Moby-Dick, or The Whale

Moby-Dick or, The Whale (1851)

Herman Melville

            For the first time in my life I’m at a loss for words, unsure, for once, of what exactly my fumbling little pretensions could add to anything. Moby-Dick is arguably the greatest novel of all time and I hadn’t read it until just now, which makes me feel as though I’ve been wasting my time as a booklover. As if reading anything else has merely been dicking around. This book is usually assigned in high school but it wasn’t assigned to me for some reason. My class read something different. The Scarlet Letter, maybe. Probably the first and third period senior English classes got Moby-Dick and the second and fourth period classes got I don’t know, Pride and Prejudice or some other nonsense. Whatever it was I’m sure I hated it. What a rip-off. My teachers could have been inducting me into the mystery cults of knowledge and misanthropy and struggle and freedom and death and ART but instead they helped me waste my youth by boring me to tears with stories about the privileged and their insipid feelings. I almost feel like it’s too late for me now, like this book could have and should have come to me at a young age like a meteorite from the dark cosmos landing aflame in my lap but now I’m too old and too calloused to really appreciate or understand it. Took me a long time to get through it, too, and if anyone cares I’m sorry about that. Mr. Melville is not at fault here: I was harpooned from the first sentence. Rather I’m a very slow reader and at my ten page per day pace a 630 page book is practically Mt. Everest.

Last Evenings on Earth

Last Evenings on Earth (1997)

Roberto Bolaño

We never stop reading, although every book comes to an end, just as we never stop living, although death is certain.

            I think I first heard about Bolaño on NPR, there was maybe a little piece on 2666, and something about the Pinochet dictatorship, or about Ciudad Juarez and her murders, maybe they talked about Bolaño’s life, a little inadequate biography of sorts, in between reports on the economy (generally poor) and violence burning somewhere. I was probably driving to work when I heard it, angry about having to work, and something about the radio story must have enticed me because I soon went out and bought a copy of 2666 and probably took it to a coffee shop somewhere (I was single at the time, barely employed, and my friends all moved away a long time before and so I had little or nothing better to do) and was crucified from the first page on. I think I read it faster than I’ve read any other book of that magnitude. Though there aren’t many books the same magnitude as 2666. I remember soon after I finished it I recommended it to a coworker and one afternoon at work he had it in his hand as he was leaving for his break, and this other coworker, this real creepy guy who used to work there, who was obsessed with antediluvian lifeforms and government conspiracies, who had a lot of really bad religious tattoos (ex: a gargoyle bleeding for Christ) and who once said he preferred Asian girls because they “have bodies like twelve-year-olds”, asked what it was about, not directed at me, and I blurted “what isn’t it about?"

Man's Fate

Man’s Fate (1932)

André Malraux

Man’s Fate is the sort of book that, on paper, I should adore whole-heartedly, with every bit of my soul, but, unfortunately, that paper is not the paper this book was actually printed on. That’s some imaginary paper, some head paper. It presses all my buttons: socialist violence in a foreign country, urban guerilla warfare, state repression, proletariat control of industry, the strange aromas of somewhere I’ll never go highlighted by the tang of gunpowder, executions in the dust, and so on. I should have loved this book but something about it was so lacking. A definite case of “so close yet so far.” I’ll try to discover why I was so disappointed in this novel, and hopefully I can articulate that.

I came into it with really high expectations: I was anticipating basically The Battle of Algiers in book form but instead got a really boring political novel which isn’t what I wanted at all. The former would be amazing. The latter already clog our bookshelves. The Earth is deforested for boring political novels. Malraux managed to take a really fascinating and electric event (in this case the Shanghai Massacre, a particularly violent and nauseating episode in the Chinese Civil War) and totally suck the life out of it through an excess of adornments and a general bloat. A book like this needs to be lean, hard, and taut. It needs to run towards the entrenchments of the State with its head down and its finger on the detonator. Instead Malraux piles on extraneous characters and scenes that do little except confuse and muddle. Right after the table of contents there is a list of the principal characters. There are seventeen names, and you could easily cut out fourteen of those and the book wouldn’t be any worse for it. Ferral, the French business magnate and sexual glutton and the dissolute and affected social changeling and grifter Baron de Clappique both stand out as being completely frivolous. Only Ch’en the terrorist, Kyo the organizer, and Katov the Russian have any sense of purpose in terms of the story, and even then they are weak and undeveloped characters. I have no stake in them or their struggle, a struggle Malraux doesn’t make very clear. He either gives too much or too little information. I’m not sure which. These are characters who do things but aren’t things, if that makes any sense. Man’s Fate reads like someone explaining the plot to a violent video game, one with lots of gun violence and grenade tossing, that is punctuated by really long scenes of boring, pointless dialogue during which anyone who’s played a video game before would set the controller down and go to pee. Call of Duty: The Chinese Revolution. I hate to bring up Roberto Bolaño for the umpteenth time, but he’s my favorite writer so I compare everyone to him, but one thing I admire and adore about a Bob Bolaño story is that they are populated by people and not by characters. I think it’s a good rule to follow.

This was one of the most frustratingly uneven and amateurish novels I’ve ever read. Neither of these are death sentences for a novel, and there are plenty of great things out there that are “amateurish” that I love but Man’s Fate is not one of them. Malraux’s problem as a writer is that he doesn’t know where to focus his attention. He wastes time. He wastes words. He’ll try to shoot a target and hit one he wasn’t aiming at. He’ll move around some little stick figure of a character for several dozen pages and then knock you dead with a couple paragraphs explaining the inner turmoil of a character that is so unimportant he may as well not be there.  Maybe that’s the point (most people on this planet are so unimportant that they may as well not be there) and I’m just not getting it, but if it was it didn’t do thing one for me. I wanted this book to be so much better than it was, I wanted to love it and it just kept on letting me down. Malraux’s heart is definitely with the Communists but every word he devotes to the banal activities of some French womanizer is a word that could be better spent in the basement fixing Molotov cocktails. The imperialist fascist plutocrats of this world don’t need to be humanized, they’ve already got everything on their side. I guess what really irked me about this book is that fifty percent of it is a misapplication of energy.

