Why 2007?

Well, it has to do with the recent death of the bookstore chain called Borders. I worked for that company for quite some time, and while I was there I made an attempt to keep up with current literature. This ended almost entirely when I left the store in October, 2007. That’s when my attention turned to the year 1946.

Four years later I’m determined to catch up. not by reading every highly praised book published since 2007, but just the ones I want to. Luckily the New York Times Book Reviews from this period are available online, so I can move through the books week by week, probably never reaching the present.

The excitement at that point was over the tablet containing a story very much like the Noah and the Flood one from the Hebrew Bible. Since this was a separate culture, the flood episode was taken as independent confirmation of a biblical event.

Over the years, more and more tablets were unearthed, filling in the gaps in the story. In 1916, the poet Rainer Mairia Rilke wrote of Gilgamesh: “I have immersed myself in it, and in these truly gigantic fragments I have experienced measures and forms that belong with the supreme works that the conjuring Word has ever produced.”

The edition of Gilgamesh I read was translated and turned into poetry by Stephen Mitchell, who famously translated Rilke into English. In his introduction, Mitchell finds parallels between the ancient epic and the current US invasion of Iraq, especially in the episode where King Gilgamesh decides to go off to a foreign land and slay a monster for no real reason other than his own glory, goading his doubtful friend Enkidu to come along, asking “Why dear friend, do you speak like a coward?”

Gilgamesh is one of my favorite ancient myths. Its story: there is a king named Gilgamesh, who, though magnificent is unruly. His people appeal to the goddess Aruru to make him treat them better. Aruru makes a man out of clay–a dark double of Gilgamesh named Enkidu. Enkidu is wild, living with the animals and scaring the farmers, until the priestess Shamhat makes love with him for seven straight days. After this he tries to return to the animals but they run from him. He hears of the great king Gilgamesh and goes to his city to challenge him. When they meet Gilgamesh and Enkidu battle, but then become friends. They go off to kill the monster Humbaba, who guards the Cedar Forest. Though they kill Humbaba (with assistance from a god) the monster curses Enkidu. Enkidu falls ill and dies, leaving Gilgamesh in anguish. He begins to fear death and desires immortality. He goes off to find Utnapishtim, the one human whom the gods have granted eternal life, to hear his secret. Utnapishtim tells Gilgamesh the story of the great flood. Gilgamesh hears that a bush growing in the waters of the Great Deep will make him immortal. He dives down and pulls it up, and starts traveling back home. He sets the bush down to take a bath in a lake and a snake carries it away.

I’ve basically finished off reading everything from my lists of books published from 1946-1950. Instead of moving on to 1951, I have decided to take a step backward, to one of my older goals: to read all the books on Harold Bloom’s “Western Canon” list.

The book “The Western Canon,” published in 1994, has an appendix that lists all of the books Bloom believed to be central to Western culture, beginning in the prehistoric Middle East and moving through the ancient world (the Theocratic Age), the Renaissance (the Aristocratic Age), the Industrial Revolution (the Democratic Age) and into the 20th Century (the Chaotic Age.) A thousand or so volumes are listed. It seems both overwhelming and incomplete.

The book appeared around the time I was beginning grad school. I remember looking at it in the library and despairing at how little of the list I’d read. I wanted to go read the Greek tragedies, the works of Victor Hugo, etc. But I was studying poetry, contemporary stuff, mainly—and there wasn’t time.
After I graduated and felt I could read whatever I wanted to, I made my first attempt to read the Canon—and immediately ran into the ultimate stumbling block. The first book on the list was fine—the ancient Sumerian text “Gilgamesh”. But next up was the King James Bible. I was not raised in the church and had picked up most of what I knew about the Bible from movies and “Davy and Goliath” episodes. Still, I was interested. But halfway through the third book I gave up.

Over the years I tried other methods—reading the 20th century list first, for instance. That gave me a pretty good overview of Italian literature (in translation), but I knew that the beginning of the list still needed trudging through.
So here I am again, armed this time with my Kindle. I had the idea of blooging my reactions to the works on the list as I read them. Well, it turns that at least in the case of the Old Testament, someone else beat me to it. David Plotz read the Bible and posted his thoughts about it on Slate. He later published the project as “The Good Book.” It’s a funny and insightful book and I direct your attention to it. It was a valuable guide to finally help me get through the Bible.

I’m going to skip over writing about the Old Testament, except for giving a few thoughts here:
It’s sort of like listening through a band’s entire catalogue when you’re already familiar with their greatest hits. You keep slogging through all these noodling jams knowing that Job is coming up, or the parts quoted by writers or the Byrds.

All in all, the Old Testament is a mean-spirited, genocidal book. God directs his chosen people to massacre thousands, kill women and children, and sacrifice a whole bunch of animals. Every time a king disobeys him, he lays down the law, inflicting plagues and horrors upon the Israelites, and eventually letting them be conquered.

