Poquette's Bibliomonde

Library of Congress – Main Reading Room

Once more into the Bibliomonde, dear friends!

Club Read 2011 was my first foray into the forums here on LibraryThing, and it was great fun! Looking forward to being amongst you all once again.

I have a few relevant New Year's resolutions:

RESOLVED, to spend less time on my thread and more time with everyone else.

RESOLVED, to write shorter reviews so as to spend more time reading. (If you've been reading my reviews, you know what I'm talking about!)

RESOLVED, to read more fiction in 2012. (Barely one-third of my 2011 reading was fiction. So I obviously need to lighten up.)

RESOLVED, to give priority to books I already own. New book purchases will be frowned on for the first three months of the year. (Would that 12-step program be just around the corner?)

Better not get carried away. That should suffice. We'll see how I do.

I already posted a summary of my year 2011 in reading in Bookaccino III @100-104, in the remote chance anyone is interested.

I predict more of the same in terms of reading interests, but see Resolution No. 3 above.

With that, here's to another great year of reading and chatting with you all!

Books read in 2012, January to March:

Fiction

Flaubert's Parrot by Julian Barnes (1984) finished reading 1/7/2012 ****½
Moby-Dick, or the Whale by Herman Melville (1851) Kindle Edition 1/27 *****
A Mapmaker's Dream: A Novel by James Cowan (1996) Warner Books 1/31 ****
A Troubadour's Testament: A Novel by James Cowan (1998) Shambhala 2/1 ****½
Einstein's Dreams by Alan Lightman (1993) 2/2 ****
Morality Play by Barry Unsworth (1995) 2/20 ****½
The House of Doctor Dee by Peter Ackroyd (1993) 2/26 ***½
Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith (2008) 3/3 ***½
Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino (1972) 3/5 *****½
Arthurian Romances by Chrétien de Troyes (1170) 3/29 ****½
Continent by Jim Crace (1986) 3/30 ***½

Nonfiction

99 Novels: The Best in English Since 1939 by Anthony Burgess (1984) 1/4 ****
The Philosophers' Secret Fire: A History of the Imagination by Patrick Harpur (2003) 2/15 ***
Pen of Iron: American Prose and the King James Bible by Robert Alter (2010) 3/29 *****

In 2011 I read 64 books but only six from the original TBR. It is odd how enthusiasms wax and wane. Most of the unread TBR still appeals, but I am reluctant to embarrass myself by setting out a new cast-in-concrete TBR for 2012 since my track record is so miserably bad.

However, I would like to make a reminder list here of books to at least keep in mind for 2012. I'll call this my HTR list, and I reserve the right to modify it as the year progresses. Many are carried forward from the 2011 TBR. And in keeping with one of my New Year's Resolutions, all of these books are currently in my possession.

Hope To Read in 2012

Fiction

The Prague Cemetery by Umberto Eco
The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro
The City & The City by China Mieville
The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope
Moby Dick by Herman Melville (reread)
Omoo by Herman Melville
Typee by Herman Melville
Piazza Tales by Herman Melville
Flaubert's Parrot by Julian Barnes
Night Train to Lisbon by Pascal Mercier
Middlemarch by George Eliot
The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell
A House for Mr. Biswas by V.S. Naipaul
Burning Your Boats: The Collected Short Stories by Angela Carter
The Moon in Its Flight by Gilbert Sorrentino
Crystal Vision by Gilbert Sorrentino
Against Nature by Joris-Karl Huysmans
The Flanders Road by Claude Simon
Morality Play by Barry Unsworth
Lord Byron's Novel by John Crowley
Love & Sleep by John Crowley (v 2 Aegypt Cycle)
Daemonomania by John Crowley (v 3 Aegypt Cycle)
Endless Things by John Crowley (v 4 Aegypt Cycle)
The House of Doctor Dee by Peter Ackroyd
The Ambassadors by Henry James
The Master and Margarita by Michail Bulgakow

ETA – Touchstones

Hope To Read in 2012 (Continued)

Nonfiction

Pagan Influences
The Mirror of the Gods: How the Renaissance Artists Rediscovered the Pagan Gods by Malcolm Bull
The Survival of the Pagan Gods by Jean Seznec
Commentary on the Dream of Scipio by Macrobius
Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition by Frances Yates
The Rosicrucian Enlightenment by Frances Yates
The Philosophers' Secret Fire: A History of the Imagination by Patrick Harpur
The Planets Within: The Astrological Psychology of Marsilio Ficino by Thomas Moore
Archetypal Imagination: Glimpses of the Gods in Life and Art by Noel Cobb
The Dream of Poliphilo: The Soul in Love by Linda Fierz-David

Criticism
The Classical Tradition: Greek and Roman Influences on Western Literature by Gilbert Highet
The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry by Walter Pater
Literary Theory and Criticism: An Oxford Guide by Patricia Waugh
99 Novels: The Best in English Since 1939 by Anthony Burgess
A Voice From the Attic by Robertson Davies

History and Geography
Plutarch and the Historical Tradition by Philip A. Stadter
A History of Histories by John Burrow
Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook has Gone Before by Tony Horwitz
The Greater Journey by David McCullough
Empires of the Indus: The Story of a River by Alice Albinia
The Passion of the Western Mind: Understanding the Ideas that Have Shaped Our World View by Richard Tarnas

Literature
The Nature of Things by Lucretius
Metamorphoses by Ovid
Arthurian Romances by Chretien de Troyes
Parzival by Wolfram von Eschenbach
Symposium and Timaeus by Plato
The Iliad by Homer

If I counted correctly, these lists contain more than 50 titles, which would amount to almost a year of reading at my normal pace. This really represents wishful thinking, but there it is. Wish me luck!

ETA – Touchstones

Late Additions

Candidates for the first challenge of 2012, found on my shelves:

The Enlightenment in America by Henry F. May (1976)
Life and Destiny of Isak Dinesen by Clara Svendsen (1976)
George Sand: A Biography by Curtis Cate (1976)

I forgot that I almost promised Dan (dchaiken) to read these relative to his rebel Bible read in Le Salon:

The Art of Biblical Narrative by Robert Alter
The Literary Guide to the Bible by Robert Alter

ETA Further: Titles will be crossed out as they are added to books read in #2 above.

A very interesting list. Our reading paths will cross a lot, as many of those books are on my TBR pile. It will be interesting to hear about your appreciation for John Crowley. I only own Little, Big.

Glad to see you back at LT, Suzanne. I share many of your "hope-to-reads."

Hi Suzanne - just returning the compliment! Glad to hear that you are interested in Elizabeth Taylor - pop over to the Virago group sometime. A warm welcome will await you.

Suzanne, I am sure our paths will cross looking at your reading list for 2012. I might even attempt that Walter Pater book if I am feeling very brave.

ah ha! so someone else is also thinking that they might be spending more time reading about books than reading actual books! (me too). Joyce Carol Oates, in an essay in 2000, said that we are were in danger of becoming a nation who read more about books than they read actual books (my paraphrase). I'm inclined to agree with her.

I had the same thoughts about reviewing. Last last year, I got in a reviewing funk and did a "Jane Eyre" (got behind the curtains in the window seat and read a little privately without feeling like my reading had to be a public show. It was just a funk that passed, though I do think I would like to be more consistently succinct).

And to inspire you on your quest to read more fiction: Umberto Eco says that we read fiction in order to find the stories which give meaning to our lives (again, my paraphrase). A nobel quest then, don't you think?

>5 edwinbcn: – Hi Edwin, thanks for stopping by. We can compare notes on Crowley at some point.

>6 theaelizabet: – Good to see you here, Teresa, I'm curious to know what's on both our lists. Do tell . . .

>7 juliette07: – Hi Julie, thanks for the invite to the Virago group. I'll definitely check it out.

>8 baswood: – Barry, the Pater will be daunting, to be sure!

>9 avaland: – Avaland, you have struck a chord there. In fact, I think I spend far too much time reading about books and thinking about reading books. If I would just get down and do it . . .

Umberto Eco says that we read fiction in order to find the stories which give meaning to our lives. Love that notion and it is so true. That must be a large part of what keeps us reading. Thanks for that thought! And welcome!

We are now into the 3rd of January and I was so busy making lists of what to read that I was temporarily paralyzed. But late this evening of the 2nd, I hit on a solution. I often enjoy reading three or more books together, and so that helped break the logjam. Here's what I came up with: One piece of fiction and two of nonfiction:

Flaubert's Parrot by Julian Barnes – I've had this sitting on my Kindle for a few months and it looked to be a quick read until I got into chapter one. Au contraire! I've read the first two chapters twice! This is going to be a book to savor and relish, I can tell already. Here are a couple of teases from the first chapter:

Isn't the most reliable form of pleasure, Flaubert implies, the pleasure of anticipation? Who needs to burst into fulfilment's desolate attic?

* * *
The writer as healer? Unlikely. I remembered George Sand's matronly rebuke to her younger colleague. 'You produce desolation,' she wrote, 'and I produce consolation.'

In describing Félicité, the main character of Flaubert's Un coeur simple:

A doctrinal confusion develops in her simple mind: she wonders whether the Holy Ghost, conventionally represented as a dove, would not be better portrayed as a parrot. Logic is certainly on her side: parrots and Holy Ghosts can speak whereas doves cannot.

It turns out Flaubert had a number of flirtations with parrots in the course of his life, and he kept a stuffed green one on his desk as he was writing this story.

I am already loving this book!

99 Novels: The Best in English Since 1939 by Anthony Burgess – I first heard about this in a thread dedicated thereto over in Le Salon whatever-it-is-today where you can view a list of the books reviewed if you are interested. Burgess had written one-page pithy reports on each of his selections. I've read some of them already and this will be delightful reading during commercial breaks on the tube.

The Philosophers' Secret Fire: A History of the Imagination by Patrick Harpur – This is in the area of "pagan influences" that I was so deeply into during 2011. Also, zenomax read it and liked it, so I want to get to this one sooner rather than later.

Now that I've decided what to tackle first, I feel so much better!

ETA – I almost forgot! I am going to reread Moby Dick in the midst of all this. Haven't read it since I was a teenager, so all these decades later it is going to be interesting!

Flaubert's Parrot is the only book where Barnes had my full attention, all the time. I loved his observation on the colour blue. It has changed my way of thinking about history.

Hi Edwin – have you read A History of the World in 10½ Chapters? Barnes stretches the idea of history quite a bit there, but it was an enjoyable read for me.

Middlemarch is a favourite of mine. I hope you enjoy it. Dorothea is such a wonderful character. There are quite a few tempting books on your list.

I've downloaded a free Kindle version of Against Nature and added Night train to Lisbon to the wishlist.

Suzanne, I thoroughly enjoyed your thread last year. You often read books I regard as books to read about, rather than read, and your reviews bring these books closer to me, some even tempt me to change my attitude towards them, so thank you for that.

I hope therefore, that you fail in your first two resolutions.

Happy new year!

>14 pamelad: – Hi pamelad, it is almost embarrassing that I have gotten this far in life without reading Middlemarch. I hope to get to it soon. The problem with making a list is that one wants to inhale the whole thing right now!

>15 tomcatMurr: – Hey tomcat! Happy new year to you as well! And thank you for your kind words about last year's thread. All in all, from my point of view it was magical and probably not possible to duplicate. Your contributions were greatly appreciated.

Suzanne, I loved Flaubert's Parrot when I read it several years ago and thought I'd surely read something by Barnes immediately, which I didn't. I returned to him only this year with The Sense of an Ending, which I also enjoyed, though not in the same way. Arthur and George also sits on my shelves, so far, unread.

99 Novels: The Best in English since 1939. A personal choice by Anthony Burgess (1984)

I did not expect this to be the first book of 2012, but I started to read it last evening and could not put it down. But since it is a new year and we are all in a list-making mode, here is real fodder for your consideration.

Published in 1984, that evocative year made preemptively fascinating by George Orwell, the introduction opens by noting that the year did not quite live up to its advance billing and marveling that "a mere novel, an artifact meant primarily for diversion, has been scaring the pants off us all." Burgess further points out that "Evidently the novel is a powerful literary form which is capable of reaching out into the real world and modifying it," and thus should be taken seriously. Of course, it might be said that Orwell's novel only postponed the inevitable.

Burgess appears to have used this as an excuse as good as any to review the state of the novel for the preceding 45 years beginning in 1939, the year of the advent of WWII, his stated reason for this particular choice being that it was "more poetic to begin with the beginning of a world war and to end with the nonfulfilment of a nightmare."

With that beginning Burgess launches into a discussion of what constitutes the novel in general and the art novel in particular. By its tone and the nature of the discussion, one is immediately put in mind of E.M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel. Here we have Burgess's "aspects" which are entirely different than Forster's, succinctly summarized in about ten pages, and it is worth the price of admission to read the introduction alone. The book is chronological and features sometimes several novels per year, although some years are omitted altogether, notably 1942-3, 1955-6, 1971-2. Burgess sums it up by saying:

Anyway, all the novelists listed here have added something to our knowledge of the human condition (sleeping or waking), have managed language well, have clarified the motivations of action, and have sometimes expanded the bounds of imagination.

Burgess is a stylist par excellence, his writing gracefully apt and in a few well-crafted paragraphs he manages to convey the essense of the novel or the novelist's particular gifts.

There is much to be absorbed here about heretofore unknown writers (in my case, Henry Green and William Sansom), about the individual books in the context of literary movements (e.g., Finnegans Wake's role in Modernism), about the parallels between authors (Flann O'Brien and Joyce or Borges), about a book's relationship to the times in which it was written (For Whom the Bell Tolls), about books heretofore unknown (Henry Green's Party Going, Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two Birds, William Sansom's The Body), about surprising inclusions (Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye, Ian Fleming's Goldfinger, Erica Jong's How to Save Your Own Life), and much, much more.

Most of the books described are widely read classics of 20th century fiction, and this provides at the very least a delightful and only slightly dated review of the memorable novels and writers of the period.



This review is also posted on the book page.

Great review Suzanne, I am convinced I need to read this. It should do wonders for my TBR.

I will be interested to read what he says about the novel

> 17 Teresa, I will have to investigate more of Barnes when I finish with Flaubert and his parrot.

>19 baswood: Thanks, Barry! I actually was thinking of you as I was reading. I'm tucking away in the back of my mind the thought of making a point of reading a good number of Burgess's selections.

This evening I embarked on my reread of Moby Dick. I was a teenager the last time I opened this book, and as I read chapter one I was stunned by the poetry of the language. In discussing the prospect of reading Moby Dick (mostly over in Le Salon) in recent months a number of people have expressed their trepidation, believing it to be much to difficult, etc. And I thought to myself, well, I read it when I was about 13 or 14 and wondered if it had somehow all gone over my young head. So it pleases me to see how transparent and evocative the writing it is. It is the beginning of a true adventure. What an absolute joy this will be.

Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off — then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.

I have a copy of A History of the World in 10½ Chapters but it is in my mother's house, so can get to it.

I'm going to have to get that Anthony Burgess book. Good review!

I read Moby Dick a few years back and really enjoyed it. There were some passages that got a little slow for me in the middle of the book, but overall I found it a beautifully written book. Glad you're enjoying it as an adult!

Nice review of the Burgess, Suzanne. I just reread his introduction to Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast Trilogy, so I was wondering if he mentions them in 99 Novels?

Oh, and good luck with Moby-Dick! I read it two years ago, and really enjoyed it.

>22 edwinbcn: Edwin, it will be worth the trouble.

>23 pamelad: Thank you, pamelad!

>24 japaul22: Moby Dick was one of those summer tomes I read as a young teenager. Not sure exactly when I read it as it is couched in memory somewhere between The Count of Monte Cristo and The Caine Mutiny. Looking back, I marvel at how books like that gripped me at such a young age. So in a way this will be a kind of recapturing of a childhood memory.

>25 dmsteyn: Hey Dewald, thanks. For the year 1946 Burgess selects Titus Groan and mentions that it was the first of the Gormenghast trilogy, the other two volumes having been written much later (1950 and 1959 respectively). He says Titus "may well be read — and perhaps ought to be read — as a self-contained work or solitary masterpiece." Then he summarizes the action and concludes:

It is, if you wish, an allegory of what had been happening in Europe during the time when Peake was writing the book. But it is also pure fantasy, a totally original creation.

Sounds interesting . . .

Hoping aboard here (behind as usual, distracted by Alter and Melville threads). I agree about Moby Dick, the language is very accessible, and tends to make me drift off into his world...or, as seems, around his world. I find I'm reading very slowingly, almost out loud, as I seem to miss something if I don't sound it out.

Oops, too long winded. Like that cat, I'm hoping you fail miserably out your first tow resolutions. And your Burgess review is tantalizing.

My husband is currently reading Moby Dick, and he's surprised by how much he's enjoying it. He reads only a little each night before he falls asleep, and I'm surprised at how much progress he's made.

Dan and Nickelini – Rereading Moby Dick is turning out to be absolutely thrilling. My memory is that it was one of my childhood favorites, but at this point that is really a memory of a memory. Now that I have gotten into it, I am remembering how I must have spent hours in the lazy hot summer breaks from school reading, and coming up bleary-eyed from my cool basement retreat and my mother saying something like, "How's the book?" and I would gush something like, "Oh, Mom, it's just so hard to describe. It's just fantastic!" or some inarticulate equivalent. That's how it was way back when. Having the luxury to spend hours at a time working my way through the biggest, fattest book I could find – that was the equivalent of being in heaven.

Actually, not much has changed!

Flaubert's Parrot by Julian Barnes (1984), Kindle Edition

In Flaubert's Parrot Barnes takes a stab at biography presented in a fictional frame. The facts are true, at least as they have come down to us, the quotations are accurate and many of them well-known to readers of Flaubert, but the mixture of fact and fiction here puts me in mind of John Fowles in The French Lieutenant's Woman and A.S. Byatt in Possession. Interestingly, the way the narrators in all three of these books weave the past and present together is part of their charm. Just last year I was put off by Walter Pater's clumsy anachronistic intrusions in Marius the Epicurean. And they were clumsy. If only I had thought of it, I might have seen Marius as a quite different book by thinking of it in terms of these contemporary works. To be sure, Flaubert's Parrot is a much lighter read than any of the above.

Flaubert's Parrot sold itself to me via its title alone. I knew nothing about the book other than that Julian Barnes was its author, and after reading a few reviews plus A History of the World in 10½ Chapters, I was pretty sure it would please. And please it did.

The unique aspect of Flaubert's Parrot is that in this case, we have a public figure, although long dead, in Gustave Flaubert. There is no attempt here to meddle with the known facts. But Barnes uses the occasion of a novel rather than a straight biography to speculate about the mysteries of Flaubert as a man, and especially his relationships with women.

The net effect is that one comes away from this book feeling as though one has gotten a "two-fer," i.e., a two for one. It is hard to imagine a more compelling introduction to Flaubert the man, and yet one has had the pleasure of speculating on aspects of his life that shall forever remain unknown.

While on balance I thoroughly enjoyed Flaubert's Parrot, it is a bit uneven. Some chapters work less well than others. The book begins by completely taking the reader in. It is so rich in detail, in nuance and so many other ways, I could not wait to move forward. In fact, I've read that first chapter three times, just to remember it. It is just wonderful.

Chapter two is made up of a series of three chronologies which catalogue three separate elements of Flaubert's life: First, a matter-of-fact chronology of his birth, accomplishments and death; second, a rather morbid record of all the deaths that affected Flaubert throughout his life; and third, a succession of quotations from Flaubert's letters and journals. At first glance, this seems a bit prosaic, but it establishes the facts on which the rest of the novel is drawn.

We see Flaubert's prejudices — "As hated by Gustave Flaubert: 'Railways, poisons, enema pumps, cream tarts . . .' " — and his great sense of ironic humor — "I attract mad people and animals." We see his relationships and come away with a strong sense of Flaubert, both man and writer. And along the way, we are treated to various Barnesian philosophical speculations such as: "Is the writer much more than a sophisticated parrot?"

The fictional frame involves a sixtyish English doctor named Braithwait who has gotten a bee in his bonnet about the fact that Flaubert had borrowed a stuffed green parrot from the local Museum of Natural History in Rouen, which he kept on his desk while writing Un Coeur Simple in which a parrot plays a seminal role. Braithwait tries throughout the novel to track down that stuffed artifact and his adventure provides the thread that runs throughout, including the mysterious fact that two different parrots were ensconsed in two different museums devoted to Flaubert memorabilia. Sorting out which, if either, was the authentic Flaubertian parrot is in part what keeps the tale moving forward.

