this nerding life

the resolution project

The Resolution Project Season Two: The Man Who Loved Children (Part One)

“Henny daily revealed the hypocrisy of Sam, and Sam found it his painful duty to say that Henny was a born liar. Each of them struggled to keep the children, not to deliver them into the hands of the enemy: but the children were not taking it in at all. Their real feelings were made up of the sensations received in the respective singsongs and treasure hunts.” (p. 33)

The Elevator Pitch: For me, living at the Pollit house would be akin to hell on earth. Sam and Henrietta “Henny” Pollit must rank among the worst couples of all time. They live in Washington D.C. where Sam works in some sort of governmental capacity while Henny attempts to look after his ever-increasing brood of children. She acts like a shrewish harridan, while Sam is a baby-talking buffoon. I hate this book.

What I knew about this book, its subject and its author going in: Nothing at all. I am kind of jealous of those days now.

Thoughts: As I mentioned in my last post, this book is a real motherfucker. It is long, overwritten, and filled with characters I can’t even begin to identify with. The eponymous “Man”, Sam Pollit, is among the most annoying characters it has ever been my misfortune to read about. He shifts wildly between Roosevelt-era Socialist dreamer, to baby-talking manchild, to condescending educated douchebag, almost every other sentence. I get that we’re not supposed to like him as readers, but this is a bit much.

He also brings back another one of my pet peeves, the overuse of accents in fiction. Whereas in something like Call It Sleep, The Berlin Stories or some of the Boston parts of Infinite Jest, accents are used to demonstrate the differences between people, be they immigrants, tourists or members of the underworld, Sam Pollit busts out accents all the time, just because he’s a dick. He pretends that he’s a stereotypical old Jewish guy, or a “cornpone” Southern guy, or someone from Singapore, just to get cheap laughs out of his kids, who essentially worship the ground he walks on. That’s literally the only reason. I’m sure Stead knew that this would happen, that I would hate her main character, so bravo, Stead! You made me hate a guy by making him unbearable to read about. You deserve some sort of award. And so does Sam Pollit, who is able to impress children with “funny” voices. What a champ, you guys.

His wife Henny is probably the closest thing to someone we can empathise with, as her husband has essentially driven her crazy with his wacky antics. The children in the book are so far pretty unbelievable characters. Louie, Sam’s daughter from his previous wife, is prone to reciting bits of poetry and theology, which would be okay if she wasn’t something like 12 years old. How is she able to remember all this stuff? Could it be that she’s only a mouthpiece for the author to attempt to class up her story with? Much like Scarlett’s son in Gone With the Wind, the younger children are written as if Stead had never seen a real human child talk. It reminds me of nothing more than the “Superbaby” stories that would crop up in Action Comics in the ’50s and ’60s. Here he is packing up a super-bindle:

So yeah, so far I don’t really like this book very much. I’m hoping it ends in Grand Guignol-style with a huge bloodbath. To close up today, here’s Henny discussing which is the best way to kill yourself, which is not a great thing to put in a book that seriously makes you consider it:

“There are so many ways to kill yourself, they’re just old-fashioned with their permanganate: do you think I’d take permanganate? I wouldn’t want to burn my insides out and live to tell the tale as well; idiots! It’s simple. I’d drown myself. Why not put your head in a gas oven? They say it doesn’t smell so bad.” (p. 164, this goes on for a long time).

Tagged 1930s, bad parenting, Christina Stead, Great Depression, modernism, socialism, The Man Who Loved Children, Time 100

Nov 11 2011

the resolution project

The Resolution Project Book Forty-One: The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940)

“Because in some men it is in them to give up everything personal at some time, before it ferments and poisons – throw it to some human being or some human idea. They have to.” (p. 32-33)

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 Singer is a deaf-mute man living in a mill town in the American South during the Great Depression. After his friend, a fellow deaf-mute named Antonapoulos is committed to an asylum, Singer somehow becomes the focal point for people in the town to tell all of their sorrows to. They include; Biff Brannon, owner of the New York Cafe and married to a sickly woman; Mick Kelly, a girl from a poor family who is obsessed with one day composing a great symphony; Jake Blount, an alcoholic would-be Communist turned carnival attendant; and Doctor Copeland, an African-American doctor who bemoans the plight of his impoverished people.

