An Uncommon Western

            

"Dark and cold and no wind and a thin gray reef beginning along the eastern rim of the world. He walked out on the prairie and stood holding his hat like some supplicant to the darkness over them all and he stood there for a long time.” (p. 3)

As we read these lines we begin to think we are in a “Western” novel when John Grady Cole (we aren't told his name until four pages later) walks “out on the prairie”. But is this really a Western novel or some other kind that is merely located in the darkness of the southwest of the United States at the end of the 1940s?

The western as a genre accentuates the American spirit and often includes, in addition to the prairie, a more sinister landscape with its Indian foes, gunfights, rough crossings, along with the darkness of the night in spite of the light of the starry sky. The sinister landscape and more is provided in McCarthy's novel and in a way that makes the western question less important than the relationship of John Grady to the world and his place in it.

D.H. Lawrence, no stranger to the American southwest, noted regarding the myth of the west: “But you have there the myth of the essential white American. All the other stuff, the love, the democracy, the floundering into lust are a sort of by play. The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.”

John Grady may be some of these things, a killer only reluctantly, but in my reading of All the Pretty Horses I recognized some of the symbols of the western as it has been mythologized in prose and on film. However underlying the veneer of a familiar genre there is an unfamiliar foundation – that is something that transcends mere sinister landscapes.

Hints of this foundation can be found on the first page; in “the image of the candleflame” and the “dark and cold” that permeates the opening of the novel. We are reminded of this foundation repeatedly as we travel with John Grady on his odyssey into the world of wild horses waiting to be tamed and Mexican culture that tries and fails to tame John Grady.

Just a few of the moments that provide material for the foundation include the following: his Grandfather's tales (p 11); his contemplation of the Pleiades and “the wildness about him, the wildness within” (p 60); “the iron dark of the world” (p 67); “that condition of separate and helpless paralysis which seemed to be among them like a creeping plague” (p 105); and, “He imagined the pain of the world to be like some formless parasitic being seeking out the warmth of human souls wherein to incubate and he thought he knew what made one liable to its visitations. What he had not known was that it was mindless and so had no way to know the limits of those souls and what he feared was that there might be no limits.” (pp 256-7)

John Grady has one defense against this mindlessness and all of the difficulties and hardships of the world around him, the world with its foundation in a mystical darkness. That defense is his almost preternatural connection with horses. This is made clear again and again, but perhaps best in his dream:

“That night he dreamt of horses in a field on a high plain . . . and in the dream he was among the horses running . . . and they ran in that resonance which is the world itself and which cannot be spoken but only praised.” (pp 161-2)

It is this defense that allows John Grady to become the “horse and rider and horse passed on and their long shadows passed in tandem like the shadow of a single being. Passed and paled into the darkening land, the world to come.” (p 302)

One may wonder what the world to come will be like with its “darkening land” but John Grady will be there. Will it be a new west, home to new western tales? Perhaps, but if the tales are told by Cormac McCarthy they will have a portentous patina that palpitates with a sinister darkness, danger and, perhaps even blood.

Selections from Valery

An Anthology 

by Paul Valéry

“Books have the same enemies as people: fire, humidity, animals, weather, and their own content.”   ― Paul Valéry

This anthology, in addition to a selection of poems, includes essays, two dialogues, and two selections from Monsieur Teste. The essays are perhaps the most accessible of all the selections. But all of Valery's prose and poetry is stunning and warrants rereading to approach a basic level of understanding.

I was most fascinated with his essay on "The Method of Leonardo". As he put it, he attempted to "go beyond indiscriminate admiration", but it would seem at least in part a form of hubris to be too critical in the case of Leonardo. He struggles to encompass the mind of Leonardo and determine the balance between art and science. 

In "The Crisis of the Mind", written in 1919 in response to the Great War we find Valery saying, "And we now see that the abyss of history is deep enough to hold us all. We are aware that a civilization has the same fragility as a life." (p 94) With observations of equal profundity and sufficient poetry to tantalize the reader, this is a volume to be recommended.

Neither a King nor a God

The Man Who Would Be King 

by Rudyard Kipling

“I have been fellow to a beggar again and again under circumstances which prevented either of us finding out whether the other was worthy.”  ― Rudyard Kipling, The Man Who Would Be King

This fantastic short tale is narrated by an Indian journalist in 19th century India who meets two British adventurers, Daniel Dravot and Peachey Carnehan. Intrigued by their stories, he agrees to help them in a minor errand, but later he regrets this and informs the authorities about them—preventing them from blackmailing a minor rajah. A few months later they reappear at his newspaper office in Lahore, telling him of a plan they have hatched. After years of trying their hands at all manner of things, they have decided that "India is not big enough for them". They plan to go to Kafiristan and set themselves up as kings. Dravot will pass as a native and, armed with twenty rifles, they plan to find a king or chief to help him defeat enemies. Once that is done, they will take over for themselves. They ask the narrator for the use of reference books and maps of the area—as a favor, because they are fellow Freemasons, and because he spoiled their blackmail scheme. They also show him a contract they have made between themselves which swears loyalty between the pair and total abstinence from women and alcohol (that last part is hardly believable).

