Missing Review Catch-Up III- International Edition

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The Dragon and Other Stories (1913-1937)
Yevgeny Zamyatin

Penguin Modern Classics

After Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita failed to melt the solid wall of ice standing between myself and the great unexplored mass of classic Russian literature, I wasn't to be put off so quickly. Rather than run towards the possible safety of recommended heavyweights like Dostoyevsky and friends, I rebounded in the only way I know how- something completely random, that in this case just happens to also be pretty obscure. The Dragon and Other Stories stood out with its odd cover, and of course Penguin Modern Classics status. Everything I learned about Zamyatin (not much- Russian dissident who wrote a letter to Stalin so he could leave Russia) came from a quick scour of the internet, so I went in to the book mostly ignorant. Sometimes a random book read at a random time can be a game-changer.

But not this time. Again I totally failed to connect with a piece of Russian literature, to the point where it'd be stupid to even try to write a proper review, hence this short one appearing here just to sooth my obsessive compulsiveness. Zamyatin's various short (and less short) stories collected in this posthumous volume describe with authority seemingly-meaningful tales that drift between the harsh realities of Russia's past and then-present and some more fantastical parables that take on dark fairy-tale like scenarios. I think since my knowledge of Russian history is confined to... um, no, can't think of anything... nothing, then, I was probably the wrong person to appreciate the layered allegories that I'm sure permeate Zamyatin's dense stories.

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Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words (2005)
Jay Rubin

Vintage

This book, on the other hand, I was very tempted to write a full-length (by my standards, anyway) review for, only to decide at the last moment that its content and topic might just be too obscure to be interesting . Jay Rubin is a very familiar name for English language-reading Murakami fans, for being perhaps the most prominent of all yet to translate the author into our language (as well as translating Ryunosuke Akutagawa's Rashomon collection), and so it seemed only natural for Rubin to write a book about his life and works. Part biography, part critical interpretation, Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words looks at the inspiration, creative process and public reaction to every Murakami novel, as well as his most important short stories.

I'd straight away recommend this to any serious Murakami fan looking to put his work into a greater context. The biographical information is interesting, though not particularly in depth- personally I prefer this to be the case, as Murakami's mystique works better without the obvious-in-hindsight revelations that he's actually a fairly normal man. As someone who pays little-to-no attention to the contemporary Western literary scene, let alone the Japanese one, it was also interesting to read more information about Japanese literary history, especially Murakami's influences and contemporary critics.

The one major criticism I found was that the book attempts to cover too much ground in too little space, particularly in regards to Rubin's interpretation of Murakami's fiction. I often found myself disagreeing with Rubin's ideas, but that made them no less interesting, and so the problem was that Murakami's longer works really need more space to accurately discuss. Rubin's reluctance to persist with spoilers also damaged his analysis for me, especially since I can't imagine there are many people who'd read this without already having devoured Murakami's own bibliography. Other than that, this was an enjoyable and informative take on an author very deserving of further public discussion. 

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The Immoralist (1902)
André Gide

  

Penguin Modern Classics

Man, French literature is just weird. Everything past the nineteenth century seems to have existentialism burnt in to its very core, and each author I read has an unstoppable fixation with looking at the worst parts of human nature in one way or another. Everything's constantly intense, everyone guilty of something, and nothing ever gets resolved neatly. Andre Gide's turn of the century novella The Immoralist was decried for years due to its homoerotic overtones, though reading it over a hundred years later it seems hard to see what the fuss was all about. Instead this novel to me, rather than focusing on the protagonist Michel's growing attraction to men was really all about his generally horrible treatment of his wife, Marceline.

The plot of the novella revolves around Michel recovering from a near-fatal bout of tuberculosis, on his Tunisian honeymoon with Marceline, who has lovingly nursed him back to health and attended to his every whim. Michel responds by re-discovering himself in the arms of young Arab men, and waxing lyrical on the new realizations he understands about life. I couldn't connect with him whatsoever, and thus the story was lost on me. Gide's work is well-written in translation at least, with an extensive vocabulary and poetical nature, but it's contents said little to me. Michel came across as such an unlikable character, with his over-bearing self-realizations clashing with his actual behaviour, that I was the most disappointed I have been by a piece of French literature.

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Georges Simenon- The Blue Room

The Blue Room

Orion Publishing Crime Masterworks

Georges Simenon

1955

I went into The Blue Room almost completely blindly, aside from the publishing line. Orion Publishing's Crime Masterworks series first caught my attention as an offshoot of their Sci-Fi Masterworks books, a numbered collection of purportedly the greatest science fiction novels of all time, through which I first read Richard Keyes' Flowers for Algenon  and Kurt Vonneguts The Sirens of Titan. Later, through the crime series, I read James M. Cain's Double Indemnity and immediately knew that if crime could be this good I needed more of it.

