Kurt Vonnegut- Armageddon in Retrospect

 Armageddon in Retrospect

Kurt Vonnegut

 2009 (Posthumous)

“Reading and writing are in themselves subversive acts. What they subvert is the notion that things have to be the way they are, that you are alone, that no one has ever felt the way you have.”

Kurt Vonnegut is one of my favourite authors of all time, but I haven't read one of his books in a few years, thanks to running through his most popular novels during my late adolescence. Armageddon in Retrospect, the first of many posthumous collections of material from the prolific postmodern satirist, was a great reminder of how individually brilliant he was, and one that, through its selection of short stories, really gets to the heart of what the great man's work was really about. Though Vonnegut's famous short novels (such as, most obviously, the amazing Slaughterhouse-Five) wandered into the genre of sci-fi on a whim, at the crux of the matter was Vonnegut's own real life experiences during the Second World War; where he was captured as a prisoner of war by the Nazi's and incarcerated in a POW camp in Dresden. While he was there, the allies bombed most of the beautiful city to ruins. As a result, the POW's were sent out by their captors to deal with the thousands of dead bodies. Seems like the kind of thing that might leave a mark on a person.

The collection opens with the transcript of a speech Vonnegut was to deliver on stage in his native Indianapolis, but which he couldn't thanks to inconveniently dying. It's a good speech, entertaining, self-deprecating and poignant, but it's really just there for its importance as probably the last thing he ever wrote. This is followed by a letter written to his family written in 1945, the collection jumping back in time in the appropriate manner of Slaughterhouse-Five's Billy Pilgrim. There's not often the opportunity for posthumous author collection editors to make a clever mark on their work, but whoever put this one together was altogether pretty smart. After that comes an essay entitled Wailing Shall Be In All Streets, a short, direct essay about Vonnegut's time in Dresden. It's powerful, to-the-point, and more directly analytical than the typical style of his fiction.

The rest of the collection is comprised of pieces of short fiction, of varying origin and interest. When I criticise Vonnegut here I don't mean to do so of his writing; that is typically impeccable, full of the confident air of an experienced and masterful writer. As proven by novels like The Sirens of Titan and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (an unrecognised classic, in my opinion), Vonnegut has as wide as an imagination as anyone, hence his regular travails into science fiction. The problem for me with a couple of stories in this collection, such as Great Day and the eponymous Armageddon in Retrospect was that Vonnegut's imagination runs so wild that his characters and plots suffer. Don't get me wrong; I wouldn't want to change the man's writing in any way since it's this imagination that allows him to hit his greatest heights, but as a result it's fair to say that some of his stories are a bit messy.

Others are much more entertaining and poignant. Happy Birthday, 1951 is a gem of a short story about a man protecting a young boy during wartime. Just You and Me, Sammy is the best story of the lot (in my opinion, of course), going back to the ruins of Dresden to tell the tale of a group of POW's and their untrustworthy liaison with the guards. Only Vonnegut knew how much of this tale was based on true events and he wrote it as fiction, but the obvious ambiguity adds an intended slice of intrigue, tension and realism that's kept in check by a believable series of events and a great revelatory ending. As far as I'm concerned the absolute best twentieth century US literature emanates from the pen of authors mixing reality with fiction, following the development of a nation through mostly-realistic depictions of its variety of life in the manner of Kurt Vonnegut, Charles Bukowski and Jack Kerouac among others. Armageddon in Retrospect certainly isn't the best of Kurt Vonnegut, and for all I know so far it might not even be the best of his posthumously published work, but regardless it's still sublime stuff thanks to the sheer strength of Vonnegut's voice. This might be naive, but I simply can't imagine anyone not liking (or at least appreciating) the work of one of the most naturally-gifted counter-cultural authors of all time.

Paul Auster- The Art of Hunger

The Art of Hunger: 
Essays, Prefaces, Interviews, The Red Notebook

Penguin

Paul Auster

1993

Other Paul Auster Reviews- The Invention of Solitude - The Country of Last Things - Moon Palace - The Art of Hunger - Mr. Vertigo - Timbuktu - The Book of Illusions - Oracle Night - Invisible

“In the end, the art of hunger can be described as an existential art. It is a way of looking death in the face, and by death I mean death as we live it today: without God, without hope of salvation. Death as the abrupt and absurd end of life”

It's an obvious sign that you're obsessed with a particular author when you get unreasonably excited at the thought of reading their miscellany. Things like essays, unfinished scripts, correspondence and interviews might seem self-indulgent or irrelevant by people not quite so obsessed, but to you each individual random article is a potential goldmine of revelation. There are only a few authors in my collection who I've cared enough about to buy their assorted leftover crap, such as Douglas Adams' posthumous The Salmon of Doubt, Terry Pratchett's recent A Blink of the Screen, and, the master of extra-curricular collections, George Orwell's Shooting an Elephant. As anyone who's ever looked at this blog more than once might see, Paul Auster easily ranks alongside those greats as someone who's entire bibliography must be mine.

