One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Alexander Solzhenitsyn)
The tale of one day in the life of a simple man, once a soldier, who’d been an enemy prisoner during WWII for a matter of days and therefore classified as spy. He’s spent eight years of his 10-year sentence for such the terrible crime of being an overpowered, under-prepared pawn of his country’s army in Soviet work camps, during the time of the book in a gulag in Siberia.
With the typical bluntness of many Russian authors — but none of the complex sentence structure and pretense of Dostoevsky or Tolstoy, for instance, IMHO — the reader climbs into Shukov’s (as he’s called) shoes. His cold, cold boots stuffed with rags, which he is allowed to dry on the stove every third night. We put on his scanty and ragged clothing (anything more than regulation will be taken away) against the chill, and our muscles ache from the hard work of laying bricks in weather so frigid that the mortar freezes if the work’s not completed quickly. The turnip broth turns cold on the table and the bread freezes solid.
Did I mention it’s cold? Siberian cold? Yes? Perhaps I stress this fact because I read this book, the WHOLE book, during a very slow day of volunteering for the El Paso County primary elections, held in a room whose AC was powerful enough to personally contribute to global warning. The volunteer next to me pulled up his hood. I rubbed my hands between my legs as I read. I felt Shukov’s pain.
As, of course, the reader is meant to. The book was one of the first that told the inside story of the Soviet work camps, and was therefore quite shocking and influential. Today, it remains so, but for different reasons. Yes, the gulag depicted is an awful place to be: I’d chose hell over this place, because I’d rather sweat to death than feel ice crystals forming in my blood. But what I found amazing was Shukov and his fellow prisoner’s attitudes toward their imprisonment. Illustrating the ultimate in human adaptation, they don’t rail against their unjust treatment. There’s nothing to be done, after all. They get by, they trade cigarettes, they finagle extra meal portions, they stamp their feet in the cold, they pester the guards. Although I’m hardly an expert, their attitude of basic survival — even cheerful survival when they can — seems so very Soviet. They allow themselves to be molded be the camp, accepting what they cannot change. They work the system when they can, but they sigh and let the system work them when they can’t. They’ve seen what disobedience causes, and it’s often not worth the high price. In other words, they accept that they’re pawns in a machine that eats pawns for breakfast, so they squeeze joy out of camaraderie, nicotine and the absence of pain.
Read in honor of the author, who died Aug. 3, 2008. I’m sorry only his passing caused me to take up his work, which I find clean, concise and cutting. Oh and cold. Very, very cold. Brrr.
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars - Book club selection
Book Reviews, Classic Lit, Fiction | Comment (0)The Bell Jar (Sylvia Plath)
So after rollicking my way through a 700-page, action-adventure, supernatural thriller, I turned back into my normal self to tackle this seminal work by our favorite head-baking poetess. I’ve always been curious about this mostly autobiographical account of Plath’s adolescent depression and suicide attempt, especially given the fact that hers is one of the most infamous suicides of the female literary world (along with Virginia Woolf, naturally), and I wasn’t disappointed. 
Told in simple and often poetic language, this book describes the unexplainable yet tangible descent of depression, which the author likens to being caught under the stifling lip of a bell jar (see illustration).
With brutal honesty, Plath speaks of how meaninglessness and powerlessness can sneak up on an otherwise successful girl like a thief in the night, stealing her ability to sleep, to read, to eat, to feel. Yet she manages this without resorting to self-pity or whining. She is more a journalist who returned from the brink, chronicling the dark side with a dispassionate and often humorous tone. It’s also a quick read - I finished it over a weekend - that nails the specifically female and specifically adolescent penchant for morbidity and doubt.
I liked the book. I don’t know how much of my feelings sprung for the fact that the novel is almost wholly truthful and that Plath descended once again beneath that bell jar, never to return: She killed herself one month after the book’s English publication and long before it came out in America. We are all interested in the dramatic misfortune of others, especially if we see roots of that person within ourselves. (No, I’m not suicidal, but I am an author, a woman and an emotional being.) We like to see the depths to which a person we can recognize can sink without having to take the plunge ourselves. And there’s always something so sad yet so poignant about a truly talented being drawn inevitably toward an untimely death like a moth to flame. (Elton John would say a candle in the wind, yes?)
(My favorite Plath poem? The very famous, but still excellent “Daddy.”)