Despite this rather flimsy excuse to pursue a well-loved author, Barnes/Braithwait reveals the essence of the quest for himself, and in a broader perspective, for anyone who has engaged in a similar pursuit. Here he describes his reaction upon finding Loulou the parrot in the museum:

Loulou was in fine condition, the feathers as crisp and the eye as irritating as they must have been a hundred years earlier. I gazed at the bird, and to my surprise felt ardently in touch with this writer, who disdainfully forbade posterity to take any personal interest in him. His statue was a retread; his house had been knocked down; his books naturally had their own life – responses to them weren't responses to him. But here, in this unexceptional green parrot, preserved in a routine yet mysterious fashion, was something which made me feel I had almost known the writer. I was both moved and cheered."

On the whole, this is an enjoyable read. One need not be an avid Flaubertian to enjoy it, but I suspect one cannot come away from it without wanting to read, at the very least, Un Coeur Simple.



This review is also posted on the book page

ETA - touchstones

Excellent review of Flaubert's Parrot yet another book that I have been meaning to read. I wondered what the Parrot connection was and now I know.

Thank you for thumbing, Barry! At least I presume that was you! ;-)

of course

Great review, Suzanne. I think Madame Bovary might be next up for me. Can you believe I've never read it?

Interesting. I never thought of Flaubert's Parrot as a novel, while I was reading it. I suppose I wasn't giving it a lot of thought, but mostly considered it an essay, or some form of literary criticism.

>34 theaelizabet: Hey, Teresa! I've never read Middlemarch or Mill on the Floss! Talk about embarrassing, especially in view of how much I admire Silas Marner and Romola.

>35 edwinbcn: I can imagine, Edwin, how the novelistic aspects got lost in the shuffle. It is a rather thin proposition to begin with and was the least successful element of the book. It would have worked equally well as a type of memoir or essay, as you suggest. But that assumes Braithwait was functioning as Barnes's alterego. I had to remind myself from time to time that it was Braithwait speaking, not Barnes directly.

Lovely review of Flaubert's Parrot. That's one I've been meaning to buy forever.

Also, hoping to see more excerpts for Moby Dick - that was a great quote. I've never read it because a couple RL friends found it boring, but maybe I should reconsider.

>37 DieFledermaus: Thank you! And yes, you should definitely reconsider. Go to Project Gutenberg and read the first chapter of Moby Dick. You'll get the idea.

Teresa, I've never read Madame Bovary either! Or War and Peace, or Vanity Fair, or a number of other classics. Too many books, not enough time!

Perhaps a new thread - Books You're Ashamed to Admit You Haven't Read? I'd probably add Moby Dick, maybe Little Women and a lot of popular ones by Dickens.

Also - would it be worthwhile to get a copy of Moby Dick with notes - i.e., is there a ton of incomprehensible nautical terminology?

#40 my list would be painfully long...

For what it's worth, I'm reading Moby Dick without notes, enjoying it and not having trouble with any terminology. I do wonder about all I'm missing.

> 40 and 41 – I always enjoy books with notes. I am reading the Oxford World Classics edition on my Kindle which has notes to identify obscure references that pop up. Nautical terms you can find in the dictionary. I'm about a quarter of the way into Moby Dick and so far "capstan" and "windlass" are the only words I've looked up so far – both familiar but I wanted a precise understanding at this point. Anyway, notes are helpful but a good introduction is even better.

>39 ncgraham: – Hi Nathan. You are way younger than either Teresa or I so you have a legitimate excuse! When you reach my advanced years, it is almost unpardonable!

>43 Poquette: Agreed!

Page One of Moby Dick illustrated by Barry Moser

A friend of mine complained to me, regarding my current reread of Moby Dick, "But isn't it full of symbolism and deep and mysterious metaphors?"

And this got me to thinking further about the book's reputation for difficulty. And to be sure there have been volumes written about those aspects, but the fact is that the book can be read as a pure adventure story. Yes, there are long digressions of various kinds that Melville indulges in. Some will be interested and others will not. As a matter of fact, I find myself trying to recapture what it was like reading the book when I was so young (age 13 or 14 – can't be absolutely sure which summer it was) and admittedly, I may again be missing some of that symbolism. But it doesn't really matter to me. I'm more interested in Melville's point of view, which I know more about now than I did as a teenager. It is possible to read betwen the lines and ferret that out by paying attention to it and it adds immeasurably to the book's substance. My reading of The Confidence-Man last year was a great prep for this rereading. And I am again thoroughly enjoying Melville's humor and irony, which are quite transparent even amidst the purple passages.

Gorgeous first page. Is that the edition you have? I need to track that down.

Nickelini – I have several editions of Moby Dick. The one I am actually reading on my Kindle is from Oxford World Classics.

But the illustration is from a University of California reprint of a fine press edition done by Andrew Hoyem at the Arion Press in San Francisco with engravings by Barry Moser. (I'm a big Barry Moser fan.) This one uses the text of the Northwestern/Newberry Library edition of Melville's complete works. My reprint was much cheaper than the fine press original! Here is the link to this edition:

http://www.librarything.com/work/15540/book/58621732

Thanks!

Due to your enthusiasm for Moby Dick, I've downloaded it to the Kindle. I'd never seriously considered it before.

I'm afraid Moby Dick is a book I've never been able to read, although I've tried multiple times, over several decades, and even once took the drastic measure of bringing it and nothing else to read on a trip.

>49 pamelad:, 50 – pamelad and rebecca, I have to admit that Moby Dick is not for everybody, and it is not all adventure. I just finished reading a chapter called "Cetology" which is litereally the equivalent of an article cataloging and describing all the various types of whales that were known at the time (c. 1850). It is hard to believe — I may have to check this out — but it appears that Ishmael, the narrator, is under the impression that whales were still believed to be some sort of fish. I can hardly believe that, but there it is. Anyway, this is hardly what I expected to find plunked down in medias res, and I do not remember it from so long ago. Bottom line, there is much to discover and much that is unexpected.

As I remember it, Melville's info was wrong and wrong to a purpose. Take a look at Trying Leviathan: The Nineteenth-Century New York Court Case That Put The Whale on Trial and Challenged the Order of Nature. I've no doubt that Sam will have the skinny over at Le Salon! ETA: I loved Moby-Dick!

Hi Teresa – I've been meaning to read the Salon thread but I'm so far behind now it will probably take forever to catch up. Thanks for that link. I'll check it out.

Yeah, I'm not following the reading either, but Sam has a great blog, all about Moby-Dick: http://thetreadleoftheloom.blogspot.com/.

Who knew about Trying Leviathan? That is absolutely fascinating. Thanks much. Also for the link to Sam's blog. I'll try to fit it in! LOL!

Hi Suzanne, I am reading Moby-Dick at the moment but have stopped for a few days. It is just not fitting in with my other reading. It is such an American novel. I need to get a different head on to do it justice. I can vouch for Sam's blog, it is excellent.

Your picture in post #45 somehow put me in a good mood, Suzanne. Loomings indeed.

And Thea, echoing #55, thanks for posting the Trying Leviathon link.

>56 baswood: Hey Barry, I cannot imagine trying to read Moby Dick and the Decameron at the same time, so I feel your pain. But your comment that Moby Dick "is such an American novel" intrigues me. I hope sometime you will explain.

>57 dchaikin: You can thank Barry Moser, Dan. He gets all the credit, but I'm pleased it pleased you!

Moby Dick is one of the top 5 greatest novels in the language. 'fish' is a term used loosely to describe any creature that lives in the sea, and Ishmael's remark is satirical, at the expense of idiot religious: see how he cites Jonah? Melville knew exactly what he was doing.

and sam's blog is really really good.

Going back a bit - great review of Flaubert's Parrot. Onto the TBR pile it goes!

>59 tomcatMurr: Murr, I finally looked at a_musing's blog. It's a bit difficult navigating but he has some interesting comments, to be sure. It would be good if he had a link to the beginning post. But I finall got there. Thanks!

>60 japaul22: japaul, it's a pretty good read, all in all.

I've just finished a chapter of Simon Schama's excellent The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age which talks about the importance of whale in Dutch culture and society. Between the late 16th century and the late 17th century saw numerous strandings (about 40) of sperm whales along the dune coasts of the Netherlands. Popular culture regarded their appearances, especially out of their natural element, as extraordinary and ominous events. These happenings coincided with the country's formative period when "Dutch culture was being shaped by the uncertainties of war and religious conflict". The beached whale, thus, was "repeatedly taken as a commentary on national fortunes or an augury of crises ahead", and became an obligatory feature in prints, verses, engravings. Melville as everyone knows had Dutch forebears and was brought up in its Church.

I read Moby Dick ages ago, and do not remember much about it, but I found the above detail interesting. I wonder if there is somehow a connection to why the whale and its symbolism loomed large (!) for Melville.

Interesting to bring that up, so I read that (part of the) chapter in The Embarrassment of Riches. Schama devoted quite a lot of space to discussing that point, there. His suggestions about the meaning of the stranded whales, should not be seen separately from the sighting of comets and the other symbolism of whales, right after. In the 16th century, the Dutch were relatively advanced in the development of telescopes, so comets, while earlier seen as ill omens, gradually came to be seen as a natural phenomenon. As Schama points out in the chapter, whales were undergoing the same process during the period described, and their depiction as bad omens may more have served propaganda purposes than a real belief at that time. On subsequent pages, Schama pays relatively little attention to the much more general meaning of the symbolism of the whale as the devil or hell, and the great seducer, etc.

Melville's great-grandfather represented the third generation in America, since 1660, from a family of merchants. That means a family history of 160 years in America. Although novelists are more likely to ponder past family relations, it seems unlikely that a belief about whales as bad omens, separate and other from a general belief as whales as a symbol of evil, would have carried over.

However, the Dutch whaling industry did make a very considerable imprint on Dutch culture, and if any Dutch cultural traditions was remained or sought out by Melville, he would have come across a very broad scope of maritime history and poetry, notably Tollens De overwintering der Hollanders op Nova Zembla (1819).

>62 deebee1:, 63

I wonder if there is somehow a connection to why the whale and its symbolism loomed large (!) for Melville.

Hi Deebee! If my memory serves, Melville went on at least two – possibly three – whaling voyages, or maybe it was three legs on different ships. He deserted the Acushnet – the first of his whaling ships – in the south seas and his earliest novels Typee and Omoo were accounts of his life among the natives. Moby Dick, it turns out, incorporates a great deal of information about the whole whaling operation, all fascinatingly but not so well disguised in the pages of the novel. In fact, one of the puzzling things about the book for me at this point is how much of it seems more like a whaling treatise. I'm not complaining, but I have no recollection of this from my childhood reading. Melville is a great story teller and even while explaining everything from the differences among species of whale to how the harpoon line is coiled in the whale boats is fascinating. Melville was very well-read and was obviously familiar with a great deal of the superstitious lore surrounding whales as well as the mechanics of whaling and he used it all in the service of creating a masterful work.

Interesting about the impact on Dutch culture, Deebee and Edwin. Thanks for all that. I may have to add Schama's book to my wishlist.

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>64 Poquette: The inspiration for Moby Dick was a contemporary disaster, the ramming of The Essex by a sperm whale, a very famous incident of the time. For a very readable account of the disaster and the fate of its crew, I would highly recommend In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex by Nathaniel Philbrick. In the Heart of the Sea also provides a fascinating look at the settlers of Nantucket, the center of the whaling economy at the time, and at their world view. It won the National Book Award.

(Excuse the above post, my daughter was logged on, and I jumped in without signing in as myself.)

Thanks, Lisa, for that recommendation. That makes two books by Philbrick that are now must reads. Have you heard about his new book — at least I think it's new — called Why Read Moby-Dick?

Yes, the Essex was a big story, but it happened when Melville was about a year old, so he had no personal memory of it. There is no question the fact of a whale ramming a whaling ship provided the kernel around which the novel was built. And it was his own experiences as an ordinary seaman on board whaling vessels that made it possible for him to write such a convincing whaling adventure. Somewhere I read that Melville said his life began on that voyage on the Acushnet.

Indeed. For on the Acushnet Melville met the son of the Essex's first mate, Chase Owen. Owen was the senior officer on the lifeboat that resorted to cannibalism. Evidently, Melville already knew the story, but Owen's son loaned Melville a copy of his father's narrative of the events. Philbrick quotes Melville as saying "The reading of this wondrous story upon the landless sea and so close to the very latitude of the shipwreck had a surprising effect on me." Philbrick goes on to say later in the book that while MD has several detailed descriptions of the whale's attack on the Essex, it is the climax of the story that relies most on Chase's narrative. Following the publication of md, Melville continued searching out details of the Essex disaster, even going to Nantucket and seeking out another survivor. So although Melville may have been a child when it happened, I was left with the impression that the Essex story was integral to the book. It will interesting to see if you see parallels between The Essex story and Moby Dick, especially since you've just read the latter, which I have not.

Interesting stuff, Lisa. I am just about half-way through Moby Dick, and I'm looking forward to that climax. The buildup is growing. I really need to read Philbrick. Thanks much!

Catching up and offering a space for your “hope to reads” (called the TarGetBooks shelf).

A delicious thread here; you've seriously interested me in Moby Dick.

hahaha! Love it! Wish I had the wall space for it. Maybe the bathroom . . .

Mebrure Oral is amazing! Thanks!

After Garneray, mentioned in Moby Dick, Ch. 56

The Western Literary Cannon in Context by Professor John M. Bowers, a Teaching Company Course
Lecture 26 — "Melville's Moby-Dick and Global Literature"

Last evening I was listening to this lecture, and Prof. Bowers points out two separate strains in the Western canon which help to explain some of the quirkiness of Moby-Dick.

Bowers suggests that there are two traditions that go back to the time of Chaucer, one led by Chaucer himself, considered to be the mainstream of English literature. The other begins with Piers Plowman which Bowers says ran parallel or counter to the "official" Chaucerian tradition. He describes it as a spiritual allegory, a difficult "non-narrative, unfunny story" devoid of love interest, a kind of "metaphysical allegory, a spiritual quest of a book." It was apparently appropriated by the Puritans in England and eventually brought to America as early as 1630.

Bowers calls Piers Plowman the "smoking gun" in reference to American "post-colonial" literature. When Ishmael in Moby-Dick describes his own restless wanderlust, he says, "I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas and land on barbarous coasts." This, according to Bowers, is a clear backward reflection of Piers Plowman.

Other examples of the Puritan influence include the short stories of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, and even T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland.

Bowers says that the Langlandean tradition of allegory and symbolism really dominate every single page of Moby-Dick. Any common shipboard item, a coin, a harpoon, a compass needle, suddenly assumes complex allegorical meanings that generate even larger and "all-encompassing oceans of symbolic meaning" beginning with the sermon of Father Mapple about Jonah and the Whale.

The implication is that the Puritan tradition is a kind of outsider tradition as opposed to the Chaucerian mainstream. Apparently, there is an even longer tradition which espouses the notion that "to become canonical, any new work must have the counter-canonical built into it," according to Harold Bloom. For example, Ovid's Metamorphoses is an anti-epic which sets itself against Virgil's Aeneid; Boccaccio's Decameron is the anti-Divine Comedy; Don Quixote is the anti-chivalric romance; and Goethe's Faust is an anti-tragedy.

And by these lights, Moby-Dick is really an anti-novel. And in the person of Ishmael, we have a sort of anti-hero. Who was the original Ishmael, after all? In the Bible he is the son of Abraham, not by his wife but by the Egyptian slave woman. Abraham was unable to father a child by his wife Sarah, so he fathered a son by his Egyptian slave, and his name was Ishmael. Later on, Abraham would father a legitimate son with Sarah who would be named Isaac.

Here, then, are parallel genealogies: the legitimate genealogy of Isaac corresponding to the mainstream Chaucerian tradition in English literature; and then an outlaw genealogy of the outcast son Ishmael, equivalent to the Puritan Langlandean tradition going back to Piers Plowman. So Melville signals that he is joining this outlaw, outcast, underground tradition by naming his narrator Ishmael.

Another aspect of New England Puritan culture is the very practical aspect of their literature. They liked books that are useful. And to be sure, in America we have a love of how-to books. This tendency would eventually lead to the whole philosophical outlook of pragmatism best voiced by William James. People liked practical books such as encyclopedias. Back in the 18th century, Chambers' Cyclopedia of 1728 had inspired the boom in encyclopedia writing, leading to the famous 35-volume French Encyclopédie with its contributors like Voltaire. The purpose of Voltaire and others was to expand human knowledge to combat superstition and fuel revolutionary opinion. But there were other purposes to the encyclopedia. And Melville has sort of absorbed this tradition into his novel. He has done his research. Thus we have all that preliminary reference matter, the chapter on "Cetology" and other chapters that digress on the processes and procedures of whaling.

So, Bowers says, there is something kind of weird going on in Moby-Dick. It is encyclopedic, it looks like a how-to book, yet it really doesn't function like one because in the end, it is a work of fiction.

Barry, if you read this, and since you have read Piers Plowman recently, does any of this hold water for you?

ETA — to correct caption.

Fascinating ideas, Suzanne. Piers Plowman is an almost Joycean story -- it's too late at night now (and I've had too many glasses of wine), but tomorrow, I'll dig out some of my Piers Plowman ideas. I never thought to apply to them to American Lit.

Insightful review of the lecture, Suzanne. To me, it seems a bit of a stretch to say that Melville named his narrator Ishmael in order to signal that his book is part of the outré Puritan Langlandism tradition. But then again there is a reason why I left the study of comparative literature for history. LOL.

Thank you for the head's up about the recent publication of Why Read Moby-Dick?. In an NPR interview, Philbrick calls the portion of the book about the whale's anatomy "wormholes of metaphysical poetry that are truly revelatory." There's a stringer for you.

Oh, and I love the artwork you have been posting.

>72 Poquette: - Thanks for posting this (and all the other info) - I have Moby Dick on the Nook now so will have to come back to these posts when I start reading it.

Also, Omoo is a great title to know for crosswords.

Suzanne, I can see where Prof. Bowers is coming from. Certainly Piers Piers Plowman is different from the Chaucerian tradition and Prof. Bowers sums it up quite well. I would myself never have connected Moby Dick with Piers Plowman. Whether it holds water or not I cannot say but my reading experience of Piers Plowman was remarkably similar to Moby Dick. The narrative flow is continually interrupted and the backward references can be very complicated.

There would seem to be so much allegory and symbolism in Moby Dick that it almost sinks the novel, but that's just my view as I struggle with some of it.

Interesting thoughts on the naming of Ishmael. The most famous opening line in Western literature "Call me Ishmael" has in Prof. Bowers eyes a real force to it. The note in my penguin English library says about this:

"Call me Ishmael" - In Hebrew 'God Hears' son of Abraham and his wife Sarah's handmaiden, Hagar: And he will be a wild man; his hand will be against every man, and every man's hand against him; and he shall dwell in the presence of all his brethren. (Genesis xvi, 12)

From his boyhood reading Melville no doubt recalled the surly pioneer whom James Fenimore Cooper had given the same symbolic name: Ishmael Bush of 'The Prairie' (1827)

A great posting Suzanne, it has woken me up this Sunday morning.

Suzanne you would love my Penguin English Library edition of Moby Dick it has over 300 pages of notes.

Jane, I shall look forward to your thoughts.

Lisa, speaking of stretches, who knew that the tradition of subversive literature stretched all the way back to Ovid, Boccaccio, Cervantes and Goethe? Harold Bloom's statement that "to become canonical, any new work must have the counter-canonical built into it," blew my mind. That quote, incidentally, I believe comes from Bloom's book on The Western Canon in his discussion of Goethe, but I have not had time to check that out.

Love the "wormholes of metaphysical poetry." What a concept!

DieFledermaus – I hope I have not oversold Moby-Dick. But it is such an interesting book on so many levels.

Barry, it may be unfair to connect Moby-Dick directly with Piers Plowman, but the connection via the Puritan movement fascinates me. I did not realize that Piers Plowman had been appropriated by the Puritans and was completely unaware of that 14th century origin of the Puritan influence in American literature. So that was a revelation right there.

Interesting comment from your Penguin edition. I suspect I would love it. My Oxford World Classics edition also contains copious footnotes, but I doubt it amounts to 300!