Two years later, on a scorching hot summer night, Carnehan returns to the narrator's office, a broken man, a crippled beggar clad in rags, but he tells an amazing story. He and Dravot had succeeded in becoming kings: traversing treacherous mountains, finding the Kafirs, mustering an army, taking over villages, and dreaming of building a unified nation and even an empire. The Kafirs (pagans, not Muslims) were impressed by the rifles and Dravot's lack of fear of their idols, and acclaimed him as a god, the reincarnation of Alexander the Great. They show a whiter complexion than others of the area ("so hairy and white and fair it was just shaking hands with old friends") implying their ancient lineage to Alexander himself. The Kafirs practiced a form of Masonic ritual, and Dravot's reputation was further enhanced when he showed knowledge of Masonic secrets that only the oldest priest remembered.

Their schemes were foiled, however, when Dravot (against the advice of Carnehan) decided to marry a Kafir girl. Kingship going to his head, he decided he needed a Queen and then royal children. Terrified at marrying a god, the girl bit Dravot when he tried to kiss her during the wedding ceremony. Seeing him bleed, the priests cried you're "Neither God nor Devil but a man!" Most of the Kafirs turned against Dravot and Carnehan. A few of his men remained loyal, but the army defected and the two kings were captured.

For the denouement of this fantastic tale you must read the story yourself, just don't expect a happy ending.

Renaissance Man

Leonardo da Vinci 

by Walter Isaacson

“Above all, Leonardo’s relentless curiosity and experimentation should remind us of the importance of instilling, in both ourselves and our children, not just received knowledge but a willingness to question it—to be imaginative and, like talented misfits and rebels in any era, to think different.”  ― Walter Isaacson, Leonardo da Vinci





The thought and curiosity of Leonardo da Vinci is on display on every page in Walter Isaacson's masterful biography. Leading the reader like a tour guide through the many places and phases of Leonardo's life, Isaacson provides both details of the art but also context through capturing the background of the history, persons, and achievements that were experienced and made by Leonardo throughout his lengthy career.

I was impressed with Leonardo's constant creativity noted as much, if not more, in his notebooks and in his completed works; which included drawings, sculpture, paintings, and more. Present are the differences that made Leonardo unique -- his  left-handedness, his holistic views, his curiosity, and a relentless desire to know that made possible his improbable life as an artist, scientist, thinker, dreamer, and mathematician. The list of his interests is almost endless just as his curiosity was boundless. In the tradition of thinkers going back to Aristotle he revered man's desire for knowledge as seen in his statement:  "The desire to know is natural to good men."

Born out of wedlock in 1452 in the town of Vinci, he spent most of his life in Florence, Milan, and Rome, ending his days in France as a guest of the King. It was a peripatetic life premised on the primacy of sight and mind applied to the world around him in ways that seem phenomenal in retrospect and which, in spite of his successes and honors, were mitigated by his inability to finish projects. This too, impressed me as the wonders of his sketches and notes match and in some ways exceed the art he produced; art that includes "The Last Supper", the "Mona Lisa", and much more. 

Isaacson captures much of the wonder, but leaves the reader perplexed at times by his inability to truly penetrate the mind of Leonardo. The length of the text suggests a completeness that is not quite enough; perhaps no biographer could capture the totality of the magnificence of Leonardo. If ever there was an exemplar of the Renaissance Man it would be this polymath personnage from the small Italian village of Vinci.

A Faustian Bargain

"

The Picture of Dorian Gray 

by Oscar Wilde

"Was it really true that one could never change? He felt a wild longing for the unstained purity of his boyhood-- his rose-white boyhood, as Lord Henry had once called it. He knew that he had tarnished himself, filled his mind with corruption and given horror to his fancy; that he had been an evil influence to others, and had experienced a terrible joy in being so; and that of the lives that had crossed his own, it had been the fairest and the most full of promise that he had brought to shame. But was it all irretrievable? Was there no hope for him?

Ah! in what a monstrous moment of pride and passion he had prayed that the portrait should bear the burden of his days, and he keep the unsullied splendor of eternal youth! All his failure had been due to that."

- Oscar Wilde (p. 164, The Picture of Dorian Gray)

The Picture of Dorian Gray,  written by Oscar Wilde, was published in April 1891. The titular Dorian Gray is a decadent dandy of the Victorian era. Concerned with little but appearances, he lives a reckless, nonproductive existence. A crucial event in his life occurs when Dorian meets Lord Henry Wotton in the studio of Basil Hallward, an artist, who has painted a portrait of the breathtakingly beautiful Dorian, now in his early twenties. Lord Wotton intrigues Dorian with his talk of the New Hedonism, which is reflected in the novel by Lord Henry’s giving Dorian a copy of Joris-Karl Huysmans’s À rebours (1884; Against the Grain, 1922), a novel that articulates this philosophy, the basis of which is the achievement of a complete realization of one’s nature.

