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Since I was in high school, James Clavell has loomed largely among my guiltier pleasures. Somewhere circa age sixteen I plowed through Shogun and Tai-Pan one summer, and came away from them heady with Orientalism: because these books are, really, Or...more
Since I was in high school, James Clavell has loomed largely among my guiltier pleasures. Somewhere circa age sixteen I plowed through Shogun and Tai-Pan one summer, and came away from them heady with Orientalism: because these books are, really, Orientalism at its pulpy contemporary finest (if that isn't an oxymoron). In them, the European hero is thrown into an exotic, spice-scented eastern culture where, through a combination of courage, canny and luck, he is embroiled in conspiracies, admitted into the luxurious inner circles of power, beds beautiful women, and defeats his enemies.
Clavell isn't subtle, by a long shot. His villains are machiavellian pedophiles and sadists, his protagonists are manly and muscular, moral ambiguity never registers on his radar, and he's not one to hesitate at cheap gratification (for example, in at least three novels he goes out of his way to have women note the gigantic endowment of his hero). This is broad-strokes, primary-colors-only entertainment, but on that level it works fantastically. He has enough superficial understanding and genuine appreciation of Chinese and Japanese culture to make Shogun and Tai-Pan read like glossy action-movie tourist brochures to a compellingly different world, inhabited by (sort of) real people, that we'd like to leave behind our real lives to visit for awhile.
Unfortunately, this is far less the case for Whirlwind, Clavell's fictionalization of the 1979 Iranian Revolution led by Khomeini. The sprawling plot, which revolves around the various European and American employees of a charter helicopter company attempting to cope with, and later escape, the deadly upheaval caused by the Revolution, features Clavell's usual twists, turns, narrow escapes, tragic deaths, unexpected betrayals, irredeemable bad guys and unimpeachable good guys. But where his other novels depict the exotic settings of his stories, and the exotic characters who inhabit them, with a sensitivity that at least tries (in a limited kind of way) to shed light on the workings of another culture, here he has settled for caricature in the most unpleasant sense.
No genuine attempt is made here to understand, or empathize with, why the Revolution captured the hearts and minds of millions. By and large, Clavell's Iranians are illiterate brutes, rapists, and thugs. The only characters who have integrity are those who resist, or at least stand apart from, support for Khomeini, and the virtue of European values -- in particular, the heroic efforts of oil-company employees, who struggle to keep the black gold flowing at any cost -- are never questioned in the slightest.
True, on a paragraph-by-paragraph level, Whirlwind is a page-turner that dishes up sex, suspense and violence in heavy rotation. Take a step back though, and this novel emerges as a perfect example of the kind of insensitive, colonialist xenophobia that fueled the Revolution to begin with.(less)
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I've always been a sucker for a certain kind of swashbuckling adventure. As an awkward middle-school student, I found a kind of refuge in books like H. Rider Haggard's masterpieces King Solomon's Mines and Allen Quatermain; as an adult, the Tarzan bo...more
I've always been a sucker for a certain kind of swashbuckling adventure. As an awkward middle-school student, I found a kind of refuge in books like H. Rider Haggard's masterpieces King Solomon's Mines and Allen Quatermain; as an adult, the Tarzan books number among my guilty pleasures. So it's hardly surprising that, without knowing it, some piece of me was waiting forRaphael Sabatini's Captain Blood all along.
Captain Blood is, without question, one of the greatest pirate adventures ever written. A century before Jack Sparrow sashayed across the screen, Peter Blood was wreaking his own brand of stylish mayhem across the Caribbean. Sabatini's novel is a product of the same late-Victorian appetite for tales of adventure in foreign lands that gave us works like The Pirates of Penzance and Kim, but nothing about it feels imitative. Peter Blood is uniquely his own character (although he has spawned countless imitators): wrongfully convicted of treason and sold into slavery on a Barbados sugar plantation, he man who is "at war with humanity" and yet has "some rags of honor." His barbed wit and rakish charm are tempered with just enough self-doubt, and occasional self-hatred, to make him a riveting leading man.
