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| 0099448475
| 9780099448471
| 0099448475
| 3.83
| 164,724
| Apr 20, 1999
| Oct 03, 2002
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Sputnik II was a Soviet satellite launched in 1957 that vanished into space with its animal cargo, a dog named Laika, aboard, and was never found. The
Sputnik II was a Soviet satellite launched in 1957 that vanished into space with its animal cargo, a dog named Laika, aboard, and was never found. The characters in this book embody the spirit of Sputnik – lost souls in a never-ending but never-finding quest for love. The unnamed narrator, known as K, is a 24-year-old teacher who is in love with Sumire, a 22-year-old wannabe writer, who in turn is in love with Miu, a married, 39-year-old Korean woman who specializes in selling premium wines to customers around the world. Each character’s love for their desired partner is one-way, unreciprocated by the other. Sumire, in her obsessive writing mode, will call K at 4 o’clock in the morning to ask him obscure questions, like what is the difference between a sign and a symbol; she openly confides her gnawing love for Miu which is not being returned, while K is unable to declare his and can only listen. Miu hires Sumire as a personal assistant and the two take off for Greece on a business trip. They take a villa on a small Greek island and live together platonically, with the sexual tension building (for Sumire). Then suddenly, Sumire disappears, never to be found. To hide the void in his life from Sumire’s departure overseas, K takes on multiple lovers, usually older women, mothers of his students. Miu summons K to Greece to hunt down Sumire, and even though Miu is his prototypical older lover, the sparks do not fly. Instead, K finds the final writings of Sumire, the only work she created since joining Mius’s employ, and which gives us a glimpse into this elegant woman-of-the-world. Sumire’s writing tilts the novel from the real into the surreal. Who was the woman Miu saw in her apartment while being marooned on a Ferris wheel for the night? Is there a mirror in our lives in which some pieces of us live on one side while the other parts live on the opposite side? Which is the real you? This is my first Murakami novel and I found him more engaging, bringing one into the writing with quirky and funny characters, and ending each chapter on a cliff-hanger, unlike his compatriot, Kazuo Ishiguro, who is dense and obtuse. While Ishiguro veers toward science-fiction, Murakami seems to favour magic realism, even though in this book that feature surfaces only three-quarters of the way in. He is very descriptive of dress, particularly of women’s attire and men’s hard-ons. The ending was enigmatic and did not work for me – several possibilities could result. The digression into the life of K’s most recent older-woman lover and her child, just when we were trying to unravel the Sumire-Miu mystery, flat-lined the growing tension. When that dreaded but much-awaited phone call arrives in the early hours of the morning, K wonders whether Sumire had unearthed the secrets on the other side of the mirror, because Miu’s physical decline since “the disappearing act” needs a lot of explaining. In fact, a lot needed explaining, and the book is too open ended for me. ...more |
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| 1420925431
| 9781420925432
| 1420925431
| 3.90
| 189,018
| 1908
| Jan 01, 2005
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That Forster was critical of the British Empire and its classist, racist, and sexist nature was evident in his novels and this one is no different. Em
That Forster was critical of the British Empire and its classist, racist, and sexist nature was evident in his novels and this one is no different. Empire rears its ugly head when it deigns to visit foreign locales like India in A Passage to India and Italy in Room with a View. Country-bred, upper-crust ingenue Lucy Honeychurch, is escorted by her older, spinster cousin Charlotte Bartlett around Florence on her first overseas trip. They do not like their hotel room and are offered one “with a view” by the working-class Emersons, father and son. Yet Lucy does not like the “offer” because it was made crudely, and it takes the Rev Beebe, a fellow vacationer, to intercede and straighten matters out. This minor incident reveals the cracks and imbalances in the British social structure. Let’s see: 1. Women were to inspire others, not to achieve themselves. 2. The English scorn Continentals, especially Italians for their crude behaviour, although they admire their art. “The narrowness and superficiality of the Anglo-Saxon tourist is nothing less than a menace,” says Miss Lavish, the novelist. 3. The idle upper classes like to gossip. They do not work. 4. While the lower classes believe in democracy for all, the upper classes believe in aristocracy for a few. “Refined people despise the world,” says Cecil. 5. Upper-class women scream at thunder and faint at the sight of blood 6. The accent is not on feelings but on conduct. An inappropriate kiss (there are two in this book) between ill-matched classes can lead to disastrous consequences. Lucy comes of age in Florence when she tries to reject the affections of young George Emerson who kisses her inappropriately in a grove of violets. On the rebound, and rushing off to Rome to escape George, she gets engaged to Cecil, a man of her class, a bore who is more interested in books than people. Yet, by a string of coincidences, George and his father take up residence close to Lucy’s country home back in England, and after he plants the second inappropriate kiss on her, she is forced to face her feelings and take on the whole upper-class establishment in which “the young rush to destruction until they can learn better, a world of precautions and barriers to prevent evil but do not bring good” – a world that neutered her cousin Miss Bartlett’s life to one of sterile loneliness and passive-aggressive rebellion. Old Mr. Emerson, a man accused unjustly by the mean-spirited chaplain, Mr. Eager, as “the man who murdered his wife,” turns out to be the wisest of them all. His prophetic lines ring to the heart of the matter: “The only perfect view is of the sky above, all views of earth are bungled copies of it” and his words to Lucy, “It is easier to face death than to live in a muddle.” His final words to her are what set her off from her shackles: “You love George!” Forster uses familiar devices from his other novels: English tourists on an excursion in a foreign land where a dark deed (a kiss, in this case) takes place while no one is looking; scenes heading in one direction are abruptly cut off, with their outcomes revealed later in the novel; a preference for dialogue to reveal action rather than narrative, reminiscent of a stage play. Given that this novel was written over a hundred years ago, one has to make allowance for the excessive verbiage and archaic words. Given his homosexuality which was outlawed at the time, one cannot help but think that Forster, the perennial outsider, was on the side of the working-class Emmerson’s, imbuing them with knowledge and tastes beyond their crassness, wanting them to win the jewel in the crown, being Lucy in this case. ...more |
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| 0393341194
| 9780393341195
| 0393341194
| 4.02
| 11,814
| Sep 30, 1999
| Nov 28, 2011
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A Scottish clan story set in Ontario and Cape Bretton, depicting that blood is thicker than water, and that the Scots never really migrated in spirit
A Scottish clan story set in Ontario and Cape Bretton, depicting that blood is thicker than water, and that the Scots never really migrated in spirit – they merely annexed this part of the New World into their ancestral homeland to carry on their traditions, speak their language, and engage in their blood feuds. Patriarch Calum MacDonald, 55, leaves the impoverished Scottish Highlands in 1779 with his brood (six children from one wife and six from another, both wives being sisters who died along the way) to Cape Breton. The Clan Calum Ruadh (red-haired ones) spread all over North America over the generations. Most of the men are named Calum or Alexander and most of the women are Catherine (or Catriona). They are either black-haired or redheads. Our story takes place at the end of the 20th century where the comfortably-off, family man, dentist Alexander, 55, is visiting older brother Calum in a flophouse. Calum is an alcoholic ex-con and is not expected to live long. They plan to take one more trip back home to the family home in Cape Bretton where the patriarch is buried on the cliff overlooking the ocean and facing Scotland. Their reminiscences of how their lives began and diverged form the core of the story. Alexander and his twin sister Catriona were raised by their paternal grandparents in town after their parents and a sibling drowned off the ice while heading back to the lighthouse that their father managed. The twins had a good upbringing therefore, were educated, and went on to have safe middle-class lives. The older siblings, aged 16, 15, and 14, at the time of the tragedy, were unmanaged and lived on the farm, leading hardscrabble lives; they became expert miners and were in demand in mines all over the world, notably in Peru, Africa, and Elliot Lake, Ontario. The book is riddled with Scottish poetry, old-country lore, and Gaelic words that these transplanted Scots, many generations in Canada, still prefer to speak. The feuds of the Highlanders vs. the British and the French, in particular, the former’s switch in allegiances from the French to the British on the Plains of Abraham, is detailed and is carried on to a 1960s clash between the Clan Calum Ruadh and French miners at the Elliot Lake uranium mine, involving dentist Alexander and his older brother Calum, that ends tragically. There is a lot of description of mining and mining camp life in rural Ontario, and of Scottish traditions that survived in North America. Some scenes stick in the mind: the lamp on the ice signaling where the family drowned; Calum pissing blood after drinking his copious daily quota of alcohol and wanting more; the brothers travelling in a run-down car to pick up an American cousin (another Alexander with red hair) who is a draft dodger; Catriona visiting Aberdeen and suddenly seeing ghosts and speaking in fluent Gaelic. The fight scene, however, is detailed to the point of neutralizing its tension. The author uses character names sparingly: maternal grandfather, himself a bastard child of a clan member, is called Grandfather; paternal grandparents are Grandpa and Grandma; two older siblings are mentioned only as “my brothers.” To add to the confusion, there are several Alexanders and Calums. I also found the writing, though poetic (the moon is the “lamp of the poor”), contained many superfluous words, something our 21st-century attention spans get annoyed over. Then I realized that Alistair Macleod was a revered writer of the 20th century. This book is a good example of the original CanLit: poetic, understated, introspective, and brooding, with an ironic but open ending premised on hope, “All of us are better when we are loved.” ...more |
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| 0393314596
| 9780393314595
| 0393314596
| 4.42
| 9,010
| 1994
| Apr 17, 1996
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it was ok
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This was my introduction to Patrick O’Brian and his Aubrey-Maturin novels, albeit his seventeenth in the series, and I came away with mixed reactions.