In many ways I think Paul Auster is potentially the ideal author for such a collection, since the works in his bibliography are extremely self-referential, drawing upon Auster's self-confessed obsessions (questions of identity and chance) and weaving them around absorbing narratives that always encourage the reader to think. He also a massive student of literature himself; each of his books is influenced by a seemingly limitless number of classic and cult classic authors whom laid the path out for Auster to re-imagine and re-invigourate. It's Auster's studentship that provides the foundation for this collection The Art of Hunger, released early on in Auster's career as a novelist but far enough into his life to be able to select a range of his non-fiction written from the 1970's onwards.

As indicated by its subheading, The Art of Hunger is split into four sections based on format. The first section collects a large selection of critical essays on literature, and was undoubtedly the section which dragged the most in certain places. Heavy critical literary analysis is never really fun to read, even if you're a fan of the subject matter. I hate to admit my own ignorance on this sort of thing, but I'd never read any of the main prose texts Auster wrote about in these pieces,  and while they each began on an interesting note, Auster's tendency to assume reader knowledge regarding the fairly obscure people and movements doesn't help maintain interest. Despite the heaviness of these essays, there are some interesting indications as to how Auster developed many of his ideas. The essays on poets and poetry, meanwhile, completely lost me since I just can't get into poetry. There's also an excellent article on French street performing legend Phillipe Petite that I very much enjoyed. 

The second section, the self-explanatory 'Prefaces', did nothing for me, since the majority of it was one Auster preface to a poetry collection that I couldn't begin to care about. It was the third section, 'Interviews', that gave me more of what I wanted; insight into the imagination and creative process behind some of my favourite books. One particularly long interview from 1990 sees Auster ruminating over the inspirations both direct and subconscious for his novels up to that point, from his autobiographical debut The Invention of Silence to the brilliant Moon Palace- as an aside, I was curious but not shocked to discover that his second fiction, In the Country of Last Things was something he started writing as a college student and eventually returned to after making his name.

The final section with the much more interesting title of 'The Red Notebook'  is the highlight of the book. It's comprised as a collection of short memoirs from Auster's life, each barely longer than a few pages, where the author highlights curious incidences that drove him to contemplate the powers of coincidence. Some are perhaps much less impressive than others, but the cumulative effect very much establishes the basis for one of Auster's obsessions that he toys with in his novels; specifically regarding the power of chance to change the course of an individual's life. Split into very small chapters, one includes Auster further extrapolating on the random phone call that inspired the beginning of City of Glass (first part of The New York Trilogy). It's far from Auster's best work, but it's a bemusing, thoughtful short piece, and the hidden gem I was hoping for when I picked this book up.

That's not to say that without it The Art of Hunger would be unenjoyable, but the more relaxing ending took my overall enjoyment of the book up a notch. Still, I wouldn't recommend it to anybody without a real attachment to Auster's bibliography since it's a rather self-indulgent compendium, but I did find it mostly interesting.

Charles Bukowski- Notes of a Dirty Old Man

Notes of a Dirty Old Man

Virgin

 Charles Bukowski

1969

Other Bukowski Reviews; Post Office - Factotum - Women - Ham on Rye - Tales of Ordinary Madness - Notes of a Dirty Old Man

"no pain means the end of feeling; each of our joys is a bargain with the devil

***

the difference between Art and Life is that Art is more bearable."

After exposing myself to the drug that is Bukowski for the first time with the seminal Post Office, I knew I'd probably love everything he'd ever written. Naturally it took me about a year to start reading more, but by god I've done it, and here's a hastily written review to prove it. I've got three other Bukowski novels in the cabinet now, so I can safely predict that I'll finish reading the complete Bukowski in about forty-two years.

