Harrison Bae Wein's Blog: Harrison Bae Wein, page 8

A bleak novel

Bleak House by Charles Dickens

My rating: 1 of 5 stars


This was the ninth novel by Dickens, Charles that I've completed, and I have to admit I'm completely baffled about why I've read so many things good about it. Note that I haven't seen the production with Gillian Anderson; I've only read the book. Maybe the series is amazing--I could see someone piecing together something interesting out of this. But as it stands, this is a long, dry, depressing novel that is pretty much devoid of any pleasures. It seems that Dickens decided that the way to convince people that the legal system was an interminable torture was to interminably torture his readers. I just felt so dispirited when I finished it--and like I'd gotten nothing else out of it.

I've not loved all of Dickens' books I've read all the way through--Little Dorrit and Martin Chuzzlewit come to mind--but I've felt happy I stuck with them through the end. Not in this case. This one includes an omniscient narrator who won't say anything in a couple of words that could be said in five lines, a first person narrator who we're supposed to believe sees herself as some kind of angel but who Dickens uses to convey his scornful judgements in circuitous and disingenuous ways, various random deaths of no apparent cause except to serve the story, and one death that is explained--by a gratuitous case of spontaneous combustion. I could go on and on.

There are so many Dickens books out there, and they really do fundamentally differ in so many ways. I would definitely recommend David Copperfield, Great Expectations, A Tale of Two Cities, and several others before this one.



View all my reviews

A messy tribute to the power of story

Everville by Clive Barker

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This is the second of Clive Barker's planned "Books of the Art" trilogy. At heart, this expansive dark fantasy is a tribute to the power of story. Storytelling itself is part of the story. It's very clever, but the execution is messy and unfocused. As usual, Clive Barker has inventive flashes of genius throughout that make you wonder how he ever thinks of these things. But while it's an improvement over The Great and Secret Show--I'd give it 3.5 stars if Gooodreads allowed--it's still a far cry from his best work. It's likable, though, and I enjoyed reading it for the most part.

I'm not sure if I'll read the third one if there ever is one. The first came out in 1989, and this one in 1994. I don't know what the long delay is, but I'm sadly not holding my breath for the continuation of this story. If you're not already a Clive Barker fan, I'd recommend starting with Weaveworld, Imajica, and The Thief of Always instead of this series.



View all my reviews

Another crazy horror world from Clive Barker

The Great and Secret Show by Clive Barker

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


The Great and Secret Show is an expansive, unpredictable, and unsettling work of horror fantasy involving a dream world and its relationship to our own. Like much of Clive Barker's work, it's wildly imaginative, gets you thinking differently about the world we live in, and is generally a good read.

But while it's worth spending the time with this long, meandering book if you know you like Clive Barker's work, I wouldn't recommend this for the uninitiated. Weaveworld and Imajica are similarly expansive works, but both are tighter and better written than this, with more compelling stories with more interesting characters.

There's also a general, well, goofiness to this book. The bad guys are more whiny and annoying than scary. And some things are just so over the top it almost seems to become a parody. Clive Barker always tries to push the boundaries, which I love, but in this book he just crosses into silliness sometimes.



View all my reviews

So much more than a Victorian romance

North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


North and South begins in London, where Margaret Hale is staying with her wealthy cousin. After her cousin is married, Margaret returns home to find that her father, the parson in a small village, is having a crisis of conscience. He decides to quit his post in the church and takes a job as a private tutor in the northern manufacturing town of Milton. The air there is polluted, and the people suffer from poverty, starvation, and disease. Margaret comes to know people of different classes and gets involved in their affairs, including a conflict between a mill owner and his workers.

