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90
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| B07Y6746DT
| 3.97
| 20,947
| 1967
| Nov 12, 2019
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it was amazing
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“When things go wrong and will not come right, Though you do the best you can, When life looks black as the hour of night, A PINT OF PLAIN IS YOUR ONLY M “When things go wrong and will not come right, Though you do the best you can, When life looks black as the hour of night, A PINT OF PLAIN IS YOUR ONLY MAN.”--Flann O’Brien, to which I say Amen (especially as it is Friday) I had decades ago read Flann O’Brien’s At Two Swim Birds and liked it very much, but had not ever read this, The Third Policeman, and think I now I can even better appreciate both of them more than I ever could have. I read this because I have been going through a sort of rough patch and needed a laugh, and surely got one. The humor here is absurdist: “Your talk," I said, "is surely the handiwork of wisdom because not one word of it do I understand.” It’s not about plot so I won’t recount that, but you might get an idea if you’d like the humor if you have read Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Kafka’s The Castle, Beckett, maybe the later Joyce, Catch 22, The Good Soldier Schweik, books with a sense of humor about the absurdities of life. Even The Book of Disquiet by Pessoa, where oxymoron and contradiction are everywhere: “To give love is to lose love.” “Only unhappiness raises us up.” “My joy is as painful as my grief.” There is similar, logic play, malapropism, oxymorons in The Third Policeman, though it has its own humor. “Is it about a bicycle?” Yes, in this book there are sexually-oriented bicycles; you can fall in love with these curvy things, apparently: “It is nearly an insoluble pancake, a conundrum of inscrutable potentialities, a snorter." And about infinite digressions, wooden legs, murder, policemen (obviously), footnotes*, the omnium, an old Irish shaggy dog story, making fun of police and other bureaucracies, making fun of literary scholarship (the main character and narrator is a minor scholar of the works of de Selby), and sometimes just plain old goofiness: “Put a thief among honest men and they will eventually relieve him of his watch.” “Descartes spent far too much time in bed subject to the persistent hallucination that he was thinking. You are not free from a similar disorder.” “I am completely half afraid to think.” “There is no answer at all to a very good question.” “Why is you say no all the time to my every questions??!!” “No is a better word than yes," he replied.” The Third Policeman is a novel by Irish writer Brian O'Nolan, writing under the pseudonym Flann O'Brien. It was written between 1939 and 1940, but when no one would publish it, he always claimed he had lost it. The book remained unpublished at the time of his death in 1966, published by MacGibbon & Kee in 1967. A masterpiece of absurdist comedy misread by the idiot publishing industry! I can see some junior editor reading it: “This makes no sense at all! Trash!” To which I would say Exactly! “You mean that because I have no name I cannot die and that you cannot be held answerable for death even if you kill me?" "That is about the size of it," said the Sergeant. “Who is Fox?" I asked. "Policeman Fox is the third of us," said the Sergeant, "but we never see him or hear tell of him at because he is always on his beat and never off it and he signs the book in the middle of the night when even a badger is asleep. He is as mad as a hare, he never interrogates the public and he is always taking notes.” “Human existence being an hallucination containing in itself the secondary hallucinations of day and night (the latter an insanitary condition of the atmosphere due to accretions of black air) it ill becomes any man of sense to be concerned at the illusory approach of the supreme hallucination known as death.” One of the best books ever. Now I may have to reread At Swim Two Birds, which I hadn't thought as funny or just as plain good as this one. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Aug 15, 2022
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Aug 19, 2022
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Aug 19, 2022
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Kindle Edition
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86
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| 4.09
| 19,202
| Mar 1921
| Jul 02, 1985
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it was amazing
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“And somewhere from the dim ages of history the truth dawned upon Europe that the morrow would obliterate the plans of today.” So more than twenty year “And somewhere from the dim ages of history the truth dawned upon Europe that the morrow would obliterate the plans of today.” So more than twenty years after Czech-American Maria gave me a copy of this 1921 classic, I have finally read it and loved it. It’s a messy, episodic story of WWI; not a tale of the western front, but of the eastern front. Of course there is a long history of anti-war literature, but this story is the obvious precursor to other darkly satirical novels such as Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, all farces indicting (especially) military and political leaders. “Preparations for the slaughter of mankind have always been made in the name of God or some supposed higher being which men have devised and created in their own imagination.” The Good Soldier Švejk is a rural naif, patriotic, quite simple, not questioning the military leadership that berates him regularly as an idiot--”Are you an idiot?!” “Yes, begging your pardon, sir. I am an idiot, I've been certified so!” The humor is absurd and ultimately indicts military leadership as the true idiots, in the tradition of most war literature, but Švejk also is clearly some combination of clueless, too--he doesn’t know who Archduke Ferdinand is at all, and in the tradition of almost all of the poor folks we send to die in wars, he has no idea what the political situation is that has led to WWI--though he also on some occasions plays the fool to his benefit: “Could you measure the diameter of the globe?" "No, that I couldn't, sir," answered Švejk, "but now I'll ask you a riddle, gentlemen. There's a three-storied house with eight windows on each story. On the roof there are two gables and two chimneys. There are two tenants on each story. And now, gentlemen, I want you to tell me in what year the house porter's grandmother died?” At one point a lieutenant tells Švejk to "attend to the needs" of a woman he is seeing: “And so it came about that when the lieutenant returned from the barracks, the good soldier Švejk was able to inform him: 'Beg to report, sir, I carried out all the lady's wishes and treated her courteously, just as you instructed me.’ ‘Thank you, Švejk,’ said the lieutenant. ‘And did she want many things done?’ ‘About six,’ Švejk replied." (haha, good soldier, Švejk!) At another point a sergeant suspects that Švejk may have deliberately given him a poisoned bottle of Schnapps, so he orders Švejk to drink it. And he does, as he always follows orders, this good soldier. The whole bottle! Here’s another anecdote to help us understand his character: Švejk's landlady tells him she is going to jump out the window, to which the good soldier replies: "If you want to jump out the window, go into the sitting room. I've opened the window for you. I wouldn't advise you to jump out of the kitchen window, because you'd fall on the rose bed in the garden, damage the bushes and have to pay for them. From the window in the sitting-room you'll fall beautifully on the pavement and if you're lucky you'll break your neck." But this is the kind of humor you see early on; as Švejk gets closer to actual battle, the humor gets darker, more absurd (as is the case with Catch 22 and Slaughterhouse Five): “The night spent in the detention barracks will always be one of Švejk's fondest memories. Next door to Number 16 was a cell for solitary confinement, a murky den from which issued, during that night, the wailing of a soldier who was locked up in it and whose ribs were being systematically broken for some disciplinary offence." (The presumption is that he is lucky not to be THAT guy). "Švejk inspected the provost-marshal's office. The impression which it produced could scarcely be called a favorable one, especially with regard to the photographs on the walls. They were photographs of the various executions carried out by the army in Galicia and Serbia. Artistic photographs of cottages which had been burned down and of trees, the branches of which were burdened with hanging bodies. There was one particularly fine photograph from Serbia showing a whole family which had been hanged. A small boy with his father and mother. Two soldiers with bayonets were guarding the tree on which the execution had been carried out, and an officer was standing victoriously in the foreground smoking a cigarette.” (You begin to see how the humor gets darker, bleaker). Švejk is constantly being sent to the wrong places and in the wrong direction throughout the tale, as he dutifully tries to get to the front, and is threatened with court martial for various offenses. It’s always military chaos, all the time. And as with Catch 22 and Slaughterhouse Five, it’s an ultimately devastatingly sad story, of course, considering millions were maimed and slaughtered. Oh, it's meandering, repetitive, messy, but it remains a classic satirical novel anyone would enjoy reading, as we experience yet another war (in Ukraine) “developed” by Our Esteemed and Unquestionably Wise Military, Political and Corporate “Leaders,” though perhaps military veterans would enjoy it most, nodding knowingly and sadly at the black humor. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Feb 21, 2022
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Feb 23, 2022
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Feb 21, 2022
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Paperback
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91
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| 0720620147
| 9780720620146
| 0720620147
| 3.86
| 12,102
| 1963
| Dec 15, 2020
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it was amazing
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9/27/23: Reread for my Ghosts class. My take is that man of the students were less than enthalled by it, but I love it. Original review August 2022, wi 9/27/23: Reread for my Ghosts class. My take is that man of the students were less than enthalled by it, but I love it. Original review August 2022, with a few small edits: The Ice Palace (1963) is one of the two (short) books--the other is The Birds--I have thus far read from Norwegian author Tarjev Vesaas, and they are two of my favorite books that I have read this year. I wouldn’t call either of them “fun,” in the sense that they are not action-filled, but their very subtlety is captivating. They are both mystical, strange, and luminous in their own ways. The Ice Palace I would say is dark and cold and mysterious, but also lyrical, haunting, drawing you in word by word. I think it is beautiful, just amazing in its quiet way. Magic. Some might call it dark magic, even horror, but I'm already maybe saying too much. The focus of this short novel is on two eleven-year-old girls in a small Norwegian village, Siss, and Unn, a new girl whose mother has passed away, necessitating that she move in with her aunt in the village. The two connect at a first after-school meeting on an emotional, almost mystical, level. Unn says she has a secret to tell Siss; Siss makes a promise to Unn at one point. Then, within thenext twenty-four hours, everything changes. The “Ice Palace” is a beautiful ice structure created by a waterfall in the coldest point of winter. But it's the first time it has happened like this, large and dramatic, and the school decides to make a trip to explore around it. An event! The most (quietly) gripping chapters focus on the ice palace. Obviously it's the central image in the book. I won’t tell you what happens, though I see other reviews do; I knew nothing about it and liked the surprises in it. Here’s some passages that give you a sense of how smart he is about relationships, especially the relationships between children, which feel psychologically compelling, convincing, and how beautifully he writes about nature, which seems to come alive everywhere in the book, becoming itself a distinct character or set of characters in the novel: * "There is something secret here”--girl secrets, but also the natural world communicating * The ice on the lake cracks, groans, booms as it gets colder, the ice stronger: “It thundered, like a gunshot.” The thunder is always ominous. Evidence of the the natural world communicating. * About the ice: “It was the mystification that fascinated her.” *The two girls hold a mirror together, looking at themselves: “Four eyes full of gleams and radiance." (this eminds me of the mirror scene in Ingmar Ber=gaman's film Persona, where two intense women look at a mirror together and similarly see how much alike they are, the more they look) * As she walks home in the dark Siss sees that, “She was in the hands of what was at the sides of the road.” (the road as liminal space between darknesses, alive with creatures, with danger) * "Her words seemed like fences alongside the road to school, it was difficult to climb over them. . .” (language itself as liminal space for Siss) * "They walked along, keeping her in the middle.” (in the middle is where she always is, in the space between childhood and adolescence) * "During the evening she noticed that she was sitting with Mother and Father on either side of her.” That sense of Siss's being in the middle, in the center, the object of attention, throughout. Liminal spaces!! * Unn skips school and goes to the Ice Palace, but stops to lay face down on the ice on the lake, to see that “Her slim body was a shadow with distorted human form on the bottom.” This chapter is narrated from Unn’s perspective, and it is gripping, mysterious, ominous. * Around the ice palace, “Unn jumped from tussock to tussock in this fairyland.” * "She stared wide-eyed into a strange fairy-tale.” Magic, mystery, fantasy, fairy tale. (all of this kind of writing is an exploration of liminal spaces, the edge of knowing/unknowing) * “I have been given a great gift and I don’t know what it is.” Siss, and always this sense of not being fully aware of what is happening. I would share more quotes, but will not give away what happens, I will not! So it’s less a book about plot--what happens, because so much is shrouded in mystery--than tone, mood, and the psychological realism of living in a place where the natural world speaks to all who live there. And two girls, growing up, living precariously in liminal spaces. * One chapter is a short poem; it's like a burst of lyricism, not quite rational language * One chapter just features a “wild bird with steel claws,” a kind of symbol of the threat of nature. So in the style there is this sense of pastiche, of fragmentation, at times, part of the mystery, the dark magic, things outside the narrative that guide it or impinge on it. Breaking out of narrative continuity, being startled by something Other. Anything negative to say? Well, the translation feels a little rough at times, just a tad awkward in a few small places, but in general the language is both simple and amazing. Haunting. Quietly, ominously intimate. Other works that this book made me think of: Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (unexplained mystery, quietly intense, lost girls); Maids by Jean Genet (darkly intense relationships between girls); Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (same); We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson (intense relationship between two sisters); Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher, (the ice palace as gothic structure has its secrets, is a kind of character in the story, and it crashes down in the spring). Oh, and Claire Keegan's Foster, which I want the whole world to read and compare with this! I am buying these books for everyone. ...more |
Notes are private!