Espousing this new kind of hedonism, Lord Henry suggests that the only things worth pursuing in life are beauty and the fulfilment of the senses. And so Gray, it appears, becomes a sort of Faust, and that evening he goes to the opera with his Mephistopheles, Lord Henry. In the following days, Wotton indeed proves a “bad influence,” for Dorian begins following him in the pursuit of pleasure for the sake of pleasure. 

He is busy courting Sybil Vane, a talented young actress, who falls in love with him. Ironically, Sybil’s being in love with Dorian robs her of her ability to act. In time, the very ability that first drew Dorian to Sybil has disappeared, and he rejects her unfeelingly. Having lost Dorian and her acting ability almost simultaneously, Sybil kills herself. Lord Henry, Dorian’s Mephistopheles, convinces Dorian that, in line with the New Hedonism, Sybil’s suicide is an experience that will help him to feel life more intensely and that it can be viewed as nothing but a source of personal growth.

They continue to engage in scandalous activities which erode Dorian’s innocence. Realizing that one day his beauty will fade, Dorian cries out, expressing his desire to sell his soul to ensure that the portrait Basil has painted of him would age rather than himself. Dorian's wish is fulfilled, subsequently plunging him into a series of debauched acts. The portrait serves as a reminder of the effect each act has upon his soul, with each sin being displayed as a disfigurement of his form, or through a sign of aging.

The Picture of Dorian Gray is a classic example of the Victorian novel and one of those books that can effect the reader in a powerful and unique way. The idea of selling your soul to the devil, like the Faust story as related by Marlowe, Goethe and others, is an intriguing image.  But there is in Wilde's version a focus on the purity of innocence (as seen in the passage quoted above) that is lost as one lives a life, whether filled with licentiousness or mere everyday experience. Wilde’s novel provoked considerable outrage when it was published. The tenets of the New Hedonism expressed in the book flew in the face of conventional morality to the point that readers were profoundly shocked. Despite these objections, the novel succeeded artistically and attracted many readers. Wilde gave the story his own imprimatur with the artistic twist and thus added to the evidence of his genius that includes the drama, stories, poetry and criticism that he created.

An Altered Place

Station Eleven 

by Emily St. John Mandel

“She was thinking about the way she’d always taken for granted that the world had certain people in it, either central to her days or unseen and infrequently thought of. How without any one of these people the world is a subtly but unmistakably altered place, the dial turned just one or two degrees.”  ― Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven

This is a book that best fits into the genre of "speculative fiction" as defined by Margaret Atwood in her book on that subject; however while within that genre it is a complex blend of dystopian science fiction and fantasy. 

The narrative describes a society almost eradicated by a deadly flu virus while it is focused on a group of actors and musicians who form a troupe called the "Traveling Symphony". Geographically centered on Canada and the Great Lakes area of the Midwestern United States this intricately plotted, post-apocalyptic nightmare ranges back and forth across the 60 years straddling "Year Zero," its five protagonists linked first by chance and ultimately by love: The actor, Arthur Leander, who gathers and discards friends and lovers with a casual cruelty he often mistakes for good intentions; Clark Thompson, Arthur's best friend; Miranda Carroll, his second wife; Jeevan Chaudhary, a paparazzo, turned entertainment journalist, turned EMT; and Kirsten Raymonde (my favorite and the most fully realized character), a child actress at the start of the novel and its conscience by the end.

Although some chapters take place in Manhattan, Toronto, or British Columbia, the bulk of the action unfolds as Kirsten and the Traveling Symphony make a circuit between Traverse City, Michigan and the Ohio border, playing classical music, staging Shakespeare, scrounging for food and shelter (although the scrounging varied in intensity and sometimes contributed to the disjunct I refer to below), and, in the novel's final third, confronting  horrors I don't presume to divulge because I want you to experience this fantasy of life after death novel yourself.

This reader's experience was uneven because it was conflicted by the author's excellent prose style - offset by gaping holes in the narrative that weakened the plot while some of the primary characters were weakly portrayed. The overall way to describe the difficulty I encountered is that the core story could have been set anywhere and anytime, that what I found was a disjunct that diminished the connection between the overarching setting of the flu pandemic (the pandemic itself being one of the weak aspects of the story) and the devastation facing the main characters centered on the travails of the the Traveling Symphony. The result was a book that I wanted to like but did not enjoy reading as much as I believe I would have absent the inherent weaknesses.

Manners, Readers, and Honest Books

Books and Readers

 130

Readers' bad manners. --- A reader is doubly guilty of bad manners against the author when he praises the second book at the expense of the first ( or vice versa ) and then asks the author to be grateful for that.

137 

The worst readers. --- The worst readers are those who proceed like plundering soldiers: they pick up a few things they can use, soil and confuse the rest, and blaspheme the whole.

145

Value of honest books. --- Honest books make the reader honest, at least by luring into the open his hatred and aversion which his sly prudence otherwise knows how to conceal best. But against a book one lets oneself go, even if one is very reserved toward people.

