William's profile
|
Sign in to Goodreads to learn more about William.
|
William's bookshelves
A tag cloud is a fun way to see which shelves have the most books.
Sorry, William has no shelves with books on them.
William's recent updates (rss)
| September 28 | ||
| August 29 | ||
|
William
gave
 
to:
The Goodbye Look (Paperback) by Ross MacDonald |
my rating:
Added to my books!
add my review |
William said:
"While many contemporary mystery writers produce entertaining novels, I like to go back periodically to one of Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer stories. To me Macdonald's narratives are more engaging than those by other pioneer detective writers, such as...more
While many contemporary mystery writers produce entertaining novels, I like to go back periodically to one of Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer stories. To me Macdonald's narratives are more engaging than those by other pioneer detective writers, such as those featuring Hammett’s Continental Op or Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe. Macdonald (a pseudonym for the Canadian Donald Millar, who grew up in Vancouver) engages our minds and our emotions with stories that reflect our society as well as show human drama and tragedy. His novels, written before gore, violence and serial killers became staple elements in the detective story, involve ingenious but logical plots that Archer solves with a humanistic (though solitary and misanthropic) outlook and no gratuitous reliance on firearms or car chases to drive the action.
Macdonald presents a few recurring themes. His main preoccupation is the paradoxical combination of a young and restless Southern Californian society that nonetheless illustrates the consequences of misdeeds on subsequent generations ("The sins of the fathers . . .”). “The Goodbye Look”, written in 1969, is a good example. A lawyer says of a colleague, a man whose grandfather came to California after the Civil War: “In our instant society that makes him the closest thing we have to an aristocrat.” Later that same lawyer says to Archer: “All this is far away and long ago.” To which Archer replies: “It seems here and now to me.” Indeed, in this story the events of the present, especially a young man’s growing mental instability, are completely bound up with events that occurred in 1945 (in this world even “long ago” isn’t so far back) – and in his parents' covering them up and dissembling. Young people in Macdonald’s novels are often damaged, confused and lost – typically due to neglect or outright dishonesty on the part of their parents. Archer’s sympathy is always primarily with the young. However, the older characters themselves are damaged, often by illusions about their early lives or by regret over their decisions and a desire to relive them. Here are two statements about major characters in this book: “Her whole body was dreaming of the past.” “His eyes and voice were faintly drowsy with the past.” And a more ominous observation about a third character: “Her mind was being carried down the stream of memory, swept willy-nilly through subterranean passages toward roaring falls.” Some characters are so mesmerized and crippled by the past that they are incapable of moving forward; their fascination with the past distorts their perspective on life: “The dream she was defending wasn’t a dream of the future. It was a dreaming memory of the past . . .” “She looked as if she were dying under the soft bombardment of the past.” It is Archer’s mission to help the young people break out of this paralyzed world created by their elders’ unhappiness and mystification and have a chance to fashion their own genuine lives. Combining ruminations on American society with clear figurative prose, Macdonald delivers a novel that will satisfy any reader of mysteries. ...less " |
||
| July 24 | ||
|
William
gave
to:
Civilization and Its Discontents (Hardcover) by Sigmund Freud |
my rating:
Added to my books!
add my review |
|
William said:
" [Commissaire:] Adamsberg switched off his phone and spun it round on the table top.
“What am I doing,” he commented, more for himself than for Veyrenc, “in charge of twenty-seven human beings, when I could be just as happy, in fact a thous...more [Commissaire:] Adamsberg switched off his phone and spun it round on the table top. “What am I doing,” he commented, more for himself than for Veyrenc, “in charge of twenty-seven human beings, when I could be just as happy, in fact a thousand times better off, on my own in the mountains, sitting on a stone with my feet in a stream?” Fred Vargas, “This Night’s Foul Work” In his introduction to this 2005 edition of Freud’s classic work, Louis Menand writes that, like Milton’s “Paradise Lost”, Plato’s “Republic” and Marx’s “Capital”, “[T:]he grounds have entirely eroded for whatever authority it once enjoyed as an ultimate account of the way things are; but we can no longer understand the way things are without taking it into account.” As much as I typically enjoy Menand’s in-depth intellectual exercises in the New Yorker, I found the lack of an explanation for this assertion to be puzzling. I also found puzzling Menand’s emphasis on the death drive as the focus of this work. Perhaps Freud did consider the notion of a death drive to be the most fundamentally important contribution to psychoanalytic theory in this small book, along with his reiterating of the notion that conscience derives from inherited guilt based on killing the ur-father in the dim historical past – Freud’s version of the Garden of Eden myth. But to me these abstract notions are difficult to take as anything other than metaphors, and I consider them secondary to what I find the main themes of this work. To me, the main subject of this extended rumination on what Freud called “Man’s Discomfort in Culture” (his own recommended translation of the German title) is simple. As the noted Freud biographer and scholar Peter Gay wrote in his introduction to another edition of Freud’s works, in CaID Freud was addressing “the irremediable antagonism between the demands of instinct and the restrictions of civilization.” In other words, conflict between the individual and society. According to the pleasure principle, we seek happiness – satisfaction of instinct, and try to avoid unhappiness – frustration of instincts. Unfortunately, this goal is impossible. Although humans seek “strong feelings of pleasure”, yet “all the regulations of the universe run counter to [the pleasure principle:],” Freud wrote. “The program of becoming happy, which the pleasure principle imposes on us, cannot be fulfilled, yet we must not give up our efforts to bring it nearer to fulfillment.” (p. 63) Society arises from these considerations. In contrast to the common belief that people