this nerding life

the resolution project

The Resolution Project Book Fifty: The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (1950)

“Everyone agreed to this and that was how the adventures began. It was the sort of house that you never seem to come to the end of, and it was full of unexpected places.” (p. 4)

The Resolution Project: For my New Year’s resolution this year (that being 2011), I decided to try and read all one hundred of the novels picked by Time Magazine as the best since their inception in 1923 to the list’s publication in 2005. I exempted myself from reading ones I’ve already read, leaving some eighty-six or so to read before the end of this year. Some spoilers may lie ahead, so be warned if you’re the type to be bothered by that.

The Elevator Pitch: Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy are four children who have been evacuated to the English countryside during World War II. They live with an old Professor, who lets them spend their days idly exploring the strange house. When Lucy happens upon a magic wardrobe that escorts her to the land of Narnia, the children will be forced to fight for what is right against an ancient evil.

Okay, confession time: before this year, I was a complete Narnia neophyte, a noob, a Neanderthal even, with regards to this book series and associated media property. I work in a comic store, so I’ve seen some of the merchandise prepared for each of the films I guess, but until now I’ve never actually experienced the world first-hand. And you know what? I really liked it.

To be honest, it was a little tough going for me early on in the two hours or so of straight reading it took to finish, though. The subtitle of the book is “A Story for Children”, and as such the writing style is very simple and direct, which takes a little getting used to as opposed to the other stuff I’ve subjected myself to this year. Lewis continually reminds the reader who’s talking and when, which got on my nerves a little at first, but this simple storytelling technique soon faded away once I got into the engaging narrative. And, to be fair, I much prefer being explicitly told who is speaking at all times to something like Blood Meridian (now there’s a wildly disparate set of books if I’ve ever seen one), which never feels the need to inform you as to any of these facts, much less why anyone would be talking as opposed to constantly raping and murdering. Score one for Lewis.

The characters are all quite plain and simple, easy for a child to insert their own personalities or those of their friends into and experience the story vicariously through in that way. I’m still not absolutely clear as to what Susan’s role was, other than to be more interesting in future volumes I guess? Edmund, that little douchebag, was characterized pretty well, once I realized that the “Turkish Delight” he was continually asking for from the White Witch was actually DRUGS (joke). I thought at first that the main thrust of the story was very similar to Poul Anderson’s Three Hearts and Three Lions, but upon looking it up, I actually found out that Wardrobe predates that book a number of years. Maybe Anderson was a fan too?

Actually speaking of drugs, another hurdle I had when initially getting into this book, and I know he’d probably hate to hear it, was Time 100 list curator Lev Grossman’s awesome reimagining of the fantasy narrative The Magicians.

I’m sure Mr. Grossman would be a little sad to hear this, but having read his Bret Easton Ellis-influenced and brilliant inversions of Wardrobe‘s tropes first made it a little more difficult to accept the original at face value. As such, though, I can say now I enjoyed both of them a lot, but probably should have read Lewis first. Moving on.

I was struck early on by the Professor’s insistence that the Wardrobe was, once admitting of all the available data with regards to the character of the child that first found it, a real dimensional portal. The Professor, who’s got to be an avatar of Lewis, if I’m reading this correctly, kind of posits this assumption in terms of quantum mechanics:

“‘I mean, there was nothing there when we looked; even Lucy didn’t pretend there was.’

“What has that to do with it?’ said the Professor.

‘Well, Sir, if things are real, they’re there all the time.”

‘Are they?’ said the Professor; and Peter did not know quite what to say.” (p. 45-46)

It’s almost like they’re living in Professor Schrödinger’s house or something. I love that. It’s too easy for children’s authors to score cheap points from their intended audience by having authority figures

a. be an obstacle to the child protagonists and

b. never listen to anything they say, even though they’re obviously correct.

The Professor can easily accept the existence of alternate realities and travel between such, and his ownership of the house the kids are fostered in never in any way hinders them from having sweet-ass adventures. I hope that it never really gets confirmed later on in the series whether or not the Professor knows of Narnia, is from there, etc, because it’s so much better for him to be from the real world and yet accommodating of others. in my mind anyway.

Lewis’s writing style is also quite conversational at times, in addition to the aforementioned easiness of reading. I really enjoyed his casual asides about the culture of giants, and how he related magical events to things kids would understand, for example how paper sets on fire, or the colour of fresh strawberries. You really get the feeling that this book was tested out on real children before getting printed, as that’s exactly the sort of great stuff you’d tell a kid while reading them a bedtime story. This reminded me a lot of William Goldman’s The Princess Bride, actually, minus all the postmodern talk about “editing” the original text and all that. The more I think about this, the more I wish I’d read this book when I was little.

The big elephant in the room, or rather the lion in the room, when speaking critically about Wardrobe is the obvious Christ metaphors. That was one of the few things I’d obviously known about going in, and in my dual ignorance of both Narnia and Christianity, I thought it was going to be a lot more explicit than it turned out to be. Sure you get the whole death and rebirth thing, but what really interested me was how the kids found it really difficult to look the lion square in the face. Sure, it would be somewhat disconcerting to stare down a magical talking lion, but his inherent goodness being awe-inspiring enough to make you have to look away? That’s a little different. That’s almost like losing SAN points by reading the Pnakotic Manuscripts or something to me, I figured everyone would just love Aslan right off the hop! This is obviously something for readers far more versed in theology and/or felinology to talk about.

“Once a King in Narnia, always a King in Narnia.” (p. 186)

Who would I recommend this book to?: Kids, definitely kids. Fans of fantasy worlds that lurk just on the outer edges of our comprehension. People who enjoy the more jovial fantasy stuff, and also talking animals.

Total pages read since January 1st: 14240 pp.

Total books on the Time 100 list read: 50/113, or (still) 44% complete.

