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Saga Fiend

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Page from One of the Icelandic Sagas

Page from One of the Icelandic Sagas

I am still contemplating going to Iceland this summer—though it may be without Martine. The poor girl has been suffering from what I think is fibromyalgia, which combines roving muscular pain in different parts of the back with the inability to get a good night’s sleep. She is currently undergoing physical therapy, which I hope moderates the symptoms, which have destroyed the last two months for her.

If Martine can come with me, we will concentrate on Southern Iceland. I will rent a car, and we will do all the sights along the southern rim of the island, from the “Golden Circle” of Thingvellir, Gullfoss, and Geysir (yes it’s a place) to the black sands of Breidamerkursandur and Skaftafell National Park. If I go alone, I will concentrate on the remote Westfjords, where I will do some serious bird-watching and hiking—and reading.

I have already loaded a collection of Icelandic sagas on my Kindle and have begun reading more of the same. So far within the last week, I have read Kormak’s Saga and The Saga of Hallfred Troublesome-Poet; I hope to re-read Egil’s Saga (which is one of the best) within the next couple of weeks.

Most of the Icelandic sagas were written in the Thirteenth Century and look back to the early days of settlement ranging from the 9th century to the introduction of Christianity around A.D. 1000 at the behest of King Olaf Tryggvason of Norway. In a way, it can be compared to the Western films that, until recently, have been made in the United States. Except for one thing: Many of the characters in the Icelandic sagas were actual people whose descendants are alive today. Many of the events, however, were quite fanciful, such as the one illustrated above in one of the old manuscripts.

In Reykjavik, I will visit the Arni Magnusson Institute for Icelandic Studies, which has an ongoing exhibit of Icelandic saga manuscripts. It was closed the last time I was in Reykjavik in 2001.

Just to show you how serious the Icelanders are about their literature, there are two museums in the country of 300,000 inhabitants dedicated to individual sagas: The Settlement Center in Borgarnes (with its permanent exhibition on Egil’s Saga) and The Icelandic Saga Center (about Njal’s Saga) at Hvolsvollur. In our nation of some 300 million inhabitants, do we have any museums dedicated to any single works of American literature?

 

The Unthinking Detective

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Georges Simenon (1903-1989)

Georges Simenon (1903-1989)

This is a slight expansion of a review of Georges Simenon’s Inspector Cadaver (also called Maigret’s Rival) that appeared on Goodreads.Com yesterday.

Sometimes I am surprised that Georges Simenon’s work is not part of the university literature curriculum. After all, he did for France what Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and James M. Cain did for the United States and what G. K. Chesterton, Dorothy Sayers, and Josephine Tey did for Britain. Although he was a more prolific mystery writer than all the other above mentioned authors put together, his work could stand comparison with the best.

Inspector Maigret is a mystery in his own right. Unlike Edgar Allan Poe’s notion of a tale of ratiocination, Inspector Cadaver gives us a detective who absorbs with the help of intuition more than he reasons from dry facts. In fact, his case comes together when one of the characters, Alban Groult-Cotelle, quite unnecessarily, presents a receipt as alibi that he was not involved in a murder—before it was ever suspected that he was involved. Maigret’s response is classic: “Don’t you know … that there is a saying in the police force that he that has has the best alibi is all the more suspect?”

That starts the Inspector on a train of thought:

The minute he left the house, an idea had occurred to him. It was not even an idea, but something vaguer, so vague that he was now striving to recapture the memory of it. Every now and then, an insignificant occurrence, usually a whiff of something barely caught, reminds us in the space of a second of a particular moment in our life. It is such a vivid sensation that we are gripped by it and want to cling to this living reminder of that moment. It disappears almost at once and with it all recollection of the experience. Try as we might, we end up wondering, for want of an answer to our questions, if it was not an unconscious evocation of a dream, or, who knows, of some pre-existent world?

I love reading about Maigret’s train of thought, because it is not only unique in the genre, but fascinating as an expression of the French concept of débrouillage, working one’s way through a mental fog.

In a few pages more, we see some progress has been made:

At such moments, Maigret seemed to puff himself up out of all proportion and become slow-witted and stodgy, like someone blind and dumb who is unaware of what is going on around him. Indeed, if anyone not forewarned was to walk past or talk to Maigret when he was in one of these moods, he would more than likely take him for a fat idiot or a fat sleepyhead.