This isn't, of course, to claim that Captain Blood is a profound study in human nature. This is an action-movie of a book, but done with so much intelligence and style that its fundamental contrivedness never feels like a problem. Sabatini's writing is crisp, enjoyable, and fast paced; consider the following account of a duel between Levasseur, a rival pirate captain, and Captain Blood:
The brute strength upon which Levasseur so confidently counted, could avail nothing against the Irishman's practiced skill. When, with both lungs transfixed, he lay prone on the white sand, coughing out his rascally life, Captain Blood looked calmly at [Levasseur's first mate] across the body. "I think that cancels the articles between us," he said.
Yes, it may not be Great Literature. But reading lines like that, my inner middle-school geek grins and cheers and I love every page of it, Great Literature be damned.(less)
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Wilfred Thesiger, the author of Arabian Sands, is without question the Real Deal. After being trained as a British secret agent and fighting behind enemy lines in the SAS during World War II, he set out to explore the Empty Quarter of the Arabian pe...moreWilfred Thesiger, the author of Arabian Sands, is without question the Real Deal. After being trained as a British secret agent and fighting behind enemy lines in the SAS during World War II, he set out to explore the Empty Quarter of the Arabian peninsula, the largest sand desert in the world. Travelling by foot and on camels with nomadic Bedouin tribes, he crossed and recrossed about 250,000 miles of the most inhospitable terrain on the planet. He was a man of deeds, not words; it took months of cajoling on the part of his friends to persuade him to write this book in which he recounts some of his adventures.
Seen from a distance, Thesiger seems like a caricature of the old-fashioned stiff-upper-lip British adventurer. His own hardships are noted with almost clinical disinterest. For example, almost as an afterthought, he mentions that in order to fit in with his native travelling companions he decided to walk across the desert barefoot and that this was "uncomfortable." Similarly, describing an episode in which he travelled 2,000 miles across the desolate dunes on starvation rations, drinking a few mouthfuls of water once a day and pursued by raiding parties intent on killing him, he restrains himself to noting that "it was hot."
Despite this terseness, Thesiger’s clear, concise prose is enormously readable and all the more evocative for its lack of ornamentation, much like the stark landscape he depicts. Through his eyes, we glimpse a world of almost unimaginable hardship and startling beauty. After travelling for miles through the desert with his companions, he writes:
…we saw a small boy, dressed in the remnants of a loin-cloth…. He led us back to the [camp] where three men sat round the embers of a fire…. They had no tent; their only possessions were saddles, ropes, bowls, empty goatskins, and their rifles and daggers…. These men would sleep naked on the freezing sand, covered only with their flimsy loin-cloths… After milking [their camels] our hosts brought us milk. We blew the froth aside and drank deep; they urged us to drink more, saying “You will find no milk in the sands ahead of you. Drink – drink. You are our guests. God has brought you here – drink.” I drank again, knowing even as I did so that they would go hungry and thirsty that night, for they had nothing else, no other food and no water.
Along with his bravery, reserve and occasional dry humor, Thesiger fits the mold of the classic T.E.-Lawrence-style British adventurer in another respect as well: his absolute admiration for the traditional Bedouin way of life, and a commensurate distain for all things "modern." Toward the end of this book, he writes: "I realized that the Bedu with whom I had lived and travelled, and in whose company I had found contentment, were doomed. Some people maintain that they will be better off when they have exchanged the hardship and poverty of the desert for the security of a materialistic world. This I do not believe."
Thesiger is a worshipper at the altar of Character, and for him Character is expressed through heroic endurance of hardship. In this sense, he is fundamentally a pessimist; change and progress are for the worse. In these sentiments, it is hard not to detect a whiff of "noble savage" ideology and its accompanying veiled racism. Certainly he is not hesitant to describe men as belonging to a “finer breed” (or an inferior one). It is an unforgiving view of the world, and one that lacks nuance. Given these things, there is perhaps a kind of poetic justice in the fact that, sixty years later, Thesiger himself seems quaint and old-fashioned, a fantastic remnant of a time when the world seemed at once larger and less complex.(less)
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Michael Boone, alias Butcher Bones, is a once celebrated Australian artist who’s just got out of jail for various crimes that resulted from his divorce and what he sees as the appropriation of his work as marital property. His reputation is in the to...