This was my introduction to Patrick O’Brian and his Aubrey-Maturin novels, albeit his seventeenth in the series, and I came away with mixed reactions. While the novel captures the spirit of naval life, replete with terminology, technology, and culture, it is as episodic as an itinerant frigate sailing from port to port, devoid of novelistic drama and conflict. The narrative style, while trying to emulate the period, is unusually long and complex. In this novel, Captain Jack Aubrey and his surgeon comrade-in-arms, Stephen Maturin, return from a long voyage (probably the stuff of Book#16) to England to be reunited with their spouses Sophie and Diana respectively, cousins, who are suffering the ill effects of long separations from their husbands. Sophie is being wooed by the local minister; Diana has taken to drink, is reputedly pregnant by her stud manager, and has vanished on a gallivant, leaving their “idiot” daughter Brigid in the care of a friend, Clarissa, herself a convict whom Stephen brought back from Australia in a previous novel. Of course, no sexual sparks erupt, for the two sailors are busy preparing for their next voyage and tying up loose ends back home. Aubrey is promoted to Commodore, given a fleet of six ships, and charged with sailing the West African coast to disrupt the slave trade, and then to make an about-turn for Bantry Bay in Ireland to stop French ships from influencing Irish revolutionaries. Maturin is in danger of losing his assets and being sent to prison because of saving Clarissa who has not yet received a pardon. We spend an inordinate amount of time provisioning the fleet and get a treatise on naval terminology in the early chapters. O’Brien seems more intent on recreating the life of senior naval officers of the time than writing a novel. Many past incidents and characters from the earlier 16 novels are constantly referred to, and, for a novice like me, were of no consequence as they had no bearing on the present story, if indeed this was a story. Ships are classified by the number of guns they carry – so they are referred to as a 74, or a 64, or a 36, or a 28. The battles, when they finally occur in the second half of the book – battles against the slavers, the duel between officers (for one calling the other a homosexual), and the final battle against the French fleet - are dealt with in cursory toss-off sentences and happen largely off-stage, while great care and time are spent on the meals Aubrey has, the costumes and regalia he wears, on sailing maneuvers, on Maturin’s birdwatching in the swamps of the ports they call upon, and on his recovery from yellow fever that he is bound to catch. What this book lacked was conflict and tension, the essential fuel of a novel. It amounted to another chapter in the itinerant lives of these two seafarers, and any outstanding conflicts could be carried over to the next book in the series, it appears. There is no urgency. I appreciated the world of sail in the early 19th century created in this book, but it got low points as a novel. ...more |
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| 0684841215
| 9780684841212
| 0684841215
| 3.54
| 8,261
| 1974
| Nov 12, 1997
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Heller has written a treatise on the corporate American male of the 1960s, replete with his phobias, neuroses, drives, and fears – a situation that ha
Heller has written a treatise on the corporate American male of the 1960s, replete with his phobias, neuroses, drives, and fears – a situation that has not changed much except for the moral standards and their enforcement. Bob Slocum is the typical middle management executive with a stay-at-home wife, a maid and a nurse, a one-acre property in suburban Connecticut, three children, but in need of recognition and love from his family more than money. And yet his philosophy is that “Money is Love,” something his family also subscribes to and which causes much angst. His middle child, Derek, is brain-damaged (the only one in the family mentioned by name) and is the source of discord in the household; Derek is also a symbolic brake on all that is wrong with the money-chasing, me-first, success-oriented American family. Everyone fears everyone else in this novel: employees fear bosses and vice versa, parents fear children and vice versa, husbands fear wives and vice versa. Male misogyny is at its height – executives accompany each other to prostitutes while on business trips or engage in orgies, male bosses sleep with female subordinates where rank is pulled even in bed, housewives get drunk during the day and get amorous when their husbands return home, husbands are jealous of their wives’ possible infidelity despite their own rampant licentiousness. What is Bob’s goal? To be able to give a three-minute presentation at the annual sales conference. His boss Green (everyone seems to be named after colours – there is a Black and a White also but their titles and rank are unclear) denies him that opportunity repeatedly by intimidating him and calling him useless, threatening to fire him, but never carrying through. As luck would have it, a rung of management above Green has plans to make Bob the Head of Sales, ousting his only friend in the firm, the incumbent Kagle. Bob is the classic neurotic. He fears getting meningitis, bursitis, varicose veins, tumours, heart attacks, and a host of other ills that strike middle-aged men, including impotence. He hates Derek’s nurses. He wants a divorce but is scared to carry through. He wants acknowledgement from his wife and children but all he gets are arguments. He has no prospects outside the company having been a lifer there. “The company doesn’t need us. We need it” – says Green. Bob has had a series of mistresses, inside the company and outside, and has a vigourous sex life with his wife (especially when she is drunk). But he yearns for “the one that got away” – 22 year-old Virginia who used to pet him in the store room when he was 17 at his first job in an insurance company. He never had sex with Virginia and now she is dead. You will have to wait for the ”Something” that “Happened,” per the book’s title, until the last pages of this voluminous novel that reads more like Bob’s grief journal, and wade through pages of overwriting to understand Bob’s mental state that leads him to this pivotal “event.” And that was my beef with this book. Stream of Consciousness writing is free to meander everywhere, but it should not be free to repeat and repeat and repeat. And Bob covers already tilled ground repeatedly in his rambling. He goes through long paragraphs of internal angst and then gets into pages of staccato dialogue when he is arguing with a colleague or a family member – both are repetitive in construct and content. Heller’s resolution to Bob’s angst seems to be money and promotion, because once those illusory goals are attained, despite the tragedy leading up to it, Bob suddenly becomes a regular guy, and so does his family. Scary! ...more |
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| 0140077650
| 9780140077650
| 0140077650
| 4.33
| 27
| Dec 31, 1983
| Feb 27, 1986
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Evelyn Waugh was a product of his time, anachronistic and quaint by today’s standards, and a signpost to how far we have travelled in our social, poli
Evelyn Waugh was a product of his time, anachronistic and quaint by today’s standards, and a signpost to how far we have travelled in our social, political, and literary evolution. Born into a family of letters in 1903 – a publisher father and a novelist elder brother – Waugh published his first novel at 25 and was given over to the literary profession from the age of 14 until his death at 63, as a journalist, book reviewer, essayist, and novelist. This book contains a wide selection of his essays, reviews, and other articles from that period. A Catholic convert from Anglicanism, he was critical of his former church, of his alma mater Oxford and of his chosen profession, Literature. A royalist and a conservative, he believed in the class system, in dressing up for the evening, and he lamented the post-WWII drift towards liberalism, and of literature’s conversion from an aristocracy to a democracy with its erosion in decency; he brimmed at morality that was not based on religion (he had problems with George Orwell’s atheistic morality, and Graham Greene’s anti-heroes). This old-world thinking led to him taking on the Angry Young Men of his generation (a la Amis, Osborne, and Braine) and losing popularity with his audiences. However, I agree with one of his assertions: that the life of the artist and his work should be appreciated separately – “Dickens was a thumping cad,” says Waugh. His prescription for kick-starting a literary career: “Write a biography of a famous person, then follow up with a risqué novel.” The requirements for good journalism were “good conversations, contacts and associations.” His elements of literary style were: Lucidity, Elegance, and Individuality; on the last item, he lamented the state taking over private schools and flattening society. He saw the continuity of family professions: “A man is best suited to the tasks he has seen his father perform” – and in his case, he followed that rule. He was a bit off in his predictions: he foresaw another world war by 1970 and an American or Russian sitting in a space capsule on the moon and being bored – this last prediction came true 10 years later, but I doubt the astronauts were bored – they became celebrities. His anachronistic traits were evident in his condemnation of the car, television, and the telephone. The last invention, he called pernicious, “You could call to cancel arrangements at the last minute.” He considered Americans better mannered than the British – the former used manners for cordiality while the latter used them for privacy. However, “in Britain, the crooks are the poor, while in America, the crooks are the wealthy.” He had special condemnation for “sloth.” Sloth, in his view, is the refusal of joy and is allied to despair. Sloth in literature is when writers churn out manuscripts with excessive writing and expect editors to cut out the chaff. Or when writers write with a view on subsidiary rights for their work (i.e. films and television), or when writers only produce notes and expect publishers to blow them up into full-length books. I couldn’t help but wonder at Waugh condemning the standards of literary production and sale towards the end of his life, in 1962, when writing was still considered a profession that one could earn a living at. How much more would he have griped if he were working today in our age of social media and AI? ...more |