I was on my iPhone for the last few messages and by necessity kept my comments brief. I agree completely with your comment that it may be unfair to connect Moby-Dick directly with Piers Plowman, but the connection via the Puritan movement fascinates me. What I found difficult to swallow was that Melville was consciously writing his book to signal that he is joining this outlaw, outcast, underground tradition by naming his narrator Ishmael. Minor point.

Would you consider The Golden Ass and Sappho's writings to be of a subversive nature too? Is satire subversive by nature? You are raising lots of interesting questions.

Lisa, you raise an interesting question: Perhaps satire is in and of itself subversive. This requires some thought and expertise that is beyond my pay grade! But if anybody has any thoughts on this, chime in by all means.

Because Melville takes serious digs at organized Christianity in Moby-Dick, maybe the Ishmael thing really was intentional.

Poking fun at the establishment I guess is always subversive to some extent. But how and how much, etc., etc., are questions for further study, in my case anyway. Good point.

Once a whale is killed, it is stripped of its blubber, decapatated and the back end is scuttled. Melville tells us that the head encompasses fully a third of the whale's bulk. The head is hoisted by means of heavy tackles along one side of the ship causing it to lean sharply.

After one successful whale hunt, and after the head had been secured, Captain Ahab appeared on deck "and stood leaning over with eyes attentively fixed on this head."

"It was a black and hooded head; and hanging there in the midst of so intense a calm, it seemed the Sphynx's in the desert."

Then Ahab launched into a soliloquey fit for Hamlet himself. It is one thing to read this once, but I have now read it half a dozen times, but even on the second reading, it begins to get under one's skin. This is just magnificent writing:

"Speak, thou vast and venerable head," muttered Ahab, "which, though ungarnished with a beard, yet here and there lookest hoary with mosses; speak, mighty head, and tell us the secret thing that is in thee. Of all divers, thou hast dived the deepest. That head upon which the upper sun now gleams, has moved amid this world's foundations. Where unrecorded names and navies rust, and untold hopes and anchors rot; where in her murderous hold this frigate earth is ballasted with bones of millions of the drowned; there, in that awful water-land, there was thy most familiar home. Thou hast been where bell or diver never went; hast slept by many a sailor's side, where sleepless mothers would give their lives to lay them down. Thou saw'st the locked lovers when leaping from their flaming ship; heart to heart they sank beneath the exulting wave; true to each other, when heaven seemed false to them. Thou saw'st the murdered mate when tossed by pirates from the midnight deck; for hours he fell into the deeper midnight of the insatiate maw; and his murderers still sailed on unharmed — while swift lightnings shivered the neighboring ship that would have borne a righteous husband to outstretched, longing arms. O head! thou hast seen enough to split the planets and make an infidel of Abraham, and not one syllable is thine!"

Moby-Dick, Chapter 70, "The Sphynx"

On the satire question, I wrote an essay on Alexander Pope's Dunciad 2 years ago in which I quoted from Ian Gordon's chapter on the Augustan literary tenets in his A Preface to Pope:

...satire attacks human evil and stupidity by making fun of it from a standpoint that at least implies… a consistent moral position. There are three distinct elements of conception involved here – attack, laughter and morality – and a careful fusing of all three elements is necessary for successful satire. (p.112).

So, although I agree that satire is inherently subversive, it is important to remember that the satirist usually assumes the moral high ground, or at least 'a consistent moral position'. The satirist attacks his opponents' failings with some degree of humour, while trying to avoid descending to their level. Satirist have, of course, not always succeeded in distinguishing between attacking their opponents' foibles and ad hominem attacks.

So Melville signals that he is joining this outlaw, outcast, underground tradition by naming his narrator Ishmael.

I love this idea and phrasing. I'm can't see Melville in close agreement with the Puritan tradition, although certainly there's a close association with it in some ways. However, I agree that the opening line defines Ishmael as an outlaw and outcast from tradition, and therefore defines the book that way as well.

Dewald, your summary of the important attributes of satire is very helpful in this discussion. I had not thought about the "moral high ground" as an aspect of this, but it certainly carries with it the impact of insight, and it fits right in with Prof. Bowers' points. And Melville's satiric barbs at Christianity seem to indicate his sense of his own moral superiority in the face of what he saw as the hypocracy all around him among the practitioners of organized Christianity. Thanks much for that contribution.

Dan, since my original post is a hopelessly condensed summary of Prof. Bowers' lecture, I may not have articulated what he was saying as clearly as I might have. But the tradition Melville represented was the literary Puritan tradition, not to be confused with the religious or practical aspects of that tradition.

Prof. Bowers was trying to get across the idea of the bifurcation in English literary tradition that occurred in the 14th century with Chaucer as father of the mainstream of English literature, and Langland's Piers Plowman as the "smoking gun" signaling an outsider tradition. The mainstream, if I understand all this correctly, is primarily secular, and the outsider is a more religious-minded tradition as the Puritans "appropriated" Piers Plowman.

This may be an oversimplification. But Bowers backs it up by pointing out that Piers Plowman exists in more than 50 extant manuscripts, and the first printing in 1550 or thereabouts was under the aegis of the Puritans. And then the Puritans actually imported copies of Piers Plowman into the colonies as early as 1630. The attraction to Puritan readers was the metaphysical allegory and the spiritual quest aspects of Piers Plowman.

It was this style of writing, this kind of content that appealed to colonial/Puritan readers, and a strain of this metaphysical, allegorical, spiritual style and content appeared in the work of American writers right through the so-called American Renaissance. Examples were mentioned in #72 above.

Somehow this all must tie into the so-called esoteric metaphysics that also reached a peak of influence in the mid 19th century. I keep thinking of that book I read and reviewed last year in connection with my reading of Melville's The Confidence-Man. The book in question was The Esoteric Origins of the American Renaissance by Arthur Versluis. Isn't it amazing how all this stuff eventually ties together?

I've only been scanning your recent posts because all the deep Moby Dick talk befuddles me, but I have to say, that painting in post 80 is stunning!

Hi Nathan! I was looking for a picture of a whale head hanging from the yard arms but to no avail. This at least depicts its enormity.

The Barry Moser illustrations are quite wonderful in depicting almost every aspect of the whaling operations that Melville describes including said hanging whale head. Unfortunately, most of them are not available on line.

Thanks for the clarification in#83. It is amazing how much the disparate things we learn tie together. Also your thread really enriches my reading of MD.

Sperm whale model – Bishop Museum, Honolulu, Hawaii

In chapters 102 and 103 of Moby Dick, Melville talks at length about his experience in the south sea islands of a sperm whale skeleton which had been appropriated by the local priests and hung up as a religious idol. Melville took the opportunity to explore this vast skeleton, take measurements and he reported his findings in chapter 103.

It reminded me that way back in 1973 on a trip to Hawaii, I visited the Bishop Museum, which at the time had a skeleton of a sperm whale hanging in the interior court of the museum.

The building housing the museum was originally a school dedicated to the memory of philanthropist Charles Reed Bishop's wife who was a member of the royal Kamehemeha family. The building itself is rectangular, three stories plus garrets, with an expansive interior court and with quads – i.e., open walkways – all around. At the time I was there one floor was dedicated to native Polynesian and Hawaiian history and culture, a second floor was dedicated to the history of the missionary settlements and the third was devoted to the history and artifacts of whaling in the islands. I believe a massive reorganization has recently taken place, so presumably this description is no longer valid. The structure itself is magnificent and the whole experience was quite memorable.

I am guessing that the above model was built up around the original skeleton. If you look closely you can see the skeleton of the fin on the opposite side.

> Suzanne, you might be interested in The Enchanted Isles by Melville - it's a collection of non-fiction pieces by him concerning his voyages around the Galapagos Islands, or 'Encantadas'. Well, I say non-fictional, but he uses all the devices of his later works in this wonderful travelogue. Don't know where you'd get a copy, though. I found my Hesperus Classics one on a sale.

Dewald, I actually thought I had a copy of Encantadas somewhere around here, but I see I have not as yet catalogued it. I'll have to find it and actually read it. I am sure I'll enjoy it. Thanks for reminding me to look for it.

On further reflection about that model whale pictured in #86 above, I am now thinking the opposite side left the skeleton entirely exposed – not merely the fin – and the reason I did not immediately recollect the "fleshed out" model is that I spent quite a bit of time gazing at the skeleton. Again, this is based on a now ancient memory, so I'm sorry to be so hazy.

I finished reading Moby-Dick last evening. There are a few novels in the annals of literature that move the reader to plow forward to get to the end as soon as possible, and once having reached the end, to be overcome by a sense of loss because it is finished. Moby-Dick is one of those books.

It is very difficult to sum up in a few brief paragraphs what this novel is and what it means. So I shall not even try, but instead I am going to share some of what this reading has meant to me personally. I have already mentioned above that I first read Moby-Dick during summer vacation when I was about thirteen. So as I reread the book just now, I was trying to remember what it must have been like as a thirteen-year-old to read this book. So many decades have passed that I simply have forgotten everything except the emotions attached to reading it. Experiencing it fresh as an adult, of course, I undoubtedly now understand many things that would have gone over my head as a child.

Moby-Dick, or the Whale by Herman Melville (1851) Oxford World Classics, Kindle Edition

Part Homeric epic, part Greek or Shakespearean tragedy, part encyclopedia and part novel, these are the elements that contribute to the mystique of Moby-Dick which, on its face, appears to be just another yarn about the sea. In this case, however, Melville attempted to convey the impotence of mere men against the vastness of the world and the enormity of the mighty sperm whale.

The key that unlocks this particular secret (only one among many) of the book appears in chapter 104 where Melville/Ishmael tells us:

To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it.

In a sense, the length and bulk and density of the book is a metaphor for the length and bulk and density of the white whale. This goes a long way in explaining the many didactic elements encountered throughout Moby-Dick, beginning with the chapter on "Cetology" and continuing with many chapters about aspects of whales and whaling. Melville wants us to understand and be prepared for exactly what we are in for and to appreciate what an epic tale he has written for us.

The debate about how Ahab should be viewed will undoubtedly go on as long as Moby-Dick continues to be read. Many say he was the devil incarnate, others that he was merely an obsessed old man whose monomania eventually proved not only self-destructive, but which carried thirty-odd good men along with him to the bottom of the sea. This reader comes down on the side of obsession and monomania for two reasons: one, because there were too many glimpses of Ahab's humanity along the way that belied the epithet of evil. For example, towards the end of the book, when the Pequod is in full final pursuit of the white whale, there is a moment shared between Ahab and first mate Starbuck that actually brought tears to my eyes. Ahab has been reminiscing about his life at sea and wondering what it all meant. Abruptly he says:

Close! stand close to me, Starbuck; let me look into a human eye; it is better than to gaze into sea or sky; better than to gaze upon God. By the green land; by the bright hearth-stone! this is the magic glass, man; I see my wife and my child in thine eye. No, no; stay on board, on board! lower not when I do; when branded Ahab gives chase to Moby Dick. No, no! not with the far away home I see in that eye!" (Chapter 132, "The Symphony")

Secondly, Ahab is a tormented and driven man whose obsession has become his tragic flaw. According to M.H. Abrams, a tragic hero like Ahab "moves us to pity because, since he is not an evil man, his misfortune is greater than he deserves; but he moves us also to fear, because we recognize similar possibilities of error in our own lesser and fallible selves."

Of course, many superstitions are displayed by the seamen and an atmosphere of omens and portents is well established by Melville, but no overt and palpable manifestations of unearthly powers are present. And while Melville pours on the symbolism and draws comparisons that suggest darker powers may be at play, it seems a stretch to say that Ahab or even the white whale itself are abstract incarnations of evil. For example, Ishmael says: ". . . maddened by yesterday's fresh irons that corroded in him, Moby Dick seemed combinedly possessed by all the angels that fell from heaven." This is not to say that Moby Dick is evil but merely that he reminds one of the attributes we ascribe to evil. This is in the end a story of men against nature and nature against men.

Much has also been written about where Melville stood in relation to a belief or nonbelief in God. Melville had lost his religion as a young man because of the hypocracy he saw around him in those who most strongly demanded adherence to "God's law." But while he may have lost his belief, he never tired of the search for some greater force to believe in, and much of the metaphysical and spiritual speculation contained in the pages of Moby-Dick seem to confirm this. And in fact, it comes as a surprise when Ishmael, after countless pot shots taken at religion, states: "The truest of all men was the Man of Sorrows." (Chapter 96)

The closing chapters describe the three-day saga of the final chase. We know the end is coming for Ahab serving as lookout atop the mast cries, "There she blows!—there she blows! A hump like a snow-hill! It is Moby Dick!" It sends a chill up the spine to read these words in context after so many pages and so much time spent in anticipation.

In the end, it is the white whale who chases Ahab and his crew to their final end. So it is with profound sadness we say, Farewell Pequod. Fairwell Ishmael, Queequeg, Tashtego, Daggoo, Starbuck, Stubb, Flask—and Ahab. It would seem that only in epic, tragedy and the Bible do we find characters with but one name and these characters and this story carry with them all the stature of our greatest literature.



This review is also posted on the book page.

Thank you for such a heart-felt review, Suzanne. You make interesting points about Ahab and Moby-Dick, and the role of Melville's religious belief (or lack thereof) in the book. I love this book dearly, and will definitely be rereading it in the future.

Great review Suzanne, Like you I do not go along with the idea that Ahab was a representation of the devil and certainly not Moby-Dick himself. I am still reading, but slowly.

Suzanne - I greatly enjoyed your review and comments on Moby Dick. I am starring them to refer back to when I finally get to reading the book, as I think they will enrich that experience for me. Thanks!

Thank you Dewald and Barry and Linda! I hardly know what to do with myself now that the book is finished. It really packed a wallop! My instinct is to go back to page one and read it again, but there are so many books . . .

Lovely review, Suzanne -- it's certainly one of those books that stays with you and reveals new aspects of itself every time it is read.

Echoing all the above, terrific review of MD. It leaves me wondering where evil fits in in the book. Clearly, it's not so black and white.

Really enjoyed the Moby Dick review. I've only a few chapters in, but I don't think it's the kind of book where you have to worry about spoilers.

Thank you Jane and Dan and DieFledermaus. Moby-Dick is indeed the kind of book that stays with you. I have finally come down from the top of the mast and am ready to move on.

And thank you to everyone who thumbed my review. Much appreciated!

A Mapmaker's Dream: A Novel by James Cowan (1996) Warner Books

I "found" this book sitting on my shelf unread and sort of forgotten since 1996 when I presumably purchased it. It carries with it a certain amount of enchantment as small books often do.

A Mapmaker's Dream purports to be a translation of one Fra Mauro's meditations on the creation of a new mappa mundi by which he intended to eclipse all such preceding cartographic efforts. Fra Mauro was indeed a famous cartographer to the Venetian court circa 1450, and a portion (depicting China) of one of his maps is pictured above. The entire map can be seen here.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fra_Mauro_map

When we think of maps today, we think of a chart that accurately depicts the details of the Earth or a specific locality. But on the contrary, the so-called mappae mundi, which appear primitive and inaccurate to the modern eye, were never meant to be used as navigational charts, and they make no pretense of showing the relative areas of land and water. Rather, they were schematic or diagramatic and meant to illustrate classical learning. Immediately one thinks of the art of memory for which such visually rich constructs might be viewed as a kind of teaching aid conveying the idea of the Earth as a sphere with its climate zones, the cardinal directions, distant lands, Bible stories, history, mythology, flora, fauna and exotic races. Some mappae mundi were regarded as compendiums of medieval knowledge.

It is helpful to have this background while reading A Mapmaker's Dream so that Fra Mauro's meditations don't appear quite so strange and seemingly unrelated to the production of a really useful navigational chart. It is quite clear throughout that this is the kind of map for which he is gathering intelligence. We are treated to his descriptions of visitors from far and wide who have come to him to add their exotic experiences to his map.

In the end, when his map is complete, Mauro says:

There is not much more to do. My map is a masterpiece, even if I do say so. I am well satisfied. With the help of others I have completed the world. It now has a form that is both physical and—dare I say it?—immaterial at once. Perhaps, yes, even mystical.

Review also posted on the book page

I find maps, especially old ones, fascinating. Thank you for reviewing a book that I probably would not have heard of.

Btw, here's something about accurate maps that I found interesting: http://www.xkcd.com/977/

What's your favourite (besides old maps)?

Very nice review, Suzanne. The book sounds interesting, and the maps beautiful and fascinating. They seem meant to be viewed in one of the beautiful libraries that you show us on your profile page.

Well, Dewald, I am actually a Globe person myself. (And I'm happy to see that places me squarely among the clever people.) Of course, the Mercator is fraught with such sentimental appeal, it is difficult to just toss it out willy-nilly. But then I saw the Waterman Butterfly and that really gave me pause. And on further thought the Peirce Quincuncial introduces possibilities I had been considering just last week, but I was having trouble following the lines of longitude because so many of them were upside down. And speaking of possibilities, the Dymaxion is a mindblower. Except I left my 3D glasses at the movie theater—about 25 years ago.

Yeah, on balance, it's the good old Globe every time.

Thanks so much, Linda! Come to think of it, there is an automatic connection between beautiful old maps and beautiful libraries.

nice map

A Troubadour's Testament: A Novel by James Cowan (1998) Shambhala

In Aquitaine during the reign of Eleanor, daughter of William of Aquitaine the first troubadour, a poet Marcebru flourished who dedicated his life and his poetry to a commemoration of the fin' amors between himself and his lady love Amedée de Jois, who entered a convent to preserve the sanctity of their love—or was it to escape it? That is the question explored in the pages of this haunting little book by James Cowan.

A fin' amors is "a distant love" that

. . . can be attained only by the renunciation of the immediate, close and deceitful love that characterized normal relations between men and women. The profane ideal of happiness governed by the senses was transformed into a more refined form of love dominated by the imagination. Sensual love was overcome by reason.

The narrator who remains nameless learns of a rouleau de mort, or death roll, that has been discovered among papers hidden away in an obscure museum in the town of Ussel in southwestern France. This scroll contains dedicatory poems by Marcebru upon the death of Amedée, augmented by comments made by people who knew her. In the end Marcebru threw the scroll into the river at Ussel, but it had been retrieved somehow and ended up in the museum. An elderly scribe in Ussel translated it and our narrator is given the translation. He then embarks on a journey to trace the path of Marcebru in his quest for contributions to his scroll. Why he attempted to destroy his work and the record of his great love is one of the mysteries that are explored in the pages of this rather philosophical novel.

It is hard to pin down exactly the genre into which this book and another by the same author, The Mapmaker's Dream, fall. Both books are filled with little encounters with remarkable people who in unexpected ways shed light upon the threads that Cowan masterfully attempts to untangle. While I enjoyed both books, A Troubadour's Testament appealed to me the most. It is filled with little aphorisms that are meaningful in context but convey a sense of quotability separate and apart from the novel.

Interesting pair of books.

I mentioned above the aphoristic quality of the writing in A Troubadour's Testament. Here are a few examples:

Ascending to the high branches of the imagination is the only way to escape . . . there freedom blossoms on a bough.

For him Latin is not a dead language, merely an ancient tongue that has chosen to take a nap.

Under the bonnet of any language, particularly ancient ones, they say there is an engine waiting to roar into life.

Certainly it takes more than wisdom or truth to enliven a man's heart.

Remember that absence contains within it not emptiness, but the obligation we all must adopt toward memory.

Your sword is the word. Why is it not buried in the blade itself? Brandish it bravely, soldier . . . . cross Styx in a coracle of hope, utter one word that will drain it of its ferment.

Such is the nature of all journeys. They take us through the unthinking events, routines, frustrations, and disappointments of the day—only to lead us to the discovery that something remarkable has occurred.

Do not underestimate the humble page . . . . Without it, where would we be? More importantly, where would the word reside? It is one of the greatest inventions. On its flatness, its blankness, and sometimes its whiteness, the word lands like a swan. Paper is the lake upon which those majestic birds of thought come to rest, there to inspire us with their elegance, their charm, and their substance. Monsieur, paper is also the bed of language. We sleep on it and we dream.

Paper is the most exquisite danger: it offers the illusion of whiteness, of purity, while perpetrating something clandestine.