are shaped by society, Freud posited that society is a macro form of the individual and takes its imprint from the individual psyche and the needs of the ego. If that is the case, then society should serve our needs. Yet it is intuitively obvious that it does not. As Freud observes, “We cannot see why the regulations made by ourselves should not be a protection and a benefit for every one of us.” (p. 68) Starating from a “suspicion” that this paradoxical situation “may be due to a piece of unconquerable nature, a piece of our own psychical constitution,” he reaches an “astonishing” conclusion – “that what we call our civilization is largely responsible for our misery, that we should be much happier if we gave it up and returned to primitive conditions.” Freud goes on, “It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built up on a renunciation of instinct, how much it presupposes precisely the non-satisfaction of powerful instincts.” Thus, “[C:]ultural frustration dominates the large field of social relationships between human beings. It is the cause of the hostility against which all civilizations have to struggle.” Humans are not only discontented with culture or uncomfortable in it, we actually feel hostile toward it. In Chapter IV, which I consider the core of the book, Freud expands on the dynamic by which this hostility arises. (In the following passages Freud’s blatant sexism is evident. Substituting “humans” for “men” and “person” for “man” alleviates some of these egregious slights. In other instances it is necessary to focus on the underlying psychological energetics that Freud is describing.) “The work of civilization,” Freud writes on p. 93, “has become increasingly the business of men; it confronts them with ever more difficult tasks and compels them to carry out instinctual sublimations . . . Since a man does not have unlimited quantities of psychical energies at his disposal, he has to accomplish his tasks by making an expedient distribution of his libido. What he employs for cultural aims, he to a great extent withdraws from women and sexual life.” Looking at it from society’s point of view, Freud writes, “[A:] large amount of the psychical energy which [society:] uses for its own purposes has to be withdrawn from sexuality.” Two remarkable features are embedded in this discussion. First, Freud talks about psychical energy as a kind of psychological bank account that can be used to attain various ends, but that has quantitative limits and can’t be squandered in every direction. Second, Freud postulates civilization as being akin to a strict religion, like Roman Catholicism. Civilization “does not like sexuality as a source of pleasure in its own right” and only tolerates it as “a means of propagating the human race.” So civilization is a suppressor of instinct and a denier of libidinal desires – no wonder humans feel hostile toward it. From the viewpoint of evolution, these ideas become not only clear but inevitable. We are creatures formed by the laws of evolution. And the number one law of evolution is natural selection, which operates to optimize reproduction of the species. All the rest is arranged to facilitate the birth and raising of new members of the species, not to satisfy the libidinal impulses or to provide for the happiness of the individual. Rather, we can say that “The individual is the species’ way of propagating itself.” Freud implicitly translates this biological argument onto the institutional level when he writes: “It also seems as though the creation of a great human community would be most successful if no attention had to be paid to the happiness of the individual.” (p. 147) What a brilliant insight! Are you ready for the Borg? In an operational sense, civilization draws on psychical energy for two mainstays of culture – science and art. Freud conceptualizes science and art as “illusions” and “substitutive satisfactions." More explicitly, he says that “psychical and intellectual work” is a result of “sublimation of the instincts”. However, “their intensity is mild as compared with that derived from the sating of crude and primary instinctual impulses.” In a long insightful footnote on work (p. 58), Freud notes that “laying emphasis on work” offers the individual the possibility “of displacing a large amount of libidinal components . . . on to professional work and on to the human relations connected with it” (He never even talks about non-professional work, such as manual labor, trade and business.) Freud posits that “Professional activity is a source of special satisfaction if it is a freely chosen one -- if, that is, by means of sublimation, it makes possible the use of existing inclinations, of persisting or constitutionally reinforced instinctual impulses. And yet,” Freud points out, “work is not highly prized by men. . . . The great majority of people only work under the stress of necessity, and this natural human aversion to work raises most difficult social problems.” Indeed. (It is important to understand that Freud doesn’t make value judgments. He casts himself as a scientist observing and analyzing.) In Chapter V Freud introduces another essential component of his argument about the antagonism between individuals and civilization. He states that humans “are creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness.” (p. 103) He quotes the folk saying, “Man is a wolf to man.” Anticipating the experiments of the psychologist Stanley Milgram, Freud writes that “In [favorable:] circumstances, when the mental counterforces which ordinarily inhibit it are out of action, [human aggressiveness:] also manifests itself spontaneously, and reveals man as a savage beast to whom consideration towards his own kind is something alien.” When we read these words, how can we not think of U.S. military personnel at Abu Ghraib prison? Notably this passage was written in 1931 before the Holocaust became known. He also makes an observation that goes a long way toward explaining the basis of xenophobia: “The advantage which a comparatively small cultural group offers of allowing this [aggressive:] instinct an outlet in the form of hostility against intruders is not to be despised.” He adds, “It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive the manifestations of their aggressiveness.” It is as though he is formulating a law of conservation of love and aggression. Freud’s dark vision was certainly a response to events of his time – National Socialism in Germany and Austria and Communism in Russia. Yet everything that has happened since 1931 reinforces his insight and counsels caution to any liberal or progressive program for human improvement. ...less " |
||
|
William
gave
to:
Bringing Out the Dead (Paperback) by Joe Connelly |
my rating:
Added to my books!