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| 0671637177
| 9780671637170
| 0671637177
| 3.95
| 796
| 1988
| Aug 15, 1988
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really liked it
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Kirk Douglas was the quintessential outsider who rose to the top of almost every social and professional set he threw himself into, be that school, th
Kirk Douglas was the quintessential outsider who rose to the top of almost every social and professional set he threw himself into, be that school, the navy, Hollywood, Washington, and umpteen women’s bedrooms, finally founding a movie aristocracy his children could capitalize upon. This autobiography is frank, conversational, and patchy in places. Douglas’s strong ego, the force that got him ahead, shines through. And yet he is dogged by his alter-ego, Issur Demsky (Douglas’s real name), the scared little Orthodox Jewish boy, yearning for his ragman father’s approval. Both father and son are propelled by anger, Kirk’s productively, but Dad’s slumps into a spiral of drinking and fighting, consigning Demsky Sr. to live out his last days alone, when Kirk’s mother and his six sisters decamp the family home at 46 Eagle Street, Amsterdam, NY. The stereotypical Jewish tropes litter the narrative: not allowed on paper runs, bullied by Gentile kids, stood up by his shiksa prom partner. Adolescent ones follow: having sex at 14 with his school teacher, being sexually propositioned by his male professor on a cross-country trip, exacting a “revenge fuck” on the hotel proprietress who hated Jews – I suspect some of these “adventures” were conjured up in the fertile imagination of this movie star in the making. The book chronicles the star’s early days on Broadway (after college and the navy), acting in many plays but never quite making it big. He travels to Hollywood and strikes paydirt with his first blockbuster, Champion, in 1949. More “star” tropes follow with women falling at his feet thereafter. He recalls having sex for 29 straight days with 29 different women and going impotent on the 30th day! A wink, a nod, a whisper in her ear, and unknown women would follow him to his car or hotel suite for sex, even though he had a wife and kids waiting for him at home. He laments the next generations’ inability to engage so freely as he did after AIDS surfaced in the ’80s. And yet, he also pursues women who are hard to get until they beat him: he was engaged to Pier Angeli for years but never consummated the relationship until it fell apart. Star roles lead him to founding his own production company named after his mother, Bryna. There is a lot of information on how movies are made, from financing, to location-scouting, to production, to promotion, and on the lives of actors, scriptwriters, directors, and producers. Major movie players from the 20th century get a mention in this book because Douglas knew them all, and the ones he didn’t like get called out without fear of sanction: “Stanley Kubrick is a talented shit,” he says of his director of Spartacus. Like all arts industries, the movies are based on connections. More tropes: Spartacus was mired in problems, despite being a box office hit; he whacked women (upon their request) so they could “get into character”; he was swindled of his savings by a crooked agent; he opposed the studio contract system; he hired Dalton Trumbo, blacklisted screenwriter by HUAC, to write Spartacus - the list goes on. Yet, a couple of things eluded him: he never cracked the Broadway nut as a star, and he couldn’t play the role he had coveted for so long: the lead in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, that went to Jack Nicholson because Douglas was deemed too old by the time the movie was made. In his later years, he made documentaries about social issues: the refugee crises in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Israel, and the plight of those in nursing homes. He became a US goodwill ambassador, supporting Republican and Democratic presidents, although he was a card-carrying Democrat. His three-movies -per-year routine slumped down to one-per-year as health issues got in the way, like a pacemaker at 69 which he details in a full chapter – one in which he finally acknowledges the value of a 32-year marriage to a wife who stood by him despite his public peccadillos. Mortality is humbling, even for the likes of Kirk Douglas. He definitely was a man of his time, living the full life during an age when macho men ruled and Hollywood actors were next to God. ...more |
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| 0593536401
| 9780593536407
| 3.87
| 1,019
| Oct 17, 2023
| Oct 17, 2023
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really liked it
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A companion to the previous book, The Surgeon of Crowthorne, I reviewed on the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), this book focuses more
A companion to the previous book, The Surgeon of Crowthorne, I reviewed on the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), this book focuses more on the process around that creation and all its contributors. Divided into 26 chapters, each representing a letter of the alphabet and a category of contributor – e.g. L-Lunatics, M-Murderers, P- Pornographers, and Z-Zealots etc., - the author Sarah Ogilvie who worked at the Oxford University Press, delves into the dusty diary of the OED’s longest-serving editor, James Murray, to unearth the names of the contributors and then uses a variety of methods to uncover something on the lives, contributions, motivations, and processes they employed to contribute to this book that was greater than all of them. The contributors were mostly of an academic bent but not part of the literary or academic establishment. Perhaps, contributing to the OED was the attempt of the outsider to become an insider. Murray was an outsider, leaving school at 14, but going on to learn 25 languages, and being excluded by the Oxford establishment before they relented and gave him an honorary doctorate a year before he died. There are just too many personalities in this book to include in a review, all colourful, all eccentric, all of whom would have been mostly forgotten had not Ogilvie embarked on this project. They were recruited by letters, pamphlets, advertisements, word of mouth, and social clubs, and through family networks. Some contributed for years, others for short periods, some sent in a huge quantity of words (slips) – the highest being from Thomas Austin Jr. with almost 165,000. Some sent just a handful. The process: each contributor selected a word from selected books recommended by the editor that covered various historical periods (usually from the 15th – 19th century) and extracted quotes that revealed the context of that word’s usage. Sometimes authors favoured by the editor got more airplay than required – Edward Peeswick, a lesser-known author is quoted 993 times because he was a friend of Murray and worked for 54 years on the OED. The slips were mailed to the editor at Murray’s workplace, the Scriptorium, a shed in his garden, where they were sorted and placed in cubby holes by sub-editors and other volunteers. Murray then used these slips to come up with a definition of each word. This process still goes on today, long after the OED was published in 1928 after its 70-year genesis. The first 22 years of the project, initiated in 1857, were shaky, because its debut editor, Herbert Coleridge, passed away two years into the project; the next editor who held on for 20 years was Frederick Fernival, a teetotaling, vegetarian, party animal with an eye for the ladies. Fernival’s free-wheeling style and flamboyant personal life which is mentioned in the book led to lost slips, irregular contributors, and general bedlam. It was only when Murray took over in 1879, that the project corrected itself and gained critical mass. And even though only six volumes of the 12-volume OED were published before Muray passed away in 1915, the dictionary was well on the way to seeing light at the end of the tunnel by then. The 19th century was the “Century of the Dictionary,” for many were written in that period – the German, French, and Dutch – the OED was the last among its contemporaries and was envisaged to encompass all words spoken in English anywhere in the world. Murray had to steer along beside the Suffragist movement, the blasphemy laws that outlawed certain words, the scientific revolution that was generating new words, the industrial revolution that had its proprietary lingo, alternative universal languages like Volapuk and Esperanto that reared their heads, and the colonies that had bastardized English into several forms of patois. In a way, it is understandable, even necessary, that this project extended beyond the lifespan of one man, and Murray accepted this inevitability when he closed his eyes having written only to the final letter T definitions. He removed his academic cap (he always wore one to signify his academic recognition, after being denied it for so long) and sailed off into the night. A good primer on the origins of this very valuable book that all of us who are immersed in the world of words cannot do without. ...more |
