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The Problem With Fantasy

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I Like It As Much As the Next Man, But ...

I Like It As Much As the Next Man, But …

There is one problem with the fantasy genre. Because anything can happen in any which way, it is impossible to remember exactly what happens in a fantasy unless you have just finished it. There is a trivia quiz on Goodreads.Com of which approximately half the questions relate to Harry Potter or the Stephenie Meyer twinkling vampire romances. Now I have not read Meyer, but I have read all of the Potter novels. The trouble is, I can’t remember more than a few basic situations.

All those games of Quidditch, all those supernatural events concerning He Who Must Not Be Named, all those spells and magical devices and such—they have quite vanished from my mind. I ascribe this not to any rotting of my memory, but to the arbitrariness in the arrangement of events depicted in the novels.

The same goes for Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, though not quite so much, and Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy.

I think you you really like a particular fantasy novel or series, you will eventually have to read it multiple times. During the process, you will probably discover that it is almost like reading it for the first time. That can be good … or bad.

 

The Wrong Type of Book-Lover

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old books1

Some People Just Like to Read Books, Not Snool Over Them

Yesterday, I visited the antiquarian book fair held at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium. I had visited book fairs in the past, and actually found some good buys—most notably a four-volume edition of the works of Sir Thomas Browne—but I found that most of the books exhibited were not my cup of tea. Well, this time it was even worse.

It seemed that the median price of the books on sale was around $650, and virtually all the books were:

  • Signed first editions of famous 20th century authors
  • Lavishly illustrated oversize books filled with old engravings
  • Leather-bound books like the ones in the photograph above
  • Seemingly endless books about the Old West

I got the impression that the book fair was primarily for those whose notion of a book does not go beyond the dust jacket, the binding, the front endpapers, and the page showing the edition and printing. That impression was confirmed when I heard some of these people talking to the dealers in the kind of pseudo-cultivated tone adopted by the very wealthy who wish to impress others with knowledge they don’t have. For one thing, they don’t actually read books!

The upshot was that I didn’t buy anything there, though I spent $10 for parking and $5 for admission. Right afterwards, I drove to a real bookstore, Sam Johnson Books in Mar Vista, where I had difficulty choosing what to buy. I finally settled on an interesting-looking book by Adam Sisman entitled The Friendship: Wordsworth and Coleridge. I had previously read Sisman’s book on James Boswell and loved it.

Januarius

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Janus, the Roman God of Beginnings and Transitions

Janus, the Roman God of Beginnings and Transitions

For many years now, I have had a habit during the month of January of reading only those books written by authors I have never read before. Here are some of the discoveries I have made in past years:

2001 – Kazuo Ishiguro, An Artist of the Floating World
2002 – Lieut Col F M Bailey, Mission to Tashkent
2003 – Orhan Pamuk, My Name Is Red
2004 – William Hazlitt, Essays
2005 – Michael Cunningham, The Hours
2006 – Victor Segalen, René Leys
2007 – Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
2008 – Simon Sebag Montefiore, In the Court of the Red Tsar
2009 – Mischa Glenny. The Balkans: Nationalism, War, and the Great Powers 1804-1999
2010 – Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird (I didn’t want to be the only person in America who hadn’t read this book)
2011 – Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
2012 – W G Sebald, Vertigo
2013 – Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate

Now these books may not mean much to you, but for an adventurer in reading such as myself, they were real milestones. Beginning in 2008, you might see an Eastern European element creeping in. That’s because, as I age, I see myself more and more as an Eastern European.

My Januarius is almost over for 2013, though I still have 2-3 more books to read this month. We’ll see how far I get.

Fairy Tales

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Reading Fairy Tales Is Good For You!

Reading Fairy Tales Is Good For You!

This evening, I started reading a sale book I had downloaded onto my Kindle 2: It was Neil Gaiman’s Odd and the Frost Giants. I did not know it was a children’s book, or a fairy tale, but it was set in that twilight world of the Vikings and their Asatru gods. It was probably the best thing I could have read on this grim day of endlessly analyzing the investments of our largest client. I highly recommend it, as I recommend all fairy tales … because they help one do things that are extraordinary.

Years ago, there were published in England a series of fairy tale books edited by Andrew Lang. There were twelve of them in all, and all were identified by a color: Blue, Red, Green, Yellow, Pink, Grey, Violet, Crimson, Brown, Orange, Olive, and Lilac. All twelve are now in the public domain and available in cheap illustrated editions from Dover Publications. You can find them (along with other of Lang’s books) by clicking here and checking out the two pages that follow.

