Cancer Ward - Aleksander Solzhenitsyn

It had been a long time since I last read Cancer Ward, and my memory of it was impressionistic, a few images and vignettes to brief to be properly called scenes. It is the sort of book where the plot is difficult to hold in your memory because there’s so little of it. There isn’t much of a narrative arc and no overt conflict. The story, such as it is, merely follows the lives of several patients undergoing treatment for cancer at a clinic in Soviet Uzbekistan.

While an ensemble piece, Oleg Filimonovich Kostoglotov sticks out as the main character. A former soldier undergoing permanent exile as part of the Stalinist purge, Kostoglotov is a stand-in for Solzhenitsyn himself. His reckoning with his disease, his status in life, and his feelings for two nurses form the closest thing to a narrative thread the novel offers. There are other characters as well, the most notable in my opinion being Pavel Nikolayevich Rusanov, a mid-tier Communist official who adheres rigidly to the party line, and denounced a roommate in order to acquire his half of a shared apartment. Rusanov serves as a foil to Kostoglotov, as the two have diametrically opposed views on the Soviet Union. Rusanov demonstrates the mental contortions the good Soviet citizen must undertake to thrive in that culture without succumbing to guilt or despair, while Kostloglotov’s honesty makes it impossible to function under communism’s yoke.

While light on action, cancer Ward demonstrates Solzhenitsyn’s gift for observing fine details of human behaviour, and characterizing people through small gestures. His work is an indictment of communism that showcases power through its plainspokenness. There is no climax or denouement, merely a continuation of existence. Like the cancer the characters suffer, there is remission but no cure.

VALIS - Philip K Dick

I waited way too long to write this, so my memory isn’t as clear as it could be.

I recently read The Man in the High Castle, which could by some metrics be considered Philip K Dick’s least Dickian work. By those same metrics, VALIS might be the most Dickian of his novels, at least among those I’ve read. To make this statement less meaningless, I should probably define what I mean by Dickian, which is the use of science fiction tropes to evince distinct veneer of unreality. Blurring of this sense of truth is universal in Dick’s fiction, be it the phony police station and paranoid hunt for replicants in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the uncertainty of which characters are truly dead in Ubik, or the personality-splitting Substance D in A Scanner Darkly. VALIS dials this up further by making Dick himself the narrator and protagonist of the book, despite the narrator and the protagonist being two different people(though also not).

The book ostensibly stars Horselover Fat, a recovering drug addict and amateur theologist who becomes convinced of having received information from a sentient pink light beamed into him by a satellite called VALIS. The book functions as a kind of first person pedestal story, with Dick discussing (ang tagging along on) Horselover’s quest for deeper truth and embroilment in strange conspiracies pertaining to early Christianity and time dilation. Only Horselover Fat is also Philip K Dick—his first and last name, in fact, being crude translations of Philip (from the Greek) and Dick (from the German). This is something Dick himself admits in the first few pages but then glosses over for most of the book in an elegant display of gaslighting.

The plot is light and hard for me to remember in great detail, but it is almost besides the point. Dick is somewhat like Raymond Chandler in that his fiction is more about mood than story, and that is particularly true in VALIS (perhaps that also makes it his most Dickian?). There is some stuff involving a rock star whose child is a reincarnation of Christ and subliminal messages through an arthouse film, but mostly the drive is the interaction between the characters, who (another Dickian touch) are erudite deadbeats, intelligent and eloquent but too damage to function in society.

I wouldn’t recommend VALIS as an introduction to Philip K. Dick’s work, but for those who have read several of his books and enjoy his style, it’s worth reading.

The Man in the High Castle - Philip K Dick

I first read The Man in the High Castle in grad school. It wasn’t my first encounter’s with his fiction (that was, bizarrely, the largely forgotten We Can Build You) but I hadn’t read much of him at the time, and while I liked it, it didn’t grab me the way his other seminal works did (especially Ubik). That’s a bit surprising, as I’m a sucker for alternative history, and on rereading I found it displayed many of Dick’s usual strengths: nuanced characters understated but eloquent description, heady concepts. There is always an iceberg quality to Dick’s fiction, in that you sense you’re seeing only the small portion of the story peeking above the surface, while a mountain of detail lurks below, unexposed but supporting the visible tip.

The premise of High Castle is pretty well known: the Japanese and the Nazis won World War 2 and now fight for hegemony in a conquered America. Interestingly, the characters are all fairly unremarkable people: a Japanese bureaucrat, a store owner specializing in Americana fetishized by the Japanese, a fired metalworker, a judo instructor. As always with Dick’s work, tiny, fascinating details lurk in the corners: in this case, it’s society’s fascination with the I Ching, a Chinese book of divination that guides the behavior of many of the main characters.