Next up on the Resolution Project: Housekeeping (1981), by Marilynne Robinson

Tagged 1940s, C.S. Lewis, Christianity, Chronicles of Narnia, England, review, Time 100, World War II

Dec 02 2011

the resolution project

The Resolution Project Book Forty-Two: The Heart of the Matter (1948)

“They had been corrupted by money, and he had been corrupted by sentiment. Sentiment was the more dangerous, because you couldn’t name its price. A man open to bribes was to be relied upon below a certain figure, but sentiment might uncoil in the heart at a name, a photograph, even a smell remembered.” (p. 45)

Elevator Pitch: Major Henry Scobie is the closest thing to an honest cop left in an unnamed town in British West Africa during the Second World War. While his compatriots routinely take bribes and abuse the local populace, Scobie adheres to a strict moral compass, driven by his Catholic upbringing and the intense pity in his heart for the wife he no longer feels anything for but pity. When a young woman comes into Scobie’s life after a traumatic accident, he had to deal with new feelings that grow inside of him, and see whether or not he can reconcile what he wants with what his faith would dictate of him.

This was a pretty solid book. The only real exposure I’d had to Graham Greene before reading it was mostly through movies he was involved in, ie. The Third Man (one of my favorite films noir) and the funny Our Man in Havana. I’d also read The Destructors in high school, I guess, but I don’t really remember too much about it now. So I didn’t really have any preconceptions upon going in to The Heart of the Matter other than he seems to enjoy setting stories in far off locales, which I learned later kind of comes from his having served in MI6 during the Second World War. He was stationed in Sierra Leone for much of it, which was supposedly the inspiration for the area Scobie polices.

While Heart does descend into lots of philosophical meandering and religious guilt in a matter almost reminiscent of Go Tell It on the Mountain and Call It Sleep it also has the decency to attach an interesting story to all the moaning about God and what he thinks of the protagonist, which I appreciated unlike those other two books. To me, the main message behind Heart is that we can never fully understand or empathize completely with another person. Everyone in the book is an island of sadness, nostalgia, emptiness and pain, and everyone wants desperately for someone else to get what led them to become this way. Scobie feels he’s done his wife wrong by making her spend 15 years in a foreign hellhole, and hates the people at the club who disdain her love of reading and literature for whatever reason. Wilson, a new transplant to the colony, falls in love with Scobie’s wife, and attempts to reach her through that love of literature and poetry, but to no avail. Yusef, a Syrian crime kingpin, just wants to be Scobie’s friend, and to have meaningful discussions with him about life, which is something he cannot get from the mostly local boys he uses as informants and assassins.

As a side note, the more I read about the English sort of clubs and the culture contained therein, the more they seem absolutely abhorrent. Granted, most of the books I’ve read with these kinds of organizations have them as representations of colonial/patriarchal power, although perhaps not intentionally in every instance. It is certainly the case here in Heart, and also in A Passage to India; whereas in A Handful of Dust, and to a lesser extent the American equivalent in Appointment in Samarra, the club is more a symbol of wealth, conspicuous consumption and prestige. I wonder if these organizations still exist nowadays, I mean here in Canada we’ve got things like the Elks and the Rotary Club, but those seem to be more “fraternal” than the classical English-style? Maybe I’ll look into it more, my grandfather was apparently a Mason, so maybe I have an in there. I’ve seen the instructional video on how to shake hands.

Greene’s writing style is not exactly florid, which I really appreciate. He’s able to distill complicated concepts like what it must feel like to be an average, run of the mill Catholic person down with incredible ease:

“When he thought about it at all, he regarded himself as a man in the ranks, a member of an awkward squad, who had no opportunity to break the more serious military rules. ‘I misses Mass yesterday for insufficient reason. I neglected my evening prayers.’ This was no more than admitting what every soldier did – that he had avoided a fatigue when the occasion offered.” (p. 103)

He’s also great at the police procedural type stuff. Scobie eventually does something really bad, and has to cover it up, and we the reader are privy to his inner monologue as the policeman’s brain thinks through every avenue of investigation and makes up evidence to cover holes. It’s interesting in that we start to see this happen even before Scobie has made a conscious effort to do so, like the back of his mind is working faster than he even realizes.

Overall, this is an excellent book. It delves into the psyche of a deeply conflicted man, takes place in an exotic and interesting locale, has the paranoid backdrop of World War II spy-catching and smuggling, and has some essential truths to impart about the frailty of the human condition, and our relative inability to ever understand one another.

“‘When we say to someone, “I can’t live without you,” what we really mean is, “I can’t live feeling you may be in pain, unhappy, in want.” That’s all it is. When they are dead our responsibility ends. There’s nothing more we can do about it. We can rest in peace.”" (p. 143)

Who would I recommend this book to?: People who are fans of Graham Greene’s work in film. People who are interested in life in the British African colonies during the war, and have a high tolerance for moaning about the “white man’s burden.” People who are interested in the precepts of Catholicism, and wish to see them pushed to the absolute limit by desire and shame.

Total pages read since January 1st: 14054 pp.

Total books on the Time 100 list read: 49/113, or 44% complete.

Next up on the Resolution Project: The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (1950), by C.S. Lewis

Tagged 1940s, Catholicism, Christianity, Graham Greene, review, The Heart of the Matter, Time 100, West Africa, World War II

Oct 28 2011

the resolution project

The Resolution Project Book Seventy: A Passage to India (1924)

“How can the mind take hold of such a country? Generations of invaders have tried, but they remain in exile. The important towns they build are only retreats, their quarrels the malaise of men who cannot find their way home. India knows of their trouble. She knows the whole world’s trouble, to its uttermost depth. She calls “Come” through her hundred mouths, through objects ridiculous and august. But come to what? She is not a promise, only an appeal.” (Highlight Location 2025-28, Kindle version)

Adela Quested and her soon-to-be mother in law Mrs. Moore have come to Chandrapore, a city in British India, to visit Ronny Heaslop, Adela’s fiancee. Ronny is the Magistrate in the city of Chandrapore, and a prominent member of the expat English society there, in the waning days of the British Raj. Mrs. Moore encounters a Muslim physician named Aziz while investigating a mosque, and a friendship of sorts grows between the two, who bond over accounts of one another’s children and a mutual respect. When Aziz invites the two women on an excursion to the Malabar caves, events are set into motion that will disrupt the balance of power between Hindus, Muslims and the occupying English. Emotions are set bare as the situation threatens to ignite a powder keg of distrust and inequality.