Not everything about this book is bad. Malraux can do some writing, some of it stands out (but it is tragically infrequent). He can definitely turn it on but I don’t think he knew when he should. One of the things that I noticed, that must have been a part of Malraux’s plan is that the characters, the revolutionaries, really only seem to come alive when death is at hand. They wake up during conflict and violence. I think Malraux was trying to make a point about revolution, about how it asks men to sacrifice themselves for a cause, and that this sacrifice may be the most important and noteworthy thing they’ve ever done in their lives (which are miserable, tragic and short) and it’s at this point of sacrifice that they truly become men, but, unfortunately, there’s two hundred pages of boring political dialogue preceding. If it were focused on just that one point Man’s Fate would have been the flick of a switchblade behind me in an alleyway. Instead large sections of this book weren’t much more immediate than C-SPAN. Maybe I’m misreading it, or I didn’t understand Malraux’s intentions, but like I said, a good chunk of this book comes off as completely extraneous. And, since I want to spend some time on the bright side I’ll add that the book isn’t racist, which is a lot more than I expected from a novel about foreign conflict written by a Frenchman in 1932. Shit, it sometimes seems like a lot to ask from books printed today. It wasn’t even misogynistic! That was a pleasant surprise.

I’ve never had this exact feeling before but when I finished this book I immediately wished for a time machine so I could go back in time and tell Malraux how to shape this book into being what it wants to be. The skeleton is there, but the flesh is horribly mismatched. Listen, chief, I’ll say to an astonished Malraux, as I materialize in his study. I’m from 2012 and I know about books. Lemme tell you what the score is… I’ll dazzle him with future slang (chief, dude, broseph) and show him my telephone. A guy like me spends a lot of time daydreaming about time machines (at least forty-five minutes a day) but usually one daydreams about travelling to 1984 and battling cyborgs or seducing future babes on a space station, get Mary Jane 147X on the space couch, unzip her space jumpsuit... this is the first time I’ve wanted a time machine to fix a book that disappointed me. It didn’t just bore me, and it wasn’t a bad book that I can shrug off and dismiss. You know what this book was, and it just came to me, but this book was such a fucking cocktease. You take her out for dinner, she points her tits at you all night long, and then when you take her home she leaves you standing in the cold on her porch without a friend in the world besides your aching stiff lizard. The literary equivalent of blue balls.

On a personal note: I’ve read a long string of books that either didn’t really do much for me or weren’t very good. The low point was To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, which was the most godawfully pretentious and privileged book I’ve ever read in my life. It made Pride and Prejudice look like Grapes of Wrath. But it seems like this whole summer I haven’t read a book that I would call a life-changer. Nothing that will stick with me forever. The Story of the Eye was good, and The Time Machine was good, but they weren’t books that I worshipped and adored. I don’t know if it’s because I’m older now and the romance is gone but it seems like those are getting fewer and further between. Maybe I’m having some kind of mid-career slump? I don’t know, but I do know that I want to hear the warm and comforting voice of a friend. I need some Bobby Bolaño in my life is what I’m saying. Next up is one of his books of short stories, Last Evenings on Earth, and I’m very excited about it. I could say a billion words about Roberto Bolaño and I won’t stop until I do.

The Dharma Bums

The Dharma Bums (1958)

Jack Kerouac

            Ah, old Jack Kerouac: the man, the myth, the legend. When I think about Jean Louis Kerouac I almost feel like I’m trying to describe some mythological figure, like Odin or Hercules or something, an alien non-human from an ancient prehistoric time, who was subject to our own mortal failings (like the old gods of myth were) but somehow untouched by the reality of the world. Yeah, you could just go out on the long lonesome highway and live like a hobo bum and then write some books about it, get a jug of wine for a quarter and go down to the train tracks and make yourself a little camp, with a fire, roast some franks, heat up a tin of beans, anyone could do that. Sure. It’s both romantic and repulsive, which is sort of how Kerouac’s books read. He presents himself as a guy just out there to experience life, to live it more fully than any of the squares in squaresville do but who is also, at times, a monumental loser. He fails, he fucks up. He gets drunk and does stupid things.

             

As a teenager I had a deep obsession with the Beats for a good couple years running. I blame my junior year English teacher: we had to write an essay about an American poet, a fairly long essay for a high school assignment, it was like a whole research project sort of deal, she gave us a long list of poets to chose from, each with a little blurb describing the poet, and the one that described Allen Ginsberg really had my number so I chose it. She called us out one by one to announce our selections, and we weren’t allowed to chose the same poet as anyone else, so that everyone had a different topic (she was probably tired of reading thirty essays about Robert Frost) and I remember being so nervous that someone was going to pick Allen Ginsberg before me. I really wanted Allen Ginsberg to be mine. If you’ve ever played Fantasy Football you know what I’m talking about: say you’ve got a pick towards the end of the first round so you sit there nervously hoping that no one will disrupt your strategy by picking Tom Brady or Adrian Peterson ahead of you and then when your turn comes you leap up and yell (or lower your voice for suspense), “Tom Brady!” So we had a month or two to do this project and on weekends I rode the trolley to the downtown library (which is an hour and a half trolley ride from where I grew up, I was dedicated or, more likely, didn’t have anything better to do) and looked up books on the Beats, on poetry, on anything relevant. Me in the library with my dorky little canvas book bag and my dorky, awkward, shuffling walk checking out those iconic City Lights editions of Howl and Kaddish and sitting at one of the tables taking notes from some lame Critique of 20^th Century American Poetry, while the homeless men jacked off at the computers. Afterwards I’d go to this vegan punk rock Mexican restaurant that was a block up from the library and eat a burrito and read. Actually that place reminds me a lot of how I feel about the Beats now, as a grown man: I was enamored as a teen but I don’t know if I’ll ever need to go back. Last time I went, probably four or five years ago, the place had a B rating from the health department and the service was awful. Maybe my tastes changed or now I’m just seeing things as an adult. I guess back to the point: that was probably the best thing I’ve ever written in my stupid life (sucks for me) and it sparked a long-term fascination with the Beats. There’s something about the Beats, and Jack Kerouac especially, that if they catch you in the right time and place they can really hit you where you live. A real punch in the gut. It caters to or preys upon the same sort of awkward romantic teenaged impulse that would inspire one to listen to Morrissey or own a dorky little canvas book bag, full of dorky little books, that slaps against your scrawny ass when you shuffle around your deeply lame and culturally dead hometown and wish you could just get out and go somewhere else.

             

So, when I was a young adult I read several of Kerouac’s books (On the Road, Tristessa, The Subterraneans, and I think that’s about it) but this was my first time reading one as a grown man, with grown-up ideas of my own and life experiences and all that crap, and I was shocked at how different my opinion on Jack Kerouac was this time around. I still think he’s a great writer but he is definitely a very flawed one, and his flaws are the sort of things I would have ignored (or not caught at all) or romanticized earlier in my reading career but now seem quite noisy and unavoidable to me. He can expertly describe the feeling of being in one place at one time, that’s really his strength as a writer, but he fails to string all these impressions into a coherent whole. He creates something that is less than the sum of its parts. His prose is at times quite nice, very sloppy and enthusiastic, very loose, easy and free. Kerouac is sort of like a really excited guy at a party who is very into something and wants to share it with you and wants you to be into it as well. He has this sort of washed-out and faded sentimental Polaroid tone that is cloying in other writers but not so much with Kerouac. It’s very uniquely American. I don’t think he’s avante-garde or anything like that. He’s solidly American, very sentimentally American. Quite conservative in a lot of ways.  He’s basically a romantic, which is the most conservative breed of writer.

