Books read January through December 1986
| Author | MacLean, Alistair |
|---|---|
| Publication | Garden City: Doubleday and Co., 1969 |
| Copyright Date | 1969 |
| Number of Pages | 281 |
| Genres | Fiction; Thriller |
| When Read | January 1986 |
Major Paul Sherman of the London Bureau of Interpol flies to Amsterdam with two beautiful young women, Maggie and Belinda, to destroy a drug ring. His contact in Amsterdam is murdered. Eventually Maggie is also murdered, and another young woman is murdered.
The gang turns out to be controlled at the top by a high ranking police officer and, below him, a crew of psychotics, killers, addicts, and money grubbers. Sherman finds them out and kills or captures them all by derring do, climbs on roof tops, swims in the harbor, endures terrible beatings and tortures - always survives. In the end he kills the bad cop, saves Belinda - who is 22 and beautiful, and marries her.
There is nothing particularly good about this book. It's a simple pot boiler, filled with formula action and a beautiful girl at the end.
I remember hardly anything about this book. What I've written above is all that I have. I was introduced to Alistair MacLean by his earlier WWII books - HMS Ulyses and The Guns of Navaronne. As time went by it seemed that the heart went out of his writing. But I respect his achievements.
| Author | Graves, Robert |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Random House, 1962 |
| Copyright Date | 1935 |
| Number of Pages | 467 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Roman Empire |
| When Read | January 1986 |
A continuation of I Claudius, picking up the story at the scene of Caligula's assassination and carrying it through to Claudius' own assassination 13 years later in 54 AD. The story is still told by Claudius himself, with three accounts of his death and a satirical attack on him by contemporary or later writers - I don't know if Graves wrote these or not.
Graves has thoroughly absorbed the period and is fluent in quoting Greek and Latin epigrams, in explicating Roman religious rites, and in countless details of the period. He has Claudius ordering terrible gladiatorial combats, mass executions, persecutions of Christians, torture of prisoners - all while making us feel what a wonderfully enlightened man he is. And next to Caligula we find him so. G constantly pokes the reader with this contradiction, making us more deeply aware of the historical grounding of our own, non-Roman consciousness.
In the end, everything falls apart for Claudius. His wife is finally revealed to him as the biggest slut in Rome. His son whom he loves and has carefully shielded is doomed to die in a futile noble attempt to fight Nero. He has killed hundreds of leading Romans. He did not restore the Republic.
As a seamless continuation of the first book, it is equally excellent.
When I read about the Roman Empire I feel a deep sense of what we might call the historicity of human civilization. We are deeply embedded in a culture that grew out of what came before. We cannot do whatever we like with it. It places boundaries on our lives and on our thinking. Studying classical Rome, a society that was very different from our contemporary society in so many ways, and maybe like ours in some other ways, helps us step outside of contemporary society just as our contemporary perspective helps us to gain a different view of Rome than the Romans had.
Robert Graves has stepped in and out of the two societies and developed considerable fluency in each. His fiction can give us inner insights that plain history cannot.
What a great writer he was.
| Author | Asimov, Isaac |
|---|---|
| Publication | Garden City: Doubleday and Co., 1985 |
| Number of Pages | 383 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | January 1986 |
Another extraordinarily readable and captivating book in the series Caves of Steel, Naked Sun, Robots of Dawn, and leading towards Foundation. This time the main characters are the two robots, R. Daneel Olivaw, who has been in all of them, and R. Giskard Reventlov, introduced in the last book.
It is 200 years after Dawn. Earth colonists have settled dozens of worlds and war threatens between the Spacer worlds and the Settler worlds. The Spacers live 300-400 years but have a stagnant culture in which robots do everything, while the Settlers ban robots, live human life spans, but have a vigorous, expanding culture. The two robots travel with Gladia to Solaria, which has been abandoned and booby trapped by the Solarians - who have disappeared, no one knows where. Humanoid robots have been left in charge with orders to kill non-human landers -where "humans" have been defined as speaking with a Solarian accent.
Over the course of the story, Daneel evolves the "zeroth law" of robotics - that a robot must place the good of humanity over that of individual humans, and Giskard evolves the first law of Psychohistory, that human behavior can only be predicted statistically in the mass.
Giskard allws the bad guys to make earth radioactive because he believes it will accelerate settlement. He dies, passing on his mind reading program to Daneel.
I love this stuff. Read it in two days with the flu.
Asimov was a favorite SF writer of mine and his robot series was my favorite group of his books. I loved his conception of robots, and I was sad to see the end of Asimov and the series. I think Roger MacBride Allen has done a creditable continuation of the series with his Caliban books.
| Author | Clancy, Tom |
|---|---|
| Publication | Annapolis, MD: U.S. Naval Institute Press |
| Copyright Date | 1984 |
| Number of Pages | 656 |
| Genres | Fiction; Thriller |
| When Read | March 1986 |
A highly technical nuclear submarine adventure about a Russian sub captain who plans to defect to the United States with his officers and his boat. It is a new, Gigantic, 30,000 ton "boomer" (missile sub) equipped with a low speed but very quiet tunnel drive. He stages an elaborate deception on his crew and slips into the Atlantic. Both fleets then search for him with the American fleet razzing the Russians and vice versa.
Many details are presented of electronic warfare, undersea events, military spying and decision making, etc.
The politics are very conservative. Yea for the Americans, boo for the bad Russians, yea for the good Russians - who must still be impressed by American prowess and surprised at American freedom.
A successful story of its type.
This was the first book by Clancy that I read and the first that he wrote - published two years before I read it. I later watched the movie version of it on TV, starring Sean Connery as the Russian captain.
Clancy was born a year after me but died in 2013. He was very conservative in his political views. According to the Wikipedia, he hoped to sell 5,000 copies of this book but sold 45,000 and then, when President Reagan said how much he liked it, sales went to over two million copies. He became a very wealthy man. Born in Baltimore, living in Maryland, and with a deep interest in the Navy, he sent his book to the Naval Institute Press, which never had a best seller in its entire publishing history before Clancy. An editor at the Press, Deborah Grosvenor, recognized the potential of the book and lobbied hard for the company to publish it. She was certainly right. As I recall, out of gratitude to the company, Clancy published a few more books with the Press but recognized that the big New York publishers could sell more of his books and switched to them.