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| 3.84
| 118,353
| Sep 28, 1998
| Jun 03, 1999
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really liked it
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Dull dictionaries can be very interesting when you delve into how they are created and into the lives of those behind their creation. The Oxford Englis Dull dictionaries can be very interesting when you delve into how they are created and into the lives of those behind their creation. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) dubbed the most comprehensive of its kind and the most ambitious, was 70 years in the making (1857-1927), and when contrasted to other notable ones like Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language that had been the standard for the previous hundred years, the latter only took 6 years to write with 6 assistants and dug no deeper than one and a half centuries of etymology. The OED not only covered hard words, or easy words, or words the researchers liked, but all words; it had “hundreds and hundreds” of unpaid volunteers from all over the world, and had false starts, fallow periods, and bursts of activity. This book, however, focuses on the lives of two men intrinsically involved in the creation of the OED: James Murray, its editor from 1879 until his death in 1915, one of its most prolific contributors, and Dr. W.C. Minor, a convicted murderer who was deemed insane and spent the rest of his life in an asylum, during which time he contributed 62,720 (the fourth highest) entries to the OED. Both men were driven by a love for words and viewed the Dictionary as a sacred goal, and both men died before the project was completed. We get glimpses into the lives of these men. Murray dropped out of school at 14, but his passion for words saw him become an assistant headmaster at 17, a headmaster at 21, and get invited to the London Philological Society where the idea of an OED was first advanced by this group of scholarly, clubbish, and eccentric men. Murray suffered early tragedies, with the deaths of his wife and child, but his tenacity was evident even back then, something he needed for the challenges to be faced with the Dictionary; he remarried and went on to have 11 children, many of whom he conscripted into working on the OED. Despite having a permanent job with the OED, his remuneration was low because he had negotiated a fixed fee, and as the project went from five years until the end of his life and beyond, his annual share of the fee lessened each year. W.C. Minor, the American, had a more dramatic life. Born and raised in Ceylon (my home country) by missionary parents, he is conflicted between the lust of seeing half-naked women from the islands and his strict Congregationalist upbringing. He becomes an army doctor and is sent to the front lines during the American Civil War, where he suffers the first onslaught of insanity when he sees the carnage of this only war fought with modern weapons but healed with primitive medicine. He slumps into sexual profligacy, frequenting brothels and catching various venereal diseases. He is diagnosed with monomania (later changed to schizophrenia) and spends time in an asylum in Washington DC, before being diagnosed as safe to take a trip to England and the Continent. In England, plagued by recurring nightmares, he shoots an innocent stoker on his way to an early morning work shift. This lands him in an English asylum in Broadmoor where he spends the next 38 years of his life. It is here that he made his contribution to the Dictionary. We get a glimpse into the work methodology of the OED. Volunteer readers combed through texts covering different periods and subjects, prescribed by Murray, and picked words in the alphabetical order of progression that the editor set. Volunteers then extracted quotes that illustrated the meaning of the selected word, entered them on slips of paper and sent them to Murray and his team at the Scriptorium, a shed in his property that housed the workers and research material. A wall of cubby holes accommodated the slips as they were sorted and lodged – a veritable 19th-century hard drive. Murray then arrived at a definition of each word based on the quotations and its etymology. Although Minor was not the most prolific (the most contributions came from Thomas Austin Jr. with 165,061 slips – source: The Dictionary People by Sarah Ogilvie, which will also be reviewed by me shortly), his was the most targeted and well indexed; most of his submissions were therefore included. He was aided in this by the generous asylum authorities who gave him two rooms instead of one, granted him the ability to write without censor, and gave him permission to hire another prisoner as an assistant, and to order books paid for from his US Army pension. Minor was allowed wine and spirits in his room, and to invite lady guests, including the widow of the man he murdered. The first meeting between Murray and Minor is well dramatized, and there are several interpretations of how that meeting must have gone down from scraps of letters and a diary Murray kept of all his contributors. But afterwards, they became friends as they invested more and more into this cause. As Minor’s mental state deteriorates, he commits self-harm in the most barbaric manner, and the slips start to tail off. When his asylum privileges end in 1910 with the arrival of the cruel caretaker, Dr. Brayn, Murray steps in to get his friend repatriated to America where Minor spends another nine years incarcerated. The lesson I took away from this book was that enterprises of great pith and moment can turn us away from facing dereliction in our lives and lead us to leave legacies. Murray and Minor certainly took their sorry lives and turned them into something greater, and immortalized themselves through this great dictionary that will be around for a very long time. ...more |
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(Previously reviewed in Devour Art & Lit Magazine Winter 2023/24 edition) Everchild is autobiographical, of someone who inhabits two worlds: Southern A (Previously reviewed in Devour Art & Lit Magazine Winter 2023/24 edition) Everchild is autobiographical, of someone who inhabits two worlds: Southern Africa and Canada, not unlike the worlds I have inhabited as an immigrant. It’s a splintered world that we will try all our lives to bring into focus as one, but will only end up with a collage of fragmented images that make for an enhanced view by the reader, but an incomplete one for the writer. The book comes in four parts: Breath, Ignite, Ebb, and Be, with poems grouped under them, not so much for chronological progression but to indicate moods. Through these groupings emerge powerful imagery. “Breath” dwells on a childhood of nannies more caring than mothers, wild animals, kukuyu grass, a marriage broken when she was six, a mother who never embraced and said “I love you,” the wicked stepmother who took Mother’s place, of singing Molly Malone while driving with a father who never talked about the war. In “Ignite” the young woman is aroused to passion: If I had time, I’d bring you breakfast on a silver tray, stretching and arching against the day’s duties lined up outside the door my nipples peak and I snuggle into sheets. Only to be abandoned in the poem “I am Rain”: …you called for me once, longed for me, needed me but now you follow the sun. Rain is not welcome on evening walks… The harsh life-lessons continue in “Ebb”: “Your father said to tell you he’s not your father,” – Stepmother. Mother finally gives her a hug after scolding her thoroughly for various childhood shortcomings. “There are toads in my family…toxic secretions spit from my mouth” – the realization of family heredity. “You say I am my mother.” And the final announcement of release from a 25-year marriage, in a letter to Mother: “I left him today, I know what you told me. I made my bed, and lie in it I did.” The poet finds resolution in the final part, “Be.” It is a time of remembrance, of how cows were milked back home; of letting go of a father and mother who pass, Father to be remembered fondly for all the times they shared, and Mother to have this book dedicated to. A time of aging and remembering the bi-polar world of the immigrant where similar things look different: Naartjies in Zimbabwe and their equivalent Oranges in Canada, for instance. A time of meeting old friends who have made similar immigrant journeys and who make this not such a lonely path. And of frequent visits to the toilet at night, thankfully shared with one’s spouse, again not making it a solitary journey: And I finish up and stumble back, still in the dark, meet you outside the bathroom door Pass the baton, you say. My turn to pee. Peering out in places are derivative poems based on paintings or poetry created by others. There are references to a mysterious K who “lost her way” to ALS, and to the drowning of a three-year old, not elaborated on in the helpful Notes section that give the reader context. Perhaps these revelations are for another time, another collection. But all is not gloom, for “Elissa” is a tribute to the poet’s eldest granddaughter: sucking at air with her round bow mouth, a heart so fresh and small, it has no room for sorrow. This collection is bold in a vibrant African way and circumscribed in a polite Canadian way, reflecting Scheltema’s artistic journey as well as her immigrant one. ...more |