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2
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Sep 19, 2023
Aug 08, 2022
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Sep 27, 2023
Aug 12, 2022
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Feb 20, 2022
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Hardcover
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85
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| 0720611431
| 9780720611434
| 0720611431
| 4.13
| 6,018
| 1957
| Jun 01, 2002
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it was amazing
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The Birds is a short novel by Norwegian poet and novelist Tarjei Vesaas, translated with great respect for the author’s lyrical prose and the quiet ch
The Birds is a short novel by Norwegian poet and novelist Tarjei Vesaas, translated with great respect for the author’s lyrical prose and the quiet characters. I think it is a masterpiece, without question. It was certainly in the top four or five books I read in 2022, but it was published in Norwegian in 1957, so is not exactly flying off the shelves today (in the USA, at least; I am sure he is still very popular in Scandanavia). Mathis is known by everyone that lives nearby as Simple Simon. He’s never labeled, but then in 1957 when this book was published, no one would have used this word to describe him: Neurodivergent. I have two boys on the autistic spectrum, and I think these contemporary terms fit Mathis in many ways. He can’t quite function in society without help; he can’t really work regularly, it’s too much for him, and he can’t quite understand the patter of “clever” people. He just wants to be outside with birds and fish on the lake. He lives with his sister, Hege, who works at home and takes care of him. She sends him out to try to get some work, but this is rarely successful. “What can you do when everyone around you is strong and clever?” Mattis is intensely connected (as my sons are) with nature and animals. He has an almost psychic or spiritual connection with trees, storms, the lake, and yes, birds. When a woodcock flies over his head he takes that as a good sign for them. When a hunter kills the bird, he takes that as a bad sign for them. I thought of indigenous spiritual connections to land as inhabiting spirit. Two aspens stand nearby his house (older, with a leaky ceiling) he associates with him and his older sister, who takes care of him, knitting sweaters constantly to make enough money to feed them. When one of the aspens is hit by lightning, he takes that as a bad sign for them. Nature speaks to him, or to anyone, if we listen. Increasingly, Mattis and Hege are living a precarious existence, financially. At one point she suggests (though she mainly needs to just get him out of the house, because he is driving her crazy with his questions and his crazy ideas) he take his (also leaky) boat to ferry people across the lake. He has to bale water out of it all the time, and his head is elsewhere, so at one point he barely makes it to a far shore. Two girls help him, and so suddenly this is a good day! I thought of Steinbeck’s Lennie, also a simple, sweet guy in Of Mice and Men, who also likes girls, especially when they are nice to him, of course. Increasingly, there is an accumulation of ominous moments that seem to portend. . . something bad: The dead bird, the lightning strike, the leaky house, the leaky boat, and then the turning point, when Mattis picks up his one “ferryboat” passenger, lumberjack Jorgen, who (okay, I won’t spoil the ending, I promise, but he's part of the turn) comes to live with Mattis and Hege, and falls in love with her. What can this possibly mean for Mattis’s future? What if Hege were to leave? People in town are generally nice and respectful to him, but it is only Hege who truly takes care of him, and to some extent understands him, as lonely as she herself has been. We are sympathetic with her need for love. We can see her dilemma. Here’s a passage that can give you a little flavor of how Mattis’s mind works, and how respectfully Vesaas crafts him as a character: “This gave him another opportunity to use one of those words that hung before him, shining and alluring. Far away in the distance there were more of them, dangerously sharp. Words that were not for him, but which he used all the same on the sly, and which had an exciting flavour and gave him a tingling feeling in the head. They were a little dangerous, all of them.” Over time we begin to see the world as Mattis does, seeing the fearfulness of communication, and the signs and portents he sees. We begin to understand him, as “simple” (which is to say different) but also very complex. We worry about him in his engagements with the community. We come to see the world through his eyes, to some extent. I loved this book so much! It's one of my all time favorite books already, and in my first encounter with Vesaas’s work! I highly recommend this sweet, achingly sad, lyrical work. So much compassion here for Mattis, and Hege, too. Such lovely writing. I will read more of his work, for sure. PS And then I read another book by Vesaas I felt was just as powerful, The Ice Palace! Two of my very favorite books of the year! Both short, both intense, mysterious, lyrical, luminous. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jan 08, 2022
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Jan 17, 2022
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Jan 08, 2022
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Paperback
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84
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| 0374279306
| 9780374279301
| 0374279306
| 3.86
| 9,191
| Sep 29, 2020
| Sep 29, 2020
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it was amazing
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Jack is my favorite book of 2021, but it is the fourth in a series, and I'd recommend your reading the other three first, or you won't realize the ful
Jack is my favorite book of 2021, but it is the fourth in a series, and I'd recommend your reading the other three first, or you won't realize the full impact of what this book really accomplishes. The novel features members of a couple families from Gilead, Iowa, and St Louis, written by Marilynne Robinson, and I have already read and reviewed Gilead, Lila, and Home. Jack is yet another masterpiece by one of the world’s greatest authors. Literary fiction, definitely. It is the tale of an (illegal) interracial relationship that takes place in the forties mostly in St. Louis between older white guy Jack, a self-described bum (though a very well-read one) whose main goal in life has become “harmlessness”” (since he has done so much harm to others in his life, since he was from the first a rebel), and Della, a black high school English teacher, who has never been anything but harmless. Both are "pks" (preacher’s kids), Jack Presbyterian, Della Methodist. “Their lives were parallel lines that would not meet.” Jack is the son of Reverend John Boughton of Gilead, Iowa. He is the godson of Reverend John Ames; close friends and good, liberal-leaning preachers, albeit with a somewhat Calvinist leaning (as is the case with Robinson, and that background is also similar to mine, though I am no longer a member of any religious group). The Gilead books are generally set in the 1950s, with some backstories reaching back to the Civil War period, in which Ames's abolitionist grandfather was also a preacher. Though the books are about many things, one thing it is about is the extent to which “outsiders” are welcome within the community. How do white religious Iowans in the middle of the twentieth century respond to the needs of those who look or act different than they do? What does faith in God and a profession of love for God really mean? These issues are of course continuously relevant with respect to religious folks today. The first book, Gilead, is written in the form of a series of letters by the dying Ames, in his seventies, to his young son, born to a (white) drifter, Lila, who happened to walk into Gilead one day. The third book, Lila, is written from her (outsider) perspective. The second book, Home, is written with the black sheep/prodigal son Jack in mind. Jack, a kind of troublemaker, left town in the forties to move to St. Louis, and since then lived basically on the streets, with no contact with his family. “So many things made no sense to him at all, which is one reason he kept to himself all these years.” It is in St. Louis, though, where (white) he meets and falls in love with (Black) English teacher, Della, though we don’t know that fact in the progression of the books until the end of Home. It is through his relationship with her that he begins to see that: “He might step like Lazarus back into his own life.” Little of the background about race and racism that emerges as important in the series is known through Home, but it is the central subject of Jack, the fourth novel. How can good Christian small town midwestern white people be other than racists, in the mid-twentieth century? Is it inevitable that they become this way? Surely most of the people in this small Iowa town are "good people" who have learned how to love their brothers and sisters. But usually they can feel good about themselves loving each other because they are all pretty much alike. But Jack loves someone outside the bounds of what/sho is socially acceptable in mid-twentieth-century America.i Jack is a white character who we learn is able to do racial harm in Jim Crow society by falling in love with a black woman. Jack and Della meet in a (white) cemetery, where he, largely a vagrant, is planning to sleep, but they end up (improbably) locked in together and they end up talking all night and becoming friends. But when she leaves in the morning, he has to hide. If they are suspected of spending the night together, they could be imprisoned for it. It is illegal for white and Blacks to intermarry in the forties in St. Louis which, if Jack continues to pursue this, undermines his intention to do no harm, as Della can lose her job, her family, maybe even become imprisoned, as could Jack. Jack is sometimes charming, and is gentle, but he's also disreputable, and white; Della is black, and respectable. He is separated from his family, with no job, he’s done jail time. She can possibly “save” him on his road to ruin, but can he “save” her in any sense? When her family finds out about the relationship as it develops, they make it clear that this love can only damn her in their eyes. This is the sweetest but also most anguished of romances, because so much damage can happen if it continues. Yet she is charmed by him, not threatened by him: “I have never heard of a white man who got so little good out of being a white man.” As a romance it is chaste, restrained, not steamy at all in any conventional sense-- it’s almost Victorian or Calvinist, essentially, for the most part--and this love that slowly and surely binds them also separates them for so much of the time: It’s too dangerous for them to be seen together! But when he sadly jokes, “I am the Prince of Darkness,” she snaps back, “No, you’re a talkative man with holes in his socks.” What do they talk about? Theology, poetry, language, meaning. Jack always apologizes to her because he knows he has generally caused harm, even at times to Della as things develop. Jack tends to despair, considering suicide, but she nudges him in another direction: “Once you ask if there is meaning, the only answer is yes. You can’t get away from it.” Of Jack, we learn: “He had a lively fear of regret.” And yet shame and regret and guilt and apology are his essence. “He had made an early start on a wasted life,” he acknowledges, and she sees this, too: “You’re living like someone who has died already.” That Lazarus reference. And she? “‘I am the mother of sorrows. I am the ender of grief.’” He sees this, and falls in love with her, for good and/or ill: “You kept me alive already. Just the thought of you.” He walks away and turns to see her: “. . . he saw her stooping gracefully in the faint morning twilight, gathering roses.” What Jack begins to see through Della is that the very world they live in can be imbued with light and life: “The air smelled green, of course, so the shading he saw in the darkness might have been suggested by that wistfulness the breeze brought with it, the earth so briefly not earth.” Poetry. Magic. Grace. Love. Yet Jack goes to Mt. Zion Baptist Church (a Black church), sees the pastor for advice about his situation, and the pastor not surprisingly discourages him. Not now, not in this country, not with this good woman from such a respected preacher's family! Yet Della makes her choice to be with him, and it’s everything he wants and needs. “. . . she is still impressed with my soul. Yes, my battered, atheist soul.” The old hymns come back to Jack’s piano-playing fingers, “ . . . in the way of some moral edification.” “Just when he thought he knew something about the rest of his life, there she was.” Della’s family intervenes, as we expect them to, and Jack backs off, respectfully, leaves town, but he later comes back to her and they make decisions with meaning, with consequences, though it’s not clear what will ultimately happen. It is, after all, illegal, so you can’t romanticize this relationship too much. It’s interesting to be living in this country, in these times, during the George Floyd trial, after the summer of 2020, and on and on. To see the roots of today in the policies of the past. And more than interesting, it's of course all too often devastating. The relationship begins in a cemetery, so this occasions references to (The Tragedy of) Hamlet, and grave-digging, and death, which occur throughout the book. Hamlet--his grief, his frozen inability to act, his being haunted by the ghost of his father, his estrangement from Ophelia, his suicidal tendencies--all resonate here, but in some ways also Romeo and Juliet--the forbidden love across two good but warring families leading to tragedy--seems relevant here, too. “. . . they were caught in a web that made every choice impossible.” “. . . grace and guilt met together,” caused by a racist legal system that made it illegal in the mid-twentieth century for blacks and whites to marry. My review of Gilead: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... My review of Home: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... My review of Lila: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... In case you want a taste of the novel, to consider whether you may want to read it, here’s a short story of Jack and Della that was published in The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20... ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Nov 04, 2020
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Apr 03, 2021
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Nov 04, 2020
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Hardcover
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79
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| 0451167783
| 9780451167781
| 0451167783
| 3.98
| 316,040
| 1947
| Aug 13, 1986
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it was amazing
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"I don't want realism. I want magic! Yes, yes, magic! I try to give that to people. I misrepresent things to them. I don't tell the truth, I tell what
"I don't want realism. I want magic! Yes, yes, magic! I try to give that to people. I misrepresent things to them. I don't tell the truth, I tell what ought to be the truth"—Blanche DuBois One of the great plays of the American theater, probably the very best Tennessee Williams play, acted first on Broadway by Marlon Brando (Stanley Kowalski), Kim Hunter (Stella Kowalski), and Blanche DuBois (Jessica Tandy), and it is riveting. I listened to a version of it with James Farentino as Stanley and Rosemary Harris as Blanche, also very good. More disturbing than I ever recalled, passionate, shocking, sad, full of sizzling southern summer heat and sweat and desire: Marlon Brando yelling “Stella!”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1A0p... Stanley is an animal, a sexual animal, "uncouth," works hard, bowls, play cards, drinks hard, married to Stella, who was formerly from a more "genteel," upper-class family. Blanche arrives after having lost her inheritance, the estate Belle Reve, having been fired as a teacher (for a "dalliance" with a student), and recently kicked out of a low-rent tenement house , but she arrives to visit/stay with her sister and brother-in-law dressed as the southern belle she once was, trying to convince them and her friends (and maybe herself) of the illusion that she never quite left her fine “cultured” life. It is tempting to think of this play as a commentary on American masculinity/sexuality, class, of the struggle between the “refined” Southern aristocracy and the “barbaric” working class, and there’s some evidence for all that: Stanley and Blanche meet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6Trg... but the play, visceral, lyrical, tragic, deeply sad (and I warn you now for a second time, in a couple places disturbing), pushes back against any easy definitions or interpretations: Blanche DuBois, at the end, “I have always relied on the kindness of strangers”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_VgD... The image you are left with is Blanche, a woman in financial ruins—her beautiful young husband had turned out to be gay, she lost her inheritance, she'd been a victim of scandal, and now she is simply trying to seek help from her sister, out of options. She's a single woman without property, she's fragile and vulnerable, she's aging and her attraction to men (crucial in this time because she has no money) is fading, she's possessed by delusions of grandeur, and yet she possesses some strength, some spirit you admire more than just pity, as she fights for a place in an often threatening male world that blames her for her vulnerability. And seeing it is always better, of course, but I recommend seeing the Brando film version, of course. Amazing literary experience that will never leave you. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Aug 28, 2019
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Aug 29, 2019
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92
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| 0394585828
| 9780394585826
| 0394585828
| 4.17
| 1,748
| Mar 19, 2019
| Mar 19, 2019
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it was amazing