The titular Man in the High Castle, Hawthorne Abendsen, only appears at the very end, though he looms throughout as the author of a book called the Grasshopper Lies Heavy, which posits an alternative alternative history in which the Us and Britain (but not Russia) won WW2. The Nazis are as expected not fans (they never did like books much), and attempt to assassinate him. Such attempts originally drove him to retreat to the eponymous High Castle, but one of the characters (Juliana Frink, Judo instructor) finds him living in a regular house, having resigned himself to whatever fate may bring him.

It is here that Dick’s universal fascination with the nature of reality—a cornerstone of essentially all his fiction—peeks through, just a little. Despite being a book about an alternate reality, the nature of what is true doesn’t feature in High Castle the way it does in, say, Ubik or Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? or A Scanner Darkly. That is, we presume throughout the novel that what we are reading is, in the context of the story, true. It is only at the very end, when Abendsen reveals to Juliana that he used the I Ching to compose every bit of the Grasshopper Lies Heavy. This leads Juliana to suggest that the I Ching actually used him, and through his words told a fundamental truth deeper than reality: that Germany and Japan actually lost the war. This is such a Dickian idea—that there exists a reality more true than the factual universe the characters are experiencing, and that such a truth mirrors (but is distinct from) the universe of the reader—and I’m embarrassed to say I missed it the first time around.

Dick truly is one of the great American writers of the Twentieth century. I’ve always bristled at the notion of some genres as more inherently “literary” than others, but if that term means anything, it is the idea of words and stories being able to convey a deeper understanding of humanity and the world. And Philip K Dick’s novels do that as well as anybody’s.

The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton

I read this over a month ago and I think I’ve missed a book or two in between. In any case, The Age of Innocence is one of the many 100 Great 20th Century Novels about unhappy rich people, and I can’t say that is one of my favourite genres (another big one among those books I don’t much care for is Male Writer Suffers Ennui in New England). I got through this one and didn’t mind reading it, so I would consider it a strong book on that fact alone.

The story concerns Newland Archer, a wealthy New York socialite who practices law more as a hobby than a career. He is betrothed to the equally wealthy May Welland, but before the wedding date is set her cousin Ellen Olenska arrives from Europe. Separated from her husband—a Count—and unfamiliar with the mores of 19th century New York, Ellen fascinated Newland, and next to her his fiancé seems hopelessly dull. He asks her to push forward the wedding, hoping that being finally married will put paid to his conflicted emotions, but she resists.

Most of the story concerns the shadow courtship between Newland and Ellen, both of whom struggle with attraction and guilt. The writing is coy in typical fashion for the era, and I’m not sure if they are ever intimate beyond holding hands (though maybe I missed something, being a typically unsubtle 21st century reader).

The writing is strong, and the characters are rich and well-drawn. Apparently the story draws on Wharton’s own childhood in terms of setting, and the details feel true to life. I doubt I’ll read it again, but that’s more a question of my interests than the book’s quality. Those into Jane Austen and the like will enjoy it.

Holly - Stephen King

It pains me to say this, but I didn’t really like this one. Holly is the first Stephen King book I struggled to finish.

The problem wasn’t the main story, which was an engaging mystery using the Columbo formula of giving away the villains and the outset and making the cat and mouse discovery the source of tension. King knows how to spin a yarn, and he does this well, teasing out revelations and using our knowledge to build dramatic irony.

The villains, likewise, were well-drawn and satisfyingly nasty (spoilers ahead, though you learn this within the first twenty pages). Emily and Rodney Harris are retired professors of English and Biology, respectively, who have descended into cannibalism under the belief that human flesh—livers and brains especially—hold restorative properties. They make for interesting villains with believable (if deplorable) motivations, though the focus on Emily’s racism and homophobia felt more like easy tags for her vileness rather than natural extension of her character. A person like her could certainly be prejudiced, but would she really be that preoccupied with her own prejudice?

The Harris’s insatiable hunger leads to a string of kidnappings, the latest of which Holly Gibney is hired to investigate. Through her sleuthing, she begins to connect the latest disappearance to previous ones. It’s clear King loves Holly, and she is indeed a good and interesting character. But I think one of the problems with this book is that he loves his characters too much. One of King’s great strengths as a writer has been his moral ambiguity. The line between good and evil is clear, but the good aren’t angelically so. They have flaws. They disappoint and hurt people. They are human. I don’t get that sense so much with Holly, and especially side characters Jerome and Barbara Robinson, who feel Mary Sue-ish in their fundamental goodness.

I’ll admit to a certain amount of sour grapes, as well, because not one but both Robinsons fart out lucrative literary careers without any effort whatsoever. Jerome receives $100,000 advance for a book about his grandpa, and Barbara is basically the Poetry Messiah, bequeathed by a character who is the greatest living poet of the 20th century and serves exclusively to beatify her. She also somehow makes $25,000, which is not something poets generally do. As someone who has written novels and sweated the requisite five pints of blood to get them published, the sheer ease of their success is galling, and makes King seem more than a little out of touch.

