Books read January through December 1984
| Author | Flaubert, Gustave |
|---|---|
| Original Language | French |
| Translators | Chartres, J.C. |
| Publication | London: Dent, 1969 |
| Copyright Date | 1862 |
| Number of Pages | 319 |
| Extras | Introduction by F.C. Graves |
| Extras | Contemporary criticism by Sainte-Beuve with reply by Flaubert |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Ancient world |
| When Read | January 1984 |
The fictionalized but intensely researched story of a three year war between Carthage and rebellious mercenary soldiers prior to the second Punic War. The novel is about the period and place as much as the war, and the war more than any individual characters. It paints an extremely detailed and strangely impressive (Flaubert might say "objective") picture of an unbelievably horrible society.
Every person in Carthage seems to be for himself alone. The mercenaries have a somewhat better care for each other but are conditioned by their primitive barbarity to little better.
The novel contains an unending succession of horrible tortures, betrayals, savage sacrifices, greediness, etc. all related in a clear, objective voice that never pauses but always plows on.
The characters are secondary but still interesting. Hamilcar, the brilliant Carthaginian general, cares only for glory and the prospects for his young son Hannibal. Salammbo, Hamilcar's daughter, is a pious moon worshiper, caught between ununderstood desire and cult superstition. Matho, leader of the mercenaries, is the most human and most heroic of the lot. He loves Salammbo in a stupid, barbarian way. Spendius, the Greek slave, is cunning and capable. He too is interesting. Hanno, a fat, leprous Carthaginian suffete (i.e., one of the two chief magistrates of Carthage), is a model of disgustingness.
All die in the end except Hamilcar, the strongest but least worthy of the lot.
I regard this as a significant, if eccentric, literary achievement. It truly attempts a fresh and objective and authentic look at ancient society. It concentrates on that which is otherwise suppressed in literature. It is boldly experimental in its type of realism. Very finely crafted too.
My recollection of this book was that it was full of finely detailed descriptions of tortures and very slow and artificially prolonged executions, like killing someone by peeling off his skin. The "civilized" people - Hamilcar, Spendius, and some others - were mostly completely devoid of any of what we would call higher values. They were able to win what they fought for by superior cunning and treachery as well as by the strength of their social positions. The barbarian mercenaries were little more than raging animals, unable to win in spite of their great numbers and military training because they were unable to organize or govern themselves. They were only an effective army when under the control of Carthaginian commanders.
My recollection of the contemporary criticism was that the critic Charles Augustin Sainte Beuve attacked the novel as a piece of outrageous sensationalism. He thought it was written to shock people, to manipulate their sensitivities, and to fill them with disgust. It seemed to me that he was correct. I seem to recall that Sainte-Beuve assumed, a not unreasonable assumption, that Flaubert couldn't have known all the gory details and therefore invented them out of his own head. Flaubert's defense, possibly correct, was that he only told the truth and that there was not one scene in the book that exaggerated or sensationalized what the historical record tells us actually happened.
I have read a few passages in twentieth century literature that described horrors like these, but I don't recall any that were as lengthy and systematic as this one, or were by such a renowned author.
We have tended to imagine that literature has moved from conventionality to realism and perhaps on to hyperbole. We think of ourselves as more mature and having a wider perspective than our Victorian ancestors, able to express more complicated emotions. Salammbo proves that theory to be false, or at least over generalized. I read Flaubert because I had learned that he was a revolutionary writer, and indeed he was, in more ways than just those in Madame Bovary.
| Author | Steinbeck, John |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Viking Press, 1979 |
| Copyright Date | 1935 |
| Number of Pages | 179 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | January 1984 |
Danny, a Chicano from Tortilla Flat above Monterrey California, returns home after World War I. Shortly thereafter his old grandfather dies, leaving him two houses. One he rents to his friends, for no rent, but they have an accident while drunk and burn it down. So they move in with him. Eventually they include Pablo, Pilon, a "logician" Jesus Maria, a "great humanist", the "Pirate", a simple minded man with five dogs and the only one who works everyday, and Big Joe Portagee - a stupid, slovenly and thieving man.
The friends of Danny live for wine, conversation, friendship, and women. Except for the Pirate they do no work, living by petty theft, handouts given to the Pirate, and waiting for "the daily miracle of dinner."
Each chapter is a separate tale of some amorous, friendly, communal, or other activity. It is always a story of the lowest class of people. It always faces their inner failures and inadequacies openly, even making fun of them. Yet at the same time it always brings out their humanity - both as their ability to act nobly and as their capacity to feel the events to which they are subjugated.
Danny is eventually alienated by his existence as a property owner, and even as a person. He has everything he has always wanted - friends, wine, love of a simple unentangling kind - but it is not enough. My own feeling is that he set his goals far beneath his potential. Having reached them he had nowhere to go and no preparation to see why it wasn't enough. He goes through ennui followed by an intense party of extreme emotion, and death in a drunken attempt to fight the devil. His friends fire his house and go their separate ways.
A most gentle and beautiful book. I found it a fine antidote to my own hectic and abstract life.
I remember an emotion in reading either this book, or maybe it was Cannery Row, of feeling that the society of these outcast people was more human and humane than those of us leading middle class lives tend to imagine, but at the same time completely self-defeating and debilitating. Maybe I found this to be "a fine antidote to my own hectic and abstract life." Maybe I thought that at the time, but it doesn't appeal to me that way now.
Time has passed. The words and feelings of the book are gone and what remains for me is my book card. Maybe I haven't really changed and, if I read it again today, I'd feel as I felt in January of 1984. Or maybe I felt the same then as I now feel in reading the book card, but I was in an expansive mood when I wrote it. Or maybe my comment was really a comment about Steinbeck's writing more than it was a comment about the subject matter of the book.
| Author | Argueta, Manlio |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Spanish |
| Translators | Brow, Bill |
| Publication | New York: Aventura (Vintage Books (Random House)), 1983 |
| Copyright Date | 1980 |
| Number of Pages | 215 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | January 1984 |
This is the story of a single day in the life of a 45 year old wife of a farm worker in El Salvador. It is the day that her husband is beaten to a pulp by the soldiers and she knows that he will be dragged off and killed.
A succession of chapters intersperses periods of Guadalupe Guardado's day with perspectives of other characters at the same or other times in the story. The people are very poor, but are awakening to the need and capacity for organization. The response of the authorities is brutality of the very highest order.
A effectively describes a traditional peasant, semi-primitive life and world outlook being forced by oppression into a new class consciousness and militancy. There are many beautiful passages of folk mythology of birds and dogs and the sight of the morning star, mixed immediately with sticks shoved into priests anuses, men with eyes gouged out, babies hit with rifle buts. The mind reels from the brutality, attempting to take refuge in the fine qualities of people and birds and good dogs, only to be dragged back by the oppression.
As a piece of pure writing, the book is already excellent. It would be a fine novel if only it were about a peaceful subject. However as a cry against oppression its subject is so strong that it is difficult for the reader to deal with his aesthetic responses.
We must demand an end to this oppression. It is a task of extreme urgency.
I still give a small donation to the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador. Perhaps it started when I read this book. I don't remember. Giving amounts of money that I can easily afford and now walking door to door during elections is the extent of my "revolutionary" activity. Not much is it?
This is apparently Argueta's most famous book. It was banned in El Salvador. He himself was exiled from the country from 1972 to the 1990's. He would have been living in Costa Rica when I read his book. He's now back in El Salvador and is supposedly, at this time, at age 81, the Director of the National Public Library
| Author | Deighton, Len |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982 |
| Number of Pages | 337 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Aviation; World War II |
| When Read | February 1984 |
A World War II flying story about an American fighter squadron during the winter of 1943-44, before the invasion of France. The main character is Captain Jamie Farebrother, a reserved, well brought up young man who falls in love with Victoria Cooper, a reserved, well brought up young woman - all of which is handled pretty much as one would expect. His father, General Bohnen, is a powerhouse lawyer and businessman who wishes he were closer to his son. The hero though is Mickey Morse, a not as well brought up young man who, in a slightly ridiculous but very earnest fashion has set himself to become the leading ace and popular hero so that he can profit from it after the war.
There is no particularly good writing here. Where Deighton does well is in his genuine love for and appreciation of these people. His book is an attempt to bring them back to life for those of us who never knew them.
There are good flying scenes, but they are not the core of the book. Colonel Dan is killed in a combat we do not see. Jamie is killed when a tire blows on the runway. The core of the book is the re-creation of the people.
This strikes me as honorable and readable literature, even if it does not have great literary merit.
| Author | Forward, Robert L. |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Del Rey (Ballantine / Random House), 1980 |
| Number of Pages | 345 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | February 1984 |
A very hard science SF story by a leading scientist in gravitational astronomy.
A neutron star hurtling towards the solar system evolves a life form on its surface. The creatures, called "Cheela", are only a few millimeters across and are made, like everything on the star, of degenerate matter - matter in which the electron clouds have been pulled into the nuclei by the 67 billion gee gravity. Due to the tiny size of the molecules, they live about one million times as fast as we do.
In a very fine display of technical erudition, F describes the discovery of the Cheela and their contact with humans. Their society is wonderfully done - not convincing or even especially well written, but very imaginative with a considerable attention to interesting details.
The story is in the best tradition of Arthur C. Clarke. In the end the Cheela surpass humanity but live with them in peace and fellowship in a mutually beneficial exchange of knowledge.
I remember this book surprisingly well. Over the course of the story the Cheela develop from a very primitive society to a scientifically and culturally advanced one. In their first contact with humans, they are shocked at the scientific achievements of these alien humans who arrived in orbit around their home. But within a few earth days they assimilate the earth science offered to them by the humans and advance well beyond it.
Here are some features of the story that I remember.
The Cheela don't use our concepts of north, south, east and west. Instead they recognize two basic directions - the hard direction and the easy direction. Travel in the hard direction is very difficult and requires strenuous effort. This has to do with the high density and rapid spin of the neutron star - something that Forward explains in the book. If I remember correctly, the hard and easy directions were perpendicular to each other. One was parallel to the axis of rotation of the star and the parallel to the equator - but I don't remember which was which.
Humans could not actually land on the star. They would be destroyed by the high gravity before they even got close. What they did was transmit electromagnetic waves to the surface in a regular pattern of exploration. Perhaps these were in the visible light spectrum, I don't remember. The beams had a delightful effect on the Cheela. A brilliant Cheelan discovered that the beams appeared in a pattern scanning the surface and won a huge following by demonstrating that he could predict where and when the beams would appear. That was the start of the discovery by the Cheela that intelligent beings from space were projecting and controlling the beams. Initially, the Cheela responded by building fires to communicate back - which later became sophisticated beam projectors of their own.