When I randomly found The Blue Room and two other crime books from the series, I snapped them up. Now, after reading this one example from Georges Simenon's extensive bibliography, it's clear that although I didn't enjoy it anywhere near as much as Double Indemnity it's opened my eyes to the wider possibilities of the genre. While Paul Auster's New York Trilogy redefined the possibilities of a postmodern private eye, the image of a classic early century gumshoe is probably overbearing when it comes to other varied styles of crime fiction.

What should've registered with me in the first place was that Georges Simenon is French, and while I don't like to generalise an entire nation's literature, I think it's safe to say that many twentieth century French novels hold Sartre-built existentialism at their core. Simenon uses the experiences of his densely-layered characters to explore the gamut of human emotion from romance to tragedy, surrounding it with a very precisely constructed crime story relying on tension created by the narrator's drip-feeding the reader crucial information, as the story is told through a series of interspersed flashbacks.

As the story begins, in the present Tony Falcone is recounting his extra-marital affair with Andree Despierre, hidden from his family and her husband, formed of scheduled liasons in the blue room of the Hotel des Voyageurs. The bulk of the novel is taken up by these testimonies, introduced by Tony's responses or train of thought, but narrated from the third person. That by itself isn't complicated, but Simenon chooses to switch from present to past incredibly abruptly, causing my first problems as the sudden changes in chronology felt unpleasantly jarring. This continues throughout the book, and does become less confusing as the story is filled out, but was a serious annoyance for at least the first half

Simenon's tight control of his narration, keeping even the slightest details of the crime secretive all the while loading the characters with motive, take time to bare fruit. When this eventually happens and the full extent of the plot is laid out, Simenon's approach comes across very well indeed, giving the reader a sense of satisfaction like filling out the last pieces of a puzzle. My overall outlook on The Blue Room was certainly swung from dissatisfied to happily bemused by the last twenty pages or so, and the credit is all due to Simenon's careful planning of that. In the meantime, he uses Tony and Andree to agonise over the morals of love and infidelity, with the delicacy of a philosopher. His style reminded me of Czech author Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being), though unfortunately without the overall same quality of prose. Simenon is good, but not great in this regard, and much of his hard work is undone by his infernal framing issues.

In the end, it becomes a question of whether or not to value the high quality of an ending above the drabness that leads to it. There's no real answer to that, I suppose, just an individual certain feeling dependent on the reader. I know that there were times I found The Blue Room to be a real drag, but that perseverance made it feel worth it to me by partially changing some of the context of what I'd read. That being said, I gave The Blue Room continual chances simply based on the publishers, so maybe I'm not the best example. Whatever the case, The Blue Room was an interesting curio of a book, a memorable experiment in style sure to stick with me, but unlikely to make me seek out any other work from Georges Simenon.

Jean Cocteau- Les Enfants Terribles

Les Enfants Terribles

Jean Cocteau

1929

“At all costs the true world of childhood must prevail, must be restored; that world whose momentous, heroic, mysterious quality is fed on airy nothings, whose substance is so ill-fitted to withstand the brutal touch of adult inquisition.”

Oh boy, here we go; a new attempt to review a book that, honestly, I don't quite know what to make of. Eagle-eyed readers may have noticed through the quitegoodreads box, hidden somewhere down the right-hand side of this page, that on Goodreads (that ironic bastion of *cough* quality book ratings) I hastily rated Les Enfants Terribles three out of five stars, which is technically above average (if we assume that average should be two-and-a-half stars); but that was almost entirely due to the quality of Jean Cocteau's translated prose. That, by itself, is very, very high in quality, written in the intellectual, vocabular style of prose masters such Joseph Conrad or W. Somerset Maugham- essentially the type of outstanding sentence-structure and word choices that I desperately wish I could emulate, requiring a naturally genius mind that I doubt can ever be taught. A lot of credit must go to translator Rosamond Lehmann for conveying Cocteau's wordy style in a very fluid, natural-sounding manner.