The late pandemic setting is an interesting touch, but this too proves distracting. I don’t think it’s by any means necessary to ignore COVID in fiction, but the constant references to it (though justifiable; it was all encompassing at that time) tended to take me out of the book, as did the repeated mentions of Trump. I know King’s politics, and while I share many of them, it still felt a bit cheap, as Trump supporter or COVID denier read like shorthands for “don’t like this person.”

To end on a positive note (and this really is a spoiler), I thought it was a clever choice to make the Harris’s cannibalism entirely a product of madness, and that the regenerative properties they feel are simply placebos. King doesn’t cheat with this, showing us impossible recovery that he then goes back on, but he does provide enough hints that, in the context of the Gibneyverse, where supernatural events have already occurred, such occult powers could conceivably exist.

Christine - Stephen King

I read Christine for the first time in high school and hadn’t picked it up since then. I’ve reread most of King’s books at least once since that time, and I’m not sure why Christine was one of the few I didn’t get around to. It’s a good book, classic King, full of quotidian details and bullies with switchblades and supernatural evil lurking at the fringes, operating at a level never fully explained but sufficiently realized to function within the universe of the story.

The book is constructed in an unusual way, opening and closing in first person with an extended stretch of third-person in the middle. Our narrator for the bookends is Dennis, friend of the bright, bespectacled, and perennially unpopular Arnie Cunningham, who is both the tragic hero and villain of the story. Arnie spots an aging Plymouth Fury up on blocks and is instantly smitten—or perhaps ensnared is a better word. He buys it from a crusty old coot named Roland LeBay, who dies shortly thereafter, and sets to fixing it up. As he works on the car—making impressive if desultory strides in the repair—his personality begins to change, aping the mannerisms of the late LeBay. Dennis is distrustful of the car and feels his relationship with Arnie start to slip.

Meanwhile, Arnie gets a girlfriend, who hates the car as much as Dennis does. The inevitable dirtbag bully crosses him and meets a violent end. A police officer grows suspicious and eventually dies as well. Dennis and Leigh both struggle to believe what is right in front of them, against the frantic struggle of their rational minds: Christine is alive, or possessed of LeBay’s malign spirit, or both (I was never entirely clear), and must be destroyed before it’s jealousy turns on them.

Christine is a good pulpy story elevated by King’s knack for dialogue and character, and his ability to nest outlandish tales in worlds made believable by small details. There is always room to breathe in a King story, and these moments of minutia, which a lesser writer might cut to torque up the action, have always been his greatest strength.

Pet Sematary - Stephen King

The 1980s was a dark time for Stephen King. By accounts, his alcoholism was at its worst during this period, and he also struggled wit ha cocaine addiction. I always felt this bled through into his fiction, as Kings novels written during this period are among his darkest, most vicious works (and also, perhaps coincidentally or perhaps not, some of his best).

People associate horror fiction with bleak plots and unhappy endings, but King is, despite his reputation, an extremely optimistic writer. Throughout his fiction, one sees a recurring motif of a benevolent force, often unnamed or unspoken, tat seeks to counterbalance the darkness faced by his characters. He has referred to this “the coming of the White” (probably not a term he uses anymore, given contemporary context), and it takes many forms: the hand that strikes the cleansing A bomb in The Stand, Maturin the turtle in the Dark Tower series and It (I assume it’s the same turtle, though I don’t think he gets a name), Father Callahan’s glowing cross in Salem’s Lot. Even if the main character dies (as he sometimes does) or tragedy strikes (as it almost always does), most King books conclude with a sense, at some level, of balance restored. The White sometimes comes late, but it comes.

Well, the White never shows up in Pet Sematary. I would consider it King’s darkest book, and appropriately so, for it deals with the horror that looms above all others in the heart of every parent: the death of a child. King is at his usual best setting up the town of Ludlow and building a friendship between Louis Creed, a doctor who moved his family to this sleepy town from Chicago, and Jud Crandall, one of King’s stalwart Maine lifers, who ayuhs his way into Louis’ heart. When the family cat dies while Louis’ wife and kids are away, Jud shows Louis a way to bring it back by burying it in an old Mi’kmaq burial ground. The cat comes back, just like the song says, but it comes back wrong. This proof of concept, however troubling, is enough to goad Louis into repeating the experiment with his own son, after the boy is killed by a truck.

The result is King’s most potent morality play, a profound metaphor on the destructive power of grief, and how if improperly channeled, it rips apart those it flows through.

Or at least, it should be.

If the book has a weakness, it is King’s repeated suggestions that the burial ground itself is manipulating things, and that the characters are only one step up from puppets in the malevolent land’s pantomime. I assume King did this to help explain some of the characters’ more irrational choices, but I think it is a mistake. The characters do indeed act irrationally, but grief is irrational. Knowing everything Louis knew at the time—that the ground had the power of resurrection, but the creatures that come from it don’t feel quite right, and secondhand accounts of human resurrections were disastrous—and faced with the death of one of my own children, would I make a different choice? I like to think I would, but any parent who says so with certainly is lying to themselves and to you.

