Harry Miller's Blog, page 4

Book Review, Midst the Wild Carpathians, by Mór Jókai

Upon finishing this intriguing book, I turned back to page one and began reading again, in the hope that the intricacies of its plot might become clearer the second time around. One dimension of this intricacy relates to the complex political situation of seventeenth-century Transylvania, where Ottoman Turks retained some influence despite the country’s nominal independence and where the word “Hungarian” could refer not only to the native ethnic stock but also to emigres from Hungary proper. Ano...

Book Review: Lanterns on the Levee, by William Alexander Percy

William Alexander Percy’s Lanterns on the Levee reads like William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience (which I have not read), with the first twelve chapters resembling an innocent rhapsody and the latter fifteen a world-weary dirge. The turning point comes with Percy’s father’s involvement in politics in 1910-12, with World War One, conflict with the Ku Klux Klan in 1922, and the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 making any return to Innocence impossible. Adding a jarring element to the...

Book Review: Washington’s Crossing, by David Hackett Fischer

As our republic is ground to nothing between the boulders of socialism and populism – the abyssus abyssum invocat of our two-party system – it seems pointless except as an act of masochism to read anything about its founding and early history. Our institutions of freedom have been so glibly discarded that books about them can amount only to quaint and curious volumes of forgotten lore, immersion in which would make anyone weak and weary indeed.

Neverthehoo, old habits die hard, and this year, wi...

Book Review: Rose, Rose, I Love You, by Wang Chen-ho

The plot of Rose, Rose, I Love You revolves around the expected descent of American GIs, on furlough from Vietnam, upon the town of Hualien, Taiwan, in the mid-60s. Time to get the female companionship ready! There’s greenbacks to be made!

The book is a 180-page long ethnic joke, in which the Taiwanese people are caricatured, as they frequently are, as charmingly, innocently vulgar. Many of the characters inhabit the underworld, and as they improvise at life, they are shown to be faithfully copi...

Book Review: The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, by Edgar Allan Poe

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (which I read in the 1965 AMS Press edition of The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe) is two books in one: a survival at sea story and a tale of Antarctic exploration. Actually, it’s one and a half books in one, as the latter epic becomes a survival story and ends abruptly.

The writing is as over-articulate and replete with nautical terms as Melville’s, but Poe’s themes of terror and the macabre frequently raise their horrifying heads, as in:

It was not until s...

Book Review: The Dud Avocado, by Elaine Dundy

Sally Jay Gorce, the protagonist of Elaine Dundy’s The Dud Avocado, is motivated by a desire to prevent the following nightmare from becoming reality:

It takes place in sort of a vast hall, in the center of which sits a girl behind a desk….The closer I get to this girl, the older she becomes, until she turns into a middle-aged spinster librarian. Then I see that it’s me. People keep coming up to her from every direction asking her for books. They are all going somewhere….Everyone is in a hurry. ...

Speedboat Dream

I dreamed I was playing what I thought was a video game but which turned out to be a real-life intercontinental remote control, piloting a super-fast speedboat as it coursed down a river in Europe, while watching on my living-room TV. The object was to beat the clock and to avoid obstacles, especially canoes and kayaks. For the most part, my “game” was going well, as my speedboat only occasionally veered too close to the unpowered craft, swamping them and spilling their passengers into the drink...

Book Review: Skylark, by Dezső Kosztolányi

Dezső Kosztolányi’s Skylark is pure delight. It depicts a week in the life of a provincial Hungarian town at the fin de siècle, when the unassuming protagonists, a Father and Mother in their late fifties, are deprived of the company of their homely daughter, Skylark, who goes to visit relatives. The town’s aristocratic bourgeoisie supplies the supporting cast and completes the book’s charm.

In a smart introduction, contemporary novelist Péter Esterházy quotes Kosztolányi’s diary:

I have always r...

Book Review: Go Tell It on the Mountain, by James Baldwin

James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain is exquisitely written and filled with poignant truths. Here’s one concerning the resentment of children toward dutiful parents:

Through a storm of tears that did not reach his eyes, he stared at the yellow room; and the room shifted, the light of the sun darkened, and his mother’s face changed. Her face became the face that he gave her in his dreams, the face that had been hers in a photograph he had seen once, long ago, a photograph taken before he wa...

What I’m Working On

My current book project is a little hard to explain, but I’ll try:

I translated a seventeenth-century Chinese text, a detailed account of a tedious political imbroglio, into English.I extracted an intriguing subplot concerning a despicable family, resulting in a snappy 6000-word text.I transplanted the setting to contemporary Baltimore. My impulse was threefold:Chinese settings seem to discourage would-be readers, and Baltimore may prove more accessible;Chinese names are especially off-put...