             

Unfortunately the problem with this book is that it’s basically two books, one great and the other horrible. The great parts are the beginning and the end, when he’s doing cool things and telling you about them because he wants you to hear and he wants you to do something cool with your time too, and the awful part is the very long tedious middle section when he’s hitchhiking across the country, going to parties, and droning on and on about Buddhism. Now, if you know anything about anything you know that there isn’t anything on this planet more boring than white people talking about “Eastern Spirituality”. I know next to nothing about Buddhism--which is already more knowledge than I want or need--but word on the street is that Kerouac was a very bad Buddhist, in that he completely misunderstood very basic teachings of the religion. I’m not qualified to comment on his interpretations of religious dogma except to say that I don’t give a flying fuck. It was some of the least enjoyable, most repetitive and shallowest writing I’ve ever read. That’s the part where Kerouac the character comes off the worst: he sounds like an obnoxious flake, lamely wading in a very shallow pool of spirituality where the only thing that’s deep about him is his misogyny (women are sex objects to him), just a creepy drunken lecher. But those good sections are really good. The first part of the book concerns a weekend climb up Matterhorn Peak in the Sierra Nevadas in the company of a poet and a crazy guy. What I loved about this part is that one, the prose is beautiful, and two, how wide-eyed and emotionally naked Kerouac is. Sometimes in moments of existential despair I feel the loss of childlike wide-eyed idealism in my own life and it’s invigorating to see it still thriving in another man. He doesn’t even get to the top of the mountain. He chickens out and fully admits to being a wiener, which isn’t something that most writers, as self-absorbed and self-aggrandizing a species as they are, would ever own up to.  The second good part, the end of the book, he goes up to the Cascades and works as a fire lookout on Desolation Peak for a summer. Desolation Peak! What a name. The other nearby peaks have names like Terror, Fury, Challenger, Despair. Sounds like a hell of a place for a fellow to be alone for three months with some books and clouds for company, and an old skillet to fry your morning bacon in and in the cool morning air sitting out on the steps in your old ratty sweater, smoking a cigarette and watching a deer in the meadow surrounding your cabin… you’d really have to twist my arm. He just goes up there and reads and thinks. What a lucky duck.

            

 Kerouac’s books kind of have this real retrospective sadness to them that I’m sure is just a product of their vintage. They come across now as in a way eulogizing an America that doesn’t really exist anymore, if it ever did. Kerouac exerts a lot of effort in making hitchhiking sound like the best and only mode of travel, and maybe it was in 1954 but I don’t think anybody seriously does it now. Maybe homeless teenage runaways do, but not intellectuals and poets. One, no one would ever pick you up. Two, if someone did pick me up I know that I’d end up dead. Some truck driver would chain me up back with the broccoli, rape me from Kansas City to Buffalo, and then chop me up into little pieces, stuff ‘em in a garbage bag, and leave the bag on the side of the road. My remains would never be found or identified. Not to mention the homeless teenage runaways stealing all my stuff and beating me up and whatever methods of torture angry and bored cops can imagine dishing out to some poor guy with no fixed address who may as well be nameless and nonexistent. It’s hard to move around, especially if you’re poor. Poverty keeps you in one place, roots you, it’s an anchor, a millstone, no matter how much one wants to romanticize it. There’s no dignity or poetry in poverty and it doesn’t free one from the bonds of materialism except through an early and lonely death after a lifetime of bone grinding misery. I suspect it was much the same in the 1950s, and for every Jack Kerouac there’s a million Tom Joads trapped in the merciless teeth of their circumstances. And there’s no hope of being a fire lookout. It costs an arm and a leg to rent the cabin Kerouac stayed at for a summer, and they use satellites to monitor for fires now. Nobody needs a guy in a cabin anymore.

             

I dunno if I could say I actually liked the book or not. I guess I’m mostly negative on it. It’s very gauzy and sentimental and a bit shallow at times. Kerouac isn’t a very deep thinker so he doesn’t have much to say about his times except that they happened, but he does have a way of making those times real and inviting you to sit around the fire and share with him. He’s very friendly and conversational. It’s kind of a unique approach even if it isn’t the most intellectual one, and Kerouac definitely does deserve a place in the American canon, in our cultural memory, though probably not ranked as highly as he often is. He’s not good, but he’s great, and he embodies something about the American automobile zeitgeist that few others really nail down; he’s the architect of a kind of Manifest Destiny of the soul. He's great for most of the reasons people already believe and I suppose the most damning thing I could say is that if he were still alive today, and was still writing, or was just beginning his writing career, then he wouldn't be a great writer, if he became one at all. Most of his greatness is in the fact that he helped shape his times and was fully a product of them, and had the foresight to write some of his experiences down and could sometimes turn a nice phrase, but not because he was a deep or original thinker. He's a describer and not an explainer, and in my mind that makes him a lesser writer.  I think he'd be particularly ill-suited to describing or explaining the 21st Century, totally lacking the tools or imagination to deal with it. Too emotional, too scattershot and inconsistent, too self-absorbed and totally guided by some lesser organ, the heart or the gut or the penis, with little to no moderation from the organ that actually has things to say: the brain. The sad fact is he'd probably just end up some tattooed hipster burnout with a substance abuse problem waiting tables at an avante-garde tapas bar. Or a yuppie or something awful like that. 

Listen, I’ll tell you honestly as I can what I felt like when I read this book. I felt like a trip to San Francisco. Have you ever been to San Francisco? You drive eight, nine hours excited about your weekend up there walking around the Wharf eating crab in your dorky little peacoat in one of the most culturally important cities in the history of America, and when you get there it’s completely disappointing, a phony tourist trap. It’s not at all what you wanted it to be and probably it never was.

           

Story of the Eye

Story of the Eye (1928)

Georges Bataille

I don’t want you to jerk off anymore without me.      