On the Genealogy of Morals by Friedrich Nietzsche, Walter Kaufmann & R. J. Hollingdale, trans. Vintage, 1989 (1887). p 175

The Sublimity of Humanity

 

Man the Creator

Nature attains perfection, but man never does. There is a perfect ant, a perfect bee, but man is perpetually unfinished. He is both an unfinished animal and an unfinished man. It is this incurable unfinishedness which sets man apart from other living things. For, in the attempt to finish himself, man becomes a creator. Moreover, the incurable unfinishedness keeps man perpetually immature, perpetually capable of learning and growing.

Reflections on the Human Condition by Eric Hoffer. Harper & Row, New York, 1973. p 3

Stoic Advice from Seneca

Selected Dialogues and Consolations 

by Seneca

This discussion of mine is aimed at incomplete, ordinary, unhealthy people, not the wise man. He must not walk fearfully or cautiously. You see, the wise man is so confident of himself that he doesn't hestitate to stand in Fortune's path and will never yield his place to her." (p 124)



The Roman thinker, Seneca, as one of the members of our Online Great Books discussion group noted, provides advice for living your life rather than the more academic discussions of many of the Greek and Roman philosophers. It is this advice and his positive tone that impressed me the most while reading this collection of some of his essays that present the essentials of the Roman view of stoicism.

Some of the key ideas that I took away from this reading included commentary that leading a happy life means conforming to your nature as a human being. In the essay "On the Happy Life" he states that a healthy mind, one that is courageous, forceful, and filled with endurance, will be necessary for a happy life. Being true to your nature includes being true to Nature itself and one with it. 

Seneca also stresses the importance of virtue for leading a happy life, and in this respect reminded me of Cicero whose writings embodied, at least in part, a stoical view of the world. His idea of virtue including valuing the truth above all which for him included "correct and precise judgement". 

In addition to the views on the happy life Seneca wrote about the need for and ways to attain a life of serenity. One key point about the serene life, that along with other of his comments seems very modern, was that your problems are not solved by moving about, leaving where you have been living; rather your problems are within you and if you do not deal with them directly they will follow you wherever you go.

Included in this collection are three essays called "Consolations". These emphasized the notion that death is not a bad thing, that it is within the nature of the mortal soul to die, that grief, while natural, has appropriate limits, and that if grief is excessive it can inhibit one's natural relationships and duties to the living. One of the consolations was written to his mother, Helvetia, while Seneca was in exile and in it he compared death to a sort of exile.

Most importantly for the average reader, both then and now, Seneca claims that his advice is intended for the "ordinary man". And it is not only about abstaining or working hard spending time improving yourself, although that is important; but, equally if not more important is having fun in your life. Seneca would definitely advise going outside, taking your mask off, and enjoying nature and the fresh air.

Proust on Reading

 

Reading States of Mind

"And wasn't my mind also like another crib in the depths of which I remained ensconced, even in order to watch what was happening outside? When I saw an external object, my awareness that I was seeing it would remain between me and it, lining it with a thin spiritual border that prevented me from ever directly touching its substance; it would volatize in some way before I could make contact with it, just as an incandescent body brought near a wet object never touches its moisture because it is always preceded by a zone of evaporation. In the sort of screen dappled with different states of mind which my consciousness would simultaneously unfold while I read, and which ranged from the aspirations hidden deepest within me to the completely exterior vision of the horizon which I had, at the bottom of the garden, before my eyes, what was first in me, innermost, the constantly moving handle that controlled the rest, was my belief in the philosophical richness and the beauty of the book I was reading, and my desire to appropriate them for myself, whatever that book might be."

Swann's Way by Marcel Proust, trans. by Lydia Davis. Penguin Books, New York, 2003 (1913), pp 85-6.

Emancipation as Termination

The Night Watchman 

by Louise Erdrich

“Lastly, if you should ever doubt that a series of dry words in a government document can shatter spirits and demolish lives, let this book erase that doubt. Conversely, if you should be of the conviction that we are powerless to change those dry words, let this book give you heart.”   ― Louise Erdrich, The Night Watchman



Five years ago I was introduced to the writing of Louise Erdrich by reading The Master Butchers Singing Club. This historical novel of Germans in America won me over and while it has been too long since, I now have returned to Louise Erdrich with her historical novel about the battle of her indigenous people for their rights.

In this story we find Thomas Wazhashk, the the night watchman of the title, working at the jewel bearing plant, the first factory located near the Turtle Mountain Reservation in rural North Dakota. Thomas is also a Chippewa Council member who is trying to understand the consequences of a new "emancipation" bill on its way to the floor of the United States Congress. It is 1953 and he and the other council members know the bill isn't about freedom; Congress is fed up with Indians. The bill is a "termination" that threatens the rights of Native Americans to their land and their very identity. He wonders, how can the government abandon treaties made in good faith with Native Americans "for as long as the grasses shall grow, and the rivers run"? While anyone who has read about the history of the relations between the indigenous tribes and the steady encroachment of American settlers will not be surprised by these events, it is disturbing that they are happening in post WWII America.