I think Pet Sematary would be a stronger book with the references to the Sematary’s manipulations cut out. But even with them in, it’s a hell of a book. One of King’s best.

Up In Honey's Room - Elmore Leonard

This was a weird one. Most of the Elmore Leonard I’ve read has been contemporary crime fiction, so if it took place in the 70s it’s because it was written in the 70s. Up In Honey’s Room is set during World War II, and is a follow up to another historical crime thriller, the Hot Kid, which I haven’t read. The setting might not seem that different, but Elmore Leonard’s dialogue is so distinct that it felt weird coming out of the mouths of these characters. Maybe people talked like that in 1944, but I found it jarring.

Leonard’s novels are never particularly plot heavy, and the principal plan or focus tends to shift midway through. I like that about them, as it feels more realistic, but it can also muddy the action. In this case ,the story is ostensibly about Carl “the Hot Kid” Webster chasing down a pair of escaped German POWs. His pursuit brings him to Detroit, where he encounters Honey Deal, a young woman previously married to a pro-Nazi German immigrant named Walter.

Carl suspects Walter might be involved in hiding the POWs, and enlists Honey to help interrogate him, under the reasoning that her presence will throw him off balance. There are some other characters, including a spy named Vera and an officer named Kevin, but their roles aren’t always that clear, and Walter’s plan to murder president Roosevelt is mentioned suddenly and comes to nothing when the man dies of natural causes. Walter’s lame attempts to make people think he was responsible were funny, but they leant to the overall sense of narrative drift.

I wouldn’t want Leonard to write tight, plotted novels like Frederick Forsythe, as the meandering stories and bumbling criminals are part of the charm, but for whatever reason this one didn’t feel like it came together as nicely as his previous work.

Homer & Langley - E. L. Doctorow

I came across this book after reading about the Collyer brothers on Wikipedia and seeing it mentioned in the popular culture section. I’d read and enjoyed Ragtime and found the brothers fascinating subject matter, so checked it out from the library. The story is told in elegant prose form the perspective of Homer Collyer, a blind pianist who lives in a Harlem brownstone with his brother Langley, an obsessive hoarder. Through his eyes (or ears, rather) the reader passes through the early years of the 20th century into the 1980s, encountering bootlegging gangsters and roving hippies, observing two world wars, and generally chronicling the century as it matures, ragged and cynical, into its twilight years.

The book takes significant liberties with its facts and chronology—the actual Collyers died in 1947, and Langley was the musician, not Homer—but sticks close to key events (the gradual recession from society, the begrudging paying off of their mortgage in one fell swoop, their untimely end) proposing a thesis on the brothers recalcitrant hermitism, speculating on the impulse that made these bizarre introverted men effectively immure themselves in rubbish collected from the streets over decades.

The plot is episodic, structured only in the natural progression of the brothers’ lives from youth to old age. Having the narrator be a blind man was an interesting choice and one Doctorow handles effectively. His limited description of images was handled deftly, and I don’t recall spotting him describing something he couldn’t have known. The fact he’d had sight as a young man allowed him some context, at least; I expect it would be a greater challenge to write a novel with a narrator blind from birth.

Homer & Langley didn’t pack quite the punch that Ragtime did, but it was still worth reading, and encouraged me to grab another Doctorow book at some point.

Deadeye Dick - Kurt Vonnegut

Vonnegut was one of my four go-to authors through high school, and by the time I left home for university I’d read all of the books of his my parents had, except for one: Deadeye Dick. The (fairly stupid) reason for this was that their copy was either poorly bound or mistreated (or both), and as a result most of the pages would come free as soon as you turned them. I was never comfortable takin it out of the house, and because I did most of my reading on the school bus, I kept giving it a miss.

I’ve picked up a few Vonnegut books since high school (mostly re-reads), but that dumb prejudice kept me from picking it up until a couple of weeks ago, when I finally decided to read the thing, and if it fell apart in my hands, who the hell cares?

It would be a neat irony if it turned out Deadeye Dick was far and away my favourite Vonnegut book, but reality isn’t so tidy. It’s a good book—I’ve never read a Vonnegut that wasn’t—and very much in his milieu, but I don’t think it is quite the equal of Cat’s Cradle, Slaughterhouse Five, or Breakfast of Champions (which most people don’t consider one of his best, but remains a favourite of mine).

The story follows Vonnegut’s familiar obsession with bizarre characters caroming off each other in peculiar coincidences. The narrator, a pharmacist and self-professed “neuter” named Rudy Waltz, recounts his life and that of his helpless bohemian parents. At twelve years old, Rudy fired a gun off his roof at nothing in particular and accidentally murdered a pregnant woman. The resulting arrest and lawsuit ruins his family socially and financially, and he becomes their caregiver, a role he doesn’t seem to particularly resent.

Like most Vonnegut novels, Deadeye Dick bounces between points in time, talking one moment about his venture opening a hotel in Haiti, the next about his short-lived career as a published playwrite. Rudy’s defining trait is his apathy/ Nothing in life excites him, and he recounts everything with muted emotion.