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It's been a good while since I posted a review on this site. The fact is, I've been fairly busy (my novel was published, book signings up and down the west coast, work of various sorts including many hours spent on the next novel, the rigors of famil...moreIt's been a good while since I posted a review on this site. The fact is, I've been fairly busy (my novel was published, book signings up and down the west coast, work of various sorts including many hours spent on the next novel, the rigors of family life, life in general) and as a result I fell off the reviewing wagon. So in the interest of full disclosure, I should admit that it's been some time since I read Memories of Ice: The Malazan Book of the Fallen, Book III by Steven Erikson.
To be specific I was on vacation in Hawaii, in December, when I stumbled across this book. I'd finished the last of the novels that I brought with me on the trip, and something about the tropical lassitude left me unwilling to dive into the Serious Tome that was slated to be next on my list. But someone had left a copy of Erikson's hefty mass market paperback in the rental house were I was staying, and out of curiosity I picked it up and, as these things happen, without quite meaning to I ended up passing the next few days in a blur of swords and sorcery and ancient evil and noble but flawed heroes.
More full disclosure. Although I was an occasional fan of "fantasy novels" (whatever that means) during middle school and highschool, I am by no means familiar with the current state of that literary movement. Nor have I read anything else by Steven Erikson, nor have I read Books I, II, or IV-X of The Malazan Book of the Fallen, and it's possible that I don't actually know what I'm talking about here. On the other hand, that's never stopped in the past, and I don't see why it should now.
So:
Memories of Ice is essentially a novel about geopolitical conflict. It centers around the political and military struggles between the several quasi-national groups that populate Erikson's imaginary world; most centrally, it focuses on a clash between an evil empire of religious zealots and a loose confederation of free-spirited (and free market) adventurers. Oh, and to complicate matters both sides have allied themselves with different armies of undead genocidal zombies.
Erikson is, without question, a very good writer. His sword-weilding heroes are complex enough to feel (sort of) like real people, his monsters are genuinely frightening, and the world he has constructed contains enough unique aspects (like a messy pantheon of squabbling divinities and semi-divinities based on the tarot deck) to surprise and engage the reader, rather than feeling like a copy-paste of standard fantasy genre tropes.
But...
But for all of that, the truth is that nothing about this novel struck me as profoundly original, profoundly insightful, or (to be honest) profound at all. This is an enjoyable action movie of a book, designed to read while lying on the beach, only half-focused on the printed words, semi-skimming between episodes of violence, sensuality, or sentimentality.
And this is what makes it so interesting.
Because Memories of Ice is 944 pages long. In total, the Malazan Book of the Fallen series is 7,705 pages long. 7,705 pages! I can't claim familiarity with Mr. Erikson's writing habits, but assuming that he can write (and edit) 2 pages a day -- which would be astonishingly fast -- that would come to around 10 years of total effort to complete this series. Make that 20 years if, like most writers, his output is more like one finished page per day.
That is, to say the least, a very long time to spend on a single creative project. The more so because, while Erikson's work is well crafted and has received substantial praise in sci-fi/fantasy circles, these are not books for the ages: I would be astonished if anyone was reading these novels in 50 years. Nor are they books that do anything substantially new, or attempt to venture into any unexplored territory. Which raises the question: why does an obviously intelligent person devote 20 years and 7,000+ pages to this sort of thing, which has virtually no hope of leaving a lasting mark or garnering the accolades of the literary world?
The cynical answer, of course, would be money. Erikson has clearly made a tidy pile on the Mazalan books, but I think this is more happy accident than anything else. To become a novelist in order to get rich is pretty much like taking up taxidermy as a means of becoming famous: hardly the most direct route from A to B. Instead, I'd suggest the answer here is love of the genre, of the project itself and the characters in this story, that renders the criticisms of the world or the standards of the orthodox literary establishment meaningless. And that kind of dedication, more than anything else about this book, is inspiring and admirable.(less)
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I've never been a fan of magical realism. Notwithstanding Gabriel Garcia Marquez's formidable powers as a writer, magical realism has always seemed to me basically like a cheap parlor trick, in which emotional metaphors are projected onto the externa...moreI've never been a fan of magical realism. Notwithstanding Gabriel Garcia Marquez's formidable powers as a writer, magical realism has always seemed to me basically like a cheap parlor trick, in which emotional metaphors are projected onto the external world. Happiness gives you wings and love makes flowers bloom; anger brings darkness and hatred is a poisonous toad crouching in someone's throat. The net result of this projection is to anthropomorphize the world itself. This is wish-fulfillment taken to its narcissistic extreme, creating a narrative universe in which nothing occurs outside the realm of human psychology.