I was never a big fan of Clancy. I liked the subject matter of the books but was less impressed with the characters, politics, and the qualities of the writing. I did read one more Clear and Present Danger and another that he wrote for an Air Force general who was not well prepared to write his own autobiography Every Man a Tiger. Now that I'm reading more books, faster, it's possible I'll read another some day - if I live long enough.
| Author | Sheckley, Robert |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Delacorte Press, 1966 |
| Number of Pages | 216 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | March 1986 |
Marvin Flynn responds to an ad from a Martian who wishes to swap minds with an Earthman. However after the swap he finds that there were prior claims on the Martian's body and he must vacate. Since the Martian scoundrel absconded with Marvin's body, Marvin has no choice but to accept a job and body on any available planet. He becomes a Melden Ganzer egg hunter, then escapes from that to become a Celsian public official with a possible bomb in his snout. He soon suffers metaphoric deformation and goes through successive Wild West, Mexican, and 17th century episodes. Finally he pursues the Martian into the Twisted World where he becomes convinced that he has arrived home in Stanhope New York. He settles down, marries, and lives ever after.
Only Sheckley could have written such a book. He fills it with wildly improbable characters who turn out to be just what they say they are, a detective who has lost 158 cases in a run of sheer bad luck, who indeed turns out to be supremely competent but unlucky. An expert in the "theory of searches" who knows nothing about the woman he is searching for but finds her, etc.
S seems to love to slip into parody - the wild west, three musketeers, whatever. Although the effect wears thin, I can't help being delighted.
Sheckley was one of my favorite SF writers. When I saw one of his books in one of the libraries in my area I always borrowed and read it. This book was typical of his writing - witty, absurd, funny, and with a hero who faces life head on, accepting absurdities when they occur.
| Author | Stapledon, Olaf |
|---|---|
| Publication | Los Angeles: Fantasy Publishing Co., 1949 |
| Copyright Date | 1947 |
| Number of Pages | 82 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | March 1986 |
Published in pages 6-88 in Worlds of Wonder.
A fellow receives a letter from a boyhood friend, now in an insane asylum, about the man's contact with an intelligent race of tiny flames. Separated from the Sun, their original home, at the time of the formation of the planets, they have survived as ash in rocks, or as living flames in furnaces and other hot spots.
The "flame race" is given a history, culture, mode of thinking and perception, even a religion, all in the grand Stapledon manner. They direct this man to discover them. They manipulate his thinking, even wrecking his marriage when they sense that his wife will be an obstruction. They try to enlist him as a go between to get humans to build a huge nuclear fire for them to live in. But he rebels at the manipulation and kills them. He is hospitalized as insane. He re-establishes contact. He writes again. Then he dies. The narrator never finds any living flames and concludes that they were a delusion of an insane man.
Again, Stapledon shows himself as a weak writer but a bold thinker. The flames are intelligent but not scientific. He imagines a race of artists and spiritual souls far advanced beyond our own, yet uncomprehending of any math or science. It is ingenious, but not as interesting as it could be. S is not himself enough of an artist to make an advanced art real.
Until the age of the Internet, access to Stapledon's books was particularly difficult. He was never a particularly popular writer and maybe even less so in the United States than his native Britain. I had read The Last and First Men and Odd John while working at the Pratt Central Library and liked them a lot, or at least liked the ideas in them a lot. So when I saw this on a library shelf and noticed that there was a Stapledon story in it, I borrowed and read it.
I've classified this as science fiction rather than fantasy even though Stapledon called it a fantasy. It seems to me that it was more like an SF novel.
| Author | Fast, Howard |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: William Morrow and Co., 1972 |
| Number of Pages | 192 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | American Revolution |
| When Read | April 1986 |
In a late year of the Revolutionary War, a detachment of Hessians lands in Connecticut and is sent through the countryside, past a town, to a hill, from which it is believed that they sent signals to a ship. On the way they capture the village idiot who has been following them and counting them on his school slate. They hang him as a spy. The village is aroused and the local militia attacks the Hessians on their way back, slaughtering all except the drummer boy, who ran away. The boy, wounded, eventually finds shelter in a Quaker house where the daughter of the house falls in love with him. He is eventually found, arrested, given an absurd trial by a gluttonous, cowardly, self-righteous army general, and hanged.
The tale is told by the village doctor, a misanthropic sort of man who is very hard on himself and his wife. He doesn't know if he is in love with the Quaker woman - and is hard on her too. He treats the boy's wounds and wants him to live, not because he has the Quakers' total regard for human life, but because he has seen enough killing in his life and wants no more.
It is a simple story told with the kind of respect for its characters which is a hallmark of Fast's writing and which elevates it above those of writers of similar competence. There is also Fast's concern with finding truth in history - with bringing out some aspect of what really happened or could have happened, that makes his writing instructive.
As a boy I was much interested in the Revolutionary War and in novels and histories about it. I read some of Fast's books for young people and liked them. As an adult I read more Fast and still liked him. This was not one of his best books but it was acceptably good.
| Author | Cherryh, C.J. |
|---|---|
| Author | Haldeman, Joe |
| Author | Zahn, Timothy |
| Editor | Mitchell, Elizabeth |
| Publication | New York: Baen Books, Simon and Schuster, 1985 |
| Number of Pages | 254 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | May 1986 |
Three SF stories. "The Scapegoat" by C.J. Cherryh. In a war between humans and a race called elves, a scout captures an enemy soldier who wants to make peace. He requires that he and the scout each commit suicide as part of the pact. They do.
"Seasons" by Joe Haldeman. A group of anthropologists living with a primitive alien race are attacked and eventually killed. They use all their skills to escape but fail. The entrepreneurs who follow them to the planet simply sweep the primitives aside.