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Jul 17, 2024
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| 0241434998
| 9780241434994
| 0241434998
| 4.15
| 119,191
| Aug 05, 2021
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| 3.61
| 2,105
| May 29, 1999
| Jun 13, 2000
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Publishing an unfinished novel over which a dead author labored for 40 years is a high-risk endeavor. Was Ellison suffering from “sophomore novel blue
Publishing an unfinished novel over which a dead author labored for 40 years is a high-risk endeavor. Was Ellison suffering from “sophomore novel blues” that he feared he could not top his debut bestseller, Invisible Man? And when Juneteenth comes with a preface and an introduction, two afterwords, and a notes section, we know his compiler is struggling to bring coherence to this huge haystack of writing. The premise is, at least, clear and compelling: a mixed-race Senator (formerly known as Bliss) attacks blacks in a speech in the Senate and is shot by an assassin who is supposed to be his own son. On his deathbed, he is visited by the black pastor who raised him, Hickman. The two men alternatingly live through dark nights of their souls, coming to terms with their own lives and the plight of blacks in America. But the delivery of this premise is a mass of preachy writing, with plot strands that disappear, foreshadowing that does not materialize, and foggy scenes written in italics for long swaths and regular type in others, with no clarity on why this distinction is necessary. The Notes section at the end of the book attempts to explain what was intended for inclusion had the novel been completed. Bliss was born of a white woman who betrayed Hickman’s brother, Bob. Was Bob the father of Bliss? Not explained. The red-haired white woman (named Cudworth) dumps Bliss on Hickman and vanishes only to reappear years later to try and claim the child during a public preaching ceremony; she fails, and is driven away, and this incident prompts Bliss’s lifelong search for his mother. He frequents movie houses where the white actresses on screen resemble her; these movie houses are also the only places where blacks can meet whites (albeit, on screen only). He even becomes a movie director in his later years before entering politics – he considers movie-making a manipulation, just like politics. Bliss is also Hickman’s cross, for the two seen together prompt questions of paternity and miscegenation that were taboo in the 1920s - 30s when Bliss was growing up. For his part, Hickman uses Bliss in his “raising from the dead” acts while on the preaching circuit, getting Bliss to descend into a coffin and rise on a signal, awe audiences, and rake in contributions and conversions. One scene that plays out in its entirety and demonstrates the author’s power of writing, is when a traumatized young Bliss, after the Ms. Cudmore episode, is taken in by Sister Georgia and invited to sleep in her bed lest he have nightmares. However. Bliss is more interested in inspecting Sister Georgia’s anatomy while she is asleep, and this leads to an explosive outcome. There is great metaphor and visual imagery: the pigeon shooting match, the car made of many assorted parts, the Devil on a horse, the nasty little boy who keeps mocking Bliss – proxies for the conditions of blacks in America and of Bliss’s life? The assassin, Bliss’s son, and why he shot his father, is not clear. We don’t even know who the mother of the assassin is. There are, however, glimpses of a repeated scene where Bliss takes a woman with dark hair under a tree on Juneteenth, and odd references to a person named Severin, and of “impregnating Severin’s mother” – go figure! The hardest to digest is the overabundance of words. “Words, words, words,” says the Senator, “what we needed was a stage with a group of actors.” “I get carried away with words,” says Hickman. And that is the downfall of this book. Ellison seems to have given full flight to his erudition and verbal dexterity at the expense of shaping a story with fully flushed out characters, probably hoping to return at some later date and cut out the fluff (and there is a lot of it). But he died, leaving it to his estate and his editor to make sense of. Spreading the story of how earlier sections of the manuscript were lost in a house fire in 1967 (even at that point this book was at least a dozen years in the making) still does not give enough reason for why it took so long to complete this novel. Perhaps, Ellison never intended to complete it but leave it as a testament to his evolving skill as a writer that could only culminate in death. ...more |
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| 1989496660
| 9781989496664
| 1989496660
| 3.64
| 129
| unknown
| May 23, 2023
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really liked it
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(This review was originally published in Devour Art & Lit Canada - Winter edition 2023/24) Twin stories by unhinged narrators about twins and the indom (This review was originally published in Devour Art & Lit Canada - Winter edition 2023/24) Twin stories by unhinged narrators about twins and the indomitable holds they have on each other. This novel, or autofiction, is a remarkable entwining of story strands — one contemporary, the other historical, in alternating chapters — to render the message that relationships humans put asunder, human nature will strive to reunite. In the contemporary strand, Kathryn, the author, is obsessed with uncovering what happened to her older brother, Wulf, who died soon after his birth, or so she’s been told. She still sees his ghost in the forest. But how does one uncover the story of an infant who did not live long enough to record one? The attempt to write Wulf’s narrative drives Kathryn to face her dissatisfaction in life, abandon her 25-year marriage and teenage children, and return to her parents’ home in rural Ontario which is under siege from rising floodwaters. Sifting through six generations of family memorabilia, she stumbles upon the record of her great-great-grandfather, Russel Boyt, a substitute soldier in the American Civil War. Instead of Wulf, she pursues Russel. Russel’s story is a fictionalized one that Kathryn constructs from traces of diaries and letters found in the flooding basement. This tale is far more interesting with the number of bizarre plot twists it involves. Russel is a reflection of Kathryn’s mental state — when there is no record, she makes something up. He is a runaway like her. He falls in love with a coloured free slave, fights horrible battles in the war, loses a limb, and kills the one he loves. He pleads insanity and enters an asylum. Kathryn is battling her parents: her mother who is in the throes of dementia yet willing to drop hidden secrets with perfect recall; her father, who is the embodiment of the patriarchy “Women don’t sweat.” Both parents do not wish to reveal the past. They want Kathryn to suck it up and return to her family before the road washes out. And Kathryn escapes after they are flooded in, to go to America to collect information on her errant ancestor, and get back to the waterlogged house – ours is not to question how or why, but to enjoy the ride. Unreliable narrator? Late in the novel, just when I thought that all imaginative pathways had been explored, the twins emerge to take both stories through to their resolution. The stories converge in the final chapter, but I’m not letting on anymore. In resolving Russel’s story, Kathryn is able to accept her own sibling’s passing, and we hope, will now return to her nuclear family, although that part is not covered. Perhaps that other reconciliation is in the sequel, which must follow, for there are more concealed, generational records in the flooded basement to auto-fictionalize, I’m sure. In Kathryn’s narrative, the writing is energetic, even frenetic. Her anger with the marital breakup and her disenchantment with the world is palpable. Russel’s narration is more apologetic. The alternating chapters between the present and the past, however, were a constant “stop and start” for me and broke dramatic thrust. At a crucial point, Russel’s first-person POV becomes insufficient to carry his story and an omniscient narrator (Kathryn) takes over to tell us all that’s happening to and around him – novel craft be damned! I found this an ingeniously constructed autofiction. One wonders how much is real and how much is fiction, and how many real-life people in the book put up with being cast in an unfavourable light — the acknowledgements section may provide a clue. That’s why I feel sorry for those who marry writers — beware, you will be auto-fictionalized, in some shape or form! ...more |
