The Caine Mutiny - Herman Wouk

The Caine Mutiny is one of those books that has simply been in the ether lately. I saw it mentioned in several different places over a one week period (technically it was the movie being referenced, but close enough), and eventually my interest was sufficiently piqued to check it out. The story follows a young man named Willie Keith from his beginnings as a rich layabout slumming as a nightclub pianist, through midshipman school to life aboard a minesweeper called the Caine. It is here Willie meets Captain Queeg, an outsized character whose megalomania, cowardice, and paranoid persecution complex have drawn apt political comparisons of late.

Willie is not actually the pivotal character in the eponymous mutiny, but rather something between an active participant and an observer. Yet it is his perspective that provides the lynchpin for the story, despite its willingness to venture off into different perspectives where necessary. Wouk rounds out the story with a rich cast of supporting characters, including Maryk, a dutiful lieutenant and former fisherman who becomes a reluctant mutineer; Keefer, an erudite writer who resents Queeg but lacks the courage to oust him; and May Wynn, a nightclub singer and daughter of a lower class fruit vendor, who plays the role of star-crossed lover for Willie.

In a foreword provided by my edition of the novel, Wouk notes that the book initially received a lukewarm reception, and that its success coincided with that of another book about the Pacific theater in World War II: From Here to Eternity by James Jones. The superficial comparisons are obvious, but the books actually offer a significant contrast to one another. Jones’ prose is more lyrical, his tone darker and more fatalistic. Wouk injects a fair bit of comedy into his novel, and while it falls short of satire, there is a broadness to some of the characters that reminded me, in their most extreme moments, of Evelyn Waugh’s Men at Arms (though never reaching the zany intensity of Catch-22)

Robert E Lee Prewitt is also a much different protagonist than Willie Keith, with the former being a hard-bitten ex-boxer from a poor southern family, and the latter a rich northern Princeton grad whose status consciousness causes him much inner turmoil. Prewitt is a man aged beyond his years, Willie a boy in a man’s body who goes to sea to grow up. The ultimate fates of the two characters is about what you’d expect.

The book was gripping in its rich use of detail, first of life at sea, and later of the legalities of the court martial process. Wouk clearly knows his stuff, and presents it in a way that feels natural. I look forward to reading his other war novels.

I Never Promised You a Rose Garden - Hannah Green

I Never Promised You a Rose Garden is a good example aof a novel that suffers from poor synopses. It is generally billed as the story of Degborah Blau, a young woman whose life is divided between the relaity of a mental institution and the fantasy realm of Yr.

Superficially, this is accurate, but it strongly implies that Yr is a Narniaesque place of adventure and magic, where Deborah goes to fulfill the destiny denied her in the real world. Whereas the Yr reflected in the book is far less tangible. Its few physical features are scarecly mentioned at all, and generally only in recolleciton between Deborah and her psychiatrist, Dr. Fried. We the reader spend basically no time in Yr at all. Instead, we see it through her discussions with Dr. Fried and her own internal struggle. Yr is less a place than a pantheon of Gods that has grown increasingly oppressive, and a language in which Deborah’s scrambled thoughts can be more clearly articulated.

The split in the novel is thus not really reality versus fantasy, but internal versus external, as Deborah struggles to permeate the barrier without destroying herself in the process. We also spend more time with her family than I’d expected, who are portraying wit ha refreshing level of nuance. Her mother and father are flawed people, and subject to a less than perfect family dynamic marred by the outsized personality of her grandfather, but they all care about her deeply, and the root cause her illness is not foisted upon them. There’s no single breakthrough that brings Deborah back to the real world—another common cliche in books about mental illness—but a gradual paring back of thought and memory. All told, it paints a nuanced and accurate portrayal of therapy, which is perhaps not surprising, given the the novel is semi-autobiographical and concern’s the author’s actual experiences.

The book was perhaps not what I expected to be, but is ultimately stronger for defying those expectations. The writing is rich and eloquent, with evokative imagery that never feels stilted or excessive. Deborah’s whiz kid dialogue, clotted with witticisims, seemed a bit much, but this receded over the course of the book, and was likely meant to show her defense mechanisms. I found it jarred wit hthe otherwise naturalistic dialogue, but it wasn’t a fatal flaw.

The Shame of the States - Albert Deutsch

The Shame of the States is not the book I’d pictured it to be. Having come across a reference to it in Edward Shorter’s A History of Psychiaty, I’d imagined it as a kind of proto-gonzo journalism in the vein of Black Like Me, where Deutsch would masquerade as someone with mental health issues in order to expose the deplorable conditions of insane asylums. To be sure, there is an exposé element to The Shame of the States, but it is not one reach through duplicity. Deutsch announced his intentions to every one of the asylums he visits, and stresses that in the majority of cases he was welcomed with open arms.

