BIBLIOGRIND
Adventures in Writing, Reading & Book Culture
March 29, 2013 at 4:55 pm · Filed under THE LETTERS OF MARK BEYER :: reading & writing & book culture, The Prague Blog
This has been a roller coaster two-month stretch of reading. Two BIG books and one decidedly philosophical, though wholly a fiction. Last year was The Year of the BIG Book, yet so far in 2013 I’ve luxuriated in some whopper-length stories and just completed a long-but-oh-so-accessible survey of Western Philosophy (and for anybody who likes philosophy, it’s a winner; for the philo-phtoowee people, you could do a lot worse — and probably have, in which case has determined your aversion ratio).
TUNC by Lawrence Durrell
Durrell has fun with this “novel of science-ideas” in that he plays with language in a way that you wonder if your leg is being pulled from the get-go. This isn’t the case, although the footing which the reader stands upon is moving. Ostensibly, the story follows an applied engineering inventor, Charlock, and his relationship with a worldwide company, the ubiquitous Merlin. To work for Merlin is to be set for life: steady income that grows to real wealth, keeper of your own patents, prestige, freedom of thought and work. But Charlock is a skittish sort, and he wants to know Why? all this must be so wonderful. Thus begins the ride.
2666 by Robert Bolano
Bolano gave us five short novels as he prepared to die (look him up on Wikipedia). The estate-cum-publisher decided to sandwich them, thus presenting a massive tome. But there is not just one story, so that’s okay, too. Each section follows different people, though there is a loose connection between the stories, and sometimes the odd character (or main one) appears in another story. The last story, “The Part About Archimboldi”, was for me the most coherent. Where the others left of as if Bolano died before he typed the last page, the story of Archimboldi is as complete a picture of a human as a reader could hope to get. Really heartfelt stuff, in a world of uncompromising treachery, delivering himself from evil with no help from north or south, and living by his wits.
The Story of Philosophy by Will Durant
This classic survey of “the world’s greatest philosophers from Plato to John Dewey” is such a fascinating read because Durant brings reasoned thought, intellect, wisdom, and humor to a whole ship-full of good prose. I’ve always disliked reading (or slogging through) the actual texts of many philosophers (Niezsche is brutal; Russel is obscure; Kant is dense as twice-baked cheesecake) but I thoroughly enjoy having a mature philosopher to pull out the best (and readable) bits from all those guys. Durant does this so well that I wanted him to give me the delineation on all the included philos’ works; alas, such an undertaking is “voluminous.” Nevertheless, we learn about the men behind their works, which partly explains the reasons they came to their … um … reasoning. And what I came away with this time, at this point in my life, is that most of the major philos were lonely, had been pushed down by society (or gov’t), rejected in love, hounded by peers, and in this built a view of life that, amazingly, captured the attention of those same people and society and gov’t that dumped on them.
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What Beauty is my newest novel, a story of art, obsession and ego. Read an excerpt here. It’s available as an ebook, too.
The Village Wit (2010) is a humorous and sometimes dark odyssey through village life, love’s fall, sexual politics, and that place where memory and modern love intersect. Read an excerpt here. This book is also available as an ebook.
January 18, 2013 at 10:16 pm · Filed under A Commonplace Book
I’ve had this book on my shelf for over a year, where it found itself buried under other books. It was suggested that I read Atwood, as it had been a while since the last. Now I wonder why it’s been so long:
january 18, 2013
“Then it was time for the keepers, and our walk out through the gate, Ah Grace, out for your promenade with your two beaus, ain’t you the lucky one. Oh no, we’re the lucky ones, we’re the lucky boys ourselves, with such a morsel on our arms, says the one. What do you say Grace, says the other, let’s just nip up a side alley, into a back stable, down on the hay, it won’t take long if you lie still, and quicker yet if you wriggle about. Or why lie down at all, says the one, back her up against the wall and heave-ho and hoist the petticoats, it’s a quick jump standing up, as long as your knees don’t give out on you; come Grace, just give us the word and we’re your lads, one as good as the other and why settle for one when there’s two standing ready? Standing ready all the time, here, give us a hand and you can test the truth of it. Nor we won’t charge you a penny neither, says the other, what’s a good time between old friends?”