add my review |
|
William said:
"
i made it about one-third of the way through this book, about the scarifying experiences of a young emt in new york city, then i stopped. connelly’s writing is good, in places very good. and he describes many arresting anecdotes that would be str...more i made it about one-third of the way through this book, about the scarifying experiences of a young emt in new york city, then i stopped. connelly’s writing is good, in places very good. and he describes many arresting anecdotes that would be strange to most of us and many quirky characters, some amusing, others tragic. all of it is plausibly derived from his real life experiences as an emt in new york. good writing, engaging incidents, exotic characters – what’s missing? plot. good old-fashioned plot. “bringing out the dead” is concrete evidence that we need to feel (at least i do) that there is some forward movement in a story. or even backward movement. but movement of some kind. as someone wrote, a story is what makes you ask, “what happens next?” in this novel i didn’t see any “next”, except perhaps another odd anecdote and maybe another bizarre character. sure, the protagonist is living on the brink of insanity, having visions or hallucinations of people whose deaths he has attended. but that’s not necessarily a plot. (in this context it might be instructive to re-read “under the volcano” to see how lowry made an alcoholic breakdown into an absorbing plot.) maybe if the protagonist didn’t string us along for almost 100 pages (and perhaps longer?) with references to a young woman named rose whom he “had helped to kill” and who haunted him all over the city . . . you can only hold the reader for so long with the credit of a promise. sooner or later, you have to cash it in. ...less " |
||
|
William
gave
to:
The Girl of His Dreams (A Commissario Guido Brunetti Mystery) by Donna Leon |
my rating:
Added to my books!
add my review |
|
William said:
"
we talk about a story being “ripped from the headlines”. in the case of “The Girl of His Dreams”, the latest installment in Donna Leon’s series about Comissario Guido Brunetti of the Venice police, the headlines appear to have been ripped...more we talk about a story being “ripped from the headlines”. in the case of “The Girl of His Dreams”, the latest installment in Donna Leon’s series about Comissario Guido Brunetti of the Venice police, the headlines appear to have been ripped from the book. in this novel Brunetti investigates several incidents that are or might be crimes, one of which involves a young Rom girl who apparently slid off a tiled roof and drowned in a canal during a robbery that she and her 2 siblings were carrying out. (Rom children are taught by their parents to steal on the streets, pick pockets and break into homes. echoes of dickens – particularly oliver twist – run through this book.) the robbed family seems oddly reluctant to talk about the robbery, rather they minimize the theft in an apparent attempt to abort the investigation. no one but Brunetti seems interested in finding out how this agile 11-year-old girl fell to her death. here’s the real-world counterpart to Leon’s plot, reported just a few days ago: Shocking Indifference to Roma Drowning TORREGAVETA, Italy (July 21) - Italian newspapers, an archbishop and civil liberties campaigners expressed shock and revulsion on Monday after photographs were published of sunbathers apparently enjoying a day at the beach just meters from where the bodies of two drowned Roma girls were laid out on the sand. Italian news agency ANSA reported that the incident had occurred on Saturday at the beach of Torregaveta, west of Naples, southern Italy, where the two girls had earlier been swimming in the sea with two other Roma girls. Reports said they had gone to the beach to beg and sell trinkets. The Web site of the Archbishop of Naples said the girls were cousins named Violetta and Cristina, aged 12 and 13. Their bodies were eventually laid out on the sand under beach towels to await collection by police. Photographs show sunbathers in bikinis and swimming trunks sitting close to where the girls' feet can be seen poking out from under the towels concealing their bodies. A photographer who took photos at the scene told CNN the mood among sunbathers had been one of indifference. "While the lifeless bodies of the girls were still on the sand, there were those who carried on sunbathing or having lunch just a few meters away," Italian newspaper La Repubblica reported. The incident also attracted condemnation from the Archbishop of Naples, Cardinal Crecenzio Seppe. "Indifference is not an emotion for human beings," Seppe wrote in his parish blog. "To turn the other way or to mind your own business can sometimes be more devastating than the events that occur." Recent weeks have seen heightened tensions between Italian authorities and the country's Roma minority amid a crackdown by Silvo Berlusconi's government targeting illegal immigrants and talk by government officials of a "Roma emergency" that has seen the 150,000-strong migrant group blamed for rising street crime. That has provided justification for police raids on Roma camps and controversial government plans to fingerprint all Roma -- an act condemned by the European Parliament and United Nations officials as a clear act of racial discrimination. Popular resentment against Romanies has also seen Roma camps near Naples attacked and set on fire with petrol bombs by local residents. i won’t spoil the