This isn’t the book I’d give someone as an introduction to Vonnegut, but for a fan it’s certainly worth a read.

52 Pick-up - Elmore Leonard

Elmore Leonard has long been a standby author of mine—someone whose work I would pick up at random whenever I wasn’t reading anything in particular. For whatever reason, I hadn’t read a book by him in several years, so when I found a copy of 52 Pick-Up in a Little Free Library I grabbed it eagerly.

52 Pick-Up is classic Elmore Leonard, full of skeezy characters, excellent naturalistic dialogue, and crisp, effortless prose. Leonard never feels like he’s trying to impress, and thus always impresses. As far as the plot goes, I wouldn’t rank this among his best, but it’s certainly engaging. Harry Mitchell, a former soldier and autoworker who studied engineering and opened a successful auto plant, is captured by masked assailants and shown a porn film starring him and his mistress. They demand he pay up or they’ll leak the footage. Stubborn Harry refuses, and the ante is steadily upped, resulting in murder, kidnapping, and other Leonardy mayhem.

The characters are archetypal but distinct, filled with life through Leonard’s keen eye for detail and even keener ear for capturing spoken language. He has mastered the art of dropping words form sentences in a way that mirrors speech, something I see surprisingly rarely in other books (perhaps because it sounds hackneyed if done wrong)

I wouldn’t call 52 Pick-Up my favourite of Leonard’s novels (that’s Freaky Deaky, incidentally), and the title is incredibly arbitrary (referring, I assume, to the $52,000 in bribe money the perps settle on, a number I’m guessing he chose after he thought of the title), but it’s solid and worth reading.

As I Lay Dying - William Faulkner

As I Lay Dying was the first William Faulkner book I ever read. I was about 18, and while a lot of it went over my head (some of it still does, to be honest), there was something deeply intriguing and evocative about it. I was used to more popular literature, with clearly delineated stories and key plot points spelled out or at most lightly obscured. As I Lay Dying offers no such roadmap. The story, itself quite minimal, is buried under conflicting perspectives, stream of conscience narration, and a language both florid and deeply colloquial.

The central premise concerns Anse Bundren and his five children, who travel with the recently deceased Addie Bundren (Anse’s wife and the children’s mother) in order to fulfill her dying wish to be married in the town Jefferson. Sudden rainfall floods the river and washes out the bridges, making the journey a challenge, but the real conflict is between and within the family members themselves. Cas, the oldest, is stoic to the point of self-destruction, refusing to admit to any discomfort from his broken leg. Darl, the second child, is slowly going mad. Jewel, the middle child and product (we infer) of an affair, bucks at the contraints imposed by his headstrong father. Dewey Dell, the only daughter, is pregnant out of wedlock and desperately seeking an abortion. Vardaman, the youngest, struggles to process his mother’s death, likening her to a fish he caught shortly before she died.

Each chapter is in first person, told by a revolving cast of characters. Most often it’s the Bundrens themselves, but smaller characters are given narrator duty as well. The prose, as you might expect, is superb, and even where actions are unclear, the strength of the language pulls you along. Rereading this some near twenty years later, I’m still struck by its narrative force. It feels like a much bigger book than it is, not because it drags ,but because of the weight of psychological and literary detail Faulkner provides. An excellent book.

Bag of Bones - Stephen King

Bag of Bones was the new King novel when I started reading him in earnest. I don’t think I got to it until high school, but I recall thinking of it as a milestone of sorts in his work, in which supernatural terrors took a backseat to more psychological fears. In truth, it’s not quite that tidy, as books like Dolores Claiborne and Rose Madder are clear antecedents, and Dreamcatcher, published just three years later, is classic King. Still, on rereading, I think there is a distinct maturity in Bag of Bones regarding how King went about writing novels, an increased reflection and willingness to let the narrative breathe.

Bag of Bones is billed as a ghost story, and it is, but the spirits take a back seat for much of the novel and, in truth, are the weakest part of the book. The story of Sara Tidwell is well-told and shockingly brutal in its depiction of racial violence, but the latter portion involving the storm felt like a tonal shift and a way to up the tension that had been building much more subtly before that. Really, Bag of Bones is a book about grief, and a grief of a particular sort, where a person loses the partner they meant to spend their life with and finds, with no small amount of despair, that they now have to find a way to spend it alone.

King, about 20 years married at the time of the book’s writing, writes marriage well, cutting past the saccharine hallmark pablum on one side and the hackneyed discord on the other to find a complex, beating core that is truer than most “literary fiction” I’ve read. It is this talent, I think, that separates King from his peers. The man can write a thriller with the best of them, but he populates those taut tales with real, richly evoked people. No one feels like a cog in a Stephen King novel, and you could easily imagine following a side character off the page and into their daily life.

Die Verwandlung (The Metamorphosis) - Franz Kafka

Ich habe Die Verwandlung von Franz Kafka viele Male in Englisch Übersetzung gelesen. Dieses war das erstes Mal, der ich es in Deutsch zu lesen versucht habe. 