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| 9781398824201
| 1398824208
| unknown
| 4.00
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The best ten percent of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s more than 160 short stories he wrote during his short life. His untimely passing robbed us of a deeper a
The best ten percent of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s more than 160 short stories he wrote during his short life. His untimely passing robbed us of a deeper and broader view of the jazz age, and the opportunity to see how it would have been treated beyond WWII through the author’s literary lens. Jazz age types are caricaturist: young, privileged, class-conscious, hedonistic, self-indulgent – not unlike our social media types today, just with more primitive technology. Their time is spent at golf clubs, country homes, and parties, lubricated with plenty of booze. Despite their material wealth and station, they are deeply unhappy. Alcoholism, boredom, and mental ill-health plague them. They are trapped in a social fishbowl where reputations can be broken by being seen with the wrong man or woman not of their class. Financial ruin sits on their shoulder. Suicides will take place if reputations are compromised. Some of the stories are macabre, some religious, some sad, others fantasist – all have edge. One even goes back to the sixteenth century when a famous bard acts like a jazz-ager. Fitzgerald is anal about descriptions - of setting, clothes, interior décor, and nature. His omniscient narrator takes firm hold of the characters and marshals them about each story. His writing style preceded the writing schools, so there is a lot of repeated words and unnecessarily long sentences, and the language is archaic (after all, his stories were written nearly 100 years ago) – when he says “making love” (which he does often), it is not what you and I mean. A couple could be taking a walk in the park and making love at the same time – a figure of speech for “wooing,” I think it was. I won’t cover all the stories, which average about twenty pages in length. But a couple of the longer ones that stand out are “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz” and “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” both which I would classify in the fantasy or speculative fiction categories; they ask questions of how we would behave if certain counter-natural occurrences took place. In the first story, a man discovers a mountain made up of solid diamond, making him, by far, the richest man who will ever live on earth, and yet it is a fortune that his progeny will not be able to hold onto, another version of Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, I thought. In the second story, which was made into a movie, a man is born at the biblical age of “three score and ten” (70) and ages backwards; his best years are his middle ones when he is on par with his peers, but at either ends of his “aging” there is nothing but alienation and ostracization - a metaphor for the outsider. Fitzgerald comes up with great lines that encapsulate the jazz age and its characters: “At 18, our convictions are hills from which we live; at 45, they are caverns in which we hide.” “Every young man with a large income leads the life of a hunted partridge.” “Deep pain is only reserved for the strong.” “I’m more beautiful than anyone else. Why can’t I be happy?” “His was a great sin who first invented consciousness.” Shades of Gatsby appear in the final story in this collection, titled “The Rich Boy,” in which despite all the partying, money, and “making love,” the protagonist is left loveless and alone because he is not able to love anyone else but himself – a symptom of the jazz age which has amplified in our present time. ...more |
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| 1416583343
| 9781416583349
| 1416583343
| 3.21
| 2,185
| Jul 08, 2008
| Jul 08, 2008
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A good introduction to the antiquarian book business written by a veteran practitioner of the art who also happened to be a best-selling author and sc
A good introduction to the antiquarian book business written by a veteran practitioner of the art who also happened to be a best-selling author and screenplay writer. Larry McMurtry of Lonesome Dove fame takes us beyond the writing of books into the acquisition and selling of rare ones. It’s a business that has high margins: buy a book for $45 less a 10% discount and later see that book sell for $80,000, or sell Churchill’s limited-edition Marlborough for $100,000. Bookmen, as he calls those in this trade, are a select breed, a closed club of experts who do not necessarily read (except for catalogs), but who estimate, acquire, sell, measure, collate, hype, submit quotes, and refer to bibliographies. They also go on the hunt for private collections among the monied classes whose members die and leave many priceless gems to be disposed of. They go to auctions for an entire household’s contents in which a library of books may be included. They buy and hold certain books until their value increases (or decreases) exponentially. They buy, sell, and re-buy the same item as its value goes up due to factors beyond their control or estimation. They buy each other’s collections (or sections of collections) as each player dies or exits the game. Taking the wrong bet on a book or collection is par for the course. Winning big is a lottery and cause for talk among their dinner circuit. McMurtry himself came from a family without books, where stories told on the family porch was the tradition. He acquired his first collection of 19 books as a teenager, managed his first store before he became a famous writer, and then went onto start his bookstore, Book Up, in 1971 in Georgetown Washington DC with partner Marcia Carter and ran it for 32 years, reaching in size of nine apartments over three floors. When moving the business to Archer City, Tx, for its remaining three years, he bought six buildings and filled five of them with books. While his anecdotes on various acquisitions, sales, and developments in the trade make for interesting reading, I found the rather short chapters – sometimes a page or two - to be somewhat repetitious and inconclusive. It was as if an aging or ailing McMurtry would sit at his typewriter each day (he is a self-admitted luddite in technology, abhorring computers and online selling) and let his thoughts roam over his life in the antiquarian book world to see where it took him. The style is conversational and he forgets that he has told us this information already, or his editor is scared to correct him. Therefore, the book is episodic with no highs or lows. McMurtry read widely, unlike his fellow bookmen. He strayed into travel books, although he said that Graham Greene’s books, written in many forgotten and forbidding places, left him cold; he regretted never completing T.E. Lawrence’s The Seven Pillars of Wisdom. He bought erotica collections and sponsored what was to be the debut book written by a literary agent, titled The Peregrine Penis, but it was never completed. There are some chapters that stray into his writing career that paralleled his rise in book-selling. His prescription for writing: write daily, at least five pages, extending that to 10 pages if possible. Despite this, he went into a fallow period for nine years after the publication of Terms of Endearment. And he hit a five-year gap in bookselling after heart bypass surgery. This is a good piece of book-selling lore. Good for those in the industry or for those who hover on the edges of it, like publishers and writers. Don’t expect the usual gripping autobiography of a writer, even if this book is written by a famous one. ...more |
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Jun 08, 2024
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| 1990336671
| 9781990336676
| 1990336671
| 4.50
| 2
| unknown
| Apr 28, 2024
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really liked it
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An eclectic collection of short stories from an independent publisher, drilling home the message that good literature is to be found in the margins no