It's best not to say much more about the plot, but Elizabeth Gaskell is, as always, entertaining and easy to read even as she depicts the most painful things. This book is admittedly not as masterful as Wives and Daughters. There is a very unlikely and frankly unnecessary coincidence to move the plot, and there are also some characters that she doesn't treat with the empathy and sophistication that she does virtually all the characters in her later work. But I like how daring this was in its approach to social issues. It is partly a romance, which many seem to see it as, but it also tackles larger economic and social questions. Gaskell is clear-headed and prescient in her thoughts about technology and the constant changes it will continue to bring to society. In the end, though, this book really hinges on Margaret learning to grow up, take responsibility, and make her own choices. It's almost a coming of age story at its core. I thoroughly enjoyed it and would rank it as one of the great works of Victorian literature.

One final note about the 2004 BBC production. I have loved many of these productions and couldn't wait to see this one after reading the book. I had been really wondering how they could ever depict all these internal thoughts and revelations in a drama. After seeing the beginning, I realized they weren't even trying. It may be great on its own merit, but I just couldn't watch the thing, it seemed so far from the book in spirit.



View all my reviews

A Masterpiece of American Literature

Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Song of Solomon is a masterpiece of American literature by Toni Morrison. Morrison has won all sorts of awards, including the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993. If you haven't read her work before, this is a great one to start with. It is one of those rare books that's about people, politics, and American history all at the same time. The personal, political, and historical all resonate to create a powerful tapestry of human experience. It's complex, beautiful, and marvelous. I couldn't recommend it more highly. Don't read anything more about it; just read it.



View all my reviews

Touring the poetry universe

Poet's Choice by Robert Hass

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I read some of the columns by U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Hass that make up this book when they were first published in the Washington Post. As a collection, this "notebook of a poet's readings," as Hass describes it, makes a wonderful bedside book. I would read one or two entries before turning off the light and fall asleep thinking about what I'd just read.

Hass is a thoughtful guide, posing questions and pointing out details to pay attention to. A particularly strong aspect of his selections is the wide range of different types of poems represented. Hass includes classics like Robert Frost's haunting "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," Paul Laurence Dunbar's powerful "Sympathy," and Matsuo Basho's haikus. You'll also find wonderful poems by more contemporary poets such as Denise Levertov, Hayden Carruth, and Michael Ondaatje. You never know what you'll encounter next. It's a surprising voyage of discovery, and there's a lot to treasure if you keep an open mind.

Haas wrote that he aspired to help "give us back what we are losing--a shared, literate public culture." I think this is a great model to follow, and makes a gem of a book.



View all my reviews

More than a great yarn

Beowulf by Unknown

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


An epic poem written somewhere in the seventh to tenth century in Anglo-Saxon? Beowulf always sounded intimidating to me and sat on my shelf for years because of it.

I shouldn't have waited. This is a great yarn told beautifully. Seamus Heaney's verse translation makes the poem exciting and accessible. It's not just a gripping tale of heroes and monsters and dragons. Beowulf tells of a feudal time before Christianity, a world before countries and their governments protected people. The fall of a king or a warrior could mean catastrophe. The bloody conflicts between the Geats, Danes, and Swedes bring a palpable sense of terror even more threatening than the monsters in this story. An old woman's worst fears at the end of the poem aren't monsters, but an invasion leading to their people's slavery and abasement.

Beowulf is great not only for its story and its musings on glory, heroism, and aging, but for the glimpse it gives us into a very distant past.



View all my reviews

Reading Tom Jones

The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling by Henry Fielding

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I try to read at least one major classic novel a year. They may take more work than a contemporary book, but these are the greats, and there's a reason they've lasted for so many years. I've long looked forward to reading The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling. It's on so many greatest-ever lists. It was also published around the time of Lawrence Sterne's hilarious, creative The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, which I absolutely loved.

I was disappointed to find that Tom Jones isn't in the same creative vein as Stern's masterpiece or Don Quixote: Translated by Edith Grossman, which preceded it by more than a century. Henry Fielding's classic is a well-structured picaresque novel about the roguish but essentially good-hearted Tom Jones and his comical pursuit of his beloved Sophia. I found it somewhat difficult to get into, but really enjoyed it by the end. In particular, once I got to around page 500, the last 300 pages just flew by. It has a very intricately plotted story and, once things start clicking together, it moves forward at a relentless pace. The characters may be thinly sketched, but you come to like many of them.