This book was for years sitting on my shelf waiting to be read. I constantly passed it over in favor of other books, for no good reason. I think I figured it would just be boring antique smut or trashy shock pornography, which it was in a way, or at least the sex scenes were, but it was also something different and quite interesting. When I finally sat down to read it a couple of days ago I went in expecting Fifty Shades of Grey for dorky intellectual types but it wasn’t like that at all. It was dirty and obscene, yes, but all of that is secondary to the book’s real point, which is about freedom and rebellion and inventing new ways of seeing the world. I haven’t read DeSade but I gather that DeSade and Bataille occupy the same sort of territory. And I understand that DeSade takes seven gazillion pages to say what Bataille says in eighty. You could read Story of the Eye in a short afternoon. Which is the perfect length for porno. Porno movies are a half hour, forty-five minutes long but nobody ever watches the whole thing. The book kind of reads as if one of the children from The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea grew up, read some Nietzsche, got a girlfriend and shoved a hard-boiled egg in her butt. Which sounds great. If that were a real I’d read it every day.

I don’t even know if I should discuss the plot or anything like that. Is it even important? It doesn’t matter in regular old porno, does it matter in 90-year-old French erotic fiction? The unnamed narrator and his girlfriend, a distant cousin named Simone, screw a lot, they urinate on each other, crack eggs on each other’s genitalia, a friend goes insane at an orgy so they break her out of the bug house and screw her and when she hangs herself they pee on her still warm corpse and screw next to it. They don’t want to get arrested (who does) so they flee to Spain, meet a depraved English gentleman who likes to watch, take in a bullfight, Simone inserts bull testicles into her vagina, they break into a church and sexually assault a priest, who basically enjoys it because under the cassock he is a depraved and sick creature, they kill him and pry out one of his eyeballs, which Simone puts in her butt, and then they all flee to Africa on a yacht crewed by negroes.

Even though this book was certainly dirty and pornographic it was surprisingly unsexy. Maybe it’s because my tastes don’t run towards eggs, eyeballs, urine or urinating on eggs but it didn’t arouse me one bit. When someone says “erotic fiction” I expect something that will really titillate but it wasn’t like that. I was kind of expecting innocent and naive racy smut. Something that would really shock a Victorian, I guess. It was instead filthy, degrading, violent. Which I imagine was sort of the point. It was also surprisingly funny. Bataille constantly uses the term “jerk off” to describe both masturbating the penis and what could more properly be termed “fingerblasting”. It’s probably just an archaic old usage that hasn't aged well. He also favors “cunt” and “beaver,” which is one of the funniest names for a woman’s cooter there is. There was one line that made me bust out laughing: “And she could also stick my cock in her mouth, and what not.” Shit man, this is a porno, you’re not supposed to leave it to my imagination. You’re supposed to tell me about cocks and mouths in detail, and what not.

As I said this book is all about transgression and rebellion. It’s about looking at the petrified social order and deciding to turn the other direction. And if you’ve ever sat down and had a good long think about what kind of ugliness happens on this benighted planet then maybe you understand that transgression against social conventions is one of the most noble goals a human being can have. Listen brother, this is a disgusting and hideous world where billions are kept destitute, enslaved and ignorant; where bigotry and oppression are the global pastime, where the use and abuse of human beings is perpetrated by some of the most awful criminal profiteers history has ever known and this profiteering occurs with the full support of the church and the state… not exactly a status quo with much value. Story of the Eye isn’t the sort of trashy low-grade juvenile transgression practiced by say, Sarah Silverman, the “look at me, I told a homophobic or racist joke” school of transgression, which isn’t really rebellious at all but merely a chance to make the privileged blush… this is the sort of rebellion that is about burning the old world to make way for the new. About smashing and destroying the decrepit, festering morality of previous generations and installing something never before seen. The characters in this book are teenagers and seem to be missing parents, which is basically what life is like… parents are for the most part useless, they selfishly give birth to a child who doesn’t ask to be born into this sickening world and are only there to indoctrinate the young into a society that is built on a foundation of slavery and warfare. The narrator has an “awful father” and Simone’s mother, when walking in on the narrator and Simone during a piss-soaked fuckfest has nothing to say… her own sins are worse.

The characters are perverse not because filthy degenerate sexuality is valuable on its own but because if this civilization is awful then the only recourse is to become perverse and whatever society labels as filthy and degenerate can’t be half bad. Nazi Germany occupied itself by organizing collections of what it called “degenerate” art, and it was all some of the best art Western Civilization has ever produced.

I found this book far more personally affecting then I expected it to be. It really spoke to my own desire to shake things up, to erase my own sense of impotence and powerlessness. As a basically uneducated and poor absolute zero the curtailing of my will to power is something I am constantly aware of. The nobody, of which there are billions, arranged on a graduated spectrum of nothingness, is constantly reminded that he has no power over anything. Sometimes I want to grab the globe like a dice cup and shake it and see what numbers we get. Can’t be any worse than the numbers we’ve got now. And who hasn’t—when lonely and longing and tormented nightly by the sex-death urge—wanted to be dissolved and liquefied by a torrent of sex and violence, to be washed away in a river of vaginal secretions like a cheap shanty in a rainstorm? With a dark-haired and beautiful French teenager? To copulate violently and die beautifully like some doomed, glittering insect? Let the innocent among us stand and be counted.

Bataille’s writing is exquisite. His language is amazing, clear, lucid. Every word is a well-chosen bullet. I know that I previously accused H.G. Wells of pretentious diction when Georges Bataille uses similarly grand language. I don’t think fancy ten-dollar words are pretentious in and of themselves, but they certainly are when they don’t fit the story. They’re out of place in a pulp sci-fi novella about time travel but they’re fine in a bit philosophical erotica about French teenagers who disintegrate themselves and annihilate the world via fucking. I understand that Bataille was a big deal in the world of European philosophy, of which I know nothing about, but if the rest of his books are this beautiful and lucid I’d read the heck out of them.

I think I said everything I wanted to say about this book. Story of the Eye was the sort of story that is philosophical enough that I’m not entirely sure I comprehended it the way the author intended, that it went over my head, that I’m not smart enough and not well-read enough to get all the references that the author makes (though since it’s a slim and lean read there can’t be that much hiding in it), and that I, an intellectual featherweight, am punching far above my weight class, and to make it even more difficult the story is different enough in form from your usual novel that it takes a new sort of viewpoint to crack the code. One almost has to hold the book upside down to understand it. Hopefully I found the right angle. I’m going to quote a paragraph that I thought was very alluring (and contained within it a seed of beautiful revolution so precious it should be locked up in that seed vault buried under the Norwegian glacier) as a way to wrap this all up:

I stretched out in the grass, my skull on a large, flat rock and my eyes staring straight up at the milky way, that strange breach of astral sperm and heavenly urine across the cranial vault formed by the ring of constellations: that open crack at the summit of the sky, apparently made of ammoniacal vapors shining in the immensity (in empty space, where they burst forth absurdly like a rooster’s crow in total silence), a broken egg, a broken eye, or my own dazzled skull weighing down the rock, bouncing symmetrical images back to infinity.