An eclectic collection of short stories from an independent publisher, drilling home the message that good literature is to be found in the margins not in the mainstream. Eight short stories play on the motif of Sunset, in keeping with the title. The first story “Golden” is an elegant elegy about a year in the life of an aging couple heading into Autumn. Only one will emerge the next Spring with the hope of renewal. “Alienation” is funny and ironic with a hint of the macabre. I re-read “Dandelion Seeds” because there were many messages in it. An illegally erected wall painting means different things to different people: the aging art expert sees it as a symbol of his demise, while the Chinese nurse who saves him sees it as a representation of herself and the new faces coming to this country. “I’m wearing a wig to my baby daughter’s funeral,” begins Liz Torlée’s short story, “Flight” - a powerful self-indictment on a woman who wraps herself in guilt and flees her disintegrating family – a probable first chapter of a novel that may spin out, given the issues surfaced needing exploration. “Wolverine” and “Lucid Observer” move into the speculative future. In the former, the world is destroyed by nuclear war and the survivors are feral cats bent on survival and who give us the message that in this new world the use of the paw is better than the book. The second story has a dream sequence in which a role reversal takes place, compared to what is happening in the main story, and relating to memory transfer between robots and humans, each transfer ripe with insidious implications. Memory is an asset in a post-apocalyptic world. “Minutes Lost” reads like a memoir, a cancer patient goes head-to-head with death, maintaining grace and elegance, calling the timing on her demise and not letting the disease dictate it. And the final story is pure chick-lit noir: three recently graduated 18-year-olds are on a girls’ night out at a bar, embroiled and absorbed in boyfriends, makeup, clothing, perfume, music and dancing, while dreaming of “the one to steal their heart.” From references to Ludacris and Britney Speers, I gathered this story is set in the early 2000s and the narrator is looking back at this idealized time that did not carry into the future. The only shortcoming in this collection is its length, coming in under a hundred pages. But in these attention-deprived times, isn’t “short but sweet” more effective? ...more |
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May 30, 2024
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| B0CP4H35NJ
| 4.58
| 33
| unknown
| Nov 27, 2023
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really liked it
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A Thriller for the Tech Generation A page turner for the tech generation who may not care too much about literary shortcomings. Lukas (soon to be abridg A Thriller for the Tech Generation A page turner for the tech generation who may not care too much about literary shortcomings. Lukas (soon to be abridged to Luke upon coming to America) is a socially-anxious, 24-year-old Belarussian emigre to Silicon Valley, excited to be hired to work at Swoop, a tech super-firm specializing in smartphone operating systems, in particular CoreOS, which can work across any device. His mates who start along with him are Ada, a 28-year-old former hacker who has been caught in the act and forced to work for Swoop as part of her atonement, and Clark, failed start-up entrepreneur whose father Walter is a billionaire venture capitalist in the Valley. Swoop’s founder is Umesh Patel, a man with twisted ideas about the future of the world, and his lieutenant and former classmate is Xavier, a battle-scarred veteran of the French Foreign Legion. The fast-paced plot gets off quickly when tech workers start dropping dead of brain aneurisms. When the tragic deaths start hitting closer to home, the plot jumps into turbo gear, and Luke and Ada get on the case. They can trust no one, not even the police. Cliff-hanger chapters lead us to the diabolic plan for the world; chase scenes lead to near-escapes and yet deeper trouble for our protagonists. The thriller novel adage – take the hero(s) and make their situation worse, then make it even worse, and even worse…until we are all screaming for release, applies here. Bonus feature – you even get a James Bond-ish ending. This is a primer on life in Silicon Valley, among the tech types, and as the author has firsthand experience from having worked there, it is all the more believable. Let’s see, I learned how to hack into a system by embedding code into passwords, how to make an acetylene bomb, and how to operate a drone. Tech types don’t care much for symbolism or interpretation – they simply want the facts. Nerdy types prefer to share hack apps rather than Instagram pics. Luke and Ada, despite being in and out of each other’s pockets and facing many dangers together, appear asexual. Physical attraction is limited to Luke musing, He liked her, really liked her, more than just a friend. He wasn’t sure what that meant exactly, but he wanted to find out. The parallel life stories of Umesh and Xavier and how they came to the decisions they made about the future of the planet are also interesting, and I wished there had been more of this side of the novel developed. Despite tech’s aversion to symbolism, there is a heavy influence of the Roman Empire playing out in the novel: A single city rising to immense power, conquering the country around it and then most of the known world. An empire that lasted more than a thousand years. Scaevola was a Roman warrior who burned his right hand to a stump to prove his courage, and is a heavy influence on Umesh. Don’t worry, the planet is still intact when this book ends, but we are given a wake-up call that perhaps there are some nefarious things going on in that Valley all the time, and perhaps we need to monitor it a bit more closely without killing its creative and entrepreneurial spirit, especially now that AI is loose amongst us and could very well surface a new Roman (or Robot) Empire to last another thousand years. ...more |
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May 29, 2024
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| 0140153209
| 9780140153200
| 0140153209
| 4.23
| 3,415
| 1958
| Jul 12, 1991
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really liked it
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Book Three in the Alexandria Quartet spins around the same characters but from a new viewpoint: Mountolive, the career bachelor and British diplomat,
Book Three in the Alexandria Quartet spins around the same characters but from a new viewpoint: Mountolive, the career bachelor and British diplomat, and this novel has a storyline unlike the first book in this series, Justine, which I read a few years ago. David Mountolive has a particular passion for Egypt, and Alexandria in particular, because he apprenticed for his diplomatic career and brushed up on his Arabic there, taking on an older woman, Leila, as his mistress, an affair he could never get out of his mind. He is the same age as her children, Naseem, the handsome banker and Narouz, the ugly farmer. Leila’s family are Copts, a Christian minority holding wealth but marginalized by the majority Moslems following Egyptian independence from Britain in 1922. After many diplomatic sojourns around the world, Mountolive returns to Egypt as the British ambassador in the 1930s with the world heading towards another world war. Leila has suffered smallpox and is hidden behind a veil from the world to cover her disfigurement – in particular, she hides from Mountolive. Neseem is a prominent financier plotting to gain political power for the Copt minority, while Narouz believes that power is only achievable through a holy war. The other principal characters from the Quartet: Justine, Balthazar, and Clea also circulate, albeit in supporting roles. Justine is yet to be betrothed to Neseem, to whom she was married in the first book of the Quartet. We get elaborate set pieces of description: the annual duck hunt, Mountolive’s drive through the desert between Cairo and Alexandria; his drunken, surreal escapade in the Moslem sector of Alexandria; Memlik Pasha’s charade of accepting bribes placed inside gifts of Qurans; the re-union between Mountolive and Leila in which his romantic illusions are shattered; the final funeral ceremony. Durrel’s style is a combination of omniscient narrator, limited third person narrator, and pretentious poet rambler whose unwieldy flights of verbosity eventually lose their descriptive power. A security report is suppressed, a diplomatic officer commits suicide, and Mountolive unearths a diabolic plot that will rock the foundations of the Middle East (and still does – but I will refrain from offering any spoilers). Leila’s family is intimately involved, and Mountolive is torn between duty to his country as Britain’s “man on the ground” in Egypt and his loyalty to his lover and her family. The characters symbolize the political entities jostling for hegemony in the pre-WWII Middle East: Mountolive is Britain, caught between his former colony (represented by Leila) and the new reality of the region; Nessim and Justin represent the Copt and Jewish minorities looking for influence; hare-lipped Narouz represents the angry Moslem masses restless to drive out the infidel and the Jew; Minister of the Interior Memlik Pasha symbolizes the bakshish that is endemic in Egypt and that has rendered its government and civil service ineffective. We get a good view of life in the diplomatic service, a club for the privileged. The uniforms, the parties, the routines, the intrigues, and the boredom. A diplomat needs coolness, judgment, and reserve. Diplomats also do not have friends, they use everyone; they have no politics or religion. And in this world of post-colonial powerplays, when in a jam, they use a scapegoat – Memlik Pasha knows it well. Mountolive is helpless to prevent the fallout. I enjoyed this book more than Justine, despite it lying in the shadow of the first book in the Quartet. ...more |