Reminiscent of Beatrice and Dante, Laura and Petrarch, Amedée inspired Marcebru to the heights of his poetry. Here is a short verse by Marcebru wherein "he had attempted to define fin' amors as a philosophic value":

He who is chosen by fin'amors
Lives a happy life, courtly and wise,
While he whom it rejects, it refutes
And condemns to destruction.
If a man disdains fin'amors
He becomes a fool, gawping
At illusion and totally misled
By the stupidity of his thinking.

I'm definitely attracted by your reviews -- I think both of these go on the wish list. Thanks, Suzanne

South West France; a book about troubadours; a recommendation from your good self suzanne. How can I possibly resist buying this book. I enjoyed the little aphorisms as well. Great review I am hooked.

Thanks much, Jane!

Barry, I figured I'd hook you on this one! ;-)

In the past few days I have read a succession of rather quirky novels which seem to defy any attempts to classify them. Two of them were the James Cowan books A Mapmaker's Dream and A Troubadour's Testament. Last night I read Einstein's Dreams by Alan Lightman, which I "found" on the shelf next to the Cowan books. It is probably just a coincidence but a happy one that they are shelved together because they were each purchased at different times and places.

None of them are troubled by anything resembling a plot, there is no character development as we normally think of it, and dialogue is minimal. In fact, by some standards, they barely qualify as novels being in the range of 50,000 words. On the surface, they are descriptive, even poetic, and some reviewers on LT and Amazon describe them as unbelievable, particularly as to the dialogue. But these readers seem to have missed the essential quality that characterizes this type of writing.

Each of these books involves a quest of one sort or another and two of the three have the word "dream" in the title. This should be something of a tipoff that the books may contain elements that lift them above the realm of the absolutely literal and almost, but not quite, into the category of fable. It just occurs to me that these books are somewhat akin to the medieval dream vision. They are all visionary indeed and have that poetic and philosophical quality about them.

There is a serendipitous aspect to "finding" books on one's own bookshelf that I had essentially forgotten about. Reading them all in succession has had the happy effect of rendering some other books I read last year a bit more intelligible. I am thinking particularly of Walter Pater's Imaginary Portraits. I simply could not grasp what Pater was about at the time I read them and could not at the time find a way to review them. But now I feel a bit better prepared—thanks to James Cowan and Alan Lightman—to go back and give them a second look.

In retrospect, I don't know why the difficulty because there are other philosophical novels that I have read and raved about. One in particular comes to mind, and that is Remy de Gourmont's A Night in the Luxembourg. It is exactly this type of literature, not meant at all to be taken literally or even to be lumped with the fantasy genre, but to explore an inner type of reality. Even Flaubert's Parrot seems somehow related because it represents a quest by a man to find the essence of a writer, in this case Flaubert, by tracing his footsteps.

I, of all people, should understand this because I have done it myself. About a dozen years ago I went off to Paris in search of Foucault, in this case the Foucault of the famous pendulum. I found the place where he lived, I spent hours in the Paris Pantheon gazing at the pendulum, I visited the Institutes de France where Foucault was a member, I went to the Bibliotheque Nationale in search of his writings. That was an experience all by itself, and I was not allowed to see the original work, merely a microform facsimile. Eventually, I ended up buying a copy of his complete works in the original, which is probably the most valuable book I own. But I digress.

All of this is by way of explaining to myself, if to no one else, a genre of literature that I find very appealing. If anyone reading this knows if there is a conventional name for this kind of thing, please do share. I am kind of at a loss to come up with a shorthand way to categorize it. And yet maybe that is the point, it may be beyond categorization. Until I hear anything to the contrary, I shall continue to refer to this broad category as philosophical fiction, for want of a better description.

I shall eventually have more to say about Einstein's Dreams.

I haven't read the books you mention and I don't know the name of this type of fiction, but I believe I understand exactly what you mean when you talk of an exploration of an inner reality.

I was thinking along almost the same lines today while on a 2 hour car journey. This was in regard to a book I am reading at present, Visitation which is different I think to your books in many ways, but similar in terms of its position above the everyday and the prosaic.

Just as you mention this genre sitting somewhere above the literal but below fable, I was thinking how Visitation is written in a style that brings in the universal, and in my mind I was trying to work out from a Jungian viewpoint why it was so powerful. My conclusion was that it was because it tapped into the archetypes and (if you believe in the existence of collective subconscious) that the universal can assume such power in literature because it also becomes the personal. All of this was going through my mind about 4 hours ago.

We need to stop such psychic goings on Suzanne.

Enjoyed your mini essay suzanne #113

Interesting books and comments, Suzanne. I am intrigued by your comments on both A Mapmakers Dream and The Troubadour's Testament. visiting your page always stretches my thinking in new ways. Thank for sharing your personal quest, may I ask why Foucault?

Hi Zeno. I hope the psychic police don't arrive too soon! ;-)

I read Visitation last year and agree that its style is similar in many ways to the books I mentioned. The main difference I believe is that the lasting impression it left—despite the notable beauty of the writing—was negative because of the underlying theme concerning man's inhumanity to man, which for whatever reason I found quite disturbing.

The so-called philosophical novels I have just been reading were all driving at a deeper connection with human accomplishment or aspiration, which register in my mind as more positive. But all these books including Visitation do reflect that universal appeal that you mentioned, partly because of the skillful writing. I mean, when you can pick little quotations out of a book that are relevant to both the story at hand and just to life in general, that is remarkable indeed.

Thanks, Barry!

Foucault's pendulum at the Pantheon, Paris

Lisa, thank you, as always.

Regarding Leon Foucault's pendulum, you may regret having asked! I've been trying to think which came first, my fascination with the pendulum itself or the eponymous book by Umberto Eco. But I believe it was back in 1997-98, I was listening to Foucault's Pendulum on my long train commute between San Francisco and San Jose. Very early in the book is a description of the pendulum at the Musée des Arts et Métiers in Paris, and I remembered seeing one when I was a teenager at the Griffith Park Observatory in Los Angeles. One thing led to another, I visited the pendulum at the Hall of Sciences in Golden Gate Park and was mesmerized by it.

I started doing some reading about Foucault himself and his various scientific tinkerings, and decided he was one of the truly unsung heros. I got it into my head that I wanted to write a childen's book on Foucault and the pendulum. During that period I was also teaching myself French because independently of Foucault, I wanted to spend some time in Paris.

All of this came together in the fall of 1999 when I did indeed arrange to spend a few weeks in Paris, and had many Foucault-related adventures. Sorry to say, after I returned home, I discovered that someone had beaten me to the punch and there was already a children's book about Foucault. So that whole pipe dream just evaporated.

At the time I was in Paris, the Musée des Arts et Métiers was closed for renovation but there was a pendulum swinging away in the Pantheon, which is where Foucault conducted his initial public demonstration. So this was even better, as it turned out. The Pantheon is a whole other subject, but the pendulum there is suspended from such a great height (220 feet) that it takes a full 20 seconds for the bob to swing back and forth. It seems unbelievable until you actually time it.

So much for my Foucault's pendulum obsession. It turns out that Eco's book holds almost an equal fascination for me. It is one of very few books I have actually read three times. It is a tour de force of ironic writing about three men who worked at a vanity publishing house who had too much time on their hands and they decided to invent a conspiracy theory. Before the novel's end, they have been seduced by their own invention and have begun to believe it themselves, and even worse, "evil forces" have learned about their theory, believing it to have some factual basis in reality, and the plot goes downhill from there.

For those who have not read Foucault's Pendulum and don't believe they ever will, I highly recommend as a substitute Anthony Burgess's New York Times review, which is a tour de force in itself. About the novel, Burgess said,

The book clearly needs an index . . . . I don't think ''Foucault's Pendulum'' is entertainment any more than was ''The Name of the Rose.'' It will appeal to readers who have a puritanical tinge — those who think they are vaguely sinning if they are having a good time with a book. To be informed, however, is holy. This explains the success of ''The Name of the Rose'' — it was all the information you could possibly need about medieval monastic life.—Anthony Burgess, NYT

And Foucault's Pendulum is all you ever need to know about conspiracy theories.

http://www.nytimes.com/1989/10/15/books/a-conspiracy-to-rule-the-world.html?src=...

#119 What a wonderful story! Sadly, I did not acquire quite your passion, although I too read Foucault's Pendulum and saw the pendulum in the Pantheon. It was amazing. Did you hear that the pendulum was dented a couple of years ago?

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/05/foucaults-pendulum-dented/

>120 labfs39: Yes, Lisa, I did hear. It was, however, the one at the Musée des Arts et Métiers. When the cable snapped it also damaged the floor.

I read A troubadour's testament two years and did not like it. At that time I did not write reviews for all books, but my ideas are very well covered by the review of lilithcat. The story seemed to be very contrived and to a great extent lacking in authentic feel. Also this idea that the scroll was thrown in the river (I suppose parchment is water-proof?) and subsequently preserved, etc.

Another Eco fan! I found your Foucault's pendulum interest fascinating! Have you read any other Eco? We are going to do a group read of Baudolino with the 12 in 12 challenge in November if you'd like to join. It will be a reread for me, but I can't seem to really comprehend an Eco novel the first time around, so I'm looking forward to it.

Hi Edwin, it would seem that sadly you missed the essence of A Troubadour's Testament. While I do not share your feeling that it was inauthentic, the deeper meaning had to do with exploring the true nature of the poet Marcebru and his lady love Amedée. It is, in effect, a kind of prose poem.

Hi japaul, yes indeed, a huge Eco fan. I have read in addition to Foucault's Pendulum, The Name of the Rose, The Island of the Day Before and Baudolino, which I would enjoy reading again. I have The Prague Cemetery on deck to read soon.

I also have read at least once—and parts of it more than once—Eco's Serendipities: Language and Lunacy, which is a collection of essays that go a long way in providing insight to his fictional work, especially Foucault's Pendulum. If you have not read it, I highly recommend it. It is a slight little book but packed with fascinating material.

Oh, and how could I forget The Infinity of Lists? One of my favorite reads of last year.

Thanks for the heads up about the group read.

I'll look forward to your review of The Prague Cemetery. It's also on my TBR pile for this year or early next year. I think I've read all of Eco's novels, but I've never tried any of his essays or non-fiction. Serendipities sounds interesting so maybe I'll give it a try. Enjoying your thread!

I'm planning to read Baudolino with the 12 in 12, too.

I read Foucault's Pendulum for the first time while studying in Paris for a year. I was buying books based on pages/franc and it was quite a good value! Still, I was fascinated and really enjoyed visiting the Arts et Metiers museum. It was pre-renovation and altogether ratty, worn out and with some really dubious displays. I loved it! It would have been possible to hide out there.

>113 Poquette: - Very nice comparison essay. I haven't read any of the books that you mentioned so not sure if some of the ones I'm thinking of would fit into your theme.

I do enjoy serendipitous discoveries of books you've bought and laid aside. I tend to buy things, forget about them for awhile, then think "Why did it take me so long to read this?" after reading and loving them.

>126 japaul22: – Thanks, japaul!

>127 RidgewayGirl: – I'm definitely making a note of the Baudolino read. Glad there will be at least two familiar participants.

Interesting about the Musée des Arts et Métiers. I'm sorry I never managed to get there.

>128 DieFledermaus: – Thank you, DieFledermaus. And your comment is so apt. After all, those forgotten books were presumably bought for a reason, and so it is, as you say, wonderful to find that they were worth waiting for.

Einstein's Dreams: A Novel by Alan Lightman (1993) Warner Books

In 1905 Einstein was considering the relationship between time and space while working on his theory of relativity. Alan Lightman, a physicist and novelist, has poetically imagined on paper that during this period of dynamic creativity Einstein was exploring even in his dreams countless variations on the nature of time that differ from the way we experience it in our world.

Imagine that time were circular, repeating itself eternally; or that it were like water flowing, sometimes interrupted by eddies or floating debris; or that time were three-dimensional like space and that it were moving in three directions simultaneously; or that time were flowing backwards, or that people were without memories, or that people were to live forever or that they were to live for just one day.

Each of these and other arcane concepts are poetically fleshed out, simply and directly, with real people in real situations that seem like possibilities. Lightman draws us into thirty simple scenes among the people of Bern going about their ordinary—or extraordinary lives. In this way, he gives us a glimpse of the mental processes of a genius dreaming about time.

To give a bit of the flavor, here is one scenario:

The world will end on 26 September 1907. Everyone knows it. . . .

One year before the end, schools close their doors. Why learn for the future with so brief a future? Delighted to have lessons finished forever, children play hide-and-seek in the arcades. . . .

One month before the end, businesses close. . . . What need is there for commerce and industry with so little time left? . . . A liberation fills the air. . . .

One day before the end, the streets swirl in laughter. Neighbors who have never spoken greet each other as friends, strip off their clothing and bathe in the fountains. . . . What do their past stations matter? In a world of one day they are equal. . . .

One minute before the end of the world, everyone gathers on the grounds of the Kunstmuseum. Men, women and children form a giant circle and hold hands. No one moves. No one speaks. This is the last minute of the world. . . .

In the last seconds . . . cool air rushes by, bodies are weightless. . . . And below, the vast blanket of snow hurtles nearer and nearer to envelop this circle of pinkness and life.

Suzanne, Einstein's dreams sounds delightful. I must look out for this book.

>113 Poquette: some other quirky/dreamy novellas to consider:

Mr g: A Novel About the Creation -- new by Alan Lightman, also imaginative, perhaps less so than Einstein’s Dreams when it comes to the science

The Incident Report -- a Toronto library clerk documents aspects of her life through incident reports; strange and lovely; thinking about this makes me want to read it again, and I'd buy it this time not borrow from the library

Light Boxes by Shane Jones -- about a February that takes over and turns dystopian; some lovely language

Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives by David Eagleman -- variations on the afterlife, very imaginative; much more a collection of vignettes than a novella

Thanks much for these suggestions! All sound intriguing and I shall definitely follow up.

#119 - but I did have a good time with The Name of Rose...which I read 20 years ago and have largely forgotten

#130 and all the read about and around this - Very interesting stuff Suzanne. This book was already on my wishlist.

>130 Poquette: Einstein's Dreams sounds very interesting. Will remember it for some imaginative reading.

I don't know whether you've read Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities yet (don't see it in your library), but it is also an extremely imaginative piece of work. It is ostensibly a conversation between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan concerning all the strange cities Polo has visited, but it is really an exploration of the imagination. I loved it.

Coincidentally, I picked up a novella by Jim Crace the other day which you might be interested in. It's his first book, Continent. I haven't read it yet, but it sounds very enticing. From the back: 'Continent is an exploration of the cultures, communities and natural life of an entirely imaginary realm.' I also like the book's epigraph from Pycletius:

There and beyond is a seventh continent - seven peoples, seven masters, seven seas. And its business is trade and superstition.

Einstein's Dream sounds like something I'd be interested in - I saw a review for Mr. g and thought it was a fantastic premise and that one is his most popular book.

>132 detailmuse: - Light Boxes also looks intriguing and has wonderful cover.

My suggestions for dreamlike, plot-less novels with hints of magic realism and gorgeous prose would be Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz and Garden, Ashes by Danilo Kis. Both have a sort of quest in looking for difficult/absent fathers, but plot is not the main thing. Also loved Invisible Cities and other Calvinos.

I second Invisible Cities, Garden, Ashes and Street of Crocodiles, all are very good, although for me Kis' book transcends into something more than very good.

Wow, a lot to catch up on here! Great discussion of Moby Dick! I have little to add to the conversation except 1. I cleaned his house (Arrowhead) once. 2. I ate whale in Iceland a year ago (more like beef than fish, of course).

Regarding Focault's Pendulum, I read this ages ago (the 80s? Book of the Month Club, I think) and remember having some difficulty with it (probably hard to read with Sesame Street in the background), but your post is enchanting! I do have a copy of Baudalino, if someone would like it...

Garden, Ashes: onto the wishlist. And while I was looking into The Street of Crocodiles, I was interested to discover Jonathan Safran Foer's Tree of Codes which uses physical die cuts to redact Schulz's story into something new (poetry? a short story?), e.g. think The Street of Crocodiles.

Touch by Adania Shibli, vignettes about a Palestinian girl, also comes to mind to recommend.

Thanks, one and all, for your contributions!

>134 dchaikin: – Hi, Dan! I think you'll like Einstein's Dreams.

>135 dmsteyn: – Dewald, I can't think why I don't have and have never read Calvino's Invisible Cities. I have thoroughly enjoyed his other books, especially If on a winter's night a traveler. Will have to rectify that error soonest! Jim Crace's Continent sounds intriguing indeed. I shall look for it.

>136 DieFledermaus: – DieFledermaus, I am thrilled with your Bruno Schulz and Danilo Kis suggestions. On the list they go.

>137 zenomax: – Hi, Zeno! Glad to have your endorsement of those titles. Thanks!

>138 avaland: – Hi avaland! Interesting tangential lore re the whale. And Foucault's Pendulum really does require one's full attention, but admittedly, I'm sure it is not everyone's cup of tea.

Hi detailmuse – we seem to have cross-posted. Thanks so much for the suggestions. I shall look for them. It would seem there is more to this type of literature than I could have imagined. I feel a "Listmania" coming on!

Ack! So now, not only are there enticing books being reviewed in every thread, now people are suggesting extra books on other people's threads! No wonder there's a TBR support group right here on Club Read!

Congratulations on a fabulous - and hot - review of Einstein's Dreams, Suzanne! Now I know I started with the wrong Lightman book. Based on your review, I think he is deserving of another try.

>142 RidgewayGirl: I am so lucky to have so many people take an interest in my little enthusiasm for this remarkable kind of book. And yes, I am beyond help! ;-)

>143 Linda92007: Thank you, Linda! Hope you enjoy Einstein's Dreams.

It is interesting that when one reads a number of books touching on one broad historical topic how many of the same people, events and ideas keep popping up, and gradually one gains a deeper understanding of interactions, cause and effect and many other elements.

The subject that I keep referring to in a sort of shorthand as "pagan influences" interested me initially because I wanted to understand the course of events from the beginnings of Christianity through the present day that explained why ancient Greek and Roman mythology were never completely expunged from the Western cultural milieu despite concerted efforts by the Church to do so right across the millenia.

I began with a scholarly history of the first five hundred years of the Christian era (The Rise of Christianity by W.H.C. Frend), and followed up with The Religious Quests of the Graeco-Roman World: A Study in the Historical Background of Early Christianity by Samuel Angus. This book really hit the nail on the head concerning the beliefs and practices of the various so-called pagan sects that were flourishing in the first few centuries AD and discussed how many of the common practices of these pagan sects were absorbed into the practice and ritual, if you will, of the early Christian church.

After that I spent some time with books dealing with the medieval period and then landed squarely in the Renaissance, where things really began to pop. My knowledge of the Renaissance at the beginning of this little journey was fairly conventional. I had read Burckhart in college, had taken a course or two in Renaissance history, and many courses in art history, so I was under the impression that I at least had a fairly good understanding of the Renaissance. And in terms of the sweep of events, perhaps I did. But what I did not know is how little I had absorbed about Renaissance intellectual history.

That whole group of books I read last year that dealt with the Renaissance, including especially The Pagan Dream of the Renaissance by Joscelyn Godwin, really captured my imagination in ways I never expected, and I am still in the grip of this fascinating topic.

I am beginning to realize that in school we don't learn much about Renaissance philosophy, except as it pertains to our democratic institutions, because it falls outside the realm of what is considered today acceptable intellectual discourse. It has been labeled "occult" even by scholars who specialize in the area. And given the definition of "occult" as "hidden," this aspect of Western intellectual history tends to be swept under the rug because it was actually driven underground by Church authorities who deemed it unacceptably outside the bounds of dogma, and this is unfortunate in the sense that a lot of very creative psychological, spiritual, even mystical insights were thrown out as well. It was further discounted by Enlightenment thinkers as not fitting in with the new rationalism. According to some who know a lot more about psychology than I do, this may have been detrimental to the whole psyche of the West until depth psychology emerged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Now, this may seem to some like a rather extreme conclusion to draw, but it definitely strikes a chord in my own thinking. I have spent my entire life resisting dogmatism, whether religious or political, and some of the Renaissance philosophy that I have become acquainted with in the past year or two seems quite charming — if somewhat quaint to our modern rationalist mentality — in its search for a kind of truth beyond dogma.

While the so-called occult philosophy of the Renaissance was brutally driven underground within a century on the Continent, and somewhat later in England, apparently it rose again in a somewhat different form among the German Romantics. I have not gotten there yet as the Renaissance is of more interest to me right now, and will probably continue to be for the foreseeable future.