I own all twelve of the Lang books and frequently pick one up to read a fairy tale or two. Why should kids have all the fun?

Triptych

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Last Scene from Andrei Tarkovsky’s Film Stalker

Last Scene from Andrei Tarkovsky’s Film Stalker

The following is adapted from my review of Geoff Dyer’s Zona: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room as posted to Goodreads.Com.

What we have here is a triptych: three linked works of art, one loosely based on the other. First there was Boris and Arkady Strugatsky’s Roadside Picnic (1972), perhaps the most memorable of the Russian brothers’ science fiction novels. Then came Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker (1979), ostensibly based on it and, in fact, employing the Strugatsky brothers as screenwriters. Now there is Geoff Dyer’s long essay entitled Zona: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room. This last is in a genre by itself, an extended commentary retelling the story of the film with lengthy footnoted riffs about how the film has impacted Dyer’s life and imagination.

All three works are masterpieces in their own right. I have now read both books as well as seen the film, and I yearn to reacquaint myself with all three of them.

Is there something perhaps a little perverse about writing a ruminative essay about something that comes from something else. Have we somehow put ourselves too many removes from the original work by the Strugatsky brothers? Or does it matter, inasmuch as both Stalker and Zona are totally absorbing, as was Roadside Picnic.

Perhaps I should draw back a little and give you some idea of the world of the composite work of art I think of as “The Roadside Stalker Zone.” We are some time in the future, in a grimy post-industrial wasteland in a small country near an area once visited by extraterrestrials who just happened, for whatever reason, to leave strange inexplicable things behind—including a room in a deserted building which, if you enter it, grants all your innermost desires. (Never mind that the only known person to have visited it, a man code-named Porcupine, hanged himself shortly thereafter.)

These zones formerly visited by the extraterrestrials (who have all moved on without getting their visas stamped) have been sealed off by the authorities. But there is an active group of individuals called stalkers who, in contravention of the law, take people to visit the zones and perhaps bring some things back—things which are marvelous and inexplicable. The children of these stalkers are themselves strange, like Monkey, the film’s Stalker’s daughter (shown above), who has the power of telekinesis, which we do not learn until the very end of the film.

Stalker takes two individuals, referred to in the film only as Professor and Writer, into the zone. Their journey is a journey of self-discovery. Do they enter the room? I do not wish to spoil the story for you, so I urge you to consume the entire triptych, in order of publication or release, to come to the same realization that I have arrived at: That Geoff Dyer is a phenomenal writer whose work I am going to enjoy reading in the months and years to come.

The Man Who Walked Through Time

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ColinFletcher

Colin Fletcher (1922-2007)

Today I got into a conversation with my co-workers on the subject of footwear. It’s not something I talk about very much, so I surprised myself how much I was influenced by the thinking of one man some thirty years ago. The man was Colin Fletcher, an indefatigable hiker who wrote several books about his long walks, most notably:

  • The Thousand Mile Summer (1964) about a walk from Southern California by the Mexican border all the way to the Oregon border—along the ridge line of the Sierras.
  • The Man Who Walked Through Time (1968) about his hike along the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon.
  • The Complete Walker (several editions) in which he talks about the gear you need (and what you don’t need) to walk long distances.
  • The Man from the Cave (1981), about his researches tracking down a man who lived in a cave in the Desert Southwest and left many of his belongings behind.

From Fletcher, I learned to wear only socks that have wool content, the more the better. And I learned to buy only those shoes whose soles and heels would wear like iron—which is why I am partial to Rockport walking shoes and various well designed hiking boots and shoes.

For many years, shoe salesman lied to me about my size. At best, I wear a size 9-1/2 shoe (American) EEE, though I can wear a 10 EE. Most shoe stores, however, stock only D-width shoes. Rather than lose the sale, they will sell me a size 10-1/2 D or even an 11 D, which leaves about two inches of storage space between my toes and the leading edge of the shoe or boot. Needless to say, I avoid shoe stores like the plague. It’s L.L. Bean or OnlineShoes.Com for me.