So then, if I respected and enjoyed Cocteau's authorship so much, what's wrong with this book? To be honest, I'm still not quite sure, other than to say that the plot establishment, development and conclusion to this book seemed so very odd to me that it left my critical faculties in turmoil. It didn't help me that, before I started reading and researching, I had no idea whom Jean Cocteau was, nor what this book was about. I bought my copy on a whim (at the same time I purchased Less Than Zero) because it was cheap, published as a Vintage Classic, and undoubtedly French and strange. This latter part was the key, since I've partially explored and enjoyed works by Albert Camus, Jean Paul Sartre, and the admittedly-not-French but very Euro-similar Milan Kundera in the past. I'm by no means an expert in philosophy (barely a novice, in fact), but I do enjoy the vague sensations of existentialism and was hoping for more of that sort of thing.

Cocteau is cool.

What I got with Les Enfants Terribles (which was apparently first released in the US as The Holy Terrors for some reason) was something rather different; essentially a very strange psychological character-based thriller, starring a very small group of characters. The lead characters, and terrible children of the title, are Paul and Elisabeth, a brother and sister with no father, a bed-ridden mother, and exorbitant wealth. The key to the story as it develops is something that Paul and Elisabeth call 'The Game', which is essentially a concentrated mutual effort to annoy and upset each other through any mental games necessary, usually involving innocent, unwitting foil such as their friends Gerard and Agatha. The winner of the game is the sibling able to frustrate the other the most by getting in the last word and presenting themselves as superior, inevitably leading to the tragic ending to the novel (which I won't spoil, but which readers should be able to see coming fairly easily).

Paul and Elisabeth's game becomes more intensely psychological as the book goes on, callously playing with the lives of their friends without much thought. As a result, both of the characters came across as villainous to me, leaving me caring very little about their ultimate fate. To be fair, I think Cocteau's ultimate goal was to leave the lasting impression that all of the children in this story are essentially victims of circumstance, where, despite being granted all of the material wealth they could ever need, the lack of parental love and moral guidance eventually warps them both into irredeemable psychopaths with no understanding of the consequences of their actions. It occurs to me now that it perhaps wasn't coincidence that I found Les Enfants Terribles and Easton Ellis' Less Than Zero on the same shelf.

As I often do when reviewing work by an author whom I'm experiencing for the first time, I feel somewhat inadequate in attempting to properly analyse what Cocteau, an early 20th century renaissance man, was fully trying to achieve. In Cocteau's case that's perhaps going to remain a problem, since Enfants is really his only piece of prose fiction with enough of a reputation to be widely available in English; and I'm not enough of a poetry, theatre, or French cinema fan to search out his other work. In essence, though, Enfants did leave a notable impression on me due to the power of its ideas and quality of its prose, but I can't say I enjoyed it in the way I would've like to. I suppose that might have been the effect Cocteau was looking for with this book; not to be loved as a favourite by anyone, but instead to be remembered for its oddness by everyone, with its key ideas slowly permeating the mind of the reader over time to leave a lasting impression forever.

L-Space- Can I Play the Piano Any More?

 

Just a quick, lazy post to draw attention to a great article on the BBC News website entitled The French Spy who wrote The Planet of the Apes, taking a fascinating look at the life and works of Planet of the Apes author Pierre Boulle. When I reviewed that sci-fi book almost one year ago now (where does the time go?) I was massively impressed by what I found to be a fantastic mix of sci-fi and classic Conan Doyle-esque adventure fiction. It was not a surprise, then, to find out through the BBC article that Boulle was a self-professed anglophile who loved all things literary and English. It was also fun to discover that his literary heroes were Joseph Conrad and W. Somerset Maugham, two men very highly regarded for their immaculate English prose, written of course in their second language.

I must get a hold of some more Boulle novels. In the meantime I have a review of Charles Bukowski's Factotum coming up sometime in the next forty to fifty years.

Jean-Dominique Bauby- The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

Jean-Dominique Bauby
1997

“I am fading away. Slowly but surely. Like the sailor who watches his home shore gradually disappear, I watch my past recede. My old life still burns within me, but more and more of it is reduced to the ashes of memory.”

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly was a book I picked up on a whim, mostly because it looked like an interesting and very quick read with the promise of some modern day French existentialism. I've long been trying to break down serious works of philosophy, with very limited success, and adding to my frustrations in the past were books including Albert Camus' The Plague and Jean-Paul Satre's Nausea- two books and authors known as the masters of existentialism, but whose work seemed too alien for me, though perhaps I would've fared better with the help of a tutor or some basic research rather than just diving-in head first as I did.