book for those who plan to read it, suffice it to say that the attempts to hush up Brunetti’s investigation – including a not-very-subtle message passed from above through his superior – turn on narrow self-interest and indifference to the death of the girl. Leon’s larger theme concerns interactions between Italians and outlanders – the Rom; a young Italian man who died in New Caledonia; and a priest who worked at a mission in Africa and who took part in a scam coordinated by an Italian Catholic bishop in India. Leon doesn’t whitewash the crimes of the Rom. rather she seems to be asking, who loses in this antagonism between police (and Italian society) and the Rom people? her answer is clearly, the children who are caught in the middle. Leon contrasts the bleak life of Rom children, particularly girls, with the privileged life of Brunetti’s daughter and that of the young woman in the family whose house was robbed. all these young women are the girls of someone’s dreams. Leon also depicts several scams run by Italian persons. in addition to the Catholic missions scam, Brunetti’s boss Patti scams to get a grant from the EU on which he will do nothing and which he gives to his toady and an incompetent detective; the privileged girl’s boyfriend is a criminal who has been protected from punishment because his father is minister of the interior; and the family from whose house the Rom girl falls to her death readily accede to blackmail from the girl’s father and buy him an expensive new Mercedes to hush up the incident. yes, the Rom do illegal things, Leon seems to be saying. but so do the highest officials in the Italian government, as well as ordinary citizens. whose hands are clean? Leon’s writing is powerfully tragic. here is Brunetti’s reaction when he reads that the dead girl was 11 years old: “When he read the age of the dead child, Brunetti lowered the papers to the desk and turned his head to gaze out the window and into the courtyard. A pine tree stood at the far corner, some sort of fruit tree a few meters in front of it, so Brunetti saw the sweet green of the still unfolded leaves outlined against the darker green of the needles. Below them, the new grass was almost electrically bright, and against the low stone wall of the inner courtyard he saw the thin shoots of what would become tulips poking up from the earth. Suddenly a bird swooped in from the left and disappeared into the upper branches of the pine tree, emerging a few seconds later to fly off. He sat for a few minutes, watching the bird return again and again. Building a house.” with each Brunetti novel Leon has been moving into darker and darker territory. in this story the Commissario is completely immersed in a world of injustice. not only doesn’t anyone get punished, but at the end Brunetti is not even sure who did what -- only that a child died, her father has a new car and no proper Italian citizens have been inconvenienced. ...less " |
||
|
William
gave
to:
Do It Now!: Break the Procrastination Habit (Paperback) by William J. Knaus |
my rating:
Added to my books!
add my review |
|
William said:
"i read this book, which is a practical guide to overcoming procrastination, along with a more theoretical book, “Procrastination and Task Avoidance”, by Ferrari, Johnson McCown. i found the theory book useful for setting a framework or context, w...more
i read this book, which is a practical guide to overcoming procrastination, along with a more theoretical book, “Procrastination and Task Avoidance”, by Ferrari, Johnson McCown. i found the theory book useful for setting a framework or context, while the more applied material in “Do It Now” can point the reader to his or her own psychological procrastination traps and triggers – Knaus (who worked with Albert Ellis, the inventor of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy) plausibly postulates that many different patterns of procrastination exist.
one complex that sounded familiar to me was a feeling called “low frustration tolerance” or “discomfort dodging”. certainly i am familiar with the feeling of unpleasant tension when i’m about to start a new task, like writing an article. here is a revealing sentence: “People with low frustration tolerance act like comfort junkies, who demand that they get what they want without a hassle.” touche! (a related emotion is exaggerated anger to even minor obstacles.) Knaus counsels deliberately doing things that provoke a feeling of tension and learning to tolerate it: “Develop tolerance for necessary tension,” he writes. here are two other statements about causes of procrastination: “We avoid activities that could potentially tarnish [our:] fragile self-image.” (from Knaus) "Freud believed that anxiety was a warning signal to the ego of repressed unconscious material that could be disruptive . . . The Freudian notion of dynamic defenses and task avoidance postulates that tasks that are not completed are avoided primarily because they are threatening to the ego." (from Ferrari et al) In a radical move, Knaus suggests looking at activities as experiments, which can reduce fear of failure and redefine failure out of your life. of course, such simple ideas can’t be a panacea. but they sound promising and are worth working on. ...less " |
||
| May 20 | ||
|
William
gave
to:
Now and Then (Spenser, Book 35) by Robert B. Parker |
my rating:
Added to my books!
add my review |
|
William said:
"(i'd actually rate this book 2 1/2 stars but i don't know how to do the half-star thing.)