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“It is every person's moral imperative to read this book”--Hannah Greendale, Goodreads reviewer I agree. My academic mentor, Jay Robinson, gave me Barry “It is every person's moral imperative to read this book”--Hannah Greendale, Goodreads reviewer I agree. My academic mentor, Jay Robinson, gave me Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams in the late eighties. He knew I was interested in environmental studies, but I was a student of literacy learning, the teaching of English. What does such a book have to do with English studies? The answer is: Everything. Language, social justice, democracy, the future of the planet, linking Western "development" to ethnocentrism and colonialism. As with his Of Wolves and Men, Lopez tries to get us to do that simple indigenous injunction: Walk a mile in someone else’s moccasins. Or ignore cultural and epistemological and spiritual differences to your peril. One chapter focuses on indigenous versus "southerner" (white) maps of the region. How do locals see and value their own land? Horizon was published in 2019; I knew it to be Lopez’s magnum opus, so I set out to slow read it, even as the world burned. Lopez (RIP, 12/25/20) was both a “nature” journalist--plumbing the relationship between human culture and landscape--and a fiction writer, invited by countless scientific groups to accompany them on travels. Horizon has many facets; it is a deeply personal memoir--“We, all of us, look back over our lives, trying to make sense of what happened, to see what enduring threads might be there”--and a chronicle of his travels to six regions of the world: from Western Oregon to the High Arctic; from the Galápagos to the Kenyan desert; from Botany Bay in Australia to the ice shelves of Antarctica. “To travel, after all, is to change one’s skin”--Antoine de Saint-Exupery “I tried to get out of myself, to enter the country”--Barry Lopez “The young man [Lopez] visiting the archeological site on Skraeling Island is the same fellow who at the end of the book encounters a stranger on the road to Port Famine, but also not.” Lopez over his life traveled to more than seventy countries, but in this book takes us to the farthest and most "desolate" reaches of the world, where few of us will ever go. And his guides along the way are explorers of the past of whom many of us know, and have been his inspiration: Darwin, Shackleton, Perry, Captain Cook, Ranald MacDonald--couriers of the marvelous, the thrilling, of understanding the world. Explorers of the past, the present, the future, most of them problematic for various reasons, too. This book is a work of archaeology and anthropology, of cultural biology, a celebration of the marvels of the natural world--”diversity is an ineluctable component of every time to establish order”--and an acknowledgement that we are also living in a time when we seem to be “killing and consuming every last living thing.” “We are the darkness, as we are, too, the light.” My blood ran cold as I read in his simple introduction, depicting a time when he sits by a pool with his grandkids and ruminates: “What is going to happen to us now, in a time of militant factions, of daily violence? . . . I wish each stranger around me, every one of them, an untroubled life. I want everyone here to survive what is coming.” What. Is. Coming. This book is not an environmental alarm bell, as many climate change books are, as they should be: WAKE UP! This book is more reflective about man’s capacity to explore, to want to know, not ignoring colonialism, rapacious greed leading to endless wars. This book is a kind of elegy, as he takes for granted the environmental catastrophe we are just beginning to really experience. It’s a call--without much optimism--to create a different way, not just more recycling or even electric cars, a kind of incrementalist seventies approach, but a wholesale rethinking of the way we exist on this planet, a sustainable one: “Our question is no longer how to exploit the natural world for human comfort and gain, but how we can cooperate with one another to ensure we will someday have a fitting, not a dominating, place in it.” Lopez is watching the same tragically sad climate change conferences, opportunities for photo-ops for ignorant politicians bought out by Big Oil and other businesses meeting with the leaders of increasingly desperate island nations: “The ongoing refusal of some governments and many politicians and business leaders to take global climate disruption seriously is part of a movement in some first-world countries to denounce any form of ‘politically inconvenient’ science. The ongoing resilience of this obdurate denial, of course, is an indication of the deteriorating state of public education in these countries.” “As the decades passed for me, I began to think that the path many of us now share, a path of self-realization and self-aggrandizement, might eventually leave us stranded, having arrived at the end of exploitation, but with most of us standing there empty-handed. And what is it that we have found through the injustice of exploitation that these Magdalenians at Altamira did not already possess?” If the human race were inclined to do it, where might Lopez have us turn? To some common ground amid so many differences and friction: “. . . what most of us are looking for is the opportunity to express, without embarrassment or judgment or retaliation, our capacity to love.” He wants us to reestablish a loving, cooperative relationship with the natural world and each other, while knowing hate and violence often over natural resources has always been with us. He wants us to look back to the past--as in archaeology, to see how ancestors survived, or not, and why--the present--what we are doing right and doing wrong, today, and to think of the future, how to avoid catastrophe as so many civilizations before us succumbed to. He wants us to return to valuing wisdom: “One emerging view of Homo sapiens among evolutionary biologists is that he has built a trap for himself by clinging to certain orthodoxies in a time of environmental emergency. A belief in cultural progress, for example, or in the propriety of a social animal’s quest for individual material wealth is what has led people into the trap, or so goes the thinking. To cause the trap to implode, to disintegrate, humanity has to learn to navigate using a reckoning fundamentally different from the one it’s long placed its faith in. A promising first step to take in dealing with this trap might be to bring together wisdom keepers from traditions around the world whose philosophies for survival developed around the same uncertainty of a future that Darwin suggested lies embedded in everything biological. Such wisdom keepers would be people who are able to function well in the upheaval of any century. Their faith does not lie solely with pursuing technological innovation as an approach to solving humanity’s most pressing problems. Their solutions lie with a profound change in what humans most value.” Lopez always brings books with him when he travels, wherever he goes, as we all do, and he upholds the arts--the key to critical empathy--and the ways they help us appreciate the necessity of beauty, joy, to critique--as a key part of the foundation for survival. Stories, often at the heart of the artistic enterprise, are central for him in the hope for survival: “Everything is held together with stories. That is all that is holding us together, stories and compassion.” Conversations across differences--a thing we are particularly bad about now--sharing our stories across differences, are crucial, too: “Conversations are efforts toward good relations. They are an elementary form of reciprocity. They are the exercise of our love for each other. They are the enemies of our loneliness, our doubt, our anxiety, our tendencies to abdicate. To continue to be in good conversation over our enormous and terrifying problems is to be calling out to each other in the night. If we attend with imagination and devotion to our conversations, we will find what we need; and someone among us will act—it does not matter whom—and we will survive.” He is not naive; he knows we are in dire trouble: “How are we to tone down the voices of nationalism, or of those in support of profiteering, or religious fanaticism, racial superiority, or cultural exceptionalism? If economic viability trumps human health in systems of governance, and if personal rights trump community obligations at almost every turn, what sort of future can we expect never to see?” But of Earth, he says, and hopeful striving: “Its only boundary was the horizon, the sill of the sky, separating what the eye could see from what the mind might imagine.” “I always sense that more room to maneuver exists. What halts us is simply a failure of imagination.” In such a big book--a reflective memoir, but also an often exciting travel book--what we are left with is a series of images, talismanic symbols--an old colonial coin, Lopez storm-watching near his home at Cape Foulweather, an old man walking on a road in Port Famine. And always, astonishing portraits of animals and birds and landscapes all across this beautiful planet. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Aug 05, 2019
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Nov 19, 2022
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May 30, 2019
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87
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| 0812995341
| 9780812995343
| 0812995341
| 3.75
| 159,535
| 2017
| Feb 14, 2017
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it was amazing
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"Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth”—
"Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth”—Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment “His mind was freshly inclined toward sorrow; toward the fact that the world was full of sorrow; that everyone labored under some burden of sorrow; that all were suffering; that whatever way one took in this world, one must try to remember that all were suffering (none content; all wronged, neglected, overlooked, misunderstood), and therefore one must do what one could to lighten the load of those with whom one came into contact”—of Lincoln, in Saunders “In some schools of Buddhism, bardo is an intermediate, transitional, or liminal state between death and rebirth. . . . One's consciousness is not connected with a physical body, one experiences a variety of phenomena.” In the West, we seem to have an uneasy relationship with the idea of ghosts. Increasingly, and maybe especially among intellectuals/scientists, skepticism abounds about the nature of any kind of spiritual existence. “Consciousness” is a much-debated state, especially among people who deny the notion of spirit. But consciousness after death? A myth, mainstream science says, and yet books detail personal testimony from people who have “died” and come back to life. And then, even if you are a personal skeptic, you have to admit you have some family member who (claims to?) “see dead people.” I do not see dead people, but I have a son who does, and I put it that way because even though I have never had similar experiences, and am generally an agnostic, I have reason to believe him. So I am interested in the bardo and spirits/ghosts that may inhabit the world that may travel among us (yeah, I am a fan of the X-Files, I admit it). Abraham Lincoln is known primarily for his views (that we now know shifted over time) about slavery that led to the Civil War, and to the subsequent actions that led to the end of slavery in this country. Almost universally revered as one of the greatest U.S. Presidents, Lincoln is known to have struggled through his life with depression (though not to the extent of his wife Mary, whose mental illness eventually seriously disabled her in many ways)—Lincoln called it “the hypo” which you can read about in various sources, including Noah Van Sciver’s comics biography, The Hypo: The Melancholic Young Lincoln—and was devastated by the death of whom was said to be his “favorite” son Willie from typhus at the age of 11. Part of this devastation and grief involved—it is reported—Lincoln’s going several times to the tomb of his young son, opening the casket and holding him. This story is about grief, but also about the ever-present specter of death in our lives, as part of our lives, and how death and grief can sometimes shape us in useful ways. It’s also very much a story speculating about "the bardo." Narrating the events in this book that span a day or two are primarily three entertaining spirits from that bardo in the cemetery where young Willie was laid to rest in a tomb. We get to know the narrators’s stories, too. One, Hans Vollman, died, hit by a falling beam at his desk just as he “anticipated” consummating his marriage, now in the bard forever in this tumescent state, which is in a story about grief and the bardo is a detail 1) bizarre, 2) sad, and 3) used to humorous effect throughout the book. There's a lot of "off-color" humor like this in this book, which surprised me, and which I loved. There seem to be two central impulses in Saunders: the strange, or skewing of reality as many of us typically experience it, and compassion. Very much in the vein of his principal inspiration, Kurt Vonnegut. Formally breath-taking, the tale is in part also narrated through quotations from various scholarly books, fiction, memoirs, letters, and journals about the events and period in question. Deeply researched, but not disguising the research in the fiction, but wearing it proudly on its multi-genre sleeves (more and more fiction writers now incorporate research into their fiction, but I am reminded of Tim O'Brien's In The Lake of the Woods, with its footnotes throughout). And the novel's purpose is not to emphasize the death of one small boy necessarily over the thousands of young men who died in the war, (nor of the horrors of slavery in which this country gladly engaged), but to show the relationship between the two, how the death of his son affected Lincoln's relationship to the others, to that war, and to slavery. How his grief increased his compassion. With some hilarious ribaldry to balance all the not unexpected grief, reminiscent for me of Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy. Can spirits from the bardo impact the living? As Saunders has it, various spirits including his son in the bardo who have died from tragic circumstances—men, women, straight, gay, young, old—come to “co-inhabit” Lincoln and revive him to act. This may seem like a bizarre idea to read about, but not if you believe in the bardo, or spirits. (Or not if you are my son Hank!) What ensues is wonderfully and strangely moving, as if the spirits of diverse dead come to embody a President, holding in his hands the future of the country. Holding him up as he holds the country up, as it were. It's not so much a theory about the history of the Civil War as a meditation on how grief and the spirits of the dead might be thought to shape history. Saunders is often described as an “experimental” or post-modern writer, largely eschewing traditional narrative. So: can a guy like Saunders (who is also famous for a graduation speech on what the world needs most, kindness, so consider that, too) convincingly write a book about the grief of a father for a son? Good question. Saunders intimates how this devastating death may have shaped the President in the days in which he had to win the war--thus himself causing the death of so many young people, causing so many parents such as him to grieve--to end slavery in this country. What was the alternative? The South wins, secedes, continues the barbarous practice? Lincoln had to find the strength and courage to lead and persevere. Grief may embitter, but in this instance a loss may have led to compassion, to greater empathy, even to greatness. "As long as I live, you will always be with me, child”—Lincoln The Lincolns (in some of the sources) are criticized for being too lenient in their parenting, for allowing young Willie to ride his pony in the rain, for holding a lavish state dinner during the Civil War as men on the cold battlefield died, and as their son suffered from the fever that would eventually kill him. But the Lincolns are also praised for deeply loving their children. The conduct of Lincoln’s governance of the war is debated in these pages, too. Books have been written about how unpopular he was as a President for some of the time. Some quoted sources talk of him as un-Presidential—ugly, odd, sad, serendipitous in decision-making, and so on. But again, this book suggests that a tragic death may have changed Lincoln, shaped him into a compassionate leader. So citations, quotations make up a lot of this book, contributing to a kind of multi-genre reflection on storytelling that could be probably off-puttingly strange for some readers, with all these crazy ghosts in the bardo that bear the main part of the telling, too. But I still found it ultimately moving for its content and amazing in form. Kind of breathtaking, if you take your time with it. I both listened to this book rendered by 166 voices, including Saunders himself, itself an astonishing (and initially baffling, I'll admit it--I had no idea what the heck was going on at first, and needed to restart it two of three times!--and it was ultimately an amazing experience, but it would have been confusing had I not also read along with the actual hardcover (thanks, Jonathan!). I recommend actually reading the book on the page, I think, though the audiobook performance is almost as honored as the book itself. It was an amazing, provocative, transcendent reading experience for me. One of my favorite books of the year for certain, and you know, it's already one of my favorites ever. P.S.: I have since read Maggie O'Farrell's Hamnet, about the death during the plague of Shakespeare's son, the grief from which, O'Farrell contends, shaped his writing of (perhaps) his greatest tragedy, Hamlet, so these two books would pair nicely for your literary fiction book club. ...more |
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Apr 07, 2018
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Apr 24, 2018
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Jul 03, 2017
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80
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| 3.93
| 239,777
| Sep 21, 1962
| Oct 01, 2015
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2/27/24: Rereading for my Spring 2024 YAL class 10/31/23: Happy Halloween, (which for horror fans in general or Shirley Jackson fans in particular is b 2/27/24: Rereading for my Spring 2024 YAL class 10/31/23: Happy Halloween, (which for horror fans in general or Shirley Jackson fans in particular is basically every day of the year), in conjunction with my having just read The Shirley Jackson Project, a comics tribute collection edited by Robert Kirby. 10/7/21: Always a great read, with an amazing main character, though in this discussion we troubled the issue of her reliability as a narrator. Of course she is unreliable, in many respects, but can we trust her version of the story in any respect? I think we can. I also read an essay that contended that Constance and Mary Katherine are different aspects of Shirley Jackson's personality. I also read more about Jackson's psychopathology, her agoraphobia, her hatred of the working class townies from North Bennington where she and her husband lived, antipathies that make their way out in this novel and in "The Lottery." 9/17/18: Third read for my Fall 2018 YA course, and what has emerged as one of my favorite books of all time. This time I noticed all the food references more than ever. “We eat the year away. We eat the spring and the summer and the fall. We wait for something to grow and then we eat it.” “I'm going to put death in all their food and watch them die.” And loved the strange lyricism of Merricat's deft observations. Are Merricat and Constance really happy in their life in the castle, and should we just leave them alone with their choices of isolation, or are they cases of arrested development, of stasis, of the opposite of "coming-of-age" and maturation that we expect in a YA novel? You get to choose, I think. I'll say that, isnce ths is horror, that there is a sufficient case here that these women need just a leetle bit of help in the mental health arena. 9/12/17: I read this in March of this year for a course I was teaching and read it again for my fall YA course. A memorable tale of gothic suspense by Jackson, the author of the much anthologized, exquisitely perverse short story, “The Lottery" (1948). Castle is Jackson’s last book, often described as her masterpiece, featuring two of the best sister acts in American literature, Constance and her sister Mary Katherine, or Merricat, who says things like this: “On the moon we wore feathers in our hair, and rubies on our hands. On the moon we had gold spoons.” And, to her sister, Constance: “Oh Constance, we are so happy.” Who often replies, "Silly, silly Merricat." But truly un-merry Merricat also says things like this, about the people of the town: “I'm going to put death in all their food and watch them die.” Six years ago, several of the Blackwood family were poisoned, from arsenic sprinkled with sugar on a bowl of blackberries. Constance, who was in the kitchen, was and still is widely suspected of the crime, of which Merricat simply says: “Fate intervened. Some of us, that day, she led inexorably through the gates of death. Some of us, innocent and unsuspecting, took, unwillingly, that one last step to oblivion. Some of us took very little sugar.” Merricat's distinctive narrator’s voice joins those of Scout and Holden Caufield as unforgettable teen main characters in American literature. At turns creepy, delightful, dark, with a touch of black humor, the book also features Constance, Merricat's caretaker sister, weirdly hilarious Uncle Julian, and greedy Cousin Charles who comes to live in the castle for a time. I was intrigued by the tension between the townies and the Blackwood family holed up in their dark gothic mansion. I loved the chilling moment of the Big Reveal, that dramatic horrific climax, but I also loved the strangely sweet conclusion, colored as always by Merricat’s strange witchy habits: “All our land was enriched with my treasures buried in it, thickly inhabited just below the surface with my marbles and my teeth and my colored stones, all perhaps turned to jewels by now, held together under the ground in a powerful taut web which never loosened, but held fast to guard us.” A masterpiece, revealing more riches at every reading. ...more |
Notes are private!