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars - Book club selection
Biography, Classic Lit, Fiction | Comment (0)The Story of O (Pauline Réage)
Busy, busy, busy and falling behind on the reviewing. This pale, plain, slim and sexy little novel has been complete for, hmmm, nine days now or so yet is still unreviewed. I blame this partially on the holidays, partially on this strange seize-the-laziness-of-the-day, eat-the-chocolate-almond-toffee and gym-what-gym holiday funk of mine and partially on The Story of O itself. Ahem, (clearing of the throat), let’s get it on.
1954. The Story of O was first published in 1954. This is something I constantly had to remind myself of while reading this racy book involving love, sex, S & M, bondage, torture, orgy, homosexuality, femininity, attraction and ownership. Most things that were scandalous in the 1950s seem very tame in this millennium–the mop top hairdos of those musical English invaders the Beatles, for instance. But O, which Playboy ranks as the 4th sexiest novel of all time***, remains as red-hot scandalous as the day the words were first printed on page.
We open our scene with O and her lover strolling through an unfamiliar park. He leads her to a large car that looks like a taxi in a lane where taxis never stand and they drive off, her lover telling her to remove her panties, roll down her stockings and sit on the cold leather of the seat. He then slashes the straps of her bra with a pen knife and they drive off (O blindfolded) to an unknown chateau. This house of pleasure and pain is where her lover is delivering her–as a prize, a choice delicacy, as the thing he most loves in the world. But as he loves it, he wants to see if he owns it and so O becomes his property, property that he shares among his friends like a good little boy. And there are rules in this secluded and plushly sexual world: never cross you legs or close your lips for they must look available, do not meet a man’s eye, do not speak unless spoken to. And there is a uniform–leather wristbands and collar that easily attach to bind the wearer, very high heels, very high and exposed breasts, and a skirt that easily lifts in either the front or the back for the wearer to, ahem, be of service to whoever (and I do mean whoever) might desire her. Oh, and there is whipping. Quite a bit of whipping.
O’s first night in the chateau:
Then they made O get up and were on the verge of untying her, probably in order to attach her to some pole or wall, when someone protested that he wanted to take her first, right there on the spot. So they made her kneel down again, this time with her bust on an ottoman, her hands still tied behind her, with her hips higher than her torso. Then one of the men, holding her with both his hands on her hips, plunged into her belly. He yielded to a second. The third wanted to force his way into the narrower passage and, driving hard, made her scream. When he let her go, sobbing and befouled by tears beneath her blindfold, she slipped to the floor, only to feel someone’s knees against her face, and she realized that her mouth was not to be spared.
The book then has three other sections that take place away from the chateau but with the same themes of torture, ownership and true devotion running beneath the frantic current of the words. And yes, there were scenes that shocked my modern sensibilities that I will not discuss here (have to leave something to the new reader, after all) and yes, my feminist sensibilities were also under assault–at least initially.
The truth is that this is a female-written book for a female audience and the author has amazing depth of insight despite the graphic sexuality, bringing up issues that intrigue me. Who exactly becomes a slave to whom? Isn’t it truly the man who cannot do without the woman, who he seeks to claim ownership over because he doesn’t believe he will keep the source of his addiction any other way? Do women actually crave some form of ownership as a token of esteem, of beauty, despite what they say? And is there really more freedom in forfeiting yourself to your basest self–does that stop the double-faced hypocrisy of how sexual desires and fantasies are hidden, but not expurgated, in the modern, civilized world?
I decided I had to read this book after seeing its author, Dominique Aury, revealed in the documentary The Writer of O. She was then 80 years old and still standing by her work, despite the fact that she hadn’t actually admitted to writing it until then. She supposed it would be more comforting coming from a post-menopausal grandma-type instead of a younger woman, still full of sexual threat and power, and explained that the book was in part a declaration of love to her long-time lover, Jean Paulhan. So this is what was wedged into my mind as I read of anal sex, mutilation and pain:
- 1954
- 80 year-old grandmother
- Declaration of love
I have no idea what will be wedged into someone else’s as they attempt the book. No matter what they think, I know that I enjoyed reading this book for both of its faces, the overtly sexual and the philosophical. Therefore I give it a:
4.5 out of 5 stars - A hardcover book club selection
*** You can see reviews of Playboy’s #2 sexiest book, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, here and #13, Fear of Flying, here. Sadly, I do not have a review of #11, Lolita, though I immensely enjoyed that one as well.
