Home » reading

Category Archives: reading

“The Mystery of All Mysteries”

Posted on by | Leave a comment

Isaac Bashevis Singer (1902-1991)

He wrote in Yiddish, yet he was one of the greatest storytellers who have ever lived. I have just finished reading his collection Gimpel the Fool and Other Stories and, for the first time in my life, I found all of the stories within to be great, with no falling off in quality from beginning to end as is usual. The following excerpt is from his story “The Unseen”:

On his last night, Nathan dreamed that Roise Temerl [his beloved first wife] and Shifra Zirel [his abusive second wife] were one woman with two faces. He was overjoyed at her appearance. “Why have I not noticed this before?” he wondered. “Why did I have to go through this trouble and anxiety?” He kissed the two-faced female, and she returned his kisses with her doubled lips, pressing against him her two pairs of breasts. He spoke words of love to her, and she responded in two voices. In her four arms and two bosoms, all his questions were answered. There was no longer life and death, here nor there, beginning nor end. “The truth is two-fold,” Nathan exclaimed, “This is the mystery of all mysteries.”

An Evening Prayer

Posted on by | 2 Comments

Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682)

He was one of the greatest writers of prose in the English language. Religio Medici and essay “Hydriotaphia, or Urn Buriall” are my favorites among his works. The following comes from Religio Medici:”:

We term sleep a death; and yet it is waking that kills us, and destroys those spirits that are the house of life. ’Tis indeed a part of life that best expresseth death; for every man truely lives, so long as he acts his nature, or some way makes good the faculties of himself. Themistocles, therefore, that slew his Soldier in his sleep, was a merciful Executioner: ’tis a kind of punishment the mildness of no laws hath invented: I wonder the fancy of Lucan and Seneca did not discover it. It is that death by which we may be literally said to dye daily; a death which Adam dyed before his mortality; a death whereby we live a middle and moderating point between life and death: in fine, so like death, I dare not trust it without my prayers, and an half adieu unto the World, and take my farewell in a Colloquy with GOD.

And here is a devout prayer he wrote:

An Evening Prayer

THOU whose nature cannot sleep,
On my temples sentry keep;
Guard me ’gainst those watchful foes,
Whose eyes are open whilst mine close;
Let no dreams my head infest,
But such as Jacob’s temples blest.
While I do rest, my soul advance;
Make me to sleep a holy trance,
That I may, my rest being wrought,
Awake into some holy thought;
And with as active vigour run
My course, as doth the nimble sun.
Sleep is a death. Oh, make me try
By sleeping, what is it to die!
And as gently lay my head
On my grave, as now my bed.
Howe’er I rest, great God, let me
Awake again at last with Thee!
And thus assured, behold I lie
Securely, or to wake or die.

Sonchai Jitpleecheep

Posted on by | Leave a comment

Bangkok at Night

During this hottest summer of my life, I have entertained myself by reading all the Sonchai Jitpleecheep novels by John Burdett. Sonchai is a member of the Royal Thai Police, while at the same time serving as a pimp in the Soi Cowboy brothel run by his mother and his boss, Colonel Vikorn. In all, there are six novels in the series:

  • Bangkok 8 (2003), named for the Bangkok police district controlled by Colonel Vikorn
  • Bangkok Tattoo (2005)
  • Bangkok Haunts (2007), with the word “haunts” to be taken literally
  • The Godfather of Kathmandu (2009)
  • Vulture Peak (2011)
  • Bangkok Asset (2015)

I assume that, since no new titles have appeared in the last eleven years, that the series is complete.

Reading the novels, you get a great picture, not only of Bangkok, but of several other Asian countries as well, including Laos, Cambodia, Kathmandu, and Dubai. The picture that emerges of Bangkok is a crowded one, like the above photo, but one tempered by the Buddhism of Jitpleecheep in an atmosphere of outrageous criminality.