At one point it is decided that the Cheela will attempt to slow one of themselves down to the point that the humans can actually see him. They construct a tiny space ship that will fly above the spinning star and contain a single Cheelan who will communicate with the humans. He calls his spaceship a flying toilet because he has to sit in one spot for what would be some days to a Cheelan in order to have a few seconds of stable communication to a human. In the course of that communication he sees these huge, slow moving, alien humans who are composed of such thin matter that he can see right through them. In the short time of communication, he sees a couple of small tumors in the breast of one of the humans and uses x-rays to destroy them, curing a breast cancer she didn't know she had.
That's a lot to remember (and I could write a little more too) of a book that I read almost 33 years ago. It was not an influential book and was not by a well known writer. The literary quality was acceptable but undistinguished. The power of the book, the strength of its influence on me, was in the power of its scientific ideas, which were really interesting and enlightening. I think I also liked that the scientific ideas were the key element of the book. The plot did not rely, or not rely much, on traditional space opera adventure.
There is a good article about Forward in the Wikipedia and a very good obituary at spaceref.com. Although he was a leading physicist and got a PhD, he was apparently never a professor. He worked as an engineer in the aerospace industry at the Hughes Aircraft Company Corporate Research Laboratories. The company paid for his M.S. and PhD. education. Forward died of brain cancer at age 70 in 2002.
Here's a quote about this book from the obituary. "His first book, DRAGON'S EGG, expanded upon Frank Drake's idea of tiny fast-living creatures living on the surface of a neutron star. Forward called it, 'A textbook on neutron star physics disguised as a novel.' The book is often assigned as 'extra credit reading' in beginning astronomy courses."
Dragon's Egg was his first novel. He wrote ten more and published more than 200 scientific papers and articles. He was a pioneer in the study of gravity, gravitational waves, and related subjects.
I read another of his books, The Flight of the Dragonfly, in 1986.
| Author | Simenon, Georges |
|---|---|
| Original Language | French |
| Translators | Denny, Norman |
| Publication | New York: Harcourt Brace, Jovanovich, 1980 |
| Copyright Date | 1938 |
| Number of Pages | 139 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | February 1984 |
Another of Simenon's "psychological" stories about a number of very limited people, unable to communicate with each other, unable to understand themselves, unable to be at peace.
The main character is a 37 year old man from Nevers who is a typical Simenon nebish with a penny pinching wife and children who don't respect him. He visits an inn in a small town 30 miles away and discovers a world of secret attractions. He is fascinated by the innkeeper's philandering with the two young maids and discovers that the night porter is his wife's uncle.
There is no plot to this story. The other characters gradually assume center stage. We see the bad tempered lecher, a completely misanthropic uncle who wants to kill someone and winds up shooting himself, a long suffering wife who runs the inn, tough working class maids, and a few minor characters.
The story is simply the exposition of the limitations of these people. All are psychologically stunted.
Typical Simenon, depressing, pessimistic, yet sharply observed with a literary ability to create a mood and a personality in a very few words - often about tangential matters.
I read a number of Simenon's novels that were not part of the Maigret series. I suspect that today's Simenon readers are mostly just reading the Maigret books.
| Author | Lobo Antunes, Antonio |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Portuguese |
| Translators | Lowe, Elizabeth |
| Publication | New York: Random House, 1983 |
| Copyright Date | 1979 |
| Number of Pages | 154 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | February 1984 |
A story in the form of a long monologue delivered over the course of one night by a man to a woman in a bar, and later at the man's apartment. The man is a doctor who served in the Portuguese army in Angola against the MPLA. The woman is someone he just met in the bar. She never speaks.
The man goes back and forth between present day affairs, especially his interest in the woman, and a recounting of his horrible experiences in Angola. He speaks of the hypocrisy, corruption, and death that is the foundation of fascism. He brings this out well in the description of the ladies of the patriotic league as well as in the putrefaction of the army in the bush.
I think two things particularly distinguish this book. One is the bold literary style which uses monologue, run on sentences, complex vocabulary ("lixivious rain") and stark language. It mostly works though there is some awkwardness that might have been worked over.
The second is the frank acceptance of guilt. The doctor slept with an Angolan washerwoman who was taken away and tortured. He did nothing for her. He witnessed murder and torture. He did nothing. He was afraid. He was shattered and defeated.
It is an honest book of very high literary merit and significant social insight. Well above most authors.
I was very interested in the political revolutions in Africa in the 1970's. Although I don't remember exactly why I picked this book off a library shelf, it was probably for that reason. I doubt if I knew anything about the author other than whatever appeared on the dust jacket.
Lobo Antunes is four years older than me and is still alive. He trained as a doctor and a psychiatrist and apparently practiced this profession throughout his writing life. It's easy to see some synergy between the professions of psychiatry and writing fiction. Drafted into the Portuguese army in the later stages of the war, he had first hand experience of the war in Angola. His first book was published in 1979, five years after the fall of the Portuguese fascist dictatorship. He has won many awards for his writing
I should look for more of his books. I see that Pratt Library is showing eight of them in its online catalog, including this one. It should be easy to get one via inter-library loan without having to go downtown.
| Author | Clarke, Arthur C. |
|---|---|
| Publication | London: Victor Gallancz, Ltd., 1978 |
| Copyright Date | 1956 |
| Number of Pages | 255 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | March 1984 |
One of C's very ambitious and far reaching works. It takes place one billion [!] years in the future. The galaxy has rotated many times. 10 million people populate the city of Diaspar, last city on earth and completely self-contained. The city is preserved by the "central computer" which keeps a complete plan of the city and holds every molecule in preserved form. The people emerge fully grown from the hall of creation, live 1,000 years, and return to the hall to be randomly recreated in 10-100 thousand more years. The people live for art and for a complex social life. They have telepathic communication with their environment, calling up chairs materializing on the spot as they sit down.
The main character, Alvin, is a "unique". He did not exist before. He escapes from the city (something which no one else wants to do), makes contact with another human culture surviving nearby, and even discovers one of the old space ships and flies to the center of the galaxy, former center of human civilization.
As in Childhood's End, the themes are writ very large. We deal with the meaning and end of life, humanity in the presence of super intelligence (e.g., "Vannamonde", a pure intelligence discovered in the Galactic center). The conception of Diaspar is worthy of its putative billion years. The mystery of life is confronted head on.
I remember this book very well and can recall some scenes that are not mentioned above, such as one in which a group of people from Diaspar are organizing some sort of pseudo-expedition. Alvin attempts, unsuccessfully to get them to go on a real expedition outside the city walls.
I don't believe that anyone of our era has any real ability to predict the human future a few hundred years from now, much less one billion. There is too much that hasn't yet been discovered or invented and, undoubtedly, some of the things that will be discovered or invented would be as inconceivable to us now as televisions and monoclonal antibodies to an 18th century man. Maybe an Isaac Newton would grasp the concepts quickly, but I'm not sure the equally intelligent Greek scientists of the classical era would. However Clarke is far more qualified than most of us and, even if his predictions turn out to be completely wrong, they do expand our thinking to include possibilities of which we wouldn't otherwise dream.
Clarke was a favorite of mine. No doubt I have said a lot of this when converting other book cards and will say it again when I get to the earlier books of his that I read.
| Author | Delblanc, Sven |
|---|---|
| Original Language | se |
| Translators | Austin, Paul Britten |
| Publication | New York: Viking Press, 1983 |
| Copyright Date | 1980 |
| Number of Pages | 153 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Race and slavery |
| When Read | March 1984 |
In 1794 a young Swedish count en route to the West Indies is transferred to the slave ship Speranza. He is 19, very intelligent and well educated but also very childish and foolish. He believes himself a great democrat and follower of all that is great and new in the American and French revolutions. He had formed "The Brothers of Liberty" at home but engaged mostly in drinking, boasting, criticizing, and seducing a young girl in the name of freedom. When she becomes pregnant, he is sent abroad by his parents with his German tutor Hoffman and his black playmate/servant Roustam. Malte Moritz von Putbus is his name. He says "Oh, bliss, to be young in the light of morning over the sea!"
Speranza challenges his whole world view. He is tormented by the concept of slavery but also by his desire for one of the slave girls. Gradually he is psychologically destroyed by these torments. Hoffman becomes a member of the crew while Roustam conspires to free the slaves. Putbus falls deeper and deeper into isolation, loneliness, fear, hallucination, desire, dread, ill health. When Roustam appeals for help, Putbus denies him and even kills a slave during an attempted revolt.
Finally, half blind, abandoned, desolated, he visits the ship's Jesuit priest and slave owner Abbe Marcello, to whom he confesses. Marcello grants him absolution and acceptance into the company of Speranza for which Putbus adopts the Abbe's view of obedience and suffering as the will of God.
He becomes the ship's executioner - dumb, obedient, strong, but wholly dominated by the society of the ship.
It is a masterful story, one in which the poverty of good intentions is finally revealed in the light of social reality.
All written as Putbus' diary, in 18th century style. Very well done, very significant.
The Wikipedia article on Delblanc says of him "In Sweden Delblanc is considered one of the foremost Swedish authors of the later half of the twentieth Century, yet in English-speaking countries he is almost unknown." Of the many books he published it lists only two as having English translations. Perhaps the subject of African slavery in the Americas was thought to be of importance to Americans and would find an audience here in the U.S.
As of this writing, the book is available on Amazon but there are no Amazon reviews and the book is rated #7,018,464 in the list of best sellers - not exactly a popular book. Amazon's top 100 best sellers appear to be mostly children's and cook books with a sprinkling of popular fiction and self help books like You Are a Badass, Calm the F*ck Down: an Irreverent Adult Coloring Book, and Go the F**k to Sleep.
Speranza was a serious book. I respect its author.
| Author | Bryant, Ben, Rear-Admiral |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Bantam Books, 1980 |
| Copyright Date | 1958 |
| Number of Pages | 259 |
| Extras | Illustrations, maps |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | Naval; World War II |
| When Read | March 1984 |
A recounting of B's experiences as a submarine commander beginning with training in the 1920's through his last mission in the Mediterranean in 1943.
B fought first in the Skagerrak in the German controlled seas between Denmark and Sweden, then off Norway, and finally in the Mediterranean, sinking Rommel's supply ships. He sank a total of 32 ships, mostly by gunfire, most of them relatively small.
Based on my reading of the German submarine stories it seems that the British subs and tactics were far more primitive. On the other hand German and Italian anti-submarine forces were not nearly as effective as those of the Allies.
The book is straightforward, probably ghost written.
The notes above are pretty skimpy and don't say why I thought the book was ghost written. I'm sure that what I meant was that a professional writer could have been assigned by the publisher to work with Admiral Bryant - a common enough technique then and now. I'm also pretty sure that the story is absolutely from Bryant and, if a ghost writer was employed, it was only to smooth out the language.
Taking a submarine into the Skagerrak, an area totally dominated by German air and sea forces, would have been a pretty gutsy thing to do. The Mediterranean was no piece of cake either with its clear shallow waters that sometimes allowed an air pilot to actually see a submerged submarine.