That is not to say that the conditions he saw were favorable, or that he pulled any punches in his reporting. Rather, it speaks to the desperation in which asylum administrators found themselves—hopelessly underfunded and overworked, with barely trained staff and annual turnover rates approaching 100%—that they willingly exposed the foetid underbellies of their institutions in the hopes that learning of their appalling conditions would shock the public out of complacency, and that their outrage would trickle down to the politicians holding the purse strings.

I can’t say whether Deutsch’s book was successful in that regard, though I can say the picture he paints is vivid and heartbreaking, full of people in restraints or slumped in chairs, of beds filling a room so completely there is no space left to walk around them, of crumbling walls and ceiling bubbling with rot. Deutsch brought a photographer with him to every asylum he visited, and the photos he captured further underscore the squalid conditions of most of these institutions.

Though writing with the restrained, clinical prose of a seasoned journalist for most of his observations, Deutsch cannot restrain his seething anger at the state of affairs he witnesses, and the book contains a number of passages in which he allows himself the freedom to editorialize. The case studies make up the bulk of the text, but the book has other facets as well, making it part history, part journalism, part treatise.

Deutsch’s compassion for his subjects cannot be denied, though the age of the book means that some of the language he uses can be jarring to a modern reader. He refers to people with mental disabilities as “mentally defective” and “feeble-minded,” and regularly throws about the term idiot as a descriptor. People with Down Syndrome are referred to as “Mongolian Idiots.” I admit I cringed a bit at some of these passages, though it’s worth reiterating that Deutsch employs these terms without malice, and that the phrases he uses were at the time blandly clinical. He even makes a point of distinguishing between morons, imbeciles, and idiots, terms that signified increasingly severe levels of cognitive delay. “Idiot” and “moron” have been so thoroughly expunged of their clinical roots, that it is almost impossible to hear them as anything other than insults. Seeing them presented this way is an interesting reminder of how language changes over time.

Vingt mille lieues sous la mer (Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea) - Jules Verne

Vingt mille lieues sous la mer is the fourth Jules Verne novel I’ve read (the third in the original French), and I must say, it’s been my least favorite so far. This surprised me, as the subject matter is something I’m inherently interested in, and while my readings of Verne have never strayed that far form his greatest hits, Vingt mille lieues is arguably the greatest hit of them all (I’d argue Voyage au centre de la terre is second, and Le tour du monde en quatre-vingt jours third, though I admit I’m basing this on my own perception and little else).

Verne could be considered the prototypical nerd, in his use of narrative to obsessively catalog scientific minutiae. Whatever the story, you can bet that at some point, Verne will digress from the action at hand to write 500 breathless words about the origins of igneous rock, or the taxonomic details of coral. In some cases, this is more feature than bug—in de la Terre à la Lune, for instance, when his recurring treatise on ballistics lends credence and weight to what would otherwise be a spare narrative.

The key difference, I think, is that in Lune and Voyage au Centre de la Terre, there is an underlying urgency to the story that keeps Verne’s digressions in check. The cannon needs to launch at the precise date and time in order to hit the moon, and Axel can only spend so much time poring over subterranean fungi before Professor Lidenbrock drags him on to their ultimate destination. In 20,000 lieues, however, the story is essentially a chronicle of Professor Arronax’s time on the Nautilus, which Captain Nemo cruises about the oceans on a whim. Without that forward drive, Verne has no incentive to rush to any one conclusion, and as a result, the detours become the trip. Much of what happens feels like it is of no real consequence, and most events seem primarily positioned to allow Verne the opportunity to spout scientific facts and theories, some of more merit than others (Atlantis makes an appearance). In other Verne works, the opportunity to wax scientific is only part of the reason for events—there’s generally some forward plot momentum going on too.

And the descriptions of fish, my god, the descriptions of fish. There must be close to a dozen passages that are little more than taxonomic litanies of every bit of flora and fauna in a given sea. This is particularly frustrating for a non-native reader, as the names of many creatures he describes fall outside the scope of my e-reader’s built in dictionary, and by the third or fourth fish, I’m just too tired to bother looking them all up on my phone. As such, I’m stuck deducing what he means from the description of each animal. It doesn’t help that he tends to use less common names for some animals (though perhaps this is an issue of age more than erudition). Notably, he uses the word squale for shark in most cases, when a modern French speaker would opt for requin.

This all sounds a bit nit-picky, and maybe it is. Despite the book’s faults, there were still moments I truly enjoyed ,and Verne retains his capacity to make his own wonder at the world infectious. And Captain Nemo is a good character, intriguing in his sombre nobility. He is an honorable man who does dishonorable things, which is about as much nuance as you’re likely to get in a Jules Verne character (like Lovecraft, Verne is the kind of genre fiction writer who eschews character development almost entirely in favor of raw story, and whose vision is so honed and rich that he gets away with it).

