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April 14
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W
gave
to:
Tree of Smoke: A Novel (Hardcover)
by Denis Johnson
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my rating:
Added to my books!
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recommended for: anyone who has passed Am Lit 100 & 101
W said:
"First of all, TREE OF SMOKE is to JESUS' SON as DUBLINERS is to ULYSSES. Compare a writer messing around with his experience and craft and an author who has come under the full blown power of his pen. One can also say TREE OF SMOKE is about Vietnam i...more
First of all, TREE OF SMOKE is to JESUS' SON as DUBLINERS is to ULYSSES. Compare a writer messing around with his experience and craft and an author who has come under the full blown power of his pen. One can also say TREE OF SMOKE is about Vietnam in the same way MOBY DICK is about whaling. I will wait until a second reading, but we may have our first great American novel since Faulkner and, in a certain sense, Dreiser.
“Tree of Smoke” is a more literal translation of the Hebrew be’ayammu, more frequently translated as “column” or “pillar”: e.g., “a pillar of fire by day, and a pillar of fire by night,” or a column of cloud by day and a column of fire by night (Exodus 13:21). It appears after Moses leads his ‘ibri (Hebrews, the marginal) through the sea and out of the slavery of Egypt. It leads them through their forty years of wandering the desert. Some scripture scholars speculate that the pillar of fire/cloud was a volcano in the southern part of the Sinai, near Mt Hebron.
Johnson takes this image, and translates it as “tree of fire” (the famous burning bush?) and suggests an association with the mushroom cloud, and so we modernists are likewise wandering for our forty years (actually, twenty: 1963-1983) in an amoral desert ever since we dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, but that’s more me than Johnson. There are lots of levels that can be mined in this book. Read it, it’s extraordinary. Pay no attention to critics who are trying the crack the book over their self-possessed hubris. It will be awhile before anybody masters it. Catch it while it’s fresh.
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March 19
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New comment on W's review of
Moby Dick; or, The Whale
(see all 2 comments)
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March 18
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W
gave
to:
Lolita (Paperback)
by Vladimir Nabokov
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my rating:
Added to my books!
add my review
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W said:
"This is a strange book, subtle, sinister (“from the left”) in its ability to turn liberals into prudes and prudes into libertines without ever knowing it.
I read "Bend Sinister" as an undergraduate, and was irritated that Nabokov co...more
This is a strange book, subtle, sinister (“from the left”) in its ability to turn liberals into prudes and prudes into libertines without ever knowing it.
I read "Bend Sinister" as an undergraduate, and was irritated that Nabokov could write so incredibly well in his non-native tongue. Envious of that talent and intelligence, I was also curious as to why he would use that talent to teach me about America, when he could be talking about Russia, a lá "The Master and Margarita" by Mikhail Bulgakov.
I still feel that way after reading Lolita. I have picked it up several times over the years and put it down just as many, for different reasons: put off by the subject, put off by the unsatisfied prurience so deceitfully incited, shamed by the perfect portrayal of his libidinous licentiousness, and frustrated by the fictional caricatures of dull, amoral adults and their America. However, after topping so many best books of the millennium lists, one would have to be a Yahoo to ignore it.
What I least like about the book is the author’s manipulation of his “reader.” First, he speaks directly to the reader, encouraging sympathy through his feigned honesty; but once engaged, he creates an artifice that allows the book-holding reader to eavesdrop on the several other manufactured audiences so as to misdirect the direct reader’s sympathy, patience, judgment—and so excuse his prurient indulgence. As soon as one is ready to hang Humbert for his amorality, he introduces a narrow-minded courtroom, a myopic judge, a vengeful detective, etc., and so slips the reader’s noose from his neck. Sinister.
It is arrogance that leads Nabokov to the conviction that the lascivious soul in us will offset our moral rectitude. He dangles his Lolita like a piece of catnip. He wrote that this was simply a story he had to get off his chest, but elsewhere he says his characters do not drive his pen, rather they are his slaves. They do that which he wants. So, if one can escape the hypnotic anticipation of what perverse behavior might come next (it doesn’t), then one can get a meta-view of his character. I thought Nabokov used her as his opinion of America: we are all adolescence and lust and mediocrity and banal. His Dickensian descriptions of dim-witted tenement life in New England and the boring restlessness of road life in the West are dispiriting. His Lolita is the archetype of triviality. And, to blame it all on Poe (i.e., Annabelle Leigh) is immature.
Though the book world says we must celebrate this achievement--Vanity Fair squibs that this is, “The only convincing love story of our century”—someone must discern between love and pedophilia. This isn’t "Dangerous Liaisons," this isn’t Molly Bloom and her soliloquy, this isn’t Baudelaire--the topic is pedophilia. Where is the morality that supersedes our guttural instincts? A love story? I rather think it is Nabokov’s dismissal of America as shallow, distracted, indulgent, libidinous, and trivial. We are, at best, not East Egg, not West Egg, but ham and eggs.