In the past I have  enjoyed the existentialist novels of Milan Kundera, (specifically the classic The Unbearable Lightness of Being), as well as the various elements that pop up in other literature from time to time, partially because the comparatively recent releases combine with a more approachable and humane narration, but more likely because my interests in the genre are amateurish at best and I need all the help I can get. Jean-Dominique Bauby's autobiographical modern world classic seemed to fit in to the (made up by me) category of light existential philosophy with everything going for it to begin with.

I want to see more of that jacket.

At only 140 pages (with larger than usual margins in my edition), as an autobiography it's very short, but this is really the tale of the author's second life, a tragic, poignant and at some points even uplifting one. Jean-Domique Bauby was a successful journalist and editor in his native France until one fateful day in '95 where he suffered a huge stroke that left him with locked-in syndrome, trapping him as an almost completely immobile prisoner in his own body. From then on until the end of his life Bauby could only communicate through blinking his left eyelid, doing so at the right moment to select the right letter as an assistant read through the alphabet. Through this painstaking method he composed this book, itself primarily about his life inside the hospital since his stroke.

The main thing that struck me about this book was the quality of Bauby's prose, which is really, really good, maybe as a result of having so much free thinking time to arrange his thoughts as well as possible. The books short length was likely because of the difficulty of the writing process, but this adds to the quality too, since obviously Bauby isn't able to experience many new things while trapped in his state and to be honest I think I would've lost interest if this had been a longer treatise on the same subject- the fleeting nature of his thoughts and observations add to the ethereal ambiance overall.

I'm hesitant to praise this to the extent that I've read other reviewers do, since I think they're reaching for sympathy brownie points, but I do recommend it to anyone interested in the premise as an interesting curio that should lodge itself in the back of your mind alongside thoughts of mortality and imprisonment. It's very well written, not as depressingly sad as it could have been, and a genuine one of a kind situation encapsulating a life that we probably couldn't otherwise imagine.

Pierre Boulle- Planet of the Apes

Planet of the Apes

Vintage

 Pierre Boulle

1963

"I racked my brains to discover some sense in the events I had witnessed. I needed this intellectual exercise to escape from the despair that haunted me, to prove to myself that I was a man, I mean a man from Earth, a reasoning creature who made it a habit to discover a logical explanation for the apparently miraculous whims of nature, and not a beast hunted down by highly developed apes.”

Somewhat randomly pulling Pierre Boulle's original piece of sixties science fiction from the shelves, a quick examination led me to realise that this was an intriguing prospect in terms of looking at a franchise in relation to humble origins. Planet of the Apes, as we know it today, is a firmly established Hollywood money-maker with a selection of classic soundbites and images cemented in pop-culture history, each much parodied; one of the first things I think of when I think of Planet of the Apes is the image of Troy McClure in the lead role in 'Stop the Planet of the Apes, I Want To Get Off!', from the classic Simpsons episode A Fish Called Selma. Since then there have been two attempts to reboot the franchise, but despite that Charlton Heston is still the man most associated with the title, thanks to the original five movies. I haven't seen any of them.

It's one of those things where I've been so often assaulted with parodies of them (well, the original) that I feel like I've experienced it quite enough as it is, and I've been put off by the apparent cheesiness; the hokey, cheap-looking ape costumes, the terrible, sub-Shatner acting ability of Heston, and the sheer lunacy surrounding the whole thing. I think in that respect, the themes and cultural presence of the movie franchise in my eyes made, on quick judging-the-book-by-the-cover analysis, the book seem that much more appealing. When you simply look at the details of the novel without the larger context, it gains a huge amount of literary hipster credentials.

Translated from the French (because I am but an ignorant Englishman), Pierre Boulle's most famous future sci-fi franchise phenomenon novel is essentially a philosophical (but not overly so) adventurous pure science fiction concept that uses adventure and mystery to explore a few basic social issues; essentially turning the world upside-down to look at it from a different perspective. The plot itself moves along quickly, thrillingly, towards a thoughtful, logical conclusion (with a final twist at the very end, and it doesn't involve the Statue of Liberty), evoking stylistic similarities to many earlier luminaries of the genre.

I couldn't resist this picture.

Ulysse Mérou travels across the universe in a time-manipulating space shuttle with two science companions, to the star system of Betelgeuse, where the team discover the planet Soror, a planet with a breathable atmosphere strikingly similar to Earth. Upon landing, they discover numerous human beings living savagely in the forest, with no language, society, or intelligence. Before getting much of a chance to study the undeveloped humans, the party is attacked by a, wait for it, a pack of seemingly-intelligent, talking, clothes wearing, congo-dancing damned dirty apes. Ulysse is captured, plays dumb, and is taken to civilisation and placed in a cage at a research facility. Still hiding his true intelligence, Ulysse takes the opportunity to observe the apes, but can only guess so much without communication. In an act of narrative fortune, however, Ulysee makes a connection with a chimp scientist named Zira, and is able to learn some monkey-talk and bring his presence out into the open.

