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.

Vidal, of Course

Gore Vidal (1925-2012) wrote novels, essays, plays, screenplays, etc.; he was an all-about man-of-letters, with a polished style and a quick wit.  Of all his writings, I find his essays to be of the most consistent high quality.  This volume, Gore Vidal: Sexually Speaking (1999), edited by Donald Weise, collects Vidal's writings on sex, mostly on same-sex relations.  Vidal had some interesting attitudes.  Though he spent some five decades with a male partner, he shunned the term "gay" and "homosexual" (as a noun).  He was perfectly open about his relations with men, but he would say there are homosexual acts but not homosexuals, even as many others accepted the term "gay" or "homosexual" as a badge of honor. 

This book contains fourteen essays, and three long interviews. The standout essays are "Sex Is Politics" and "The Birds and the Bees", but Vidal is also very acute in writing about people he knew, from Eleanor Roosevelt, to Tennessee Williams and W. Somerset Maugham.  The interviews are somewhat lesser.  Vidal is at his best in writing prose.

A few of Vidal's stray statements on modern culture strike me as worth repeating for their self-evident truths:

"If I were dictator or president or otherwise in control of a well-run country . . . I would not allow any religious group to have schools. And without schools, there would be no Catholic Church in two generations because their doctrines are so insane that nobody in his right mind would accept them.  Then I would tax all churches heavily. That would reduce their influence by 90 percent." (p. 238)

"I don’t think Western Civilization as I’ve understood it and cared for it will continue. I don’t really in my mind’s eye see the human race in existence for another hundred years, right or wrong. When you feel like this, it makes it very difficult to create a work of art because I think the principal impulse to create is the will to make something permanent, even though you know that from the stand-point of eternity, nothing is permanent. But certainly in terms of the generations of man, as the Bible would put it, you do have a sense of continuing and addressing future generations. And so you will not become entirely extinct because of what you have wrought. Well, if you don’t have that sense or if you are fairly convinced that there is going to be no future either for the written word as you practice it or for the human race as such, well, this sort of takes the moxie out of you. And I don’t think I’m the only one to feel this.  I think that the deterioration in all the arts that we are now seeing is a sign of this." (p. 250)

The Seventh Ogre

Lee Brown Coye (1907-1981) was primarily an artist of the weird.  Early in his career, he adapted and illustrated an East Indian folk tale as his first book, The Seventh Ogre (1932).  The story tells of a blind man and a deaf man who team up and have a number of adventures, including while scheming to steal the gold of an ogre, who calls upon six other ogres to help him (unsuccessfully) defend his gold.  While Coye's macabre illustrations are interesting and well-done, they don't seem a very good match for the tale. Still the combination makes for an interesting little book.

The Secret Lives of Authors

How I Write: The Secret Lives of Writers (2007), edited by Dan Crowe, is a kind of coffee table book about writers and their writing spaces—their desks, their surroundings, their rituals, and their favored desk-top tchotkes.  Basically, the editor wrote to sixty-some-odd writers about their daily work as writers. There are some well-known authors included, but a lot of the names are of less-known, and all of them are decidedly pretentious in a literary way (i.e., genre authors were evidently not asked).

As an exercise, I though the book sounded interesting, but the end-result is considerably less engaging.  One goes from such insights as Lionel Shriver's note that "having the nerve to write yet another book in a world already drowning in blather requires bravery, arrogance, and willful naiveté" to Tim Carvell's "the only way to write is to first spend a considerable amount of time not writing." Well, both statements are true, but it's rather sad that they represent the best this book has to offer.

Wisdom for All Ages

Ursula K. Le Guin turned 88 a few weeks before her latest book was published. Her new book is No Time to Spare: Thinking about What Matters.  It is basically a collection of some of her blog posts since she started blogging in 2010. That makes the book sound less interesting than it actually is. Le Guin has accumulated much wisdom in her nearly nine decades on the planet.  And her viewpoint is always worth reading and reflecting upon. (Well, almost.  When authors write about their own pets the result is often dire.  With Le Guin, it's cats. And there are seven entries on her cat. I'm sure some people will find them charming.  I didn't.) 

Much of Le Guin's thoughts on fantasy, escapism, imagination, fundamentalism should be read by everyone (especially those people who don't sympathize with these subjects).  Her views on Darwin and belief are quite clearly thought out and reasonable. She writes: "I don't believe in Darwin's theory of evolution.  I accept it.  It isn't a matter of faith, but of evidence. The whole undertaking of science us to deal, as well as it can, with reality. The reality of actual things and events in time is subject to doubt, to hypothesis,  to proof and disproof, to acceptance and rejection—not to belief or disbelief."  Amen to that.

Le Guin is a national treasure.  May she ruminate and continue to write for years to come.  (But hold back on too many cat posts.) 

YA Tales of Unnatural Death

John Gordon's short collection, The Burning Baby and Other Ghosts (1992), contains five tales of various ghosts and unnatural deaths. The title story is the best in the book, about a glowing baby that appears in the bonfire that secretly hold the corpse of a murdered pregnant girl. The second story, "Under the Ice," is about a dead body sometimes seen under the ice where some young boys go skating. The remaining three tales get silly—"The Eels" about a haunting be eels after an old woman's grand-daughter is killed.  "The Key" and "Death Wish" are overly complicated and not very rewarding. The vibrancy of the first tale sets a standard unrivaled by any other tale in the book. 

Silly Ghost Stories

The Travelling Bag and Other Ghostly Stories (2016) is the latest collection of ghost stories by Susan Hill, known for her novella The Woman in Black (1983) which has been filmed twice. The new volumes contains only four stories, all of them silly in some way.  In the title story, the prank of filling a travelling bag with moths ends up with a man dead. In "Alice Baker" an office worker always has bad smells around her and she doesn't make friends with her co-workers.  Eventually, the narrator figures out she was a ghost. In "The Front Room" a Christian family, feeling charitable, move the husband's unpleasant elderly step-mother into their front room, with predictable awfulness.  "Boy Number 21" concerns a very lonely schoolboy whose one friend goes missing, yet apparently he reappears from time to time. All four stories feel unpolished--with incongruous ideas tossed off to keep the plot moving without regard to the story structure itself. A sad, disappointing little volume.