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3
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Oct 04, 2021
Sep 12, 2017
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Oct 07, 2021
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Feb 17, 2017
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72
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| 1860463185
| 9781860463181
| 1860463185
| 4.09
| 326
| Sep 18, 1997
| Jan 01, 1997
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it was amazing
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"It’s a long long way from Clare to here"--Ralph McTell Sometimes I hear the fiddles play, maybe it’s just a notion I dream I see white horses dance, on "It’s a long long way from Clare to here"--Ralph McTell Sometimes I hear the fiddles play, maybe it’s just a notion I dream I see white horses dance, on that other ocean. It’s a long way from Clare to here, it’s a long, long way from Clare to here It’s a long, long way, gets further by the day, it’s a long way from Clare to here. This song by Ralph McTell for me gets at the sad, sad beauty of this book and of the Irish emigrant story and maybe evoking the emigrant story generally, sung here by Nanci Griffith: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rchmQ... Before I really begin I’ll just say the review to read on this one is the one that got me to read this book, Ted’s amazing review. https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... In it he has some of the photographs from the book, more actual sections from the writing, things I myself would have marked to include in a review. Sometimes a review is just like that. We heard the same songs in our heads when we were reading and viewing this book! Maybe this book is mostly music, really, at the intersection of image and word, where neither expresses adequately the other. Da’s flute music, our main character’s accordion music, the music that sustains. Poetry. Lyrical prose. Evocations of time and place that have less to do with plot and facts about life than tones and echoes and loss, always loss. I have been reading a lot of graphic novels and looking at a lot of photography books lately, but I’m most interested in the intersection of the written and the visual. Multiple genres, mixed media. How they come together to tell multi-levelled stories. I’m less interested in picturebooks and graphic novels where the images are just illustrations of the words. They should be doing different things, contributing to different dimensions of the overall project. Complementary storytelling forms, in collaboration. That happens here. Which is one reason I do not like the Goodreads description of the book: “Accompanied by photographs, this novel tells the story of a man's journey from the West of Ireland to the fields/boxing-booths/building sites of England”. The unique thing about this book is that it is not just a novel accompanied by photographs, it is a collaborative storytelling venture. The words and photographs talk together. They interanimate each other. And O’Grady based his novel on dozens of oral history interviews he did, as well. The language is here, their stories are in here. It’s a kind of pastiche telling of fiction, oral history, and on-site photography. The language is lovely, poetic, devastatingly sad, heartrending at times. The photographer/philosopher John Berger nurtured this project and you can see him in this work throughout. He also wrote the lyrical introduction to it. Read Berger (Ways of Seeing, Pig Earth) for loss and poetry and photography about the fading cultural traditions in rural France. This is a book about leaving home and never leaving home, about leaving Ireland to work in England and about missing a girl and your family and your father’s music and dancing and about the persistence of memory, every day a deepening sadness, drinking away the lonely evenings for some pleasure after backbreakingly long days in the fields and factories. It’s about the aching loneliness of not knowing how to talk to people, not knowing how to find the words. It’s about watching the curve of a girl’s leg under her skirt as she walks ahead and wanting to talk to her and just be with her and imagining she may want the same, she knowing you are walking behind her, hoping you will speak to her, and decades later, being alone without the words, all longing. It’s about time and how the past is always present--in this novel, you don’t always know when the particular anecdote you are reading is taking place and this is also true for the main character, he doesn't always know when things are happening, vivid memories of long ago are happening now in his head. It’s about your father and mother dying when you are away and not being able to afford to get home for the funeral. It’s about the madness of grief. I Could Read the Sky is essentially lyrical prose portraits of the soul, about the heart, and for the family, and with love, finally. And so devastatingly sad and beautiful you can only weep on some pages. Endless graveyards and strong wrecked and resilient Irish faces and family and music. The memory of joy and love. Here’s a few lines, but truly, if I were to highlight all the passages and sentences and images for you that I love, I would have to share with you much of the book (which, of course, I want to do; I want you to find this book and read it now): *Eileen gets me out for a reel before the thick air closes in again and when I look up with her spinning me round it seems the whole galaxy is whirling above me. *What I could do. I could mend nets. Thatch a roof. Build stairs. Make a basket with reeds. Splint the leg of a cow. Cut turf. . . I could read the sky. *What I could not do. Eat a meal lacking potatoes. Trust banks. Wear a watch. Ask a woman to go for a walk. . . Not remember. *The way Maggie was. She could place a hat on her head at a perfect angle. She knew the names of trees. . . She could fill an emptiness even when silent. . . She was like a forest. The light never stopped moving. *What I could do then [after his father was buried]. I could forget my name. I could lie in my bed for a week. I could seek the darkness. . . I could walk without knowing it. *Ma is looking at the priest like she can see the future in his face. . . He is gone from this world, we are thinking. I think too as I sit beside his coffin that I will never again have such respect for a living person and now that he is no longer here I will not be able to stop things falling from their places. A sadness reaches like a clawed hand into my bones and organs. It fills the spaces between. It is heavy and strong. I believe this sadness can never leave me. I had to order the hardcover version of this book online. No library system in Chicago had it, which is sad in itself. But buy this book right now, because even if you were to get it from your library, you would have to own it, anyway, so save yourself the time. Here's more Irish music to listen to, to get you in the mood as you read or consider reading, from the wonderful Sinead O'Connor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_XoZ... Listen to Sinead O’Connor’s version of this 16th century Irish classic, once a love song, Róisín Dubh, now a kind of metaphor for Ireland itself. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YmmA... ...more |
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May 18, 2016
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May 28, 2016
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May 01, 2016
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Hardcover
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70
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| 4.27
| 936,797
| 1866
| Mar 02, 1993
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it was amazing
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And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you. --Nietzsche I first read Crime and Punishment in my late teens. In those years I And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you. --Nietzsche I first read Crime and Punishment in my late teens. In those years I read several of the great Dostoevsky novels—The Idiot, Underground Man, and especially The Brothers Karamazov and C & P. In various “the BEST _____ ever” bar and coffee shop conversations over the years (such as, for instance, who is the hottest actress in the history of cinema, Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca or Lauren Bacall in To Have or Have Not?) (Ingrid, of course!), The Brothers K and C & P would always top my Greatest Novels of All Time list, usually BK first, C & P second. I actually once named one of my brooding gray cats Raskolnikov (Rascal, for short), so there: Proof that it wasn’t a trivial thing for me, this book. ☺ I come back to C & P more than four decades later, as part of the process of my revisiting some of my greatest reads ever, and also reading some other Great Books that had been on my bucket list for decades, such as Anna Karenina and In Search of Lost Time. (Livin' the [Reading] Dream, man!) Spoiler Alert: I want to really talk about this book, so if you have never read it and still might, you might want to skip this review or at least parts of it. Some reviews I write in part for others; some of them I write mainly for myself, as a kind of autobiography of my reading. This I put in the latter category, though if you have read it, please tell me what you think of what I think. So, most people who have never even read this book already know from the simple title that a Crime has been committed, and most probably know a guy kills a woman or two. Then we know there is a punishment that follows the crime. Simple. You need 500 plus pages to tell that?! The short answer is yes. But the crime is basically what happens in the first hundred or so pages, and we never know exactly why, really, which is also part of the overall point Raskolnikov seems to be making to himself. So Rask kills his pawnbroker Alyona and robs her, though he never does anything with what he steals. In the process, her sister Lizaveta walks in so Rask kills her, too. So that’s the crime. The last 4/5 of the book is in part about the “punishment” which unless you omit the short epilogue, does not involve institutional punishment. The police have to solve this "mystery," and they do, with some suspense, I guess, but whodunnit is obviously not the point. The last 4/5 focuses on psychological and spiritual self-punishment or what Dostoevsky always refers to as “suffering.” And various considerations of what Dostoevsky never quite calls sin in the context of a parade of wild and wonderful characters. At the outset of the novel, we learn that former college student Raskolnikov lives in St. Petersburg, in relative poverty, spinning his wheels, drinking and hanging with women (or, spending some of what little money he has on prostitutes) (things that we know Dostoevsky also did much of his life, in addition to gambling). As things proceed we see Rask has published an essay about how there are some people, usually great ones, who are “above the law,” people who can do whatever they want and get away with it. Nietzsche, a nineteenth century philosopher, called such folks “supermen,” those who attempt to rise above the moral precepts of the time to achieve greatness or just to prove that moral systems do not apply to them. This might begin to summarize simply the moral position of Nietzsche: You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist. There’s no God, and no religious or ethical system that must apply to all people. Rask commits the murders in part as a way of working out this stupid theory, though he is poor and at the very least could also use the cash he steals in the process, but never does. He seems to be making a point, this bright and anguished young scholar. So why care about this idiot, you ask? Well, read on. Rask needs the money, but when he has it, he tends to give it away to others. Not that he is a really a good guy; he IS a murderer, but he has some charitable aspects to his character revealed from time time. There's some goodness that shines through the grime. Sometimes he despicably tries to dismiss his murders as trivial, sometimes we see that the woman he murders is not likable in any sense, but he never gets off the hook for it, ever, especially with himself. This is not an isolated thing, this murder for philosophical principle, by the way. In the twentieth century, the two teenagers Leopold and Loeb read Nietzsche and just to test the theory killed a kid randomly in Chicago, and they fried (yes, were electrocuted) for it. They had the same thing in mind: Great men can do Whatever They Want and not experience Guilt. They will rise above ethics, they think or, as most novelists and moralists think, sink below it. The theory is an empty one, of course, as most humans with any common sense would see, but intellectuals, eh, sometimes they are kinda blowin' in the winds of theoretical fashion, as Dostoevsky sees it. Arrogant, they all think they wanna be Napoleon, D thinks. D thinks there are a lot of young nihilists around in the latter part of the nineteenth century when he writes this. Anyway, Rask is painfully aware his mother and sister will do anything to help him financially. And he’s maybe in love with prostitute Sonya, who is doing this terrible work to make money for her family. He fears his own sister (Dunya) will do similar sorts of prostituting (she has already, for instance, agreed to marry rich jerk Luzhin, just to help out the family that has gone poor in part through supporting profliigate student Rask; this is one sub-theme, how women are reduced in the [Russian] patriarchal economic system). But he never does anything with money except give some that he has to Sonya's family, left destitute at the death of their drunken father, Marmeledov. So he's strange and at times quite unlikable, our anti-hero Rask, though he is fascinating always and even a little likable sometimes to me, as I am also [pretty] [okay, a lot] fallible myself, so I have empathy for him sometimes. Later, we might see a kind of “moral” in this story about a man like Rask who doesn’t believe in God, from Dostoevsky through Nietzsche: He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you. [Nietzsche] That happens to Rask, and others in this book. They suffer, facing their demons or monsters. And no one depicts suffering like Dostoevsky. His predecessor and mentor in Russian literature, Gogol, also knew suffering, though while he is similarly recognized for creating poor folk grotesques, Gogol's are often comic. D references and creates tributes to his Master in this work, but most people don’t see D’s grotesque, suffering folks as all that funny. D does sad better than funny. In this reading, I saw some characters as (darkly) funny sometimes, however. There’s satire throughout, especially of the upper classes. D and literature in general don't usually make fun of the poor with any success. The drunken Marmeledov, for instance, is pathetic, but he's also hilarious and insightful and finally tragic. He’s a full and rich and complex character. We see poverty and its attendant horrors in many ways in this book, and we come to care about them and their needs. They suffer and we can see this is central to humanity. In some ways they become close to saints in their suffering. This is certainly true for Sonya, one of the several notable "madonna-whore" women characters in literary history. There’s some action in this book, of course; in fact it is sometimes quite the page turner as we wonder what is going to happen, whether Rask going to get caught, and so on, and in this sense it has the feel of a murder mystery where the suspense is whether he gets caught, but the centerpiece in this book (besides the moral wrangling) is dialogue in the service of character, and it works breath-takingly well here. Most twentieth century dark gutter noir (Thompson, Cain) owes much to Dostoevsky, for sure. And the talk from the gutter is stunning. Most of the male characters are tortured drunken philosophizers who go on page after page speaking their madness and grief. And most of these crazy flawed folks are indeed men doing most of the talking. The women are less crazy, and less flawed, on balance, and mostly crazy BECAUSE of the men, surprise, surprise. But the talk is amazing, it is the heart of the book as narrative creation. When men drink and talk, they are passionate, he has that down, (actually, this book came out of a failed attempt at a draft he called The Drunks!), but the ideas that flow from their mouths, the thinking about the meaning of life, the struggles with love and morality, all this is incredible. I mean it, no irony here. Some of the best writing ever, and about poor folks, sometimes even despicable folks, that he makes you care for! Is it their fault they are in such destitution? Well, sometimes, yes. See above. Does it go on a bit long, like this [undrunken] review? Some say yes, but not for me. We need to know what is going to happen and why for Rask, but we also need to broaden the lens and see others who are also suffering in their own ways. We need foils for understanding Rask in a sociological sense. Luzhin, the self-centered lawyer who is for a time engaged to Dunya, he’s a world class jerk, but an