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May 24, 2024
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May 24, 2024
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Paperback
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| 9386834383
| 9789386834386
| B07D39QZLK
| 2.75
| 4
| unknown
| Jan 01, 2017
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A Divisive Ruler I came upon this book while researching another publishing project, and soon realized that Tipu Sultan is a reflection of the communal A Divisive Ruler I came upon this book while researching another publishing project, and soon realized that Tipu Sultan is a reflection of the communal and religious polarization of India that still exists today and a personification of the “divisive ruler” archetype that seems to have returned to vogue. On the surface Tipu was a rather unprepossessing man: “His stature was about five feet eight inches; he had a short neck, square shoulders, and was rather corpulent: his limbs were small, particularly his feet and hands; he had large full eyes, small arched eyebrows, and an aquiline nose.” He was introduced into battle at 15 by his father Hyder Ali, who as military commander had taken over the kingdom of Mysore, and Tipu spent the rest of his life warring against one neighbour or the other, persecuting Hindus and Catholics, and waging four wars against the British only to be killed in the last one in 1799. During his rule he completed the project of Lal Bagh started by his father, and built roads, public buildings, and ports in his kingdom. His dominion extended throughout North Bangalore including the Nandi Hills and Chickballapur. His trade extended to countries such as Sri Lanka, Oman, Durrani Afghanistan, France, Ottoman Turkey and Iran. Under his leadership, the Mysore army proved to be a school of military science to Indian princes. Other notable achievements include the creation of his own coinage (every ruler had to have his own coins – it was a mark at having arrived!), and the Mysore Rocket – a military missile used effectively against his enemies and operating at longer ranges (2km or more) than the competition. In fact, the British, upon vanquishing Tipu, used his technology to perfect the rocket for the later Napoleonic Wars and the War of 1812 in North America. However, Tipu Sultan is vilified for his persecution of Hindus and Catholics in surrounding kingdoms whom he captured, circumcised, and forced into his army or into captivity in his capital city of Seringapatnam. On forced marches back to Mysore, thousands of prisoners perished. His men “procured” female prisoners for their harems, Tipu had 200 for his own, and any protest by the male prisoners were met with torture, dismemberment of limbs, with whatever was left being paraded through the streets of Seringapatnam. His colonial ally was France whom he tried to enlist for his various wars against the British. While the French helped with the first two of Tipu’s skirmishes, they were embroiled in their own revolution and Reign of Terror back home for battles #3 and 4 which Tipu lost conclusively, including his life in the final conflict. Much was his affiliation with France that Tipu formed a Jacobin Club in Mysore, and Napoleon desired to make Tipu “Our Man in India” to complete his trade route that extended as far as Egypt. But Napoleon lost Egypt and Tipu decided not to flee his burning city when he had the chance, choosing to fight to the death – his words, "One day of life as a Tiger is far better than a thousand years of living as a Sheep." And true to his Tiger motif, Tipu’s Tiger—a mechanical toy created for Tipu Sultan, carved and painted in wood casing—represents a tiger savaging a near-life-size European man, and emitting the growls of the beast and the squeals of its prey. It reposes in a London museum today, a testament to this enigmatic man who is a hero to some and a devil to others, similar to some of our “tough man” politicians in power today. ...more |
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May 19, 2024
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May 19, 2024
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Kindle Edition
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| 0156196255
| 9780156196253
| 0156196255
| 3.79
| 18,920
| 1938
| Oct 22, 1969
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“You can never go back” is the moral of this tale of a middle-class, WWI veteran who returns to his childhood home to recapture a world that had been
“You can never go back” is the moral of this tale of a middle-class, WWI veteran who returns to his childhood home to recapture a world that had been safer and more predictable, only to find the opposite. In this seemingly innocuous, mildly humorous, extremely detailed account of life between the two world wars, Orwell paints us a picture of the Lost Generation. George Bowling is an insurance salesman, 45, fat with false teeth, married with two children, living in suburbia where all the houses look the same and everyone engages in predictable activities. It is 1938 and the clouds of war are gathering again, and George predicts 1941 to be the year of conflagration – he is being generous, unknowingly. His wife, Hilda, is a worry wort when it comes to household expenses and suspicious of his on-the-road affairs, his children are a pain in the ass, and he is fed up with this miserable existence that only holds the promise of an early death. On his day off from work to get a new set of false teeth, he has an extensive recollection of his life, of growing up in Lower Binfield where his father owned a grain store. He had two passions as a teenager - fishing and reading – both of which he had to give up as the demands of life claimed him: to get a job at 16 when his father fell upon hard times, to join the war at 19, to get injured two years later and sit out the rest of the conflict guarding a food supply on the west-coast that no one wanted, although at this last posting he got to read extensively again as there was nothing else to do. Sales jobs followed in peacetime culminating in the insurance job held for 18 years, marriage in 1923, followed by life in suburbia where he gradually gave up on dreams and started to put on the weight. His marriage is moribund; Hilda who came from the penniless Anglo-Indian officer class, only wanted to trap a husband, then let herself go, and worry about the bills they had to pay, thereby kiboshing every leisure initiative George came up with. “We can’t afford 10 bob for a fishing rod, George!” George decides to take a trip down memory lane. He concocts an excuse to put Hilda off the scent and takes a week’s vacation to Lower Binfield to recapture his safer and happier past. He is in for a surprise and a disappointment. The village of 2000 is now a town of 25,000. Housing sprawl is everywhere. His former girlfriend Elsie is a hag who can’t recognize him, and his old fishing holes are littered with naturists or turned into garbage dumps. He beats a retreat home to concoct a new excuse for the wily Hilda who has blown his alibi. The level of memory recall that Orwell draws from is impressive; every hue, smell, texture, and sound of that period is on display in his detailed descriptions. His social and political observations are at their sharpest. George Bowling sees no future for himself or England. He worries more about what comes after a war – the streamlining, as he calls it. George sees fear keeping people in jobs – fear of bosses and customers; everything is made from something else like manufactured goods; he can’t even get it on with women anymore – who would want a fat man with false teeth? And yet he has been a mean man too: he dumped Elsie when it was convenient for him; as a child, he broke birds’ nests and stamped on the chicks, he blew up frogs with an inflator until they burst; and as a husband, he cheated on Hilda until he got fat. George is truly a specimen of the Lost Generation. Unlike Hemingway and Fitzgerald who tried to elevate the heroism of this cohort, albeit tragically, Orwell makes no bones about displaying their ineptness and hopelessness. This is not one of my better Orwell books. The pacing is slow, the conflict moderate, and the humour is muted. And yet it captures the essence of an entire generation, one that has been lost behind others (The Greatest Generation, the Boomers et al) who have dominated recent literature. ...more |
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Jun 27, 2024
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Jun 18, 2024
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May 30, 2024
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May 29, 2024
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May 24, 2024
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May 19, 2024
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May 10, 2024
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May 09, 2024
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