Being reminded of Colin Fletcher, whom I had forgotten for so long, I remember the happy hours I spent reading his books and paying close attention to his advice. Much of his hiking advice is now a bit dated because of the recent influx of new materials that have revolutionized the gear situation for camping and hiking, but the basic information was solid; and Colin tested it all himself the hard way.

If you can find any of Fletcher’s books, you may well find yourself falling under the man’s spell. I particularly recommend the first, second, and fourth books I listed above. The Complete Walker needs to be substantially revised, though I have no plans to get rid of my fourth edition copy.

The Man from Stalingrad

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Vasily Grossman (1905-1964)

Vasily Grossman (1905-1964)

Over the last year, I have been participating in a European History Meetup Group that, for a while anyway, turned into a Russian history group. We did readings and discussions on Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, the Russian Revolution and Civil War, Stalin’s purges beginning in 1937, and two sessions on the Russian contribution to the Second World War.

Vasily Grossman was a loyal supporter of Stalin and, as such, served as a war correspondent for Krasnaya Zvezda, the official Red Army newspaper. He was in Moscow, Stalingrad, Kursk, and Berlin during the battles for those cities; and he provided eyewitness accounts of the liberation of the Nazi extermination camp at Treblinka.

Only toward the end of Stalin’s rule, when the dictator began to persecute the Russian Jews, did Grossman begin to rue his former attachment to the State. His great 900-page novel, Life and Fate, shows the actual change of mind taking place.

His extended Jewish family of Shaposhnikov women and their in-laws both suffer and are rewarded for their contributions to the State. Mostly, though, they suffer. Even the heroic tank commander, Nikolov, who leads the first Soviet armored units into the Ukraine, ends the book with an order to report to the stavka (General Staff) in Moscow. His scientist/academician, Viktor Shtrum, receives a congratulatory call from Stalin just when he thinks he is about to be arrested and interrogated—but then he is pressured into signing a statement that two physicians he respects were responsible for murdering the writer Maxim Gorky.

Stalin gives with one hand and takes away with the other. At the end of the Siege of Stalingrad, Grandma Shaposhnikov walks through the ruins and ponders:

And here she was, an old woman now, living and hoping, keeping faith, afraid of evil, full of anxiety for the living and an equal concern for the dead; here she was, looking at the ruins of her home, admiring the spring sky without knowing that she was admiring it, wondering why the future of those she loved was so obscure and the past so full of mistakes, not realizing that this very obscurity and unhappiness concealed a strange hope and clarity, not realizing that in the depths of her soul she already knew the meaning of both her own life and the lives of her nearest and dearest, not realizing that even though neither she herself nor any of them could tell what was in store, even though they all knew only too well that fate alone has the power to pardon and to chastise, to raise up to glory and to plunge into need, to reduce a man to labour-camp dust, nevertheless neither fate, nor history, nor the anger of the State, nor the glory and infamy of battle has any power to affect those who call themselves human beings. No, whatever life holds in store—hard-won glory, poverty and despair, or death in a labour camp—they will live as human beings and die as human beings, the same as those who have already perished; and in this alone lies man’s eternal and bitter victory over all the grandiose and inhuman forces that ever have been or will be …

Life and Fate is one of the great novels of twentieth century Russia, on a par with (and perhaps even a little bit better than) Anatoli Rybakov’s Arbat trilogy (Children of the Arbat, Fear, and Ashes and Dust).

As I wrote in my review of the book for Goodreads.Com:

I rather doubt that most readers will have the sitzfleisch to attack either Grossman or Rybakov. Unless one is somewhat familiar with the history and with Russian character names and patronymics, one is not likely to stray too far from the tried and true and excessively familiar. But, know this, there are rewards for those who do.

For an interesting perspective on Grossman, check out this site from the Jewish Daily Forward.

“Fun With Substance”

David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace

At first, you have:

“fun with substance, then very gradually less fun, then significantly less fun because of like blackouts you suddenly come out of on the highway going 145 kph with companions you do not know, nights you awake from in unfamiliar bedding next to somebody who doesn’t even resemble any known sort of mammal, three-day blackouts you come out of and have to buy a newspaper to even know what town you’re in; yes, gradually less and less actual fun but with some physical need for the Substance, now, instead of the former voluntary fun; then at some point suddenly just very little fun at all, combined with terrible daily hand-trembling need, then dread, anxiety, irrational phobias, dim siren-like memories of fun, trouble with assorted authorities, knee-buckling headaches, mild seizures, and the litany of what Boston AA calls Losses … then more Losses, with the Substance seeming like the only consolation against the pain of mounting Losses, and of course you’re in Denial about it being the Substance that’s causing the very Losses it’s consoling you about—”—David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

Celebrating the End of the World

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The 2nd Volume of Jack Vance’s “The Dying Earth” Series

This was my reading choice to commemorate the upcoming end of the world on Friday, December 21, 2012, the so-called end of the Mayan calendar according to conspiracy theorists and gullible fools. What better choice than one of Jack Vance’s The Dying Earth series of stories, in this case the second volume of the series, The Eyes of the Overworld.