So, you may be asking — if you are still reading: What is all this in aid of? I am writing this for two reasons. One, these ideas have been rolling around in my mind for a while, and I wanted to get them down on paper. And, two, while this was a major preoccupation of mine last year, I have said very little about it so far in this thread as I have been reading a lot of unrelated fiction, and I wanted to lay the groundwork for people who may be joining my conversation for the first time this year. Last year it evolved; this year we are jumping right into the middle.

The first book on this general topic that I am reading just now is called The Philosopher's Secret Fire: A History of the Imagination. I am about halfway through it, and it confirms much of what I have been thinking and learning. I'll have more to say about it when I have finished.

Well, that was a real conversation stopper! Sorry folks, but this is one of those things you'll just have to get used to. ;-)

Actually Suzanne, I found it fascinating -- just too overwhelmed to reply. It's the sort of stuff I love to have dancing around in my head, but I'm not sure I want to ponder about.

suzanne, I am still trying to figure out how I can thumb your post #145. Excellent stuff.

No, that was amazing! More, please.

Enjoyed the essay and will be looking forward to your reviews. A quick question about Joscelyn Godwin - I saw that he was also a musicologist and had written some books on the topic. Did you find that his writing on music was pretty technical or was it easy to read? I'm interested in reading about music from that period but would need layperson explanations.

Also had a couple more suggestions for your previous theme (#113) - Sunflower by Gyula Krudy and the books of Magdalena Tulli. I've read Moving Parts and Dreams and Stones and both would fit your description.

I missed the earlier discussion, but I definitely second the recommendation of Sunflower and I very much enjoyed Magdalena Tulli's In Red (one of my favorites of last year), and will be looking for her other books.

Thank you, one and all! Guess I sort of asked for that, didn't I?

>147 janeajones: – Jane, I feel your pain. Occasionally I get carried away with a sort of mind dump. Fortunately it doesn't happen too often.

>148 baswood: – Barry, just please don't flag me!

>149 RidgewayGirl: – RidgewayGirl, thank you. You'll be sorry! ;-)

>150 DieFledermaus: – DieFledermaus, thank you as well. Regarding Joscelyn Godwin, yes, he is a musicologist, but I think most of his writing, musical and otherwise, has a bit of an esoteric tinge to it. So I would suggest reading the reviews at Amazon of anything that particularly interests you. You'll see what I mean. But his Pagan Dream of the Renaissance gives a very wide-ranging picture of Renaissance arts and ideas, and it is well-written. Again, one of my faves of last year. One chapter is about the birth of opera.

Oh, and thank you for the additional — as you dubbed them — "quirky dreamy novella" suggestions. Well, maybe these are not novellas, but whatever they are, I'll certainly check them out.

>151 rebeccanyc: – Rebecca, thanks for seconding DieFledermaus's suggestions plus the additional one.

"Mr. Havelock shows how the Illiad acted as an oral encyclopedia."

One thing led to another as it usually does and I ran across this statement in the Amazon book description of Preface to Plato by Eric Havelock. (How on earth did I get there???) This is a new concept to me. I may have to drop everything and read the Iliad. I've actually been putting it off until I had a really good reason to read it. This has implications for my ongoing interest in memory. Since I already have a couple of copies, I won't be in violation of New Year's Resolution number four if I add it to my Hope To Read list.

As to Eric Havelock, I have a vague recollection of something less than complimentary about him, but maybe it is some other Havelock. Anybody read anything by or about him?

I said I wasn't going to do this, but I can't help myself. I want to make a record here of all the books that you in Club Read (plus one or two others) have read and reviewed that interest me. I have included your names to remind me of who recommended what and a word or two about the book. Books that caught my eye in January are here. I will list February's gleanings at the end of the month.

January Wishlist

A Game of Thrones: A Song of Ice and Fire by George R. R. Martin. (***fasciknitting –but this may be a feminist screed so I'll take a second look)
Doc by Mary Doria Russell (***labfs39 and avaland – brought to my attention by them early last year – I met Russell way back when – The Sparrow an all-time fave)
Elizabeth Taylor novels (***juliette07 — remind me to check out Virago Modern Classics group)
Proud Beggars by Albert Cossery (***rebeccanyc)
The Towers of Trebizond and Potterism, etc. by Rose Macauley (***pamelad and rebeccanyc seconds – been meaning to check out T of T forever – love the title)
Renaissance Humanism & The Papal Curia by Christopher S. Celenza (***PimPhilipse in le Salon)
Sea of Poppies by Amatai Gosh (***labfs39 – Lisa)
The World of Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse (a collection of short stories! ***ljbwell)
Journey to Nowhere: One Woman Looks for the Promised Land by Eva Figes (***rachbxl — a post-WWII Jewish refugee story. Her review sounds interesting)
Clockwork Universe: Isaac Newton, the Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern World by Edward Dolnick (***AnnieMod)
Why Read Moby-Dick? by Nathaniel Philbrick (available on Kindle)
Cultural Amnesia by Clive James (***Lola Walser)
Genoa: A Telling of Wonders by Paul Metcalf (***Enrique Freeque on his blog — Metcalf was Melville's grandson!)
Kidnapped and Treasure Island (reread) by Robert Louis Stevenson (***ncgraham)
Bellefleur by Joyce Carol Oates (***avaland's review reminds me that I've been meaning to read this)
The Master of the Day of Judgment by Leo Perutz (1924, Austria) (***deebee1 — 1920s Vienna whodunnit)
A Week in December by Sebastian Faulks (***edwinbcn — a novel set in contemporary London)
Conversations with Sacred Mountains. A Journey along Yunnan's Tea Caravan Trail by Lawrence Brahm (***edwinbcn)
North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell (***baswood — why haven't I read this???)
In the Heart of the Sea by Nathaniel Philbrick (***labfs39 and others — about the whaling ship Essex)
The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes (***japaul — can one really know oneself? ***baswood was disappointed)
Underground Time: A Novel by Delphine de Vigan (***Akeela — two people in Paris)
Book of General Ignorance by John Lloyd (***bragan)
According to Queenie by Beryl Bainbridge (***pamelad — about Dr. Johnson)
The Girls of Slender Means by Muriel Spark (***Nickelini — WWII Britain)
Memoirs of an Anti-Semite by Gregor von Rezzori (***deebee — not as bad as the title sounds)
Stuff Parisians Like by Magny Olivier (***Petermc )
The Memory Chalet by Tony Judt (***Petermc — reminiscent of The Diving Bell and The Butterfly)
The Golem by Gustav Meyrink (***DieFledermaus)
To the Finland Station by Edmund Wilson (***Rebeccanyc – Russian revolution from a 1940s POV)
Armies of Heaven by Jay Rubenstein (***Rebeccanyc — the First Crusade)
The Giant of the French Revolution: Danton, A Life by David Lawday (***japaul)
Silent Day in Tangier by Tahar Ben Jelloun (***akeela — introspective octogenarian "evading the clutches of old age.")
A More Perfect Heaven by Dava Sobel (***richardderus — about Copernicus)

You had better be saving up all your cents suzanne.

Could be another year's worth of books there!

That's some list.

I see you've flagged The World of Jeeves. I'm a huge Jeeves fan, and might suggest here the Robert McCrum bio Wodehouse: A Life, which made my top 10 list for 2010. Great book!

Pleased to see two of my suggestions on the list! (And I can't believe that I have never read North and South, either.) This is an excellent idea, but one I'm wary to use myself, as it would just add more books to my already teeming wishlist. And my parents have begun joking that some of our foundation problems are due to the weight of the tomes that are sitting in my closet: they say one day that part of the second floor will just give way and all the books will tumble down into the downstairs entryway. Ha.

I'm very glad you're doing this, though. Now that I've made the list for January, I will want to continue doing so, which may spur me on to review more and keep up with my thread better. For I am nothing if not competitive.

If you think North and South is too much, you can also only read North. ;-)

Thanks, everyone, for your comments and recommendations.

>155 baswood: – Barry, my common "sense" is also in need of saving!

>156 DieFledermaus: – Die Fledermaus, indeed another year's worth. And when you project that one might produce a list like this for every month of the year, there's a dozen years' worth of reading right there. It's almost enough to send one over the edge. And that underlines one of my reasons for posting the list to begin with. Surely I am not alone in being fascinated by all the interesting reading we are all engaged in. This is just to demonstrate the burden we are all under here! ;-)

>157 petermc: – Peter, thanks for the suggestion. The fact is I am embarrassed to say that I have never read any Wodehouse although I am very familiar with Jeeves and Wooster thanks to the British productions that made their way across the pond a couple of decades ago — starring Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry, of all people. So I shall reserve McCrum's bio for after I have actually read some of the books!

>158 ncgraham: – Nathan, if this is what it takes to inspire you, then I did not post in vain! ;-) Glad your parents are only joking. After all, there are several obvious solutions to the foundation problems that come to mind that you could jab them right back with — such as building you some book cases in the basement that could double as foundation supports! Just a thought . . .

>158 ncgraham: – Edwin, good idea, and in fact, I could just stick with my native West and save myself the trouble. Except that curiosity always gets the best of me in the end.

Anybody read or heard about The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern? I was just lurking over at the 75 Books Challenge — and I know, it is almost impossible to lurk there . . . soooo many people, so many threads, it is downright frantic — but this book is being raved about. Inquiring minds want to know . . . before I add it to the wishlist.

Seconding the recommendation of The Towers of Trebizond!

Glad to have contributed, even if it is just a collection of trivia!

I almost never remember who or what inspired me to add something to my wishlist. Books just seem to spontaneously appear there.

And I have a copy of The Night Circus, but I haven't read it yet. If I get to it soon -- which might or might not happen -- I'll let you know what I think.

>162 rebeccanyc: – Thanks Rebecca!

>163 bragan: – I've been keeping this list as a Word document and so I didn't have to remember anything. I take notes when a book sounds interesting. But the list has grown so large and so fast, I just wanted to share with everyone how fascinating you all are and the books you are reading. It kind of puts in concrete terms just how stimulating this group is to this one little person — i.e., moi!

When I break my New Year's Resolution No. 4, The Night Circus is probably going to be an early purchase. I'm really intrigued now. I just watched a short video interview at Amazon with Erin Morgenstern and she said she was influenced by Einstein's Dreams and a book called Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke. That one sounds pretty interesting as well. Anybody read it?

The Philosophers' Secret Fire: A History of the Imagination by Patrick Harpur (2003) Ivan R. Dee

This book is beyond my ability or motivation to try to explain. Its premises are far enough out of the mainstream that to try to encapsulate them without causing a general what-on-earth-are-you-talking-about sort of response may be impossible.

The first mistake I made was to take literally the assumption that it was, as its subtitle suggests, a history of the imagination. While much is said about the imagination, Harpur's view is that it is the very antithesis of literalism, said literalism – which is closely associated with rationalism – to be shunned and decried at all costs. And if I were to write a book purporting to be a history of the imagination, it would have been a very different book indeed and would include material that is curiously missing from this text.

Harpur's message seems to be that now, at the leading edge of the 21st century the world has lost its soul, as have all the people in it. The loss took place several centuries ago when rationalism gained an ascendency at the time of the Enlightenment. But perhaps it took place even before that, as Harpur decries the ravages of monotheism in stamping out the imaginary world of fairies, elves, household gods and daimons and dealing the human psyche a death-blow in the process. He believes the death of the soul has ultimately resulted in everything from mass murderers like Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot to serial killers like Jeffrey Daumer.

While he may be absolutely correct about this, he seems to be asking us as a society to return ourselves en masse to those wonderful days of yesteryear before the comforts of modern technology, before monotheism gained the ascendency and to give up the rational thought processes we all prize and adopt a mythic world view. It is not enough for individuals alone to see the genius of the author's insights, which are many and wonderous. His is a tall order and a totally unrealistic one on a societal level.

While The Philosophers' Secret Fire contains much that is interesting about folklore, mythology, literature, psychology and many other things that we all might find interesting, it is presented in a fragmented way that is nonlinear in the extreme. But each segment has the power to stand alone, and many of them are quite capable of causing the reader to want to follow up by reading the source material referred to in the notes.

In the end, however, the book puts me in mind of the story of six blind men and an elephant, in which each man having touched a different part believes an elephant is respectively very like a pillar, a snake, a tree branch, a rope, a wall, a fan or whatnot. You may read the book and see something completely different.

Well said Suzanne - corresponds closely to my feelings about the book overall.

My dilemma is that the debate is interesting, even exciting, but to ask me to come down on either the side of 'rationalism/literalism/scientism' or the side of 'the imagination/esoteric/world soul' is just to make me disengage from the whole discussion - because I like bits of both worldviews.

Jung (for example) to me is best seen as aphilosopher rather than someone asking you to make a choice between 2 diametrically opposed understandings of the universe.

Curiously, Jung himself doesn't ask us to make that distinction, partly because he saw himself as both a 'scientist' and a 'mage'.... at least at different times in his life.

So suzanne are we dealing here with the ravings of a well read crackpot? I think I detect some disappointment in your review as you were really enthusiastic when you first started to read it.

>164 Poquette:: Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norell is one I have read. Long enough ago that I don't remember all that much about it, I'm afraid, other than that it had surprisingly entertaining footnotes, but I definitely did like it.

Suzanne, I'm currently reading the Night Circus, and it is proving to live up to all the rave reviews it's been getting herein the LTverse. It's a but surreal at 1st but the images that Morgenstern is able to create are some great stuff and the story isn't half bad either. It is a little difficult to follow at times since the story is not told in a straight linear progression, Instead it jumps from one year to another and back again; and is told from multiple character prospective, as well as the singular person. So Far from prospective Morgenstern has done a masterful job of pulling this off and it is well worth the pursuit.

You've reminded me that I have Jonathan Strange & Mr. Novell on my shelf to read and would make the prefect follow up read.

>168 bragan: I agree with what bragan has to say about Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norell - also read it about 6 years ago. It was quite good, but not as good as Neil Gaiman claimed, I felt. It got a bit bogged down at times.

>165 Poquette: Nice review, Suzanne. I am also interested in these types of books, but this sounds a bit disappointing.

>166 zenomax: Zeno – The debate is very interesting, the exposition of both sides is interesting, but as we discussed in your thread a few days ago, the writer's biases come across loud and clear, and I believe he crosses a line when he seems to demand that we agree with him. He goes to great lengths to point out the dual parts of human nature — i.e., the rational v. the imaginal — but then makes the same mistake but in reverse that he accuses the rationalists of. It would seem that well integrated people should contain a balance of the two elements within them, as Jung did.

> 167 Barry, I do not know whether he is merely a well-read crackpot. But I am very disappointed in the book overall although it contains many interesting factoids. I thought it would add something to my pursuit of "pagan influences," but it goes down a different road than the one I am on.

> 168 bragan, Glad to hear you liked Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norell. I see it is available for only $2.99 on Kindle. That alone may be a reason to break New Year's Resolution No. 4!

>169 stretch: – Hi stretch! Your comments about The Night Circus are much appreciated. I feel the temptation growing . . .

>170 dmsteyn: – Dewald, the $2.99 price tag on Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norell is almost impossible to resist. Thanks for your perspective.

Thanks also re the review. Indeed, Harpur's book is not one that I would recommend.

I am into three books just now. Got a good start on Arthurian Romances by Chretien de Troyes which I bought last year because of Barry's (baswood's) recommendation and excellent review, and Morality Play by Barry Unsworth which at this point my recollection fails as to why or how I acquired it, but it seems to take place after the Great Plague and during the reign of a Pope Boniface, so my research indicates that would be Boniface IX (1389-1404), which places it during a period of great interest as Chaucer died in 1400. The third book is Burning Your Boats: The Collected Short Stories of Angela Carter, about which more below.

I love short stories, and I love Angela Carter although I have only read one small collection of her stories and none of her novels. Burning Your Boats seems to be a complete collection of her shorter works. A quick look at my tag cloud tells me that I have 74 collections of "Short Stories" so that should tell you something about my attraction to them. I enjoy having a book of stories at hand to dip into when the spirit moves. Each story will get a brief blurb here as I go mostly for my own sake of remembering. First up, the first story:

Burning Your Boats: The Collected Short Stories by Angela Carter with an introduction by Salman Rushdie (1995) Penguin

"The Man Who Loved a Double Bass" (first published 1962) — What could possibly go wrong for a third-rate sixties jazz combo on a gig "at a small town in the Fenland wastes of East Anglia"? Plenty, it turns out.

Suzanne -- Angela Carter is wonderful -- I especially recommend as novels her early The Magic Toyshop and her best book, Nights at the Circus -- who knows, it may be a good companion piece to The Night Circus which is close to the top of my TBR list.

Hi jane - good idea about pairing the two "circus" books. I'm making a note. ;-)

More Angela Carter from Burning Your Boats.

"A Very, Very Great Lady and Her Son at Home" (first published 1965) — The first line of this story would be a fine epigram: When I was adolescent, my mother taught me a charm, gave me a talisan, handed me the key of the world. Said talisman serves the protagonist well until she reveals it to her son. At the same time lyrical and scatalogical, this is a masterpiece in miniature.

"A Victorian Fable (with Glossary)" (first published 1966) — Readers of Finnegans Wake and solvers of literary puzzles will enjoy this one-page story, which reads like gibberish but for the seven pages of glossary required to render the story intelligible. Requires too much work for my taste.

Nine stories — tales, really, as she described them — were originally published as Fireworks: Nine Profane Pieces in 1974.

"A Souvenir of Japan" — In the city of Shinjuku a western woman interprets her illicit love affair with a local man through her perception of the culture surrounding them. They boast the most passionate puppets in the world who mimic love suicides in a stylised fashion, for here there is no such comfortable formula as 'happy ever after'.

I'm also an Angela Carter fan. I had Burning Your Boats and Nights at the Circus on the pile for years, then read them both last year and though, why did I wait so long? Even the so-so stories in Burning Your Boats had Carter's idiosyncratic prose that not only threatens to turn purple but revels in it.

Catching up from a ways back. Very interesting post up there in #145 - which, as you saw, added a few books to my wishlist. Too bad about the Harpur book. I was curious, but probably not a book for me.

And I think it's terrific that you are posting on all these Angela Carter stories.

DieFledermaus, I felt exactly the same way about Carter's Saints and Strangers, which I bought — and get this, because I owned another book by the same title! — in 1986 when it first came out, but didn't get around to reading until last year! It turned out to be one of my favorite reads.

Hi Dan, glad you liked my little outpouring. The funny thing about The Philosophers' Secret Fire is that when I wrote that post (#145) I had just reached the part — way too short as it turns out — of the book that summarized the contribution of Renaissance Philosophers. In fact, that one chapter is golden. But it does not make up for the turn for the worse that the book took in my opinion. So lesson learned: it pays not to get too excited until one has consumed the whole enchillada.

Today I finished Erec and Enide, the first of Chretien de Troyes Arthurian Romances. I simply could not wipe the smile off my face. Any of you who have read these romances will know what I'm speaking about. I suppose this one is fairly characteristic of the genre, with its humor and irony, and total devotion to the values of chivalry. Chretien is a delightful storyteller. I am eager to carry on.

I loved the Arthurian Romances and they get even beter than Erec and Enide, particularly "The Knight and the Lion."

Rebecca, it's hard to believe anything could be better, but I'm looking forward to finding out.

Meanwhile, I got so wrapped up in Morality Play that I've finished it already. Still trying to wrap my mind around it, but a review will follow. It is quite a book!

Morality Play by Barry Unsworth (1995) Doubleday

Hamlet said "The play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the King" more than two hundred years after the events described in Morality Play wherein the play inadvertently becomes the vehicle that solves a murder. Hamlet by design caused the players to embellish their lines to reveal his father's murderer; the morality players by necessity adapted their art to replenish their bankroll but unexpectedly discover who the murderer is.

Morality Play is a deeply textured novel that transports the reader back to the fourteenth century — according to some perhaps the worst time in human history with repeated waves of plague, massive population shocks and accompanying breakdown of the feudal system — and immerses us in the hardscrabble life of a troup on its way from York to perform Morality Plays for the Christmas season at Durham. On the road, one of their members dies suddenly, while being spied upon by Nicholas a truant priest who against his vows joins the troup. They must make an unscheduled stop in a town along the way to arrange for a proper burial of their deceased companion.