Spartacus - Howard Fast

Sometimes, a book suprises you. I picked up Spartacus expected a straightforward telling of a fraily well-known story: a slave rises up against his masters, raises an army, and fights against the tyrannical forces of Rome until cut down in a blaze of glory. What I did not expect was a strange, cubist masterpiece that resonates across time and place, to make a profound statement on what society is and what it costs us.

The novel begins in the months after the Roman general Crassus has defeated Spartacus and put down his rebel army, and returns to the life of the eponymous character only in flashback. His story emerges through the recollections of various characters who either knew him or knew his reputation: Crassus, the above-mentioned general, who did not meet Spartacus on the field of battle but came to admire his tactics even as he abhorred his insurrection; Batiatus, the owner of a gladiator school whose scouts rescued Spartacus from a Nubian mine; Gracchus, a corpulent Roman senator, whose dealings with Spartacus, however indirect, spurred an existential crisis; David, a Jewish gladiator who fought beside and idolized Spartacus.

The narrative shifts fluidly between these characters, and is not bound by the limits of their own knowledge. We gain direct access to Spartacus’ thoughts on some occasions, even though the ostensible teller of the story whould have no knowledge of them. The result is a panoramic tale that is less about historicla accuracy—much of the occurences Fast recounts are completely lost to history, and he plays fast and loose with details even in situations where they are known—than about the creation of myth, and the way such myths can ripple through time.

Fast’s prose is sumptuous, grandiloquent, unafraid of lofty pronouncements and detours into philosohpical speculation. He manages this without growing tedious or unduly absorbed in his own musings. Rather, it captures the broader tone of the book, pulling out the few threads of fact (or assumed fact) that remain of Spartacus’ legacy, and weaving them into something wondrous and whole.

Rarely has a book so exceeded my expectation. And what makes its triumph as a work of art all the sweeter is this: Fast was forced to self-publish the book after blacklisting censors bullied every publisher in America into rejecting it. It ended up becoming a runaway best-selle,r and inspired the movie that arguably delt the deathblow to the blacklist itself. All this from a book about rebelling against impossible odds.

If that isn’t justice, I don’t know what is.

Winter's Bone - Daniel Woodrell

The strength of Winter’s Bone lies in its simplicity. Ree Dolly is a girl from a community deep in the Ozarks where blood ties mean everything—or are supposed to—and the law isn’t trusted. She’s a mother to her two younger brothers, and to her own mother, who tumbled into madness some years before. Her father has vanished while out on bail, and the sheriff tells her that her house was posted as bond. If he doesn’t turn up, dead or alive, it goes to the county, and Ree and her family will be left homeless.

So begins an odyssey through the backwoods of Missouri, as Ree travels from house to house and town to town in search of answers. The Dolly bloodline flows into every corner of her world, but there are places where it runs too thin to protect her. The plot is spare, exposition flensed clean, resulting in an immediacy that further bolsters the comparisons with Cormac McCarthy, which were already inevitable from the subject matter and the writing style.

Woodrell’s prose is swift and lyrical, full of rich imagery that rises naturally from the words, rather than artful constructions of metaphor. At its best, it’s hallucinatory. though there were the odd passages that felt a bit overdone for me. One example: “a picnic of words fell from Gail’s mouth to be gathered around and savored slowly.” Such moments feel a bit self-consciously literary, but I’ll freely admit that my own writing could draw similar criticism, and probably does. Style is a matter of taste, and on the whole, Woodrell’s style is deft enough to earn its flourishes. It is not quite as transcendent as McCarthy’s but that’s a high bar to reach.

The Red Badge of Courage - Stephen Crane

I’m several episodes into Ken Burns’ documentary on the American Civil War, and it inspired me to revisit The Red Badge of Courage, a book I hadn’t read in decades and barely remembered. It tells the story of Henry Fleming, a young man who leaves his small town to become a soldier in the Union army.

Though it depicts several battles in great detail, much of the book’s action is internal, as Henry struggles with his competing fears of death and cowardice. He spends much of the book’s first section obsessing over how he will fare in battle, by turns certain he will display valor and terrified that he will crumble under the pressure. Rattled by a Confederate charge, he flees, and the middle section finds him fighting on two fronts: a practical one, as he decides whether to desert entirely or slink back to his regiment, and a personal one, as he wallows in self-disgust at his cowardice and jealousy of the wounds of his comrades, which he sees as signs of bravery—or red badges of courage, as the title has it.

The prose is lyrical but dens,e filled with rich detail that can illuminate moments while leaving the broader action somewhat obscured. There is an opacity to the text that may be deliberate, a little like WIlliam Faulkner’s tendency to sidestep key moments and view them only on the periphery. This sensation is further enforced by Crane’s insistent use of descriptions rather than names to identify characters. Henry is referred to almost exclusively as “the youth” by the narrator, his name gleaned by the reader only through dialogue. Othe characters are referred to in the same way, so we get “the tattered soldier,” “the lieutenant,” and “the loud soldier.”