This was a pretty solid book, which illustrates the dangers of turning someone you know (or at least think you know) into a sort of Christ-figure who you feel could absolve you of all of your sins. Like many of you, I’d first heard the phrase “the heart is a lonely hunter” from the song by Reba McEntire, who, with the rest of her pop-country ilk, was on the radio any time my father drove somewhere when I was younger. After listening to it again, there isn’t much that the two have in common, other than acknowledging a desperate longing that dwells deep within the bowels of the human soul. For McEntire, this takes the form of a woman seeking out a one-night stand; for McCullers the hunger is more complex.

All of “the people” who talk at Singer (I say at, because you’re never really too sure how much he’s listening, but at least he looks like he is, right?) are basically using him like a psychotherapist performing Freud’s talking cure. Unfortunately, all of their problems are way too big to be solved in this manner, they’ve all got to do with the abject poverty and predation that were omnipresent in the South at this time. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is a good companion piece to The Grapes of Wrath in this way, approaching the grand themes of that novel, but in a somehow gentler way. I must say that the Time 100 list is definitely well stocked with tales of Southern tragedy; in fact that’s probably the biggest theme to be found on the list in my reading so far. If the intention of the list’s creators is to make me feel sympathy for Southern people down on their luck, consider that accomplished, I guess, but it’s starting to get a little old to me.

McCullers also has a lot to say about how human beings perceive people, as well as how time erodes the rough edges off of the things we like. Hunter shows us how we put a lot of stock in other people, and how when they don’t meet up to our expectations the results can be devastating. The mute is no exception to this, as we the reader are privy to his own need to expound on the thing he loves, namely the mentally unsound Greek man who was his best friend:

“This was the friend to whom he told all that was in his heart. This was the Antonapoulos who no one knew was wise but him. As the year passed his friend seemed to grow larger in mind, and his face looked out in a very grave and subtle way from the darkness at night.” (p. 204)

That’s all I’ve got to say about this one, really. It was good, but parts of it were a little familiar at this point in the game. Down below, you’ll notice I’ve changed the numbering scheme I’m using for the list. I’ve decided to tackle the entirety of Anthony Powell’s epic A Dance to the Music of Time “dodecahedral masterpiece”, and so the number below reflects that, as well as my having finished the Lord of the Rings books when I was younger. They were okay, but I really have no desire to ever go back to Tolkien ever again. I’ll gladly up my number though

“That is the way they talk when they come to my room. Those words in their heart do not let them rest, so they are always very busy.” (p. 216)

Who would I recommend this book to?: People who want to explore how human beings interact with each other in reality and in our own heads. People who are not sick of reading books about Southerners who are sad.

Total pages read since January 1st: 13604 pp.

Total books on the Time 100 list read: 48/113, or 42% complete.

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

Tagged 1930s, Carson McCullers, Great Depression, Oprah's Book Club, Reba McEntire, review, The American South, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Time 100

Sep 27 2011

the resolution project

The Resolution Project Book Thirty-Seven: The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

“Some of the owner men were kind because they hated what they had to do, and some of them were angry because they hated to be cruel, and some of them were cold because they had long ago found that one could not be an owner unless one were cold. And all of them were caught in something larger than themselves. Some of them hated the mathematics that drove them, and some were afraid, and some worshiped the mathematics because it provided a refuge from thought and from feeling.” (p. 33)

The Joad family of Salisaw, Oklahoma is in a bind. The owner of the land they sharecrop off of has decided to try factory farming as the Dust Bowl looms over the Midwest, and the Joads are left with nowhere to live. When their boy Tom Joad is released from McAlester Prison for good behaviour off of his homicide stint, the family decides to pack it all up and head West to the fabled land of California, which has been described to them by handbills as a land of plenty, with jobs and land for all who care to take them. But should the family survive the trek in their ancient jalopy, what is to separate them from the hundreds of thousands of other migrants who also have come to the Golden State?