i went to the library looking for a mystery to reward myself for finishing my article and i found this. spenser is always (well, almost always) enjoyable, s...more (i'd actually rate this book 2 1/2 stars but i don't know how to do the half-star thing.) i went to the library looking for a mystery to reward myself for finishing my article and i found this. spenser is always (well, almost always) enjoyable, so i picked it up. it was indeed a fun read. in this book you not only get the expected character ticks -- with lots of manly badinage -- and some shooting, but as an extra bonus, spenser actually does some detecting. in cleveland, no less. parker has such a smooth style. the characters and narrative go down as slick as a raw oyster. without the hepatitis. (his jesse stone novels are even smoother, but i've resolved not to read any more of them until he modulates the obsessive theme. it's boring, bob! keep your personal life out of your stories. you're not hemingway.) in addition to the characters and plot, every now and then parker slips in a nice writerly touch. like when he says of a character who killed a lake erie charter boat captain and then assumed his identity that he "had undergone a lake change." or when he says of the dissembling and manipulative villain whom he has just taken down with a hard left hook: "He stared at me. And in his stare I saw for the first time the furtive reptilian glitter of his soul." nice rhythm. or when he speaks of his mythic black sidekick hawk's "barely contained kinesis." i found this short graf strangely moving: "Behind Captain Quirk's desk was a picture of a very young Ted Williams, in a Minneapolis Millers uniform. He was beautiful. Nineteen years old then, and it was all ahead of him." and how could you not like a book about a character named spenser who says: "the medieval courtly love tradition holds that love is impossible in marriage because it is coerced." but it sounds like he is going to marry susan anyway. who says series characters never change? ...less " |
||
| May 15 | ||
|
William
gave
to:
Of Love and Other Demons (Paperback) by Gabriel García Márquez |
my rating:
Added to my books!
add my review |
|
William said:
"in this novel marquez sketches a tragic plot generated by intense conflict between the twin demons of love and religion. it takes place in an 18th-century south american city and has an inevitably tragic outcome -- the destruction of a sincere and bo...more
in this novel marquez sketches a tragic plot generated by intense conflict between the twin demons of love and religion. it takes place in an 18th-century south american city and has an inevitably tragic outcome -- the destruction of a sincere and bookish but overscrupulous priest, delaura, and a life-filled young woman, sierva maria. yet he does it in a style that never descends to heavy or ominous handwringing or moralizing. his graceful, witty, often humorous, writing shows us the most effective antidote to such destruction -- a humanistic appreciation of the feelings of others combined with a determination to live a good -- and enjoyable -- life.
marquez's examplar of this life philosophy may be the portuguese jewish converso abrenuncio de sa pereira cao, "the most notable and controversial physician in the city." other characters in the book consult abrenuncio for advice, which he offers freely. it is usually not what they came to hear, but that is all right with him -- he is not caught up in their passions. when the bishop realizes that delaura has fallen in love with sierva maria, he bans him to a leper colony. abrenuncio says to the brilliant young scholar-priest, "i leave you with this enigma. no god could have created a talent like yours to waste it scrubbing lepers." we -- and delaura -- can make of this ambiguity what we will. abrenuncio is primarily interested in continuing to live. in fact, he wants to live for a long time. in one passage that is typical of marquez's fanciful invention he writes of abrenuncio: "he had invented a pill to be taken once a year, which enhanced one's health and lengthened one's life but caused such mental derangement for the first three days that no one but the doctor had dared to swallow it." what fun! of course this is tongue in cheek, but it is also a droll commentary on human vanity. many such comments are scattered throughout the book. this style of extreme imaginative writing --- in which highly implausible or even impossible events (abrenuncio claims that his horse is 100 years old and that he can prove it) rub shoulders with more conventional goings-on -- has come to be called "magic realism". however, i don't think of it as "magic". i think of it as marquez expressing his characters' feelings and ideas in what amounts to extended metaphors, but formulated in a literal voice. these portrayals arise from the author's attention to character and societal beliefs combined with a poetic talent. i prefer to think of it as creative psychological realism. whatever you call it, most of the time it enriches the narrative with entertaining and revelatory anecdote. another feature of the writing in this novel are the colorful, often ironic, descriptions: "a horde of satanic macacque monkeys" "the city lay submerged in its centuries-long torpor" abrenuncio's "puerile corpulence" "the rigor of her prejudices" "disbelief is more resistant then faith because it is sustained by the senses." "hereditary nostalgia" "descended from a family of distinguished theologians and great heretics" "once again the bishop had confirmed the facile nature of secular power." also quite humorous, and scary, is marquez's demonstration that, although the educated catholic europeans look down on the natives as superstitious, they are just as nonrational and they, too, engage in magical thinking based on their religion: "i see no reason for a plague" "the dog must have died because it bit her." "rabies in humans is often one of the many snares of the enemy" however, marquez clearly distinguishes the european-derived culture from the native, black culture on one important dimension: the european culture is moribund and enervated by centuries of "civilization" -- self-imposed restraint, while the native culture is alive and joyous. religion is one of the life-sapping forces that preys like a vampire on the europeans' energy. to show the degree to which the life force has been drained from the spanish rulers, marquez describes a scene at a dinner party given by the local governor for the new viceroy. after the meal, the governor