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

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.



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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.



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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.



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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.



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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.



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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.



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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.



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Nostalgic reading John Irving again

Last Night in Twisted River by John Irving

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Like many people, I first discovered John Irving with The World According to Garp. After that, I went back and read all his previous novels, and then started reading new works as they came out. What made Irving special to me was his ability to write fun, intricate stories that made you think. They were both enjoyable and rich with passion and meaning.

John Irving makes no secret of his love for Charles Dickens, and his novels capture the spirit of the master novelist like no contemporary novelist that I know. Like Dickens, Irving could be faulted for the intricate potting, the crazy coincidences, and the sprawling casts of fairly one-dimensional characters. None of these bother me when done well. I feel that if an author exaggerates something to prove a point, there's nothing wrong with that.

That said, the best of these sorts of novels breeze along so quickly that you don't tend to think about these things while you're reading. You think about the injustices in society that the author is working to shine a light on. John Irving's particular talent is for creating a rich, warm world of quirky characters that you feel nostalgic for even if you've never been there yourself.

After A Prayer for Owen Meany, Irving continued to create such worlds, but I found that the books were starting to meander and the characters becoming forgettable. At some point I stopped reading them; sadly, I can't even remember which was the last one I read in full.

I picked up Last Night in Twisted River because I read that it was something of a return to form. It is somewhat, and I read it with a warm nostalgia for past masterpieces. Irving has created a rich world that spans decades and many different places. I enjoyed it overall, but there are some aspects that keep it from being a great novel.

The first is that the main character is just as sketchily drawn as much of the supporting cast. After sixty-some years and hundreds of pages with Danny, I can't say I have much of idea of who he is. He's partly autobiographical, and that might be the problem. There's a wall behind which we never see. We're told he loves people, but we don't really see or feel it. Mostly, we see his sense of loss, not what drives him forward.

The other things that kept me from enjoying the novel were the inconsistent ways both the settings and people were drawn. Some places and situations were rich and detailed; some were grotesque sketches that were meant to be funny but missed the mark or even bordered on offensive. Characters were treated in the same way, with some minor characters warmly and painstakingly drawn and others that proved to be very important marked by little more than physical characteristics or linguistic quirks. There was no rhyme or reason to this.

As a writer, I've long been puzzled by the question of character and caricature. Dickens is often criticized for his caricatures, but I find in life that while everyone may have depth beyond what you see on the surface, they can behave as caricatures in society. The magic of Dickens and Irving at their best is that they are able to capture the essence of a person in just a couple of sentences. You can see the caricature but understand the person beneath. There's an art and a finesse in this that Irving has done a lot better in the past.

Lastly, I missed the kind of driving force that propelled my favorite novels by Irving. This book seems to be about the power of stories to shape lives and how that (view spoiler)[makes Danny become a writer. But the power of story is important in all our lives, from childhood to old age. There's really nothing here that convinces you why Danny had to become a novelist, as he seems to believe. In the end, this book is a kind of meditation on how long and tough life is, and how we keep soldiering on. Nothing wrong with that, but many episodes here, including the end, are forced and unconvincing. This author has been a lot more insightful and powerful in past work. (hide spoiler)]

Still, I enjoyed Last Night in Twisted River, and if you're an Irving fan, you'll feel right at home here.



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Remarkable, not so enjoyable

Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I've been meaning to read Midnight's Children for a while now, as it's on just about every list you see of best novels of all time. The book is about Saleem Sinai, who is born on the stroke of midnight at the very moment India gains its independence in 1947. His life mirrors that of his country in an expansive tale of dashed hope and disappointment.

This is a remarkable book in many ways. It's got the scope and allegory of Günter Grass, the dark humor and complex plotting of Charles Dickens and John Irving, the wonderfully messy digressions of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, and some of the descriptive inventiveness of Angela Carter. I finished it thinking, "Wow, how did he do all that?"

That said, I wish I'd liked it more. It's a very dense, difficult read. The digressions and endless cast of characters--many with multiple names--made it a long slog for me. I found the obvious narrative manipulations (backtracking to explain, hiding things that are later explained, etc.) and overt metaphors grating, and almost gave up a couple of times. There's no subtlety here. It's all muscular bravado, a writer showing off. When this kind of thing is done in the service of the story, I tend to love it, but I often felt that the author was throwing too many things against the wall in the hope that something would stick, rather than making thoughtful choices.

I also wasn't a fan of the way this book playfully trivializes very serious events, even though Saleem keeps telling you how horrible things are and how much worse they will inevitably get. Despite the pretense of this all being about a country and a people, there really seemed to be no soul to this book. The narrator is gleefully unreliable and unlikeable, and the characters he depicts are almost all described in an unflattering light. Whereas, say, Graham Greene, Günter Grass, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez thoughtfully examine the struggle for the soul of their countries with characters that pulse with life, this all came across to me as a big and flat joke. Major historical events are really, you see, all about our unreliable narrator.

I know I'm coming at this years after the fact. At the time this book came out, it must have seemed like the arrival of such a new, exciting voice--a shift of the international literary landscape. But taking it purely as a piece of literature in our modern, internationally-connected time, I found it a harsh, cold read with much invention but not so much to take away from it in the end.



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An oddly unemotional account of the great London plague

A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


This is a fairly straightforward accounting of the great London plague of 1665 written in the early 1700s. It's somewhat interesting as a historical artifact, with long lists of how many people died and when, along with extended discussions of the veracity of the statistics. The descriptions of policies and their outcomes were the most fascinating aspect, and there were a couple of stories buried in here that were gripping, but these were too brief and way too sparsely scattered through the inartfully disorganized text. As much as I wanted to enjoy this, it was a long, dreary slog to get through. A series of excerpts would be ideal to read, but as a whole I'd recommend this only for people who have an academic reason to tackle it.



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