Die Verwandlung ist Kafkas berühmteste Arbeit und vielleicht auch sein Bestes. Es wurde im Jahr neunzehnhundertfunfzehn publiziert. Die Geschichte geht um Gregor Samsa, ein Handlungsreisender, der seine Familie durch seine Arbeit ernährt. Die Zeit und Ort der Geschichte wird nie in dem Text erklärt, aber es wird allgemein vermutet, dass es in Prag stattfindet, und zur gleichen Zeit, in der das Buch geschrieben wurde. Samsa verdient nicht viel Geld, aber er ist stolz auf seine Rolle als Ernährer, und träumt davon, seine Schwester eines Tages auf das Musikkonservatorium zu schicken, wo sie Geige lernen kann. 

Das Buch beginnt mit einem dramatischen und berühmten ersten Satz, der die Geschichte in Gang setzt: “Als Gregor Samsa eines Morgens aus unruhigen Träumen erwachte, fand er sich in seinem Bett zu einem ungeheuren Ungeziefer verwandelt.” Der ungeheuren Ungeziefer, obwohl nie so genannt, wird durch die Beschreibung im Text als ein riesiger Käfer verstanden.

Anfangs scheint Sansa seine Position zu akzeptieren. Er scheint zu glauben, dass sie nur vorübergehend ist, und macht sich meistens Sorgen, ob er spät für Arbeit wird. Als sein Chef kommt, um ihn zu sehen, versucht er eine Ausrede zu machen. Leider, obwohl sein Verstand unandert ist und er andere Leute verstehen kann, niemand kann ihn verstehen. Sein Chef flieht in Furcht, und seine Familie ist entsetzt. Sie sperren ihn in seinem Zimmer ein, wo er über seinen neuen Körper lernen muss. Wie er fühlt, wie er bewegt, welche Art Essen er essen kann, alles ist für ihn neu und seltsam.  

Gregors Familie wisst nicht, wie Gregors Verwandlung zu reagieren. Sein Vater greift ihn an, wenn er versucht, sein Zimmer zu verlassen. Seine Mutter weint immer aber sie kann es nicht ertragen, ihn zu sehen. Nur seine Schwester kümmert sich um ihn. Sie bringt ihm Essen und putzt sein Zimmer auf. Sie übernimmt seine Fürsorge und weigert sich, die anderen Familienmitglieder in sein Zimmer zu lassen. Letztlich beginnt sie, ihn zu verübeln, weil er eine Bürde wird. Gregor verübelt seine Familie auch, weil sie ihn nicht verstehen kann, und langsam wird er krank. Schließlich er stirbt, und seine Familie ist zu erleichtert, um ihn zu trauern.

Was bedeutet diese seltsame Geschichte? Einige Gelehrte glauben, es geht um seine Gefühle gegenüber seiner Familie, besonders sein Vater, der angeblich wütend und anmaßend war, so wie der Vater, der in der Geschichte steht. Für Andere ist Die Verwandlung eine Geschichte von Kafkas Depressionen und Selbsthass. Man kann auch Die Verwandlung als eine Prophezeiung darüber lesen, die Behandlung der europäischen Juden in den kommenden Jahrzehnten. Als ein Jude konnte Kafka vielleicht vorstellen, dass eine Tag seiner christlichen Landsleute plötzlich dazu geführt werden könnte, einen Mann wie ihn als Ungeziefer anzusehen.

Die Verwandlung ist kein leichtes Buch. Seine Sprache ist komplex und seine Themen sind subtil und düster. Jedoch ist es eine ausgezeichnete Geschichte, psychologisch komplex und gut geschrieben und verdient ihren Platz im literarischen Kanon.

Needful Things - Stephen King

I’ve been half-finishing a lot of books lately, which is why there’s such a large gap between entries. My choices weren’t bad books, but were a little too demanding for my frame of mind. I needed something I could sink into easily, and for that Stephen King is always a good choice.

I last read Needful Things in high school, so my memory of it was spotty. A few brief scenes remained clear to me—the fatal duel between Nettie and Wilma, the thing in Polly’s azka, and the encounter between Sherriff Pangborn and Leland Gaunt—but beyond that I could really only recall the general plot: a new store called Needful Things opens in Castle Rock, selling objects that entrance the townsfolk. I’d forgotten about the pranks, which Gaunt extracts from buyers as an additional payment in an effort to play the townspeople off of each other and stoke ill feeling.

It’s a classic King story, with a compelling villain, strong flawed heroes, and an undergirding magic that is never fully explained but feels earned by the premise of the story. It also includes a fair bit of what I think is King’s strongest trait: his ability to conjure a deep sense of community between his characters. His books never drag, even when they spend whole chapters on seemingly prosaic matters unrelated to the main story. His characters feel real, and it’s always a pleasure to spend time with them, even the unpleasant ones. There is something entrancingly human about them.