presents an abyssinian slave woman -- "she wore an almost transparent tunic that heightened the peril of her nakedness"; "her perfection was alarming." what is the viceroy's reaction? "[He:] turned pale, inhaled deeply, and with a movement of his hand erased the unbearable vision from his memory. . . . take her away, for god's sake," he ordered. "i do not want to see her again for the rest of my days." his rejection of this voluptuous woman is motivated not by morality, but by his extreme discomfort with passion. considerable death imagery is associated with the european characters. they fear life. the abbess of the local convent "viewed with equal alarm the garden flowering with so much vigor that it seemed contra natura." how ironic -- as though these europeans totally cut off from nature could know what is natural. europeans are also associated with spectral imagery. for instance, the bishop has "an aloofness that over time was turning him into an unreal being." and at one point the marquis and his household are described as "people walking around like apparitions." his wife bernarda "was a walking corpse". these people are like nothing so much as zombies. bernarda is an interesting case: she originated from the native class, but she and her father schemed to have her marry the marquis. her resulting boredom and frustration drove her to drugs (coca and fermented honey) and a beautiful and sexy kept man, judas iscariote. when judas killed himself, that was "the final step in her degradation." her life force was dissipated in "unrestrained fornication with slaves on the plantation." marquez shows us that even a native who enters into the europeans' civilization becomes infected with their fatal disease. near the end marquez describes two very sad scenes between the marquis and the two women in his life -- his wife and a women in a house for mental patients next door to his whom he had loved when he was young, but whom he had not had the courage to marry. both women express extreme hatred for him. his soitary death in a desolate landscape is oppressively depressing: "all that remained of him -- a skeleton eaten away by turkey buzzards -- was found two summers later on a path leading nowhere." such are the wages of repression enforced by religion and civilization. conversely, sierva maria, daughter to the marquis (who neglects her) and bernarda (who hates her) is banished to live in the black slave quarters. she grows into an independent and defiant adolescent full of life force, expressing herself chiefly through singing and dancing. sierva maria is bitten by a rabid dog; a considerable part of the plot turns on the outcome of this event. at first the marquis and bernarda ignore her possible contraction of rabies. then, in a fit of conscience and love, the marquis becomes concerned and tries to find a cure for her. in fact, she probably is not infected; certainly she shows no symptoms. yet she is subjected to "treatment" that is indistinguishable from torture. for all their supposed knowledge and sophistication, the europeans are so unfamiliar with strong feelings that they can't distinguish between a severe illness and a child's violent response to pain. religion-based superstition rules: she is declared to be possessed, immured in the convent -- "the pavilion of those interred in life" -- and exorcism is invoked as a "cure". sierva maria "dies" when she enters the convent, but when she connects with the blacks who serve in the there, "she recovered her world". delaura confronts wsierva maria when the bishop appoints him to do the excorism. the predictable conflict ensues, mostly in delaura's mind but also within sierva maria. she transforms during her experience with delaura in her cell in the convent -- she grows capable of loving another human and communicating with him. in the complex and conflicted extended interaction between delaura and sierva maria, marquez shows how religion perverts natural and wholesome love. chapter 4 ends with delaura saying to the bishop: "it is the demon, father . . . the most terrible one of all." it is love, the only demon for which delaura's religious training has not prepared him. finally, in sierva maria's cell, delaura stops resisting. he "unburdened himself of the dark truth that did not permit him to live. he confessed that every moment was filled with thoughts of her, that she was his life, as only god had the right and power to be . . . " this finally moves her to love him -- in a symbolic gesture welcoming him to the world of the living, "sierva maria gave him the beautiful necklace of oddua: eighteen inches of mother-of-pearl and coral beads." oddua is a santeria figure; she had been given the necklace by the black servants. sierva maria is willing to be delaura's lover, but he restrains himself -- "spent, but virgin." is delaura's desire for iserva maria love or lust? marquez seems to be conflating the two. perhaps he is saying, dont they go together? just as a human is a package containing both body and spirit? at the end, delaura's courage fails. although sierva maria wants to escape with him and live in an escapee colony, he seeks to resolve things in an "honorable" and rational way, rather than by taking action. the inevitable tragic denouement ensues. while this is a historical novel, yet it is relevant to contemporary times, because it is the story of the people who founded the south american country where the story takes place. delaura says: "at my age, and with so much mixing of bloodlines, i am no longer certain where i come from . . . or who i am." abrenuncio replies: "no one knows in these kingdoms . . . and i believe it will be centuries before they find out." ...less " |
||
| May 13 | ||
|
William
gave
to:
The Moon and Sixpence (Dover Thrift Editions) by W. Somerset Maugham |
my rating:
Added to my books!
add my review |
|
William said:
"what an entertaining novel! like one of maugham's other novels, "the razor's edge", this is a tale of a man who can't find fulfillment within society's conventions and so seeks a higher, more spiritual calling. in this case, art. "the ...more
what an entertaining novel! like one of maugham's other novels, "the razor's edge", this is a tale of a man who can't find fulfillment within society's conventions and so seeks a higher, more spiritual calling. in this case, art. "the moon and sixpence" is loosely based on the life of paul gauguin. but i read this book not so much as a commentary on gauguin's life as a vehicle for expressing maugham's ideas about art and life.