I just looked up Bryant in the Wikipedia. He was born in India in 1905 and died in 1989. To my surprise, the small article about him did not include a reference to this book. So I added it.
| Author | Kurten, Bjorn |
|---|---|
| Original Language | se |
| Publication | New York: Pantheon Books, 1980 |
| Copyright Date | 1978 |
| Number of Pages | 255 |
| Extras | Introduction by Stephen Jay Gould |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| When Read | March 1984 |
A novel by an eminent paleontologist describing contact between Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon, and the demise of the Neanderthal. In a reversal of popular prejudice, K has gentle, white skinned, blond Neanderthals who are named for flowers and trees being forcefully displaced by black skinned Cro-Magnons named for fierce animals. When they mate, their offspring, like mules, are sterile.
The story concerns Tiger, a young CM whose clan is slaughtered by fierce bandits led by twin brothers who never appear together and so foster the belief that they are one man in two places.
The brothers are unusually intelligent, born leaders, who are ahead of their time. But they are eventually undone by Tiger, who is a great artist and fine fellow.
The story is a vehicle for K to achieve two goals: 1) to recreate prehistoric life in Scandinavia in a plausible and informed fashion - bringing us to common bonds of sympathy and understanding of our ancestors, and 2) to debunk our prejudicial views of Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons - not with facts (which no one has) but with plausible alternate views which show up how much of our current view is based on prejudice instead of knowledge.
The writing is entirely adequate to the task.
I read William Golding's The Inheritors in December of 1974, almost ten years before reading this book. Although I've read a number of novels of prehistoric times, I think Golding's was the best. He was not a paleontologist like Kurten, but he was among the very best of novelists. I think that Golding gave me an interest in this period that lead me to read other books when I came across them, which was not often. Reading my notes about Kurten's book make me think more of Golding's than of this one.
| Author | Holleran, Andrew |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: William Morrow and Co., 1983 |
| Number of Pages | 240 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | March 1984 |
A very fine story of a homosexual man drifting through life, unable to form any real attachments or find any meaning in life except through his relationship with his mother. It is told from his perspective as a man near 40, relating his childhood in Aruba where his father was a petroleum engineer, then to life in the army where he came to terms with his homosexuality, then to life in New York.
He worked at low status jobs to keep himself alive and lived for his nightly romantic encounters. But as the years passed it all grew stale. He dwelt more and more on the shortness of life and the inability to accomplish anything or reach out to anyone. Only in his mother - a neurotic woman in whom he saw something of himself - did he find anyone to hold on to. And with her he had nothing to say.
The story is presented as fiction but has the fine detail of personal life. It is beautifully done with fine moments of summation of existential dilemmas in a scene, even of a passing boy on a bike.
Very well done.
See the diary for more on this.
The diary entry is a fairly long analysis of the book in a very long total diary entry of 407 lines. It is a much more complete and more interesting analysis than the one I wrote here on the 3x5 inch index card. When I read it, I remember much more of the book than I remembered from reading these book card notes.
Aruba has a special interest for me. It was Marcia and my first vacation together to the Caribbean, in December of 1983. It was very romantic. It was also just at the time that I had left my job at Online Computer Systems and become an independent computer consultant, an important but risky and anxious step for our family. I don't remember if the word "Aruba" in the title had anything to do with my choosing this book to borrow from the library. It might have, though I note that there is nothing about the island of Aruba in my notes here or in my diary.
See the entry for March 21, 1984.
| Author | Forsyth, Frederick |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Viking Press, 1974 |
| Number of Pages | 408 |
| Genres | Fiction; Thriller |
| When Read | March 1984 |
A procedural thriller about a mercenary, Carlo "Cat" Shannon, hired by mining tycoon Sir James Manson to topple a corrupt government of "Zangaro" in West Africa. In 100 days of very tightly planned operations, Shannon buys guns, ammunition, uniforms, a ship, boats, radios - all sorts of equipment for a private war. At the other end, Manson had made moves to create dummy corporations, setup a puppet government, get a deal on the platinum mines, and so on.
The plot is worked out through hundreds of pages of detail culminating in a furiously violent and bloody assault on the presidential palace and massacre of the president, guards, servants, etc.
There is a twist at the end however when Shannon reveals his own hidden agenda of placing a responsible government in power of men from his former employers (hunted as Ibo intellectuals from the Nigeria / Biafra civil war.) He murders the puppet brought in by Manson and sets up his African friends, who were not mercenaries after all, as a ruling group.
F thus redeems Shannon and the story - and the reader who is, or should be, ready for some reason for the carnage.
The style and substance of the book is typical Forsyth. Good of its kind. Shannon dies in the end - cancer (suicide).
As often happens, more than 32 years later I remember this action packed thriller very well while the book I read immediately after by Dostoevsky is just a hazy memory, even though Dostoevsky was one of my favorite authors.
Considerable tension built up in my mind between developing more and more respect for the meticulous planner of the coup and more and more anger at the purpose of the whole operation. I remember the old ship purchased to transport the mercenaries. I remember the 50 German World War II machine pistols packed in grease inside barrels that were opened and revealed on the ship. I remember the recruitment of brave and experienced white and black men. I remember the assault on the presidential palace carried out with courage as well as competence, and the collapse of the president's guards whose specialty was bullying unarmed people, not fighting experienced soldiers. I remember the stupid and gorilla like man who was picked to be president by the mining company, and his greed and pleasure as he walked into his new palace, right up until Shannon casually shot him to death, right in front of Manson, and then introduced the man who would be the real next president of the country. Everything was redeemed. I no longer had to feel conflicted about the respect I had developed for Shannon over the course of the story.
There are many ways of being a good writer. Forsyth was a master of some of them.
| Author | Dostoevsky, Fyodor |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Russian |
| Translators | Garnett, Constance |
| Publication | New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963 |
| Copyright Date | 1856 |
| Number of Pages | 243 |
| Extras | Introduction by Philip Rahv. |
| Extras | Bound with The Eternal Husband. |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | April 1984 |
Sergey, a student in St.Petersburg, is called back to his uncle's estate, asked to marry the tutor there. He arrives to find an incredible household consisting of his uncle, Yegor Ilyitch Rostanev, a retired colonel, his neurotic and demanding mother Madame La Generale, an unbelievably arrogant man who holds sway over the mother, Foma Fomitch Opiskin, and a whole ragbag of children, old ladies, neighbors, hangers-on, etc.
The uncle is a complete doormat for Foma Fomitch - who runs his life and is plotting to force him to marry a crazy rich woman. He however would like to marry the lovely tutor Nastenka who is too honorable to allow him to marry her. There are both funny and frustrating scenes as all of this reaches a climax when the uncle finally rebels and throws Foma Fomich through a window out into a thunderstorm. Foma soon returns and resumes his overlordship of the Colonel, but he has changed, he knows the limits of his power and no longer opposes the marriage. The lovers are married and live happily ever after, caring for Foma and the old lady until they die.
The story is a very theatrical comedy, originally planned as a play. Rahv notes that the Russian critics have found in it an attack on Gogol, who made a pompous pronouncement about loyalty to the state just a few years before the time of this novel's writing and in something of the same manner as Foma. D wrote it in Siberia, under arduous circumstances, after his arrest and mock execution.
To me, it reveals little of D's genius though much about Russian society.
| Author | Brunner, John |
|---|---|
| Publication | Garden City: Doubleday and Co., 1972 |
| Number of Pages | 224 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction; Short stories |
| When Read | April 1984 |
13 SF stories, most set in the present or near future and all ending in some ironic twist, usually some mortification of a crass character.
The are all about equal - decent, not really very good, but acceptable. "The Biggest Game" has a man who conquers and lives on rich women trapped and killed by aliens in search of a specimen. He invents stories of his prowess as a hunter but is himself the game. "Planetfall" is a wistful story of a young earth girl who yearns for a spaceman and a young man from space (a Russian colony) who yearns for earth. He cannot stand earth and returns to the rational life of his ship. "Wasted on the Young" has a youth who is allowed to burn up 200 years worth of resources - then made to pay his debt with 200 years service as a cyborg space ship crew. "The Vitanuls" is an Indian story. All souls are in use and new babies do not have dead counterparts whose souls they may have. An old Indian gives up his life so that his soul may be recycled.
Most of the characters are flat and of a type with whom we cannot sympathize. Even Vitanuls, which has a sympathetic doctor / philosopher in it, also has an arrogant Westerner. Only Planetfall gives us a story of all sympathetic people. The writing is good but I find these kinds of characterizations slightly juvenile and uninteresting.
Sap that I am, or maybe it's sympathizer that I am, I'm turned off by stories that denigrate people or take delight in harming them. The worst example of that kind was Accordion Crimes by Annie Proulx. It isn't in these book notes because I couldn't bring myself to finish reading it.
Maybe today that sympathy I felt for the characters in fiction extends further towards authors than it did in 1984. If I live another 20 years and still have enough brain cells to read and write, I may be approving of all of the writers I read - but probably not.
| Author | Cather, Willa |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976 |
| Copyright Date | 1931 |
| Number of Pages | 280 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| When Read | April 1984 |
"A novel of Quebec during the last days of Frontenac, 1697-1698." Euclide Auclair, a pharmacist/physician, and his 12 year old daughter Cecile, live in the town of Quebec. Euclide grew up in a family that always served the Frontenacs and when the old count was sent as governor of French Canada, Euclide and his wife and four year old daughter went too. There they lived a quiet life of service to the community and of moderation at home.
Like all of C's novels, it is a beautiful story of quiet, graceful, gentle people who create a world of meaning and value in the simple acts of everyday life. They are good people - respectful to their superiors (who treat them as Auclair treats his inferiors) and kindly to their inferiors. Their friends are Pommier the shoemaker whom everyone trusts, Father Hector the missionary too gentle for Canada but committed nonetheless, Pierre Charron the brave woodsman, little Jacques - son of a tramp, and there is Blinker, the deformed ex-torturer of the King's prisons, now himself tormented by dreams of what he has done.
The book is divided between Auclair and Cecile - both equally attractive.
As in other works, C makes sense of the religious views of her characters. Making no supernatural claims of her own, she yet accepts and understands those who do make such claims. This is part of the spiritual values which she pursues in her work.
See the diary entry for April 22, 1984 and earlier for more.
| Author | Erofeev, Benedict |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Russian |
| Translators | Dovell, J.R. |
| Publication | Malvern, GB: Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative, 1981 |
| Copyright Date | 1969 |
| Number of Pages | 188 |
| Extras | Translator's notes |
| Genres | Fiction; Satire |
| Keywords | Soviet Union |
| When Read | May 1984 |
The hero of this story, also named Benny Erofeev, is drunk in a subway station. He has just been fired from his job and he begins a drunken odyssey through the subways of Moscow to his ultimate destination - the station where his girlfriend will find and save him.