One warning I would add is that each of the 18 books that make up the novel begins with an introductory chapter that is best used to cure insomnia. These self-indulgent, rambling discourses about writing and such have nothing to do with the story. I plodded my way through them to see if they contained any gems, but found none. Overall, though, this book is definitely worth the effort. It's a bawdy, funny, and generally great book to spend some time with.



View all my reviews

A stark monument to a lost culture

The Family Moskat by Isaac Bashevis Singer

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This brutal book follows the downfall of a wealthy Jewish family in Poland from the turn of the 20th century until World War II. At its heart, it is about the deterioration of a culture. Thousands of years of tradition are yielding to new political, cultural, and social ideas. This book is extraordinary in its broad, meticulous depiction of a now-extinct Jewish community as it slowly falls apart. But it's a difficult read. Few of the large number of characters are well-drawn, and almost none are likeable. Singer also often has characters casually discuss political and social theories with the assumption that readers will have a full understanding of the debates people were having at the time. That may be realistic, but it makes for tough reading for someone a century removed from the action.

As a literary work, the book seemed inconsistent to me, shifting tone and focus with seemingly little design. Any hope I had of understanding where Singer was going with all this was dashed by a bleak, abrupt ending. Without giving too much away, it seemed remarkably cynical and hopeless to me, especially given that the author himself came from this community and lived to tell the tale. I stewed about this for a couple of days. Then I found a review by Milton Hindus in the New York Times from 1965, when the book was printed in a new edition. It explained this feeling of incompleteness that I got from the book (see http://www.nytimes.com/.../98/01/25/h... "Such an ending made a marked impression on the initial readers of the book in English, but in the Yiddish text the story is rounded out an additional 11 pages.... In 1950, such an ending may have been dropped because it seemed fatuously sentimental so soon after the war. Now, it is regrettable that Singer's softer ending has not been restored in the new edition. Should another edition ever be called for, I hope that this will be done. The coda is certainly not superfluous; it contains some of the most eloquent and moving passages in the whole book."

I do wish that ending, which Hindus describes as hopeful and redemptive, had been restored. As it reads now, the more thoughtful, meaningful aspects of this rich book were abandoned in the face of a horrible moment in history to leave what amounts to a stark, cold monument to a lost community.



View all my reviews

How to prevent the apocalypse

Apocalypse Never: Forging the Path to a Nuclear Weapon-Free World by Tad Daley

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


The novel I'm working on right now is about a nuclear terror attack in Washington, DC and the people who are trying to prevent it from happening. I started on this project more than ten years ago, well before The Life and Opinions of the Housecat Hastings. I put it down for a while because it's been so difficult to write, both for technical (how to structure this thing?) and emotional (you can only read so much about nuclear war) reasons.

So I've been reading about nuclear war and nuclear weapons policy a fair amount lately. It's not the focus of my book, but it's key to the outcome. Apocalypse Never: Forging the Path to a Nuclear Weapon-Free World resonated with me the most of any that I've picked up so far. What's most striking about reading it now, years after it was written, is how much of Daley's perspective still applies in 2017. He explains why countries like Iran and North Korea feel they need nuclear weapons as a deterrent. These explanations are as true today as they were then. Daley also drives home how misguided and foolish foreign policy can be when you don't pause to understand why the actors are acting the way they are. After all this time, you've got to wonder why our approach remains what it is.

What I liked most about this book, though, is how Daley makes the case for global nuclear disarmament and charts a realistic path for how to get there. This is ambitious, and most people in this dark, cynical time might be inclined to dismiss it outright. But the great achievement of this book is that this idealistic vision remains grounded in reality. We can't let go of this hope. We've got to believe that cooler, more visionary minds will eventually prevail. The alternative is just too horrific to think about.

I highly recommend this book. Daley, Director of the Project on Abolishing War at the Center for War/Peace Studies, is now working on another book. You can read more about them at http://www.cwps.org.



View all my reviews