“So, you’re concentrating on your thoughts?” said someone who prided himself on his psychological perception.

And Maigret had replied with comic sincerity:

“I never think.”

And it was almost true. For Maigret was not thinking now, as he stood in the damp, cold street. He was not following through an idea. One might say he was rather like a sponge.

Try to get Sherlock Holmes or Philip Marlowe to admit to something like this! He never thinks, and the facts come to him the way a sponge absorbs water. What Maigret does is allow the patterns to form by themselves in his mind. Then, he is ready to pounce!

Inspector Cadaver was published in 1944 during the War in a France under German occupation, and its atmosphere of grimness partakes of the time. And yet, and yet, Simenon, whenever he sets a tale in the provinces, creates an intriguing combination of ugly weather and pompous, ugly characters.

Finding Old Books Has Changed

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It’s Become Easier to Find Old Rare Books

It’s Become Easier to Find Old Rare Books

There was a time when I would have paid a hundred dollars for even a ratty copy of Sir Francis Galton’s The Art of Travel, or Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries (1872). This book was a vade mecum for Victorian explorers, such as Sir Richard Francis Burton, whose works I collect and love to read. Other books that Burton and his fellow Victorian explorers took with them on their jaunts into the wild places of the world are Randolph Barnes Marcy’s The Prairie Traveler: The 1859 Handbook for Westbound Pioneers (Burton himself edited later editions) and Harriet Martineau’s How to Observe: Morals and Manners (1838).

Now how much do you suppose these rare titles would cost you today? Remember, these books (even the one on the Prairies of North America) were taken into the darkest parts of Africa and South America. According to Monte Reel’s article entitled “How to Explore Like a Real Victorian Adventurer,” reprinted in The Best American Travel Writing 2012, the answer is Zero. Zip. Nil. Provided, of course, you have a Kindle e-reader.

If you do, you can easily put together a library of works which are no longer under copyright for nothing or next to nothing.

Oh you can expect to pay for the latest Stephenie Meyer twinkling vampire books or the latest New York Times best-sellers.

Now, you ask yourself, why would I be interested in these old general guides on travel to unexplored areas? The fact of the matter is that I love old travel books. Burton’s own First Footsteps in East Africa, or An Exploration of Harar (1855) and his voluminous A Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Mecca (1855-56), in which he disguised himself as an Arab and did all the Holy Places of Islam, are two of the most exciting books ever written.

Going farther afield, there are writers like W. H. Hudson on Argentina and Uruguay, H. M. Tomlinson’s The Sea and the Jungle (1912) about a voyage to the interior of Brazil; George Gissing’s By the Ionian Sea (1901) about a trip along the heel and sole of the Italian boot; and Captain Irving Johnson’s The Peking Battles Cape Horn (1932) about the last big sailing ship through the storms of Cape Horn.

These are just a few authors and titles that come to mind. How can I forget Robert Byron’s The Road to Oxiana (1937)? Or Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia (1977) or The Songlines (1987)? Or Paul Theroux’s The Old Patagonian Express (1979)?

One of these days, I will put together a more organized list of my favorite travel books—but that will take a little time!

If Books and Reading Are Important to You …

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... Then You Belong Here!

… Then You Belong Here!

After dinner, most people repair to their television sets and begin the process of becoming one with their couches or La-Z-Boys while a host of pundits, would-be stars and celebrities, and announcers with expensive hair-dos fill the hours of their lives with … noise. Just noise. Nothing much else but noise.

What I do after dinner is sit in my library and read. And you can track all the books I read by visiting my website at Goodreads.Com. There you can obtain my own personal review of every book I read. Right now, I am reading two short Fyodor Dostoevski novels, Poor Folk and A Little Hero. When I am finished, you can see the review.

Generally, I read between eight and twelve books a month, depending mostly on their length, The whole first half of January was taken up with Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, which was worth the trouble at any length.

There is an excellent New York Times article on Goodreads.Com, which you can bring up by clicking here.

Some people say that the reading of books as an activity is dying. No, I do not think so. I think that people who don’t read are finding a way to kill off their brains. Every hour in front of a TV set kills off several hundred brain cells. Every hour reading a good book stimulates your brain cells and—most especially—your imagination.

 

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.