Like The Great Gatsby, The Grapes of Wrath is one of those inviolable CLASSICS of literature that without a doubt deserves its spot on the Time 100 list. The book captures a period in time so well, and with such detail and gravitas that it will undoubtedly endure as long as books are read, a cautionary tale of what happens when too much power and influence is centered in the hands of too few. Also like Gatsby, Wrath is one of the books on the list I felt deeply ashamed for not having read before, but also probably don’t have too much to say about. Its influence has been so profound, and the quality of the text so high, that everyone at least knows about it, and won’t glean any sort of insight from my feeble attempts at analysis. So I won’t try too hard on that.

The last book I read, Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep, was difficult for me to get through, partly because of the author’s insistence on keeping the argot of non-English speakers’ language intact, for better or worse. In Wrath, though, while the language of the “Okies” was nowhere near gramatically perfect, it was still accessible in a way that Roth’s text was not. Perhaps the poor sharecroppers’ English reminded me subconsciously of the people who attended my high school in rural Alberta?

One aspect of Wrath that really spoke to me was the way in which Steinbeck would occasionally shift his narrative focus away from the Joad family, giving us a glimpse into the life of another person in the era. He shows us the life of a diner waitress and a used-car salesman, among others. This alleviates a problem I thought I might have with the book going in; while the story of the Joad family is certainly gripping, it could occasionally become too depressing to bear. Shifting focus to someone else gives us time to breathe, while deepening our knowledge of the era. Even the aforementioned car salesman, who could have come off as a minor villain without this focus, is made somewhat understandable to the reader. He, like everyone else, just trying to get by. Steinbeck is more likely to blame the system that has set salesmen at odds with customers more than any individual person.

The author saves his real vitriol for the landowners, the true, though unseen, villains of the piece, and also for tractors (Steinbeck hates himself some goddamn tractors), the most visible tool of encroaching industrialism upon the dying rural society. Some of the best passages in the book are descriptions of tractors “raping the land”, or diatribes on how the owners work, just how things have gotten so bad, and why they fear the little people.

“And the great owners, who must lose their land in an upheaval, the great owners with access to history, with eyes to read history and to know the great fact: when property accumulates in too few hands it is taken away. And that companion fact: when a majority of the people are hungry and cold they will take by force what they need. And the little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed. The great owners ignored the three cries of history. (p. 249)

I think that remembering things like this are even more important in today’s society than ever, what with Wall Street engineering a housing bubble that has destroyed the global economy and plunged the world into recession yet again. The lessons of the past are always there for us to see, it is only when we either forget about them, or willfully ignore them like the bankers at Bear Stearns and Lehman Bros. did, that they come back and bite us all on the ass. I can see why Wrath faced so much political controversy upon its release, it’s because it’s filled with unhappy truths like these. It could easily be seen as a piece of socialist literature, as its critics undoubtedly tagged it, but it’s more humanist than anything else.

“There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificates – died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot.” (p. 365)

Total pages read since January 1st: 11601 pp.

Total books on the Time 100 list read since January 1st (not including ones read before 2011): 28

Next up on the Resolution Project: Gone With The Wind, by Margaret Mitchell (1936)

Tagged 1930s, California, Great Depression, John Steinbeck, Pulitzer Prize, review, The American Midwest, The Grapes of Wrath, Time 100

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:

3. ~~American Pastoral~~

4. ~~An American Tragedy~~

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

6. ~~Appointment in Samarra~~

7. ~~Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret~~

8. ~~The Assistant~~

9. ~~At Swim-Two-Birds~~

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~~

Total pages read since January 1st: 6185 pp.