Classic Lit, Fiction | Comment (0)The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (Henry Fielding)
“Hell-oooo, Tom!” she says with a wolf whistle. How do you still look so dashing after, let’s see… 257 years? What? How long? you may ask but I speak the truth. The character is just as dashing, humorous and entertaining as he was when this novel was first published in 1749. Sex! Sex in a novel from 1749?! Ah yes, ’tis true and oh-my-dear so funny.
Young, foolish, lustful, rougish, golden-hearted, loyal (sometimes) and handsome–Tom’s is a typical foundling’s tale. He is the product of sin, abandoned and raised by a benevolent man who grows up to have wild adventures, be disinherited by the benevolent man unjustly and be “unsuited” (meaning of low-birth and no money) for the woman he loves. But as with so many classic plotlines that have become trite with time, every obstacle thrown in the path will eventually be tidied up, all threads tied with the reader’s amused smile.
I say, “Classic plotlines, typical tales.” This is both yet neither. In fact, Fielding is often credited as being the inventor of the genre of the novel. Theater and poetry were the forms of the day, the ones those that were rich enough to read did read. Fielding instead decided to tell an entirely fictional tale (and admit it the fiction, which was shocking). To me, Fielding is truly a gifted author to have gotten the ball of fiction rolling (thank you from all readers, Henry!) and also due to his style. His tone and diction, though antiquated, are relatively easy to get used to as compared to Dickens and Co. Plus, I love the way he addresses the reader directly, a metafictional technique done centuries before we modern writers coined the term.
A great read, especially for those with a knack for such old style. For those who don’t want to tackle the complex language, there is always the movie, which is also fantastic.
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars = Book club selection
Classic Lit, Fiction | Comment (0)Tortilla Flat (John Steinbeck)
This is the second Steinbeck novel I have found for sale in the libraries remnant bin—the second-hand shelf where they get rid of books that they don’t want to keep on their shelves any more for various reasons. While I am happy to get a copy of this book (I have read it before but do not own it), I am also sad. What is the state of our library system that they toss out Steinbeck with the morning’s refuse? Where is the love I ask you? I comfort myself with the thought that new editions are simply becoming available and the libraries are restocking their shelves with better, brighter copies with which to educate the future generation of readers. I hope.
Steinbeck. Two syllables of greatness. Sometimes I have a hard time pinning down just what it is that makes Steinbeck so fun to read. It’s not as if he reinvents the wheel or as if poetry, a river deep and swirling, drips from his pen like a, like a… okay, I’m no poet either. Steinbeck is simply an excellent story-teller (look here, for instance) and Tortilla Flat is no exception.
The short, speedy novel is the tale of a group of friends recently returned from WWI, paisanos (of mixed Indian, Spanish and European blood) who love their wine and women. These characters are unique and human, humorous, bumbling, touching. Their world is so simple and easy in a way. Having property may be a great status symbol but is not worth it because of the headache. Disgrace and sin are not characterized by adultery or theft. Instead, honor lies in sharing a jug of wine or a cut of pork with a friend. Oh, did I mention the wine?
“Two gallons is a great deal of wine, even for two paisanos. Spiritually the jugs may be graduated thus: Just below the shoulder of the first bottle, serious and concentrated conversation. To inches farther down, sweetly sad memory. Three inches more, thoughts of old and satisfactory loves. An inch, thoughts of bitter loves. Bottom of the first jug, general and undirected sadness. Shoulder of the second jug, black, unholy despondency. Two fingers down, a song of death or longing. A thumb, every other song each one knows. The graduations stop here, for the trail splits and there is no certainty. From this point on anything can happen.”
Oh please. Take me to a time and place (and to a people) that prizes sitting in the sun barefoot in the morning, working only sporadically (usually to buy wine or throw a party), stealing in a Robin Hood context, pulling the wool over outsiders’ eyes. A society where a man who sleeps under the stars, had no bed to call his own and steals chickens from his neighbors can still be a “good” man. And if not “good,” at least endearing, entertaining and memorable.