This was a pretty solid read. What I liked most about the book was that not a single character in the story really understood one another, while we the reader benefited from the third person omniscient narration and could see the problems from all sides. Everyone in the book is an outsider, in a way. The two women are obviously so: just off the boat from England, looking to see the mythical “real India”, they are unaware of the preconceptions they bring with them, as well as the tenuous, hard-fought peace they will go on to unknowingly disrupt. I love this quote, by the way: ”This pose of ‘seeing India’ which had seduced him to Miss Quested at Chandrapore was only a form of ruling India; no sympathy lay behind it …” (Highlight Location 4613-15). It perfectly describes how I feel about travelling, when “seeing” things almost becomes a way of taking ownership of them, of catching them and diluting them down into a Facebook slideshow of things you did on holiday. You can never get out of your own skin long enough to actually experience a foreign land, the most you can do is translate it into something that makes sense to you.

Gotta catch them all, mind expanding travel experiences, that is...

Aziz, on the other hand, is a Muslim, and as such is precluded from experiencing Hindu society to almost the same extent as an English person is. We learn a lot about what Muslim life would have been like at the time, and are helped to understand the theological and social underpinnings that separate Hindu India from Muslim India, which was to become the nation of Pakistan 23 years after the novel’s publication. The book helps us to understand all of the differences between the two cultures, who use the English almost as an intermediary in many cases.

Forster is an amazing descriptor of Indian society and the landscape of the country. He spends a lot of time (especially near the end of the book) describing Hindu religious ceremonies with an anthropological eye; never really getting the reader into the mindset of someone participating in the rituals, but describing them as an outsider would have experienced them. While some might find that a fault of the book, that we never really get to know a Hindu person as well as we do a Muslim and several Christians, it is definitely done with a purpose in mind. I don’t really think that this book is guilty of being written with “orientalism” as the goal, the Hindu world is instead used as a backdrop for the personal dramas of the protagonists to play against. The core of the book comes from the culture clash between Aziz and Adela, as well as their mutual friend Cyril Fielding, who is an Englishman who has ingratiated himself well in the country and acts as a sort of midpoint between the two in many ways.

I liked the imagery Forster used with regards to the “echo”: Adela, in the Marabar cave, hears an echo in the circular chamber, which afterwards seems to loom over her whole existence. What actually happened to her in the cave remains a mystery, but her accusation of Aziz of impropriety causes echoes, ripples, to spread over the entire city. Adela’s virtue starts as a cause celebre for the English occupiers, but grows into an excuse for a general distaste for the region they chose to conquer, and a reason to punish its inhabitants. I loved how “Marabar” starts off as innocent, the name of a cave structure, but grows into an all encompassing catch-all term for racial hatred that threatens to turn into violence. It’s the same way news organizations nowadays label everything “-gate” in an attempt to reclaim all of the feelings that the Watergate hotel came to signify in American popular culture. If you’d like something to compare the frenzy that is stirred by the ensuing trial (that most of you have had to read in school), I’d compare it to fellow Time 100 list member Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird, which captures the same sort of feeling, this time in the American South. What began as a supposedly simple sexual assault (if you can really have such a thing, of course, but hear me out on this), turns into a huge debate, over the future of India itself; Miss Quested, described as extremely plain and priggish, temporarily metamorphoses into the very flower of British womanhood herself, and just as quickly vanishes from the pubic interest soon afterwards once her usefulness as a symbol is extinguished.

Anyway, Forster must have been an incredible judge of character and had a great eye for landscapes, if the evidence found in this book is to be believed. He is able to, with short declarative language, capture the tenor of an entire age, of a Raj about to go into decline, and an India about to become resplendent once more.

“They had started speaking of ‘women and children’ – that phrase that exempts the male from sanity when it has been repeated a few times. Each felt that all he loved best in the world was at stake, demanded revenge, and was filled with a not unpleasing glow, in which the chilly and half-known features of Miss Quested vanished, and were replaced by all that is sweetest and warmest in the private life.” (Highlight Location 2754-57, Kindle version)

Who would I recommend this book to?: People who are interested in the historical period known as the British Raj. People who like seeing how small events can blow up into large calamities. People who enjoy reading about other cultures handled really well.

Total pages read since January 1st: 13245 pp.

Total books on the Time 100 list read since January 1st (not including ones read before 2011, and two extras): 31

Next up on the Resolution Project: A Handful of Dust (1934) by Evelyn Waugh

Tagged 1920s, A Passage to India, Christianity, E.M. Forster, Hinduism, India, Islam, Muslim, review, Time 100

Aug 09 2011

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the resolution project

The Resolution Project Book Fifteen: Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West (1985)

“The wagons were no more than embers armatured with the blackened shapes of hoop-iron and tires, the redhot axles quaking deep within the coals. The riders squatted at the fires and boiled water and drank coffee and roasted meat and lay down to sleep among the dead.” (p. 153)

The back of my copy of Blood Meridian says that it follows the fortunes of “The Kid”, a young man who runs away from Tennessee and ends up near the U.S./Mexico border looking for work, finding a bloody task set ahead of him indeed. The novel is based on real events that happened at the end of the 1840s, as bounties were placed on Indian scalps by Mexican authorities, and the Kid ends up throwing his lot in with John Joel Glanton, a mercenary Indian-killer. “Captain” Glanton travels with Judge Holden, a mysterious psychopath who is gigantic and hairless, and apparently a polymath. Over the course of about a year or so, the Kid, Glanton and the Judge kill Indians, Mexicans, basically anyone who gets in their way in order to reap scalps and treasure.