The Time Machine

The Time Machine (1895)

H.G. Wells

            It’s been a long time since I’ve written about a book. The truth is the last few months in my life have been very hectic. I moved, which was way more complicated and stressful than it needed to be, and I’ve been working a lot, up to six or seven days a week sometimes. I’m also “working” on my “novel” (barf) and I have other things to do and since I can’t fit everything into one day I often have to choose one or the other. Unfortunately the ol’ book blog, and books in general, have often been the “other”. I was also briefly in jail (violence against cops) and hospitalized, for a spell, with a prolapse of the face. The surgeons had to staple it back on. And on top of that I’m constantly tired.

            In between reading The Third Reich and The Time Machine I wasted a bit of forever struggling to get halfway through one really awful book (To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf), which I had planned to write about here because I was really looking forward to reading it since it’s a really famous beloved classic but god, it was so horrifyingly bad. As bad as Pride and Prejudice. I tried and tried and eventually I had to move on. One day I’d like to finish it so I can tell the world about how shitty it was and is. Really drained me. I almost swore to never read another book again in my life, that’s the level of repulsion I felt. It was in a way like a really painful break-up. You feel murdered, betrayed and obliterated for a few months or so but then you realize you’ve got to pick up the pieces of yourself so you pour the bottle down the kitchen sink and take a long hot shower and put on some pants and go back outside.

            So to wash the taste of Virginia Woolf out of my mouth I read The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac and The Time Machine, which is the book I’m going to talk about first, mostly because I feel like it was more the medicine I needed, and I just finished it last night, so it’s still fresh in my head, and because I feel like I have more to say about it.

            I’m really ashamed of myself for not reading this book when I was in middle school. When I was thirteen. There was an overlong and tragic period in my life (years 10-15, probably older really) where I was into painfully sad and dorky nonsense like Dungeons and Dragons and trashy fantasy novels. I was obsessed with knights and castles and troll-slaying and all the other trappings of the really awful trashy fantasy novel. I suppose that I was enamored with the idea that somewhere out there was a world that was more fantastic and heroic than this real world, hostile and pitiless, that I found myself imprisoned in. Which is how it felt at the time. All those years wasted trapped indoors brain-damaged by escapist fantasy books with embossed lettering and an elf on the cover. So many hours of pointless unhappy teenaged masturbations spent friendless doing nothing but sitting on my stupid ass. I never had the fortune of having a guide to tell me to read this and don’t read that, an older friend or brother to hold my hand and make sure I don’t make bad choices. Those are only in movies, I guess. Of course my parents were no help, but that’s another story for another time.

            The Time Machine would have been such a great gift for a lonely, unhappy and angry teen such as the one I was for a lot of reasons, not the least of which being that it would have lifted me up from the ghetto of fantasy and into the paradise of science fiction. Though I wasn’t savvy enough to think of it at the time I’ve developed a pretty good working idea on why the science fiction genre is superior to the fantasy genre, and why I think it’s better for our society in general. Indulge me for a moment here while I talk about what is quite possibly the least important topic in the history of humankind. It’s pretty simple: fantasy promotes fascism and sci-fi does not. This is not to say that all fantasy is fascist and all sci-fi isn’t but I think it’s generally true. Fantasy is about characters who are empowered by their birthright with mystical abilities or portentous destinies and who have to use these gifts to save the world on behalf of the little ones, the uninteresting and faceless peasants (so basically exactly like racial nationalism). As a whole it's very romantic and unintellectual and mostly a mess of lamely fascistic wish-fulfillment power worship that preys on the weak minds of the lonely, unhappy, powerless and disenfranchised who wish that they, in whatever fashion possible, could one day be a person of consequence instead of what they are, which is a nobody, a zero. I have a roommate who is addicted to that terrible Game of Thrones television show. He watches it all the time and sometimes I hear it when I’m in the kitchen or otherwise puttering around. From what I can tell the show is about two things: objectifying women (by showing some tits so a nerd can beat off or by having the characters engage in really demeaning sex) and searching for newer and more appalling ways to glorify the military and warfare in general. As if the military didn’t get enough congratulations. Game of Thrones not only sucks the military’s dick, it also lets the military cum on its face and probably sticks a tongue up the military’s asshole too, it’s called analingus and it’s something you only do to someone you really like. There are more than enough hawkish cheerleaders out there (a disgustingly large and vocal number really) but you know what doesn’t have enough friends in this world? Liberty, equality and fraternity, that’s what. I also think that Harry Potter is a terrible thing to expose children to.

            A good deal of sci-fi is pro-military and fascist (Orson Scott Card and Starship Troopers I’m looking at you) but the best of it is not. Science fiction is a lot like punk rock in one respect, in that they are both at their core anti-establishment. And if it’s not anti-establishment then it’s not punk rock. Likewise with sci-fi. There is a sort of anti status quo spirit that’s really important to sci-fi. I think a good thing to compare something like Game of Thrones to would be the original series of Star Trek. Game of Thrones is a world where the protagonists are depraved militaristic aristocrats who command armies to burn and pillage and the common man is just a powerless, voiceless plaything in the dramas between the vain and power-hungry elite. And these are the people you’re rooting for! You are literally asked to arbitrarily pick one violent slave owner over another. Just flip a fucking coin. So in that respect it’s exactly like the real world, and the viewer is being brainwashed and preconditioned into seeing one fascist autocrat as his buddy, instead of some other fascist autocrat. In Star Trek, by contrast, the crew of the USS Enterprise live in a democratic utopia where technology, science and rationality have ameliorated the physical and material needs that keep so many today in poverty and want. Everyone is educated and nobody is exploited. The society is completely equal. One of my favorite things about the original series is that nobody on that ship is drawing a paycheck. Everyone in Starfleet is there because they want to be there, on a mission of exploration, to expand the borders of the knowable, to show us back here on the merciless and inhospitable Earth what exactly the human spirit is capable of. It would be a good standard for our species to hold itself to. A nice, reasonable and completely realistic set of goals. The polar opposite is something like Harry Potter where technocrats who are born better than us save the day.