The journey is one long binge interspersed with new passengers and hallucinations. But when he arrives there is no girl waiting. In the end he is pursued and killed by four men who, according to the translator, stand for Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin.
The writing is good. There is a comic view of the Russian people that is both sympathetic and disparaging. But I didn't know finally how to take it all in. Presumably it is E's response to what he regards as a genuinely absurd society. Perhaps he is unable to approach this society with anything other than ridicule for the society and the people it produces.
I don't see any other books on Amazon with the precise author's name "Benedict Erofeev". However are some by "Venedikt Erofeev" any by "V" and "V.V" Erofeev. There is a Wikipedia entry for Venedikt Vasilyevich Yerofeyev, who is indubitably the same man. He seems to have lived a highly unconventional and perhaps alcoholic life. See the Yerofeyev entry for details.
Although I could probably convince myself otherwise, I don't really remember this book. However I was quite interested in the history and literature of the USSR as well as the literature of Russia in the 19th and early 20th centuries (Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Turgenyev, Goncharov, etc.) I've read some of the early "socialist realism" works (as opposed to "social realism"?) by approved writers as well as some of the more or less underground writers. The underground writers in Russia and Eastern Europe seemed to specialize in satire and nihilism. I think I understand why.
Using the wondrous resources of the Internet I learned about the Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative. It was formed by Glenn Thompson, an orphan from Harlem, born in 1940, who taught himself to read at age 12. He traveled the world then settled in London, starting this cooperative publishing house in hopes of producing books and comic books that would appeal to poor, working class children, giving them important information in easy to read formats. Some of the titles are still in print under the imprint of a successor organization. Erofeev would not seem to belong with such a publisher and his apparent anti-Marxist, or maybe it's just anti-Soviet, attitude might not accord well with Thompson's clear Marxist orientation, at least in his early years. Whatever. The coop performed a service in publishing this book.
I put a note on the book card that this book was written in 1969 "during cable laying". It appears that Erofeev lived largely by poorly paid labor in places that weren't particular about a man's credentials.
| Author | Domhoff, G. William |
|---|---|
| Publication | Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1967 |
| Number of Pages | 184 |
| Extras | notes, index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Society |
| When Read | May 1984 |
A study, heavily documented, of the "sociology of leadership" in the United States.
D argues first of all that there is a definite upper class of wealth, private schools, exclusive clubs, resorts, charities, parties, and of course, corporate boardrooms. It is not a static class. People do enter it (usually in a two generation process) and leave. Nor is it primarily a leisure class. Its members tend to be active, well educated, competent, and hard working, even though most of their income is from property rather than salary.
D then examines, one by one, corporations, foundations and associations, the executive branch of government, and the military and CIA, to show how they are dominated by the upper class. While other institutions, including the FBI and state and local government, are dominated on specific issues and policies, where they need to be.
Very importantly, D points out that the participation of professional managers and technicians in corporate and government control strengthens rather than weakens upper class rule. These people are selected, trained, promoted, and co-opted by the upper class to serve its interests. Their presence and capability is a key asset of the upper class, not a competition. There is division and conflict between them and the upper class - just as there is division and conflict within the upper class as a whole (which is much more important) but it is a minor aspect of the relationship.
Nothing on the book card qualified as a "comment" I think.
As of this writing, Domhoff, aged 80, is still maintaining a blog at the University of Southern California where he is "Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Research Professor" in the Sociology and Psychology departments. He maintains a web page on Who Rules America with information that appears to have been updated at least as recently as four or five years ago. The information there is still in the left progressive spirit of the original book written so many years before.
| Author | Howe, Irving |
|---|---|
| Publication | Boston: Beacon Press, 1958 |
| Number of Pages | 37 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Writing; Essay |
| Keywords | Literature; Literary criticism |
| When Read | May 1984 |
An introductory essay in which Howe recounts some of the history of 20th Century American criticism. Some of his themes include: Why difficult, often outrageous art exists - Because for some writers the "formal claims of society" have become unacceptable. "The usual morality seems to him counterfeit; taste, a genteel indulgence; tradition, a wearisome fetter. It becomes a condition of his being or remaining a writer that he rebel ..."
Howe is against every "method" of criticism when it becomes a dogma. Freudianism he finds particularly subject to such mistreatment. Marxism less so, but also often misused, especially by Stalinists. Yet the "New Criticism" which rejected all sociological approaches and insisted on close reading of texts as the sole source of criticism is equally blind. The best method is (and he quotes T.S. Eliot) to be intelligent.
There had been in the mid-fifties an emergence from a period of many shocks to intellectuals. On the left, the repudiation of Stalinism and the invasion of Hungary pushed many out of socialism and Marxism. On the right, McCarthyism and the vacuous vulgarity of mainstream American culture left them alienated and isolated as well. They turned to literature as literature, writing and reading as a safe and humane sphere of life which must be preserved as a last holdout against conformity - and in which we must not attack writers on political grounds and thereby destroy this preserve of art and sanity.
A solid essay with much to say about tendencies in criticism and some on individual critics. (See also diary.)
This essay appeared in Modern Literary Criticism: an Anthology. It is one of a handful of short pieces that I thought were important enough that I should write book cards describing them. I discovered them outside of my regular stream of book cards, which mostly only record full books, but I do have dates for them so, for the purpose of preserving them in the XML, I've added them into the streams for those dates.
| Author | Eliot, T.S. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Harcourt Brace, 1958 |
| Copyright Date | 1932 |
| Number of Pages | 9 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Writing; Essay |
| Keywords | Literature; Literary criticism |
| When Read | May 1984 |
Eliot attacks the view that criticism is based purely on the aesthetic response ("inner voice") of the critic. "Why have principles when one has the inner voice? If I like a thing, that is all I want' and if enough of us, shouting all together, like it, that should be all that _you_ (who don't like it) ought to want."
Instead he argues that criticism is a constant attempt to discover and interpret facts about the work. These facts about structure and sense can be true or false, and can be correctly and successfully or incorrectly interpreted. The first and foremost such critic is the author himself who cannot write without simultaneously criticizing - without constantly striving to see his work objectively, apart from his subjective feelings and inner inspiration. further, this kind of criticism, the laying bare of objective facts about a work, will in no way reduce our aesthetic enjoyment of it.
I think the primary premise of his argument is the claim that criticism is necessary for creation. I am, of course, sympathetic. His way is also mine. However I don't know how far we can go in insisting that aesthetic response can be analyzed. I do think we can go far, and that pushing those limits is the primary function of criticism. But I won't rule out a few plain, silent, finger points or dull grunts as well.
This is another essay that appeared in Modern Literary Criticism: an Anthology. See the notes on the essay by Irving Howe above.
In my training (nine years in school) in philosophy I learned to analyze very abstract subjects and subjects that had much to do with perceived values. I had the tendency to do it even before going to college, but in college and grad school I learned that there are ways to argue rationally about things as difficult to talk about as the difference between right and wrong, good and bad behavior, and indeed, good and bad art.
It's not always obvious how to go about criticizing a painting, a piece of music, a poem, a story, or a novel. We can start with obvious things. Do people actually behave the way the characters in a novel behave? Is the plot of the novel realistic? Do impossible things happen in the story? Then we can progress to trickier things. Is this novel, perhaps, not intended to be realistic, these characters real, or the events possible? Maybe that's part of the point of the story. We can proceed further and further from the obvious. The author has alluded to other works. Are these allusions appropriate? Do they contribute to the story? How? What is the author's relation to these characters? Does he care about them? Should he care about them? Is he right to care about them? What about the structure of the story? Has the author told us what we need to know? Has he hidden things from us to bring them out later? Is his telling or hiding good or bad? Why? And on and on.
The questions can be hard to answer, but I don't believe that any of them reduce only to finger pointing and grunts, personal preferences that are beyond evidence, argument, or enlightening discussion. I thought that in 1984 and in 1974 and today in 2017.
| Author | Kundera, Milan |
|---|---|
| Original Language | cz |
| Translators | Kussi, Peter |
| Publication | New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976 |
| Number of Pages | 209 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | June 1984 |
A famous trumpet player, Klima, is told by a pretty but pretty mean spirited nurse, Ruzena, that she is pregnant by him. He comes to the resort town where she works determined to trick her into an abortion. His wife Kamila, consumed by jealousy, follows. At the resort Jakub, a former Party intellectual now out of favor, visits Olga, daughter of an old friend executed by the Party but actually himself a persecutor of Jakub when he was in power. Other characters are Bartleff, a wealthy American Christian, Franta, a young man who is in love with Ruzena and in fact impregnated - though she will have nothing to do with him now that she has a hold on Klima, and Dr. Skreta, the resort gynecologist who treats barrenness by injecting his own sperm into women unbeknownst to them.
There are several fantastic scenes, including one in which Jakub makes love to Olga, each thinking they are doing the other a favor (Olga believes she is forcing Jakub out of his fatherly role), Bartleff makes love to Ruzena to give her a new sense of self worth, and Klima and Kamila make love in an excruciating scene of impotence and fierce determination reinforcing each other - all while Franta paces back and forth outside.
In other scenes Jakub accidentally slips Ruzena a poison pill and, for the last 40 pages or so, he goes through agonies wondering whether he is a murderer - passing opportunities to save her.
The writing is uniformly excellent. K handles his themes of the twin features of communism and fascism (in Jakub and Ruzena), the surreality of politics, the falseness of love - with a very strong but light hand. There is no realism in this book. Its satire verges on slapstick. Yet K writes so adroitly that it feels light and sure and positive.
Not as brilliant a book as Life is Elsewhere, but brilliant nonetheless.
I believe that Kundera is one of those lucky, or maybe unlucky, men who is very attractive to women and indulges, or at some time in his life did indulge, in many relationships. Sex is both more and less compelling for a man like that (listen to me, I'm an expert, right?) It's more compelling in that sex occupies much more of his life than for most men and less compelling in that, as sex with different women becomes a part of his life, sexual oddities, tangents, comedies, and banalities become more recognizable to him and occupy more of his consciousness of sex. This book, along with others like The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Laughable Loves exemplify this aspect of his writing.
If I remember correctly, the book ends with a street scene in the resort town in which a class of young children is walking by with their teacher. Half of the children are wearing glasses and look an awful lot like Dr. Skreta.
I've met some people who didn't like Kundera's writing and were even offended by him, but not me. I've liked all of Kundera's books.
| Author | Vidal, Gore |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Random House, 1981 |
| Number of Pages | 510 |
| Extras | maps |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Ancient world |
| When Read | June 1984 |
A first person narrative of Cyrus Spitama, grandson of Zoroaster, told to his nephew Democritus in the fifth century B.C.