Next up on the Resolution Project: Henry Roth’s Call it Sleep (1935)

Tagged 1930s, Christianity, Great Depression, Hollywood, L.A., Los Angeles, movies, movies that suck, Nathanael West, non-protagonists, review, The Day of the Locust, Time 100

Mar 26 2011

the resolution project

The Resolution Project Book Fourteen: The Blind Assassin (2000)

“The average working man wouldn’t read that kind of thing, though – the working man the comrades think is so inherently noble. What those guys want is his stuff. Cheap to buy, value for a dime, fast-paced action, with lots of tits and ass. Not that you can print the words tits and ass: the pulps are surprisingly prudish. Breasts and bottom are as far as they’ll go. Gore and bullets, guts and screams and writhing, but no full frontal nudity. No language. Or maybe it’s not prudishness, maybe they just don’t want to be closed down.” (p. 280)

As I am myself a purveyor of pulp fiction’s closest children, comic books, I have a lot of respect for what has come to be termed the pulp style, even if I don’t have much first-hand knowledge of it. I know it’s like a cinephile who claims to love movies and yet doesn’t like black and white, or worse, silent movies, but you have to admit, pulp was made for its era, an era that we no longer live in. Pulp was a cheap, disposable sort of entertainment which has become irrelevant now, as we are continually bombarded with cheaper, even more disposable fun. Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin is a brilliant book, which uses pulp tropes and style marvelously in an attempt to ingratiate the reader into the world of Canada in the 1930s and 1940s. The pulp-ish sections of the book are where we can find the eponymous blind assassin, who is himself the fictional creation of a fictional author found in a scandal-making novel. But I’m getting ahead of myself here.

The Blind Assassin is told to us by Iris Chase Griffen, a woman who was an heiress to her father’s button and underwear factories in 1930s Ontario. She relates to us the story of her life from then until the present day, showing how her family’s factories went under during the Great Depression and how she’s now become a somewhat decrepit and penniless old lady just playing out the string in her hometown of Port Ticonderoga. She also wants to tell us about her sister, Laura, who committed suicide at the close of the Second World War by crashing her car into a river. The fictional tale “The Blind Assassin” is also imparted to the reader in the book, through passages that comment on Iris’ main narrative, as well as the social mores and taboos of the time, showing us the illicit rendezvous of a hacky pulp writer and a wealthy young woman. These two narratives mix together into a lovely stew by giving us Iris’ version of events as they unfolded, as well as the lives of the book’s doomed lovers, who create the world of Zycron where an assassin blinded from birth and a sacrificial maiden with her tongue cut out attempt to flee their decaying city of Sakiel-Norn.

What I really liked about this book, in addition to the lovely writing style and attention to period details, is how it treats the matter of pulp fiction. Most modern-day treatments of pulp’s heady mix of jingoism, titillation and violence just present themselves to us fully formed, with no attempt to place the reader in the headspace of the genre’s intended audience of eighty years ago. True, pulp was pretty trashy, but in some ways it was also kind of quaint, as the above quote discusses. What Atwood does is to give us an epic generational saga to make us understand the way one lived at that time (with Iris’ story), then gives us a small rebellion against that stifling world (in the story of the nameless lovers who tell us the pulp stories as pillow talk), and only then introducing the spaceships, temple priestesses and lizard-men that we would characterize as being “pulp” fiction (in the story of the Blind Assassin’s mission in Sakiel-Norn). With the addition of these three layers of context, we are able to see why people were driven to read this sort of book, why they wanted an escape from the Depression that surrounded them every day.

A tangent: It doesn’t really irk me when people say comic books are for kids. While for the most part they aren’t anymore (which is a damn shame, as kids could potentially be missing out on a whole art form they’d be able to enjoy for the rest of their lives, with current market trends), the bright colours and over-the-top storylines of many books could easily lead the ignorant into believing as such, as they have no way of knowing better. What really bothers me is when people who should know better, ie. the middle-intelligentsia who dictate the critical discourse on film and literature, use the word “comic book” to describe instances when other, “better” art forms discard character development for fight scenes and exciting visuals. Anyway, this is all in describing how I felt a connection here to how Atwood here redeems the idea of pulp fiction, by proving it can be just as nuanced and layered as the “higher” art forms, if done well enough. And yes, I do realize that the “Blind Assassin” sequences are just one facet of this great book, but they were one that I really identified with, so there. The rest of the book is even better, but I’m sure many people have gone on at length about that in greater spheres than my humble blog.