In the town the murder of a boy Thomas Wells is all that people can speak of. The murderer is said to be the young daughter of a weaver. The burial and a night's lodging leaves the troup very short of funds, so they decide to present a performance in the hopes of replenishing the communal purse. But it is bitterly cold and few turn out for the entertainment.

In the space of two days, the players begin to see that the murder of Thomas Wells is more complicated than first believed. Martin the troup leader is inspired to step outside convention and adapt a play to the local circumstances.

The unraveling of the mystery results from the breaking of the bonds of convention both for the players as well as for Nicholas the truant priest. The troup prepares to give the Play of Thomas Wells, about the murdered boy. To step outside the security of the conventional morality play is a novel idea for common street players in the fourteenth century. For Nicholas, an ordained priest, to join the group of players is blasphemy in the eyes of the church.

In the course of their performance, it begins to dawn on the players that the murderer could not have been the weaver's daughter, and gradually they piece together from their fragmented knowledge what must have transpired. This gains the attention of the local Lord who is not pleased and who rounds them up and takes them prisoner to the castle keep.

In the aftermath of performing the Play of Thomas Wells for the Lord in his castle, Nicholas recounts:

We learned through the play. . . . We learned through the parts we were given. It is something not easy to explain. I am new to playing but it has seemed to me like dreaming. The player is himself and another. When he looks at the others in the play he knows he is part of their dreaming just as they are part of his. From this come thoughts and words that outside the play he would not readily admit to his mind.

While the players watch the spectacle of a jousting tournament as prisoners in the castle, Nicholas muses over his new understanding of the way in which each member of society plays his role:

We were the people now, in our turn, they the players. And the play was their own valor and pride. . . . But now, perhaps because I had become a player myself . . . it came to me for the first time that this was the greatest example of playing that our times afforded. We were players by profession and borrowed roles as seemed fitting. The nobility had only the one but they persisted in it, though denounced by popes and kings for the violence and vainglory of it and the expenditure of money which might have been better spent in maintaining those same popes and kings. . . . This was the role that had brought them to wealth and power and they must dress for it and cover themselves in signs and emblems, for what are power and wealth without display?

In the end, despite the uncertain times, we do find out whether or not truth triumphs over evil.

>179 Poquette: - Okay, you win - I only had Burning Your Boats since '97 or '98. Enjoying the Carter mini-reviews.

Morality Play also sounds fascinating - a little bit meta which always appeals to me.

Excellent review of Morality Play. I have a copy sitting on my shelf and so I will dust it down soon and get to reading it.

Glad you are still in love with Chretien de Troyes.

Thanks for your great review of Morality Play, Suzanne. This is one I will be looking for. I am not familiar with Unsworth, but see that he also had a Booker Prize winner. Always nice to be introduced to new authors!

Enjoyed your review of Morality Play. I thought Unsworth captured the uncertainty of life at that time really well.

Like Hilary Mantel, Unsworth's books each involve a different time and location, but after reading your review and looking over some of his other books again, I realize they all deal with this uncertainty and your last sentence sums them up so well.

>184 DieFledermaus: – Anytime I can win, I'll take it! ;-)

>185 baswood: – Keeping my fingers crossed, Barry!

>186 Linda92007: – There is so much more to Morality Play than I was able to fit into my review. I suspect you will like it.

>187 SassyLassy: – Thanks for stopping by SassyLassy. This was my first Barry Unsworth and presumably not the last, so eventually it will be interesting to see what the commonalities are among his books.

More from Burning Your Boats by Angela Carter, first published as Fireworks: Nine Profane Pieces 1974. Some of this group of stories are positively elegaic. Others, not so much. If I had encountered Fireworks as my first exposure to Carter rather than Saints and Strangers, I suspect I would not have been nearly as enthusiastic.

In an afterword to Fireworks, Carter identifies these stories as tales rather than short stories. Of the distinction she writes:

Formally the tale differs from the short story in that it makes few pretences at the imitation of life. The tale does not log everyday experience, as the short story does; it interprets everyday experience through a system of imagery derived from subterranean areas behind everyday experience, and therefore the tale cannot betray its readers into a false knowledge of everyday experience.

This puts me in mind of the recent fictional binge I was on in the realm of "quirky dreamy novellas," as detailmuse described them. While I do not believe those novellas were true tales, they do share some of the qualities Carter describes, and perhaps it explains why some readers found them less than satisfying because they were trying to interpret them under the strict rules of literalism when they were never intended to be read in that way. Any thoughts?

Now, on to the stories:

"The Executioner's Beautiful Daughter" — An unspeakable tale about unspeakable people, but wrought in a language of excess.

"The Loves of Lady Purple" — A demonic puppet show like no other wherein the lady, having destroyed all around her, devolves into a wooden puppet only many years later to reverse the process.

"The Smile of Winter" — A tableau of winter in a Japanese fishing village — I picture it as being the northern coast where "the coastal region is quite flat." Written in 1972, Carter eerily muses that "if a tidal wave consumed the village — as it could do tomorrow, for there are no hills or sea walls to protect us — there under the surface, life would go on just as before. . . ."

"Penetrating to the Heart of the Forest" — We begin with Candide meeting voodoo in Shangri-la, but gradually Adam and Eve appear in the garden — or were their names Emile and Madeline? Never mind, it is all the same. And then we understand how it all came to pass.

"Flesh and the Mirror" — A neurotic Western woman in Tokyo engineers the end of an affair and discovers her own character — or the lack thereof — in the process.

"Master" — Depressing story of a white hunter who "did not kill for money but for love." So glad I read this. NOT.

>183 Poquette: - Excellent review, Suzanne! This also sounds like my kind of book, so it goes on the list.

Thank you, Dewald!

"Reflections" — Mind-bending tale of walking in the woods, stumbling over a sea shell, being taken captive by a militant siren and forced by a compulsively knitting evil sort of hermaphroditic time lord to step through a looking glass into a mirror of this world.

"Elegy for a Freelance" — At the brink of civil war in some imagined future London a conspirator goes rogue, is dealt with by his cell and the twist at the end is surprisingly satisfying.

That concludes the Fireworks collection in Burning Your Boats. Compared to Saints and Strangers, I did not enjoy this collection as much. The situations are mostly an impossible and evil kind of fantasy, seem forced and usually contrive to go one step too far. If you are dreading the outcome, Carter manages to top your worst imaginings. A little of this goes a long way. Hoping the next section, The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories (1979), which I believe is a retelling of some fairytales, will be more to my liking although with a title like "Bloody Chamber" I'm not so sure. I am bracing myself!

The House of Doctor Dee by Peter Ackroyd (1993) Penguin

This strange fictional biography about a strange man of the English Renaissance tries to focus on the actual elements of Doctor John Dee's life rather than the overwrought legends that have been perpetuated about him. While it is true he was deeply involved in occult investigations, specifically with reference to alchemy and scrying (crystal-gazing), his most ardent wish was to thereby get nearer to the presence of God rather than to the Devil as many have asserted.

Doctor John Dee (1527-1608) was one of the most learned men of his time. He was a book collector without equal, his collection, the largest nonacademic library in England at the time. He was an advisor to Queen Elizabeth I, and he had an international reputation as an astronomer, astrologer and navigator. But he also devoted himself to the study of alchemy and the Renaissance philosophy of Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola and Giordano Bruno. He was involved in both scientific and magical pursuits at the very time when they were becoming separate fields of knowledge. Such was his reputation that it is believed that the character Prospero in Shakespeare's The Tempest was modeled after him, and in modern times, the Aegypt tetralogy of John Crowley features Doctor Dee.

Ackroyd has attempted to arrive at a kind of truth that might be palatable to the tastes of modern readers who may or may not be captivated by the supernatural, by combining two stories that focus on the London house Doctor Dee owned in Clerkenwell. One is a first person account of Dee himself, much of it adapted from his own writings; the second, also in first person, brings us into the twentieth century and concerns a young man who inherits the house and finds himself absorbed by the mysteries surrounding the good doctor.

In a post-modern way, both stories eventually merge and reach a highly visionary and somewhat enigmatic conclusion, in keeping with the subject matter. One memorable chapter near the end called "The Garden" puts one in mind of either a dream vision or a directed meditation.

In the course of the book, Ackroyd considers the true nature of history. At one point he steps from behind the veil of author and injects himself in medias res, asking:

And what is the past, after all? Is it that which is created in the formal act of writing, or does it have some substantial reality? Am I discovering it, or inventing it? Or could it be that I am discovering it within myself, so that it bears both the authenticity of surviving evidence and the immediacy of present intuition?

One can easily relate to these questions because of the wide chasm that separates the pros and cons that have come down to us and continue to this day in both factual and fictional accounts of Doctor Dee. The question is: wherein lies the truth?

Ackroyd also seems fascinated with the imagination and how it impacts each individual person's perceptions of reality. He puts the following into the mouths of his characters:

It is true . . . that the imagination is immortal, and that thereby we each create our own eternity.

. . . though the blazing stars had gone for ever, the light of the imagination filled every corner and every quarter, every street and every house of this place . . . . The imagination is the spiritual body and exists eternally.

This book will probably not have a wide appeal because of its subject matter, but it does afford a fictional glimpse into the mind of a highly influential historical figure with a mystical turn of mind.

Excellent review, Suzanne. I'm very interested in Doctor Dee and Renaissance occultism, and will give this book a look sometime.

A very interesting review, Suzanne. I usually enjoy "fictional biographies" more than nonfictional ones, so I'll have to look for it.

Interesting review, Suzanne -- Dr. Dee played a cameo role in one of the recent books I read -- Iramifications by Maria Galina -- as a time-traveling mage. Obviously Galina was invoking the legendary rather than the historical.

Very thoughtful review of The House of Doctor Dee, Suazane. I read it last year and it didn't work for me, although there were some very cool elements. I think Ackroyd lessened my interest in Doctor Dee if anything--I own one other book by him, and after I read it I think I can cross this author off my list forever (I haven't liked two others by him, either).

Suzanne, I am with Nickelini as far as Peter Ackroyd is concerned. I struggle with his prose. nevertheless I will read The House of Doctor Dee even if I have to grimace all the way through it, because I am interested in the subject matter. I notice that you only rated the book at 3.5 stars and so I suppose you had some misgivings about it.

This was an odd book for me when I read it several years ago. The writing was excellent, the character of Dr Dee was fascinating, even the house itself was intriguing, but I don't think Matthew was up to dealing with Dr Dee in this world or any other. The result was that the book fell somewhat flat for me.

I wonder how much of his writings and scientific work Dee destroyed, given the times he lived in and the dangers inherent in his work. It makes me wonder too, how long the scientific world had to wait for some of his work to be "rediscovered".

I am with Nickelini and Baswood as far as Ackroyd himself is concerned. He writes on topics I am interested in, but I have less and less patience for reading him.

Liked reading your review though!

Thanks, everyone, for your comments!

I have read two other books by Peter Ackroyd and I enjoyed them both to varying degrees. The first was Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination — yet another book touching on "imagination"; I'd forgotten about the subtitle — and late last year I read The Clerkenwell Tales which I enjoyed very much. Interesting that Doctor Dee's house was in Clerkenwell, a couple of hundred years after the Clerkenwell Tales which were set at the very end of the 14th century. My main criticism of Albion was that it seemed to be a frenetic romp through a thousand or fifteen hundred years of British literary creativity with no in-depth examination of any writer or period or kind of literature. It is really a survey, and perhaps it needed to be read twice to really get what Ackroyd was trying to do. At this point I've kind of forgotten.

As for The House of Doctor Dee, I gave it only 3½ stars because I was comparing it to the other books I've read recently and rated higher, and I didn't think it quite stacked up. The attempts to exploit Doctor Dee's interests in the occult and try to make this into a kind of supernatural ghost story were simply not to my liking. I did say that this was a fictional biography, and it was indeed a work of fiction with some of the details of Dee's life slightly altered to fit the narrative.

So I see what Joyce and Barry and SassyLassy are saying and I don't disagree.

Jane, I suspect Dee would have loved to be a time-traveling mage but as you said, that is pretty much over the top.

Dewald and Linda, I'm not suggesting that anyone run right out and get the book — far from it, but I was very interested in the portrayal of Doctor Dee, although frankly I found Frances Yates' discussion of him in The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age to be even more intriguing, perhaps because it was really the first time I had become consciously aware of him as a historical figure.

So, bottom line, the book is kind of a mixed bag, but I'm not sorry I read it, and after all it was a two-fer as it fit into two categories of my current reading interest: fiction and pagan influences.

I know everyone has been waiting for the February installment of my wishlist, some of which have already been recommended to me in this thread. This is getting to be ridiculous. You are all too interesting for words, and I hope I can shorten this in coming months, but here goes:

February Wishlist

The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America by John Demos (***labfs39 — about early Indian and French and English colonial conflicts)
Seven Types of Ambiguity by William Empson (***dmsteyn — lit crit)
The Ambassadors' Secret: Holbein and the World of the Renaissance (2002) by John North (***??? — art explication; this one is pricey so I'm going to have to wait)
Mr. g by Alan Lightman (***detailmuse — the creation as told by God)
The Incident Report by Martha Baillie (***detailmuse — "quirky, dreamy novella")
Light Boxes by Shane Jones (***detailmuse — "quirky, dreamy novella")
Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives by David Eagleman (***detailmuse — "quirky, dreamy novella")
Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino (***dmsteyn — Marco Polo and Kublai Khan talk strange cities; also ***DieFledermaus and ***zenomax)
Continent by Jim Crace (***dmsteyn — imaginary realm)
Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz (***DieFledermaus — gorgeous prose, hint of magic realism; also ***zenomax)
Garden, Ashes by Danilo Kis (***DieFledermaus — gorgeous prose, hint of magic realism; also ***zenomax)
Tree of Codes by Jonathan Safran Foer (***detailmuse — plays with The Street of Crocodiles)
Touch by Adania Shibli (***detailmuse — vignettes about a Palestinian girl)
Unclay by T.F. Powys (***dmsteyn — a fable about Death holidaying in a small village)
The Broken Word by Adam Foulds (***Linda29007 — narrative poem about the Mau Mau uprising in 1950’s Kenya)
Sunflower by Gyula Krudy (***DieFledermaus and ***rebeccanyc — quirky dreamy novella)
Moving Parts by Magdalena Tulli (***DieFledermaus — quirky dreamy novella)
Dreams and Stones by Magdalena Tulli (***DieFledermaus — quirky dreamy novella)
In Red by Magdalena Tulli (***rebeccanyc — quirky dreamy novella)
Cleopatra: A Life by Stacy Schiff (***Rebeccanyc — outstanding review!)
The Undrowned Child by Michelle Lovric (***Nickelini — YA alternate 1899 Venice)
The Floating Book by Michelle Lovric (***Cariola dissed on Joyce's thread; ***baswood liked it – nice review; about printing in Renaissance Venice)
The Beginnings of Western Science: The European Scientific Tradition in Philosophical, Religious and Institutional Context, 600 BC to AD 1450 by David C Lindberg (***baswood — this sounds like something I should get sooner rather than later)
A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel (***japaul — French revolution)
Celestial Harmonies by Peter Esterhazy (ran across by accident — a novel of the Esterhazy family by a descendent)
Wodehouse: A Life by Robert McCrum (***petermc — made his "top 10 list for 2010")
The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern (***richardderus raves about it; ***torontoc damns with faint praise; ***stretch currently reading)
Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter (***janeajones says it's her best book)
The Magic Toy Shop by Angela Carter (***janeajones)
The Librettist of Venice by Rodney Bolt (***DieFledermaus — Mozart's librettist Lorenzo DaPonte)
Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont by Elizabeth Taylor (***arubabookwoman — I saw the movie, would love to read this!)
Scribal Culture and the Making of the Hebrew Bible by Karel van der Toorn (***dchaikin — fascinating review)
The Map of Time by Felix J. Palma
Sister Queens: The Tragic, Noble Lives of Katherine of Aragon and Juana of Castile by Julia Fox (***Cariola) (ETA ***janeajones who also reviewed in March)
The Living and the Dead by Patrick White (***baswood — WWII novel; I need to raise my consciousness about White)
No Man's Lands: One Man's Odyssey through The Odyssey by Scott Huler (***bragan — compare with Halliburton's The Glorious Adventure written in the twenties)
Rob Roy by Sir Walter Scott (***SassyLassy — why haven't I read this already???)

After restraining myself for a couple of months, I went out and bought some books today, most of which appear on the wishlists.

Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino tops the list. Three of you — Dewald, Zeno and DieFledermaus — have recommended it and I'm actually kind of embarrassed that I have not read it because I love Calvino.

Dewald recommended Seven Types of Ambiguity by William Empson, which I wanted to jump on right away.

The Towers of Trebizond by Rose Macaulay, one of those books that attracted my fancy many moons ago simply because of the exotic sound of the title. Pamelad and Rebeccanyc reminded me that I should read this.

The Floating Book by Michelle Lovric. Nickelini had recommended the Undrowned Child by Lovric, but when I looked her up and found out what The Floating Book was about, I decided I'd rather read it, but Joyce gets full credit!

I read a review somewhere of Cultural Amnesia by Clive James and decided I needed it. Isn't that a great justification? I need it. hahaha

Preface to Plato came up in my readings somewhere, and I grabbed that as well.

A couple more for my Kindle:

Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith, which a friend has been bugging me to read. It is a novel set in the fifties about the Soviets.

The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern. This one grabbed my fancy and I knew it was going to be an early purchase.

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell was mentioned by Morgenstern as an influence in her writing, along with Einstein's Dreams which I had just finished. It was cheap, so I decided to grab it as well.

This should keep me happy for a while.

Thanks for taking the time to share your lists, Suzanne. They are great compilations and I am saving them as favorites for future reference.

As if you hadn't already mentioned my recommendations enough, Suzanne (thank you!), I can add that I'm also a big fan of A Place of Greater Safety, which is my favorite Hilary Mantel, and I'm a big fan of hers.

38 books on your February wishlist!!

>203 Linda92007: Linda, it pleases me that you like my lists. It's kind of fun for me to see a bird's eye view, if you will, of what grabbed me and everyone else over the course of a month. It's clear I'll never get around to reading all of them, but I may yet surprise myself. Time will tell.

>204 rebeccanyc: Rebecca, I have not read any Hilary Mantel yet. I saw a lengthy interview with her and was quite intrigued. I'll get there sooner or later. And I appreciate your comments always.

>205 baswood: Yeah, Barry, it's a bit much. But please note that at least three books on there have your name by them!

Please keep these lists up...they are great. It's fun to share vicariously in your slight loss of restraint!

I need to borrow your idea of citing the source for recommendations. I've often put a book on my wishlist but later couldn't remember why it was there.

Mr. g and Light Boxes have made it onto my wishlist as well. I couldn't remember exactly why, but it seems I probably have detailmuse to thank.

And I'm looking forward to reading Invisible Cities myself, since I got a copy for Christmas, and it's one I also can't believe I haven't read before now.

>207 SassyLassy: LOL, Sassy. You probably shouldn't encourage me but I'm pleased with the reaction. ;-)

>208 StevenTX: Steve, borrow away! Since my list accumulates in a Word document, it sort of compiles itself, and it is no trouble at all to note the source.

>209 bragan: Bragan, it is amazing the books that fall through cracks — i.e., Invisible Cities. And I am mightily impressed that someone was astute enough to give you a copy for Christmas! That's really something. I don't know anyone like that.

>210 Poquette:: Well, there wasn't really a great deal of astuteness involved, I'm afraid. I realized the oversight myself a while back and stuck the book on my wishlist, and my mother got it from there. She's developed this tradition, in recent years, of picking a few things of the list semi-randomly, or at least with more attention paid to price than content. Which I find utterly delightful. The wishlist has hundreds of books added over the course of years, some of which I've since completely forgotten about, so whatever I get, it's a complete surprise. And yet, it's also something that, at some point in my life, I actively wanted. So it's the best of both worlds! In fact, I enjoy it so much that I wrote a computer program to randomly pick books of my wishlist so I can replicate the experience for myself between Christmases.

>211 bragan: That's the best use yet I've heard for a computer!

I should say the second best use after LT.

Bragan and Sassy — that is hilarious! And yeah, I too love random generators! What fun.

Oooh, I'll have to put The Librettist of Venice on my wishlist too, given my fascination with the Da Ponte-Mozart operas. Enjoy Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell when you get to it! It's one of my favorite fantasy novels. Remarkable world-building.