Rating: 5 out of 5 stars = Buy the hard cover
5 out of 5 Star Books, Classic Lit, Fiction, Repeated Author | Comment (0)Walden (Henry David Thoreau)
Ah yes. Our infamous friend Mr. Henry David. All of us have heard the name and perhaps a well-known quote or two (”suck the marrow” and all that) but few of us have actually read his tome to rural simplicity and individual development. Outside the classroom, that is. Herein was my problem. I have read such thick and meaningful books in a school setting. Something about the deadlines and mandatory discussions makes the pages flip regularly if not speedily. On my own, however…. Sigh.
I am still on page 172 out of 303. And it has been almost three weeks. No, no. It has been three weeks. If you take a look at the speed I normally read, you will see how arduous this has become. I finished all of the other books I had out on loan from the library in an effort to focus on my Thoreau. I figured I should apply some of the author’s principles–I would take away all distractions in order to expand my mind and improve myself. I would forego the easy pleasure of modern life (i.e. entertaining novels) and seclude myself with something that would possibly change my life. Didn’t work. Instead of turning to Walden when I needed a reading fix (usually two or three times a day), I glanced at it, sighed, and turned on the television.
Being a lover of literature and a aspiring author, I feel it is my duty to read such classics. Who am I to hope to add to literary history if I cannot appreciate those who came before. My effort will karmically be rewarded when, 150 years from now, some future reader will laboriously try to read my books, struggling over my antiquated slang and phrases. I agree that:
“A written word is the choicest of relics. It is something at once more intimate with us and more universal than any other work of art. It is the work of art nearest to life itself. It may be translated into every language, and not only be read but actually breathed from all human lips; -not be represented on canvas or in marble only, but carved out of hte breath of life itself.”
Is the book that bad that I couldn’t finish it? you ask. I never said it was bad. It was very, very good in ways. Deep, touching and meaningful. A few pages of deep, touching and meaningful without a story, however, is an excellent generic form of Ambien. I must say that Mr. Henry was a very interesting fellow. He walked away from the urban life he knew (partially because the tax man was on his ass). He “squatted” on piece of unclaimed land–as if that is anywhere near possible anymore–and built a little house for exactly $28.12 1/2 (he includes an itemized table). The book goes on as an isolated man’s journal, divided into sections based upon the theme of the musings i.e. the ponds, the village, the bean fields, winter animals, etc.
Being a bit of an introvert myself, I love Thoreau’s escapists spirit:
“Society is commonly too cheap. We meet at very short intervals, not having had time to acquire any new value for each other. We meet at meals three times a day, and give each other a new taste of that old musty cheese that we are. We have to agree on a certain set of rules, called etiquette and politeness, to make this frequent meeting tolerable, and that we need not come to open war. We meet at the post-office, and at the sociable, and about the fireside every night; we live thick and are in each other’s way, and stumble over one another, and I think that we thus lose some respect for one another. Certainly less frequency would suffice for all important and hearty communications… The value of a man is not in his skin, that we should touch him.”
I was drawn towards the journey of solitude and contemplation, where only the amount of time necessary to remain living is devoted to work and the rest to contemplation, reading and writing. Lord, what a life! Though Mr. Henry delivers this, he also added a spin I didn’t expect, this upbeat and positive attitude of “Yay humanity!” where I was expecting “Hey humanity! See you later, sucker!” He says he appreciates his fellow men more at a suitable remove yet also claims that his journey is not an “ode to dejection” but instead an attempt to wake up those around him, enlightening them to his point of view. To me, this is the same as finding the perfect isolated and undiscovered beach and then going home to tell all your friends about it, inviting them to come on down next time around. Screw that. Okay, that’s a bit bitchy. I guess I would say to my friends, “Having a beach is great but, then again, some prefer the mountains. Either way, find your own specific chunk of nirvana and hike away from my Walden, okay?”
I want to finish this book. I will finish this book. I want to use this book as background in a character sketch for a story I have been working on. Therefore, the library will just have to wait to get it back until I find the isolated days, weeks and months I will need to finish it. They will have to deal with a few dogeared pages.
As for isolating it with no other books on my plate, well, that ain’t going to work for me. I have already started the joyous ride of Pricksongs and Descants by Robert Coover. Stay tuned for that discussion next episode. Same time. Same station.