I’m finding it difficult to summarize Blood Meridian in any meaningful way, as it is almost entirely narrative-based: things keep happening, over and over again without giving you any time for reflection over the events that occurred. In this respect, it’s pretty much the spiritual opposite of something like Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, which features less in the way of plot and more thoughts and agonizing over whether or not to do anything (granted, a lot of the agonizing is over whether or not to kill someone, but still…).

McCarthy never uses quotation marks, which is okay for when one or two people are talking to each other, but when you get more than that it can get confusing. It does give the conversations the feel of being “pulled from myth” by not having them be constrained to a specific person and time, which I can get, but for someone who enjoys reading well-written conversations like myself it’s a little irritating. McCarthy has said he doesn’t like the little marks “cluttering up” the page.

In this respect though, I can see why Hollywood has taken a shine to Cormac McCarthy’s style, with No Country for Old Men working out especially well a couple of years ago. By eliminating any sort of interior monologues or philosophical meandering and having the book instead be the depiction of a series of events, the book ended up reading more like a record of historical occurrences than anything else. This would in turn be easier to adapt to film than, say, a less straightforward postmodern piece like At Swim-Two-Birds or Gravity’s Rainbow, no matter how cool I think both of those books would be as movies. Who cares about conversation if this is the case, as the story is more about what the people are doing, rather than what they think, or who they are.

I read a lot of historical accounts that felt like this when I worked at a museum in my third year of university; my task there was to learn more about the N.W.M.P. men who built the fort that eventually became my hometown. They dealt with all sorts of amazing, unbelievable stuff during and after the Great March West; not the least of which was the first execution in Alberta’s history, that of “Swift Runner”, a First Nations man who was convicted of killing and eating his family, which come to think of it is something that would not have been out of place at all in Blood Meridian. I’ve even read that like No Country, All the Pretty Horses and The Road, the book might be adapted into a film as well, which seems hard to believe, as it shares more DNA with something like Salo or Tokyo Gore Police than it does with most Western movies. The extreme violence is definitely one of the most important parts of the book, and to excise that from the narrative to ensure any rating other than an NC-17 would render the meaning of the whole exercise null and void.

I found it exhausting to read this book because it almost never took a break. Not only were there very few lulls in the narrative action, what little time not devoted to murdering people or riding around on horses was allocated to philosophical treatises from the demonic Judge, who felt a need to fill his fellow murderers in on his solipsistic philosophies of dominion over the earth around innumerable campfires. Blood Meridian taught me most that one of the things I like when reading for pleasure (which, rest assured, making my way through this list still has this in mind) is narrative efficiency, which it didn’t really feel the need to demonstrate.

As I noted above, the characters are alternatively murdering, raping and pillaging, riding around forbidding countryside, smoking meat or sleeping. The quote that started this piece is a fairly good indicator of how every day goes for the group, which has an odd tendency to fall asleep inside smoking relics of dead civilizations, or recently-murdered wagon trains. McCarthy also feels the need to inform you of every kind of grass, or shrub, or tree, or weed that the characters walk past, like we’re all scholars of the flora that populated the border between the U.S. and Mexico at this time. The book has a curious mix of absolute banality piqued with occasional bouts of over-the-top violence and Biblical-style proclamation. At times, it read like (and many people would probably get angry about this comparison) a very well-read person attempting to summarize what they did moment by moment in an open world video game like one of the earlier entries in the Grand Theft Auto series, before they started getting good at developing characters.

“The man stole a car. He drove the car past garbage cans overflowing with effluvia and newspaper; the last printed words ever produced by a dying civilization that no longer had any need for them. He ran over some people as he progressed towards his objective, the Ammu-Nation store. At the store, he bought more bullets for his guns, then killed the man behind the till, which was difficult as he too was well-versed in the craft of murder. Wounded, the man staggered back to his car, then stole the ambulance that arrived to pick up the store clerk’s carcass.”

That sort of thing. I guess the point I’m attempting to get across here is that, yes, Blood Meridian is a good book, but it was entirely not for me. That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy it at some points. After <SPOILER ALERT> Glanton gets killed by the Yuma tribe and the Kid goes on the run with the expriest Tobin, I was really enthralled with his attempts to stay one step ahead of the Judge, who has at this point stripped naked (again) and is leading the idiot boy the party picked up along the way on a leash like a dog. The Judge was a fantastic character, a kind of Doc Savage of evil, well-versed in every science known to man. His hobby of finding historical artifacts and sketching them in his little book was interesting, as he destroyed the original after the sketch was complete. In the cosmology that the Judge is attempting to create, nothing now living exists without his permission, and everything that came before must be catalogued, sketched, and then excised from human memory. And if his erudition would occasionally mark him as maybe not being pure evil, he goes and say … scalps a baby, or buys two puppies and them throws them in a river for his friends to shoot at.

There were a few other characters who stood out as well. Glanton, mentioned above, becomes more and more insane as the narrative progresses. I also like Toadvine, potentially McCarthy’s attempt at a comic relief character, who has the letters H T F burned into his face, along with having had his ears docked off (potentially the inspiration for the similarly-afflicted Raven from Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash?). But the story really belongs to the party as a sort of living pestilence on the land, for the most part, a retinue that could be included as part of the train behind the Horseman Death. Small villages are for the most part wiped from the face of the earth as a matter of course, as no matter what the race of the people there, their scalps’ll bring money. When the group reaches a larger settlement, the destruction they cause is a little more gradual, starting with infesting a cantina or something, and always ending with more deaths.