interesting one. While Rask is never excused for his murders, these other men and their iniquities help us see what can be some goodness at times in Rask, and appreciate the remarkable end of the book. The (also drunken) philanderer Svidrigailov is also a jerk, but he also takes care of Marmeledov’s consumptive widow, and after her horrific death, her children, including her step-daughter Sonya (she’s the one who has become a prostitute to help her family, whom Rask sort of over the course of the novel falls in love with, though simultaneously torments from time to time) (of course, because this is what relationships sometimes are) in part because he is trying to bribe her into marriage. He also tries to bribe Rask’s sister Dunya into marriage, though he is already engaged, and fails. He becomes a central character in the book because he (spoiler alert!) makes the decision to commit suicide, which makes him a foil to Rask, who also contemplates this, but instead, Rask chooses (spoiler alert) confession, hard labor in Siberia with Sonya able to come north with him and visit regularly. Another great character is the Columbo-like (look it up! You have google! Peter Falk!) bumbling and rumpled old genius detective Porfiry, who finally convinces Rask to confess and give himself up. Unforgettable character! Rask’s great friend Razumikhin is also wonderful in defense of Rask against all evidence to the contrary, who also agrees to take care of his sister and mother. He’s a strange man, also a drunk (D knows drunkenness, it’s clear) but good where most men are not in this book. The story is one of final and not easily achieved redemption, but we only see this in the very final pages of this long novel, as he finally fully accepts the love of Sonya, and understands it as a model for living. Sonya is the moral center of the book, with her unwaivering and not easily achieved faith in God. She’s convincingly Good, the closest thing to God's Unconditional Love we got in this tome. Rask's sister Dunya and their mother are also really good, giving up everything for her love of her son. Nastasya cares for Rask, too, She's also wholly good. The late goodbye scene between Rask and his mother is affecting and powerful. The scenes between Rask and (totally good) sister Dunya are powerful, too. Do you see a pattern here? Sure, Sonya is a prostitute, but only in necessity for her destitute family, of course. Women are often saints here, they make the right choices, or most of them do. Maybe that is a kind of literary flaw, that D deifies women; this is a kind of cliché. But there are a couple weak and wicked women in this book, too. The women don't always seem quite as real as the men sometimes because they are a little one-dimensionally good, but they are still great, they do still seem real to me. But it is LOVE that redeems Raskolnikov, the love of a woman, Sonya, and his mother and sister, too, but mainly Sonya, and while it seems like a stretch that she would care for him, she really does, and both he and we come to believe in her goodness and love. Some favorite scenes? Sonya’s reading of the Biblical Lazurus story to Rask is ELECTRIC, unforgettable. The best scene in the whole book, for my money. I was once religious and I know that passage from the Bible; I say now that I am agnostic, but that scene, that felt like an indictment, a promise to me, in my own lost-soul-ness. The scenes with Porfiry are great and the scene in particular where Porfiry finally accuses Rask is also ELECTRIC, I promise, as is the final scene of the book. The lyrical final scenes with Svidrigailov are wonderful, powerful and surprising; I had NO idea he was going to do that. Anytime Mom and Rask or Dunya and Rask are talking with each other, these scenes are deeply poignant, trust me. Marmeledov's drunken talk with Rask is wonderfully comic early on. When I first read this book I was “churched” in a Calvinism that seemed darkly consistent with Dostoevsky’s dark, angsty world view. Later, I came to like the work of D-influenced South African writer J. M. Coetzee, who actually wrote his novel The Master of St. Petersburg about Dostoevsky (yes, very much worth reading!). I still love these writers, though my views on matters of faith have shifted considerably. But as a veteran doubter, I liked D’s anguished struggles with faith and the meaning of life more than anyone else’s writing and thinking. And they once led me, in my existentialist period, into Kafka, Sartre, Camus, and others. Camus’s The Stranger and Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” owe things to C & P. Hamlet and Macbeth are anguished precursors, as is D’s own “Underground Man." Anyway, doubt and anguish have always seemed more interesting to me than joyful faith and happiness, and still do. I think the world is more complicated than mere celebration, though I have much to celebrate, too. But the world is a dark place just now, as I see it, with a lot of ugliness in it. Dostoevsky resonates with the present for me as much as it ever did. C & P is as much a psychological and sociological novel (about various forms of “madness” in nineteenth century Russia) as it is a philosophical renunciation of nihilism, though it is richly both, and much worth reading for these aspects. It’s a real thriller, too, a cat and mouse story with the focus on Rask and his interior experience of suffering, but it is also a novel the literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin would identify as a “cultural forum” on issues in D's times in Russia. Raskolnikov is a jerk, a wonderfully reprehensible character that D refuses to sentimentalize, but as much as we despise him for some of his ridiculous youthful views—his ideas about the superman display the worst of the intellectualism of his times—we also come to appreciate him in various ways. Dostoevsky is a thinker, but he is first and foremost a poet of the heart and what might still be called “soul” unapologetically. The translation by Pevear and Volokhonsky is supposedly the best ever, much lauded, and I can’t say, not speaking the language, but it was fabulous to read. I read the Constance Garnett version 40 years ago. This is the one to read now, everyone says, so choose this one if you are going to read or reread. I also have read in the past couple years their translations of Anna Karenina and Underground Man and Brothers Karamazov, so I can attest they are wonderful writers/interpreters. Finally, yes, it is (again) one of the best things I have ever read, and I highly recommend it. You may find it a tad long for contemporary tastes, but hey, you also have David Foster Wallace, who is very long. Pynchon is long. Ulysses is long. Sometimes great things are long! And maybe he is too nineteenth century modernist for you, finally. But for me he is great, deserving of his high status in the canon of world literature. It is just one hell of a read. Sorry this is so long, if you read this far! ...more |
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“Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within
“Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love”--Father Zosima, to Fyodor Karamazov, a scoundrel and atheist who somewhat disingenuously asks of his son Alyosha’s spiritual mentor what it is he needs to transform his life. I have always said in bar or coffeeshop conversations about The Best Books of All Tme that the two best books I have ever read (for my tastes) were The Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment. Great epic explorations of nineteenth century Russian society--politics, society and morality--and both are also great murder mysteries that help to complicate the social and cultural and moral issues Dostoevsky raises. I took the time to read and listen to this 750-page tome because I was sheltered at home and hoped he/it would help me take a broad look at my own time and place and inner life again. I took notes all along the way but cracked my laptop screen a couple days ago, lost several things including 3-4 ongoing reviews, including a review of this book, boo hoo, so am just writing this again, having taken roughly a month to finish the book. I will say that this particular edition of this book is a gift from perhaps the best (let’s say among the very best, more modestly?) translation team of our time, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. Dostoevsky spent nearly two years writing The Brothers Karamazov, which was published as a serial in 1879-1880. Dostoevsky died less than four months after its publication. He wrote it after he was released from six years of prison in which he made his most complete commitment to God after a lifetime of doubt and struggle (though if you are worried this is some kind of religious tract, relax, there is still a lot of anguish and struggle in it). What’s it “about”? Debates about God, doubt, free will, love, capital, inequity . . . and (there henceforth spoilers) patricide. Fyodor, Daddy K, is a wastrel, scoundrel, rake, philanderer. . . you get the picture. We are not rooting for him. One wife leaves and he neglects his son, another dies and he neglects the next son. He fathers a child with a disabled woman in the village, known as Stinking Lizaveta, ugh. (I mean he despicable, not her). We would not be unhappy to see him go. . and he does, but not for a long time in this story. He’s in love with Grushenka and in some dispute with his son Dmitri over money and his shared love/lust/jealousy about her. Dmitri is, like his father, a ladies man, a “sensualist” or hedonist, engaged to Katerina Ivanovna, but later in love with Grushenka. A trial ensues after his father is killed, and he is accused. Ivan is an intellectual, the most cynical of the three brothers, an atheist that battles his monk brother Alyosha over issues of faith; recites a poem/tale of The Grand Inquisitor that is seen as one of the great statements about faith and doubt ever written. Ivan, distressed about the massive suffering of the world, doubts that a benevolent God would allow it. He also seems to be in love with Dmitri’s betrothed, Katerina Ivanovna. Alyosha is the youngest brother, a novice monk who has left the lust and greed and cynicism of his family (which are some things Dostoevsky himself struggled lifelong with, and more). Called by the narrator as the “hero” of the novel, he is also named after Dostoevsky’s dead 3-year-old son, Alyosha. While the novel primarily moves forward through rich and entertaining dialogues on social issues and family, Alyosha speaks the least, and is potentially the least interesting in a way because he is just so. . . good, but the novel ends with him interacting with children in love, an image of hope and reconciliation. At one point he is briefly engaged to disabled neighborhood friend Lise. His spiritual father is Father Zosima, who gets to make some of the best defenses for faith in God; even if you are an atheist you might want to check out these speeches. Smerdyakov, an epileptic as was Dostoevsky, is the “illegitimate” son of Fyodor and Lizaveta. Maybe as grim and cynical as Ivan. His father hires him as a servant. I felt a kind of intellectual vindication of my feeling for the book when in grad school I read Mikhail Bakhtin’s assertion in The Dialogic Imagination that the novel was the best of all forms of writing for an exploration of the world. Not poetry, not debate/argument, but narrative. At its best, Bakhtin said, the novel could function as a kind of “cultural forum,” as opposed to some kind of didactic treatise. Bakhtin held up the Brothers K as the best example of this tendency in the best of novels, not a sermon with mere types of characters but a rich dialogue among very real and visceral human beings representing a range of human (and decidedly Russian) experience. Bakhtin thought the later Tolstoy, such as in Resurrection, created a kind of black and white, saints and sinners universe, not nearly as good an example of the novel’s possibilities as Brothers. In Brothers Dostoevsky has a credible atheist, a credible hedonist/sensualist, and a credible Christian, all three brothers making a kind of case for how one might live one’s life. Dostoevsky, a gambler, a heavy drinker, an intellectual, an epileptic, a passionate lover of women, a passionate and anguished believer and doubter of Christianity, isn’t writing a tract for faith but an exploration one can use to think about one’s own moral life. “And what's strange, what would be marvelous, is not that God should really exist; the marvel is that such an idea, the idea of the necessity of God, could enter the head of such a savage, vicious beast as man.” That murder and trial? As good a page turner as any murder mystery you’ll find. You just have to wait about half of the book to get to it. . . I am not sure if you can actually predict the verdict. I mean, Dmitri is found with blood on his clothes, had motive, was on the scene, was spending money drunkenly afterwards. . . So he did it, right? Maybe. A lot of people had reason to kill the old man. Some interesting things: *So, Father Zosima finally dies, but not before he makes a final sermon to those around him at the monastery. Whether or not you are a Christian, or even religious, this is a great and powerful speech. Then, almost as comic relief, we see that many people are disappointed to find that the body of this guy they think of as a saint actually decays. What, no resurrection?! “This is my last message to you: in sorrow, seek happiness.” *As the father of two boys with autism, I was especially anguished this time around about the chapter on Lizaveta, who roams the streets, with no verbal language (as is the case with one of my sons). Most people accept her, feed her, support her, but as now, not everyone. And she is pretty clearly raped by Fyodor, because we can’t assume consent. *One sort of feminist acknowledgement of patriarchy is that people of this time found a tendency in some women to largely go “bad” because of. . . men. These women were referred to as "shriekers," and if you saw the limitations many women faced in this time, you would shriek, too. *Early on I love the dialogues between the hedonist/wastrel/sensualist/sinner Fyodor and Father Zosima, who is the closest thing we have to a saint in any Dostoevsky story, though his follower Alyosha may just fill his shoes. *After all the anguish, I like the sweet simple image of love and faith that concludes the book, with Alyosha and some children. Some good and thoughtful quotes: “The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for.” “I think the devil doesn't exist, but man has created him, he has created him in his own image and likeness.” “Man, do not pride yourself on your superiority to the animals, for they are without sin, while you, with all your greatness, you defile the earth wherever you appear and leave an ignoble trail behind you--and that is true, alas, for almost every one of us!” “If he's honest, he'll steal; if he's human, he'll murder; if he's faithful, he'll deceive.” “Everything passes, only truth remains.” The best book ever? For me it is. ...more |