Rating: 4.5 stars out of 5 = Hard cover book club selection
Biography, Classic Lit, Non-Fiction | Comment (1)Desolation Angels (Jack Kerouac)
One summer, old Jacky was stationed on Desolation Peak in the Cascade Mountains with a view of a small mountain named Hozomeen. Though he claims to have been without mind-altering substances, this is what his cocaine-fueled brilliance captured on the page:
“The void is not disturbed by any kind of ups and downs, my God look at Hozomeen, is he worried or tearful? Does he bend before storms or snarl when the sun shines or sigh in the late day drowse? Does he smile? Was he not born out of madbrained turmoils and upheavals of raining fire and now’s Hozomeen and nothing else? Why should I choose to be bitter or sweet, he does neither?—Why can’t I be like Hozomeen and O Platitude O hoary old platitude of the bourgeois mind ‘take life as it comes…’
Does the Void take any part in life and death? Does it have funerals? Or birth cakes? Why not I be like the Void, inexhaustibly fertile, beyond serenity, beyond even gladness, just Old Jack (and not even that)…
Hold still, man, regain your love of life and go down from this mountain and simply be—be—be the infinite fertilities of the one mind of infinity, make no comments, complaints, criticisms, appraisals, avowals, sayings, shooting stars of thoughts, just flow, flow, be you all, be you what it is, it is only what it always is—Hope is a word like a snow-drift—This is the Great Knowing, this the Awakening, this is Voidness—So shut up, like, travel, adventure, bless and don’t be sorry—Prunes, prunes, eat your prunes—And you have been forever, and will be forever, and all the worrisome smashings of your foot on innocent cupboard doors it was only the Void pretending to be a man pretending not to know the Void—”
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars = Book club selection
Biography, Classic Lit, Non-Fiction | Comment (0)Mrs. Dalloway (Virginia Woolf)
A portrait of a lady named Dalloway. A portrait of every soul that walks the streets of London. A portrait of one spring day in June. As the famous sentence goes,
“In the people’s eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane over head was what she loved; life; London; this moment in June.”
Woolf’s (at the time revolutionary) stream of consciousness can be considered a map of the human psyche and a true representation of thought. I’ve heard that. I can see it. Truth of the matter is that, one by one, all of her well-crafted sentences and characters and chain reactions of words flowing from rock to rock in the creek of humanity are amazing. Like museum pieces under glass to be studied, ooooohed, and lit from the right angle in an acid-free environment for future generations enjoyment and education. Ming vases or King Tut’s crispy bandages.
All strung together, though, it can be a bit much to take. That river is hard to trudge against. Not that it isn’t worth the journey–I recommend it as heartily as I do backpacking in the Grand Canyon. And no, watching The Hours and staring at Nicole Kidman’s enhanced nose will not cut it! However, I tried to read this on the treadmill and wound up repeating the same paragraph at least four times. It’s quite easy to lose track of the subject of the sentence and have to backtrack in search of a noun.
I love Woolf not only for what she writes but for what she represents to the modern world–feminine author, equal marriage, equal rights, mental instability, the coexistance of genius and madness, and the incredibly powerful symbolic image of walking into a river with stones in your pockets. Man, what woman hasn’t contemplated such a poignant passing in moments of delicious desperation–the beauty of death and through an act that replicates literally the feelings that are weighing you down. I can just see her stirring the stones around her palm with a resigned yet sly smile on her face. Don’t write me love notes of encouragement now. I’m not suicidal–just overly dark and Woolfish. Grrrr.
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars = Book club selection
Classic Lit, Fiction | Comment (0)The Sun Also Rises (Ernest Hemingway)
I have read a lot of Hemingway. He is ubuiquitous in the literary world, some people think for little reason–what, with his simplistic style, betraying his “low” journalistic roots, with his party party storylines and characters. The man’s personality, after all, has been captured so well in the modern mind. His drinking, manliness, ex-patriotism, adventuring, travelling, womanizing. I myself am guilty of this in calling my father’s style of interior decorating very Hemingway. Well, the man has zebra-striped dining chairs for god’s sake! In all that personality and the hype surrounding his works, I don’t think a lot of people take the time to sit down and read Hemingway. Just read the words and discover their worth for themselves, wiping the whiskey and zebra stripes out of their mind’s eye to do it.
This, I believe, is the ideal Hemingway work to practice this theory. His first novel-length piece, it tells the story of a journalist living in Paris after World War I, a journalist with a mysterious un-named wound to which our only clue is that he can no longer, ahem, function as a man. He and his group of ex-pat friends travel to Spain to fish and watch the bull fights, as well as drink themselves silly. Easy to summarize, yet hard to truly express the essence of it. The themes are like the deep currents of a river, the river itself being simple yet the currents underneath are always playing on the sun-sparkled surface, reminding you of the chilly power underneath.