            Back on topic: I was really impressed by The Time Machine. I adored it. It isn’t really a fantastic work of art by any stretch of the imagination but I don’t think that things like plot, characterization or more technical aspects of writing are especially important when talking about sci-fi. What’s important in sci-fi is the clarity of future vision. And ho boy does Herbert “Groovy” Wells ever have a clear future vision. The Time Machine is about a future where the class system (a very real and pervasive problem right here today) is a tumor that has gone unaddressed for so long that in the intervening years humanity has undergone radical speciation. It’s a world where the upper and lower classes have devolved into semi-intelligent animals that prey on each other in some form of mutually symbiotic class cannibalism. It’s fantastic. When talking about sci-fi it’s important to know the difference between “hard” and “soft” science fiction. “Hard” sci-fi is more grounded in the materialistic and mechanistic realities of the universe. “Soft” sci-fi is more often about society and the organisms that make it up. I like both but I’m definitely more in love with the latter. I’m less interested in how the space rocket gets to Mars than in what happens to us when we get there. I was surprised by how soft The Time Machine was. Since it’s a book about a Victorian Brit building a time machine, which will never be possible in Victorian Britain or anywhere else, I suppose that I shouldn’t be at all surprised. I guess I think of hard sci-fi as being more traditional or old-fashioned, though I don’t think that’s really true at all. The Time Machine like a socialist pamphlet with a thin veneer of science fiction, which is more than all right in my book. In fact I’d prefer to read much more of this sort of thing during my lifetime if at all possible.

            I’ve also developed a system for cataloging sci-fi, a system of my own invention, which I think works out great. I draw a distinction between what I call “kinky” and “non-kinky”. Non-kinky sci-fi asserts that our future is basically bright and that through cooperation we can conquer the outer and inner spaces, that good things are in store for us and that technology will make us better men, et cetera. Think Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov and 2001. Kinky sci-fi sees our civilization as a sham, sometimes our whole reality as a sham, and our species as barely intelligent predators who will eat each other alive if given half a chance. William S. Burroughs (though as I’ve said before fuck that guy), Thomas Pynchon, Phillip K. Dick, Neuromancer and Mad Max are all kinky. One is not superior to the other and both have their merits, mountains and valleys and all that. One is just more cynical, but given the sort of person I am (given to long bouts of pessimism and misanthropy, mostly work-induced) I more often feel myself drawn to the kinky kind. It also tends to be a bit more avante garde, experimental and over all better written than the non-kinky sort. Maybe a good way of summarizing it is that non-kinky sci-fi is for ideas and kinky is for feelings. One is the brain and one is the heart. Or the gut. Whichever you prefer. I was pleasantly surprised by how kinky The Time Machine was. The last few chapters are reminiscent of a really lurid H.P. Lovecraft story, where under the dark red light of a bloated and dying sun all that remains of life on Earth is foul lichens and sinister crustaceans that graze on the shores of a black and motionless sea. It’s a very cynical view of our future. I wasn’t at all expecting that.

            I was also struck by how bad of a writer H.G. Wells is. He’s sort of a gifted storyteller and passionate future prophet but an awful writer. Phillip K. Dick is a poor writer too but in neither case do I feel that the author’s clumsiness at all detracts from my enjoyment. When I read this kind of book I don’t worry about plot or consistency or poetry or anything, I just strap myself in and enjoy the ride. I will say that the one thing that really grated on me about this book is that H.G. Wells writes as though someone gave him a thesaurus as a birthday gift and he up and decided to marry the fucking thing. One of my least favorite things that writers do is when I can very physically sense that they looked up fancy-pants words to season their writing with when older and simpler words would probably go down much easier. Here’s a selection of painful ten-dollar words from the very first paragraph: expounding, recondite, incandescent, trammels, paradox, and last but not least, fecundity. Jesus Howard Christ. At no point in The Time Machine does his infatuation with the thesaurus ever abate. There's a paragraph towards the end of The Temple of the Golden Pavilion by Yukio Mishima where Mishima or his translator decided to use the word "adumbrate" or some derivation thereof about a thousand times. It's not a long paragraph but man does it hurt like a kick in the teeth. "Adumbrate" is a word with several different meanings, all of them poetic and flavorful and simpler on their own so why not just go with one of those? Faulkner does it too, and both Mishima and Faulkner are a thousand times better prose writers than H.G. Wells so I guess it's a mistake even a master is capable of, and I suppose what do I know, they're writers who are immortalized in culture and I'm just some dork sitting in his tiny room thinking about the stutter steps of more interesting writers than I'll ever be.  It’s not a deal-breaker but in my sort of clumsy mental manifesto about writing I envision writing as an Occam’s Razor where the simplest and most soulful is the best and there isn’t anything simple about “fecundity” or “recondite”. The goal isn’t to dazzle me with pretentious diction. The goal is to sear my balls off with your irradiated and lysergic vision of the future where in the shadow of the crumbling ruins of human civilization our brain-damaged and mutated descendants barely cling on to whatever meager, pitiful shreds of their humanity remain.

            So to wrap this puppy up I guess what I’m trying to say is that I really love the science-fiction genre and I wish that I had understood why I like it and why it is good earlier in my life. It plays all the right notes for me. Could talk about it for days, and believe me, if you get me going I will. Sometimes I feel bad for my poor coworker, who is also a book reading type, and has to hear about this sort of shit all day long. Poor guy. I was so happy when they landed that one-ton metaphor on Mars just a while back. If something had gone wrong I would’ve cried.

El Tercer Reich

The Third Reich (2011)

Roberto Bolaño

This kind of game creates a pretty interesting documentary urge. It’s as if we want to know exactly how everything was done in order to change what was done wrong.

            It’s absolutely astounding to me that one of the greatest and most interesting writers of the last twenty years could have such a backlog of unpublished work, enough for his publishers and heirs to put out a half-dozen books since his death in 2003. Whoever rejected this book in 1989, 1990 must surely be kicking themselves now (if it was in fact rejected, to be honest I don’t actually know). If I had books like this just sitting around in my desk drawer doing nothing I’d be set for life. One facet of Bolaño’s legend--his cultish and confusing mythology--that I’ve always found particularly enthralling is that his entrance into fiction writing was motivated, at least partially, by purely mercenary reasons: he spent the first part of his life as a vagabond poet, wandering up and down Latin America, until finally settling down in Spain, where he got himself a wife and kids, and knowing that he was dying and that there is no money in poetry, no money at all, turned to fiction writing in order to secure his children’s future after his passing. This was his first book, the first one he wrote, and I like to imagine him sitting at his desk every day with dollar signs in his eyes, knowing that this was the only way he could do it. Most aspiring writers, if they wanted to make a big pile of cash, would write cheesy patriarchal detective fiction, or politically disgusting children’s fantasy novels, or something similar, but not Roberto Bolaño, he’s way too smart and ambitious for that and he knows he’s still got to look at himself in the mirror. His first novel is of course, like everyone else’s first novel, a metaphor using tabletop war games to explain how we still ache for the return of fascism (or a time machine to reverse the mistakes of the past) even if we don’t realize it or think better of ourselves (how liberal and educated we are, certainly no Nazis; our in-laws are Jewish, we have a gay nephew, one of our neighbors is black, we could never be a horrible fascist.)