Burdett has also written several other books, which I will eventually evaluate—though I feel that the Bangkok novels are going to be tough to beat.

I have always loved reading mystery fiction set in other countries, such as the Inspector Ghote novels set in India by H.R.F. Keating; the Napoleon Bonaparte novels set in Australia by Arthur Upfield; the Mario Conde novels set in Castro’s Cuba by Leonardo Padura; the Inspector Espinosa novels set in Brazil by Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Rosa; and the Judge Dee novels set in Tang Dynasty China by Robert van Gulik. And that’s just to name a few.

A One-Man Band

Posted on by | Leave a comment

Did I say one-man band? Actually, he was a one-man symphony orchestra. Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) was not only a poet, writer, translator, and philosopher. He was eighty poets, writers, translators, and philosophers. Born (and died) in Lisbon, Portugal, Pessoa wrote under approximately eighty heteronyms.

These heteronyms were like pseudonyms, except that each wrote in a different style. In a way, Pessoa constituted an entire literary movement. The work for which he is best known, The Book of Disquiet, is a collection of fragments in no particular order—and probably one of the greatest works of the Twentieth Century.

There are several editions of The Book of Disquiet. I have read the Penguin edition translated by Richard Zenith.

Today, while eating lunch at the Mitsuwa Marketplace in Mar Vista, I was reading an old New York Review of Books and came across this passage in a new translation by Margaret Jull Costa:

To say things! To know how to say things! To know how to exist through the written voice and the intellectual image! That’s what life is about: the rest is just men and women, imagined loves and fictitious vanities, excuses born of poor digestion and forgetting, people squirming beneath the great abstract boulder of a meaningless blue sky, the way insects do when you lift a stone.

I first learned about Pessoa when IO read José Saramago’s The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis (1984). It turns out that Ricardo Reis was a poet and prose writer, author of Odes and texts on the work of Alberto Caeiro. Interestingly, Reis and Caeiro were merely two heteronyms of Fernando Pessoa.

The man constituted an entire literary movement in his person!

Obviously, I had to get to know more about Pessoa. I plan to read more of his work if I had world enough and time.

Two Blind Warriors

Posted on by | Leave a comment

Shintaro Katsu as the Blind Swordsman Zatoichi

I am thinking of two incredible blind warriors. One is from the Japanese cinema circa 1970s; and the other is from the literature of Edwardian England, around the time of the First World War.

During the 1970s I was a big fan of Daiei Studio’s Zatoichi films. At the time, Daiei owned two movie theaters in Los Angeles: the Sho Tokyo in Downtown L.A.’s Little Tokyo and the Kokusai on Crenshaw just south of Adams. Both theaters are long since gone.

Zatoichi was a blind masseur and gambler who also was a samurai-grade swordsman who could slice his opponents to ribbons due to his superior hearing ability. Between 1962 and 1989, Daiei produced some 26 Zatoichi films starring Shintaro Katsu. At the time, Daiei had some excellent action directors such as Kazuo Ikehiro, Issei Mori, Tokuzo Tanaka, and Kenji Misumi. Probably my favorite title was Zatoichi’s Fire Festival (1970).

Skipping to the other blind warrior, we have Private Investigator Max Carrados created by Ernest Bramah, a London tea merchant, who was also responsible for the Kai Lung stories, which can be described as fantasy Chinoiserie.

Max Carrados may not have been a swordsman, but his skills were no less incredible.In “The Coin of Dionysius,” a man named Carlyle investigates a Sicilian tetradrachm, taking it to the blind detective:

For a few seconds Carrados handled the piece with the delicate manipulation of his finger-tips while Carlyle looked on with a self-appreciative grin. Then with equal gravity the blind man weighed the coin in the balance of his hand. Finally he touched it with his tongue.

“Well?” demanded the other.

“Of course I have not much to go on, and if I were more fully in your confidence I might come to another conclusion—”

“Yes, yes,” interposed Carlyle, with amused encouragement.