There’re some images from Blood Meridian that I know will haunt me for a while: the Kid sleeping near a burning bush, surrounded by the other predatory animals of the forest; the expriest Tobin attempting to attack the Judge with a cross made of lashed-together oxen bones; and whatever it was that happens in the “jakes” at the story’s end. I don’t think it’s as simple as most commentators, who believe that the Judge either kills the grown-up Kid, or potentially just rapes him, I feel like something more mythic occurs. If the Judge is an avatar of absolute evil, and the Kid was the one person who kept even the slightest bit of good locked away inside him, maybe what happens is some sort of transference of holy power? The Judge certainly seems pleased with himself afterwards, maybe he leached out the last bit of anything approaching good from the world, and is content now to dance among the ashes. Interpretation is fun!

“He had with him that selfsame rifle you see with him now, all mounted in german silver and the name that he’d give it set with silver wire under the checkpiece in latin: Et In Arcadia Ego. A reference to the lethal in it. Common enough for a man to name his gun. I’ve heard Sweetlips and Hark From The Tombs and every sort of lady’s name. His is the first and only I ever seen with an inscription from the classics.” (p. 125)

Who would I recommend this book to? People who thought that The Wild Bunch and Deadwood were entirely too tame.

Total pages read since January 1st: 9605 pp.

Total books on the Time 100 list read since January 1st (not including ones read before 2011): 25

Next up on the Resolution Project: The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (1939)

Tagged 1850s, banality, Blood Meridian, Christianity, Cormac McCarthy, Doc Savage, Grand Theft Auto, Mexico, review, Salo, The American West, Time 100, Tokyo Gore Police, video games, violence, western

Jul 08 2011

the resolution project

The Resolution Project Book Thirty-Five: Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953)

“There was a stiffness in him that would be hard to break, but that, nevertheless, would one day surely be broken. As hers had been, and Richard’s — there was no escape for anyone. God was everywhere, terrible, the living God; and so high, the song said, you couldn’t get over Him; so low you couldn’t get under Him; so wide you couldn’t get around Him; but must come in at the door.” (p. 226)

The Resolution Project: For my New Year’s resolution this year (that being 2011), I decided to try and read all one hundred of the novels picked by Time Magazine as the best since their inception in 1923 to the list’s publication in 2005. I exempted myself from reading ones I’ve already read, leaving some eighty-six or so to read before the end of this year. Some spoilers may lie ahead, so be warned if you’re the type to be bothered by that.

John Grimes is a young man growing up in the poverty-stricked Harlem of 1935, continually being told that he is destined to become a man of God. His father, Gabriel, is a tyrant who preaches fire and brimstone every Sunday at the Temple of the Fire Baptized Church. Gabriel makes his son’s life a living hell, so much so that John even daydreams about killing him. One night, when John, Gabriel, John’s mother Elizabeth and his aunt Florence are at the Church, all are caught up in a religious rapture through which the reader learns about their pasts. At the end of this sequence, John undergoes a series of horrific visions and emerges from this ecstasy with a revitalized furor for the Church.

The majority of this book is taken up by the “Prayers of the Saints” scenes in which we learn about the three older peoples’ pasts, and through them learn about how John came to be. I thought the back-stories of the gathered faithful were far more interesting than the framing story about John. It was an interesting way to read a story, almost Rashomon-ish in the way it moved around through time and space, although without that film’s use of unreliable narration. You ended up putting the pieces together as to why Gabriel hated his son, why Gabriel’s sister hates him, etc. So that was kind of fun.

John’s father Gabriel is by far the most interesting character in the book. I liked how he was a complete asshole the entire time, who barely even paid lip service to the ideas of repentance he preaches to his flock. What did begin to wear on me after a while were the sermons. There is a lot of sermonizing and moral lessons and stuff in this book, and it got pretty boring after a while. While I did recognize some of the allusions to Biblical imagery that were to be found in the intertwined stories of Gabriel and his son, I really felt like I was being pounded over the head with it.

It actually put me in mind of Canadian author Timothy Findley’s excellent book Not Wanted on the Voyage, which actually just explored the lives of Noah and his kids (to name an example from Mountain), rather than preaching it at me. Maybe all of this sermonizing wouldn’t have been so boring to me if I were even remotely religious? Who knows. I just know that quotations like the one above, how John’s will must be broken before God, read more to me like dispatches from Room 101 in Nineteen Eighty-Four than any sort of belief system I’d like to adhere to.

I learned later that this book is semi-autobiographical, which explains to a certain extent why the character of John is such a cipher. It’d be difficult to examine yourself at the age of fourteen with anything resembling objectivity, so that’s why Baldwin chose to focus instead on John’s family members. That’s my take on it anyway.

“To ‘come along’ meant that he would change his ways and consent to be the husband she had traveled so far to find. It was he who, unforgivably, taught her that there are people in the world for whom ‘coming along’ is a perpetual process, people who are destined never to arrive.” (p100-101).

Total pages read since January 1st: 9268 pp.

Total books on the Time 100 list read since January 1st (not including ones read before 2011): 24

Next up on the Resolution Project: San Diego Comic Con Vacation!

Tagged 1930s, bad parenting, Christianity, Go Tell It on the Mountain, Harlem, James Baldwin, New York City, non-protagonists, racism, review, The American South, Time 100

Jun 05 2011

the resolution project

The Resolution Project Book Thirty-Three: The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969)

“I do not know. This story I am telling is all imagination. These characters I create never existed outside my own mind. If I have pretended until now to know my characters’ minds and innermost thoughts, it is because I am writing in (just as I have assumed some of the vocabulary and ‘voice’ of) a convention universally accepted at the time of my story: that the novelist stands next to God.” (p. 95)

The Resolution Project: For my New Year’s resolution this year (that being 2011), I decided to try and read all one hundred of the novels picked by Time Magazine as the best since their inception in 1923 to the list’s publication in 2005. I exempted myself from reading ones I’ve already read, leaving some eighty-six or so to read before the end of this year. Some spoilers may lie ahead, so be warned if you’re the type to be bothered by that.