Picking up Needful Things got me in a mind to reread some of the other Castle Rock stories, as that particular intertextual universe of his hasn’t drawn me back as often as some others (the Dark Tower, for one). There’s something homey a Stephen King book (an odd thing, maybe, considering he’s known as a horror writer). It’s comforting to know I can always come back to them.

Mother Land - Paul Theroux

I loved The Mosquito Coast, which is what drew me to pick up Mother Land from a book store. The book is billed as a novel, but Theroux takes pains to make it feel as autobiographical as possible: the narrator is a travel write and novelist with two sons, and many of the family members referenced in the book correspond to real people in Theroux’s life, albeit with different names.

This lends a certain queasiness to the story, as the characters are, to put it bluntly, not pleasant people to be around. And no one is more unpleasant than the titular mother of Mother Land, a vain, narcissistic woman who sees her children more as treasures of conquest than actual people. The book chronicles a period stretching most of the narrator’s (Jay, though he may as well be named Paul) life, though it focuses primarily on two points: one period in his young adulthood when he fathered a child out of wedlock, and another in his middle age when his father dies and he moves back to Cape Cod. The plot is light and episodic, focused more on the interactions between the siblings than on events. There is a certain repetitiveness to the story, and we get the sense by the last fifty pages that Jay’s mother will simply never die. That she is somehow eternal, a creature of avarice feeding off her own young.

If I’m being honest, I didn’t exactly enjoy reading Mother Land, though that’s not to say the book was boring or bad. Theroux’s writing is rich, and his characters have great psychological depth. They just aren’t very nice people. I had no trouble picking p the book to read it, but when it was over, my biggest feeling was of relief. It’s a feeling shared by the children at their mother’s death, so this sensation may be deliberate. If so, then it’s a bold literary move and one Theroux should be proud of. It takes courage to write such an ugly book, especially one that most readers will assume is about you and your family.

Fairy Tale - Stephen King

I was pleased as always to come across a new Stephen King novel last month. It’s comforting to know that he’s out there, and I’ll have something enjoyable form him to read every year or so. It’ll be a sad day when he’s gone.

Fairy Tale treads a similar path in broad strokes to another of his more recent works, 11/22/63. In both books, a young narrator befriends an old recluse and through their friendship discovers a portal to another world. Except in 11/22/63, it’s a question of when, and in Fairy Tale it’s a question of where. In this case, the world of Empis, a kingdom once majestic but defiled by a usurping king. Drawn to the world by the promise of a cure for his ailing dog, Charlie Reade finds himself slowly transformed into a storybook prince, albeit one with a dark side, and becomes embroiled in the struggle to right past wrongs and restore balance to the kingdom. The book follows and plays with fairy tale convention, demonstrating the allusive richness that King has become known for, especially in his later years.

The writing is pure King, effortlessly readable, with rich turns of phrase now again dropped in without tarnishing the sense of genuine dialogue needed in a first person account. As always, King’s characters are his strongest point, and the long set up as Charlie meets and befriends the cantankerous old Mr. Bowditch, scenes that would be mere water treading for a lesser author, are in some ways the best parts of the book.

Petersburg - Andrei Bely

I continue my Russian kick with Andrei Bely’s seminal symbolist novel Petersburg. The book’s history is interesting, in that it had two different publications straddling the Russian Revolution. First released in 1913, it received little notice. It was reissued in 1922 with significant cuts, particularly around anything seen as critical to the revolutionary movement. The first version is widely considered superior, and is the basis of the translation I read.

The story is fairly simple: Nikolai Apollonovich Ableukov, son of prominent bureaucrat Apollon Apollonovich, is recruited by radicals to assassinate his father with a bomb stored in a sardine tin. There are other components, like the moral quandary of his contact among the radicals, Alexander Ivanovich Dudkin, who faces his own pressure form their leader Lippanchenko; the unhappy marriage of Sofya Petrovna Likhutina and her husband Sergei, the former of whom Nikolai pines for; and Nikolai’s unusual tendency to dress up in a red domino costume and make a fool of himself around Petersburg.

But the core of the story is almost besides the point. Much more focus rests on the tone and language of the book, which translators Robert Maguire and John Malmstad take plains to situate in a context comprehensible to English readers yet faithful to the original Russian, and especially on details of place. The main character of Petersburg is ultimately Petersburg itself, manifest at one point by the living Bronze Horsemen, a symbol drawn from the Pushkin poem of the same name quoted regularly throughout.

As a Symbolist work, Petersburg has moments of impenetrability, but there is a playfulness and sardonic wit that you can appreciate even if some of the details escape you. I would not be surprised to learn that Salman Rushdie read and admired this book, as it feels aligned with his work in tenor if not in form. Ulysses by Joyce is also a good comparison (the only book, incidentally, that Nabokov ranked higher than Petersburg in his personal list of the great 20th century masterpieces of literature).

This is not an easy read, but it deserves its place in the canon.