The history portions are pretty disgusting, though there is some good poetry near the back the book.

Here’s a story to give you a hint of what the god of the Old Testament is like: You are probably already familiar with the story of Abraham and Isaac, where God tells Abraham to (in Bob Dylan’s words) “kill him a son, out on Highway 51” and Abe complies, preparing to sacrifice Isaac. At the last second God is all “lol jk” and calls the murder off. I guess we’re supposed to think that God is merciful, but it’s a pretty unflattering look.

So, anyway, that’s the story we remember. One I’d never heard before, and which shares some features, appears in Judges 11. Jephthah vows that if god helps him defeat his enemies, he will sacrifice the first person he sees when he comes back home. He beats the Ammonites, then returns, finding his own daughter at the doorstep. Jephthah lets his daughter go to the mountains to wail for two months, then he kills her. God, a real Gov. George W. Bush figure here, issues no last minute reprieve. And of course we’re supposed to think that Jephthah is a great guy for keeping his word.

Anti-Semitism and Hitler are kept in the background for much of the book, which concerns a wealthy Jewish family and its various love triangles and financial difficulties. It’s comparable to a family saga, like John Galsworthy’s “Forsythe” books, though in this case the reader knows that the world being described will eventually be eviscerated, not by time or changing values but by evil itself.

Asa Heshel, a young scholar, could be said to be the book’s main character, though other characters receive extended focus. He comes to Warsaw and meets Abram Shapiro Moskat, who takes him under his wing. Asa falls for Haddasah, one of Abram’s nieces. She is already engaged, to a man she does not love. Haddasah runs away with Asa, but she falls ill, comes home and marries her fiancé. Asa ends up marrying Adele, the step-daughter of the Moskat family patriarch Meshulam.

Already there are enough names to scare away a reader, but I found the book engrossing throughout its 608 pages, though admittedly not all that much happens. The descriptions of Jewish life in Poland are well rendered but not sentimental. The wealthy characters are at a remove from the street life, and are often subjects of gossip and scorn from the lower classes.

Asa is as unromantic a romantic lead as I can imagine. He pines for Haddasah for years, treating his own wife like dirt. But when the paths are cleared and he can marry Haddasah he soon throws her over for another woman.

Singer went on to write works he is more well known for, particularly his nearly magical realist short fiction. This work, though it contains no hints of the supernatural, still stands as a powerful evocation of a time and way of life that far too few lived to remember.

This strange drama of ideas is a bit Sci-Fi (it even involves a ray gun). It would be fascinating to see it performed, as it likely has not been for around sixty years. The problem is the setting: Wilson places the action in small town America, but nearly all the drama is taking place elsewhere. What we have is five characters who talk about the despotic forces battling for control of Europe and America. An idealistic magazine publisher is constantly forced to revise or scuttle article because one faction or another objects. A philosophical guru arrives in town, seemingly so the publisher can bat ideas around with him. There is divorce and espionage, with metaphysical terror hinted at but left in a merely talky state throughout. The most baffling character is a gardener who swaps foreign accents each time he appears, finally stepping forward as “the Wandering Jew” to give a closing monologue about, uh, “What you trust in, for all your techniques, for all your mechanisms of industry and politics, is simply the brute vitality that animates the universe.” (5.5 of 10)

I never got around to reading much of Asimov’s fiction, beyond his famous stories “Nightfall” and his series of futuristic detective novels beginning with “The Caves of Steel.” In fact, I only recently read “The Foundation Trilogy,” the work for which he is best known. It appeared as a run of linked short stories and novellas in the pages of Astounding Magazine throughout the 1940s that were collected into three books in the early 50s. Asimov would revisit the universe he’d created decades later, when he returned to writing Science Fiction, having abandoned it for quite a few years to concentrate on popular science books. The books of his later years were dedicated to connecting the books from the 40s and 50s into a Future History, starting with the robot stories (collected in “I, Robot”) and novels, continuing to the Galactic Empire books, and ending with the Foundation Series, which charts the decline and fall of the empire and the preservation of its values throughout the long dark ages that follow.

“Pebble in the Sky” was Asimov’s first published novel and it is grouped with the Galactic Empire books. It is a somewhat incoherent story in which a present day Earthman is transported into a strange distant future where Earth, now a radioactive planet, is nearly enslaved to the Empire. Of course scientists and researchers are the heroes of the novel and the action moves in the jerky, accelerated manner of much early SF, with many philosophical and scientific discussions taking main stage, while actual events and drama are barely described.

The idea appears here, as it later did in Battlestar Galactica and probably a thousand other places, that humanity has colonized the galaxy and forgotten where its original home world even is. Of course, the Earth is a dying, radioactive place, but it must be saved!