In 1867, Charles Smithson and Ernestina Freeman are on vacation in the English port town of Lyme Regis before their wedding, visiting family and engaging in Charles’ hobby of paleontology. Charles is in line to become a baronet, while Ernestina is the daughter of a successful businessman. While on the docks, the couple meet a strange woman, looking out to sea with a mournful look about her. She is known around town as “Tragedy” or, less tactfully, as “The French Lieutenant’s Woman,” her heart having been broken long ago by an uncouth French naval officer. The lives of these three characters intertwine in interesting ways throughout the plot of the book, which has as one of its aims to help modern audiences understand the oft-incomprehensible social mores and taboos of the Victorian period.

This was an excellent novel, probably the most experimental of all the ones I’ve read so far going down the list (excepting The Crying of Lot 49, which I’d read before starting this project). I really enjoyed the what I like to call “anthropological” approach Fowles took to telling his story. I feel like I learned quite a lot about how people in Victorian times acted, and why. It was especially helpful when it came to Charles, who, about halfway through the book, learns that he might need to be associated with the grim specter of “trade”, in the form of his father-in-law-to-be’s store (the marriage, like most made at this time, was primarily a business venture wherein one family trades their financial largesse for the esteem and prestige of the other family’s aristocratic rank). I started to hate the insufferable man, who, for the life of him just couldn’t bear working for a living, not even for a second; he goes so far as to compare the store to a great engine that threatens to grind his frivolous life away. But right as I couldn’t stand Charles, Fowles redeemed him somewhat by explaining just why the concepts of work and commerce were so threatening to a member of the aristocracy at this time, when the bourgeoisie was just starting to loom large over the country and with Marx beginning to put forth his theories on capital and labour.

The book is just full of little things like that, taking ideas that the Victorians would have understood automatically and then translating them into terms a modern day reader can relate to in a world far removed from the adherence to duty and repression of the time. It made me think of Victorian novels I read when I was in school, and why I couldn’t really identify with anyone in them. I much preferred books from the Regency era, like those of Jane Austen, where life didn’t seem as rigid, to someone like Thomas Hardy for instance, where your life was basically forfeit from the starting point. After having read The French Lieutenant’s Woman, though, I feel as if I could revisit works from that period with the easy-to-digest concepts Fowles puts forth.

The book also plays around with its form and style in an entertaining fashion. As noted in the quote that began the piece, the narrator of the book is Fowles himself, who is able to shift some parts of the narrative around to suit his fancy. He puts forth three endings for the love triangle; forsaking the first one for having too stereotypical a resolution, he changes events to let two more endings occur, which are more painful yet also more realistic at the same time. He even shows up in the world of the characters to do so, sort of like how Kurt Vonnegut Jr. would often show up in his books as the trashy writer “Kilgore Trout’, armed with limited omniscience and the power of fiction itself. Anyway, I thought that was really cool, especially coming from a book written in the 1960s. Sure, it’s not exactly revolutionary, but it was fun.

“She made him aware of a deprivation. His future had always seemed to him of vast potential; and now suddenly it was a fixed voyage to a known place. She had reminded him of that.” (p.130)

The List:

5. ~~Animal Farm~~ (read before 2011)

8. ~~The Assistant~~

10. ~~Atonement~~ (read before 2011)

11. ~~Beloved~~

12. ~~The Berlin Stories~~

13. ~~The Big Sleep~~ (read before 2011)

14. ~~The Blind Assassin~~

15. Blood Meridian

16. ~~Brideshead Revisited~~

17. ~~The Bridge of San Luis Rey~~

18. Call It Sleep

19. ~~Catch-22~~ (read before 2011)

20. ~~The Catcher in the Rye~~ (read before 2011)

21. ~~A Clockwork Orange~~

22. ~~The Confessions of Nat Turner~~

23. ~~The Corrections~~

24. ~~The Crying of Lot 49~~ (read before 2011)

25. A Dance to the Music of Time (1st Movement)

26. ~~The Day of the Locust~~

27. ~~Death Comes for the Archbishop~~

28. ~~A Death in the Family~~

29. The Death of the Heart

30. ~~Deliverance~~

31. Dog Soldiers

32. ~~Falconer~~

33. ~~The French Lieutenant’s Woman~~

Total pages read since January 1st: 7683 pp.

Next up on the Resolution Project: Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook (1962)

Tagged 1860s, aristocracy, Charles Darwin, Christianity, evolution, Jane Austen, John Fowles, Lyme Regis, post-modernism, review, The French Lieutenant's Woman, Thomas Hardy, Time 100, Victorian England, Victorian Era

May 18 2011

the resolution project

The Resolution Project Book Twenty-Eight: A Death in the Family (1958)

“Look at me, Poll,” he said. She looked at him. “That’s when you’re going to need every ounce of common sense you’ve got,” he said. “Just spunk won’t be enough; you’ve got to have gumption. You’ve got to bear in mind that nobody that ever lived is specially privileged; the axe can fall at any moment, on any neck, without any warning or regard for justice. You’ve got to keep your mind off pitying your rotten luck and setting up any kind of a howl about it. You’ve got to remember that things as bad as this and a hell of a lot worse have happened to millions of people before and that they’ve come through it and you will too. You’ll bear it because there isn’t any choice – except to go to pieces.” (p. 141)

Family man Jay Follet is called to his father’s bedside in the dead of night in the summer of 1915. Fearing the worst from his ailing father, Jay speeds through Tennessee backroads only to find a false alarm waiting for him at his childhood home. On his way back to Knoxville, however, his car malfunctions while on bad terrain and Jay is killed instantly by hitting his chin on the steering wheel. A Death in the Family, then, is about how his family deals with the grief of his loss. The narrative floats between his now widowed wife, his atheist brother-in-law and his eager-to-please son Rufus, as they come to terms with Jay’s death over the two or three days following the accident.