As in V's other works there is a mixture of grand theme and personal viewpoint. Cyrus is a childhood friend of the Great King Xerxes. He is sent by Xerxes' father Darius to the Indian states on the Ganges where he meets the Buddha and other religious and political leaders. Later, after his return, he arranges an embassy to Cathay. He spends many years there as a slave and then semi-slave, meets Confucius and the Taoist Master Li, and eventually returns via India again.
Cyrus always attempts to convince everyone of the truth of Zoroaster's vision of the Wise Lord and the struggle of the Truth against the Lie. But the easterners are completely bored by what they regard as such a primitive view. Cyrus is himself partly won over to Confucius' agnosticism and belief in the here and now.
One theme is this search for truth on big issues. Is there a god? Is there an afterlife? How was the world created? The other theme is the drive for empire, for hegemony in Persia, India, China, and Greece in which intelligent men like Cyrus and Confucius serve lesser men in their desire to establish a universal order.
The strength of this book is its ability to see the ancient world as a whole, and its effort to understand some of its political and ideological/religious life as a developed and interesting whole.
V is not fully adequate to this task. Neither the historicity nor the literary qualities qualify as first rate. Nevertheless, it is a good effort.
Writing about philosophy and religion is pretty difficult. In the first place, the answer to every question raises a new question, or two or three new questions. In the second place the sensibilities of readers on these subjects can be very delicate and quite prejudiced. A novelist can't afford to pursue every thread of philosophy to a fully satisfying end, even assuming such an end can be found. Neither can he afford to too harshly abuse the sensibilities of his readers if he hopes to entice them to read more of his books. I give Vidal a lot of credit for tackling these problems and, if he doesn't always succeed, he does as I said in 1984, make a good effort.
| Author | Albrand, Martha |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1974 |
| Number of Pages | 213 |
| Genres | Fiction; Thriller |
| When Read | June 1984 |
A professionally written thriller about a Swiss doctor who has discovered a possible cure for arteriosclerosis and is victimized by industrial spies who will kill to steal it.
The characters are Anton Zeller, 41, the doctor, his unloved and faithless wife Helene who refuses to divorce him, his mistress Lisa Tanner, a detective Wieland, and a number of assorted bad guys ranging from charming to demented. Two opposed teams of baddies try to steal the secret, killing Helene, severely injuring Lisa, and kidnapping Zeller.
The story ends rather foolishly with a string of implausible events crammed together for an ending. It's as if Albrand felt she had had enough and decided to cut the story short. Nevertheless, the writing is generally competent and sometimes interesting. The depiction of Zeller and wife as a couple created by his ambition and her connections is effective and convincing. Her love affair with the suave crook is also nicely handled.
It was fast reading. Someday when I am in the mood I would probably find her writing acceptable. I'd like to see her best book.
I have no real memory of the book but I find my last comment interesting. I now have access to more books, at least in some genres, than I did at any time that I wasn't working in a big library like Pratt or the University of Illinois. Just as importantly, via Amazon, the Wikipedia, and other Internet sources, I have access to more reviews and authors' biographies than ever before. Now, if I'm looking at books by a particular author, I can find out which particular titles are thought to be best by critics and other readers. I have probably read many relatively worse books by relatively good authors in the past where, today, I'm more easily able to find the better books by each of the authors I read. If I am more generous to authors today than I was in the past, and I can't say for sure if I am, maybe it has something to do with reading books that are more highly thought of than in the past.
Nah. I'm more generous because I'm more aware of my own shortcomings than I was when it still seemed possible that I would write a book. I'm more aware of what an achievement it is to write and be published.
| Author | Murdoch, Iris |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Viking Press, 1965 |
| Copyright Date | 1956 |
| Number of Pages | 316 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | July 1984 |
A very odd tale of a dozen or so characters who take all sorts of desperate actions but get nowhere. At the center is Rosa Keepe, 40 years old, living with her younger brother Hunter and an empty headed 19 year old Annette, daughter of wealthy parents who travel on the continent. Rosa works in a factory where she has become dominated by two young Polish brothers who treat her as their shared woman. She is also pursued, each in a different way, by Peter Saward, an intellectual working on deciphering an ancient language, John Rainborough, a government time server who cares only for himself, and Mischa Fox, a mysterious rich and powerful press lord whose motives are totally inscrutable and who controls a sinister henchman Calvin Blick, and Nina, an immigrant seamstress who kills herself out of a groundless fear of deportation.
There are many subplots involving different combinations of characters. Many of these turn out surprisingly - some with plots resolved suddenly by fiat of the author.
The book is written only averagely well. The story is hardly constructed at all, seeming to move and turn by whims. The characters are boldly and very effectively drawn but not developed to any fruition. Yet the book is full of sheer intelligence. It is pervaded by it. The forces and dynamics of the characters and their responses are all extremely complex and perceptive. The writer's hand is heavy but strong.
I will read more of her work. I hope she develops her writing as well as her mind in the later books.
I have not, so far, read any more of her books. I have borrowed them from libraries and opened them but was never interested enough in the first few pages to commit to reading them.
Murdoch was nothing if not a complicated and interesting character. She studied literature, classics, and philosophy, taught philosophy, and wrote non-fiction books about all of those subjects as well as novels. She was married for more than 40 years to a man who, according to the Wikipedia, thought sex was "inescapably ridiculous" while she had "multiple affairs with both men and women", sometimes observed by her husband. She won lots of awards for her writing. So is she a complicated and interesting person or what?
While uniquely interesting people often write interesting books, not all readers share the interests of the authors. Murdoch doesn't seem to have worked out for me.
I guess the last sentence on my book card, "I hope that she develops her writing as well as her mind in the later books", was pretty arrogant. At any rate, it seems arrogant to me now. Who am I to say that Iris Murdoch needed to develop her writing and her mind? Perhaps I should just have said that her interests and mine didn't align. Certainly our marriages have been different.
| Author | Laumer, Keith |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Berkeley Publishing, 1976 |
| Number of Pages | 179 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction; Short stories |
| When Read | July 1984 |
A collection of six SF short stories about "Bolo" fighting machines, intelligent armored tanks equipped with all kinds of nuclear and directed energy weapons.
L's treatment of humans is trite and poor. In the first story the main character awakens out of 60 years in a "stasis" field to find a world devastated by nuclear war. He finds his wife's grave, mourns for two sentences, and goes on to feats of derring-do. All the human heroes are clever, strong, brave, he men, or Brooklyn mouthed, short, old but helpful sidekicks. I put it down after 35 pages and only picked it up again to read when I found out that the war game "Ogre" is based on it.
As it turns out, L's writing about the machines is quite good. They are brave, resourceful, intelligent beings with a wonderful machine-like character. His imagination comes alive in the later stories where the machines speak, culminating in the last one which is entirely told by a machine and is the best of the lot. The last machine is left on a hill, with 47 years to kill and enough energy to spend it actively. It decides on a review of literature and music and a study of science. I liked it.
The last story is the only one I remember after all these years. The armored tank wakes up in a machine shop and quickly determines that its side had lost the battle, it had been knocked out of action and it was now about to be dismantled and studied by the enemy. When the enemy realizes that the tank is still alive (in an AI sense of alive), they attempt to kill it by electrocution. That in fact charges the tank's batteries and turns it from a weakened and disabled tank to a primed fighting machine. The tank defeats the immediate enemy and then re-activates the other tanks from its side to sweep the enemy off the planet and turn defeat into victory. Now in command of the planet, the surviving tanks send a message to the home base many light years away. They know it will take 47 years for anyone to reach them, but that's not a problem for beings that don't age the way humans do. They settle down to wait and pursue their private intellectual projects.
I like military fiction. I like science fiction. And so, of course, I like military science fiction. There are more bad than good examples of the genres, but sometimes we make allowances for books that aren't as well written as we'd like but are about a subject of interest. I think that last story was one that didn't require me to make too many concessions. It was pretty good.
"Ogre" is the name of a strategy board game that my son Daniel and I used to play. I don't remember how old he was at the time, but I'm thinking somewhere starting at perhaps 9 or 10 years old.
| Author | Boswell, James |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1966 |
| Copyright Date | 1790 |
| Number of Pages | 458 |
| Extras | index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Biography |
| When Read | July 1984 |
A biography of Samuel Johnson by a contemporary friend and acolyte.
I have commented on Johnson in a number of entries in the diary. A brilliant man, yet pompous,arrogant, pious, conservative, interested as much or more in his own wit as in the truth of what he argues for. And Boswell - himself a man of some ability who nevertheless put himself almost completely under the shadow of Johnson. Surely this is an original and yet archetypal relationship in all of literature.
Johnson had prodigious ability. All his arguments are keen - even when wrongheaded. I also had to admire his total dedication, if not to truth, then to intelligence. He was always determined to be intelligent, to read, to think, to express himself as forcefully and eloquently as possible. All this in spite of a great laziness which he would easily have indulged - spending his time in food, drink, and socializing.
B's approach to biography was to again and again and again write down what the man said. He gives analysis, he tells occasional anecdotes of eccentric behavior, he does sum up the man in a few pages at the end, but the core of the book is a record of Johnson's spoken words. This is a form of respect which could not be found today. No modern biographer could be so humble. None since Freud could take a man so literally. Thus Boswell gives the modern reader a foil against which to understand the conventions of modern biography as well as its 18th century subject.
A fine work besides.
My diary entries discuss some of the specifics of Johnson's ideas, and some of mine too. I comment on both of our propensities for daydreaming and what, in his case but not mine, might be called magical thinking, though maybe mine is too.
Nothing that I wrote in 1984 could be called an "abstract" of the book. However I thought there ought to be one so I added the sentence in the "abstract" above now, in 2016.
| Author | Lem, Stanislaw |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Polish |
| Translators | Kandel, Michael |
| Publication | San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983 |
| Copyright Date | 1968 |
| Number of Pages | 199 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | July 1984 |
An American mathematician, Hogarth, is co-opted by his government to work on a secret project to decode a neutrino transmission which appears to have been sent by an intelligent race from outside the solar system. Hogarth's greatest fear is that they will discover something which contributes to the building of a weapon. They almost do, but the discovery turns out to be essentially and absolutely worthless as a weapon.
The book is reminiscent of Solaris. Highly intellectual, deeply involved in the processes and personality of advanced science, it is very serious SF. In the end, only a small portion of the message can be decoded and we are left not even knowing for sure that it is a message.
As in Solaris, the description of contending schools of scientific thought is brilliant. Lem is extremely imaginative in spinning complete, plausible, interesting theoretical systems which are all mutually exclusive. He handles cosmology, mathematics, and biology with equal ease and convincing authority. His politics are humane and advanced - nicely concealed in an attack on the U.S. - which really just as clearly cuts the USSR.
As in his other works, it is also a book genuinely concerned with the large questions of life. His character is complex and misanthropic and humane at the same time. There is a clear passage in which the narrator, Hogarth/Lem, takes himself to task for getting along in the world - pursuing a private life.