Now, if he were writing about Lady Chatterley and not her pubescent daughter, then we’d be free to talk about art. And it is art. Nabokov is as mesmerized with the English language as Humbert is with Lo, more so. The allusions to authors and major works cascade; he parodies Joyce’s style on one page, Faulkner’s on another; he lampoons Freud, and appeals to Byron; his paragraphs are tapestries, his vocabulary would challenge the OED. It is interesting to note that researchers have identified pre-existing stories or events that provide Nabokov with the structure his tale. So with tale set, the art becomes paramount. This would, perhaps, explain why so many (especially female) reviewers excuse Nabokov from the subject and defer to the art. At least, I think they do, they say they do. Whatever, as erotica, it flops; as master of the English language and literature,he astounds.
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February 23
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W
added:
Billy Budd, Sailor (Enriched Classics)
by Herman Melville
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my rating:
Added to my books!
add my review
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W
gave
to:
Moby Dick; or, The Whale (Paperback)
by Herman Melville
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my rating:
Added to my books!
add my review
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W said:
""Call me Ishmael"--God will listen. Strange name for a pretty godless rant, which is really one of the top four books in America. The bible story has Abraham chasing Hagar and their son, Ishmael, out of camp in favor of Sarah and Isaac (one...more
"Call me Ishmael"--God will listen. Strange name for a pretty godless rant, which is really one of the top four books in America. The bible story has Abraham chasing Hagar and their son, Ishmael, out of camp in favor of Sarah and Isaac (one of the two saddest stories in the the bible), so the questionable confidence in a Christian god is always challenged.
Speaking of Moby Dick, I am reminded of Maxwell Perkins habit of giving his best writers: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Wolfe, copies of War & Peace, saying this is how a novel should be written. Moby Dick is a novel in that same vein. Of interest to me, is that Melville wrote it not in New Bedford, in the lee of a fleet of whalers, but rather in the Berkshires under the shadow of the great humpbacked Mount Greylock.
There is not a lot to say about it without embarrassing oneself. It starts in the Seaman's Bethel and ends with Ishmael clinging to a coffin (symbolism often presents floating wood as a saving Christ)until he is rescued by the Rachel, a whaler (biblically)searching for her lost children. In between, human outrage wails against the horror of hostile fatalism and then dies.
But readers have found everything under the sun in this book--including the industrial revolution.
It is worth everyone's while. Today, it could be a good preface to those interested in understanding Thomas Pynchon's post-modern Gravity's Rainbow.
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W
read and liked
Laura's
review of Gravity's Rainbow:
"I was trying to read this book on the bus, thinking that if I was reading I wouldn't be bothered by all the weirdos who take public transportation and want to chat. Boy was I wrong. This book actually drew all the weirdos to me. They all wanted to...more
I was trying to read this book on the bus, thinking that if I was reading I wouldn't be bothered by all the weirdos who take public transportation and want to chat. Boy was I wrong. This book actually drew all the weirdos to me. They all wanted to discuss this book and how it related to their lame philosophies about life. Barf. This book also made no sense....less
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February 22
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W read and liked a piece of writing titled "High Rise Spiders"
by Jo
"
High Rise Spiders
No natural enemies so high,
The birds don’t even fly up there.
They seem to drop out of the sky,
And cling where no one else would dare
To grow up large upon the glass,
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...read more »
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February 20
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W
gave
to:
The Time Traveler's Wife (Paperback)
by Audrey Niffenegger
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my rating:
Added to my books!
add my review
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W said:
"Marvellous, beautiful, startling--what a unique love story! Though, I would be reluctant to enter into a conversation that focused on connecting the dots between this fiction and why it so appeals to those who live in this real, chronological, humdru...more
Marvellous, beautiful, startling--what a unique love story! Though, I would be reluctant to enter into a conversation that focused on connecting the dots between this fiction and why it so appeals to those who live in this real, chronological, humdrum. I wonder what she would do with science fiction? ...less
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W
gave
to:
Captain Corelli's Mandolin (Paperback)
by Louis de Bernieres
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my rating:
Added to my books!
add my review
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W said:
"On the recommendation of a prof--so it came at me by total surprise. All the gnarled and confused history of the Balkans, the depradation of war as an end unto itself, all the romanticism and grace of the Italians, and the earthiness and tragic innoc...more
On the recommendation of a prof--so it came at me by total surprise. All the gnarled and confused history of the Balkans, the depradation of war as an end unto itself, all the romanticism and grace of the Italians, and the earthiness and tragic innocence of the Greek isles. It is a love story worthy only of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. ...less
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W
gave
to:
Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words that Remade America (Simon & Schuster Lincoln Library)
by Garry Wills
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my rating:
Added to my books!
add my review
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W said:
"Mandatory reading for American citizens, and those interested in what America might mean.
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