"Cordon Sanitaire" a group of scientists exploring a planet come under attack and one of their own members goes crazy and joins the attackers. They eventually discover a very subtle means by which aliens from hundreds of years ago left this planet booby trapped.
All 3 stories are standard, professionally written, adventure SF. Nothing special, nothing particularly good. Only competence.
I left out Timothy Zahn's name in my original 1986 write-up. Now that everything is on amazon.com I was able to look up the book and find it.
Amazon lists this as "Book 1 of 3 in the Alien Stars series." They go on to list three books labeled, 1, 3, and 4. All are edited by Elizabeth Mitchell and each has three stories by well known authors. The last of the books was published in 1987.
| Author | Durden, Charles |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Viking Press, 1976 |
| Number of Pages | 287 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Vietnam War |
| When Read | May 1986 |
A Vietnam War story. Jamie "Hawk Hawkins is sent to Vietnam as a grunt. His company is assigned to guard a pig farm. Hawk cannot bring himself to kill at first, but by the end he has killed numerous times, including a three year old girl wired with a grenade, an old grandmother, a number of Viet Cong, and a former friend who defected to the enemy. All his buddies and his one real friend are killed.
The book is filled with the combination of super-alienation and high self-indulgence which are so common in Vietnam literature. Perhaps it is the product of the extreme youth of the soldiers, the absurd conditions of always stoned, firebase mentality soldiers and the obvious stupidity and failure of the war. The language is all fuckin this and fuckin that. It's filled with one line responses of the "does the bear shit in the woods" variety. But for all that, there is a more serious attempt at honesty and a more serious attempt to really describe what happened than in other books I've read. The hype and the self-indulgence are somehow authentic and real. They too communicate D's experience of the war.
I first read this book in October, 1976. Apparently, I hadn't realized that I read it before because the card information above makes no mention of it. If I read it today, I'd probably have the same memory problem with it.
The book card I wrote in 1976 (q.v.) is quite different from this one. It's much more critical and, surprisingly, asserts different facts about the book. It appears that I either misinterpreted some things in 1976, or I read sloppily in 1986, or as often happened in those days, waited too long to write up the book card in 1986 and forgot too much, possibly not even having the book in front of me when I wrote the card.
| Author | Golding, William |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Playboy Paperbacks, 1982 |
| Copyright Date | 1980 |
| Number of Pages | 278 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| When Read | May 1986 |
A young English gentleman boards a ship during the Napoleonic era for passage to the Antipodes (New Zealand?). Most of the novel is his diary, recorded for the benefit of his influential godfather. It records his seasickness, drinking with the officers, altercation with the Captain, semi-rape of the not so ingenuous Miss Brocklebank, and observations on the other passengers, all of whom are far below his own station. Almost the least among the passengers is the Reverend Robert James Colley, whom Talbot (the gentleman) would like to cultivate simply to annoy the Captain, but he cannot bring himself to overcome his aversion to the man. Later, Colley is humiliated by the ship's company. Later still he goes into his cabin and will not emerge. He dies there. Talbot discovers a diary, which is presented as the next section of the novel, and participates in an inquiry into the parson's death. It turns out in the end that Colley, attracted by the seamen, rejected by the upper class, drunk from his first taste of rum, performed fellatio on a seaman and then died of shame.
The story was very well told, with considerable and successful effort placed in achieving an air of technical accuracy and authenticity in consciousness, language, society, and seamanship - a hallmark of G's historical novels.
I particularly like the ambiguity and yet ordinariness that G builds into his characters. They aren't extraordinary. They behave like ordinary men. They do nothing which only fictional characters would do, and yet in scene after scene we see them in new and different lights.
I hesitate to call G brilliant. His work is too thoughtful and too highly crafted for that. But he is more than just another good writer. This is a very, very good book.
When I hesitated to call G brilliant I must have been thinking of "brilliance" as something like "dazzling" and "amazing". However in the other sense of "exceptionally intelligent" or "exceptionally capable and knowledgeable", Golding surely was brilliant. There are still some books of his that I haven't read. Perhaps I'll get the chance in the time I have left.
| Author | Mishima, Yukio |
|---|---|
| Original Language | jp |
| Translators | Wetherby, Meredith |
| Publication | New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1973 |
| Copyright Date | 1954 |
| Number of Pages | 183 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| Keywords | Japan |
| When Read | May 1986 |
A simple, honest, ingenuous, upstanding young fisherman falls in love with a simple, honest, ingenuous, upstanding young diver. Her father finds out when village gossip reaches him and forbids their meeting. But they persevere in modest but upstanding behavior, eventually winning the hearts of all to their side. They are engaged to marry with their parents approval. They are set to live happily ever after.
In other hands this sentimental tale would have been unbearably mawkish, but I didn't find Mishima's story to be so. Perhaps I was seduced by sentiment myself, but M seems to have achieved his aim. There was an acuteness of observation, an acceptance of some of the failings - perhaps the stupidities of the people - that gave it interest; and there was an attention to nature (waves, wind, sea) and a treatment of love as natural - that gave it some beauty.
If Mishima means to hold up the simple and unsophisticated virtues as an example for us, I can't agree with him. The boy and girl, Shinji and Hatdue, are beautiful young animals. They entertain only the most primitive thoughts. Their answer to all offense is more goodness.
As I grow older I cease to ask of a writer that he present objective truth. it is enough if he presents one idea, well developed. I'll be responsible for the objectivity - let him follow his muse.
An interesting contribution to the literature.
| Author | Forsyth, Frederick |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Viking, 1984 |
| Number of Pages | 389 |
| Genres | Fiction; Thriller |
| When Read | June 1986 |
A spy thriller about a Russian attempt to install a "hard left" government in England by sneaking a bomb into the country and blowing up a town just before the 1987 elections. The American air force stationed there will be blamed and a wave of anti-nuclear, anti-American sentiment will sweep the country, causing the election of the Labour Party. That party will then be taken over from within by Communist sympathizers.
MI5 sleuth John Preston leads the fight to find the spy and eventually runs him down. Various subplots in England and Russia are revealed at the end.