Hard to believe another month's gone by!

>212 SassyLassy:: The great thing is, I got to write the program at work, because they thought it would be good for me to learn a little Python programming, and I needed something to practice on.

>215 ncgraham: Hard to believe indeed, Nathan! And I never did see any of your reviews so I missed the opportunity to include you on my wishlist. Next month . . .

>216 bragan: It is always good to stay nimble — you never know when you're going to need that skill.

Yes, I had a very busy month school-wise. I hope to catch up on my thread sometime this weekend.

Finally! caught up here. You've been reading some interesting stuff. I love your monthly wishlist recap which I'm considering shamelessly copying.

>218 ncgraham: School interfering with life. Again. Oh well, Nathan, it will have been worth it! Trust me.

>219 janemarieprice: Jane, by all means, no shame involved. On the contrary, I shall look forward to reading your wishlist.

I have been meaning to mention that I found my copy of The Encantadas and Other Stories by Herman Melville. It had fallen down behind some books, and I simply passed by it when I was cataloging that shelf. I thought cataloging the library was going to make it easier to keep track of my books. I suppose it has, except for the ones that fell through a crack, literally!

Also I acquired two more books. One is Continent by Jim Crace, which was recommended by Dewald and seconded by others. The other is Celestial Harmonies by Peter Esterhazy, which I read about somewhere — not here. It is a heavy tome. But I'm glad I was able to get hold of it.

Like the sound of Celestial Harmonies, hadn't come across it before.

Hi Zeno, Celestial Harmonies may not be what you think! It does not fall into our usual area of mutual interest; rather, it is a novel about the famed Austro-Hungarian Esterhazy family by one of its descendents. It looks intriguing.

A Mapmaker's Dream sounds just up my alley and I've ordered one through PaperBackSwap. It's so nice to find new reads via LT members.

>224 auntmarge64: It's so nice to find new reads via LT members.

Indeed it is! And do let me know how you get on with A Mapmaker's Dream. I'll be interested in what you think.

Child 44 (Leo Demidov) by Tom Rob Smith (2008) Kindle Edition

Child 44 was not on my radar screen until a week or so ago when a friend urged that I read it. There was a time when I gobbled up spy thrillers and police procedurals and whodunits as fodder for a long commute. They really constitute a kind of escape reading, holding the attention at the time, but quite frankly, they all have sort of faded into a large pot of literary stew, and I don't recall the specific characters or plots or endings of any of them. The idea of spoilers is silly, in my view, because I could read any of these books again and it would be like an entirely new reading experience.

So I find myself now reading a novel that might be termed a police procedural in almost any country other than the Soviet Union, but in the 1950s, the Stalinist ideals of a crime-free society interfered with actually getting to the bottom of any particular crime. Their approach was to round up not the usual suspects, but just anyone who might potentially be an enemy of the state, pin the crime on them and torture and execute or ship them off to the gulags. Crime solved. End of story. And the state continued to feel good about itself.

But a criminal emerged who was engaged in such heinous crimes that, try as they might, the authorities were unable to sweep it under the carpet. And it was due to the efforts of one man — who had been a rising star in one of the secret police organizations but was denounced, tortured and shipped off to the hinterlands — to apprehend the criminal against staggering odds.

The criminal in question was a serial ritual killer of children, who murdered more than 44 in a dispicably inhuman way. How this crime is uncovered and solved against the overbearing power of the state apparatus and its utopian ideals, which made even suggesting that such a criminal was out there a capital offense — after all, such a thing would be a black mark against the state — is the concern of this novel.

While Child 44 qualifies as pulp fiction, I suppose, as opposed to literary fiction, it is interesting to me how well-written it is. The author has managed to create a tone in his writing that is sustained throughout. It is totally devoid of flourishes or fancy verbal pyrotechnics and draws attention to itself only in the sense that it caused this reader, at any rate, to wonder why these obvious talents are wasted on crime fiction. Of course, it is a silly question, because this is obviously where the money is. And we can list many writers whose stylistic abilities have overcome genre. One reader at least has sniffed at Child 44, implying that it is not really worth mentioning. But I think it is worth mentioning for a number of reasons. In what it tells us of life in the Soviet Union circa 1953, the year Stalin died, it follows in the tradition of Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago, and in what it tells us of this first-time writer's abilities, it is not a complete waste of time.

The question arises as to how to rate such a novel. Having encountered many four and five-star books already this year that are not lowly genre fiction, how do you compare Child 44 to, say, Morality Play by Barry Unsworth? The fact is you don't. They occupy a different literary space. So all things considered, I'll give this book 3½ stars although in some ways I think it deserves more.

Suzanne, I saw Child 44 and had wondered about it, as I do enjoy the occasional thriller or police procedural, and particularly those set in less familiar times and places. Still, I probably won't run out and get it, as my first employment out of college was as a child protective worker, which left me adverse to reading novels about murdered and abused children.

But I enjoyed your review for the points you raise about how we judge books of differing genres.

The novel is a fictionalised account of the Andrei Chikatilo case, then? There's a very good (though of course very disturbing) film of that story called Citizen X with Stephen Rea and Donald Sutherland, who are both excellent, which puts a lot of emphasis on what you call the apparatus of the state, and of the impossibility of reconciling the Soviet mindset and the reality of the case - how serial killers were considered a "decadent American phenomenon" and so of course there simply could not be a Russian serial killer...

>227 Linda92007: Linda, I share your aversion to reading about murdered and abused children — or anybody else for that matter. In Child 44 these horrors fit in nicely with the rest of the gratuitous violence perpetrated by the Stalinist state on the lives of ordinary people. None of it is fun to read about. And I need to emphasize that I would not have chosen to read this book without being prodded by a friend. The level of inhumanity described in the book would be shocking if there were not substantial evidence that fiction sadly in this case is mirroring reality, not the other way around.

>228 lyzard: Liz, I am completely unfamiliar with the source of the story except that I was told something similar did actually happen in Russia, which lends credence to the plot. The level of self-deception in the Soviet police state was indeed truly breathtaking.

Back to more pleasant topics, I have just finished Cligés, which is the second of the Arthurian Romances by Chrétien de Troyes. Another delightful tale filled with what we would today call magical realism.

223 - I read the amazon reviews before commenting Suzanne so was aware that it was celestial in a different way. It sounds intriguing though, particularly the non chronological first part of the book. Family history, genealogy, and genes all interest me as do the aristocracy - not least because they provide one of the best links to the past....

Zeno, I too was intrigued by descriptions of the first part. It's going to be interesting.

Catching up here. I like seeing your monthly lists - keep them coming!

What a good review of Child 44 - I don't think I've read another one that made me consider reading it. Many of the reviews may have been reacting negatively to its inclusion on the Booker list. The historical background sounds interesting though.

It was Snowdrops that was on the Booker shortlist. Also set in Moscow.

I really enjoyed Child 44; I though the author did a great job creating a atmosphere.

>233 DieFledermaus: - Glad you like the lists — and the review.

>234 RidgewayGirl: - I agree, the atmospherics were noteworthy. Also, the novel seemed to be written with a Russian accent, at least that's what I heard in my inner ear. How the writer did that is amazing to me, or is that whole concept a figment of my imagination? At any rate, that's part of what made me think the writing itself was pretty good.

Thank you Dewald, DieFledermaus and zenomax for pointing me in the direction of Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino. I finished reading it a few days ago but had to go back to page one and read it again.

Invisible Cities has so much more to it than meets the eye, it is going to be a real challenge to review without slipping into a clichéd awe in the face of a master of the post-modern novel at work. But I'm working on it . . .

Suzanne, rereading Invisible Cities was the exact same reaction I had to first reading it. :-)

Suzanne,

Ever since I got your message, I've been thinking of running out to get Invisible Cities. Will probably do this weekend. :)

Jane, I'll look forward to your reaction.

Great review of Morality Play (I'm a little behind!) - I'm aware of Unsworth but haven't read any of his work, and you've really piqued my interest with that one.

I, too, love your monthly wishlists! So many books catch my eye on LT but I don't have a particular system for keeping track of them (perhaps not entirely a bad thing, given that my TBR piles are no smaller than anyone else's!)

Hi rachbxl! Welcome! Thanks! Yeah, the TBR is a problem, no getting around it. Best to just enjoy it! ;-)

Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino (1972) Harcourt

Italo Calvino in an essay called "Levels of Reality in Literature" says that "A work of literature might be defined as an operation carried out in the written language and involving several levels of reality at the same time." This gives us an interesting way to observe a distinction between life and literature. He further states, "In a work of literature, various levels of reality may meet while remaining distinct and separate, or else they may melt and mingle and knit together, achieving a harmony among their contradictions or else forming an explosive mixture." As an example, he cites Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, which displays many levels of reality, that of the 1) aristocratic Theseus and Hypolyta, 2) the supernatural Titania, Oberon and Puck, 3) the rustic Bottom, which borders on 4) the animal kingdom when Bottom is transformed into an ass, 5) the play within the play about Pyramus and Thisbe; and the entire world encompassed by the work of literature in relation to 6) the external world, and a) the era in which it was created and b) the period in which it is experienced by the reader. "We cannot lose sight of the fact that these levels are part of the written world" [Calvino's emphasis].

This merely scratches the surface of what is contained in Calvino's essay, but it provides an excellent insight into Calvino's Invisible Cities, which is nothing if not an exemplar of multiple levels of reality that "meet while remaining distinct and separate," and "achieve harmony among contradictions" and form "explosive mixtures."

The first level of reality we are presented with is an intermittent dialogue between Kublai Khan and Marco Polo. But that is merely the frame upon which the novel is structured, and it serves as a pretext for describing the many fabled cities Marco Polo has passed through in his travels — or did he? Might he have been playing at being Scheherazade with his fanciful imaginings?

Calvino has enigmatically placed each city under one of ten headings distributed in a distinctive pattern one can puzzle over in the table of contents. Might these also be considered as signposts of yet other levels of reality? Readers can expect to entertain themselves with the question of exactly how many levels there are, and presumably there are infinite responses to this question.

But this is not by any means the whole story. In fact, it is not the story at all. But it does present a fascinating window into the mind of a post-modern novelist who was obviously thinking along these lines when he wrote Invisible Cities.

The above-referenced essay is only one of several in Calvino's The Uses of Literature that shed light upon what he was attempting to pull off in this deceptively simple novel. In another essay called "The Novel as Spectacle," Calvino suggests that "if we can finally achieve an in-depth reading of a classical novel . . . it is because we are dealing with a dead form." Novelists such as Claude Simon had believed that narrative was passé and strove to create fiction such as, for example, The Flanders Road, which attempted to forego narrative altogether. And we can see in Calvino's own work how he plays with the traditional elements of the novel. Along these lines he states:

If we now know the rules of the game we can construct "artificial" novels, born in the laboratory, and we can play at novels like playing at chess, with complete fairness, reestablishing communications between the writer, who is fully aware of the mechanisms he is using, and the reader, who goes along with the game because he, too, knows the rules and knows he can no longer have the wool pulled over his eyes.

Being aware of this post-modern attitude toward the novel as a game is terribly important in enjoying the work of a writer like Calvino. If on a winter's night a traveler is not on it's face a comedy filled with one-liners and pratfalls, but one cannot keep the smile off one's face in the course of reading it because the author is obviously having fun, and he has drawn the reader into the game by addressing him directly. One is not merely observing the spectacle, one becomes a part of it.

In a related vein, Calvino points out that storytelling has always had "a quality of collective spectacle even after centuries of being no longer a recitation by a storyteller or troubadour," and in the form of the modern novel it is now merely "the object of silent solitary reading." The great novels are indeed visualized as spectacles in our imagination as we read them. In his so-called "invisible cities" Calvino treats us to a veritable parade of imaginary spectacular cities, many of which defy the known laws of physics and the fabric of time, but the mind cannot keep itself from visualizing them in relation to actual cities one knows.

What we have here is a novel in which the protagonists are cities, but they are solitary, existing only within the intricate Fibonaccian framework — or is it Oulipian? — that Calvino has devised for them. In keeping with good post-modern dicta, this novel contains no plot, no character development, not even so much as a story line. But there is poetry in the prose, an evocation of the urge to see and possess the world and hold it all within memory. There is also a revelation of what Calvino calls "the poetics of the ineffability of existence" which "are and always will be bound to rare individual experiences and particular historical circumstances."

We are told that Kublai Khan is in possession of a great atlas containing "also the maps of the promised lands visited in thought but not yet discovered or founded: New Atlantis, Utopia," etc. This atlas of his conjures up images of the great mappae mundi of the Renaissance that provided an interpretation of the world rather than a representation. A Mapmaker's Dream was very much on my mind as I read about the great Khan. But for him the maps represented his empire and his desire for power. Marco Polo's desires are presented much more subliminally. The cities all bear women's names and represent the desires of men to possess them in all their beauty and mystery. But Kublai Khan denies having any desires. And Marco calmly tells him:

With cities, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or its reverse, a fear. Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.

Eventually, Marco admits, "Sire, now I have told you about all the cities I know."

"There is still one of which you never speak," says the Khan: "Venice."

"What else do you believe I have been talking to you about? Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice."

Calvino puts this idea of Venice in the reader's mind, but there are universals that apply to many cities that have a certain mystique about them. And the reader participates in the visualization of fanciful realms that may be everywhere but nowhere.

As time goes by, The Khan becomes bored and attacks Marco, accusing him of "smuggling: moods, states of grace, elegies." And in fact, Calvino has managed to smuggle into the reader's consciousness these very precious commodities.

So much more ought to be said about this remarkable little book. I have not even named a single name, or listed the chapter headings, or explained the Fibonacci connection or how this is an Oulipian writing, or an exercise in semiotics, or how it relates to ten other books in a similar vein. And of course I won't reveal the ending except to say that in truth the book does not end, for it is impossible not to return to the beginning and experience it all again, now better prepared to explore its intricacies.

If I am ever lost . . . stranded on a desert island, Invisible Cities is a book I hope to have with me, for there is much, much more to it beneath the surface. One could spend hours, days, weeks, ferreting out its deeper meanings, deconstructing its patterns, committing it to memory, rearranging the typography so it resembles a poem, envisioning pen and ink wash drawings of each city, and then starting all over and creating surrealist collages because the cities' reality defies our conventional perceptions.

5 and 1/2? Fabulous disquisition, Suzanne. I'm quite dazzled.

An incredible review, Suzanne. I have been wanting to read Calvino, but I'm now wondering if I should read The Uses of Literature before tackling his fiction, assuming I can find it. Any thoughts on that? I do like to have a clue about what an author is trying to do...

By the way, are you going to post the review on the book's work page?

>Yeah, the TBR is a problem, no getting around it. Best to just enjoy it!
That's my goal: getting around to it! So many goodies in it, including If on a Winter's Night..., which I really should devour before acquiring Invisible Cities, terrific review!

>243 janeajones: Yup! 5½. And thank you so much, Jane!

>244 Linda92007:-5 And thank you, Linda! I would recommend that you first read If on a winter's night a traveler, which is very accessible and very funny and should be required reading for all booklovers. A book like The Uses of Literature becomes much more meaningful when you can relate its various messages to things you have read. But I think it is a circular process. From my own experience, it helps to have one or two experimental novels under your belt and to read a bit of post-modern criticism here and there, and it gradually dawns on you what is going on. I will say that Calvino's criticism is some of the most lucid I have read, and I have no doubt that you would enjoy it as well as the fiction. By the way, Invisible Cities is only 165 pages. Give it a try.

>246 detailmuse: Detailmuse — You are the one who defined this little sub-genre that has captured my imagination (#132) — "quirky dreamy novellas" — and that whole conversation earlier in this thread that contained so many recommendations included Invisible Cities, which is nothing if not a quirky dreamy novella. So thank you very much!

Very impressive review, and very intriguing too.

Thanks Rebecca! It is very intriguing.

Oh, Linda, I forgot to say that the review is indeed posted on the book page. You can find it here.

Terrific review, Suzanne! Glad that you decided to read this one: it's probably my favourite 'post-modernist' book. Now, I have to get into more of Calvino's stuff...

Joining in the chorus - fabulous review.

I think people will understand from your review that deconstructing a novel is not everybody's cup of tea. Post modernist writing is littered with failures. The prime requisite is that an author must be able to write well and by the sound of your review Calvino does just that. It is also useful for the author to give the poor reader some clues as to what he is doing and Calvino seems to have done this in "Levels of Reality in Literature. It was a great idea to link his essay with your review.

Thanks Dewald and Barry. I'm so pleased that you enjoyed my review.

>250 dmsteyn: I can see why Invisible Cities is your fave, Dewald. It is both fun and enlightening.

>251 baswood: You are so right, Barry, that probably most people don't want to get all involved in the whole post-modern-experimental-artifical-novel thing. However, I do believe that seeing behind the curtain, so to speak, really adds to one's enjoyment of that type of literature; hence, my rather lengthy exposition. I found it all quite illuminating and hope others will as well. Invisible Cities can be read on many levels and enjoyed even without playing the game that Calvino has devised. I think I already said this somewhere, but Calvino's criticism is particularly straightforward — more so than that of many literary critics, and it is not merely about post-modernism, which makes it of general interest.

Excellent, a bunch of your TBR is on my list or I have read recently... I've starred your thread. I stumbled across this thread because i just bought A Mapmaker's Dream...

Thanks for stopping by Peter. Let me know eventually what you think about A Mapmaker's Dream.

Really wonderful review for Invisible Cities - reminded me of how much I enjoyed the book! I haven't read any of Calvino's criticism so it was nice to some of it related to Invisible Cities. Speaking of quirky dreamy novels - I recently picked up a copy of Einstein's Dream thanks to you!

Thank you so much, DieFledermaus. Einstein's Dreams may put you in mind of Invisible Cities in an odd sort of way.

*****

Still working my way through Arthurian Romances, and just this evening finished "The Knight of the Cart," a romance about Lancelot. This puts me just over halfway through the book, two more tales to go. This one more than the others so far puts me in mind of a Dungeons and Dragons type of role-playing game largely because of the formidable named obstacles Lancelot must overcome, such as the Sword Bridge and the Stone Passage, and being sealed up in a stone tower and the timely appearance of a lovely damsel coming to the rescue at the most opportune time. Anyway, a very enjoyable read.

Chretien was the first writer to introduce Lancelot into the Arthurian legend. His patron, Marie de Champagne (Eleanor of Aquitaine's daughter) wanted a French Arthurian hero -- and one who embodied all the ideals of amour courtois -- even though Lancelot faltered for a moment to ride in the lowly cart. But you probably know all of that.

It's really interesting to compare Chretien's version with the section in Malory that tells the same story.

Jane, I read Malory a number of years ago, and it has mostly faded in memory largely because I didn't know as much then as I do now (hahaha). I'll have to dig that out again and reread the comparable stories. You're right. A comparison will be very interesting.

I was fooling around at wordle.com and came up with this, my first attempt. It is not easy to translate from wordle to here.



Around the courtyard of the great Museum of Florence stand statues of her
illustrious dead, her poets, painters, sculptors, architects, inventors,
and statesmen; and as the traveler feels the ennobling lift of such
society, and reads the names or recognizes the features familiar to him
as his own threshold, he is startled to find Fame as commonplace here as
Notoriety everywhere else, and that this fifth-rate city should have the
privilege thus to commemorate so many famous men her sons, whose claim to pre-eminence the whole world would concede.

—James Russell Lowell, Among My Books

Back to Burning Your Boats: The Collected Short Stories of Angela Carter. I must admit to approaching this next collection, originally published in 1979 as The Bloody Chamber, with some trepidation since the previous collection called Fireworks: Nine Profane Pieces were in such marked contrast with the Carter stories I first read in the collection published as Saints and Strangers — as Black Venus in Britain — which I was very enthusiastic about. So I am happy to report that The Bloody Chamber treats us to retellings of various fairytales, and of the ten stories, the six or seven that I have read thus far are luminous. All of Carter's gifts are generously on display here.

"The Bloody Chamber" — In this the title story, a virgin bride unwittingly marries a serial wifekiller. Does she break the chain and outlive her murderous husband? This is a mesmerizing retelling of "Bluebeard" with a twist or two. One of Carter's best and the longest in the book.

"The Courtship of Mr. Lyon" — The Beast is a lion in the twentieth century but Beauty is still Beauty in this retelling.