Very good, vintage, serious Lem.
I seem to recall passages in this book where Hogarth or another scientist produces a report and delivers a theory about the message replete with excellent documentation of the evidence and convincing logic. Then another scientist, working independently with a different team, gives an equally excellent and convincing report, but with a conclusion that contradicts the first report. The two presentations highlight both the difficulty of doing science, and the interrelation of the empirical problems of the subject matter of science and the human and social problems that plague the scientists.
Lem became my favorite SF writer. I have read many other good ones both before and since, but he still ranks at least as high as any other SF writer in my estimation.
| Author | Austen, Jane |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: New American Library, Signet Classics, 1961 |
| Copyright Date | 1811 |
| Number of Pages | 314 |
| Extras | Afterword by Caroline Mercer, punctuation and spelling revised. |
| Genres | Fiction; Romance |
| When Read | August 1984 |
At the turn of the 19th century, the Misses Dashwood, Elinor and Marianne, have come of age into a middle class home with no father and a total family income of 500 pounds - enough to live comfortably in a country cottage, but not elegantly. Elinor, 19, has "sense". She is practical, careful, always sensitive and considerate to others, carefully restrained in her own behavior. Marianne, 16, is full of passionate "sensibility". Each appears to love and lose. Marianne falls madly in love with handsome, dashing Willoughby, only to find he toyed with her and then married someone else for money. Elinor falls in love with Edward Ferrars but finds that he is trapped in a secret engagement to Lucy Steele, a grasping person beneath his own class. In the final pages however all comes right in a fairy tale ending for both of love, money, and family happiness.
The story is pure soap opera but the writing is more than competent. Characters, especially the avaricious ones, are very nicely characterized and delineated. There are scenes of very excellent comedy and very acute observation. The story is told fluently and effectively and, despite the dramatic turns of plot, with some plausibility at every turn.
This is supposed to be the weakest of Miss Austen's novels. If so, I am willing to read more.
More notes in the diary.
This was the first of Austen's books that I read. I went on to read all of the others and also to read a biography of her. She was an important writer, and I've written much more about her. My notes on this first book are much more extensive in the diary than in the 3x5 inch index card entry.
| Author | Figes, Eva |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Pantheon Books, 1983 |
| Number of Pages | 81 |
| Genres | Fiction; Biographical fiction |
| When Read | August 1984 |
One single day at Claude Monet's country home is portrayed in the year 1900. He arises before dawn and goes out to the river to paint it in dawn light. He returns. The perspective shifts to that of his old wife Alice, then to servant, grandchild, Alice's daughters Marthe, and Germaine, the Monet's son Michel, and back to each again. Each perspective is impressionistic, deeply interior in each person's consciousness. We learn something of the essence of each person first in a reflection from that person's own point of view, then we see how shallowly each person is perceived form the point of view of the others.
The narrative is permeated with observations of light - the main subject of Claude's search in his painting.
The writing is excellent. Individual roles in the family are perceived with grat keenness and insight. The special problems of women and children are understood and portrayed. Alice's developing madness is chilling in the success of its description. Claude's obsession and his achievement, though not in the foreground of the novel, are deeply appreciated.
All in all an outstanding little book. There is much about it in the diary.
I read this book for our book club and wrote these notes before the book club meeting to discuss it. I wrote a number of extensive observations about the book in the first three August, 1984 entries. Then on September 27, I wrote about the book after the book club meeting. It turned out that I liked it best of all the readers. Some thought it was quite bad. Vicki Porter, for example, thought it was terrible. Vicki is an art historian and, if my diary entry is fair to her, she thought that the passages about light "... not only failed to capture anything of the quality of light, but were absolute disasters of writing - gross, forced, manipulative attempts at observation which were not real observations at all." Jody Maier, a young man working as a translator of English from and to the Romance languages, "thought it was a failed book, one which attempted to achieve something but could not, and wound up 'thematizing' everything."
I believe that Jody (a fine person who died of AIDS decades ago) and Vicki were sophisticated readers and I like to believe that I am too. So this is one of those books that sophisticated readers had radically different reactions to. Each side had some success in convincing the others though.
| Author | Innes, Hammond |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986 |
| Copyright Date | 1956 |
| Number of Pages | 276 |
| Genres | Fiction; Thriller |
| When Read | August 1984 |
John Sands, a salvage diver, is sailing the English Channel in a storm when his boat is almost run down by an old steamer. The next day he sights the steamer and goes aboard while his boat sails on to a Channel port, unable to take him off again in the storm. On board he meets Patch, an obsessed captain, all alone. There is a dramatic struggle to keep the ship afloat, an inquiry afterward, a desperate attempt to reach the ship again - pursued by a murderous rogue (including rowing and swimming), and a final exoneration of Patch.
It was a very satisfying adventure tale. There was almost a smell of damp wool and salt and scraped knuckles about these characters. Innes has the feel not only of the sea, but also of the professional seamen who live and work on it. The details of ships and storms were excellent and the characterizations - thin as they were - very acceptable. The love interest did not even concern the main character - a mark of a tale of suspense.
I liked it. A fine example of its kind.
I have a limited memory of this book, but I have read three Hammond Innes novels since this one in 2014, 2015, and 2016. I still like his characters and his seafaring stories but they're no longer available in the Baltimore County Library. When I came across some more I read and enjoyed them. The recent editions are brought out by one of the ebook publishers but this one, read in paper, was published by Knopf, a top of the line publishing house.
Looking this up in the Wikipedia I found some information that I didn't record but probably should have. Patch was a first officer, not a captain. Sands boarded the ship thinking that it was a derelict that he could commandeer for salvage, but Patch convinced him to stay and help him attempt to beach the ship, which would prevent Sands from declaring it as salvage, but he helped anyway. In the inquiry it was learned that the owners had planned to wreck the ship, presumably for the insurance claim, and make Patch the fall guy.
This was made into a movie starring Gary Cooper in 1959.
| Author | Toland, John |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Random House, 1970 |
| Number of Pages | 547-1181 |
| Extras | index, sources, notes, maps |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | August 1984 |
This is the conclusion of Toland's history.
To me it seemed clear that the Japanese could not understand or deal with their defeat. When faced with defeat on land or sea, time and again they resorted to the suicidal attack in desperate and foredoomed attempts to win or lose all in a "single decisive battle". They always lost. They also lied to themselves about the true situation, thus misleading commanders about the seriousness of their plight and causing that many more losses.
Particularly amazing to me was that, not only were the Japanese not ready to surrender before the bomb was dropped, not all were resigned to surrender after two bombs and a Russian declaration of war! The army and navy leadership both argued strenuously for a final decisive battle on the home islands and only gave in when the Emperor took the unprecedented step of personally calling for an end to the war. Even then die-hards attempted a coup and many committed suicide.
While feeling great admiration for their courage and great sympathy for their suffering, I am still glad that such a warped society was defeated and transformed.
I have read a lot since finishing this book many years ago, all of it in essential agreement with what I wrote about my conclusions from Toland. However I would not, today, choose the same words to write about their courage and their suffering. The code of the warrior, or however we describe what animated the Japanese officer class, wasn't just about personal sacrifice for the sake of honor. It also included mass sacrifice of others for the sake of the honor of the man ordering the sacrifice, and it required that the honorable one hide the truth from himself and others.
I have wondered if the Japanese could have won the battle at Guadalcanal if they had not stupidly believed and acted upon their own false reports of victories. On balance, I think it likely that the Marines and the Navy would have beaten them anyway, but it would have been a close thing and the Japanese might well have won. However, whether they won or lost at Guadalcanal, and even if they had won at Midway, they would surely have been defeated in the end and, since they were unable to accept defeat, would have been pulverized and "ground into powder", as Winston Churchill predicted they would be and as, in fact, they were.
I thought that Japan 1941, Countdown to Infamy by Eri Hotta was particularly good at describing the political situation in Japan before the start of the war. If I understood her analysis, a significant number of the militarists who insisted on starting the war had strong misgivings. They believed themselves to be stronger than they actually were and believed the Americans to be weaker than they were, but even at the beginning of the war they understood that the odds were against them. Their own war college studies showed that they would not win, though they managed to blind themselves to the facts. But by the end of the war they all must have understood, not only that they were going to lose, but that they were going to lose catastrophically. However they were more afraid of losing face among their fellow officers than of throwing away their own and others' lives.
Is that "honor", or is it something else? It seems like something else to me.
| Author | Bayley, Barrington J. |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: DAW Books, 1982 |
| Number of Pages | 159 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | August 1984 |
Another far future tale. A hunchback named Mudworm living on a disgusting planet has been rescued by a philosophical society and rebuilt with computer implanted silicon bones capable of greatly enhancing all of his emotional experiences. With the bones "on", he is caught in a terrible fire and put through a horrendous agony - the worst any human could ever suffer. Then, because science has proven that the universe repeats its development in endless identical cycles, he goes on a quest for a means to change the universe - to prevent this from happening again and again in future cycles.
This paradoxical plot is the center of a novel with some philosophical and cultural imagination. Bayley presents the same vision of a corrupt and seedy civilization seen in The Garments of Caean, though without the attraction of the art of attire.
Some of the imaginative twiddles include the bones, packs of cards with philosophical significance - to be studied and interpreted, "boems" - crystals which may be sapient - or may not be - and are used to put a spark of life in mechanical toys, time jewels which contain images of past and future fleeting in their facets, sex killing with clone rebirth, "adplants" of ADP equipment built in to human bodies providing reliable memory and computing power, and much more.
It is unusual SF, not conforming to any standard formulas. It employs many gadgets but isn't based on them as much as some books.
Not as good as Garments, but still interesting. Not so much good as interesting.
I remember that, after reading The Garments of Caean, I was eager to read more of Bayley's writing. This is the only other book of his that I have read to date. Now, via the magic of the Internet, I see that many of his books, perhaps all of them, are available again. Maybe I'll try another one.
| Author | Thoreau, Henry David |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Collier Books, 1964 |
| Copyright Date | 1854 |
| Number of Pages | 255 |
| Genres | Non-fiction |
| When Read | October 1984 |
p. 228 - "I learned this at least by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; ..."
Walden, or Life in the Woods is the record of the first year of T's life in a cabin of his own construction in a secluded area by a small lake, Walden Pond. He presents an attractive libertarian anarchist view of life in which it is what one thinks and does by oneself, not one's wealth and position, that are important. A day spent chinking a wall, measuring a pond, conversing with a friend, or even watching clouds roll by, can be well spent if a person really lives and appreciates that time.
It is a literate, intelligent, poetic book, full of keen observations on nature and man. Perhaps we should treat its philosophy of life exactly as Thoreau seems to have done - something to understand and absorb - and then bring back to ordinary life.