As a spy thriller, this is quite good. Plenty of technical tradecraft is employed and explained and some suspense is steadily built up. We get very authentic seeming views of upper crust ministers, spies, bureaucrats, etc.
The politics are straight, solid conservative, though not fascist.
I've commented further in my diary.
The diary entry (June 20, 1986) is an interesting one about the opposition of the life of danger and action versus the ordinary life.
| Author | Forward, Robert L. |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Timescape Books, dist. by Simon and Schuster, 1984 |
| Number of Pages | 318 |
| Extras | diagrams |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | June 1986 |
A very scientific SF by a renowned physicist.
A robotic probe sent to Barnard reports interesting planets and a manned expedition is mounted. They travel 40 years in a solar sail ship powered by sun driven lasers using a drug to slow down aging. When they arrive they discover an intelligent race of sea creatures whose hobby is mathematics.
The science in the book is highly imaginative and informative. We learn astronomy, physics, geology, aeronautics, computer science, etc.
As is so often the case in this genre, the characters are a bit juvenile, sort of middle aged super enthused adolescents. But what can we expect? Perhaps too much literature would spoil the other charming qualities of the book.
I liked it.
There are many ways that an author can be interesting. Some ways are literary and some are not.
| Author | Cather, Willa |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Vintage Books |
| Copyright Date | 1926 |
| Number of Pages | xxii + 105 |
| Extras | Introduction by Marcus Klein, 1961 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | June 1986 |
Myra Driscoll/Henshawe ignored the wishes of her wealthy uncle in Illinois and eloped with a man, going to New York to live with him. The old man then cut her out of his will.
In New York she lives a dual life of brilliant parties with theater and concert artists, and a dull social life with her husband's business associates. Although Henshawe seems a decent and likable fellow, she eventually grows to hate him, considering him unfaithful and dull and the cause of her loss of brilliance and fortune.
All of this is related by a young girl who sees the Henshawes twice, in their middle age in New York, and in old age in California where they are living in much reduced circumstances.
In the end, Myra leaves home and goes to sit by the ocean, where she dies of cancer. Her last act was to escape the home of her husband, her "mortal enemy".
This is certainly a different sort of novel from C's upbeat lessons in humanity. The people are not finely drawn, not sympathized with. But the theme is uncompromising in its portrayal of an intelligent, spirited woman turned against her husband, herself, her past, her life. There is no redemption.
My sympathies were with Henshawe in this book as, I think, were Cather's. He was portrayed as a good man. If I remember correctly, he lost his business in an economic downturn, using his money to pay his creditors and support his clients rather than to escape to personal safety. He then took hard and unrewarding work to support himself and his wife, always keeping her in at least a middle class lifestyle. He bore her constant attacks and criticism silently, without attacking her in return. But she refused to recognize any goodwill from him, treating him as the cause of all of her disappointments in life.
I couldn't help but think about my father and mother. My mom was always very critical of my father. I think that he considered his life and the life he provided to her to be happy and successful, or at least he wanted to consider them that way. But she seemed to have considered her life, and their life together, to be disappointing. I never really understood why. What was wrong with her life? What did she want that she didn't have? They weren't rich, but they never lacked for anything. They did not socialize with celebrities or college professors, but they had many friends. My father could be rather gauche, boasting of his deeds at work or in the Marine Corps or in his many winning fistfights against bullies, but he wasn't a bad guy and always cared for her. I loved both of them and it always seemed to me to be a terrible shame that they didn't get along better than they did. Towards the end, of course, it all got worse with her advancing dementia. He never abandoned her and was faithful to the end, but she just grew more and more bitter. Cather understood all of that. I think she must have seen it somewhere in real life.
| Author | Cabezas, Omar |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Spanish |
| Translators | Weaver, Kathleen |
| Publication | New York: Crown Publishers, 1985 |
| Copyright Date | 1982 |
| Number of Pages | 233 |
| Extras | Foreword by Carlos Fuentes |
| Extras | Afterword by Walter LaFeber |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| When Read | July 1986 |
"Skinny" Cabezas was a young college student in Leon, Nicaragua when he joined the movement in 1968. He worked first as a student organizer, then a community organizer, spent time underground, then one year in the mountains with a guerrilla unit, then more time as an illegal underground organizer going into new territory to organize terrified total strangers.
He recounts the life of an organizer and a revolutionary, including all of the awful difficulties of life in the bush. It ends in 1975 when he meets an old man who actually fought with Sandino, helping C to find his own revolutionary roots and to confirm him as a totally committed revolutionary.
This book is good literature as well as primary source history. C writes as one might speak, a sort of "Let me tell you" style, and "No shit, it really was ..."
It's not pompous or arrogant either, not full of self-righteousness.
Fuentes loved it and considered it an authentic voice of Central America. The real thing, the man others wish they could be.
I have to agree.
In the scene where Cabezas meets the old Sandinista from the revolution in the 1930's, the old man says something like "I knew you (meaning the Sandinista revolution) would eventually come back." It was a great moment for Cabezas and was meaningful to me, the reader, too. I would like to believe that "the revolution" is ongoing and, although frequently interrupted and smashed, it is never permanently destroyed.
However, I don't know how glorious was the revolution under the Sandinistas. Perhaps they never had a chance. The Carter and then Reagan administrations considered them to be communist subversives and, themselves, did everything they could to subvert the new government.
We read accounts by Cabezas, Che, John Reed, Frantz Fanon, and see the shining future of the dictatorship of the proletariat, but somehow we get more dictatorship and not much proletariat. Today, 30 years after reading this book and 40+ years after my most radical period opposing the Vietnam War and believing in the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, I'm now just a liberal incrementalist - but I still long for something better.
| Author | Mann, Thomas |
|---|---|
| Original Language | German |
| Translators | Lowe-Porter, H.T. |
| Publication | New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980 |
| Copyright Date | 1924 |
| Number of Pages | 729 |
| Extras | Essay by Mann on "The Making of Magic Mountain". |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | July 1986 |
A dreamy neurasthenic young man goes to a TB sanatorium in Switzerland. He winds up staying seven years. He develops intellectually. He has a love non-affair with Claudia Chauchat of the Kirghiz eyes. He is the companion of his ill fated cousin, the would be soldier, Joachim Ziemssen. He observes the great paddle handed director, the Hofrat Behrens. He befriends the lion like old man Pieter Peeperkorn. But the most amazing character in the story are the intellectuals Ludovico Settembrini and the little Jew turned Jesuit Herr Naphta. The futile but truly incredible battles between these two for the intellectual soul of Hans Castorp are one of the great achievements of literature.