“Then I would advise you to arrest the parlourmaid, Nina Brun, communicate with the police authorities of Padua for particulars of the career of Helene Brunesi, and suggest to Lord Seastoke that he should return to London to see what further depredations have been made in his cabinet.”

Both the Zatoichi films and the Max Carrados stories are highly entertaining, even if a bit fanciful.

Astonishing Strides

Posted on by

Food Vendor at a Bangkok Night Market

It is strange to be suddenly confronted by truth in places that one had not thought to look for it. Such was the case this evening when I encountered it in a little-known mystery novel set in Bangkok. The Sonchai Jitgpleecheep novels of John Burdett have been a recent preoccupation of mine during this hot and seemingly endless summer in Southern California. Then, like a Buddhist burst of contemplation, there it was a fifth of the way through Bangkok Asset, the sixth novel in the series:

Man has made astonishing strides recently in all things inessential. The price we’ve paid is enormous. Stuck with an infantile description of reality that cannot come to terms with death or even lesser challenges, the eternal infant must torture himself for lifetime after lifetime, probably without end.

This is what happens when one is a serious bookworm. The truth is out there, even in seemingly unusual places, like genre series novels.

Sometime this month, I’m going to tackle the Collected Stories of William Faulkner. For some reason, I’ve always liked to read Faulkner during the hottest month of the year. I might suddenly find some pearl of wisdom that stands out, or I might not. On the other hand, I might read some arrant piece of trash an find myself at the edge of a cliff that stretches to the horizon.

“The Pleasures of Fantastic Kind”

Posted on by

As I am currently reading Lord Dunsany’s The Charwoman’s Shadow, I thought I would give you a poem by H. P. Lovecraft, who admired Dunsany’s fiction:

Fact and Fancy

How dull the wretch, whose philosophic mind
Disdains the pleasures of fantastic kind;
Whose prosy thoughts the joys of life exclude,
And wreck the solace of the poet’s mood!
Young Zeno, practis’d in the Stoic’s art,
Rejects the language of the glowing heart;
Dissolves sweet Nature to a mess of laws;
Condemns th’ effect whilst looking for the cause;
Freezes poor Ovid in an iced review,
And sneers because his fables are untrue!
In search of hope the hopeful zealot goes,
But all the sadder tums, the more he knows!
Stay! Vandal sophist, whose deep lore would blast
The grateful legends of the storied past;
Whose tongue in censure flays th’ embellish’d page,
And scorns the comforts of a dreary age:
Wouldst strip the foliage from the vital bough
Till all men grow as wisely dull as thou?
Happy the man whose fresh, untainted eye
Discerns a Pantheon in the spangled sky;
Finds sylphs and dryads in the waving trees,
And spies soft Notus in the southern breeze
For whom the stream a cheering carol sings,
While reedy music by the fountain rings;
To whom the waves a Nereid tale confide
Till friendly presence fills the rising tide.
Happy is he, who void of learning’s woes,
Th’ ethereal life of bodied Nature knows;
I scorn the sage that tells me it but seems,
And flout his gravity in sunlight dreams!

Romans Durs

Posted on by

Author Georges Simenon (1903-1989)

He wrote hundreds of novels during the fifty years while he was active. There were 75 novels featuring Inspector Jules Maigret of the Paris Police Judiciaire, plus 28 short stories. According to Wikipedia, he also wrote some 117 romans durs, literally “hard novels,” usually grittier than his Maigret works.

I have just finished reading Le destin des Malou (The Fate of the Malous, 1948) about the young heir of a bankrupt developer who must make his way in the world after realizing that most of his family are completely unsympathetic. In the end, his hero Alain reminds me of Honoré de Balzac’s Eugène de Rastignac from Père Goriot as he resolves to conquer Paris as he stands on the heights of Père Lachaise cemetery overlooking the city. It is nothing short of a masterpiece.