The thing I liked best about this book, in addition to how real it felt (author James Agee lost his father to an accident when he was six, some have called this novel autobiographical), was how good a job it did at putting you into the mindset of a child. There are flashback sequences from young Rufus’ point of view scattered throughout the book, delineated from the rest by way of being italicized. In these parts, Agee deftly captures the feeling of being a small child, a precocious child who only half gets things that he is told and ends up extrapolating meaning for words like “instantly killed,” “drunk,” and an “eightfoot embankment.” Rufus is an excellent reader surrogate as, through a child’s eyes, we have to look again at the world to see what is trying to be imparted to the boy. It’s also helpful given the time period the novel is set in, 1915, to have an inquisitive mind that wouldn’t take for granted some of the social mores and taboos of the era, allowing us to experience a way of life that has since moved on.

Agee is also blisteringly critical of organized religion and its role in helping grieving families. Most of this work is done through the character of Andrew, who is what we’d call either an atheist or more likely an agnostic, and for this reason is set apart from Jay’s wife Mary and her aunt Hannah, who are very devout. He warns her that if she starts falling down the hole of religious fanaticism after her husband’s death, it’s not likely that she’ll ever make it out again. Christianity is also demonized in the form of Father Jackson, who comes to officiate the funeral. Rufus and his little sister Catherine never really hear what the priest tells Mary and Hannah upstairs; they instead intimate through everyone’s tone of voice that she is subsuming her grief into devotion, rather than having it out in the world to be dealt with:

“And they felt that although everything was better for their mother than it had been a few minutes before, it was far worse in one way. For before, she had at least been questioning, however gently. But now she was wholly defeated and entranced, and the transition to prayer was the moment and mark of her surrender.” (p.272)

A lot of people seem to use their devotion like that, like a crutch that explains every single thing that happens. It’s defeatist. But enough about that. A Death in the Family is by no means a fun novel, but it is a very interesting one. Agee pours his real-life grief into the story, and it feels palpably real as a result. Definitely a must for someone who wants to understand how death changes people.

“That’s what they’re for, epitaphs, Joel suddenly realized. So you can feel you’ve got some control over the death, you own it, you choose a name for it. The same with wanting to know all you can about how it happened.” (p.158)

The List:

5. ~~Animal Farm~~ (read before 2011)

8. ~~The Assistant~~

10. ~~Atonement~~ (read before 2011)

11. ~~Beloved~~

12. ~~The Berlin Stories~~

13. ~~The Big Sleep~~ (read before 2011)

14. ~~The Blind Assassin~~

15. Blood Meridian

16. ~~Brideshead Revisited~~

17. ~~The Bridge of San Luis Rey~~

18. Call It Sleep

19. ~~Catch-22~~ (read before 2011)

20. ~~The Catcher in the Rye~~ (read before 2011)

21. ~~A Clockwork Orange~~

22. ~~The Confessions of Nat Turner~~

23. ~~The Corrections~~

24. ~~The Crying of Lot 49~~ (read before 2011)

25. A Dance to the Music of Time (1st Movement)

26. ~~The Day of the Locust~~

27. ~~Death Comes for the Archbishop~~

28. ~~A Death in the Family~~

Total pages read since January 1st: 6798 pp.

Next up on the Resolution Project: James Dickey’s Deliverance (1970)

Tagged 1910s, A Death in the Family, Catholicism, Christianity, James Agee, Pulitzer Prize, review, The American South, Time 100

May 12 2011

the resolution project

The Resolution Project Book Twenty-Seven: Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927)

“This Missourian, whose eye was so quick to read a landscape or a human face, could not read a printed page. He could at that time barely write his own name. Yet one felt in him a quick and discriminating intelligence. That he was illiterate was an accident; he had got ahead of books, gone where the printing-press could not follow him.” (p. 85, in reference to Kit Carson)

This was a solid little book, I unwisely chose to read it in the Large Print format so it hurt my eyes, but I enjoyed it nonetheless. Father Jean Marie Latour is tasked with taking over the diocese around New Mexico in 1851 after its annexation by the United States. When he arrives in the unforgiving landscape, he finds that not only does the harsh terrain replace his native France in his heart, it also becomes the scene for many of his greatest trials and tribulations.

This book is fairly episodic, as it looks at nine or so periods in the life of the Bishop, as well as his best friend and colleague, the Vicar Joseph Vaillant. The back cover of the book would have you think that the life of a priest in the wild countryside is very lonely, but I didn’t really get that from the text itself, aside from the last segment. Latour and Vaillant seem to be welcomed into the homes, pueblos and villages of both the Mexicans and the Indians alike, who possess much in the way of Church architecture from the days of Spanish missionaries. There is of course, many scenes of traversing rough country, living off the land and sleeping under the stars, but it never felt that lonely to me. As Vaillant is called away more often, with his eventual destination being Colorado during the Pike’s Peak Gold Rush, Latour thinks often on their life together, and how they got into the missionary trade, kind of providing a reverse narrative as the main story reaches its fatal end.

The book’s also been called “mythic”, and I’m much more inclined to agree with that. The way the stories are laid out is I guess roughly chronological, but not too much is constant between them. Latour has to deal with wayward Spanish priests who have taken wives and gamble and party all day long; the sticky situation caused by a rich widow’s inheritance and a bequeathment to the Church; a murderous road agent who assaults travelers who need a place to stay; and finally the construction of a cathedral in Santa Fe. It felt to me like any of these could have been short stories published in a magazine, but the way they are laid out does tell us about the melancholy of growing older.

Death Comes for the Archbishop reminded me a lot of Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey, partially because of all the Catholic dogma and belief, but also in the episodic approach shared by the two books. I’m probably one of the least religious people ever (seriously, the only gods I would ever really believe in would probably be Lovecraft’s Great Old Ones, and no, I’m not really joking), but this book, like Wilder’s text, definitely makes a lot of Catholic belief make a bit more sense to me, and makes it beautiful in its way, the adherence to tradition and veneration of artifacts and miracles, especially. Overall, this book is an excellent one, especially in the approach it takes to death. It’s not something to be afraid of for the most part, it’s the culmination of all your days on Earth. If you do good things, like the two wilderness priests, you have nothing to fear. The quotation below says it best:

“‘I will go at once, Father. But you should not be discouraged; one does not die of a cold.’