            The book is pretty simple: it’s the journal of a young man, Udo Berger, the German champion of a board game called The Third Reich, who goes on vacation to a seaside Spanish town with his pretty girlfriend Ingeborg. While there they meet another German couple, go out drinking and dancing, sit on the beach, fraternize with vaguely threatening locals the Lamb and the Wolf, Udo has some sexual tension with the woman who runs the hotel but she keeps her legs shut so he humps a maid instead, at night the sea is black, thoughtless and menacing like a predator, and so on. There’s a death and eventually all the Germans return to Germany one way or another, save Udo, who locks himself in his dark reeking hotel room to practice and refine his revolutionary new Third Reich strategy with a disciple of sorts: a muscular and horrifically scarred hulk who rents pedal boats and sleeps on the beach, not Spanish, possibly South American, a grunting mysterious threat named El Quemado: The Burned One, The Burn Victim.

            Though this is Bolaño’s first novel and it’s pretty rough, not as mature, his prose isn’t as good as it would later be and the dialogue is sometimes cringe worthy and it meanders quite a bit, even for Bolaño, but it’s still quite evident that this is a Bobby Bolaño book and that name on the cover means you are in for something good. It’s a real mark of quality. It’s not his best book (The Savage Detectives or 2666) but it’s certainly not his worst (looking at you, Amulet). All his hallmarks are there: long ruminations on literature and poetry and how they relate to state violence, tourists (outsiders) who travel to a place and discover the real outsiders, the people really on the fringe who drag the tourists into their ugly underworld, our latent unrealized potential for fascism, narrators or central characters who may or may not be going slowly insane or just falling apart from pressure and stress, vague threats from indeterminate sources, generalized modern world bourgeois anxiety, and the blistering away of the mundane and banal surface to reveal the violence and darkness at the core of our societies and ourselves.

            A Bob Bolaño book is always such a special gift. They excite a hunger in me, a real voraciousness. An almost animalistic feral book love. I feel like I’m a pretty slow, plodding reader but not when I’m reading Bolaño. Bolaño sets me on fire: I finished Nazi Literature in the Americas in a single afternoon, 2666 in a week. The Third Reich took me a couple days. I’ve been dog sitting for my girlfriend’s parents for the last few days, gentle relaxed mornings with a cup of coffee and this Vizsla on my lap, when I get off work evenings with a beer and a pastrami sandwich and the dog again… what a life. A fellow could get used to this. If they kept on putting out Roberto Bolaño books like they've been doing I’d be in paradise.

            Roberto Bolaño is my favorite writer for a lot of reasons. I recommend him to anyone who asks and will listen. I can and will ramble on about Bolaño when I’m drunk at a bar but this is the first time I’ve really tried to sit down and articulate what I like about him. Almost all of the books I read were written and published before I was born by writers who died before I was born (there’s so many books out there that I can’t really read all the classics and keep up with what’s being published now so I stick mostly with the classics) and I feel like a lot of books that have been published recently that I have read just plain aren’t very good (up your ass with a stick Dave Eggers and Brett Easton Ellis) and have little to nothing say and no interesting ways to say it, and that the world of American letters is in a really sorry state, so I guess what I’m trying to say is that I think Bolaño is the first writer I’ve read whose books make me feel like I’m part of something important, a secret discovery, a secret someone took to the woods and buried in a shallow hole in the roots of a tree and I later dug up, horrified; in on the ground floor of a zeitgeist, a movement, and that part of that movement is mine and mine alone. I feel included and in on something. I also feel like a lot of authors popular these days are fake transgressive, like they play act at being shocking and avant-garde but they’re really just conservative, tedious and boring (for example Chuck Palahuniuk, the worst writer in the history of the English language) whereas with Bolaño I don’t feel like he’s being phony about anything. I find his prose and writing skill worthy of worship and the level of detail he can get into a novel astounding. He speaks to me like we're equals. He’s the perfect writer (a eulogist, really) for the end of the 20^th Century, a hundred years that were so ugly for so many people. I think I might be obsessed with him and I’m not at all worried about it.

            Also, and I don’t have any proof of this but it’s something I feel has to be true: there aren’t many American writers around these days that I could think of who could produce a politically acceptable novel. Ninety percent of American writers teach creative writing at some public college somewhere and, therefore, have a stake in maintaining the status quo even if they think they don’t, and aren’t going to rock the boat, not in any real way. Sort of like how NBC is never really going to tell you how many children were disintegrated by General Electric cruise missiles today, or how many mutants were born in a fifty-mile radius around a Superfund site. The writer is institutionalized, part of the state apparatus. What a tragedy. Of course there’s worse things in the world than a public college (nearly everything I can think of is worse) so maybe I’m overreacting but I don’t think it’s helped to get any teeth back into our limp wrist culture, as if anyone actually wants some teeth, and if the state is violent and obscene, and a writer works for the state, doesn’t that just make him part of the propaganda machine? It’s a stupid and confused feeling, I know, but this is what I think about when I read Bolaño.

            Mostly though, what I like about Bolaño is that I find him inspirational, if that doesn’t sound too dorky and stupid. When I read him I get the feeling that I could do this, that anyone could—but most importantly that I could—that in Bolaño I’ve found someone who speaks the same language as me, after years of searching, and that language is pretty awesome to hear (I can finally have a conversation with someone), that it’s in my grasp, and that all it takes is a determination and a desire to paint outside the lines, to stand against boring institutionalized MFA literature, especially the really pernicious kind that infects this country and has since the 1970s and makes us stupider and duller and supports the violent sadistic goals of the state, to stand for something and put it into words. That it doesn’t take a fancy NYU writing degree to write a book, just a bibliography and a pair of eyes and one or two ears and some balls.