As has been shown here, I'm a fan of reading various collected editions of shorter works by a favourite author, like Orwell, Thompson and Sir Terry, for example, and there's something about the unrelenting power and pace of Bukowski's prose that I felt would make Notes of a Dirty Old Man a memorable read at the very least. One of a few Bukowski compilations, this edition compiles fifty-seven editions of his column published in L.A.'s' short-lived tabloid Open City, published from '67 to '69. Each of the short articles is at least as surreal as the previous one, and I can only imagine and dream of reading it in the original weekly installments. Reading them consecutively as they're published here is almost an overwhelming experience.

As he is widely known for, Bukowski uses his page space to tell kaleidoscopic visions of his real life experiences, with snarling, aggressive narration. Many of the stories are almost completely obscene, and vary in their narrative coherency. On a few separate occasions Bukowski proclaims his disdain for the work of some of his contemporaries, particularly William Burroughs, though it was quickly apparent to me that much of Bukowski's presentation resembles the style of Naked Lunch, in their bizarre odysseys of semi-recognisable beatnik culture mired in surreal expressions of obscenity.

Bukowski is at heart a poet, and much of my enjoyment of this book comes from the power and rhythm of each of his sentences, where sanity is sacrificed for art. As such I read this book in small portions, finding it works better to savour a briefer taste of the strangeness. It was still over quickly though, as I find Bukowski strangely comfortable to read despite the aggression and downbeat exultation of twisted hedonism.

I think I've come over a bit wordy today, I might need a lie down. 

Hunter S. Thompson- The Great Shark Hunt- Strange Tales from a Strange Time

The Great Shark Hunt- Strange Tales from a Strange Time

Picador Press

  Hunter S. Thompson

1979 (Collected)

“I've always considered writing the most hateful kind of work. I suspect it's a bit like fucking, which is only fun for amateurs. Old whores don't do much giggling.”

“In a nation run by swine, all pigs are upward-mobile and the rest of us are fucked until we can put our acts together: not necessarily to win, but mainly to keep from losing completely.” 

First of all, Hunter S. Thompson is probably the most quotable author I know, and settling on a quote for this review was really hard, so I went with two. Secondly, this is the fifth installment in my frantic (well, ish) attempt to catch up with the list of books I'd read and not reviewed, which puts me more than half way there. For a lazy writer like me, this is somewhat of an achievement.

Anyway, this brings me to my latest review and it's my second Hunter S. Thompson one, after Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72. If you can remember, or just clicked the link and trawled through my rambling nonsense, I wasn't as much of a fan of that book as I'd like to be, though I did gain a positive impression of it overall. Basically the deal with that one is that I frantically admire, adore and worship Thompson's ability to select his vocabulary and manipulate his prose like a true genius, like a modern-day-drug addled Thomas de Quincy (he who wrote the book of which I stole and adjusted the title of for this blog) or Joseph Conrad (Thompson's quest to track down Ricard Nixon reminded my of the hunt for Kurtz in Heart of Darkness)- I like him that much. It's just the topic matter that I don't care enough about; like when Paul Auster inserts an article about baseball in a novel I'm enjoying.

The Great Shark Hunt- Strange Tales from a Strange Time is somewhat like Campaign Trail '72 in that both are collections of Thompson articles and columns from a set period. The latter was a pre-planned series following one topic, but this collection is far more open, collecting the author's most notable work from the late fifties until the end of the seventies, for famous publications such as Rolling Stone, Playboy & The New York Times as well as some very early articles writing for the US air force.

The subjects of these angrily-written, expletive-ridden, extravagant prose filled articles are generally the things that Thompson was most interested in. This means lots of articles about politics, and about the world of politics. Nixon and Jimmy Carter are constant targets of aggressive analysis, as is the Watergate scandal of course. Altogether the politics encompasses around half of the book, which I had mixed feelings about. As in Campaign Trail, I learned a little and enjoyed a little more about the 70's US politics scene, but the aspects that I enjoyed (namely Thompson's ability to portray the world in the way he does) were swamped by a deluge of names of people and societies that I've never heard of before, and so the deep context alienated me as a reader somewhat.

Everything else, though was very entertaining and interesting. The first part of the book is short but intriguing, containing a selection of Thompson's air force work. The character within his writing is totally clear and identifiable, but it's the thought of Thompson writing for the establishment (and failing to meet their standards) which is interesting. Part two of the book is the politics stuff. Some of it is taken directly from Campaign Trail and included as extracts, which is basically just a way of ripping the buying reader off. The third part of the book was the one that appealed to me most, as it avoids politics and instead focuses on travel and culture; looking at the beat generation, at South America. The book concludes with a focus on Thompson's gonzo influence, and the Fear and Loathing name.