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A Balm in Gilead There is a balm in Gilead To make the wounded whole; There is a balm in Gilead To heal the sin sick soul. Some times I feel discouraged, A A Balm in Gilead There is a balm in Gilead To make the wounded whole; There is a balm in Gilead To heal the sin sick soul. Some times I feel discouraged, And think my work’s in vain, But then the Holy Spirit Revives my soul again--Traditional African American spiritual. Gilead is a novel in the form of a letter from a small town (Gilead, Iowa) Congregationalist minister John Ames, 77, to his 7 year old son, written in 1956 as he assumes he is near death from heart troubles so his son can, later, as an adult, understand him a little through an account of his life. The text is challenging in a number of respects; first, it deals with--if not spans--three generations Of Ames's family, beginning in the days his Abolitionist grandfather was a young man harboring fugitive slaves on the Underground Railroad, so it’s a century of, among other things, race relations. Ames’s grandfather and father were preachers, and he and his best friend Boughton is also a preacher. So it’s obviously a father-son story, and just as obviously a story of faith, which is a challenge in itself for an agnostic like myself, though I “grew up in the church,” as they used to say, so I understand the theological wrestling that Ames does in his tale, coming to terms with issues of grace and forgiveness, with the very existence of God, and the leap of faith against (sometimes? usually?) reason. I did some of that wrestling myself and it led me away from the church; Ames and I went different ways, but I understand the guy and like and admire him a lot. But to read of this religion now for me, was a bit of work initially, and I bet for others it would be challenging. At least it is religion that has texture and richness to it, and not just conservative Tea Party meanness we have seen so much lately. Another challenge is that the tale is told by a 77 year old man, who is as a preacher reflective, but also as an older man wandering, somewhat repetitive, perfectly rendering an older (and erudite, and spiritual) religious man’s speech and thought. Do you like to talk with older people? I do. But you have been warned, if you don't like to. Though I would go so far as to say that the repetition actually becomes one of the marvels of the book, as Ames only gives only so much information at a time, and then digresses; you think it is one kind of book, a family history, for almost 100 pages, told by a guy who is psychologically predictable and sometimes bordering on a bit boring, an old religious guy talking, and then bam, it surprises, it becomes a somewhat different kind of book, one tangling with mystery, and powerfully moving, and you can see how it may have won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award in spite of its being unfashionably spiritual in a postmodern age. The language! The artistry of it! In the generational tale of three preachers we get a perspective on faith, from the crazy grandfather who literally steals from the comfortable (never quite rich in this town) to give to the poor, who gives away most of his own family’s possessions and money and food. His faith is one filled with visions of the Lord coming to him, a fiery faith that leads him to enlist young men to die in the Civil War, and then, having served himself in that war as a Union chaplain, to leave his town and family, having been the cause of decimating his own congregation. The narrator and his father are more conventional Congregationalist preachers, our storyteller staying his whole life in Gilead. But we can see there are varieties of belief that are respected here. Since it is a preacher’s tale of preachers, you know it will be more than just epistolary, but also hortatory, if not didactic. Preachers gotta preach, after all, yet this is a gentle kind of preaching as Ames has the wisdom of not being so sure of himself, not so quick to judgment. His sermonizing calls attention to its preaching when it happens, and he invites us to question it, leaves it open sometimes. Ames’s story sermons includes familiar sermon imagery/themes though, such as water, sunlight, vision, pertaining to war, slavery/racism, love, and faith itself. Two of the characters, one of them central, are atheists, and these views, while by the Reverend mourned (as Robinson does through her non-fiction, too) are also respected, complicating the story. Images and family stories, we are told, have important meaning, but that meaning can shift over time, sometimes as new information is revealed. Transgressions happen, but grace does, too. Blessing, that key religious experience, happens, and happens convincingly. Apropos of the shift in meaning in town and family stories, the main thrust of the present “plot” is to tell of the return of his friend Boughton’s prodigal son Jack’s return to Gilead for a visit with a purpose I won’t reveal, except to say that most of the surprising and moving aspects of the story are tied up in this aspect of the tale, that and Ames's telling of the basis for the love of his young wife, Lila, and their son, and all of these he sees are great gifts that he is grateful that come to him before the end of his life. One twist I can reveal is that wayward Jack not only comes home to Rev. Boughton, but to his second father (figure), our teller the Rev. John Ames, his namesake. So there's a twist in that prodigal son story that is interesting. Sometimes your father is not technically your father. Yet another layer of this father-son story. To an aging but hopeful cynic like myself the wonder and amazement and hope in Reverend Ame’s tale was enough, to paraphrase another reviewer, to convince even the faithless of the possibility of transcendence in this world. The fourth book in the tetralogy is titled jack, so all the four books are interconnected. Another aspect of connection for me to this book: like Ames, I am an older father of young ones. Sometimes I imagine they in later years might read these very words as a kind of message to them, as Ames writes his story--a kind of letter--for his son. [Hi, guys! Love you!] Moving, lyrical, with simple yet powerful language, Gilead is one of the best novels I’ve ever read. I liked her Housekeeping even a little better for the greater edge-of-madness in it, though this one is also amazing, at times breathtaking, and has its own touch of madness in the crazy grandfather Abolitionist and some surprising turns with respect to the prodigal son Jack I am going to remain cagey about, though in some way this is one of the central attractions to the plot. Jack is a non-believer. He challenges his believing fathers in ways that test their faith. But in the end we get to see our seemingly stable Reverend Ames, too, in a different light we didn’t quite anticipate as the story began. It’s a quiet tale, an emotional one, finally. And there IS a balm in Gilead here, for any reader, sinner or saint or one--like Jack's, and mine--whose belief is that there are neither of those. In the rest of the tetralogy Jack gets a parallel version of this story, titled Home, which is such a wonderful idea, also amazingly wrought, where we learn yet more about him and his life, but from more of his perspective, and in the final book of the trilogy there is Lila, Ames's young wife, an outsider from the town who had just one day wandered in to preacher Ames's doorstep. And stayed. And then the fourth book, Jack, where even more is revealed. Such wonderful writing. One of the best writers living, without question. ...more |
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Aug 16, 2015
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May 17, 2013
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47
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| 0151365040
| 9780151365043
| 0151365040
| 4.17
| 46,825
| 1955
| Oct 15, 1992
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it was amazing
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A masterpiece collection of short stories published in 1953. Flannery O’Connor must have been a bizarre phenomenon at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, where A masterpiece collection of short stories published in 1953. Flannery O’Connor must have been a bizarre phenomenon at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, where I imagine mostly atheist urbane sophisticates shaped their literary fictions. O’Connor was not an atheist; quite the contrary--she was a devout and passionate Roman Catholic. As she once said, “If the Eucharist is just a symbol, then I say the Hell with it.” Regarding the question of whether people are Innately good, I think she would say there is a Heaven and a Hell, and Evil is real. Maybe she would say they have the capacity for good but almost never come through. As she says about most of her characters, many of them are offered the opportunity of grace, of better options, and they don’t usually choose these options. Flannery O’Connor is known for comically depicting physical and mental and decidedly Southern “grotesques” as part of her literary landscape. Southern gothic. I won’t review every story, though I love them all, having read them many times over the years. I think she basically points out hypocrisy and prideful ignorance, with sardonic humor. And that includes hypocritical religious people who get skewered by her razor tongue, those who are shown routes to redemption, those roads untaken. Hilarious characters and amazing writing. “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” is a story--and a(n brutal) American classic--about a “Misfit” wandering the country, robbing and killing. Grandma, Bailey, his wife and two kids get lost on a trip, roll their car, and sure enough, the Misfit and some of his “companions” find them. The Misfit has a kind of theological discussion with Grandma, a self-absorbed ludicrous character who begins to argue passionately for the Misfit to do the right thing. In the end the Misfit says this iconic line: “She would have been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life." This is one of her stories that makes me think she is kind of Catholic Jim Thompson (a brutal noir writer). Here’s some of the crazy good writing from the story: “Lady," he said, and turned and gave her his full attention, "lemme tell you something. There's one of these doctors in Atlanta that's taken a knife and cut the human heart-the human heart," he repeated, leaning forward, "out of a man's chest and held it in his hand," and he held his hand out, palm up, as if it were slightly weighted with the human heart, "and studied it like it was a day-old chicken, and lady," he said, allowing a long significant pause in which his head slid forward and his clay-colored eyes brightened, "he don't know no more about it than you or me." "That's right," the old woman said.” “The Life You Save May Be Your Own” is about a woman raising her disabled daughter on a small farm when a traveling handyman comes in and offers to help do stuff around the place. The woman wants her daughter married, and sort of offers the man an opportunity to have a wife, a broken-down car, and eventual ownership of the place if he stays and helps them. Right, she sort of barters her daughter for a car. Depressing, okay, but the story has a kind of manic hilarity to it as we see the self-interests of the man and woman vie for ascendence. Here’s a chunk: “A fat yellow moon appeared in the branches of the fig tree as if it were going to roost there with the chickens. He said that a man had to escape to the country to see the world whole and that he wished he lived in a desolate place like this where he could see the sun go down every evening like God made it to do.” “The Artificial N--ger” is amazing, too, about Mr. Head and his grandson Nelson who visit Atlanta and get lost. Head is racist and in these stories, one generally has to pay for treating people badly (and one of those people he mistreats is Nelson): “A cloud, the exact color of the boy's hat and shaped like a turnip, had descended over the sun, and another, worse looking, crouched behind the car. Mr. Shiftlet felt that the rottenness of the world was about to engulf him.” The last one I’ll mention is another personal favorite relevant to today’s refugee crisis,”The Displaced Person” about a woman on a farm who takes in a “displaced” Polish family, the father having survived a concentration camp. He’s an amazing worker and so disrupts the largely dysfunctional indolence of the farm, but when he states his intention to bring others from Poland to join them, this crosses a line for her: "It is not my responsibility that Mr. Guizac has nowhere to go," she said. "I don't find myself responsible for all the extra people in the world." In the process, O’Connor shows us how the woman and others on the farm who resent the “displaced person” themselves become "displaced" from their own self-satisfied ways of living. The story becomes ultimately tragic, but is very powerful, and moving, and as I said, relevant to today's immigration politics. "The Displaced Person" is actually novella-length. It was also developed into a one-hour film I actually saw (and taught, as a high school teacher!) first when it came out in 1976. Here's a trailer for it, but you can see the whole thing on YouTube for free: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2qhP... ...more |
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Apr 04, 2023
Jun 12, 2014
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Dec 19, 2012
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74
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| 0394712811
| 9780394712819
| 0394712811
| 4.25
| 36,720
| Sep 15, 1983
| Aug 12, 1984
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it was amazing
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After two collections of beautifully written, lean but grim and mercilessly sad working class stories, Carver lets the reins loose a bit in this 1983
After two collections of beautifully written, lean but grim and mercilessly sad working class stories, Carver lets the reins loose a bit in this 1983 collection, allowing some of the stories to expand just a bit, in various ways. Almost all of the stories in Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? (1976) and What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981) are about working-class people on the edge of tragedy, or seen at the end of a slow tragic decline, though it’s not classic tragedy, of a great man—say, Macbeth, a noble soldier pricked by the spur of his own ambition—but a factory rat brought down by an affair, say, and by his own drunken bumbling. The first story in this collection, “Feathers,” signals the change, maybe, by identifying the tale as a “low rent tragedy.” In this collection, sometimes still featuring such AA-based tragedies, there’s more humor, fuller descriptions, the pace slows a bit for more to happen, for us to get to know the characters as more fully human, though most of all there’s a generosity of spirit you don’t see to this extent in the earlier collections. The best example of how this works is in a story that gets revised here. “The Bath” is a story in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love; it’s a story about an eight-year-old boy hit by a car and in a coma on his birthday. The day before, his mother had ordered a cake for him. At different points both the mother and father take breaks from sitting near their son, and they get annoying calls. They are too distracted to remember the baker and the cake. The phone is ringing, and they all seem lost, nothing is resolved. The tone is harsh, devastating, unrelentingly sad. None of the people connect when they so need to. Various sources reveal that an earlier version of the story is fuller, but editor Gordon Lish wouldn’t publish it until it was stripped to the bone. In Carver’s revision of “The Bath” in “A Small, Good Thing” he lengthens it considerably, letting us get to know the parents better. But the change in the story becomes dramatic when, in this version, the parents drive to confront the baker in their grief and rage against the world. We don’t get to know the baker at all in “The Bath,” but something astonishing happens here, as the baker hears what has happened, realizes that the boy has been hospitalized, and he reaches out to the broken couple, offering them freshly baked bread which, in communion fashion, in family fashion, they share together. Sometimes “a small, good thing” such as breaking bread together is essential in restoring some small measure of grace and humanity. I thought that “The Bath” was technically amazing, but in the closing pages of the revised story I was reduced to tears. Until this point that had never happened to me in a Carver story. It’s wonderful. There are other such stories in this collection where you find that similar grace happens, but possibly one of Carver’s greatest stories, maybe one of the best stories ever, is the story that concludes the collection, “Cathedral.” Narrated by a man whose wife is old friends with a blind man, the story reveals the narrator doesn’t initially like (or understand) the blind man. There’s a rich intimacy that his wife and the blind man have that makes him irritable, jealous. The narrator’s life is going nowhere, he just likes to get stoned and watch tv, but the blind man is rich and “insightful” in a way the husband is not. There’s a program about cathedrals on tv, and our narrator tries to tell him what a cathedral looks like, and fails. The blind man asks our narrator to get some paper and a pen and to begin drawing a cathedral, with his hand over the narrator’s hand. “'Close your eyes now,' the blind man said to me. I did it. I closed them just like he said. 'Are they closed?' he said. 'Don't fudge.' 'They're closed,' I said. 'Keep them that way,' he said. He said, 'Don't stop now. Draw.' So we kept on with it. His fingers rode my fingers as my hand went over the paper. It was like nothing else in my life up to now. Then he said, 'I think that's it. I think you got it,' he said. 'Take a look. What do you think?' But I had my eyes closed. I thought I'd keep them that way for a little longer. I thought it was something I ought to do. 'Well?" he said. 'Are you looking?' My eyes were still closed. I was in my house. I knew that. But I didn't feel like I was inside anything. 'It's really something,' I said.” In this story a small but significant miracle happens. The majesty and power of a cathedral become clear, sure, but also the power of imagination, and relationship. Our selfish narrator learns for a bit what it might be like to be blind, to live in someone else’s shoes. And I am thinking about it right now as the social discourse continues to deteriorate. We need desperately to learn from each other and experience beauty in each other. In Carver’s previous stories, the man might just have remained lost, stoned, as his wife meets her old friend; in this story, though, there emerges the possibility of redemption, of life change. Here, read it today, if you get the chance: http://www.giuliotortello.it/ebook/ca... This is long, but it is Stephen King on Carver, a terrific review: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/22/boo... What I agree about the review is that the heavily Gordon Lish-edited stories seem technically virtuoso, yet in some way almost nihilistic. I think of them as Edward Hopper visions of loneliness and grief; but in the best of this collection Carver finally has achieved heart, attaining at moments the height of the master he so loved, Chekhov. ...more |