The book is a kind of study in weakness and futility. Its main character slides into a passive, almost solipsistic life. Only the "thunderbolt" of the Great War brings him back to the world - perhaps to die in the mud of France.
It is a great book, a great monument of literature. It is filled with Mann's subtlety, his universal education, his ability to probe the meaning of life through minute examination of psychological and philosophical detail.
See many diary entries for several months discussing this book.
There are a number of diary entries with ten times as much about the novel and about my reaction to it than I was able to write on a 3x5 inch index card. The Magic Mountain was a great event in my reading life. It was one of the best books I ever read and it elicited from me some of what I think is my best writing about books. I cannot summarize it here both because it is too extensive and because I read the book thirty years ago and cannot recapture all of my thoughts and feelings about it in order to do justice either to the book or to my writing about it. Search the 1986 diary entries for "Magic" or "Mann" to find the entries.
On a side note, I was using the WordStar word processing program to record diary entries from 1982-6. It produced heavily modified text. In order to read it today, without WordStar, I had to write a program to convert WordStar, and PC-Write also, from proprietary formats to plain ASCII text. It's the first real program I've written since retiring and I rather enjoyed it.
| Author | Francis, Dick |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Fawcett Crest, 1986 |
| Copyright Date | 1985 |
| Number of Pages | 341 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | August 1986 |
Wineseller Tony Beach is tending bar at an outdoor party that he is helping to cater when a severe accident occurs, killing some people and opening up a mystery about the affairs of one of the dead guests. He is drawn first, by the police, into an investigation of falsely labeled liquor in a club bar and then, by a private investigator, into uncovering the facts of some hijacked tank trunks full of scotch. Beach's ability to taste the difference between brands, and his knowledge of the manufacturing processes, makes him central to the investigations.
He and the investigator eventually uncover the crooks and capture them in a big fight in a bottling plant. In the process he finds himself, discovering that he is not a coward, that he likes his profession, and that he is able to overcome his sorrow at the loss of his wife.
It is a typically satisfying Francis story with a strong protagonist plagued by inner doubts bringing all of his resources to bear on fighting his way out of a problem. As good as any Francis books I have read.
The scene that most easily comes to mind from this book is Beach getting tipsy while sitting in a bar with a cop. The cop has driven him from one bar to another where Beach tastes the whiskey or wine and, after a few bars and more than a few drinks, he's feeling it. The cop and the reader both wonder about what it would be like to have a job like this.
I liked Francis' books about horse racing but I particularly liked his books about winesellers, accountants, pilots, and people in other professions. None of his characters are rich. None are endowed with exceptional physical or super intellectual qualities. They are not entirely ordinary but what distinguishes them is not their native endowments but their effort, their honesty, and their determination - whether it be to succeed at their jobs or to fight back against injustice.
| Author | Paton, Alan |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Scribner's Sons |
| Copyright Date | 1948 |
| Number of Pages | 283 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | August 1986 |
An old black priest, the Reverend Stephen Kumalo, an "umfundisi" in Zulu, leaves home and travels to Johannesburg to find his younger sister and his son. He finds the woman and her son living a wild life and talks her into returning with him, but she disappears back into the city the day they are to return.
Another black priest, Msimangu, helps him track down his son, but they are too late. Before they can find him he is arrested for murder. In an ordinary housebreaking the boy killed a white man who happened to be one of the greatest promoters of black rights in South Africa. Some chapters then follow Jarvis, the white man's father, a farmer from the same area as Kumalo, as he tries to understand his son's death the reasons for his son's pro-black activism. Eventually Jarvis spends his own money, through Kumalo, to help raise up the black people of their valley.
This is both a Christian book and an almost radical political book. There are passages that explain to white readers how and why the white domination of South Africa has destroyed the traditional culture, family, and economy; how the mines benefit only the white shareholders and hurt black workers; how the blacks' farmland has been destroyed; how the shantytowns are created and what life is like in them. Yet there is a simplicity and Christian humanity in the writing that are quite beautiful. An exceptional, one of a kind book from a man with a passion for his country and all its people.
Some writers who write for a living carefully analyze the market and their skills, then tailor their output for that market. That's not a terrible fault. Some of those writers are pretty good. But there are also some writers who write from conviction. If they're good writers, that conviction can add something special to their work. Paton had that conviction.
| Author | Greene, Graham |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Bantam Books, 1968 |
| Copyright Date | 1949 |
| Number of Pages | 117 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | September 1986 |
Rollo Martins, alias Buck Dexter - a writer of cheap Western novels, is invited to Vienna to see his old friend Harry Lime. But when he arrives he's told that Lime was killed in an accident. Martins investigates and eventually concludes first, that Lime was murdered, and then later that Lime is not dead at all - another man was killed in his place in a staged accident.
The story is narrated by the head of police for the British army of occupation in Vienna, who in turn relates the story as told to him by Martins, filling in where it is convenient to do so. In the end, Calloway, the cop, convinces Martins that Lime is responsible for the horrible deaths of children in a black market fake penicillin scheme and gets him to lure Lime into a trap where he is pursued and shot by Martins himself.
There is a depressed, post-war, winter, dark mood to this story not common in mysteries. The protagonist, Martin, is a more bumbling sort of man than we are used to. He is mistaken for another, high brow, writer named Dexter and brought to a cultural evening where he makes a total hash of the literary discussion. He declares his love to Lime's old girlfriend in an awkward, drunken, foolish way. Yet he is a very sympathetic character.