for instance, early in the story the narrator, a successful writer, says: "A writer should seek his reward in the pleasure of his work and in release from the burden of his thought; and, indifferent to aught else, care nothing for praise or censure, failure or success." gauguin's life makes a perfect means of illustrating this maxim. when the englishman charles strickland, the gauguin stand-in, leaves his wife and children and goes to paris, people assume that he went with a mistress and is living a luxurious and decadent life. but when the narrator visits him at the request of strickland's wife to ask him to return, he finds him living alone in a shabby room. why has he left? strickland simply repeats, "i've got to paint." challenged by the somewhat priggish natrator with the question of what he will do if he never rises above being a third-rate painter, strickland replies: "when a man falls into the water, it doesn't matter how he swims, well or badly; he's got to get out or else he'll drown." for the most part, strickland is portrayed as being not verbal, he is almost a dumb animal. the narrator several times expresses strickland's sense of being driven, rather than of having a rational basis for his radical life change. some of these descriptions are: "there was real passion in his voice. . . i seemed to feel in him some vehement power that was struggling within him. it gave me the sensation of something very strong, overmastering, that held him as it were, against his will. he seemed really to be possessed of a devil, and i felt that it might suddenly turn and rend him." strickland was "passionately striving for liberation from some power that held him". in other places the narrator describes strickland as "a man possessed", "not quite sane", "like some wild creature of the woods" and "something primitive". yet there is a spiritual element in strickland. the narrator says, "there was something impressive in the manner in which he lived a life wholly of the spirit." at another time he calls him "a disembodied spirit". he also says, "the screen of the flesh seemed almost transparent. it seemed as though his sensuality were curiously spiritual" it doesn't seem to me that maugham literally means that strickland's behavior is due to a religious devil. rather, maugham was depicting the twin aspects of the artistic impulse -- obedience to a complusion and a drive for freedom. strickland also seeks to escape the bounds of society. here is an extended passage with strong freudian overtones in the narrator's voice: "i take it that conscience is the guardian in the individual of the rules which the community has evolved for its own preservation. it is the policeman in all our hearts, set there to watch that we do not break its laws. it is the spy seated in the central stronghold of the ego. man's desire for the approval of his fellows is so strong that he himself has brought his enemy [conscience:] within his gates . . . and it keeps watch over him, vigilant always to crush any half-formed desire to break away from the herd. it will force him to place the good of society before his own. . . when i saw that strickland was really indifferent to the blame his conduct must excite, i could only draw back in horror as from a monster of hardly human shape." in this passage i hear two impulses -- a recognition that conscience is a tyrant, along with an acculturated abhorrence of any man slipping the bonds of conscience. the narrator clearly knows the source of this abhorrence: "[man:] has no words hard enough for the man who does not recognize [conscience's:] sway; for, a member of society now, he realizes accurately enough that against him he is powerless." to me, the narrator sounds ambiguous -- strickland is both inhuman and more than human. he is, in short, nietzsche's uberman. questions of interpretation inevitably bring up the postmodern notion of the unreliable narrator. at one point the narrator writes: "if i were writing a novel rather than narrating such facts as i know of a curious personality . . . " in this passage he calls attention to the artifice of his story. yet later he writes about his narrative as if it is determined, not malleable. he had initially intended to end with strickland on the islands living happily "i wished to end on a note of hope. it seemed to emphasize the unconquerable spirit of man. but i could not manage it. after trying once or twice i had to give it up. . . " maugham doesn't mean us to take the narrator's values literally. this is clear in the several places where the narator is depicted as still young and somewhat immature, where he says "i didn't know then that . . . " he is still learning, and his acquaintance with strickland is one of his strongest learning experiences. at one point when strickland says something unscrupulous but witty the narrator thinks: "i had to bite my lip to prevent myself form laughing. what he said had a hateful truth in it, and another defect of my character is that i enjoy the company of those, however depraved, who can give me a roland for my oliver. i began to feel that my abhorrence for strickland could only be sustained by an effort on my part. i recognized my moral weakness, but saw that my disapprobation had in it already something of a pose . . . " thus, moral judgments in this novel are not the main point. indeed, the narrator expresses this in a chekhovian maxim: "the writer is more concerned to know than to judge." one blogger wrote that, when strickland dies of leprosy, maugham means that as a punishment for his wicked life. but i think this is too simplistic. to me leprosy represents an exotic non-european disease and fits with strickland's going totally native in the south sea islands. one of the most difficult aspects of writing about artists is to portray or describe their work. a.s. byatt dealt with this in "possession" by writing two whole sets of poems in the voices of the two 19-century poets. one of the few satisfying depictions of jazz that i know is james baldwin's "sonny's blues". maugham finesses this problem by making his narrator a philistine, or at least non-perceptive. when he first sees strickland's pictures, he says, "i felt nothing of the peculiar thrill which it is the propery of art to give. the impression that strickland's pictures gave me was disconcerting . . . " rather, the narrator presents strickland's work in terms of his effort to master technique and to develop a unique visual