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2
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Aug 12, 2017
Jul 1984
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Aug 13, 2017
Jul 1984
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Dec 19, 2012
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Paperback
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68
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| 0226143880
| 9780226143880
| 0226143880
| 4.03
| 1,432
| Jan 01, 1961
| Jun 01, 2005
|
it was amazing
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I was raised as a (Dutch) Christian Reformed boy (DeVries uses Dutch Calvinist as shorthand for his many fans NOT in his tradition) in Grand Rapids, M
I was raised as a (Dutch) Christian Reformed boy (DeVries uses Dutch Calvinist as shorthand for his many fans NOT in his tradition) in Grand Rapids, Michigan, graduated from (the Dutch Calvinist) Calvin College (associated with the Christian Reformed Church, which is seen as theologically slightly distinct from the Reformed Church--more liberal--or the Protestant Reformed Church--more conservative), gradually extricated myself from the tradition, leaving the church at last when I was 28, and at 61 had never read the most celebrated and famous Calvin College author's greatest book. I think most people who know me from those days assume I had read it. I'd read others from DeVries, but not this one, the Great One. Why not? I think it was the topic of (spoiler) child cancer--something I couldn't connect with in my early twenties--and that for the ex-Calvinist I was becoming, it was the Everest of "my tradition's" works of literature. Read Camus and Celine and Dostoevsky instead, I thought. His skepticism, that I also came to adopt, should have brought me to read this book. But the more I think about it, I guess I wanted to avoid uncomfortable books about death and grief. I tried hard to avoid funerals for much of the teen/early adulthood years, though there weren't that many in those years. All my grandparents had been dead before I was born. I lost a close uncle, which affected me pretty deeply, at 13, I had a cousin killed in Vietnam, I had started to lose distant uncles and aunts, but I was pretty sheltered from death until I was well into my thirties. Now, at 61, I have known lots of losses: Both parents and all my Mom's 13 siblings and most of my Dad's 5 siblings. I have known the deep and continuing grief about my now 18-year-old son who in many ways slipped away from me into severe autism, and am dealing with some serious psychological/neurological issues with my 14-year-old son, too. I'm happily married now, but I am twice divorced, have had my history of screw-ups that cost me the love of some friends and family, and so on. But in that time, in my early thirties, I associated DeVries with all things Calvin and (Dutch) Christian Reformed and left it all behind. I had sort of forgotten him, and could hardly remember which of his novels I had read when I began reading this. But it suddenly felt timely to read this book; I am myself trying to write about fathers and sons and grief and separation and this book fits. Also, I had read that one of the inspirations for the Peter Van Houten character in John Green's The Fault in our Stars was Peter DeVries (I could be wrong about this specific fact, but it is true that Green loves this book and he admits it helped him shape Fault in many ways; he says "this is the best novel about cancer I have ever read" and he says "It's one of my favorite books ever"). I liked Fault quite a bit, and so Green's liking it nudged me to read it. DeVries was born in Chicago, graduated from Calvin in 1931, was editor of Poetry magazine for years, joined the staff of The New Yorker, published 23 novels, and was known primarily for his wit. An erudite humorist; a smart smart-ass. He did not return to Calvin College until 1976, the year after I had graduated, and I had been part of the effort to invite him there, which took years, in part because many of his novels were of course satirical about being Dutch, Calvin and its religious tradition, which he had left, and some people at Calvin hadn't liked that, and in part because he just didn't feel the need to go back there. But he did finally speak there, and it was amazing (for me and all the future ex-pats that loved his blasphemy) to hear him speak about art and comedy and comic writing and lightly make fun of Calvin and all things Dutch in front of us. So (sorry for the delay) The Blood of the Lamb I consider a masterpiece. It's a book about loss, death, grief, and its last third (SPOILER alert from here on in) is in particular about the narrator Don Wanderhope's eleven-year-old daughter Carol dying of cancer--leukemia--something that DeVries had experienced himself less than a year before he had published his book. It is set in Chicago, where I now live, where DeVries grew up and was raised in the CR Church, and worked for his Dad as a garbageman for a time. The Chicago scenes are great. There are flat out hilarious scenes in the first half of the book that may be funnier to me because I can relate to them as a skeptic, but his tales of a young man questioning his family's doctrinal "truths" in front of his family are familiar to me and many of my friends. There is a scene where the narrator and his father are neck deep in garbage that is terrific, laugh-out-loud comedic writing. There is a funny scene where the narrator is caught in bed with his girlfriend by her parents which I loved. But the humor is a kind of set-up; what happens to a funny guy when it's more than a pie he gets in the face? What happens to a man who receives the greatest blow of his life? As a writer, DeVries's style is somewhat urbane and formal with ironic and caustic observation his strengths. James Thurber, who invited him to join the staff of The New Yorker, saw him as a fellow traveler in ridiculing society, and readers in the sixties and seventies agreed; he was very popular then. In this book the very funny DeVries remains very funny, but also weds grief with satire; the narrator experiences many losses through madness and death in the book and along the way finds a way to keep himself and us laughing. The first half of the book balances laughter with loss in almost equal measure; in the second half, however, the balance can't be maintained. The rage and despair and grief are so raw in the last section of the book, anyone who has faced the death of a loved one can relate to it, though maybe it is rawer because it is the death of a child. Senseless. And DeVries, raised in the bosom if the church, led to believe God has a purpose for everything, points his rage at a God he is not sure exists and mostly doubts does exist. Wanderhope has a debate about this with another father who is an angry atheist railing against God and the universe, but DeVries is not quite that guy, though he is not quite Wanderhope, either, as this is still a novel, as seeringly autobiographical as it is. The characters help him work out his various views on the subject of faith and loss. This is flat out the best book I have ever read about cancer, and one of the best novels I have ever read, ever, so I agree with John Green, yeah. And it's an achingly painful read about fatherhood and fragility. Terrifying. And what I am going through with my own son Sammy and very severe autism after his having been seemingly heteronormative until the age of four is an ongoing trauma for me (f not quite the same kind of loss) so I know a little bit of what he is talking about. And it's a great book for railing against the narrowness of religion (and he rails against God, or against a concept of God that would allow for the slaughter of innocent lambs such as he sees in the pediatric cancer ward, too). There's DeVries at his caustic best; to take a phrase familiar to the faithful like "washed in the blood of the lamb" (i. e., the innocent Jesus who died on the cross for our sins) and turn it on itself, to show how the blood of his own lamb (he calls her this at her death, weeping) has washed him in the way he will see the world thereafter; as random, not predestined for meaning or salvation. I don't mean he is lost to me entirely--I work with a range of kids on the spectrum and always have--but Sammy is severely autistic, and wasn't early on, so it has taken some adjustment to figure out how to appreciate his "differences," let's say. DeVries's writing is not my favorite style--I prefer something leaner and more minimal than one so consciously crafted and stylized--but I like its sudden, breath-taking rawness in its dealing with reality, while also making you laugh, since I now know quite a bit about cancer and loss and grief, and hope I don't learn much more about it, except to hear news of cancer's final and complete cure [and then got cancer--melanoma--early in 2022! though am cancer-free at the moment]. The writing is, still, astonishingly good throughout, whether of hilarity or grief, or both. I highly recommend it. No one seems to read DeVries anymore, though this book was re-released in 2005 and maybe it got a few people to check him out. I hope so. When he died, all his books were out of print. But this one, especially, should be read. It took my breath away and left me in tears in part from my own and his griefs, and in part for my admiration for the beauty of his insights. ...more |
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Sep 20, 2014
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Nov 11, 2014
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Oct 09, 2012
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Paperback
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75
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| 0141183047
| 9780141183046
| 0141183047
| 4.41
| 32,422
| 1982
| Dec 31, 2002
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it was amazing
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Job: “My soul is weary of my life.” Pessoa/Soares: “I'd woken up early, and I took a long time getting ready to exist.” Pessoa/Soares: “I write because Job: “My soul is weary of my life.” Pessoa/Soares: “I'd woken up early, and I took a long time getting ready to exist.” Pessoa/Soares: “I write because I don’t know.” You are planning a party; here’s your guest list: Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov (from Crime and Punishment) Melville’s “Bartelby the Scrivener” Kafka’s Gregor Samsa (from The Metamorphosis) Joyce’s Stephan Dedalus (from The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) Camus’s Merseault (from The Stranger) Beckett’s Molloy Sartre’s Roquentin (from Nausea) I'm a comics guy, too, so let's let in Noah Van Sciver (who wrote Disquiet [I suspect naming it with Pessoa in mind] and a comics biography, The Hypo: The Melancholic Young Lincoln) Hmm, maybe you also invite Hamlet (for some historical perspective) to recite his “To be or not to be. . . “ soliloquy as entertainment, or have Macbeth say out his speech at the party opening, “Tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace from day to day. . .” And you will add your own literary grumps, when you begin to pick up the pattern of this literary party guest list. Some fun, eh? What’s a good party game for this bunch, Russian Roulette? My list above is all male, but I also just read (8/21) Anna Kavan's Asylum Piece, so I could make another list of just women, too, of course. I just met someone who is a perfect addition to the guest list, Bernardo Soares, from Ferdinand Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet published in 1982, 47 years after his death at 47 in 1935. What do they have in common, the characters on our guest list? All men, yep. Men largely living without women. And many of them alone, even if they live with others. Sad, sad men. Melancholic. Intense. Maybe today we would psychologically diagnose some of them as bipolar or neurologically diagnose them as autistic/Asperger Syndrome or philosophically diagnose them as nihilist? So what does Soares, a mild assistant bookkeeper, bring to the party that we don’t already have? Well, for one, he’s Portuguese, from Lisbon, and The Rua dos Douradores, where he lives and works and eats alone in one solitary restaurant night after night. Soares’s “story”—never to be finished, based on scraps of paper Pessoa threw in a trunk, edited and arranged by Richard Zenith with loving care—is mainly a collection of aphorisms and philosophical reflections and psychological insights with respect to Soares’s experience of “disquiet,” which I take to be a psychological condition akin to depression, ennui, and alienation, but which also seems to be a kind of existentialist statement. Some people think Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet makes of Lisbon what Joyce’s works make of Dublin, or Kafka’s works make of Prague. The difference? Joyce’s novel is a narrative, and Disquiet actually resists narrative in most respects. It resists coherence, completion, and is a kind of deconstructionist, meta-fictional precursor to postmodernism. Resistant to logic. Often absurd. I don’t think it is for everyone, especially if you want to read a good old-fashioned story, but it does create a portrait of an interesting character, and it does have some of the most beautiful and insightful sentences you will ever read in a book. Many people list it as one of the greatest works of fiction of all time, and I won’t say nay to that, but I think as he never finished it, most readers won’t finish it, either. Would Pessoa care if we finished it? What does it mean to "finish" or not finish any book, especially this one? The basic move Pessoa makes to convey “disquiet” is a set of repeated paralyzing contradictions, inversions, circularities or oxymorons, which can also seem very darkly funny: “. . . the stoicism of the weak.” “Though naturally ambitious, he savored the pleasure of having no ambitions at all.” “Consoler of the inconsolable, Tears of those who never cry, Hour that never sounds — free me from joy and happiness.” “To give love is to lose love.” “Only unhappiness raises us up.” “My joy is as painful as my grief.” “Since we can't extract beauty from life, let's at least try to extract beauty from not being able to extract beauty from life.” And on and on, delightfully and sometimes painfully so. The Book of Soares’s Disquiet is a portrait of melancholy, of isolation: “I am not a pessimist, I am merely sad.” “I aspire to nothing. Life wounds me.” “Do not make the infantile mistake of asking the meaning of things and words. Nothing has any meaning.” “. . . the chance circumstances of his life and the direction it had taken were dictated by his instincts, in his case inertia and detachment.” “My past is everything I failed to be.” “I feel as if I'm always on the verge of waking up.” “I'm sick of everything, and of the everythingness of everything.” “I've always rejected being understood. To be understood is to prostitute oneself. I prefer to be taken seriously for what I'm not, remaining humanly unknown, with naturalness and all due respect.” “. . . the stagnant jewel of my ecstatic disdain.” Soares in his spare time keeps a journal of sorts, though we have no idea when he wrote what he wrote. Writing and reading do sustain him, in a way. “There are metaphors more real than the people who walk in the street. There are images tucked away in books that live more vividly than many men and women. There are phrases from literary works that have a positively human personality.” But writing is also not self-discovery so much as it is self-erasure: “To write is to forget. Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.” “I write because I don’t know.” {but not that he now expects to know; see above where life has no meaning to discover] And he’s also sustained by dreaming (which is of course related to reading and writing): “I never tried to be anything other than a dreamer. I never paid any attention to people who told me to go out and live. I belonged always to whatever was far from me and to whatever I could never be. Anything that was not mine, however base, always seemed to be full of poetry.” “I've never done anything but dream. This, and this alone, has been the meaning of my life. My only real concern has been my inner life.” But as with writing, there's also the flip side of dreaming: “The only important fact for me is the fact that I exist and that I suffer and cannot entirely dream myself out of feeling that suffering.” “Their way of dreaming is a garment that conceals, not a dream that creates.” And he's alone: “We never love anyone. What we love is the idea we have of someone. It's our own concept—our own selves—that we love.” I want to share a longer section, just so you can get a better feel of Soares: “Today, suddenly, I reached an absurd but unerring conclusion. In a moment of enlightenment, I realized that I'm nobody, absolutely nobody. When the lightning flashed, I saw that what I had thought to be a city was in fact a deserted plain and, in the same sinister light that revealed me to myself, there seemed to be no sky above it. I was robbed of any possibility of having existed before the world. If I was ever reincarnated, I must have done so without myself, without a self to reincarnate. I am the outskirts of some non-existent town, the long-winded prologue to an unwritten book. I'm nobody, nobody. I don't know how to feel or think or love. I'm a character in a novel as yet unwritten, hovering in the air and undone before I've even existed, amongst the dreams of someone who never quite managed to breathe life into me. I'm always thinking, always feeling, but my thoughts lack all reason, my emotions all feeling. I'm falling through a trapdoor, through infinite, infinitous space, in a directionless, empty fall. My soul is a black maelstrom, a great madness spinning about a vacuum, the swirling of a vast ocean around a hole in the void, and in the waters, more like whirlwinds than waters, float images of all I ever saw or heard in the world: houses, faces, books, boxes, snatches of music and fragments of voices, all caught up in a sinister, bottomless whirlpool.” We are left with this explosion of dolorous language, “those feelings that inhabit the gloom of my wearinesses and the grottoes of my disquiets.” The Book of Disquiet raises questions about the nature of authorship in that, while it is technically authored by Pessoa, it is credited to one of his several heteronyms, Bernardo Soares, assistant bookkeeper. Who is Pessoa? He’s not a stable, unified person, but multiple and fractured. Pessoa was known primarily as a poet with several titles under several different names. The whole idea most of ascribe to of an author's "voice" is clearly undermined by Pessoa. He leaves us with fragments of literature and identity. As Soares says, I feel “The vast indifference of the stars.” Seems like he and Hamlet and Beckett and Camus would have a lot not to talk about at your party. ...more |