“Back at home, they drew the curtains and read, with disapproval, with relish, with avidity and glee – even the ones who’d never thought of opening a novel before. There’s nothing like a shovel full of dirt to encourage literacy.” (p, 39)

The List:

3. ~~American Pastoral~~

4. ~~An American Tragedy~~

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

6. ~~Appointment in Samarra~~

7. ~~Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret~~

8. ~~The Assistant~~

9. ~~At Swim-Two-Birds~~

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~~

Total pages read since January 1st: 4823 pp

Next up on the Resolution Project: Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (1986)

Tagged 1930s, 1940s, books within books, Canada, Communists, Great Depression, Margaret Atwood, Ontario, post-modernism, pulp fiction, Reds, review, The Blind Assassin, Time 100, witch hunt, World War II, WWII

Mar 07 2011

the resolution project

The Resolution Project Book Twelve: The Berlin Stories (1946)

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.

“Berlin was in a state of civil war. Hate exploded suddenly, without warning, out of nowhere; at street corners, in restaurants, cinemas, dance halls, swimming-baths; at midnight, after breakfast, in the middle of the afternoon. Knives were whipped out, blows were dealt with spiked rings, beer-mugs, chair-legs or leaded clubs, bullets slashed the advertisements on the poster-columns, rebounded from the iron roofs of latrines.” (p. 86) William Bradshaw, narrator of The Last of Mr. Norris, describing Berlin in the early Thirties.

The Berlin Stories, by Christopher Isherwood

This book is actually two books for the price of one (although I think that’s kind of a flaw in the end), with both stories based on people and places Christopher Isherwood knew in Berlin in the early Thirties. The first short novel contained within is The Last of Mr. Norris (1935), which is a kind of comedy of manners-meets-crime novel type thing. The narrator, William Bradshaw (whose names are the middle names of the author) is a British expat making his living teaching well-to-do Germans the English language while putting off finishing a novel. On a train ride, he meets Mr. Norris, an exceedingly nervous middle-aged gentleman, whose sexual tastes run to the masochistic, and who may be engaging in a dangerous criminal endeavor pitting Communists against the growing fascist movement in Germany. The book follows Bradshaw’s on-again, off-again friendship with Mr. Norris, whose libertinistic tendencies are a continual source of entertainment.

The second mini-novel in this collection, Goodbye to Berlin (1939), is much better. This time the thinly veiled author substitute/main character actually just is Christopher Isherwood, charmingly called “Herr Issyvoo” by his landlord Fraulein Schroeder, whose English pronunciation is somewhat lacking. The book details various events that happened in the few years leading up to Isherwood’s departure from Berlin upon Hitler’s rise to power. There’s his friendship with Sally Bowles (who could potentially be in the running for the first fully-realized Manic Pixie Dreamgirl in English literature), another Brit come to Berlin to make her fortune in the German film industry; odd couple Peter Wilkinson and Otto Nowak, who Isherwood meets on vacation on Ruegen Island (later Isherwood moves in with Nowak’s family in a tenement building); and the distinguished old money Landauer family, who each touch Christopher’s life in a different way before being caught up in the Holocaust.

The two books that make up The Berlin Stories are interesting from a few different angles. In one way, we see Isherwood getting better at writing between the two stories, with Goodbye to Berlin being miles beyond its predecessor. The characters and situations feel much richer in the second book, due to, I feel anyway, Isherwood’s better understanding of his own environment of Berlin with the benefit of hindsight (he’d just left Berlin by the time he wrote Mr. Norris, giving him four more years to ruminate on Goodbye to Berlin).

An interesting fact about Isherwood (brought up often in the book’s introduction, not to mention the back cover of the book) is that he was one of the first openly gay writers to be widely read in English. In his treatment of gay characters in the books, here again we can see Isherwood’s growth as a writer between them. In Mr. Norris, the character I’d most label as being gay, as he’s obviously never named as such in a 1930s novel, is Baron von Pregnitz, aka “Kuno”. The Baron surrounds himself continually with athletic young men at his estates and while on vacation, and he compares them to characters in an English children’s book about a shipwrecked group of boys. I found this character to be very stereotypical, although it’s a little difficult to pin that down exactly, as this is so early he may have been one of the stereotype’s originators.