I’ve read approximately half of Simenon’s work—at least half of what he published in his own name. I couldn’t find a bibliography of what he published under various pseudonyms. Although much of his work could be classified as genre fiction, I am beginning to think that perhaps, in our time, the best fiction falls into that category.

In a letter to the author, André Gide compared his roman dur La veuve Couderc (Ticket of Leave, 1942) to The Stranger by Albert Camus, “In my opinion, your book goes much further, and without seeming to—which is the height of Art.” Maybe that’s why Simenon is sadly underrated as an author of mysteries and police procedurals. I like that expression “goes much further, and without seeming to.”

That’s why I am now considering Georges Simenon the equal of other great 20th Century authors. I love reading his works, sometimes even multiple times. I’ve been reading his work for half a century now, and I am deeply grateful that he was so prolific.

Jackson

Posted on by

1903 U.S. Stamp Honoring Andrew Jackson

On the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, I decided to return to reading books on American history. The fact that I refrained for so long was due to my contempt for Donald Trump and the voters who elected him to office in 2024.

Consequently I am halfway through a biography of Andrew Jackson (Jon Meacham’s American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House). Recently, I thought of “Old Hickory” as a precursor of the Trump madness. Now I begin to think that, although Jackson was highly conflicted, a slaveholder, and responsible for gross injustices toward the American Indian population of the Southern states, he was by and large an honorable man of his time and place.

For one thing, he was an excellent general, responsible for inflicting a humiliating defeat on the English during the Battle of New Orleans. He served two terms as President of the United States, and did not attempt to loot the country for his personal benefit.

He was probably one of the unhappiest of our nation’s leaders. His beloved wife Rachel died before he was sworn in as president. He had a close relationship with his Andrew and Emily Donelson, who served as his personal assistants. But then a vicious petticoat war between the Donelsons and the wife of his Secretary of War, who was a personal friend, poisoned much of his first term.

Somehow he maintained his popularity among the voters. That was because he firmly believed in following the will of the majority, even if meant stepping on the toes of men like John C. Calhoun, his vice president, or Henry Clay—both of whom craved the presidency for themselves.

I am only halfway through the biography, but have decided to continue reading one or two American histories or biographies a month for the foreseeable future. Since I am rapidly on the road to recovery after my broken shoulder, I shall look for a copy of Bernard DeVoto’s 1846: The Year of Decision for my next read in this series.

One Night in Bangkok

Posted on by

Palaces and Temples in Bangkok, Thailand

Now that I am (1) retired and (2) living on a fixed income, my fantasies of travel become ever more vivid. Some months ago, I found a copy of the Lonely Planet Guide to Thailand in one of those take a book/leave a book stands. Ever since then, my mind has traveled to Bangkok, Chang Mai, Pattaya, and Ko Samui and points in between.

I know that if the money for travel should drop into my lap, most of my fantasy travel destinations would involve my going by myself. Martine wants no part of the Third World, let alone closer destinations like Yucatán or the Alaska Panhandle.

No matter: Even armchair travel can be a rewarding experience. I am currently reading Alex Garland’s The Beach about a visit to a strange island near Ko Samui. And I continue to pore over my Lonely Planet Guide, even if it is a year or two out of date. And I will look for more of those Bangkok crime novels featuring Sonchai Jitpleecheep written by John Burdett. It should make for a fun summer.

Of course, if I went to Thailand, I probably would not spend much time on the beach. To be sure, I would visit museums and Buddhist temples and spend hours at various Thai “Walking Streets” and night markets. The food would be fantastic. And, being the type of person I am, I would get a ton of reading done. Not for me the full moon parties on the beach and the girlie bars of Soi Cowboy and Patpong.

And when I have read my fill of Thailand, there are other places that I could explore from my armchair.

As for real, non-armchair travel, I am looking forward to going with Martine to Arizona sometime in the not too distant future.