1. Cornell Woolrich- “Fright”

A man is about marry, when a drunken fling comes back at him in the form of a blackmailing would-be femme fatale. Our protagonist, however, proves to be a bit more fatal than she is. He takes his new bride to a new city, hoping to outrun his crime, but his guilt and fear cause him to see detectives behind every smile. An outstanding psychological noir reprinted as part of the Hard Case crime series. (7.4/10)

2. William Demby- Beetlecreek

Beetlecreek is an excellent, heartbreaking, slightly Faulknerian novel about race and loneliness. A white recluse and former carnival worker, Bill Trapp, chases off a group of African-American boys stealing apples from his property. One of the boys, Johnny, remains behind, and Bill breaks a silence of many years. Bill begins slowly and naively to reach out to the his black neighbors who have long labeled him a weirdo, who have thrown rocks at him, becoming first the toast of the town for a donation of pumpkins to the black church and then reverting to an object of scorn after he hosts a tea party for a group of young girls, some white and some black. (8.3 of 10)

3. Edmond Hamilton- City at the World’s End

When a super-atom bomb sends a small town a million years into the future, to an abandoned and radioactive Earth, the interplanetary forces arrive to helpfully evacuate these new arrivals to a safe world, only to run into Tea Party-ish resistance from the yokels who refuse to leave their home planet and take up arms. It is up to the scientists to save the day and make Earth a livable environment once again. (5 of 10)

4. Edmund Crispin- Frequent Hearses (American title: Sudden Vengeance)

Crispin brings his non-sleuth Gervase Fen into the film world, as a consultant on a movie about Alexander Pope. Of course an actress ends up dead (by her own hand) but then others begin to drop dead quite unwillingly. There is a tense and well-played stalking scene through a maze garden. (6.7 of 10)

5. Henry Nash Smith- The Virgin Land

A pioneering work of what came to be known as American Studies. Smith takes on the myth of the American West, as it was built in the 19th century by Penny Dreadful novelists feeding the tastes of city dwelling Easterners for tales of Leatherstocking heroics and rugged individualism. (8.5 of 10)

6. Lionel Trilling- The Liberal Imagination

Essays on Literature and politics by one of greatest critics of the 20th century. Subjects include Henry James, Faulkner, the Kinsey Report, the Partisan Review, and many others. Trilling returns again and again to his point that good politics do not create good literature (and in fact they may harm a writer’s imagination, leading him from the savagery and selfishness that faciltates great writing.) (9.5 of 10)

Simenon’s Frank Friedmaier is a Frenchman living under the Nazi occupation, or perhaps he is a German living under Allied occupation-—it is never made clear, and the character’s names (Kromer, Timo, Lotte) blur matters of nationality. Since Frank is apolitical and certainly not a patriot, where his oppressors come from means little to him. They are there. That is the situation. When he murders an occupation officer, it is not as a partisan, but merely to “lose his virginity”, as he puts it: to kill his first man, so that he may be more like his drinking buddies, who claim to have strangled their lovers for no reason, or killed to facilitate other crimes. They kill not out of passion or rage, but of indifference. Whether in war or in peace it is a man’s role to kill at least one other person and perhaps many. Frank is happy to see his crime blamed on a neighbor with a suspicious violin case, and he wishes for, an eventually gets, a green card that allows him to move through the city at will. The sight of the card makes the occupiers shrink away in fear. Frank kills another victim—-an old lady who recognizes him while he robs her house—-but his most disturbing crime is the false seduction and pimping out of Sissy, a young girl in his building.

It is too easy to conclude that Frank represents an amorality brought about by oppression. He is a monster who could operate under any flag. But the way in which he is dealt with—-by his neighbors, who fear turning him in because of his connections; by the authorities: his ultimate downfall is due not to his murders but to his link to some money stolen from an occupation authority safe and his strange interrogations seem to be about one department getting dirt on another-—do reflect the madness of country under the heel of an outside force.

Frank is a brutal creation, somewhat like Genet’s murderous protagonists but lacking their claims of passion. He lives in his mother’s brothel, and sex is something he takes from whichever woman happens to be nearby. He begins dating Sissy, but his motive is only to provoke her father and to find out if she is a virgin, the information he needs in order to calculate her worth. When he stonewalls his interrogators it is not out of pride, but spite. No one should be allowed to ask questions of him, no matter which uniform they wear.

There are hints of Kafka’s “The Trial”, but Frank is certainly no innocent man. What is strange here is that those in authority are not at all interested in punishing him for his true crimes.

(Note: I was interested to find out that “Dirty Snow” was written while Simenon was living for two years in my hometown, Tucson, AZ, and writing “westerns.”)

A light marriage farce in which characters call one another “monkey.” Great. The barely adult children of two former lovers (both now widowed) announce their engagement after a bit of sleuthing to make sure they aren’t actually half-siblings. The parents, who are still in love, do their passive aggressive best to keep the marriage from happening. Green was a master of a certain kind of British comedy—more Waugh than Wodehouse. Appropriately reissued by Dalkey Archive Press.