The Crapper in the Rye

When I first read The Catcher in the Rye, around the age of twenty, I thought it was terrible. Reading it again years later, I find I was too kind in my youth. The idea that this insipid stream-of-conscious first person narrative of a sixteen year-old moron is a classic completely befuddles me. I find no merit in the book whatsoever.  It is the perfect example of "phony" that Holden Caulfield whines about for over two hundred pages.  Do yourself a favor and skip this book.  For me, I shall never read another word written by the hack J.D. Salinger ever again. This book now tops two personal lists:  1) Most Overrated Book Ever; and 2) Worst Book Ever Published.

Wicked Angels? Not really

Wicked Angels is an English translation of the 1955 French novel Les mauvais anges by Eric Jourdan.  It was banned for thirty years in France, presumably because of its subject matter. It tells the love story of two seventeen year old boys.  Oddly, the novel avoids describing the sex between the boys and opts instead for a coy allusiveness and lyricism. This turns unpleasant as the boys take to inflicting pain upon each other as signs of their love. The escalation of this sadism leads on to the death of one boy and the suicide of the other. The short novel is divided into two parts, the first told by Pierre, and the second told by Gerard. Though it is marketed as a lost classic, it is not one. It is frankly boring, and the cliched ending (where same-sex lovers end up dead) is (fortunately) a thing of the past. 

The Green Children

I happened upon an interesting reference to this book by Kevin Crossley-Holland, so I secured a copy.  Early in his career, Crossley-Holland published a number of reworkings of early Germanic literature, from Beowulf and King Horn to Havelok the Dane. Most of them are the size of short novels, whereas The Green Children (1966) is basically a short story, published as a picture book, illustrated by Margaret Gordon. 

The origin of Crossley-Holland's version of The Green Children is found in two accounts of a twelfth century happening in Suffolk in East Anglia. One day two green children are found by peasants and brought to the local lord.  They can't speak English and are hungry but won't eat anything offered to them until they see some freshly cut beans. The beans satisfy their hunger, but over time the boy gradually withers away and dies.  The girl learns English and begins to eat normally, so that her green coloring diminishes.She notes that she and her brother came from an underground realm, and got lost in caves before emerging in the sunshine in a world new to them.

That's pretty much the whole tale in a nutshell.  I liked the story, but thought less of the illustrations.