Since graduating high school, Pixie Paranteau has insisted that everyone call her Patrice. Unlike most of the girls on the reservation, Patrice, the class valedictorian, has no desire to wear herself down with a husband and kids. She makes jewel bearings at the plant, a job that barely pays her enough to support her mother and brother. Patrice's shameful alcoholic father returns home sporadically to terrorize his wife and children and bully her for money. But Patrice needs every penny to follow her beloved older sister, Vera, who moved to the big city of Minneapolis. Vera may have disappeared; she hasn't been in touch in months, and is rumored to have had a baby. Determined to find Vera and her child, Patrice makes a fateful trip to Minnesota that introduces her to unexpected forms of exploitation and violence, and endangers her life.

Thomas and Patrice live in this impoverished reservation community along with young Chippewa boxer Wood Mountain and his mother Juggie Blue, her niece and Patrice's best friend Valentine, and Stack Barnes, the white high school math teacher and boxing coach who is hopelessly in love with Patrice.

In The Night Watchman, Louise Erdrich creates a fictional world populated with memorable characters who are forced to grapple with the worst and best impulses of human nature. Her very real characters speak simple, but truthful words, all the while fighting a Federal Government whose words are duplicitous. 

Illuminating the loves and lives, the desires and ambitions of these characters with compassion, wit, and intelligence, The Night Watchman is a moving work of both personal and historical fiction whose story has both sadness and a positive spirit that finds its source in family and community.

The Divine Force in Painting

On Painting

 "Painting contains a divine force which not only makes absent men present, as friendship is said to do, but moreover makes the dead seem almost alive. Even after many centuries they are recognized with great pleasure and with great admiration for the painter. Plutarch says that Cassander, one of the captains of Alexander, trembled through all his body because he saw a portrait of his King.  Agesilaos, the Lacedaimonian, never permitted anyone to paint him or to represent him in sculpture; his own form so displeased him that he avoided being known by those who would come after him. Thus the face of a man who is already dead certainly lives a long life through painting. Some think that painting shaped the gods who were adored by the nations. It certainly was their greatest gift to mortals, for painting is most useful to that piety which joins us to the gods and keeps our souls full of religion. They say that Phidias made in Aulis a god Jove so beautiful that it considerably strengthened the religion then current."

On Painting by Leon Battista Alberti, trans. by John R. Spencer. Yale University Press, 1966 (1436). p. 63.

Notes from Hermann Hesse

Books on Trial

 Recently I had to sort out my books again, because circumstances forced me to give away part of my library. . . 

Days later, when I was finished with the job, I realized for the first time how much my relationship to books had altered during these years, along with other things. There are whole categories of literature that I now cheerfully give away. There are authors whom it is no longer possible to take seriously. But what a comfort the Knut Hamsun is still alive! How fortunate there is Jammes*! And how nice it is to have cleared all the thick biographies of poets, with their boredom and their meager psychology. The rooms look brighter. Treasures remain behind and now they gleam far more brightly. Goethe stands there, Holderlin stands there, all of Dostoevsky stands there, Morike smiles, Arnim flashes audaciously, the Icelandic sagas outlast all troubles. Marchen and folk tales remain indestructible. And the old books, the books in pigskin with a theological look, which for the most part are so much dearer than all the new books, they too are still there. They are something that for once one doesn't mind being outlived by."

My Belief: Essays on Life and Art by Hermann Hesse. Denver Lindley, trans. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York. 1975, pp 93-95.

*Francis Jammes, French Poet (1868-1938)

Proust on Identity

 The Person We Know

"But even with respect to the most insignificant things in life, none of us constitutes a material whole, identical for everyone, which a person has only to go look up as though we were a book of specifications or a last testament; our social personality is a creation of the minds of others. Even the very simple act that we call "seeing a person we know" is in part an intellectual one. We fill the physical appearance of the individual we see with all the notions we have about him, and of the total picture that we form for ourselves, these notions certainly occupy the greater part. In the end they swell his cheeks so perfectly, follow the line of his nose in an adherence so exact, they do so well as nuancing the sonority of his voice as though the latter were only a  transparent envelope that each time we see this face and hear this voice, it is these notions that we encounter again, that we hear."

Swann's Way by Marcel Proust, trans. by Lydia Davis. Penguin Books, New York, 2003 (1913), p 19.

Write, write, write . . .

Write, write, write, out of your guts, out of the sweat on your forehead and the blood in your veins. Do not think about Mr. Potter’s guide to the salesmanship of short stories produced, apparently, on the lines of the Ford works. Do not bother your head about the length of the stuff you are writing . . . . Write a story (if you must write stories) about yourself searching for your soul amid the horrors of corruption and disease, about your passionate strivings after something you don’t know and can’t express. (This is one of the few ways [of] knowing it and expressing it.)