– Margaret Atwood, “Alias Grace”
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What Beauty is my newest novel, a story of art, obsession and ego. Read an excerpt here. It’s available as an ebook, too.
The Village Wit (2010) is a humorous and sometimes dark odyssey through village life, love’s fall, sexual politics, and that place where memory and modern love intersect. Read an excerpt here. This book is also available as an ebook.
June 24, 2012 at 12:42 pm · Filed under THE LETTERS OF MARK BEYER :: reading & writing & book culture
I’ve been reading “The Kindly Ones” by Jonathan Littell for a couple weeks now (it’s 975 pages!) and every bit of it is filled with contrasting images. From the Ukrainian forests overrun by Nazis, and used to hide the slaughtered “enemies,” to the garish nightlife of war-arrogant Berlin’s privileged aristocracy, Littell is intent on showing his audience life in Nazi Germany through the war years.
At first I was disconcerted with the story — not for its prose, or the character; both are compelling works of literary imagination — because the description of the atrocities inflicted on the civilian populations by the SS killers was a lesson in repetition of the striking image. This were as much a blitzkrieg to the senses of readers as war is to soldiers. Then he tempered these images by getting into the mind of the narrator, whose own careful observation of other soldiers brought about a picture that goes far beyond any film or war-time documentary can illustrate.
This is where “The Kindly Ones” took hold of me, and has not let go since. And here is found the focus of this column: the need for the author to get the thoughts of his character at just the right time; sometimes woven into the descriptive narrative, and other times coming abruptly, through memory or sense-triggering. Here’s where we writers can draw the reader along, after whipping her back and forth through the carefully developed labyrinth of images created to tell the story.
For example, after several such “actions” in which this narrator-cum-SS-Officer has watch in horror how (this is early in the war) regular soldiers were used to shoot civilians point-blank in the head and let them fall into a hastily dug trench, he sees what this has done to soldiers:
As brutalized and habituated as they may have become, none of our men could kill a Jewish woman without thinking about his wife, his sister, or his mother, or kill a Jewish child without seeing his own children in front of him in the pit.
Without this internal struggle, this book would have quickly become a “war book” filled with dirty language, “band of brothers” camaraderie, and sentimental feelings for home or family (or both). But this SS Officer is not so different from officers in other armies who have witnessed home-grown atrocities, and this makes all the difference.
In another episode, on the Russian front at Stalingrad as the Nazis are surrounded and being pummeled by the counter-attacking Russian army, under conditions known only to rats, weasels, and other rodents, our newly promoted (to captain) narrator is about to meet a partisan officer on the front lines, hiding in a room whose walls look like Swiss cheese from all the holes blasted through them:
What could this officer, cut off from everything, teach me that I hadn’t already read in some report? True, I could see for myself the miserable condition of the men, their fatigue, their distress, but that, too, I already knew. I had vaguely thought, on my way over there, about a discussion on the political involvement of the Croat soldiers with Germany, on Ustashi ideology: now I understood there was no sense in that; it was worse than futile, and this Oberleutnant would bprobably not have known how to respond; in his head there was room only for food, his home, his family, captivity, or his imminent death. All of a sudden I was tired and disgusted, I felt hypocritical, idiotic. “Merry Christmas,” the officer said to me as he shook my hand, smiling.
These paragraphs are instructive for any writer: in a world where so much imagery is dark, colored only by the red of blood from torn apart soldiers, we have the thoughts of an intellectual-turned-soldier to interrupt our own horror (a living nightmare few of us have witnessed). This is the humanity we seek within war’s theater, often left out, and unexplained; and these are the thoughts that make fiction the truth of humanity’s struggle with itself, no matter what conditions of splendor or squalor, heralded victory or murderous failure.
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What Beauty is my newest novel, a story of art, obsession and ego. Read an excerpt here. It’s available as an ebook, too.
The Village Wit (2010) is a humorous and sometimes dark odyssey through village life, love’s fall, sexual politics, and that place where memory and modern love intersect. Read an excerpt here. This book is also available as an ebook.