Conversely, in Peter Wilkinson and Otto Novak from the Ruegen Island sequence in Goodbye to Berlin, we have a similar situation handled with much more depth and tact. Wilkinson is middle-aged and Otto is a young man, and they obviously are in a relationship with one another. Here though, Isherwood shows us what it’d be like for an older man to be in love with an impulsive 16 year old boy, at turns infuriating and lovely, with the Sword of Damocles continually dangling over their affair. Much more believable, to the point that I thought they were definitely based on real people, which is not a claim I’d level readily at Baron von Pregnitz.

The other big thing these books deal with is, obviously, the rise of fascism in Germany, personified by the Nazi Party. Again, we see the growth in Isherwood’s talent between both books. In Mr. Norris, Nazis are thugs engaged in a running campaign of street battles and op-ed columns against the Communist Party, which counts among its membership briefly both Isherwood/Bradshaw and the eponymous Mr. Norris. In Goodbye, though, in addition to the above-mentioned douchebaggery of the S.A. and Hitler Youth-types, we are shown an all-pervasive, yet perversely ambiguous anti-Semitism found in all the strata of German society that Isherwood meets. Jews are vilified as a matter of course, yet individual Germans don’t really seem to have a problem with the ones they know personally. Another good passage details the closing of a bank, and an angry mob’s seizing on an innocent young child playing nearby as a receptacle for their rage. Yet another vignette shows an S.A. man mocking book titles from a liberal book publisher they’d just shut down.

“‘Nie Wieder Krieg!’ he shouted, holding up one of them by the corner of the cover, disgustedly, as though it were a nasty kind of reptile. Everybody roared with laughter. ”No More War!” echoed a fat, well-dressed woman, with a scornful, savage laugh. ‘What an idea!’” (p 205).

These interludes with an encroaching fascist state of mind echo throughout the second book, lending it the “beautiful and the damned” allure that Weimar Republic stories tend to. These sorts of indicators are ever-important, especially today, when the political rhetoric in North America gets louder and more desperate. The Sally Bowles sequence from Goodbye to Berlin was eventually turned into a stage play, then finally the movie Cabaret in 1972. I can’t say that reading the book makes me want to rush out and watch the movie, though, as Bowles’ character was kind of an insufferable bitch. I suppose, though, that the only other thing I’ve seen Liza Minelli, who plays her in the movie, in was Arrested Development, so it’s nothing personal against her, because she was great in that.

“After all, whatever government is in power, they are doomed to live in this town.” Goodbye to Berlin (p. 207)

The List

3. ~~American Pastoral~~

4. An American Tragedy

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

6. ~~Appointment in Samarra~~

7. ~~Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret~~

8. ~~The Assistant~~

9. ~~At Swim-Two-Birds~~

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

11. ~~Beloved~~

12. ~~The Berlin Stories~~

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

Total pages read since January 1st: 3053 pp

Next up on the Resolution Project: Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy (1925)

Tagged Berlin, Cabaret, Christopher Isherwood, fascism, Germany, Great Depression, Liza Minelli, non-protagonists, review, The Berlin Stories, Time 100

Jan 20 2011

the resolution project

The Resolution Project Book Six: Appointment in Samarra (1934)

“What was there about Reilly that caused him to say to himself: ‘If he starts on more of those moth-eaten stories I’ll throw this drink in his face.’” – Julian English

So, as expected, my scheme to read all of the books in alphabetical order has become a dismal failure, owing to the vagaries of the Edmonton Public Library’s holds system, which seems to favour people who were there first, for whatever reason. Still, I plan to keep the convention of naming these entries according to their placement on the Time Magazine list, as it will make searching for books I’ve read previously a lot easier to do this way. Oh, and for the record, the fifth book on the list, George Orwell’s Animal Farm, is a skip book for me, as I read it in high school. I wouldn’t mind going back to it though, perhaps after my task is through.