Since the success of GGM's fables, a generation of latin american authors (and others) have pursued this trite formula at the expense of literary innovation. Their devotion to the cult of magical realism has produced a few bestsellers but little in terms of work that seems capable of addressing the painful realities of life in the often impoverished, repressive and bloody context in which these works are grounded. Which brings me to Roberto Bolano's sprawling opus, 2666.
Despite our best efforts it's not often that a work of fiction genuinely contributes something new to the technology of literature. What I have in mind here is the kind of constructive experimentation embodied in, say, Ernest Hemingway's spare precise sentences. Whether or not you like Hemingway, he was doing something new, something which confronted the self-involved lyricism and pretension of his era. In a similiar way, Bolano's writing is utterly original and fearless.
At this point, it's hard (for me at least) to articulate exactly what makes 2666 an important book. I expect that like most artistic innovation, its effects can be described but its significance will only become clear with the passage of time. This significance, I think, probably has something to do with dreams. Dreams play a central role in Bolano's narrative and a dreamlike intensity and urgency runs through the pages of this novel. Bolano captures the sense of veiled significance that inhabits our dreams better than any other writer I have encountered, and extends this nameless allusiveness to waking life as well. In this respect, 2666 is the opposite of magical realism: its symbols defy comprehension or human agency, and create a world that is pregnant with nonhuman meaning.
The significance of 2666 also has something to do, I think, with the limits of narrative. Rather than expanding to encompass the world in magical realist tradition, this novel is given shape by the things which it cannot tell. Specifically, the interlocked narrative segments of 2666 center around a series of brutal killings in the fictional border-town of Santa Teresa. These events are seen mainly in terms of negative space; they exist in the peripheral awareness of various characters and exert a kind of gravitational pull, distorting the paths of unrelated lives in unexpected and subtle ways although they themselves remain unseen, outside the scope of the novel. When, finally, Bolano attempts to directly narrate these crimes the story breaks down: in place of character and motive we are left with a clinical list of the gruesome facts, anatomy and police forensic reports, the only language -- the author seems to suggest -- that can stand up to the horror of these events without excusing them. In this way, Bolano's novel can be read as an argument that some things cannot, or should not, be comprehended in narrative terms
Over the last year there has been a great deal of discussion about whether 2666 is a masterpiece (which it effectively alleges itself to be). Personally I'm not sure if this is a worthwhile, or even meaningful, question to ask. What, after all, is a masterpiece? What does seem relevant is that 2666 is a work which does something genuinely new and interesting. This is a book whose echoes will be with us for a long time.(less)
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"Absolutely loved this book -- along these lines, you might also enjoy Youth In Revolt by C.D. Payne."
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It's been over half a year now since I last reviewed anything here on Goodreads. There are a number of things that have kept me away (moving across the country, working on a novel, having a baby, etc.) but mainly -- if I'm honest -- the thing that's ...moreIt's been over half a year now since I last reviewed anything here on Goodreads. There are a number of things that have kept me away (moving across the country, working on a novel, having a baby, etc.) but mainly -- if I'm honest -- the thing that's kept me silent has been the prospect of critiquing this book.
For one thing, I'm about as qualified to comment seriously on a treatise on Jewish theology as I am to, let's say, fact-check a textbook about string theory. For another, it's the thought of Dr. Heschel himself that I find daunting: dear deceased A.J. with his mad prophet's beard and his saintly demeanor and his Walt Whitman stare, sadly shaking his head at my fumbling misunderstandings. (Take a look at the NYT article on Heschel at http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/24/arts/2... if you don't know what I mean -- yes, that's the good rabbi standing next to Martin Luther King, Jr. in the topmost photo.)
Nonetheless, I'm feeling exhausted and hazy enough today (see note re: baby, above) that somehow none of this is enough to stop me from giving this long-overdue review a try.