Overall, I enjoyed the book, though some of the passages feel sluggish and overburdened with description. I suspect this “slow motion” effect was deliberate, but even with a novel as short as this one, I couldn’t help but want the pace to pick up a bit at times.

The Incomplete Book of Running - Peter Sagal

I’m a sucker for books I encounter by happenstance. In the case of the Incomplete Book of Running, my wife bought a copy for a friend, and unwisely left it on the kitchen counter where I could see it (she should know better). I have no interest in running, and I’d never heard of Peter Sagal or his game show, but the cover intrigued me and I picked it up, intending to read a few pages. A few pages became a few chapters, and I finished it in two days.

The book is a though one to categorize. Part memoir, part manifesto, it uses a loose collection of stories from Sagal’s life to reflect on what running means to him, what it’s done for him, and why it is people like to do it. Sagal eschews a linear narrative, instead bouncing around in time and space (an early reference to Billy Pilgrim sets this up nicely) while using the year of 2013 as a touchstone—a pivotal year in Sagal’s life, begun with his witnessing the horrific bombing at the Boston Marathon, and subsumed with a messy divorce that left him a bachelor in his forties. Though not shining from rough subjects, the tone is never maudlin, and Sagal demonstrates a keen wit throughout.

Jokes are hard to pull off on paper. It’s a skill distinct from stand-up comedy, and Sagal has it. Beyond being funny, the prose has a good momentum to it, lyrical without excess imagery or verbiage. It’s surprising to see an autobiography by a non-writer read so smoothly. Though it did say that he was a playwright at one point, which may explain it. In any case, it made me want to listen to his game show.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey

I first read One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest when I was maybe 19. It made a strong impression on me at the time, and remained at the back of my mind as an example of a Great Novel. Picking it up again at 33, I realised how much of my recollection was on the broad strokes of the plot, and on Randle Patrick McMurphy as a character. McMurphy is a solid character, a prototypical 60’s system-bucking hero, and it’s not surprising that we would become the focal point of the novel for most readers. But as I read through the book a second time, I found my attention drifting more and more to the narrator, Chief Bromden.

Books like Cuckoo are written in what we creative writing workshop dorks call “first person pedestal.” This means that the narrator is a character in the story, but unlike a standard first person novel, the narrator and the hero are not the same person. First person pedestal works to give an intimate portrait of an exceptional person from someone who knows them well, but whose own light shines a little less brightly. The Great Gatsby and To Kill a Mockingbird are probably the two most famous examples. Cuckoo is another.

But while Nick Carraway and Scout Finch can never match the allure of Gatsby and Atticus, I actually found Chief Bromden to be an even more interesting character than McMurphy. Kesey drops in details of the Chief’s past life with elegant restraint, and paints an evocative picture of his madness. A lesser author would take the fact that he pretends to be a deaf-mute as a simple narrative device and make his thinking otherwise normal, but it is clear that Bromden really does suffer from some sort of psychological ailment, quite possibly schizophrenia. Much of the narrative richness comes from Bromen’s interpretation of emotional states as affected by the Combine, a nefarious mechanism that controls everything it touches. The recurring images of machinery and fog play into common tropes among schizophrenic patients. It is interesting that Bromden’s paranoia seems to heighten rather than obscure his perception—we don’t question that Nurse Ratched controls the ward, even if we don’t take Brmden’s insistence that she does so through a fog machine literally. This device might not be medically accurate, but it makes for very rich prose.

Valérian et Laureline: L'Integrale Volume 1 - Pierre Christin and Jean-Claude Mézières

Valérian et Laureline is a long-running French comic book series. I’d only learned of it recently, but it’s apparently quite the institution in Europe, and has served as inspiration to everything from Star Wars to The Fifth Element. Since much of it was published as short stories in serial magazines like Pilote, categorizing it as a book is somewhat arbitrary. The Ottawa Library has it in a multi-volume omnibus format (L’integrale), so that’s how I’m reading it.

Valérien is a spatio-temporal agent from Galaxity, the Earth-based capital of the Terrien Galactic Empire in the 28th century. His job is to travel back in time and prevent temporal paradoxes caused by careless or malicious time travellers. The series is gleefully pulpy in tone, full of technobabble and concepts with no pretense of grounding in physics. I admire hard science fiction for the intricacy of its concepts and its spartan adherence to known laws, but I have room in my heart for the goofy stuff, too, and Valérian et Laureline definitely falls into that camp.