"The Tiger's Bride" — Another version of "Beauty and the Beast," in which The Beast is a tiger, but in the end Beauty is the one who is transformed.

"Puss-in-Boots" — Only slightly altered but charmingly and cynically told tale of Puss in Boots.

"The Erl-King" — Fantasia on the theme of the Erl-King almost as a personification of the forest.

"The Snow Child" — A child appears naked in the dead of winter. Is she a figment of the Count and Countess's imagination? Based on an obscure version of "Snow White."

> !!!

I just bought The Bloody Chamber yesterday!

I had never heard of Wordle before. Looks like fun.

Great review of Invisible Cities! I used to use the book when I taught Visual Art- students would read and select " one city" to illustrate.

torontoc,

Mapping out Calvino's cities is something that I have been thinking about using for a project on the city and 'communitas'.

Anyhow, are your students' illustrations accessible? Such things always interest me.

Here is some interesting, like-minded, stuff- although most of the links no longer work, sadly.

http://rodcorp.typepad.com/rodcorp/2003/09/illustrated_inv.html

and

http://www.evolo.us/architecture/reinterpreting-italo-calvinos-zenobia/

http://www.bibhasde.com/diomira.html

http://www.cittainvisibili.com/tuttelecitta-en.htm
http://www.cittainvisibili.com/incisioni/Irene-en.htm

>261 edwinbcn: – Hi Edwin, I hope you'll enjoy The Bloody Chamber.

>262 Linda92007: – Linda, Wordle is fun. What I posted there was my first attempt and is rather pedestrian. But playing around at the web site I can envision many possibilities.

>263 torontoc: – torontoc, I can't think of a more wonderful source of artistic inspiration than Invisible Cities. Wish I had what it took to realize the images that are dancing in my head.

>264 PeterKein: – Peter, I had seen the "rodcorp" page before and was sorry the links did not work. But I especially enjoyed the bibhasde.com collection of renderings of Diomira, the first city.

The whole subject of cities in literature fascinates me. In Calvino's wonderful The Uses of Literature is an essay called "The City as Protagonist in Balzac" in which he speaks of a work I had never heard of before entitled History of the Thirteen (Histoire des Treize, 1835). It is made up of three novellas, the first called Ferragus which opens with the following:

In Paris there are certain streets which are in as much disrepute as any man branded with infamy can be. There are also noble streets; then there are streets which are just simply decent, and, so to speak, adolescent streets about whose morality the public has not yet formed an opinion. There are murderous streets; streets which are more aged than aged dowagers; respectable streets; streets which are always clean; streets which are always dirty; working-class, industrious, mercantile streets. In short, the streets of Paris have human qualities and such a physiognomy as leaves us with impressions against which we can put up no resistance.

And it goes on . . .

Calvino, who must have taken inspiration from Ferragus when writing Invisible Cities, begins his essay:

To make a novel out of a city, to represent the streets and the various districts as dramatis personae, each one with a character in conflict with every other; to give life to human figures and situations as if they were spontaneous growths from the cobbles of the streets, or else protagonists in such dramtic contrast with them as to cause a whole string of disasters; to work in such a way that at every changing moment the true protagonist was the living city, its biological continuity, the monster that was Paris—this is what Balzac felt impelled to do when he began to write Ferragus.

Now, if that doesn't just make you want to dive right in, what will? Needless to say, I downloaded History of the Thirteen to my Kindle immediately.

265, wonderful... I found it as well... and now on the list. I have The Uses of Literature but have not read that particular essay (yet, and soon to be rectified).

re: cities in literature - I have just finished reading Robert Alter's Imagined Cities - which I talk about a bit here. It may interest you.

Peter, thanks for the link. Very interesting comments. I am currently reading Alter's Pen of Iron, and Imagined Cities is now on the wish list. Thanks much!

Picked up Invisible Cities a couple days ago when I conveniently had a meeting get out a touch early down the street from a bookstore. I have a big test coming up end of month and am saving it as my treat for finishing. :)

>260 Poquette: I love Angela Carter for many reasons. She died too young.

260 and 269> Me too. One of my favorites.

>268 janemarieprice: – Hi Jane, glad you got hold of Invisible Cities. Hope it will be worth the wait. And good luck on your test!

>269 avaland: and 270 – Way too young! And I'm so glad to share an enthusiasm for Carter with you two.

The last four stories in The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter:

"The Lady of the House of Love" — The last vampiress, her last supper acidentally of her own blood.

"The Werewolf" — Was Little Red Ridinghood's grandmother a werewolf?

"The Company of Wolves" — Fear and flee the wolf; for, worst of all, the wolf may be more than he seems. But Red Riding Hood has a different scenario in mind.

"Wolf-Alice" —A feral child raised by wolves meets the werewolf and somehow a transformation occurs.

Next in the collection come the stories from Saints and Strangers. It was published in England as Black Venus. You can read my review from last year here if you are interested. The stories in this collection are all concerned with familiar subjects but they are told in a strikingly unusual way. They follow a slightly different order than the American publication:

"Black Venus" — about Baudelaire and his mistress.
"The Kiss" — a story of Tamurlane.
"Our Lady of the Massacre" — a 17th century British gal goes to the New World and back—and forth.
"The Cabinet of Edgar Allen Poe" — the life of Poe.
"Overture and Incidental Music for A Midsummer Night's Dream" — a strange twist on Shakespeare.
"Peter and the Wolf" — a quite different story than one might expect.
"The Kitchen Child" — the upstairs/downstairs we did not see on television.
"The Fall River Axe Murders" — a prequel to the infamous Lizzie Borden murders.

My favorite is "The Kitchen Child," a tour de force which I describe more fully in my review.

Heading into the home stretch with one collection to go. Burning Your Boats actually consists of the contents of four published books plus a few previously uncollected stories. I should have read them separately, or can I claim credit for four?

Very quiet here suzanne, you are probably too busy buying books. I have noticed a few being added to your library.

Just now work is interfering with reading and I'm trying very hard to finish Arthurian Romances and Angela Carter's short stories and Pen of Iron, all of which are near completion. I found myself having to go back and reread "The Knight of the Cart" because I missed a salient point early on which drives me crazy. Anyway, still plodding along, Barry. ;-)

Despite being deluged with work these past couple of weeks, I have still managed to squeeze in an hour or two of reading before lights out, and I'm happy to report that late this evening I finally finished Arthurian Romances, and even later read the last chapter of Pen of Iron: American Prose and the King James Bible by Robert Alter. More about both in due course.

anxiously awaiting your comments :) ... especially about Pen of Iron.

Pen of Iron: American Prose and the King James Bible by Robert Alter (2010) Kindle Edition

Due to popular demand, I'm reviewing this one first. ;-)

Robert Alter has written here one of the best books on literary style that I have ever read. I wish I had read this decades ago, but of course it was only published in 2010, so that would not have been possible.

Both readers of literature and aspiring writers of fiction in particular will find much that is helpful in analyzing the style of a few selected authors and, if one chooses to do so, to apply it in shaping one's own fictional writing style.

Alter points out that "style is not merely a constellation of aesthetic properties but is the vehicle of a particular vision of reality." His thesis is that the King James Bible is an integral part of the American literary psyche and has influenced American writing since the beginning. His goal is "to understand how this prose serves as the vehicle for certain distinctively American constructions of reality." This would seem to be a tall order, but what he accomplishes here is just astonishing.

When Alter talks about style he does not merely mean what seem to the modern ear to be the baroque flourishes of seventeenth century English as seen in the King James version. He drills down into the syntax and diction of the Bible which have influenced the work of writers from Melville and Abraham Lincoln to Hemingway and Cormac McCarthy.

Pen of Iron consists of five chapters which focus on distinctive writers whose prose reflects the pervasive influence of the Bible in ways one might not have thought of. There is a chapter on Melville, which alone is worth the price of admission if one cares to get to the bottom of Moby-Dick:

. . . we would do well to think of Melville as a post-theistic writer. That is to say, he comes after the highly charged theistic tradition, and though he no longer believes in the personal and providential God of Christian faith, he manifestly still carries the weight of theistic ideas, struggling with it, imagining a more savage god, or sometimes none at all.

In addition to Melville and Lincoln, Alter discusses and dissects style in Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom, Saul Bellow's Seize the Day, Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises and Cormac McCarthy's The Road. The reader is informed about these writers in unexpected and very rewarding ways. In fact, each chapter builds on the previous so that by the end one has a new grasp on how to read and how style — diction, vocabulary and syntax — shape narrative and contribute to or may even detract from the writer's ability to convey a sense of reality in a work of fiction where "space and time are intricately intertwined." For example, in discussing McCarthy's The Road, Alter states:

The basic challenge for the book is this: how do you use language to represent an order of reality fundamentally alien to the reality in which and for which our shared language has been framed?

This is a question that anyone who has attempted to write fiction has asked. Alter has taken a giant step in the direction of showing us a variety of answers to that question.

I feel so influential.

Terrific review, Suzanne. You've convinced me, I will get here at some point...

Excellent review suzanne, thumbed

I agree, great review. It's a shame he doesn't do any American poets - Whitman and Dickinson being the obvious ones.

Fabulous review, Suzanne. I think I may look for Pen of Iron. I would certainly never have made those connections on my own.

Such an enticing review, onto the wishlist!

Thanks so much, everyone!

Sometimes I read a nonfiction book out of order. That is, I may read the intro and some or all of the first chapter to get an idea of where the author is going, and then I go to the last chapter to see where he will arrive and then go back and pick up where I left off at the beginning. This is how I happened to read the final chapter first and was completely mesmerized by it.

It turns out Pen of Iron is not one of those books that comes to a conclusion per se, but I am certainly not sorry I read it out of order. I said in my review that the Melville chapter was worth the price of admission, but I also should have said that chapter five was as well. In fact, the whole darn book is a revelation. And while Alter focuses on American writers, what one learns about analyzing style can be applied to any writer from any time and place irrespective of Biblical influences.

Last evening I read Continent by Jim Crace. This is one of those "quirky dreamy novellas" that I have become so smitten with of late. It fits right in. Thanks to Dewald for recommending it. More about this eventually.

Arthurian Romances by Chrétien de Troyes (1170) Penguin Classics

Thanks to Barry for recommending this last year. In his excellent review, which I highly recommend, he provides a brief synopsis of each of the five tales, so I won't repeat them here and will merely make a couple of observations.

To me the most striking thing that surfaces in the wake of reading the Arthurian Romances is just how much of the lore and mystique surrounding the practice and ideals of courtly love and chivalry have permeated modern culture. Of course, it helps that many derivative books, movies and video games have kept the era of knights and ladies, tournaments and quests alive in our imagination. It is a tribute to the power of these tales as well as others that they continue to charm and enchant us.

Many of the characters we know – Gawain, Lancelot and Quinevere – and some we may not – Cliges and Erec and Enide – have fantastical encounters that are described in the most realistic terms yet with a sophisticated irony and humor that seems downright modern, yet all of this is set in the context of the conventions of courtly love and knightly ritual. For all the conventional social customs and tournament formality, these are not exactly stick figures without personality. In fact, for readers demanding evidence of character development, look no further than Perceval and The Story of the Grail. Here we see the naiveté of a country bumpkin who develops into an accomplished and worthy knight.

From a historical standpoint, it is interesting to note that chivalry emerged in feudal society in the wake of the toubadours in France in the mid 1100s during an unprecedented period of peace. Tournaments allowed for military training to be channeled in the direction of entertainment, and it was in this context that the connection between knightly prowess and courtly love emerged. How courtly love, chivalry and tournaments became entwined is unclear, but the combination led to a highly stylized and sophisticated sort of public theater in which tournaments were not real war and courtly love was not real love. On the one hand, matters of life and death were reduced to mere social gameplaying, but on the other hand, chivalry represented the kind of Platonic ideal of knighthood that inspired several centuries of literature, from Chrétien to Chaucer to Mallory to Shakespeare to Tennyson and beyond.

Chrétien's delightful version of these stories will put a smile on your face. Highly recommended.

I am glad you enjoyed Arthurian Romances they are quite magical I think. I like your idea of tournaments being not real war and courtly love not being real love. I wonder how stylized both of these became. Edward III was the great tournament king in England with some incredible pageantry organised around these events. At one of the biggest tournaments the royal show went on for so long that by the time the jousting started it had got too dark to see.

Chretien is the true literary progenitor of the Arthurian romances -- as you note, utterly delightful. Now you have to try Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival -- perhaps the greatest of the Arthurian romances.

I too am glad you enjoyed Arthurian Romances. It inspired me to read more, and I've acquired several more, but have yet to read them, except for Parzival by Wolfram von Eschenbach, which I enjoyed a lot less.

>286 baswood: Barry, didn't you read a bio of Edward III? Or am I thinking of something else? I realize he was somewhat later than Chretien, but I presume tournaments reached their peak later anyway.

>287 janeajones: Jane, I actually have Parzival on my Hope to Read list. Thanks for the reinforcement.

>288 rebeccanyc: Hi Rebecca, hmm, so you enjoyed Parzival not so much. Well, I intend to read it and see what I think.

Bottom line, we all seem to agree that Arthurian Romances are kind of wonderful, and that's good!

It looks like the wish list continues to grow apace, thanks in large part to the inspiration I find here in Club Read.

March Wish List

The Birds Fall Down by Rebecca West (***Linda29007 — 1900s Russian exiles and terrorist revolutionaries in England)
This is Not the End of the Book by Umberto Eco and Jean-Claude Carrière (***AnnieMod — how did I freaking miss this???)
Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age! by Kenzaburo Oe (***Linda29007 — famous Japanese author obsessed with William Blake)
The Sovereign Map: Theoretical Approaches in Cartography throughout History by Christian Jacob (pricey — ran across in reading reviews of Invisible Cities at Amazon)
Life: a User's Manual (La Vie mode d'emploi) by Georges Perec (in an article "Italo Calvino and Georges Perec: The Multiple and Contrasting Emotions of Cities and Puzzles" by Laura Chiesa, The Romantic Review 97:3-4 (2006) — found after reading and reviewing Invisible Cities)
Heaven Cracks, Earth Shakes: The Tangshan Earthquake and the Death of Mao's China by James Palmer (***SassyLassy — China since death of Mao in 1976)
28 Artists and 2 Saints by Joan Acocella (***DieFledermaus — collection of New Yorker profiles of authors, dancers, choreographers, etc.)
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens (***rachbxl — nice review; and ***baswood says it is one of his faves; making a note for 2013)
Pen of Iron: American Prose and the King James Bible by Robert Alter (***A_musing — from hot reviews)
Amours de Voyage by Arthur Hugh Clough (***janeajones — Clough revised Dryden's Plutarch's Lives)
Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (***dmsteyn — reminds me of this omission)
The Delighted States: A Book of Novels, Romances, & Their Unknown Translators, Containing Ten Languages, Set on Four Continents, & Accompanied by ... Illustrations, & a Variety of Helpful Indexes by Adam Thirlwell (mentioned in Pen of Iron)
Absalom, Absalom by William Faulkner (thoroughly dissected in Pen of Iron)
Seize the Day by Saul Bellow (thoroughly dissected in Pen of Iron)
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway (thoroughly dissected in Pen of Iron; I read this long ago but would like to reread)
The Road by Cormac McCarthy (thoroughly dissected in Pen of Iron)
Meditations on the Soul by Marcilio Ficino (***baswood — did not know this was available in English)
Chronicles of Barsetshire by Anthony Trollope (***Cariola — based in part of her review of The Last Chronicles of Barset; I really have to get to Trollope one of these years)
The Hour of Our Death by Philippe Aries (***dmsteyn — a "magisterial history" of the Western attitude towards death; I love magisterial histories)
Imagined Cities: Urban Experience and the Language of the Novel by Robert Alter (***PeterKein — using six novelists, investigates how writers "experience space and time associated with the introduction of new technologies" and "how writers cope with this new reality in the language of fiction")
The Master of the Day of Judgment by Leo Perutz (***DieFledermaus — a Sherlock Holmes style whodunnit)
Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes (***dmsteyn — the comparison with Parzival compels me to add it to the list)
A Field Guide to Melancholy by Jacky Bowring (***zenomax — check this one out and hope for a good bibliography)
One Book, The Whole Universe: Plato's Timaeus Today (***Mr.Durick — why is this book so expensive??? Am dipping into Timaeus itself from time to time but have not tackled it from front to back yet. )
The Cat's Table by Michael Ondaatje (***dmsteyn — lyrical tale of "an ocean voyage as life-changing event")
Every Man for Himself by Beryl Bainbridge (***rebeccanyc — idle rich on the Titanic)
The Periodic Table by Primo Levi (Jim Crace, Paris Review (Fall 2003) — he was influenced by this and Invisible Cities)
Kalpa Imperial by Angelica Gorodischer (***janeajones — 12 stories about "the greatest empire that never was" by a famous Argentinian writer, translated by Ursula LeGuin. Quirky dreamy novellas, anyone?)

How do you keep track to post this each month?

#289, Don't get me wrong. I was glad I read Parzival (my review is actually on the Parzival and Titurel page because my edition contained both works), but for me it paled in comparison to Chretien. von Eschenbach's style is much less lively and is often confusing, and I didn't feel he had Chretien's psychological insight. But the story has such resonance in western culture even down to the present day that I wanted to read it. And, looking at your wish list, I read Matterhorn (a wonderful book) first, and that's what made me want to read Parzival. It would have been better to read Parzival first, as you will have done.

Suzanne - The Periodic Table is an excellent book. What I admire most about Levi is that despite the enormities through which he lived, he always treated events with a detached (yet curiously involving), analytical eye.

I just love your wishlists, Suzanne. I was interested to see that Pen of Iron dissects Absalom, Absalom!, which is on my wishlist also. I need to get them both!

>293 zenomax: - I agree about Levi (though I haven't read The Periodic Table, just Survival in Auschwitz). He writes through the eyes of a scientist, and is in such control of his own emotions. When that control breaks down, the fleeting glimpses into his feelings are so incredibly powerful. I'm going to look for more of his books - thanks for mentioning him, as I hadn't thought about his writing in a long time.

Ooh, The Periodic Table. I was going to read a story from it for the short story challenge, but then grew unsure whether it's memoir or fiction (or a mix)? I read the first entry some time ago and if I recall it has the dreamy quality you're mentioning.

I read The Periodic Table back in the 80s, I think, and was very impressed. It was recommended to me by a scientist friend.

>291 Nickelini: Joyce, I keep an ongoing list in a Microsoft Word document on my computer. When a book strikes my fancy here on LT or some other source, I add it to the list and note the source of the recommendation and a few words to remind me of what the book is about. So the list compiles itself. At the end of the month, it is just a matter of copy and paste and adding touchstones. It amazes me that every month I accumulate so many books on my list.

>292 rebeccanyc: Rebecca, I understand completely. And I look forward to Parzival for the reasons you suggest, probably foremost because of my lifelong love of Wagner's opera.

>293 zenomax:, 295, 296, 297 - Zeno, Cait, detailmuse and Rebecca — looks like I hit the jackpot on the Periodic Table. I will have to get that right away and read it. Thanks for your reinforcements!

>294 Linda92007: Linda, I have been resisting Faulkner for decades and recently Absalom, Absalom! has been drawn to my attention through several sources, so I'm thinking this may be the book to read. Time will tell . . .

The Periodic Table is one that's been on my own TBR pile for ages, and that I keep thinking I really, really ought to read soon.

298 my lifelong love of Wagner's opera

I grew up in an opera-hating family, so that's probably why I was unfamiliar except in the vaguest possible way with Parzival.

Tempting reviews for both Pen of Iron and Arthurian Romances.

I've enjoyed reading your monthly wishlists - it's always interesting to see where people get their recommendations. I'd second the Trollope recommendation.

I'm also interested in reading Parzival for the Wagner connection. It sounds like a number of group members read it - does anyone know how the book and opera compare?

I think Wagner'r Parsifal could best be described as a radical reworking of Wolfram Von Eschenbachs poem. He takes three climactic scenes from the story for each of the three acts. I am currently listening to the opera in as much depth as I can manage to see if there is an emotional connection.

This thread is getting rather long in the tooth, so it is now continued at Poquette's Bibliomonde II. Please join me there. Hopefully I will eventually have something to say . . . ;-)

>272 Poquette: Sorry to skip back this far, but I've enjoyed the notes on your Angela Carter readings, makes me want to read them all again (but there are so, so many books yet to read...)