Dylan Thomas (letter to Trevor Hughes, 1932)

Narrative Distortions of Memory

Trust Exercise 

by Susan Choi

“REMEMBER THE IMPOSSIBLE eventfulness of time, transformation and emotion packed like gunpowder into the barrel. Remember the dilation and diffusion, the years within days. Theirs were endless; lives flowered and died between waking and noon.”  ― Susan Choi, Trust Exercise



This was a confusing look at relationships in the twenty-first century. Centered around the titular activity the narration changes from section to section in a way that seems quite postmodern. I read the author's American Woman, based on real events, more than a year ago and found this, her latest novel, was more effective in spite of, or perhaps because of, being more unconventional. More loosely inspired by some actual places and events, it comes across as a deliberate demonstration of the possibilities in fiction, from shifting and unreliable narrator to viscerally real characters living lives that change in ways that are both weird and wonderful.

Events at the CAPA(Citywide Academy for the Performing Arts) involve students in love with each other while at the same time being challenged by a overbearing teacher in trust exercises that border on harassment. I'm not sure I would have survived in that environment.

After the first section, which follows Sarah through her sophomore year, we shift into the perspective of Karen, one of Sarah’s classmates. “Karen” – whose name is not really Karen – informs us that for the first hundred or so pages, we’ve been reading a novel written by “Sarah” (whose name is not truly Sarah). Now an adult, not only is Karen utterly dissatisfied with her erasure from the story that plays out in Sarah’s semi-autobiographical novel, she’s also armed with her own version of the events of that year.

Through it all you learn more about the subsequent lives of some of the students which includes surprising twists. In spite of some realistic detail, the over-the-top nature of some of the students' activities is hard to accept. I'll give the author a high rating for imagination, but the structure and execution of the story at times left me wondering what the author intended.

Winner of the National Book Award for fiction in 2019, Trust Exercise is a stunning study of the increasingly muddied line between fact and fiction, the power of the stories we tell ourselves and the consequences of the inherent distortions of memory.

Notes on the Border Trilogy

All the Pretty Horses 

by Cormac McCarthy

“He lay on his back in his blankets and looked our where the quartermoon lay cocked over the heel of the mountains. In the false blue dawn the Pleiades seemed to be rising up into the darkness above the world and dragging all the stars away, the great diamond of Orion and Cepella and the signature of Cassiopeia all rising up through the phosphorous dark like a sea-net. He lay a long time listening to the others breathing in their sleep while he contemplated the wildness about him, the wildness within.”  ― Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

The story begins in a room lit by candle light with John Grady Cole wearing a black suit and looking at his dead grandfather laying in an oak coffin. "It was dark outside and cold and no wind." This bleak opening belies the adventure that lay ahead for young John Grady Cole. The seventeen year-old boy at the center of this scene and the novel is suddenly, roughly jolted from the freedom of youth into another life - one of the open frontier, of adventure, of love and danger. Cormac McCarthy blends gritty realism with mystical dreams of horses and meditations on the meaning of fate and life and horses in this meaningful and mesmerizing novel of a young man's quest for love and life and, ultimately, redemption.

What makes this novel great? Is it the archetypical experiences of a young man's first love, of the pains of that and the initiation into the violence and reality of the west? Is it the beauty of words strung together in phrases that take your breath away? It is these and more as McCarthy succeeds in mixing the quotidian details of ranch life with just the right balance of mythic phantasmagorical imaginings. Just as his prose seems to be over-the-top he suddenly returns to the Beckett-like dialogue of two buddies alone on the prairie. One example of this occurs when he is out on the mesa with his buddy Lacey Rawlins--his Sancho to at least the extent that his adventures approached the Quixotic--when one evening a few nights later he is approached by Alejandra, the daughter of the Ranch owner. Two pages and many nights together riding their horses up and swimming in the lake until; "She was so pale in the lake she seemed to be burning. Like foxfire in darkened wood." (p 141) She beckons and he says yes and just as the scene reaches a mystic climax we return to the world of the two buddies. The dynamic tension is like the immediate break from fortissimo to piano in a Beethoven Symphony.


The story of John Grady Cole takes many turns and he looks back at regrets while going forward on his own personal quest. One constant question that is raised like a drumbeat accompanying his actions is what does fate have in store for him. Alejandra's grandaunt and godmother is the Duena Alfonsa who is the matriarch of the family. Like several of the characters she eventually relates her story to John Grady Cole. Not the least important aspect of this is her view of fate, "Yes. We'll see what fate has in store for us, won't we?" (p 241). McCarthy presents a complex world and John Grady Cole dives into it with the fervor of innocence. The excitement is watching him lose that innocence while maintaining a sort of fervor for life, at least for the life that he chooses for himself.