Volume 1 contains three multi-issue stories: Les Mauvais Rêves (Bad Dreams), La Cité des eaux mouvantes (the City of Moving Waters), and L'Empire des mille planètes (The Empire of a Thousand Planets). The first two follow the heroes’ efforts to thwart a rogue spatio-temporal agent Xombul at various points in history (the 11th century and 1986, respectively). The third story shifts to a distant galaxy where spatio-temporal travel is unknown, and Valérian and Laureline act less as time cops than Star Trek-esque explorers.

The plots are messily enjoyable, full of twists and turns, and the dialogue is full of pulpy banter and excessive exposition—a trait that would be irritating in other concept,s but is so fundamental to the pulp sci fi of that era that it becomes part of the fun. There are some funny bits scattered throughout. My favorite is the gag of having Laureline describe her version of past events to Valérien, while the image shows what actually happened. I look forward to Volume 2.

A History of Psychiatry - Edward Shorter

The premise of Edward Shorter’s A History of Psychiatry is interesting. The brain remains the one piece of human anatomy whose inner workings we have not yet fully understood, and so an overview of our efforts to treat neurological illnesses seems like it would lead down some dark and intriguing alleyways. And so it does. Shorter provides a thorough chronicle of the different stages of psychiatric medicine, from the first efforts to house the mentally ill in asylums to the wonders of modern pharmaceuticals. The description of these phases was interesting, but strangely the least engaging aspect of Shorter’s chronicle was the human element. Shorter treats the book like a Who’s Who of psychiatric history, and the litany of names drone out paragraph after paragraph, each tagged with a brief description of the individual’s accomplishments before stepping aside to make room for the next shout out. Some names reappear pages later, vaguely attributed, leaving you scratching your head and wondering which of the 50 people you’ve just learned about this one is. I can’t fault Shorter for wanting to cite those responsible for psychiatry’s various accomplishments, but a more in-depth study of fewer players would have gone down a lot easier.

The cluttered prose is an inconvenience, but my biggest issue with the book was its editorializing. Shorter admits early on that he has a certain slant, which is admirable, but a history should strive for some level of objectivity. By contrast, Shorter’s preference for some schools of thought over others is apparent throughout the text—every figure associated with biological psychiatry, however slight their contribution, gets a solid 300 words, while major figures of psychotherapy are glossed over. Carl Jung is mentioned perhaps twice, both times in passing, and without any regard to his work or theories.

This editorializing by omission descends into something almost resembling a rant once it reaches the modern day. His dismisses patients with PTSD, anorexia, and moderate forms of depression, anxiety and OCD as little more than whiners who foisted their diagnoses on a hapless DSM committee through political strong-arming. There remains some validity to his criticisms of how the DSM was and is put together, but his cavalier dismissal of serious illnesses—some of which I’ve witnessed firsthand—was pretty gross. He walks this dismissal back in later pages, making it difficult to discern his exact stance on them, but either way the entire final chapter felt far too editorial in tone.

Darkness at Noon - Arthur Koestler (Translated by Daphne Hardy)

If I had to describe Darkness at Noon in one word (why would I ever have to do this? It’s not important), I’d call it “brooding.” The book details the imprisonment and confession of Nicholas Rubashov, a member of the communist old guard who has been accused, somewhat arbitrarily, of crimes against the state.

The majority of the novel is set in Rubashov’s cell, where he communicates with his neighbours using a tap code, and the interrogation room, where he undergoes questioning by two men: Ivanov, an old friend who retains some sympathy for him, and Gletkin, a younger man who represents to Rubashov the changing face of the party he helped build. The action briefly flashes to other times and places, mostly through Rubashov’s recollections of events that are being used against him in the accusation.

The story is lean, slow, and meditative, with most of the action occuring inside Rubashov’s head as he reflects on his situation and explores his shifting attitudes towards communism. Koestler’s creates a rich and conflicted character in Rubashov, a man too intelligent to buy the absurdities of communism, yet nevertheless dedicated to the movement and not yet ready to disavow it. At the start of the book, Koestler provides a brief note explaining that Rubashov is a composite of many individuals who were purged during the Soviet show trials of the late 1930s, and this authenticity bleeds into the narrative.

The prose was rich and engaging, full of sumptuous images that chronicle Rubashov’s inner and outer turmoil. It’s worth noting that the English version of the novel is actually a work of translation, despite appearing on the Modern Library’s Top 100 Best English Language Novels of the 20th Century. I imagine it was deemed to qualify because Koestler’s original manuscript (written in German) was lost, and Daphne Hardy’s English translation was the first version to see publication. I question whether it counts, personally, but translation or no, it’s an excellent novel, and the psychological richness of Koestler’s account cannot be denied.