Cover for Appointment in Samara, by John O'Hara

Appointment in Samarra, by John O’Hara

In the fictional city of Gibbsville, Pennsylvania, Julian English is a moderately successful Cadillac dealer, a status owing more to his distinguished parentage more than any sort of merit he himself possesses. English and his wife Caroline are one of the main power couples in their circle of the hardscrabble (for poor people) coal-mining town, part of an elite group of country club-frequenting upper class folk for whom reputation is absolutely everything. With the aforementioned thought briefly passing through the head of Julian English, though, the fate of the young man is set in stone with everything coming to a head in three days over a post-Christmas weekend. After he throws his drink at nouveau-riche douchebag Harry Reilly, the clock starts ticking for English’s own meeting with death (the title refers to a folk tale about a man who freaks out after meeting the embodiment of Death in a marketplace, then runs to Samarra, not knowing that Death was actually planning to meet him there as well).

For me, the real draw of this novel, other than its short length, was how it describes the lives and petty squabbles of upper-class country club types in 1930s America. Unlike Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March, whose eponymous hero also frequented such places when he was in the company of a well-heeled dame (but never really set the stage for you much), O’Hara definitely brings you into the club lifestyle, which on the one hand sounds absolutely decadent to me, while at the same time incredibly boring. Drinking bootlegged scotch and rye (or in some cases straight-up bathtub gin, heh) all day while passing time with your cronies at the club sounds fairly entertaining to me, especially when you describe some of the alternatives to this lifestyle with passages like this one, from the mind of low-level mafioso Al Grecco:

“But that was not possible here, at the Stage Coach. It was a woman’s place. All dance places. night clubs, road houses, stores, churches, and even whorehouses – all were women’s places. And probably the worst kind of woman’s place was a place like this, where men put on monkey suits and cut their necks with stiff collars and got drunk without the simple fun of getting drunk but with the presence of women to louse things up.” (p. 144)

The descriptions of the minutiae of dancing, though, sounded both boring and exasperating to me (not to read about, but if you actually had to do this sort of thing on a regular basis, of course). It’s interesting on a sociological level to see how stag lines worked, and how many dances you should have with married women and unmarried ones, but it just seemed like a lot of work when everyone hates each other anyway. While I’ve never really enjoyed frequenting nightclubs on a regular basis in our time, there’s something to be said for drunkenly groping people on the dance floor rather than being all civilized about it. It is interesting to see the 1930s societal attitude towards dating though, which hinges on having many dates with different people in order to increase your prospects, which our STI-fearing culture has made a relic of the past and Archie Comics.

If I had to describe the relationship between the main couple of the book, in addition to their attitudes toward the scene occurring around them, the closest I can come up with would be Revolutionary Road, the movie of which definitely made me think twice about ever getting married. I haven’t read the book, it’s on the list though, so I anticipate I’ll encounter it around October or so.

Here’s what Lacayo says about this book: http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1951793_1951936_1952091,00.html

“‘Don’t go,’ he said. He wanted to call her all kinds of bitches.’” Julian English, upon his being rebuffed by a gossip columnist. Possibly one of the greatest lines ever written.

The List

3. American Pastoral

4. An American Tragedy

5. ~~Animal Farm~~

6. ~~Appointment in Samarra~~

Total Pages read: 1345 pp

Next up on the Resolution Project: Philip Roth’s American Pastoral (1997), for real this time.

Tagged Appointment in Samarra, Great Depression, John O'Hara, review, Time 100

Jan 16 2011

~~2. All the King’s Men~~

the resolution project

The Resolution Project Book One: The Adventures of Augie March (1953)

“I always believed that for what I wanted there wasn’t much hope if you had to be a specialist, like a doctor or other expert. If so, as an expert, you’d be dealing with other experts. You wouldn’t care for amateurs, for experts are like that about amateurs. And besides specialization means difficulty, or what’s there to be a specialist about?” – Augie March

So here’s the first book on the list completed. This list is going to be jumbled as all hell, I think, as there are a lot of holds on the books I need to read. Oh well. This book took much longer to read than the last one, owing perhaps to its sheer density.