"That night he dreamt of horses in a field on a high plain where the spring rains had brought up the grass and the wildflowers out of the ground and the flowers ran all blue and yellow as far as the eye could see . . . and the horses out along the high mesas where the ground resounded under their running hooves and they flowed and changed and ran and their manes and tails blew off of them like spume and there was nothing else at all in that high world and they moved all of them in a resonance that was like a music among them . . . " (p 163)

Rereading Notes

Unfinished Business: 

Notes of a Chronic Re-Reader

by Vivian Gornick

“Responsible for every successful connection ever made between a book and a reader--no less than between people--is that deepest of all human mysteries, emotional readiness: upon which the shape of every life is vitally dependent. How morbidly circumstantial life can seem when we think of the apparent randomness with which we welcome or repel what will turn out to be--or what might have turned out to be--some of the most important relationships of our lives. How often have lifelong friends or lovers shuddered to think, 'If I had met you at any other time...' It's the same between a reader and a book that becomes an intimate you very nearly did not encounter with an open mind or a welcoming heart because you were not in the right mood; that is, in a state of readiness.”  ― Vivian Gornick



A lovely read for those of us who reread books with a passion. I have books that I have read and reread for my whole reading life - one that spans more than six decades. Then there are other books that I have encountered in the early years of this century and I have already reread them; for example Call Me By Your Name is one of those. Others from the whole span of my life from the pen of authors like Lewis Carroll, Somerset Maugham, Willa Cather, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Dreiser, Gide, Mann, Proust, and more are among those whose books I have reread. 

The author shares her personal experiences with books, but even though they may be personal I believe most readers will find a universality in them as well. The title of her short book belies the joy that I believe all re-readers gain from their literary habit. It may be a "chronic" passion, but is one worth pursuing and, I believe, it does not deter the continued exploration of new reading, but rather spurs you onward to more reading in a search for your next favorite great read; one that you can add to your rereading list.

"I sometimes think I was born reading. I can't remember the time when I didn't have a book in my hands, my head lost to the world around me." - Vivian Gornick

Alaskan Beauty and Mystery

The Snow Child 

by Eowyn Ivey

“We never know what is going to happen, do we? Life is always throwing us this way and that. That’s where the adventure is. Not knowing where you’ll end up or how you’ll fare. It’s all a mystery, and when we say any different, we’re just lying to ourselves. Tell me, when have you felt most alive?”   ― Eowyn Ivey, The Snow Child




This is a simple story inspired by a famous Russian fairy tale. In its narrative complications abound and the the story grow more and more complex as it encompasses multiple story lines. Changes abound in this novel, as one might expect in a story inspired by an older long lasting piece of imaginative literature; one that has inspired operas, ballets, films, and other similar tales.*

At the opening we meet Mabel and Jack, a childless couple who have moved to the wilds of Alaska to start farming. The work and the weather is brutal, but they are committed not just to surviving, but to succeeding. Early on we are told by the narrator:

“All her life she had believed in something more, in the mystery that shape-shifted at the edge of her senses. It was the flutter of moth wings on glass and the promise of river nymphs in the dappled creek beds. It was the smell of oak trees on the summer evening she fell in love, and the way dawn threw itself across the cow pond and turned the water to light.”(p 5)

Mabel's dreams seem to come true when a young girl appears the day after they had built a child out of snow. The young girl is elusive with a feral, yet magical appearance. They barely survive the first winter and, as they prepare to plant a crop of potatoes for the following year, Jack is injured by his horse when it is startled by a bear. Fortunately, their neighbors Esther, George, with their youngest son Garrett help them to get their crop planted. The story continues to follow the intrigue between the snow girl and the travails of Mabel and Jack along with young Garrett who continues to work with them on their farm.

The broad outlines of the story do not begin to capture the beautiful magic of the growing relationship between the snow girl, whose name is Faina, and Mabel and Jack. Each is transformed over the course of the narrative, while at the same time the neighbor's young son is growing into manhood. These stories blend together in a way that is unpredictable (at least for this reader) while the families grow together growing to understand and love the nature that surrounds them. The harshness, especially the cold winters, is made palpable by the precise and simple prose of the author.

The Snow Child blends this rough reality with the magic of the fairy tale presence of the snow girl to produce an unusual and wonderful book. The reader experiences something like the following:
"It was as if Mabel had fallen through a hole into another world . . . This was an untidy place, but welcoming and full of laughter."(p 31) 

There is also sadness and ultimately the satisfaction of lives that incorporate some of the magic of believing as they deal with the reality of a harsh but beautiful world.

*The Snow Maiden

Isolated from the World

Snow 

by Orhan Pamuk

“How much can we ever know about the love and pain in another heart? How much can we hope to understand those who have suffered deeper anguish, greater deprivation, and more crushing disappointments than we ourselves have known?”  ― Orhan Pamuk, Snow

Orhan Pamuk' s novel is set in the small Turkish town of Kars, isolated from the rest of the world for three days by a snowstorm. The plot of the novel is as intricate and symmetrical as the pattern of a snowflake. As narrated by Pamuk himself, he tells of the poet journalist Kerim Alakusoglu, known as Ka is a poet, who returns to Turkey after 12 years of political exile in Germany. He has several motives, first, as a journalist, to investigate the events surrounding a group of young women who are committing suicide rather than give up their headscarves, but also seeking Ýpek, a woman on whom he had a crush many years before. Heavy snow cuts off the town for about three days during which time Ka is in conversation with a former communist, a secularist, a fascist nationalist, a possible Islamic extremist, Islamic moderates, young Kurds, the military, the Secret Service, the police and in particular, an actor-revolutionary. In the midst of this, love and passion are to be found.