The Death of Ivan Ilych and Other Stories - Leo Tolstoy

It’s been a long time since I read much Tolstoy. Apart from rereading Anna Karenina about ten years ago, I haven’t picked up his work since leaving university. I was always more attracted to the darker psychology of Dostoevsky and the proto-surrealism of Gogol. However, as I get older, I’ve come to appreciate Tolstoy more, and it was nice to read a collection that mixed stories I’d encountered before with ones I read for the first time.

This particular collection contains four stories, which I’d classify as novellas or short novels with the exception of Master and Man, which I suppose you would call a short story (such descriptions are more about pacing and tone than actual word count anyway). In addition to its differing length, Master and Man is also the oddball of the four in terms of its subject matter, as the three other stories all deal in some way with unhappy marriages (something of a recurring theme for Tolstoy, who had a famously unhappy marriage of his own).

Of these, Family Happiness explores the theme most overtly, dealing as it does with a young woman who marries and older man only to have her expectations gradually wither. Interestingly, the book is written from the woman’s perspective and is very much on her side. Her husband is not made out as a villain—Tolstoy’s characters are too psychologically complex for such easy characterization—but sympathies lie more with her as the younger, more naïve party who believed an impossible dream and watched it buckle under the weight of reality.

The Death of Ivan Ilych is the best story of the four, and though unhappy marriage is a theme, the focus is ultimately on Ivan’s growing sense of mortality, and his fear not just of dying, but of dying after having lived his life so pointlessly. Praskovya, his wife, is not entirely sympathetic, but there was a humanity in her flaws that felt like a real person rather than a caricature. When her husband falls ill, she treats as either an uncooperative patient or a deliberate nuisance, by turns discounting his pain and chastising him for not doing more to treat it. Her lack of sympathy is harsh, but feels real, reflecting the weight illness puts on the caregiver as well as the sick.

The Kreutzer Sonata is the most Dostoevskyian of the four. It is written as the extended confession-cum-manifesto of a bitter and cynical man who killed his wife after believing her unfaithful (all we know for sure is that she was sitting at a table with another man; whether more was going on I’m not sure). The killer is wistful but unrepentant, seeing his act as necessary but blaming himself for causing it—not by being the murderer, but by “defiling” his wife through marriage and intercourse. He’s a weird dude.

Master and Man is the most tender story, and significantly the only one where a marriage doesn’t feature prominently. The relationship is instead (as the title implies) between a lord and his servant. Impious and greedy, the wealthy landowner Vasili Andreyevich Brekhunov travels through a snowstorm in an effort to beat his competitors to a land deal he believes will be very profitable. On his wife’s assistance, he brings the peasant Nikita with him. Nikita knows he is underpaid by his master but lacks other options. Despite feeling forced to work for him, Nikita is loyal to Vasili and does his best to serve him well. When their sledge gets trapped in the snow and Nikita begins freezing to death, Vasili shows selflessness in covering him with his body. IN lesser hands the story would feel hackneyed, but Tolstoy gives a rich reading of the inner lives of both men, ultimately justifying the action.

Overall, a solid collection of Tolstoy’s work.

Cool Hand Luke - Donn Pearce

I’ve never seen Cool Hand Luke, and was only aware of it from pop culture references until picking up Donn Pearce’s novel. I didn’t know what to expect beyond it being about a nonconformist prisoner who eats a lot of eggs. As a novel, it exceeded my expectations, narrrated in a dreamy, impressionistic style by a man named Sailor, about whom we know almost nothing.

Cool Hand Luke uses first person pedestal narration. which is a writing workshop way of saying that the narrator is a character but not the main one. The narrrator can feature prominently (think Fifth Business or To Kill a Mockingbird) or tangentially (think the Great Gatsby or Breakfast at Tiffany’s) but they are not the protagonist. Rather, the serve to bear witness to the protagonist, who is usually a tragic figure. In Cool Hand Luke, the narrator is kept so vague that he is barely a character—chapters can go by when you forget that he’s in the story, and not just a disembodied voice telling it. This feelign is underscored by the prose, which uses a non-colloquial poetic diction to convey scenes.

This is contrasted with portions narrated by another inmate, Dragline, who accompanied Luke on his final, fatal escap eattempt. Much of the novel is actually takign place during one of Dragline’s retelling of this episode to new inmates, though Sailor, our ghostly narrator, gives his version of events for much of the same period. There’s no line breaks or even dialogue tags to indicate who is speaking, but Pearce handles the transitions well with his command of vernacular dialogue. It’s always quite clear when we’re listening to Dragline or Luke and when we’re listening to Sailor.

The story is itself fairly simple, mostly the arc of Luke’s arrival at the prison, ascension to a place of honor among the inmates, and a gnawing dissatisfaction that forces him to escape again and again wtih a desperation that flirts wit hthe suicidal. The story is well realised and well told. A truly excellent novel. I’m surprised Pearce didn’t write more, though it seems he only published another two before taking a prolonged hiatus to do other work. I’ll have to seek these out at some point.