According to Wikipedia, “The stories of the Dying Earth series are set in the distant future, at a point when the sun is almost exhausted and magic has reasserted itself as a dominant force. The Moon has disappeared and the Sun is in danger of burning out at any time, often flickering as if about to go out, before shining again. The various civilizations of Earth have collapsed for the most part into decadence and its inhabitants overcome with a fatalistic outlook. The Earth is mostly barren and cold, and has become infested with various predatory monsters (possibly created by a magician in a former age).”

Cugel the Clever is our hero, who finds himself in deep trouble when he is trapped by Iucounu the Laughing Magician attempting to burgle his manse. He is sent to find a certain magical eye cusp in a distant land to complete a matched set. To ensure Cugel’s cooperation, Iucounu uses magic to wrap a creature named Firx around his liver to prod it with sharp barbs whenever its bearer appears dilatory about returning to Azenomei and Iucounu.

The Eyes of the Overworld is a record of Cugel’s travels to return to Azenomei and use his cleverness to avoid being felled by magical spells and to use the people he encounters along the way.

Vance goes out of his way to imagine interesting peoples and situations:

The spell known as the Inside Out and Over was of derivation so remote as to be forgotten. An unknown Cloud-rider of the Twenty-first Eon had construed an archaic version; the half-legendary Basile Blackweb had refined its contours, a process continued by Veronifer the Bland, who had added a reinforcing resonance. Archemand of Glaere had annotated fourteen of its provulsions; Phandaal had listed it in the ‘A,’ as ‘Perfected,’ category of his monumental catalogue. In this fashion it had reached the workbook of Zaraides the Sage, where Cugel, immured under a hillock, had found it and spoken it forth.

While no one can truly admire Cugel’s selfish, immoral ways unless to his extreme social detriment, the book is an incredibly humorous introduction to the end of days and worthy of being read.
The volumes in the series are The Dying Earth (1950), The Eyes of the Overworld (1966), Cugel’s Saga (1983), and Rhialto the Marvelous (1984). If you like fantasy, this is highly recommended.

The Arbat Trilogy

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Anatoli Rybakov’s Children of the Arbat

Anatoli Rybakov’s Children of the Arbat

For me, this has been a year in which my reading has been strongly colored by Russian history and literature. I am currently reading the third volume of Anatoli Rybakov’s Arbat trilogy, which consists of Children of the Arbat, Fear, and Dust and Ashes.

The Arbat is a street around the center of Moscow that dates back to the sixteenth century and is famous for its picturesque buildings and as the home of artists, academics, and petty nobility.

What Rybakov does in these novels is take a group of young people who knew each other in school in the Arbat and follows them through Stalin’s purges of the 1930s and into the Great Patriotic War (the Second World War). In addition to his fictional characters, Rybakov also gives us a glimpse into the minds of Stalin, Voroshilov, and other Russian political and military leaders.

Suppressed for many years by the Soviet authorities, the Arbat trilogy finally saw the light of day after twenty more than years of circulation via the samizdat underground press. In the meantime, he had served for three years in the Gulag, after which he was a tank commander during the war.

I read the first volume, Children of the Arbat, in 2008, while Martine and I were on vacation in Canada. Then, at the beginning of this year, I joined a European History discussion group, which in the end turned out to be a Russian History discussion group. This was no disappointment for me, as I delighted to learn more about Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, Napoleon’s 1812 invasion of Russia, the Russian Revolution and Civil War, the purges under Stalin, and now the Second World War in Russia.

The literature of Stalin’s purges is vast, including Victor Serge’s great The Case of Comrade Tularev and Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon. But I have a special fondness for Rybakov’s trilogy, as I have gotten to know the characters as they manage to walk on eggshells during one of the darkest periods of their country’s history while still retaining their essential humanity.