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Dec 29, 2017
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Apr 03, 2018
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Oct 05, 2012
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Paperback
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66
| 
| 0747532036
| 9780747532033
| 0747532036
| 4.28
| 143,891
| 1955
| 1996
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it was amazing
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None
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not set
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not set
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Oct 03, 2012
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Hardcover
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89
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| 0394757688
| 9780394757681
| 0394757688
| 4.19
| 43,458
| 1953
| Aug 12, 1988
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it was amazing
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“To say goodbye is to die a little.” While we may know The Big Sleep (1939) best of all Raymond Chandler’s works because of its film adaptation featuri “To say goodbye is to die a little.” While we may know The Big Sleep (1939) best of all Raymond Chandler’s works because of its film adaptation featuring Humphrey Bogart as Phillip Marlowe, and indeed is (as a book, I mean, in addition to the film) a masterpiece, one of the best novels ever--and if you have only seen the film, you should also read it--I am here to say that The Long Goodbye (1953) is even better, that takes my “masterpiece” and raises it to eleven. Oh, you could make arguments for Farewell, My Lovely and a couple others as masterpieces, too. But I’m in good company in voting for Goodbye; Chandler himself thought it was his best book. Chandler is the great stylist of detective fiction, but sometimes he can come off as just delightfully clever (which is still a lot, really, if you like entertaining reading, of course!). But in these books he uses his style to invent Marlowe, who is a terrific character, and this character-making--in the context of his entertaining prose style--is his chief priority. Here’s Marlowe’s own quick sketch of his character: “I'm a licensed private investigator and have been for quite a while. I'm a lone wolf, unmarried, getting middle-aged, and not rich. I've been in jail more than once and I don't do divorce business. I like liquor and women and chess and a few other things. The cops don't like me too well, but I know a couple I get along with. I'm a native son, born in Santa Rosa, both parents dead, no brothers or sisters, and when I get knocked off in a dark alley sometime, if it happens, as it could to anyone in my business, nobody will feel that the bottom has dropped out of his or her life.” So to be fair, saying Chandler is “just” clever means you still highlight half the sentences in each of his books. But in addition to making Marlowe, the cleverness in this book pays serious attention to something he sometimes finds less important” in other books: A well-designed plot. The Big Sleep is sometimes seen as convoluted (though I don’t care), but The Long Goodbye is a carefully complicated tale, with a lot of parallelism and (I’ll call them) doppelgangers (all the guys reflect on each other in certain ways), and there’s a couple surprises in the ending that are also very satisfying. There is serious attention in an auto fictional way to alcoholism, too, from the alcoholic Chandler, as both of the chief secondary characters Marlowe befriends, Terry Lennox and Roger Wade, are alcoholics. Marlowe (who is not, by the by, Chandler) sips his drinks, and stops drinking them when he is around these clearly needy friends, so that’s interesting. Sure, we know now alcoholism is a disease, and hard to cure, but then even more than now it was seen as an issue of personal responsibility and commitment (which it still is, I think, to some extent): “There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself.” The first time Chandler famously told producer John Houseman that he could not complete the manuscript for The Black Dahlia unless he was drunk, to which Houseman agreed, and the screenplay was nominated for an Academy Award. But his insights about the disease run throughout: “A man who drinks too much on occasion is still the same man as he was sober. An alcoholic, a real alcoholic, is not the same man at all. You can't predict anything about him for sure except that he will be someone you never met before.” Here Wade says, about drinking, to Marlowe: “I like bars just after they open for the evening. When the air inside is still cool and clean and everything is shiny and the barkeep is giving himself that last look in the mirror to see if his tie is straight and his hair is smooth. I like the neat bottles on the bar back and the lovely shining glasses and the anticipation.” “Maybe I can quit drinking one of these days. They all say that, don't they?" "It takes about three years." "Three years?" He looked shocked. "Usually it does. It's a different world. You have to get used to a paler set of colors, a quieter lot of sounds. You have to allow for relapses. All the people you used to know well will get to be just a little strange. You won't even like most of them, and they won't like you too well.” Lawrence Block, an alcoholic who wrote a detective series featuring a detective Matt Scudder, may have been in part inspired in his depiction of Scudder’s struggles with drinking by Chandler especially in this book. The book isn’t exclusively about alcoholism, though it is there on almost every page; it is as much about one of the typical base human emotions we see in noir novels (desire/jealousy), as we see there are links in this book between one central woman and the two men. There’s also the promise of a more serious relationship the promiscuous Marlowe may have with a woman, Linda Loring, though that does not come to fruition until his last, unfinished book, Poodle Springs. Another topic: Writing and writers. Wade sells out his talent to make a lot of money writing crappy books that everyone wants. There’s an innovative chapter, too,. that is comprised solely of the notes the drunk Wade wrote to himself about writing. This is in part a reflection of Chandler as writer and an insightful reflection on writing and drinking. As with most noir writers, Chandler’s target is capitalism, where the rich grind their heels into the poor, and where “crime isn’t a disease, it’s a symptom,” and where “Organized crime is just the dirty side of a dollar.” “There ain’t no clean way to make a million bucks.” “Man has always been a venal animal. The growth of populations, the huge costs of war, the incessant pressure of confiscatory taxation – all these things make him more and more venal. The average man is tired and scared, and a tired, scared man can’t afford ideals.” “There's always something to do if you don't have to work or consider the cost. It's no real fun but the rich don't know that. They never had any. They never want anything very hard except maybe somebody else's wife and that's a pretty pale desire compared with the way a plumber's wife wants new curtains for the living room.” More examples of vintage Chandler-noir speak: “Mostly I just kill time," he said, "and it dies hard.” “There was a sad fellow over on a bar stool talking to the bartender, who was polishing a glass and listening with that plastic smile people wear when they are trying not to scream.” “Twenty four hours a day somebody is running, somebody else is trying to catch him. Out there in the night of a thousand crimes, people were dying, being maimed, cut by flying glass, crushed against steering wheels or under heavy tires. People were being beaten, robbed, strangled, raped, and murdered. People were hungry, sick; bored, desperate with loneliness or remorse or fear, angry, cruel, feverish, shaken by sobs. A city no worse than others, a city rich and vigorous and full of pride, a city lost and beaten and full of emptiness.” *I like good cop Ohls. As Graham Greene said of Chandler, he was in comparison to Patricia Highsmith a Boy Scout of virtues, a cynical man, like Highsmith was cynical, but unlike Highsmith, Chandler also is essentially a good man, who operates according to a code of ethics, doing the right thing, advocating for the poor in a brutal capitalist society. “I hear voices crying in the night and go and see what’s the matter.” I like Chandler for that; there's a little hop in his existentialist tone. One thing that makes this a superb book, better than most of his other books, is the plot, which I can’t discuss without giving too many things away, but I love it. There is a murderer, and people die, and Marlowe figures that out. Now I gotta see the neo-noir Robert Altman adaptation featuring Elliot Gould as Marlowe. But I love this book. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jun 11, 2022
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Jun 17, 2022
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Oct 01, 2012
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Paperback
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my rating |
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|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
90
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| 3.97
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it was amazing
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Aug 19, 2022
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Aug 19, 2022
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86
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| 4.09
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it was amazing
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Feb 23, 2022
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Feb 21, 2022
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91
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| 3.86
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it was amazing
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Sep 27, 2023
Aug 12, 2022
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Feb 20, 2022
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|||||
85
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| 4.13
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it was amazing
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Jan 17, 2022
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Jan 08, 2022
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|||||
84
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| 3.86
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it was amazing
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Apr 03, 2021
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Nov 04, 2020
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|||||
79
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| 3.98
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it was amazing
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Aug 29, 2019
Jan 1971
not set
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Aug 29, 2019
|
|||||
92
|
| 4.17
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it was amazing
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Nov 19, 2022
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May 30, 2019
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|||||
87
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| 3.75
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it was amazing
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Apr 24, 2018
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Jul 03, 2017
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|||||
80
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| 3.93
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Oct 07, 2021
Sep 16, 2017
Mar 2017
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Feb 17, 2017
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||||||
72
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| 4.09
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it was amazing
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May 28, 2016
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May 01, 2016
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|||||
70
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| 4.27
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it was amazing
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Nov 26, 2015
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Sep 21, 2015
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|||||
81
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| 4.37
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it was amazing
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Feb 15, 2022
not set
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Jul 21, 2014
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44
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| 4.13
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it was amazing
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not set
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Jul 13, 2013
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|||||
78
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| 3.85
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it was amazing
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Aug 16, 2015
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May 17, 2013
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|||||
47
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| 4.17
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it was amazing
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Apr 04, 2023
Jun 12, 2014
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Dec 19, 2012
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|||||
74
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| 4.25
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it was amazing
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Aug 13, 2017
Jul 1984
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Dec 19, 2012
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68
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| 4.03
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it was amazing
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Nov 11, 2014
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Oct 09, 2012
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|||||
75
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| 4.41
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it was amazing
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Apr 03, 2018
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Oct 05, 2012
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|||||
66
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| 4.28
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it was amazing
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not set
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Oct 03, 2012
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|||||
89
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| 4.19
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it was amazing
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Jun 17, 2022
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Oct 01, 2012
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