This book isn't going to appeal to many people who pluck it randomly from the shelf, and, ironically, it'll never be as recognised as the amazing Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, but it's definitely the place to go for newer fans of Thompson who've just finished Raoul Duke's story, and also for readers particularly into the post-beat movement. While there are plenty of great full novels from that period, these shorter snippets of encapsulated life offer a manic, ingenious, and unique view into a fascinating artistic world.

George Owell- Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays

Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays

Penguin

George Orwell

1950 (Collected)

Other Orwell Reviews- Burmese Days - A Clergyman's Daughter - Homage to Catalonia - Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays

 "The enemies of intellectual liberty always try to present their case as a plea for discipline versus individualism. The issue truth-versus-untruth is as far as possible kept in the background. Although the point of emphasis may vary, the writer who refuses to sell his opinions is always branded as a mere egoist. He is accused, that is, either of wanting to shut himself up in an ivory tower, or of making an exhibitionist display of his own personality, or of resisting the inevitable current of history in an attempt to cling to unjustified privileges."
- The Prevention of Literature (1946)

With my perusal of George Orwell's bibliography of fiction almost finished (well, aside from Burmese Days which I have sitting on the pile), I was really excited to visit my first collection with essays. Orwell is obviously a very well known and appreciated essayist, and besides that much of his appeal to me within his fictions (I'm specifically thinking of A Clergyman's Daughter and Keep the Aspidistra Flying as well as 1984) is his ability to convert the most salient, entertaining and insightful points of a quality, passionate essay into his fiction without too much trouble, seemingly effortlessly both enriching the story and further establishing his sociopolitical viewpoints.

Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays is a very popular compendium of around twenty Orwell essays of differing length and subject. As an aside, it slightly irritates me that I didn't get a hold of a more complete, chronologically accurate collection of the complete Orwell, but I suppose that gives me something to do in the future. Now, to state the absolutely obvious, the variety of subjects, subject length, in-depth analysis and whimsy (or lack of) is sure to effect the reader's enjoyment of each individual essay. Personally, while I'm very glad I read each essay and certainly learned a lot, it was the extended length (and, to a certain extent) subjects of two essays in this collection which left me feeling a little bored and disinterested temporarily, while most of the shorter pieces were utterly fantastic.

Black + White= Cooler

To get the less-interesting (to me) out of the way first, I wasn't particularly interested in the 60-page plus critical analysis of Charles Dickens, entitled simply Dickens. Without meaning to go on a distracting diatribe, I did go on a bit of a Dickens binge in my late teens, but gave up after eight or so books due to the increasing feeling of boredom I felt with each new book. In fairness, Orwell's essay is certainly no fawning fan worship or anything like that, instead seriously studying the social reflections and interpretations of the then one hundred year novels with insight and care. I just didn't find it that interesting, and its length distorted the collection somewhat. The other essay I found uninteresting was Politics vs. Literature- An Examination of Gulliver's Travels, which is probably because I've never read Gulliver's Travels, and can't really be bothered to.

Now, the good stuff; pretty much everything else. The title essay, Shooting an Elephant is an autobiographical snippet about Orwell in Burma working as a policeman, on a day where an elephant went rogue and Orwell had to shoot it. Mostly lacking in political analysis and doom and gloom, it's an enthralling and dramatic piece that's interesting and emotional, and gives a great insight into the mind and ethics of the author. The Decline of the English Murder is another extremely famous essay, which satirises in a very black way the representation of real life crime stories in the English press of the time. How the Poor Die is an extremely bleak autobiographical look at a Parisian hospital Orwell visited in the 20's, and provides another fascinating insight into the mind of Orwell.

I very much enjoyed the numerous essays on literature aside from Dickens and Swift; Bookshop Memories might be my favourite of everything collected here, and is accompanied by Boys Weeklies and Good Bad Books as charming, thoughtful and joyously written essays on popular literature and personal experiences on it. One of the things I love about reading Orwell is that he leaves his heart on each page; you can trace through his bibliography and get a full impression of his personal development and thoughts throughout the years, leading eventually to the epic 1984. Each snippet collected in Shooting an Elephant adds towards that, giving a fuller and fuller picture of one of the most important authors of all time. I would heartily recommend this collection because it offers a variety of moods and themes, but consists of great, great writing from a unique and talented mind.