All in all a different, interesting and effective story. It is a mystery, but first of all it is a story - with character, mood, setting and plot - not just suspense. Very good.
A quite good movie was made of this novel. Marcia and I watched it many years ago.
| Author | Ackerman, Diane |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Atheneum, 1985 |
| Number of Pages | 307 |
| Extras | Glossary |
| Genres | Non-fiction |
| Keywords | Aviation |
| When Read | September 1986 |
Poet and professor Ackerman takes flying lessons, first in Ithaca, NY, with a narrow sort of teacher who yells at her constantly, and then in Williamsburg VA with a fine young fellow who really teachers her to fly.
She seems strikingly inept at both the concepts and the skills. She can't read graphs or maps. She freezes up every time on final approach and flareout. She misses all her checkpoints on cross country flights. But for all her incompetence in flying, she is extraordinarily competent as an observer and reporter of the sights, emotions, thoughts, and people of flying. The title of "poet" already seems fully justified to me although I have never read a line of her poetry.
She is a direct, open person who can speak as easily and unself-consciously about shakes and tears as about navigation.
The one page on gliders makes me more interested in gliders than the whole book on airplanes.
I first learned to fly in 1971 (IIRC), getting far enough to solo in a 2-22, a 2-33 (IIRC), and a 1-26, but not getting a private pilot's license. I started up again, I think, in 1987. I'd have to dig up my old logbooks to produce more accurate dates. If that's all correct, I was probably thinking about flying again when I read this book and that may have been the reason why I read it.
I never considered myself a natural pilot. I got airsick easily and didn't fully master that until at least a half dozen or so flights in each season, then was sick again at the beginning of the next season. I rarely felt secure and comfortable in the air. So reading this book may have helped me to feel that I could have been a worse pilot than I was.
A's observations of her flight instructors matched mine very well. Some instructors demanded that the wings be straight and level at all times, that the speed be under tight control, that the horizon always be at the same level in front of the canopy, that thermals be tightly cored, that turns be steady at the prescribed angles of bank, and that landings touch down on the centerline of the runway with nary a bounce. I couldn't learn from those guys. I needed an instructor who would let me throw the plane all over the sky, feeling and seeing the effects of all of the different attitudes of flight. I needed to make mistakes and correct them, or see what happened if I failed to correct them quickly. I think A's book shows that it's not just me who needed that kind of instruction.
I liked her book.
| Author | Balzac, Honore de |
|---|---|
| Original Language | French |
| Translators | Crawford, Marion Ayton |
| Publication | Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1965 |
| Copyright Date | 1846 |
| Number of Pages | 444 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | September 1986 |
The Baron Hector Hulot D'Ervy squanders all of his family's money, and everything he can borrow on or embezzle, on courtesans, while his virtuous wife Adeline sacrifices everything out of love for him. The whole family is sucked into his debauchery when he falls in love with Madame Valerie Marneffe, wife of a clerk in the Baron's Ministry of Defense. He gives everything to her. The father of his son's wife, M. Crevel, gives a fortune to her. His daughter's husband Wenceslas Steinbock becomes involved and damages his marriage to Hortense. And through it all, poor Cousin Bette helps deepen the involvements in order to revenge herself on Adelina, Hortense, Wenceslas, and the Baron in her rage at their wealth and comfort in the face of her poverty and hard work.
In the end, Marneffe and Crevel die a horrible death at the hands of a jealous lover. Bette dies before the ruin of the family. Adeline dies of mortification, the young people do okay, and the Baron, in his old age, runs off and marries a stupid chamber maid.
The book is brilliant in both grand scheme and in detail. B is ruthless in his exposure of the vileness of vice and the futility of virtue. He draws devastating pictures of high government officials, struggling young artists, bourgeois nouveaux riche, beautiful women, everyone. It is not a modern novel. The author intrudes everywhere. But it is full of brilliant passages and is relentlessly pursued to its logical end.
See diary.
While all of the characters in the novel pursue their foolish ends, they all admire their poor, hardworking, cousin Bette, never realizing that Bette is doing everything possible to wreck their plans and their lives. Bette is the only one of them who actually achieves her goals, but what good does it do her? As she is dying, everyone praises her. She has successfully sabotaged the others and concealed her true nature, but it's hard to see how her schadenfreude has left her any better off. All of the characters, Bette included, live futile lives, each in a different way.
I seem to recall that Marcia and I both read this book as part of a book group, but I'm not certain about that. It's possible that I merely read it by myself and discussed it with her. I do remember her being impressed with Balzac's observation of the old Baron losing the hair on top of his head but sprouting hair on his ears growing like moss on old stones. I'm afraid I fit that description and fit even better now as my stones have gotten older still.
I admired Balzac and thought to read more of his books. I had read The Country Doctor and Pere Goriot before this one but didn't read any more until 2002, and then only one. There are so many great authors and life is so short. Of course it's the short life part of that statement that is most bothersome.
I haven't found much in the diary. There is a brief appreciation of the novel in the entry for August 29, 1986.
| Author | Forester, C.S. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1941 |
| Number of Pages | 344 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Naval; War of 1812 |
| When Read | September 1986 |
A sailing adventure tale by the master, this time with an American ship and captain fighting in the War of 1812 against the British.
Josiah Peabody, captain of the 38 gun frigate Delaware, slips out of Long Island Sound in a snowstorm through the British blockade. He reaches the Caribbean where he successfully breaks up a convoy, and then cruises the islands, burning and sinking everything in sight. Eventually he is run to ground in a neutral port where the war ends just before a final attempt to break out takes place. There is a picture story marriage with the beautiful daughter of the French governor and a grudging respect developed between the American and British officers.
As with Hornblower, F creates interest in Peabody by mixing some ambiguous ideas and emotions into the character. He is a reformed alcoholic, son of drunkards. His brother is a coward who deserts the ship and gets away. He is a stern Protestant, surprised and unnevered by his experience of love.