The Adventures of Augie March, by Saul Bellow

Augie March comes from a single-mother household in Chicago, and comes of age in the Roaring Twenties and the Great Depression. Along the way he falls in and out of money, jobs, clothes and the hearts of many women. Eventually he leaves Chicago and his family behind, first for Mexico on a wild scheme to train an eagle to hunt giant iguanas, then to Europe to take part in the Second World War.

I had some difficult times reading this entry on the list, mostly at the beginning of the book. Bellow is lavish in his descriptions of Augie’s friends, family, their families, where they live, what the weather was like, what smells there were, etc. I tried to follow along and remember all of this stuff, until I realized that none of it was that important, serving instead to set the themes of the novel in place, those being (to me anyways) transience, new love affairs and a struggle with the place of money in the world. Unlike some other commentators I quite liked Augie as a main character (IAmTheBookie on youtube has some very erudite and well thought out comments towards this end here), he’s if anything unbearably earnest, a quality which leads him to be semi-adopted by seemingly everyone he meets. You can almost tell eventually when someone is first described whether they’ll become a teacher or lover to Augie, culminating in the hilarious circumstance of Augie being lectured to about morality and science in a lifeboat by the only other survivor of his ship’s destruction.

So while some people might think of all this mentor-ship as a thinly-veiled way for Bellow to impart ideas about society and the fragility of human existence in the minds of his readers, it’s also a source of comedy as Augie very rarely listens to what they’re saying and stumbles into new ways of life every chapter.

I’m actually really glad that the publication date on this book was 1953, rather than 1943 or even 1933. The distance afforded by Augie March‘s being written long after the Great Depression does two things: 1. it allows for the “mature” Augie, who is full of quotations, allusions and historical facts (mostly gleaned from his stint as a book thief for university students, who spent most of the time reading the stuff he stole rather than selling it) to comment on his past in a way that is pretty funny and knowing (while sidestepping the fact that he’s learned almost nothing since), and 2. It allows for Bellow to use the common vernacular, sprinkling “fucks” and “cunts” around in a way that I feel like people would have talked in the Thirties (because they’ve always talked that way), but few books would have been allowed to print at the time.

This book is often touted as the return of Dickensian richness to the American novel (so sez Lacayo on the Time list, anyway), which was really good for me because I’ve never really enjoyed reading Dickens on his own. With the richness and depth of allusion and description in Dickens’ work, I always felt like I was reading the footnotes more often than the actual text, but in Bellow’s book, I got most of the allusions and was never really confused by antique language or anything. My copy of the book was also pretty sparse when it came to notation, stuffing it all at the back, and that was mostly explaining things in other languages, most of which I knew or could at least glean a meaning from the text.

To continue my sad allusions of classic novels to modern pop culture (as seen in my earlier post on All the King’s Men), if I were to describe the character of Augie March to someone prospectively looking at reading the book (because, rest assured, Augie and maybe one or two others are the only deeply detailed characters in the piece), I’d compare him most to Don Draper on Mad Men. Both are inventive, attractive characters who keep making the same mistakes over and over, mainly wanting to sleep with women but never commit to them. Both men are drawn to very strong women who would easily make their lives better, but they can never reconcile themselves to that fact. Both are outraged when a woman brings up lovers and affairs from their past, obviously forgetting that they are more than culpable for the same offence. Arrested development is the adjective I’d bring to bear on both of them.

I’m going to be meeting up with Bellow again in a few months when I get to reading his Herzog (1964), and I’ve got to say I am looking forward to it.

“To tell the truth, I’m good and tired of all these big personalities, destiny molders, and heavy-water brains, Machiavellis and wizard evildoers, big-wheels and imposers-upon, absolutists.” Augie March. You and me both, pal.

The List:

~~1. The Adventures of Augie March~~

Total Pages read: 1076 pp

Next up on the Resolution Project: Philip Roth’s American Pastoral (1997)

Tagged Great Depression, Judaism, review, Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March, Time 100

Jan 07 2011