The perfect instance of this is in the main character’s relationship with his lady love, a British aristocrat by the name of Brett. She’s a loose and easy type, strikingly beautiful but ready to live life to the fullest now that the horror of war had shown how dear and fragile it can be. Though their conversations together are simple and appear breezy, I almost want to cring with the unfulfilled emotional undercurrent:
“Don’t talk like a fool,” I said. “Besides, what happened to me is supposed to be funny. I never think about it.”
“Oh, no. I’ll lay you don’t.”
“Well, let’s shut up about it.”
“I laughed about it too, myself, once.” She wasn’t looking at me. “A friend of my brother’s came home that way from Mons. It seemed like a hell of a joke. Chaps never know anything, do they?”
“No,” I said. “Nobody ever knows anything….
“It’s very funny. And it’s a lot of fun, too, to be in love.”
“Do you think so?” her eyes looked flat again.
“I don’t mean fun that way. In a way it’s an enjoyable feeling.”
“No,” she said. “I think it’s hell on earth.”
“It’s good to see each other.”
“No. I don’t think it is.”
“Don’t you want to?”
“I have to.”
Excellent style, exotic storyline, and great depth. A three punch-er in my book. If you keep hearing about that Hemingway guy, that drinking author who lived in Cuba, that Kilamanjaro bloke your English teacher keeps pushing down your throat… give The Sun Also Rises a try. If it effects you similarly to me, well then, Ole! If not, you poor literature-loathing college student, it’s always great as a drinking game. Simply count and take a shot every time a character says, “Let’s have drink!” Looks like the first instance is on page 10.
Rating: 5 out of 5 stars = Buy the hard cover
5 out of 5 Star Books, Classic Lit, Fiction, Repeated Author | Comment (0)A Confederacy of Dunces (John Kennedy Toole)
“When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.” - Jonathan Swift
I have no idea how to begin describing this book. Perhaps that is why is has been finished for nine days now and I have yet to review it, letting 1.5 books accumulate behind it in the queue. I think I must begin with a few simple words to get the ball rolling: irreverent, witty, grotesque, farcical, erudite. I would compare it to a book of Thomas Aquinas and a MAD magazine, both left under a boy’s bed to grow mold and develop patches of stickiness until they gel into one unit of random, insightful and tragi-comic ramblings.
These ramblings are the work of a character named Ignatius Rielly. An over-educated and under-motived slob and medievalist. A slave to the workings of his “valve” and the food that bloats him up to monumental proportions. Lazy, badly dressed and arrogant, Ignatius lists through life, living in his mothers house, living to yell obscenities at daytime television. That is, until he is almost arrested for appearing “suspicious,” which stresses his mother, who drags them into a dive on Bourbon Street, where they get quite drunk and offend the establishment, after which his mother drives drunk into a stranger’s house, that causes a little problem with the money for reparations, which makes Ignatius venture forth into the workplace and attempt to change the world. All in the first few pages, of course.
The rest is about this interaction between the world of Ignatius and the world reality. I think we begin to love Ignatius, repulsive as he is, for how he doesn’t fit in, doesn’t want to fit in, and blindly plows through his oddball antics with true courage–that is, the courage to not give a damn whether your world makes sense to anyone else or not. Incredibly funny and often very incisive, Confederacy of Dunces should be standard reading for every high school in America. Would definitely be a jumping off point for further literary ventures. I think this book could bridge the gap for non-bookies, proving to them that literature, even “classic” literature, can be more entertaining than sex. Okay, not sex. Television, though? I hope?
The innate tragedy of the novel, however, is the story of it’s author, John Kennedy Toole. This novel was published 11 years after he committed suicide, partially because of his failure as a writer and partially because he was a writer (you know how moody we can be, right?). It was his mother and a professor she recruited that lobbied for the book’s publication in 1980. It won the Pulitzer Prize, posthumously, obviously, in 1981. I suppose that knowing this information in advance, the novel reads out some of Toole’s angst against a society that doesn’t recognise genius and yet, simultaneous, pokes fun at the oddity, grotesque quality, and stupidity of that genius.
Rating: 5 out of 5 stars = Buy the hard cover
5 out of 5 Star Books, Award-Winning, Classic Lit, Fiction | Comment (0)