Justine

Justine (1957)

Lawrence Durrell

           

           

            Some writers I wouldn’t want to engage with socially. I just don’t like their books, or I find their politics repulsive, or I imagine that they were assholes, and then there are writers like Lawrence Durrell, who I would drop anything to spend an afternoon with, sitting on the balcony of some bar with dark beer and bread and cheese, shooting the shit, learning from him. He was kind of an old-fashioned sort of British world-traveller, the kind that they don’t make any more, a man with politics likely just as unbearable as Borges’ politics were but, like Borges, a writer whose writing is so good that I find myself unable to give a hoot, a man who wandered around the Mediterranean, started spontaneous and modern literary movements with Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin, moving from government post to government post. Rhodes, Alexandria, Corfu, Yugoslavia…

             

          Justine is the first part of Durrell’s most famous and well-regarded work, The Alexandria Quartet (the other three books are Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea), a series of experimental modernist novels about a tormented love triangle (it’s sort of a love octopus, with a tentacle everywhere) viewed from different angles, a different angle in each book. In this book the angle is an unnamed narrator who is trapped between two women:  the simple, sweet and loyal Melissa, an impoverished dancer in a bar and the sort of woman a man should marry; and the magnetic and carnivorous Justine, a lodestone of sexuality, a cannibalistic man-eater that men would break their necks to get a glimpse of from across a crowded room. The book is achronological, it has the rhythm of a man sitting in the rubble of his life sifting through painful old memories; there isn’t any order or sense to when a memory surges up from your gut (that’s where an ugly or painful memory is, in your stomach), they just come when they come, one leading you to another. The tone is also pretty interesting, part romance novel and part travel guide, sort of like if a National Geographic met a Playboy though that isn’t entirely right.  It’s not pornographic. It’s not even racy at all, certainly not as racy as I was expecting from a man who had a deep and long-lasting friendship with Henry Miller, author of Crazy Cock. Though, as I understand it, some of his early books were banned for obscenity so maybe he just got it out of his system by the time he wrote Justine. It sort of reminds me of an old painting of a harem, like a Delacroix or something… one with tons of fine gilt detail where you can really smell the sweat, the musk and the hookah smoke, where bored dark-eyed girls sit on cushions fanning themselves and looking downward, waiting miserably and nervously for their turn.

             

          The book definitely fits in a genre that I think should be a genre but isn’t yet. I don’t know what you’d name it but it’s mostly about one thing: white Europeans in the Colonies doing ugly things to each other.  There are a million books like that… The Stranger, The Quiet American...

I’d say almost without hesitation that Justine is by far the most beautifully written book I’ve ever read. Very sensuous and emotionally rich, very luxurious and exotic. This is a book that has a smell (redolence), that has a sound (clanging weekend bazaar), I know where I am when I read this book; I’m in Alexandria. I used to live around the corner from this Ethiopian market. It was in the bottom floor of an apartment complex, and I’d go there sometimes for toilet paper or soap. It wasn’t really a convenience store, mostly what they sold were spices. Racks and racks of spices. Curries, dried peppers, tins of desiccated things I’d never seen before and were never a part of my cooking. It smelled like a wizard’s laboratory in this store, the smell was sometimes so overpowering it would wrack my nerves…it smelled like ancient secrets, and that’s what I imagine this book smells like. The prose in this book is very high quality, just the absolute finest stuff. Some prose is “workmanlike” and gets the job done (Steinbeck, say) but this is something else… this is loveliness.  I’d drag myself across the Mojave on broken legs to write a sentence like “…etiolated flowers of afternoons spent in anguish, tossing upon ugly beds, bandaged by dreams.” I'd staple my nutsack to a revolving door to write something extraordinary that Durrell could probably do without thinking in one afternoon on a Greek island on the beach with a beer and nothing else but the waves.

One thing I really loved about this book is how deep the characterization is. I don’t really have any clue what most of these characters look like, with a few exceptions, but I know exactly what they are like internally, in their souls. Durrell’s skill at forging metaphors really stands out when he’s describing someone’s essence, for example, something that really struck me was a line about the titular Justine: “She could not help but remind me of that race of terrific queens which left behind them the ammoniac smell of their incestuous loves to hover like a cloud over the Alexandrian subconscious. The giant man-eating cats like Arsinoe were her true siblings.” I don’t know if she’s tall or short or anything, but I know what she is (and goddamn what images Durrell uses) and what she is is elemental, tempestuous, amoral in the way that the ocean is amoral. The ocean calls to men like a siren, and it will kill a man as surely as anything, and has taken the lives of innumerable men, but there is no guiding force behind it. But what a way to go: death in the arms of the sea, maybe the only death worthy of manhood.

But, really, the main character of this story is the city of Alexandria. It’s where Durrell directs his most loving attention. Alexandria is an ancient, endless, eternal city like a dark dense jungle where age, rot, endless chaotic growth and decay build upon each other and the weight of history and timelessness enervates and entombs the inhabitants. History here is heavy, burdensome. In a lot of ways it reads like some made-up fantasy city from Borges or Calvino where time never passes, I mean to me a timeless city of minarets, labyrinthine rat warren ghettoes and spicy fumes on a narrow isthmus between the cold sea and a saline blood-colored lake sounds fantastical but it isn’t, Alexandria is a real place and it’s still there. Alexandria was there before any of us were, and it’ll be around after we’re all gone. I just looked up airplane tickets: a round trip is about thirteen hundred dollars at the cheapest. People spend at least that much to go to places that aren’t nearly as interesting: Hawaii, Japan, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, San Francisco. I think most of those places sound tedious and boring. Japan is where people go to fondle teenagers dressed up like cartoon characters, and Las Vegas is for blowing a life’s savings and pawning your old lady’s wedding ring but Alexandria, by contrast, is one of the most important cities in the history of mankind. I’m positive you could fondle a teenager or lose a lot of money in Alexandria, but it’s almost impossible to overstate how important that city has been to the development of Western Civilization, whereas it’s really easy to exaggerate the importance of Los Angeles or Dallas. Alexandria was a nexus of history for a long, long time. Celestial objects with massive gravitational fields distort space-time, forming a dip or a well around them in which smaller objects fall into and circle like around a drain. Significant cities are like that as well: they force history into orbit.

Unfortunately as pretty as this book is I’m not really sure what it’s about, what the deeper meaning is. That may be a failing on my part. It’s lyrical and metaphorical and richly executed but I don’t know to what end Durrell is working towards. Supposedly it’s an allegory for the Second World War but the novel is so internalized and solipsistic that I’m at a loss to tell you what Durrell is trying to say about it. Perhaps I have to read the other three books to find a resolution. I looked it up on good old Wikipedia and it says The Alexandria Quartet is an “exploration of relativity and the notions of continuum and subject–object relation, with modern love as the subject” but I’m not sure what that means, if it means anything at all. However, this book is pretty enough that I’m willing to accept it on its aesthetic value alone, and for that reason I would give it a hearty recommendation for anyone who is interested in scaling the magnificent heights that a true prose artist can lift you towards. Millions stampede to the Mona Lisa every year but as anyone knows it’s just a pretty picture.