All Quiet on the Western Front - Erich Maria Remarque

All Quiet on the Western Front is a story narrated by Paul Baumer, a young German man who, a long with his friends, enlists in the German army during World War 1. No jingoist, he is clearly disillusioned at the opening pages, and becomes only more so throughout. His enlistment, we learn, was largely due to social pressure, personified by an arrogant teacher who bombarded his students with stories of false glory.

The story is episodic, with the only overarching narrative e being the course of the war, which Baumer, as a lowly soldier, barely glimpses. We see through his eyes, and what he sees are generally periods of boredom and hunger punctuated with week-long stretches of terror at the front. Stints on leave and at a military hospital broaden the picture further, giving a cross-section of life as a soldier at that time and place.

The descriptions are frank and horrific without being melodramatic. Indeed, the almost casual way in which Baumer details life as a soldier serves to reinforce the horror of the war. However, the prose isn't always plain, and Remarque allows Baumer the odd poetic digression, without going beyond what a young German intellectual might reasonably say.

All told, the book deserves its reputation as a preeminent work of World War 1 fiction. It's interesting to read as a Canadian with German heritage, as I have relatives who fought on both sides of that conflict. Baumer's reflection on the war's futility, and the perversion of killing men who share more in common with you than the generals and leaders who insist you do the killing, is a simple one, but its truth is profound.

The Baron in the Trees - Italo Calvino

My god, I wish I came across this book when I was 13. I loved it at 33, and don't doubt I'll love it just as much when I eventually reread it (which I'm sure I will), but I think I would have loved it even more then. And not simply for its content—though as an avid tree-climber it would doubtless have gripped me--but for its melancholic whimsy. It reminds me in tone of Winnie the Pooh and, in a sense harder to define, of Louis Sachar’s Wayside books. Stories that seemed so fully realised that as a child I fell into them, walked about their pages for a while, and emerged at the final chapter ever so slightly changed.

The main character is Cosimo Piovasco directed Rondo, who at the age of 12 has a fight with his father over dinner that leads him to climb into the trees and never come down. The story is narrated by his younger brother, who often relies on secondhand information and freely admits that certain passages are supposition on his part--a device that lends both uncertainty and verisimilitude to the story. The rest of the book is an episodic chronicling of Cosimo's life in the trees, with passages both prosaic (his inventive solutions for toiletry, sleep, and commerce) and heroic (battles with pirates and treacherous Jesuits). I loved the former as much as the latter, and the whole story flows effortless as q long campfire fable.

The prose is translated from the Italian, but retains a bit of Mediterranean flavour, evocative but not florid. It avoids the common pitfall of first person narratives where the narrator takes on the cadence of capital N Narration, losing the voice of the person who is supposedly telling the story. I never doubted the voice used here.

Italo Calvino is a name I'd heard for some time but never pursued, knowing nothing about him apart from that he was an author. I found The Baron in the Trees as a fluke, as it was mentioned in the comments of a Guardian article about a man who spent 2 years in a tree. Such happy accidents reinforce the value of always keeping an ear out for new titles. Sometimes the best stories come to you from unexpected places.

Clock Without Hands - Carson McCullers

What a great and burdensome thing it must be, to have written as your debut novel something as immensely powerful as The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. Where do you go from there? How can you compete?

Clock Without Hands is McCuller’s fourth and final novel, written 21 years after Hunter. It opens and closes with J.T. Malone, a middle-aged pharmacist diagnosed with terminal cancer. His remaining lifespan serves as a timeline for the novel, though he quickly recedes into the background of the main story, which instead centers around Judge Clane, an elderly ex-congressman who epitomizes the arrogant bigotry of the Old South, and Sherman Jones, a young blue-eyed black man who was orphaned shortly after birth and carries a large—and not wholly unjustified—chip on his shoulder.

The story builds on the themes of racism and homosexuality that first appeared in Hunter, and while they were less obvious in her first novel (particularly those of homosexuality), their subtlety lent them power. In Hunter, the ruthless racism of the south is shown directly through the visceral descriptions of savagery against Dr. Copeland and his son, whereas in Clock it emerges through the musings of the Judge, who longs for an antebellum era he never actually knew and abhors integration of the races.

However, where a lesser novelist would tumble into saccharine cliche, McCullers strengthens the story by playing against type. Sherman, the black orphan who gets a job as the judge’s secretary, would in a lesser novel be a sympathetic and heroic character. But in Clock Without Hands, he is downright unpleasant—arrogant, rude, untrustworthy, quick to lash out at anyone and everyone. We see his wounds more clearly by what they have made of him, and McCullers makes the more difficult choice of showing that the scars of a hard life, mental and physical, aren’t always attractive.

In mediocre stories, underprivileged protagonists often present with the psychological equivalent of the single scar across the eye favored by rugged action heroes: a disfigurement that lends character and gravitas without damaging handsomeness. The truth, which is at its core the subject of all great literature, is much messier. Often wounded people are hard to be around. We want our underdogs to be polite and heroic, but sometimes politeness and heroics are themselves the result of privilege.