The old man smiled. ‘I shall not die of a cold, my son. I shall die of having lived.’” (p. 279)

The List:

5. ~~Animal Farm~~ (read before 2011)

8. ~~The Assistant~~

10. ~~Atonement~~ (read before 2011)

11. ~~Beloved~~

12. ~~The Berlin Stories~~

13. ~~The Big Sleep~~ (read before 2011)

14. ~~The Blind Assassin~~

15. Blood Meridian

16. ~~Brideshead Revisited~~

17. ~~The Bridge of San Luis Rey~~

18. Call It Sleep

19. ~~Catch-22~~ (read before 2011)

20. ~~The Catcher in the Rye~~ (read before 2011)

21. ~~A Clockwork Orange~~

22. ~~The Confessions of Nat Turner~~

23. ~~The Corrections~~

24. ~~The Crying of Lot 49~~ (read before 2011)

25. A Dance to the Music of Time (1st Movement)

26. ~~The Day of the Locust~~

27. ~~Death Comes for the Archbishop~~

Total pages read since January 1st: 6488 pp.

Next up on the Resolution Project: James Agee’s A Death In the Family (1958)

Tagged 1850s, Catholicism, Christianity, Death Comes for the Archbishop, New Mexico, review, The American West, Time 100, Willa Cather

Apr 28 2011

the resolution project

The Resolution Project Book Twenty-Six: The Day of the Locust (1939)

“Being with her was like being backstage during an amateurish, ridiculous play. From in front, the stupid lines and grotesque situations would have made him squirm with annoyance, but because he saw the perspiring stagehands and the wires that held up the tawdry summerhouse with its tangle of paper flowers, he accepted everything and was anxious for it to succeed … [s]he was an actress who had learned from bad models in a bad school.” (p.65)

This was a fun little book packed with meaning and metaphor. Recent transplant Tod Hackett is a painter making a living in Hollywood during the Great Depression. While he’d rather be working on his magnum opus, a huge painting called “The Burning of Los Angeles”, he pays for his sad little apartment in the San Bernadino Arms by designing costumes and sets for the movies, all the while nursing a crush on his neighbour Faye Greener, a 17-year old aspiring starlet. His pursuit of her affection will lead him through the dregs of Hollywood, through whorehouses and cock-fights, culminating in a riot outside a movie premiere.

If I had to pick one of the books I’ve read so far on The Resolution Project, this one reminded me most of number twelve, Christopher Isherwood’s The Berlin Stories. Both books share an interest in other peoples’ sordid stories and shady rooming houses, and while Tod Hackett is mildly more of a character than Bradshaw/Isherwood by the virtue of him having an ambition in life (even if that ambition is first to possess, then when that fails, rape Faye), they’re both pretty much silent protagonists. While this works great in video games (see Chrono from Chrono Trigger and Gordon Freeman from the Half-Life games), if you want to use this device in a novel, you need to populate the world with some other strong characters to make up for the lack, which West does here, to a certain extent at least. There’s a large assortment of interesting types, vaudevillians, cowboys and Eskimos among them, who at least provide interesting juxtaposition against the stolid main character.

The Day of the Locust‘s Hollywood and environs feels almost post-apocalyptic, filled with oddities left there by a film industry ravenous for the outlandish and strange and new; at one point Tod compares cast-off film sets to a painting of the Sargasso Sea, and this metaphor can easily be transferred to the rest of the book’s cast. What these people bring to L.A. is a sense of globalization come early, and their transplanted architecture rings phony against the look of the area. This definitely put me in mind of the fine essay film from a few years back, Thom Andersen’s Los Angeles Plays Itself, which is all about discussing how the city is portrayed in film, and how it seems from the outside looking in to lack much in the way of its own identity (Andersen is very persuasive in his argument against Hollywood’s co-opting of the city). It’s one of those movies I think back on often, as it’s fucking great.

Some of the best quotes from the book are remarking on the outsides of things, and how things look has become pointless, a signifier without anything to be signified. By means of example, here’s Tod traversing a movie studio in search of a recreation of the Battle of Waterloo, for a film he believes Faye is working on:

“From the steps of the temple, he could see in the distance a road lined with Lombardy poplars. In was the one on which he had lost the cuirassiers. He pushed his way through a tangle of briars, old flats and iron junk, skirting the skeleton of a Zeppelin, a bamboo stockade, an adobe fort, the wooden horse of Troy, a flight of baroque palace stairs that started in a bed of weeds and ended against the branches of an oak, part of the Fourteenth Street elevated station, a Dutch windmill, the bones of a dinosaur, the upper half of the Merrimac, a corner of a Mayan temple, until he finally reached the road.” (p.105)

The book is also spot-on when it comes to the culture of celebrity, and how easily it turns into mud-slinging and hate. There’s a lovely sequence later on when Tod sees a mass of people waiting to see stars exit their cars at a movie premiere, and he talks about how these peoples’ lives have led them to this state, to care only for famous people and to perversely wish for them to be struck down. While he was describing people who live in Hollywood primarily, you only need to look at the checkout line at the grocery store to see that this is basically our culture’s primary mode nowadays. So while the book possesses little in the way of characterization outside of some stock tropes (including, again like Isherwood, a potential ancestor of the modern day Magic Pixie Dream Girl archetype that haunts modern romantic movies in the person of Faye) it’s more of a comment on a city whose primary export is dreams, and primary import is people to leach those dreams out of. Definitely worth a read.

The List:

5. ~~Animal Farm~~ (read before 2011)

8. ~~The Assistant~~