This is a very contemporary story of the clash between devout Islamists and the secular state that controls Turkey. Isolating the action in the snowbound town of Kars we learn of the tensions through Ka's interviews with various citizens. Pamuk's narrative style presents a pastiche of events that blend together to form the story with both love and politics coming to the fore.

Though slow reading at times, Snow has considerable appeal as a satire of a paralyzed society in which political and social groups are either too weak or too fanatical. Locked in perpetual conflict, none of them can establish a nuanced stance or interact, except violently. Consequently, over the course of the novel, the dilemma of each character becomes bleaker, each caught between the violence of Islamic radicalism and government crackdowns. Some Western readers, often seeing themselves as the victims, may gain a more nuanced grasp of the conflict and the almost impossible situation in which the people of the Middle East find themselves. The many surprises and shocks of the story kept me interested and I found new fascination for the contemporary history of Turkey. The translation by Maureen Freely, who has translated several of Pamuk's novels, is excellent.

Schubert on Mozart

 

On June 13, 1816 the 19-year-old Franz Schubert wrote in his diary,

    This day will haunt me for the rest of my life as a bright, clear, and lovely one. Gently, and as from a distance, the magic tones of Mozart’s music sound in my ears. With what alternate force and tenderness, with what masterly power did Schlesinger’s playing of that music impress it deep, deep in my heart! Thus do these sweet impressions, passing into our souls, work beneficently on our inmost being, and no time, do change of circumstances, can obliterate them. In the darkness of this life, they show a light, a clear, beautiful distance, from which we gather confidence and hope. Mozart! immortal Mozart! how many and what countless images of a brighter, better world hast thou stamped on our souls!

Drawn Apart by Desire and Reason

Metamorphoses 

by Ovid

Translated and edited by Charles Martin

“I am dragged along by a strange new force. Desire and reason are pulling in different directions. I see the right way and approve it, but follow the wrong.”  ― Ovid, Metamorphoses

Metamorphoses is a poem in fifteen books by the Augustan Roman poet Ovid describing the history of the world from its creation to the deification of Julius Caesar within a loose myth-based historical framework. It is often called a mock-epic, as it is written in dactylic hexameter (the form of the great epic poems of the ancient tradition, such as “The Iliad”, “The Odyssey” and “The Aeneid”), unlike Ovid's other works. But, rather than following and extolling the deeds of a great hero like the traditional epics, Ovid’s work leaps from story to story, often with little or no connection other than that they all involve transformations of one sort or another. Sometimes, a character from one story is used as a (more or less tenuous) connection to the next story, and sometimes the mythical characters themselves are used as the story-tellers of “stories within stories”.

 Completed in AD 8, it is recognized as a masterpiece of Golden Age Latin literature. The recurring theme, as with nearly all of Ovid's work, is that of love (and especially the trans-formative power of love), whether it be personal love or love personified in the figure of Cupid, an otherwise relatively minor god of the pantheon who is the closest thing this mock-epic has to a hero. Unlike the predominantly romantic notions of love that were "invented" in the Middle Ages, however, Ovid viewed love more as a dangerous, destabilizing force than a positive one, and demonstrates how love has power over everyone, mortals and gods alike.

 It is notable that the other Roman gods are repeatedly perplexed, humiliated and made to appear ridiculous by fate and by Cupid in the stories. This is particularly true of Apollo, the god of pure reason, who is often confounded by irrational love. The poem inverts the accepted order to a large extent, elevating humans and human passions while making the gods (and their own somewhat petty desires and conquests) the objects of low humor, often portraying the gods as self-absorbed and vengeful. Perhaps because of the continuing power of Greek culture there remains the shadow of the power of the gods as a distinct recurrent theme throughout the poem.

 Revenge is another common theme, and it is often the motivation for whatever transformation the stories are explaining, as the gods avenge themselves and change mortals into birds or beasts to prove their own superiority. Violence, and often rape, occurs in almost every story in the collection, and women are generally portrayed negatively, either as virginal girls running from the gods who want to rape them, or alternatively as malicious and vengeful.

 As do all the major Greek and Roman epics, “Metamorphoses” emphasizes that hubris (overly prideful behavior) is a fatal flaw which inevitably leads to a character's downfall. Hubris always attracts the notice and punishment of the gods, who disdain all human beings who attempt to compare themselves to divinity. Some, especially women like Arachne and Niobe, actively challenge the gods and goddesses to defend their prowess, while others display hubris in ignoring their own mortality. Like love, hubris is seen by Ovid as a universal equalizer.

 Ovid's “Metamorphoses” was an immediate success in its day, its popularity threatening even that of Virgil's “Aeneid”. One can even imagine it being used as a teaching tool for Roman children, from which they could learn important stories that explain their world, as well as learn about their glorious emperor and his ancestors. Particularly towards the end, the poem can be seen to deliberately emphasize the greatness of Rome and its rulers.

 Not unlike many works of classical literature this poem has been a rich cultural resource ever since its inception, influencing authors from Chaucer and Shakespeare to, more recently, Ted Hughes, and composers from Gluck and Offenbach to Britten.