language. "It was evident that colors and forms had a significance for strickland that was peculiar to himself." he extends this observation into a philosophical statement about life: "each one of us is alone in the world. he is shut in a tower of brass, and can communicate with his fellows only by signs, and the signs have no common value, so that their sense is vague and uncertain. we seek pitifully to convey to others the treasures of our heart, but they have not the power to accept them . . . " to overcome this obstacle is the (necessarily futile) struggle of the artist, and the source of strickland's primitive impulses and demons: "i fancy that strickland saw some spiritual meaning in material things that was so strange that he could only suggest it with halting symbols." the only person who recognizes strickland's genius is his abject fellow-painter dirk stroeve. (stroeve is dutch, but i don't think he is a van gogh stand-in.) stroeve is a counterpoint to strickland -- he loves art and beauty but doesn't have strickland's passion or talent. stroeve says of strickland, "he has genius . . . it's a great burden to its possessors. we should be very tolerant with them . . . " stroeve is so tolerant that he doesn't even get mad when strickland seduces his wife away from him in a tragic eisode that maugham tells at great length, in the mode of a true storyteller. near the end, in the south sea islands the narrator meets captain brunot, whose life is a reflection on strickland's --another way that maugham puts strickland's life into perspective and comments on it. captain brunot knew strickland and had compassion for him. when the narrator asks him why, the captain replies, "did i not tell you that i too in my way was an artist? i realized in myself the same desire as animated him. but whereas his medium was paint, mine has been life." brunot then says that he and his wife succeeded only because of their belief in god -- "without that we should have been lost." one can see this as a moralistic touch, but i think its meaning is that there are different paths, as expressed in these words of the narrator: "how strange that the creative instinct should seize upon this dull stockbooker, to his own ruin, perhaps . . . and yet no stranger than the way in which the spirit of god has seized men, pursuing them with stubborn vigilance till they have abandoned the joy of the world . . . conversion may come under many shapes." in the end, the narrator's final words on strickland may be these: "strickland was an odious man, but i still think he was a great one." or these: "his real life consisted of dreams and tremendously hard work." in which strickland is like every other true artist. ...less " |
||
|
William
gave
to:
A Death in the Family: A Restoration of the Author's Text (Collected Works of James Agee) by James Agee, Michael A. Lofaro |
my rating:
Added to my books!
add my review |
|
William said:
"a frequent comment on this novel is that the writing is "poetic". i think this is accurate and is one of the main atractions of this unusual novel. in the prologue, for instance, agee (who was also a poet) wrote a poem that is clearly an im...more
a frequent comment on this novel is that the writing is "poetic". i think this is accurate and is one of the main atractions of this unusual novel. in the prologue, for instance, agee (who was also a poet) wrote a poem that is clearly an imitation of whitman. this is revealing: whitman celebrated the ordinary person and ordinary life. agee, too, chooses as his heroes ordinary, flawed people and their involvement in and reaction to an ordinary human event -- the death of a man who lives within a web of family relationships. each family member's character is brought out in their reactions to the man's death and their reactions to each other. multiple varied viewpoints are handled quite skillfully throughout. the greatest part of the novel is presented from the viewpoint of the man's son, presumably the young agee, whose father did die in an accident. we are shown in heartbreaking detail how the boy's loss of his father prevented him from ever recovering from the fear that his father disapproved of him for being bookish and smart, rather than brave. yet every other character is given at least one section to show what and how they think, making this a true ensemble story with many fully rounded participants.
the novel is poetic also in its emphasis on the concrete everyday actions of these people -- for instance, in the prologue, the author describes men out watering their lawns in the sumemr evening in memphis. and in a scene late at night, when an aunt stays with the wife of the dead man, the making of tea is given a prominent and effective place to reflect their awkward interactions. in its feeling treatment of ordinary people and their emotions in a situation of loss and regret, "a death in the family" invoked for me faulkner's novel "as i lay dying", delmore schzartz's short story "in dreams begin responsibilities" and thomas wolfe's novel "you can't go home again". the quiet poetic writing in this work creates what i can only call an elegiac tone -- an elegy for the dead father, for the young boy's lost childhood, for the life we leave behind when we grow up, and for all human beings who are trying to do their best with imperfect selves in an imperfect world. (note: when writing this review, i could only find this revised version of the novel on amazon.com; i actually read an old copy of the original edition. agee died before he finished the novel; many sections were lying around loose and the novel had to be constructed by the editors from these fragments. the literary scholar michael lofaro has recently undertaken to reorganize the materials into a different version. i found the original version very satisfying; while i can imagine different organizational strategies, i don't think any of them would make a superior novel to the first version.) ...less " |
||
William's friend comments
block this member *
This will prevent William from sending you messages or viewing your profile. William will not know you have blocked him/her—your profile will appear as if it was private. Also, messages on discussion boards from William will be hidden (though there will be a link to view it if you want to).
William's friends (4)
|
Thomas 9 books 5 friends |
|
Erika 22 books 17 friends |
|
Lauren 0 books 1 friend |
|
|
Irene 6 books 4 friends |
polls voted on by this member