As in all Foresters, the technical detail is immensely satisfying, the character of the hero pleasing, the story acceptable. Only the love affair is much simpler and worse than in Hornblower stories. The character too is more quickly drawn.
By the time this book was published I imagine that F already had a large following in the United States. Perhaps it was already larger than in Britain. Perhaps this book was a nod to his American fans, a gesture of appreciation to them.
Conceivably there was another motive. In 1941 Britain was beleaguered by Germany. At least until the invasion of Russia on June 22, it was the last country standing in the fight against tyranny, and no one knew how strong Russia would be. Maybe there was some thought that a book of this type would do a bit to buck up American sympathies - though I must admit that writing a book about a war between Britain and the U.S. doesn't sound like the best way to do that.
| Author | Golding, William |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Farrar, Straus, Geroux, 1984 |
| Number of Pages | 191 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | October 1986 |
Noted English author Wilfred Barclay is pursued by an American graduate student and then assistant professor from age 50 into his late 60's. Rick L. Tucker wants to become Barclay's official biographer and will offer anything, including his young wife, to get Barclay's consent. The two become psychologically enmeshed. Barclay runs around the world. Tucker pursues. Then, finally, Barclay pursues Tucker, demolishing him with severe humiliations and broken promises. Each gives up everything else. Barclay, always a self-centered sort of man, loses wife's and daughter's respect. Tucker loses position and wife. After the last devastating humiliation, Tucker gets a gun and kills Barclay.
The book is superficially clever and witty but is also full of much subtlety and many risky passages in which G takes chances on being obscure and misunderstood. I liked it for both qualities.
There is an unusual approach to aging here. It is addressed head on and seriously, but without any respect for age. Barclay drinks away a good part of his last years. He experiences his "rites of passage" and he changes, but he does not mature and grow wiser - only older.
Excellent, like all of Golding's books.
This book made a strong impression on me, one that survives to this day, thirty years later.
The story opens in Barclay's kitchen. He is getting breakfast, or something, when he hears a noise around the garbage cans outdoors. Certain that it is a raccoon that has recently been rummaging in his garbage he opens the door and fires his shotgun, only to see that it was Tucker, who had been going through Barclay's trash, looking for papers he could steal for use in his research project. Barclay, standing in the kitchen door, harangues Tucker. What the hell are you doing in my trash, looking at my old papers - angry and accusing. Tucker looks back at him, eyes wide, in shock, and says "Shot!"
It's a magnificent tragicomic scene that sets the tone for the rest of the book. In many following scenes Tucker remains importunate, clueless, pursuing his academic end with no respect for the very man whom he aims to immortalize - or more accurately, whom he hopes to use as a tool to immortalize himself. Barclay becomes more angry, more contemptuous, more aggressive in his offensive defense, building to the final scene which is a turnabout of the first. Barclay sees the chastened, defeated and humiliated Tucker across the river from him and wonders what that ass is doing now aiming that gun at him. It's the end of the book.
I had read many of Golding's earlier books and thought that the very best ones were the two earliest, Lord of the Flies and The Inheritors. I had wondered if his best years were behind him. He had already won the Nobel Prize. Had he done his work? Was he now going to rest on his laurels? The Paper Men overcame all my doubts about him. It was as great a book as any of them and was in a newer, sophisticated, comic style.
He was still alive when I read this book. A photo of him on the back showed him at what seemed to me to be the ripe old age of 73, looking quite elderly but also totally alert and in command of his life. He inspired me to believe that life continues into old age. We don't have to become intellectually enfeebled. He went on to publish two more novels and a third was produced from his posthumous papers.
In the course of the novel, Barclay suffers a heart attack. I wonder if that will be his end? Will he shortly have another and die? Will he be bedridden? Will he mellow? Will he cease his persecution of his witless persecutor? He does slow down a bit but he takes the heart attack in stride. It is a stumble and a fall but he gets up and continues on exactly as before. Nothing has changed. He is the same man pursuing the same goals. Tucker's hopes of moving in on his weakened prey, helping him and preying upon him at the same time, are dashed. This too was inspiring to me. I hoped that as I grew old I would age as Barclay did - remaining the same man that I had always been. I have retired now and no longer sell my services as a programmer. I have doubts about my programming capabilities. But I still haven't given up hope of being a sharp man right up to the very end. I still hope to avoid the debility and defeatism of old age.
Was Golding himself pursued by assistant professors determined to hitch their careers to his star? I wouldn't be surprised if that were the inspiration for his book, and I wouldn't be terribly surprised if he sometimes felt as Barclay did and meant his opening scene as a warning to some asinine professor to stay out of his, Golding's, trash.
Golding is one of my literary heroes.
| Author | Collenette, Eric J. |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Walker and Co., 1984 |
| Number of Pages | 192 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | World War II; Naval |
| When Read | October 1986 |
All of the officers of the British submarine Scanvenger are killed in an air raid off the coast of Norway, leaving coxswain Ben Grant in command. He opens the ship's orders and finds that he has a dangerous mission to sink a floating drydock being towed north along the coast. He makes one attempt, fails, suffers damages, makes another, succeeds, and is sunk. He and six others survive and attempt to return to England in an old fishing boat. They are captured by a German destroyer and, in a battle with a British sub, sabotage the destroyer and survive.
This is a very standard sort of sea adventure - all action, no development, minimal character. The plot advances by episodes, each episode proceeding as required by the logic of the story but with no development of character or theme or even of depth of plot. It is adequate of its type, no more.
I grew up reading sea stories, first and foremost stories of the fledgling American Navy fighting the British in the War of 1812. I still liked sea/war/adventure stories in 1986 and I still like them today. I put up with poorer writing to read stories on subjects I like. I think a lot of readers do the same though some may do it less consciously than I do.
| Author | Mishima, Yukio |
|---|---|
| Original Language | jp |
| Translators | Marks, Alfred H. |
| Publication | New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969 |
| Copyright Date | 1950 |
| Number of Pages | 200 |
| Extras | Introduction by Donald Keene |
| Genres | Fiction |
| Keywords | Japan |
| When Read | November 1986 |
A middle class widow, living as the mistress of her dead husband's father, falls in love with the young, strong, handsome gardener. She is forced by convention to try to hide her love but her suffering and jealousy increase to a fever pitch as the boy is found to have made the maid pregnant. Finally, near insanity, she meets the boy at night to talk but he doesn't know how to talk - doesn't understand what she wants him to say. He tries to make love to her. She screams. The old man comes running with a farm implement. She grabs it and kills the boy.