Duty is a classic analysis of how it is not the slaveholder and general who make slavery and imperialism possible, but the liberal gentlemen who, every four years, vote for a liberal government, then continue to pay taxes and turn their heads whatever happens, absorbed in their private lives.
I felt terribly guilty reading it though T seems to admit that only the man who is ready to give up family, wealth, and position can brave the retaliation of the state.
Walden was published in 1854, On the Duty in 1848.
I have transcribed this card two days after the election of Donald Trump to be President of the United States. All over the country, young people and not so young people are demonstrating in the streets. While they are doing that, I am sitting alone in my room at home, watching YouTube videos of Stanley Jordan, the incomparable jazz guitarist, and transcribing this book card. I spent many hours in the last month canvassing neighborhoods for Hillary Clinton but now I don't know what to do. I'll hunker down and think about things. I'm more in the Walden than the civil disobedience mood.
| Author | Cunningham, E.V. (pseud of Howard Fast) |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1982 |
| Copyright Date | 1977 |
| Number of Pages | 159 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | October 1984 |
A simply written mystery about a murder in Beverly Hills committed by an actress / housewife against a former Nazi killer who killed her father in a concentration camp and was now trying to get a famous postage stamp which her mother had owned (and wasn't aware of.)
The hero of the case is detective sergeant Masao Masuto, a Japanese American who practices Zen and is married to a very traditional woman who loves him unreservedly. He solves the case, gets all the bad guys, deduces that she killed the Nazi, but lets her go free because of lack of evidence.
It is a professionally written story, clearly with some story telling interest by the author even if it is a pot boiler. The mystery aspects are, as is often the case in the genre, contrived. The solution is achieved by rather forced deductions and one or two improbably coincidences. The best part is the portrayal of Masuto and his fellow cops as harassed human beings. Masuto has several interesting reflections on his attraction to the actress and his marriage to his unexciting wife - concluding that he and his wife are bound together forever.
Fast was a prolific writer who lived a long and productive life. Based on information in the Wikipedia, his first book was written at age 18 and his last published at age 87, two years before his death. It is not unusual for writers of very different genres to use more than one name. "Cunningham" was a name he used for his seven Masao Masuto novels.
This book has Fast's trademark political perspective. More power to him. I very much like that aspect of his writing.
I've learned that at least one reason prolific authors use multiple pseudonyms is that they and their publishers are afraid that, if the readers learned that an author published five books in a year, they migh conclude that he couldn't have put much into each of them. Fast however also had other problems. Quite possibly, some of the Masao Masuto readers would not have bought the books if they knew that a left wing writer produced them.
| Author | Adler, Renata |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Random House, 1976 |
| Number of Pages | 178 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | October 1984 |
A sort of novel consisting of individual chapters, some previously and separately published, relating anecdotes and observations in an autobiographical style.
Most of the anecdotes are witty and interesting. They are full of small but insightful observations on how people converse on an airplane or meet in a hallway, sportswriters talking, professors talking, vacationers talking, people falling in love, people attacking each other, people in bars, whatever.
There is no plot. Few anecdotes run longer than a page and they are at best loosely connected within a chapter. They bear the marks of their origins - witty chit chat, magazine publishing in the New Yorker - possibly in the "Talk of the Town" column.
The prose has a kind of sparkling, easy to read, no personal involvement required quality. It is comedy, intended to entertain - but intelligently - with observations that strike home often enough.
| Author | Abelard, Peter |
|---|---|
| Original Language | la |
| Translators | Bellows, Henry Adams |
| Publication | New York: MacMillan Co., 1972 |
| Copyright Date | 1135 |
| Number of Pages | 96 |
| Extras | Introduction by Ralph Adams Cram |
| Genres | Non-fiction |
| When Read | October 1984 |
Abelard tells his story of love, castration and battles with his scholastic enemies with some verve and poetry and with a neurotic obsession with fighting his enemies. He also magnifies his suffering, possibly to convince Heloise and others that he suffered worse than her.
The love story is charming. He is the handsome young intellectual star. She is beautiful, intelligent, warm, and pure. He writes, "No degree in love's progress was left untried by our passion, and if love itself could imagine any wonder as yet unknown, we discovered it."
Yet most of the story is his battles over scholastic matters, his determination to vanquish all others in debate, his provoking of all others to personal attacks on himself - perhaps because of his intellectual vanity. Again and again he is accused of heresy in his philosophical and theological work, though he always successfully defends himself.
It is easy to laugh at Abelard but in fact he was a giant who should be understood and appreciated rather than mocked. Like many of the great intellects I have known, he was vain and foolish, but also penetrating enough to know his own foolishness as well as anyone.
The story is fascinating. Surprisingly to me, I felt I learned more about Abelard himself from it than about his times.
I put "1135" in the cpyrt_date field because that is the date that the work was written, or perhaps offered to others. The translation was copyrighted in 1922.
I know hardly anything of medieval philosophy and theology, or the extent to which those were two different intellectual domains. I once asked Roger Ariew (my old friend from the University of Illinois), about it. I knew what philosophy was suggested possible definitions of theology using examples of questions that theology might try to answer. He didn't like any of my example questions. Then I suggested that theology was about questions like "Is God one or three?" He smiled and gave his assent to that one.
However I do know a bit about intellectual arrogance. I've encountered it in school and at work. I learned not to be put off by it. It is not unusual for brilliant people to think very highly of themselves. That doesn't make them any less brilliant or really any less worthy of friendship and regard. I may have first learned that from Roger. In any case, Abelard didn't put me off. While I don't envy him and would be frightened to death to stand in his shoes, I do believe that he was a very bright and interesting guy (as is Roger.)
Incidentally, I notice from my book cards that Abelard is the first in alphabetical order of all of the authors I have read.
| Author | Baron, Richard |
|---|---|
| Author | Baum, Abe, Major |
| Author | Goldhurst, Richard |
| Publication | New York: G.P. Putnam's sons, 1981 |
| Number of Pages | 283 |
| Extras | maps |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | October 1984 |
On March 25, 1945 a task force of 53 medium and light tanks, half-tracks, self-propelled guns, and scout cars and 253 men punched through the German lines and headed for a POW camp 60 miles behind the lines. They made it the next day, wreaking havoc on several rail lines and training camps along the way. They broke into the camp, liberated the prisoners, and tried to fight back to their own lines. However the mission was impossible. They were blocked in the second night, then blown to pieces the next morning when they tried to break out. All of the POWs and almost all of the task force was captured and put back in the Hammelburg camp.
Patton may have ordered the raid simply to free his own son-in-law who was a prisoner at the camp - though he later denied it. Or it may have been a successful diversion. In his journal he decried it as the biggest mistake of his career - his failure to send a stronger force. By clamping "Top Secrecy" on the raid he incriminated himself.
The book is very good. It gives an authentic account of fighting through a rear area; maneuvering tanks at night without knowledge of the enemy positions; tank against tank; tank against infantry; ability to control men in confused conditions, etc. Even then, infantry with Panzerfausts were death to tanks at night, in forest, or in any other conditions than high speed, open country fighting. Morale, tiredness, logistics, maps, communications, knowledge of terrain, surprise - all played key roles. Author Abe Baum led the task force.
I remember a surprising amount about this book. I remember, for example, the surprise of both Germans and Americans as the American tanks tore along a road past a German training camp where recruits were practicing on the drill grounds. The tankers, who were relatively experienced troops by then, quickly opened fire on the recruits, who were stunned and unable to effectively respond.
I remember a group of four "Elefants", the heavy self-propelled guns or tank destroyers that the Germans were able to bring to bear on the raiders on the second day, decimating the American armor and dooming the remnants to capture or disorderly retreat.
I especially remember the elation of the American prisoners when they saw the American vehicles at the gates of the camp, followed by horror and fury when the vehicles withdrew at high speed without them. Most of the men stayed in the camp, believing that there was no chance for them to make it back to the American lines. Others attempted to follow the raiders out, hoping that, even if they couldn't keep up with the fleeing vehicles they could still get through what they hoped would be disorganized German lines. Most of these men were killed or recaptured but a few did get through.
And, if I remember correctly, Patton's son-in-law was called out by name, placed in a vehicle, and rushed out. I seem to recall that he was wounded and maybe recaptured. I don't remember. However, at the time I read the book, it seemed to me that he was clearly the object of the raid. There were nowhere near enough vehicles to get a majority of the men out and there couldn't have been any real plan to save them. Patton, a man whom I believe made a substantial contribution towards winning the war, was fully capable of being an ass and demonstrated that multiple times in his career.
| Author | Warner, Rex |
|---|---|
| Publication | Boston: Little Brown and Co. "An Atlantic Monthly Press Book", 1966 |
| Copyright Date | 1941 |
| Number of Pages | 302 |
| Extras | Introduction by Angus Wilson |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | November 1984 |
An allegorical novel, subtitled "a love story"
A young man, Roy, living in a rural town in an unspecified country, learns on his birthday that his putative father, rector of the local church, is not his real father. But he is told no more than that. He falls in love with a barmaid and they plan to marry. Partly at her urging, he joins the air force and goes to work at the local aerodrome. He advances rapidly, soon becoming assistant to the air vice marshal.
There is a lot of plot. A young airman kills the Rector in a reckless accident. The same man seduces Roy's wife. Roy leaves her and takes up with the wife of the chief scientist. The air vice marshal turns out to be Roy's real father.
The subject of the story is fascism. The air vice marshal is planning a coup d'etat, to implement his philosophy of discipline, hard work, and single-minded dedication. He is foiled by Roy's final act of rebellion - a refusal to assist in the coup and a return to his fallen wife. There is a reaffirmation of love over hate and of humanity over political regimentation.
The writing is acceptable but not good. The plot and theme are very heavy handed. One can only suppose that the book was written under the exigencies of the war against fascism. Oddly, Roy never really revolts at the end. He does not sabotage the coup so much as abstain from it. He never repudiates the air vice marshal himself, only his ideas. Those ideas are wildly silly to boot.
I remember nothing of this novel at this moment. Yet the Wikipedia authors portray this man as someone I should appreciate. He was a political leftist, a novelist, a poet, an author of literary criticism and literary biography, a translator of works in Latin and ancient and modern Greek, and an author of historical, philosophical, and political non-fiction. In his New York Times obituary, V.S. Pritchett wrote that Warner was "the only outstanding novelist of ideas whom the decade of ideas produced".
I know that in 1984 I was fantasizing about flying sailplanes again and actually did it less than two years later. It's very possible that I spotted this book at a library, thought it might be about airplanes and flying, maybe even saw that it was written in England in 1941, and read it for that reason. Perhaps I was looking for the wrong things and missed some good thing because of it.