It was from this point especially that the gap between this novel and the story as it exists in modern media became most apparent. Earlier on in the novel I felt that the pacing and style of Bouelle's prose and story most reminded me of Arthur Conan Doyle, in particular The Lost World and his other Professor Challenger stories. Then I remembered Boulle's countryman Jules Verne and his famous adventure stories, and Boulle's fantasy origins became more tangible. Still though, this novel was written in the mid-sixties, and betrays its period style through the contemplative philosophical musings related to the analogous events of the novel. When Ulysse finally begins to explain himself to the ape civilization (at the most appropriately dramatic time), rather than continue along the lines of danger and adventure by having his life threatened or worse, Ulysse is rather quickly accepted into society, and spends much of the rest of the novel working with the apes, contemplating the meaning of this odd reverse species arrangement.

This considered pace secured my admiration for the book, elevating it up there with the best science fiction I have yet to experience, such as the work of Arthur C. Clarke, and Daniel Keys' Flowers for Algernon. Like the best of its genre, Planet of the Apes uses a deceptively outrageous formula to ask searching questions about the human race, but does so with style and mystery the eggs the reader on to complete it. It's at strange odds with the uber-serious tone of Rise of the Planet of the Apes, the most recent film, with the irony being that the franchise is far  from considerable as a philosophical allegory for the standing of man amongst the animals of Earth. Still, perhaps the biggest compliment I can give this novel is that despite its weightier overtones it still feels fresher and more exciting as a pure story than the massively engorged, cash-injected twenty-first century temple of decadence movies. Highest recommendation of its genre.

René Descartes- Discourse on the Method and the Meditations

Discourse on Method and the Meditations

René Descartes
1637 & 1641

"The reading of all good books is indeed like a conversation with the noblest men of past centuries who were the authors of them, nay a carefully studied conversation, in which they reveal to us none but the best of their thoughts."

Although I really enjoy dabbling in the odd bit of philosophy, picking up famous titles by legendary authors and waving them about in other people's faces so I can make myself look smarter than I am, I'm by no means any kind of expert on the subject. In the past I've picked up some famous titles that I happened to find on the shelves; essays by  Nietzsche, Spinoza and Plato and philosophical fiction from Satre, Camus and Kundera, but if anybody ever tried to quiz me on the possible deeper meanings etcetera of these texts I think I'd crawl up into a ball of tears and embarrass them into going away. I'm explaining this now so when this review fails to tell you anything relevant about René  Descartes and Discourse on Method and the Meditation you can't really complain.

This Penguin Classics edition contains Descartes two most famous pieces, along with a typical haughty introduction and a personal letter from Descartes. The first essay, published in 1637 and fully-titled Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One's Reason and of Seeking Truth in the Sciences, is one of the most important and influential works in the history of philosophy and scientific thought, and essentially involves Descartes attempting to address the world of scientific thought in relation to skepticism; by first stripping his thoughts of any preconceived established knowledge so he can tackle the title topic through a supposedly entirely clear and unbiased perspective. Much of this involves the existence of god, and Descartes elegantly argues the proof of the existence of god, though thankfully without the inclusion of typical dogma. Did he convince me? Not really, but I'm a very skeptical person.

The second essay, full and unwieldy title of Meditations on the First Philosophy in which the existence of God and the Real Distinction Between the Soul and the Body of Man are Demonstrated, published in 1641, is a metaphysical exploration summed up by its title- a thematic sequel to Discourse on the Method, Descartes explores through a series of six meditations the logical existence of god as demonstrated by the nature of the human condition. It's a lot more complicated than I can really sum up here in my clumsy prose, and, to tell you the truth, my attention on the subject completely wavered after reading so much concentrated personal logic. Anybody expecting some sort of insight into the subject please refer to the opening paragraph of this review.

Someone who went into this book looking for brilliant insight and mind-opening concepts might find them if they read it about five times alongside an open page of Sparknotes, but otherwise it's certainly not a quick read. While I find it fascinating to explore the extravagant prose and impeccably organized mental thoughts, I wasn't interested enough in the overtly religious and archaic social scientific topics, and therefore didn't really get much out of it and have very little to say here. However, since I'm on a mission to review every prose book I read, I had to do this one as well for some reason.