Although this volume is subtitled "a philosophy of religion," in many ways it reads more like poetry than a work of epistemology or metaphysics. This is intentional on Heschel's part: rather than being an argument for faith, Man Is Not Alone functions more as a description of faith and of the encounter between ourselves and the "ineffable." For example, Heschel writes:
There is no answer in the world to man's radical wonder. Under the running sea of our theories and scientific explanations lies the aboriginal abyss of radical amazement.... To live only on that which we can say is to wallow in the dust, instead of digging up the soil.... The essence, the tangent to the curve of human experience, lies beyond the limits of language.... All we know if the self is its expression, but the self is never fully expressed. What we are, we cannot say; what we become, we cannot grasp... the self is something transcendent in disguise.
In this excerpt, which begins to convey the beauty of Heschel's language, the outlines of his argument become visible. Actually, "argument" may be the wrong word here because Heschel contends that applying rational analysis to the divine is an intellectual error. Instead, he suggests, our awareness of the divine is an immediate, given, experiential fact; it doesn't need to be "proved" any more than our awareness of red needs to be proven.
This comparison -- between Heschel's descriptions of the divine and our awareness of the color red -- is in fact a useful one. When it comes to "red," we are able to scientifically demonstrate a number of facts: eg, that there is a spectrum of visible light in the wavelength range of roughly 625-750 nanometers, that seeing this wavelength causes certain sorts of neural activity in a majority of individuals, etc. etc. What these facts capture is not, however, the color "red" -- they capture a number of physical/chemical details about the universe. But everything that constitutes the redness of red -- how it evokes images of love, passion, violence, associations with roses, looks good with black and white, etc. -- all these things are products of our subjective experience, rather than externally demonstrable facts. Indeed, it is this tendency to have a certain kind of cognitive response to certain conditions that comprises the entire existence of "red" as an experiential phenomenon.
Similar to our experience of the color red, Heschel argues, each of us has experiences of the "ineffable" -- that is, something that the theory-inclined might call the sublime, while others might describe as the divine. To write off this experience as meaningless because it is "only" a subjective awareness would be as silly as writing off the color red (vs. a certain wavelength of light) as meaningless because it is "only" a product of our subjectivity.
This much of Heschel's argument is, to me, quite interesting and much more original than the standard tactic of trying to demonstrate the existence of God via some rational construct (eg infinity, absolute goodness, etc). And much of this book is structured like a koan, insofar as it is designed to elicit the kind of "ineffable" experience it describes.
At the same time, Heschel never adequately deals with the inconvenient fact that God, unlike red, seems to have no consistent physical correlate for our experience -- and things go from bad to worse when he makes the transition from "the ineffable" to "God," beginning to assign determinate attributes to what was, thus far in his argument, a private sparkle in the brain.
It may be, of course, that I am misunderstanding the nuances of Heschel's argument. From my admittedly simplistic reading however, I came away from this book deeply impressed with Heschel's commitment to understanding our unspoken yearnings, and his beautifully written descriptions of sensations that lie at the outer borders of language; less impressive, however, was his attempt to articulate these subjective subtleties in the terms of conventional monotheism.(less)
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If I was ever (God forbid) asked to teach a course on the ethics of fiction, this slim novel would surely be on the assigned reading list.
Intimacy unfolds over the course of 24 hours as its protagonist, a middle-aged screenwriter named Jay, prepare...moreIf I was ever (God forbid) asked to teach a course on the ethics of fiction, this slim novel would surely be on the assigned reading list.
Intimacy unfolds over the course of 24 hours as its protagonist, a middle-aged screenwriter named Jay, prepares to leave Susan, the mother of his two young sons. Not that he has told her he's going; he intends simply to pack his bag and slip out the door in the morning after she goes to work.
This is a case of art imitating life if there ever was one. Like his protagonist Jay, Kureishi himself is in his forties; like Jay, Kureishi has been nominated for an Academy Award, and has a weakness for psychopharmacology. And like Jay, shortly before the publication of this novel Kureishi left his wife and two sons.
The release of Intimacy saw a brief flurry of reviews which lambasted the book as thinly-veiled self-confession. Among the most vocal critics of the novel were Kureishi's sister and ex-wife both of whom condemned the author for, essentially, airing private dirty laundry on the international stage.