Memory is fluid and elusive. I wrote on last October 23 that I remember nothing of this novel. Now I seem to recall something of it. Is it that I really am remembering something from 1984, or only that I'm remembering something from 2016 and projecting it backward. At other times however I'll read a note that is only a few months old that claims that I remembered a lot, but on this day that I'm reading the note I'm marveling at what I remembered. Maybe it's my age, though I suspect that I've always been like that. We humans don't have the perfect memory of computers.
| Author | Kazantzakis, Nikos |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Greek |
| Translators | Bien, Peter A. |
| Publication | New York: Simon and Schuster, 1962 |
| Copyright Date | 1956 |
| Number of Pages | 379 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| When Read | November 1984 |
A novelized account of the life of St. Francis as related by Brother Leo, who has accompanied him in his journey from young rake to saint.
Francis is depicted as a man for whom no sacrifice is enough. No humiliation is enough. No mortification is enough. In his search for God, his submission to God, he believes that he must always give more, always dig deeper and deeper to root out the selfishness in himself.
K says that he cried over many of the pages in this book. It is easy to see why. After each mortification, when Francis proves himself e.g., by carrying the leper, it is always necessary to go further. It is necessary to make him kiss the leper on the lips. It is as if K himself is driven, not wanting to force his hero into each successive catastrophe, loving his hero so that it hurt to do this, yet himself forced by his vision of the saint to make Francis do what he himself could not do. Like Brother Leo, he follows along, protesting, yet submitting to God's will through Francis.
The book is a brilliant statement of faith. It is a primitive faith but it is taken to its highest extreme. The characters are attractive and the impulse to sainthood is made comprehensible in its own terms.
There are also good passages covering an audience with the Pope, the Crusades, the development of the Franciscan order and its subversion by scholars and bureaucrats.
I now know that K had a PhD in philosophy, that he was a political leftist though not a Stalinist, that he traveled widely, lived in different countries, and spoke many languages, even making a living by translating English, French, and German books into Greek. So in spite of the religious subject of this book, I find it hard to see him as a simple Greek Orthodox religious believer. He clearly was a deeply "spiritual" man in the sense of being concerned with attaining an altruistic and selfless life. But he was also cognizant of the difficulty, I should even say impossibility, of his attaining spiritual perfection. Unlike Francis, K would have been held back not only by weakness, but by rationalism (in the philosophical not the psychological sense) and doubt. At least that's what I now think.
Seven years passed since my reading of The Last Temptation of Christ and another twelve passed after Saint Francis before I read Zorba the Greek. Each book gave me a steadily deepening appreciation of Kazantzakis, however perhaps it was the very power and force of each book that led me to delay so long before I read the next.
| Author | Simak, Clifford D. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Cambridge, MA: Robert Bentley, 1979 |
| Copyright Date | 1963 |
| Number of Pages | 210 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | November 1984 |
A soldier in the Civil War returns home to his farm in Wisconsin. His mother dies and his father is killed in a farm accident. He works on alone. He is contacted by an alien who recruits him to run a way station on a galactic travel route. They convert his house, filling it with machinery and his own personal simulated rifle range for amusement, and armor it on the outside. The inside is filled with fabulous gifts from travelers and with journals recording all the visits. The keeper never ages inside his house and so is still in his 30's after all the years.
His peace is disrupted by events on earth and in the galaxy. The CIA has become aware of him and has his house under observation. A local deaf-mute with extraordinary psychic powers has befriended him and sought his protection against her bullying father. Meanwhile galactic amity is disintegrating as the center of its spiritual force, the "talisman" has been stolen and it looks like the Earth station may be abandoned.
Of course it all comes to a crisis at the earth station when the alien thief of the talisman appears, fights, and is killed by the keeper, and the deaf-mute girl turns out to be the next and greatest guardian of the talisman.
The story is less shlocky than it sounds. There are many fascinating devices - especially the semi-materialized dream people of the keeper's imagination, the rifle range, and some others. Good imagination, decent writing, fair conception - OK.
I didn't remember any of the detail of the story but did remember that there was a Union soldier from the Civil War who went back to his farm and became an ageless person in a house modified by aliens. I have long dreamed of a similar future for myself. How wonderful it would be if Marcia and I could live on in our house forever, or at least for a long, long time. Even if we were never able to leave the house, or better, the house and grounds, that would be fine with me. I'd have my books, my Internet access, TV, and Marcia. Our kids could visit us - though I never worked out a way to incorporate ageless immortality into a scenario with the kids. There are problems with each of the potential solutions to the child problem, and I don't know if Marcia could stand being permanently at home.
Did this fantasy originate with my reading of Way Station? It might have. I was only 38 years old when I read it. Aging was still an abstract thing. Mortality was real to me but I'm not sure my fantasies had much to do with defeating it. Maybe Simak planted a seed in my mind about this.
| Author | Priestley, J.B. |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Stein and Day, 1978 |
| Copyright Date | 1946 |
| Number of Pages | 229 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | December 1984 |
Published in My Three Favorite Novels pp 373-602.
Gregory Dawson, a 50 year old script writer, goes to a hotel by the sea in England to finish off a film script. He meets an old couple there that he knew in 1913-14 and recalls his youth in Yorkshire. The story is a mixture of these recollections with current times.
He worked in a wool exporter's office then, writing on the side, and fell in with the Alington family - three beautiful daughters, two lively and intelligent sons, music, fun, friendship - all destroyed by catastrophes. Meanwhile Gregory's current life is losing its meaning. He has offers to return to Hollywood and even to be the lover of a beautiful film star and old friend. But he doesn't want any of it. He's burned out. He has no purpose in life. He detests the anti-realism of the film industry and the falseness of the scripts he has to write.
In the end he joins a group of young film makers who want, under union auspices, to setup a new studio to do left wing films. He meets a woman who knew him then - and there may be a future for them.
The writing is excellent. There is much Proustian recollection at the beginning and then always a sophisticated tone, a consciousness of effect, some clearness of observation. He makes social and political points but successfully avoids heavy-handedness.
The solution at the end is too sudden and hence forced. He has not developed it out of the story but tacked it on and worked it in. Still, it is not altogether unacceptable. He does offer a social solution to his existential problem.
There is a much more complete and interesting account of this book in the Wikipedia. See the entry for "Bright Day". The entry for "J. B. Priestley" is also good. He fought in the first world war, suffering serious injuries, and then later worked on behalf of labor and socialism, and very much against Nazism and Stalinism. He helped the Labour Party win in the 1945 elections, was a founding member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, author of Literature and Western Man "a 500-page survey of Western literature in all its genres", and did many other things. He died less than four months before I found and read this book.
I don't remember this book and can't say how much I liked it at the time or how much it meant to me. I don't see anything about it in the diary. However I did read another of his books in 1989.
| Author | Le Carre, John |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974 |
| Number of Pages | 355 |
| Genres | Fiction; Thriller; Spy |
| When Read | December 1984 |
George Smiley, forcibly retired leading member of London's espionage apparatus, is recalled by the minister's office to ferret out a spy in the top levels of "the Circus". Wading through a mass of details in the files, and in interviews with peripheral people, all done secretly, he gradually closes in on and catches the spy.
As in his other books, L pays great attention to authenticity and detail - not the detail of the "trade-craft" of spies, though that is there too, but the details of cynicism, careerism, and frustration in the spy service. These are the materials which the Russians use to defeat them and which Smiley must trace to unravel the deceptions.
As usual, L plays out his interviews to give us the full flavor of the interaction. There is never just an exchange of information. We always get the nuance of expression - as important as the rest.
It is a straightforward story, not so full of cross and double-cross as his others, but just as full of disillusionment.
The character of Smiley is most attractive. Fat, elderly, short, myopic, still in love with his faithless wife. He is polite and considerate, unable even to disappoint a lousy waiter at a bad restaurant. But he works hard, methodically, and logically. He summons the courage and wisdom he needs. His archenemy Karla sees his love of his wife as "the last illusion of the illusionless man."
I think this was my first introduction to George Smiley. I read the earlier books where he first appeared after this one.
I think most spy thrillers feature either a James Bond style action hero or perhaps a Sherlock Holmes style deduction genius. Smiley is outstanding at deduction but he's very much a human being. I still find him attractive in all of the books in which he featured. Alec Guinness captured him perfectly in the film adaptations of Le Carre's novels.
I have liked some of Le Carre's books better than others, but I've never read one I didn't like at all.
| Author | Sennett, Richard |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984 |
| Number of Pages | 222 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| Keywords | Music |
| When Read | December 1984 |
A novel about musicianship. Alexander Hoffman, son of Jewish communists in Chicago, grandson of a scrap iron millionaire immigrant, learns first the piano and then the cello. He becomes highly proficient, studies with an eminent master, attends a conservatory in New York, and starts a successful career as a concert soloist and recording artist. He also marries Susan Fields, a pianist who just does not have the depth of feeling or expression to be successful in her work. She grows to hate him for his success and her failure. She is unfaithful. They have fights. She is killed in an auto accident.
The story intertwines these events with Alexander's developing musicianship. We watch as he discovers hand positions for the cello, as he struggles with vibrato - learning to relax, as he begins to appreciate the interplay of instruments, as he learns to understand a composer's intention.
The music passages are fascinating, both informative and inspiring. The book is a very serious attempt to present the life of a professional musician to the non-professional reader. Clearly, S had progressed very far in his own musical training.
The character and social development is also excellent (I am better able to judge that.) His descriptions of Party activism, Jewish American life, the difficulties of marital relationships, the Italian exile's feelings about living in a foreign country, etc., are all full of insight and subtle observation. [Oddly, I completely disagreed with the book's dust jacket blurb.]
Good writing. Excellent content.
There's no telling what parts of the books we read, or for that matter what parts of any of our experiences, will remain with us for 32 years. Typing up this book card I did not remember that Susan Fields was unfaithful to her husband or had died in an auto accident. Yet I do remember a scene in which she has become part of a quartet class at her music school. She was the pianist, Alexander was the cellist, and there were a violinist and a violist. The professor listens to them play, is pleased with the string players but not with the pianist. He says to himself, "This is going to be one of those classes, three strong players and a weak one."
I know something about this from my own career as a computer programmer. I have been on teams in which I believed myself to be one of the strong programmers and also on teams in which I believed myself to be one of the weaker ones. It was because of that experience that I chose to retire when I did. I would like to have continued working, but not if I couldn't be the kind of contributor that I felt I ought to be. I found that humiliating. I was becoming ashamed to take my pay. So today I have a better understanding of Susan Fields and maybe know something new about Richard Sennett which I didn't know when I read this book. Unlike Susan Fields, perhaps because of my age and experience or perhaps because of my temperament, I only admired the stronger programmers and, if I hated anyone, it was myself. I would never have sought to punish those who did better than me. Also, because of my age and experience and my life with Marcia, I could manage to overcome any self-hatred. I am who I am and what matters is not just my achievement but also my attitude and my effort.
I think this book was very much about those kinds of struggles, struggles that are present in every field, not just music and computer programming.