well, as mentioned, according to its fans, there's a pretty simple argument for why this book should be considered a classic; it's demonstrably the very first novel to establish so many of the tropes now found in almost all modern creative projects concerning war, including not only the examples already mentioned but also the older rah-rah schoolmaster who gets all the boys whipped up for combat in the first place, and the concept of a returning soldier finding it almost impossible to reconnect with his old life once getting home from active duty. Plus the book has a strong connection to both Hollywood's past and future, with the 1930 adaptation being the very first non-musical "talkie" to ever win the Best Picture Oscar, and with a brand-new big-budget adaptation in the works as we speak, starring Daniel "Harry Potter" Ratcliffe; plus it's an important landmark of the Early Modernist arts as well, say its fans, the book that inspired the term "Lost Generation" through Baumer's remarkable monologue about halfway through, on how he and all his school buddies left for the war as naive children who thought they understood the way the world worked, but were returning as scarred adults who have lost the ability to understand how polite society even works, shades of the Tropic of Cancer "Jazz Age" times just around the corner. And then there's the fact that the Nazis were so threatened by this book, it was one of the first they banned after gaining power in the 1930s, even going so far as to cut off Remarque's sister's head in retribution for Remarque himself successfully escaping to America; and if the Nazis hated it this much, there's gotta be something to it almost by default, right?
The argument against: Not much, to tell you the truth; although like most books that are considered classics, you find a fair share of people online complaining about being forced to read this in high school under unpleasant circumstances, which pretty much ruined whatever chance they had to enjoy it. But that's not really a complaint about the book so much as it is about their old high-school lit teacher, so am not sure how appropriate it really is.
My verdict: As regular readers know, after three years we're finally approaching the halfway point of the CCLaP 100, at which point I plan on writing a long essay about everything I've now learned from the process, including a series of lists such as the titles I've been most enjoyably surprised by; and All Quiet on the Western Front definitely earns a spot on such a list, a shockingly powerful book to this day which is not exactly the anti-war screed its fans claim it is, but rather becomes one by default for so unflinchingly detailing the random, utterly unglamorous brutality that comes with war. And indeed, this was one of the many surprises I had with this novel, was learning just how many military veterans love it themselves, precisely for being one of the most realistic depictions of life along an actual battlefront ever written, which when combined with its poetic Modernist elements makes it still such an affecting winner, even 81 years after its original publication. (And for an excellent example of the "poetic Modernist elements" I'm talking about, see the whole section near the end where Baumer gets caught in an enemy foxhole during an artillery attack, is forced to kill a French soldier at close range, then is stuck with the corpse in the hole for four straight days without food, which drives him so insane that he starts holding conversations with the dead man and promising to deliver his personal effects to his widow after the war is over, a temporary insanity that he quickly comes out of again once being reunited with his buddies. If that isn't one of the most effectively bizarre war anecdotes ever written, I don't know what is.)
Although not exactly a textbook example of Early Modernism when it comes to style, and in fact displaying at points more of an affinity for the now-hated Genteel literature of the same period ("Ah! Mother, Mother! How can it be that I must part from you? Here I sit and there you are lying"...sheesh), this is very much a touchstone of Modernism in terms of expanding the scope of what was allowed to be discussed in "polite company," and it's hard to imagine how we would even have such modern classics as Saving Private Ryan and the like without this trailblazer paving the way. It's not only an undeniable classic, but will probably end up as one of my ten personal favorites of the entire series once it's all over, and it comes strongly recommended today for just about everyone out there.
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