As in The Sound of Waves, M glorifies strong, silent youth. Intellectualism is seen as futile and sterile. The most despised character in the story, Kensuko, the main character Etenko's brother-in-law, is a useless man who reads and prattles while Saburo, the gardener, who never has a thought, can do anything.
The portrayal of Etsuko is not as clear as it could be. Her emotions change constantly. But the development of the story is consistent and relentless. In the first part we see Etsuko attending to her faithless husband in the last days of his illness - drawn both by love and by death. And in the end she enacts on Saburo that which she was ready to do, longed to do, on her dead husband.
This is not a story for which I feel any innate sympathy, and yet I am drawn by the writer's powerful, if twisted, sensibility.
Mishima was a very strange character. His antics, his love for the old Imperial Japan and its militarism, and his ritual suicide at age 45, were all heavily reported in the U.S. It was because of the publicity that I wanted to know what this man was all about, and I read three of his books. I appreciated the power of his writing but his consciousness was alien to mine and still is.
| Author | Wells, H.G. |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Random House, Modern Library, 1935 |
| Copyright Date | 1908 |
| Number of Pages | 400 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | December 1986 |
George Ponderevo, son of a housemaid in a rural country mansion, is apprenticed to his pharmacist uncle Teddy. Teddy loses his money, shop, and George's inheitance in a bad investment and must leave to work in a shop in London. George later joins him there in a venture to sell Tono Bungay - an over the counter tonic of no value which nevertheless makes them rich. George marries a working class woman of no intellect who never could understand him or give herself to him - and winds up divorcing her after an affair with a secretary.
Eventually the business empire collapses. George takes Teddy out of the country, where he dies. He returns to another futile love affair with the mistress of a rich man. She refuses to leave her life of indolence to marry him. He must close his experimental airship shop and takes a job with a shipbuilder designing engines for destroyers.
Wells writes in first person. He says he might have titled the book "Waste" because it is a story of great wealth accumulated for no purpose, barren women and futile love affairs, and absurd spending on conspicuous consumption.
It is a serious book, very well done, the kind where one thoughtful reflective paragraph follows another. See the diary for excerpts.
I was acquainted with Wells through his popular science fiction novels and the movies made from them: The Invisible Man, The War of the Worlds, and The First Men in the Moon, etc.. I hadn't realized that he also wrote serious books and so this one was a revelation.
There is a scene in the book that I don't remember very well, but it was particularly interesting to me at the time. Teddy had worked on the formula for Tono Bungay, if I remember correctly, for some years until he finally found the formula he liked. Someone, I think it was probably George, asked Teddy whether the tonic actually worked. Teddy answered that it might work. Who knows? He was distancing himself from having any responsibility to ensure that it worked.
Is this different from what all of the vitamin and supplement manufacturers do today, or what they did in Wells' day? Probably not. Today we have verbal formulas for this sort of thing. "Supports heart health", "Supports prostate health", or maybe nothing at all about what it does, just, "Take two a day, with meals, morning and evening."
| Author | Trew, Antony |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: St. Martin's Press, 1982 |
| Number of Pages | 249 |
| Genres | Fiction; Thriller |
| When Read | December 1986 |
Two college aged South African anti-apartheid activists are informed by an older fellow that the police are onto him and they must help him leave the country - for if he is arrested and tortured their identities will also become known. They all decide to escape on the young man's father's sailboat, with his older brother as skipper. The father hides valuable paintings and diamonds on the boat to take advantage of their escape to get money out of the country.
There are various adventures and clever escapes until, eventually, the young people discover that the older man is a Soviet spy. He runs. They catch him and turn him over to the authorities, make their way to England, and strike a deal for their freedom.
The writing is perfectly acceptable. Surprisingly, the ruthless Soviet spy is given some personality. He likes Bach. He is sorry to have to kill innocent people in order to escape but is committed to his mission. There are also pro and anti-apartheid arguments - at least at a superficial level. But all of that is made secondary to yet another adventure thriller (yawn) plot.
Not bad. Not good. Just another competent pot boiler.
| Author | Canetti, Elias |
|---|---|
| Original Language | German |
| Translators | Neugroschel, Joachim |
| Publication | New York: Seabury Press (A Continuum Book), 1979 |
| Copyright Date | 1974 |
| Number of Pages | 256 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | December 1986 |
Fifty short sketches of exactly 3-5 paragrphs each of abstracted characters with names such as "King-proclaimer", "Name-licker", "Water-harborer", "Humility-foerbear", and so on. Most are abstractions and caricatures of of some unpleasant personality trait - seen as the dominant trait in a person that lives only to exercise that trait.
With the possible exception of the "Earwitness" - Canetti's alter ego who presumably is the witness to three other characters, the characterizations are all ugly and condescending. They are brilliantly drawn but uninteresting. After putting down five or ten lopsided characters one feels that the rest is merely an exercise continued out to fulfill some arbitrary assignment to do exactly 50 characters, each in 3-5 paragraphs and each in the identical satiric style.
There is no doubt left here about Canetti's keen intelligence and powers of observation. These people express their single traits in the full multitude of ways permitted by their short treatments. It is a clear, lucid, penetrating book. But it lacks any redeeming human concern.
A very good book - but interesting more as an exercise than a work of literature - at least that is its interest for me.
I don't remember much of Earwitness but I just read an Amazon review that came to very similar conclusions about it. Maybe I was on the mark.
Canetti won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Did I happen upon the wrong examples of his books for my taste? If I had read some others of his books would I have become a big fan and gone on to read many more? I don't know the answer to those questions and will probably never find out.