The character of the Judge presents the same idea in reverse: while the novel is unabashed in its implicit criticism of his worldview, and is not above a satiric tone at times, the overall picture it paints is one of pity more than anything. The Judge’s supreme arrogance is pared away and revealed as a hollow varnish painted over a great gaping emptiness. In the book’s closing pages, when he learns of the Supreme Court’s decision to integrate the school system, his final charge for segregation becomes a pathetic farce ,and the last bit of that varnish is torn away. The people in Clock Without Hands are neither heroes nor villains. They’re simply people. And while the story lacks the peerless power of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, it is nevertheless a strong and moving novel by one of the twentieth century’s greatest novelists.

Bear - Marian Engel

I knew Bear by reputation many years before I actually read it, and now that I’ve done so, the controversy that surrounded its publication—already a bit ridiculous on the face of it—seems positively quaint. Only in a place like Canada, where Queen Victoria’s prudish reign hung on in spirit until the final days of the twentieth century, could a novel like Bear be controversial. After all, we’re talking about a book published in 1976—17 years after Naked Lunch, 42 years after Tropic of Cancer, 54 years after Ulysses. If its sole aim was to shock through depiction of sexual debauchery, then it was decidedly too little too late.

Fortunately, Bear’s sole purpose is not to shock. I’m honestly not sure whether that was even among its purposes at all. Its risque subject matter aside, Bear reminds me less of the taboo-probing forbears listed above than of Surfacing, Margaret Atwood’s novel published only a few years earlier in 1972. It’s been over a decade since I read Surfacing, but my thoughts turned in its direction as a read Engel’s novel. Both books feature female protagonists facing some profound but largely unspoken emptiness in their lives, and both venture into the Canadian wilderness in an effort to address it. It is in these wilds that Engel’s protagonist, Lou, meets the eponymous Bear while on an assignment to catalog the possessions of the late Colonel Cary.

What follows is a subtle and often unspoken portrait of loneliness. There are a few short passages with explicit language that strike with surprising keenness amidst the literary prose, but my takeaway from Bear was less the protagonist’s peccadilloes than than the yawning and undefined hunger inside her. It’s a rich story well told, and one deserving of continued appreciation beyond its seamy notoriety.

The Interpreters - Wole Soyinka

I often put a hold on books at my library that don't arrive for months, and by the time I get them I don't remember what they are or why I wanted them in the first place. The Interpreters has been a similar experience, only I bought it instead of borrowing it. I don't recall when or why, but I'm glad I did.

The novel concerns a wide-ranging cast of young intellectuals in Lagos, Nigeria. There is little by way of an overarching plot. Instead, stories come and go and cross paths with one another, not in an episodic faction, but rather a fluid and ever-shifting narrative flux. Targets emerge for satire--politics, the news media, universities, religious cults--before dissolving into the textual mists. The result is disorienting, though Soyinka's rich prose and dark humor propel things along.

The book offers little by way of narrative signposts. Characters are introduced with no context for who they are or how they relate to one another, and names take a central role before disappearing for chapters at a time. Egbo opens and closes the novel, and his traumatic memory of seeing his parents drown acts as a thematic bookend, but other characters play a much bigger role in the novel's center. Kabo, the disillusioned painter, is one example. Sagoe, a beleaguered journalist, is another. A few white visitors emerge as peripheral characters, where they serve as both targets of satire in their own right and ammunition aimed at the obsequious treatment they receive by black intellectuals in some circles.

The prose is rich with imagery, the dialogue quick-witted and playful. It reminds me, in a free-association sort of way, of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. The stories are nothing alike, and the writing styles are different—Soyinka’s more florid and poetic, Heller’s more jokey—but both authors deal with a fluctuating cast of characters, through which they paint a stinging picture of of a community, and through it society at large.

This book is a real find. I just wish I remembered where it was I found it.

(An additional point: none of the characters are interpreters by profession, and no one does any interpreting, so I’m at a loss as to the meaning behind the title. I could probably come up with some sort of symbolic reason, but it would be a guess and probably wrong)

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter - Carson McCullers

There are a handful of books that seem to make in on every “best of” list for 20th century fiction. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter is one of them. And rightfully so.

Centered around a deaf mute man named John Singer in a Georgian Mill Town, the book slowly expands to encompass a group of characters who are superficially unrelated, but share a profound inner pain that Singer, in some strange way, seems to soothe. Though fundamentally good, Singer is not some beatific healer, but is himself deeply wounded, and seeks his own solace in a friendship with a Greek man named Spiros Antonapoulos. Though their friendship is platonic and there is no hint of romantic affection between the two, their interactions have a subtext of unrequited love, as Singer’s devotion to Spiros is not mirrored by Spiros’ behavior towards Singer. This is not necessarily because Spiros is manipulative or selfish, but more likely from an undiagnosed mental illness or developmental issue. Much remains unspoken and unlearned, which is an accurate reflection of how mental illness was treated at the time.