Subsequently, the furor over Kureishi's novel subsided somewhat; the majority of reviewers have been reluctant to make grand pronouncements about what a novelist should, and shouldn't, be empowered to write about. This is an understandable impulse: nobody wants to be viewed as guilty of censorship or small-mindedness; indeed, being unshockable and accepting when it comes to art is generally accepted as synonymous with sophistication.
But let's consider this outlook for a moment. Sure, it's easy to say that in principle that a great work of art could emerge from the examination of any given subject. But granted that it's not possible to take the stance, a la Jesse Helms, that certain topics should be artistically off-limits a priori, what about applying ethical standards to specific cases? It is unreasonable to believe that, like doctors or politicians, artists can be guilty of unethical behavior in the practice of their chosen profession? And, if so, what might that mean?
Rather than leaping headlong into these thorny questions, it's instructive to start by looking at some of the things that are wrong with Kureishi's novel. To begin with, for a novel ostensibly about -- well, intimacy, and interpersonal relationships -- virtually all the characters in Intimacy are shallow to the point of being ciphers. Susan, Jay's wife, appears only in terms of Jay's dislike for her "fat, red weeping face" and his sour quips along the lines of "she thinks she's a feminist but she's just bad-tempered." As for Jay's sons, although our protagonist is ostensibly tormented over the hurt he may cause them by disappearing without a word of warning (what, you think?) they receive, if anything, an even more cursory treatment than his wife, cropping up mainly as background scenery and noise for Jay's self-pitying observations.
And, make no mistake, Jay is a champion of self-pity. "I have lost my relish for living," he announces. "I am apathetic and most of the time want nothing, except to understand why there hasn't been more happiness here." He is a navel-gazing, self-indulgent child at heart; the few insights which occur to him are depressingly generic exercises in justification which shed no light on the situation at hand. For example, he points out that "Desire is naughty and doesn't conform to our ideals ... Desire is the original anarchist and undercover agent." Yeah, sure, and...?
So where do all of Jay's lucubrations get him? Predictably, the answer is not very far. As scheduled, he leaves his wife and sons to be with Nina, a club girl who combines (here's a twist) elements of mother and whore in one fuzzily-drawn, idealized package. As our hero traipses off into the bliss of Nina's embrace, still unenlightened and tearful (it's not easy, being the father who leaves his children) one gets the distinct sense that nothing has changed and that the sordid little drama we have just witnessed is, or will be, only one in a series of similar dismal incidents.
All told, if Intimacy has a message it seems to be this: that sometimes people do stupid, confused, hurtful things.
The question then arises: what does all of this mean in terms of the ethics of fiction? If one believes that novels are nothing more than entertainment, then Intimacy is nothing more than a case of bad writing. But any serious author must realize that stories are more than just diverting sentences on paper. In a literal sense, the stories we tell ourselves form the basis for our understanding of our selves and of the world. And as such, they have lasting significance as epistemological acts. This subject quickly moves beyond book-review territory, and I'll leave it to the judgment of Kureishi's readers as to whether this book offers any meaningful insights about the human condition. But apart from such lofty standards, let me throw out an off-the-cuff suggestion about the minimal ethical responsibilities of a novelist, taken from the Hippocratic Oath: first, do no harm.
It is on this count that, most plainly, Intimacy seems to me like a basically irresponsible piece of writing. Whether or not Kureishi intended this book to be taken as autobiography (which seems difficult to deny), the fact is that his family and the public at large will read it as such. Kureishi is an internationally recognized author who has used his pulpit to smear his ex-wife and publicize what appears to be the private tragedies of his family. I would argue that writer with a modicum of decency would have attempted to minimally disguise the real circumstances about which he is writing. What would it have cost Kureishi to depict Jay as, let's say, an academic rather than a fiction writer? Or to give him a daughter rather than two sons? This minimal kindness would have given Kureishi's ex-wife and sons at least a chance to avoid being preemptively framed as the characters in this novel.
Regardless of the theoretical standards which we apply to art, it seems little enough to ask of an author that they refrain from defaming the people who are close to them, and Intimacy fails even this modest benchmark. Mr. Kureishi, you should be ashamed of yourself.(less)
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