Loose (SF) Canon

Charles Platt was a seminal figure in science fiction from the 1960s (New Worlds days, in London) through the early 1990s, as a writer, editor, and witness to the scene (mostly in America, to which he emigrated in 1970).  Loose Canon (2001) collects a bunch of his essays that appeared in various venues such as Interzone, Science Fiction Eye, The New York Review of Science Fiction, as well as some zines published by Platt himself.  In a simple sense, the book exemplifies his disillusion with the science fiction sphere as place for literary experimentation as well as technological optimism.  Thus it often reads angry, bitter, and cynical, but it always reads true. One may not always agree with Platt, but his views are always cogent and worth reading.

Another Borges

Having just read Doctor Brodie's Report, I still felt the need for more Borges, so I turned to the anthology Extraordinary Tales, by Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares, translated in 1971 by Anthony Kerrigan, and originally published in Spanish in 1953. Basically, it's a collection of passages, often of some kind of transformational scenes (mythological, philosophical, historical), from the editors' wide reading through world literature. Most source are verifiable, but some are not (or the passages that are given do not appear in the work cited), so there is some of the usual Borgesian playfulness. Overall, the tales are moderately interesting, but there are no real classics. Again, not first-tier Borges, but not without interest.

Doctor Brodie's Report

In the Afterword to Doctor Brodie's Report (1970), Jorge Luis Borges notes that these eleven short stories are the first he has written since 1953.  Thus they can be considered late-Borges, which is different from classic-Borges, which includes such first-class tales as "The Aleph," "Tlon, Uqbar and Orbis Tertius" and many others.  Though the tales collected in Doctor Brodie's Report appeared in English in such venues as The New Yorker (five stories), The Atlantic Monthly, and Harper's Magazine, they remain second-rate Borges, but they are all worth reading.  The best stories in the book are the first, "The Gospel According to Mark," and the last, titular story "Doctor Brodie's Report."  

The Making of The Wind in the Willows

This volume, published by the Bodleian Library of Oxford University (and showcasing some of their holdings of Kenneth Grahame's manuscripts), is a very attractive and nicely illustrated account of the origins and publication of Kenneth Grahame's classic, The Wind in the Willows. There isn't much more to say about it, just that if you like this kind of book (as I do), this one is well-done and engaging.

Le Guin's Last Words

Ursula K. Le Guin corrected the proofs of this small book just one week before her death in January 2018 at the age of 88.  It is called Ursula K. Le Guin: Conversations on Writing.  It began as conversations with David Naimon at a small community radio station in Portland, Oregon, where Le Guin lived.  The book version of these conversations is divided into three main sections:  "On Fiction," "On Poetry," and "On Nonfiction."

All three parts are interesting, though the one on poetry is on a foreign ground for me.  Nothing seems out of place if you have read Le Guin's nonfiction, particularly her recent collection Words Are My Matter (2016), which is referenced often in section three. 

All in all this is a pleasant coda to a long and distinguished career. 

The World Turned Upside-Down

The first words I read by Junot Diaz were his supposed confession of having been raped as a child, published in the April 16, 2018 issue of The New Yorker.  All the Holden Caulfield bells went off in my mind:  Phoney!  Sexual assault is charge to be taken seriously, but in this case it seemed that Diaz was making a generic and contrived complaint, one that just didn't (for me) ring true. Soon afterwards some charges against Diaz himself of sexual abuse surfaced, which made his "confession" seem even more like a calculated pre-emptive strike for sympathy.  Be that as it may, I thought I'd give one of his books a read, and by most accounts the book to read was his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007). It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award.  Well I'm now completely baffled as to why this book won any award at all.  It's a poorly written account of the sad (and not short enough) life of a Dominican geek in New Jersey, with the author sneering at his characters all of the time.  If something as repulsive as  MTV's Jersey Shore had been based on a novel, then the novel would share a kinship with The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. 

After struggling to get through Diaz's book, what a great pleasure to read The Uncertainty of All Earthly Things (2018), a short story collection by British writer Mark Valentine.  It contains twelve stories, all originally published in small press sources between 2013 and 2017, plus a section "Notes on the Border" comprising some diary entries from 2001 through 2003.  There is more talent and artistry in a few pages of Valentine's prose than could be found in an entire novel by Diaz.  The Uncertainty of All Earthly Things was published in a limited edition of 199 numbered copies. Why is there such a disparity, and one in the wrong direction, between the receptions of Diaz and Valentine? Valentine is a literary writer, while Diaz is schlockmeister of the tee-vee generation.  It's a sad world that Diaz is acclaimed while Valentine is read only by the cognioscenti.

Strike One, Strike Two . . .

Some books just don't click with particular readers, for various (often personal) reasons.  Two books encountered in succession struck me this way.

First was The Forever War (1974), by Joe Haldeman. Yes, it's a patently obvious contemplation of the Vietnam war, stretched across space.  Yes, it won the Nebula Award in 1975, and the Hugo Award in 1976. And it's well written, but I just found it hard slogging, with themes that do not much interest me, and characters with attitudes that (to me) belong to out past not to our future.

Next came The Gates of Paradise (1960) by George Andrzeyevski.  It was translated from the Polish in 1962 by James Kirkup.  I'd seen the 1968 film of the novel, and found it to be an interesting if exasperating mess, gradually revealing the flaws behind the people who were involved in a religious quest in medieval France. So I thought that perhaps the original source might be better. Alas, it's not, and the film at least has the benefit of eye candy, something lacking in the book.  In fact the book is one of those pointless attempts at being avant garde. Its contrivance is that the entire novel is one long run-on sentence (with a second five word sentence as the final line). The contrivance palls very quickly and it is a struggle with little reward to keep reading on, and on, and on.