McCullers’ prose is excellent in a graceful, understated way. She writes in a style I admire in no small part because I can’t emulate it. It takes a special gift to write prose that is lyrical but not ornate, that carries poetry in simple, declarative sentences. Whole paragraphs can pass without a single comma, and her use of metaphor is restrained, giving the few that she uses greater power. The book is a masterpiece.

Bonjour Tristesse - Francoise Sagan

I encountered this book on recommendation from a friend, who bought me the English translation. However, I make a point of reading French works in the original wherever possible, and fortunately I was able to find a copy at my local library. It would be interesting to pick up the version she gave me and see how it matches up to my interpretation.

Like Nabokov’s Lolita or Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, Bonjour Tristesse is less about the story it tells than the person telling it. The narrator, a world-weary seventeen-year-old named Cécile, vacations with her father and his young girlfriend Elsa on the French Riviera. Their peaceful equilibrium is shattered by the arrival of Anne, an attractive and intelligent woman who is a friend of the family through her father’s late wife. Her father soon leaves Elsa for Anne, who insists that Cécile show greater ambition for her studies. Cécile, incensed, resolved to break them up.

Aside from a budding romance with a neighbourhood boy, this is about all the plot the book has to offer. As a storyline, it’s pretty trite, but where the book rises above its tropes is in the complex and partially unspoken feelings that Cécile has for Anne. A more straightforward story would paint Anne as the villain, or at least in the wrong, or flip it by making her misunderstood and forcing Cécile to learn the error of her ways. But while Cécile does show regret for her actions, it is the ambivalence of her attitude that makes her intriguing. She slingshots between crushing doubt and steely resolve over and over again.

As a reader, I find first person perspective to be overused and often misapplied, but this is a book that simply couldn’t work any other way. The story only matters because we hear Cécile telling it. Without direct access to the riptide of her adolescent angst. As I learned my French more through reading than conversation, I struggle to pinpoint accuracy in dialogue, and the fact that this book is written in the voice of a French teenager form the 1950s, I am simply too far removed to argue whether or not that it rings true. I can only say that it flows nicely, and that its flights of poetic fancy are modest enough to avoid the pitfall common to first person books, in which the author adopts a tone too elevated to belong to a casual speaker.

Mosquitoes - William Faulkner

Mosquitoes is the second novel that William Faulkner published, appearing only a year after his debut Soldiers’ Pay. Though it is uncertain which of them was written first, Mosquitoes certainly feels like the sophomore work, as its tone and style place it somewhere between the more straightforward Soldiers’ Pay and the mad rush of stream-of-conscious fervor to come. The story concerns a party hosted by a socialite named Mrs. Maurier, whose fascination with artists leads her to invite various luminaries from the New Orleans literary and artistic scene on a four-day cruise aboard a motorized yacht called the Nausikaa.

Faulkner employs many of the techniques that would become his signatures, including a rich and somewhat archaic diction, bursts of stream-of-conscious writing to underscore moments of great psychological insight or strain, and a tendency to write around key events rather than describing them outright, leaving it up to the reader to infer what happened based on the shape of the hole made by its absence. This technique even extends to the titular insects themselves, who plague the characters on multiple occasions but are never actually mentioned by name (note: this only occurred to me midway through my reading, so it’s possible I missed a mention early on. In any case, he seemed to take pains not to write the word “mosquito,” whatever the reason for that may be)

Another common trait in Faulkner’s work—at least the ones I’ve read—that also appears in Mosquitoes is his tendency to avoid having one character stand out as a clear protagonist. Reflecting on the story, there are a number of candidates for the title: Mrs. Maurier, whose desire to host a gathering for artists launches the entire novel; Mr. Talliaferro, whose presence bookends the novel; Fairchild, a slightly gone-to-pot novelist who seems a focal point for many of the other characters; Patricia, Mrs. Maurier’s niece, whose complex and combative relationship with her aunt and brother drive much of the story’s tension. However, none of these characters feel truly central to the story.

If the book has a key character, it is probably Gordon, the terse and enigmatic sculptor who acts as a source of fascination for many of the other characters, but hardly says or does anything himself. In this way, he is oddly reminiscent of the doomed pilot Donald Mahon in Soldiers’ Pay. While Gordon is a less sympathetic figure, both men cast outsized shadows across the stories they inhabit, where they act more as symbols and foils for the other characters than as characters themselves. It will be interesting to see if this tendency appears in Faulkners’ other books. Certainly the dead mother in As I Lay Dying is a good example of such, though it’s been too long since I read his other work to recall accurately.