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Beneath the Wheel (1906)
by Hermann Hesse, translated by Michael Roloff
216 pages - Bantam Books
This is the story of young Hans Giebenrath, who is an accomplished student in a small German town, and gets chosen to take special exams in order to be enrolled in a special academy that will mean a bright future for him with a career either in the church or academics. As Hans progresses further on, he feels more pressure from all sides - his father, schoolteachers, prominent townspeople - and life becomes less and less meaningful and enjoyable. After a series of events at the academy, Hans begins to fall just as quickly as he rose, unable any longer to resolve his alienation and disconnection from the people around him. This novel has also been published under the title The Prodigy.
A lot of people consider this Hesse's spiritual autobiography, as well as an attack on the educational system, and in about a hundred years it's clear that not much has changed. Hans is full of potential, but he's thrust into a system which is designed to take the dull and thick-skinned average student and turn them into relatively productive members of society, while any sign of uniqueness or difference is usually seen as a threat by the teachers. As another saying goes, the educational system turns coal into diamonds, and diamonds into dust. Even the pastor who counsels Hans is someone striving to be modern, and concerned with textual interpretation and historical truths, while evidently not even believing in the Resurrection or the living presence of the Holy Ghost. Hans later on tries to simply become a craftsman, but his intelligence and sensitivity means he can never fully integrate himself into the world of manual labour.
In some ways this novel is not that ambitious, and so it's not usually counted as being among Hesse's great works. But there are some sequences which are wonderfully evocative, and really spring to life. And there are also some fantastic passages describing the natural world. I actually think it's the best traditional 'novel' I've read by Hesse, as a lot of his other works seem overwhelmed by ideas, whereas here the guides are character, story, and atmosphere.
One point of interest is that in the little biographical sketch at the back it mentions that Hesse attempted to commit suicide before he became a writer (an event mirrored somewhat in the novel), and it does seem to match an uncanny pattern where if you look at the biography of a lot of great writers, an incredible number of them either attempted or seriously contemplated suicide at some point in their formative days. 'A schoolmaster will prefer to have a couple of dumbheads in his class than a single genius, and if you regard it objectively, he is of course right. His task is not to produce extravagant intellects but good Latinists, arithmeticians and sober decent folk. The question of who suffers more acutely at the other's hands--the teacher at the boy's or vice versa--who is more of a tyrant, more of a tormentor, and who profanes parts of the other's soul, student or teacher, is something you cannot examine without remembering your own youth in anger and shame.' (pg.113)
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The Captive Mind (1953)
by Czeslaw Milosz, translated by Jane Zielonko
251 pages - Vintage International
A few people on my friends list had the great idea of reading something related to the theme of Remembrance Day, and so I decided to do the same, and picked out this book from my 'to-read' pile. Though it actually does have a lot to do with war, it covers much more ground as well.
Czeslaw Milosz was born in Lithuania in 1911 to a Polish-speaking family, and while he pursued his dream of being a poet, he also studied law. Before the Second World War he held somewhat leftist ideals, but as the Soviets took tighter and tighter control of Poland, he decided to take his chance to defect to the West. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980.
This book is an examination of the way in which the totalitarian ideology of Soviet Russia takes hold in the minds of certain segments of the population, and specifically it looks at the stories of four different writers who became active voices in the promotion of Stalinism, sometimes at the very same moment when their own families were being deported to slave camps. Milosz himself attributes his own decision not to accept the conditions of life under Communist rule not to a strong character or a sharp mind, but to a sick feeling in his gut. The human mind can accept and tolerate almost anything, he says, but the gut can only take so much before it rebels.
This book can be quite a harrowing read, as it takes the reader into the concentration camps of the Nazis, as well as explores the way that the Red Army stood by, delaying their march until the Warsaw Uprising was crushed by the Nazis, and then goes into the many deportations, slave labour camps, and wholesale mass-murders and genocides carried out by the Communists. The four writers highlighted found a role for themselves in the new totalitarian society, saw themselves praised and rewarded, and thus were able to, at least for a time, divorce the reality in front of their faces from what they expressed in their writings.
As someone of Lithuanian descent, it was especially affecting for me to read Milosz's account of the fate of the Baltic states, such as the quote from a Soviet official that in the future, "There will be a Lithuania; but there will be no Lithuanians." (Pg. 230) Not only did the Communists eliminate a large portion of the population with massacres and deportations to slave-labour camps in Siberia, but this very account of it was written at a time when it was not unthinkable that the party heads in Moscow would decide that it was historically necessary for the salvation of humanity, according to their Marxist science, to finish the job of extermination.
This turned out to be an excellent read to mark Remembrance Day, because it is anything but an angry or simplistic attack against Communisim. Instead, it is simply a sober account that stands witness to the people and nations who are caught, "Like a fly between two giants." Many of the ceremonies of Remembrance honour the soldiers, but make little mention of the civilian cost which is almost always many times greater. Even for those of us who live in 'free' nations, we can see today that the civilian cost of far-off wars is beneath the concern of governments.
'The war years taught me that a man should not take a pen in his hands merely to communicate to others his own despair and defeat. This is too cheap a commodity; it takes too little effort to produce it for a man to pride himself on having done so. Whoever saw, as many did, a whole city reduced to rubble--kilometers of streets on which there remained no trace of life, not even a cat, not even a homeless dog--emerged with a rather ironic attitude toward descriptions of the hell of the big city by contemporary poets, descriptions of the hell in their own souls. A real "wasteland" is much more terrible than any imaginary one. Whoever has not dwelt in the midst of horror and dread cannot know how strongly a witness and participant protests against himself, against his own neglect and egoism.' (pg 216)
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Enchanted Night: A Novella (1999)
by Steven Millhauser
109 pages - Crown Publishers
'Memory keeps turning into imagination.' (pg.33) This short little book takes place in the space of a single summer night in Connecticut, from just past midnight until the break of dawn, under an almost-full moon. It's divided into small pieces that start at the top of the page, and usually end on that same page as well. In this one night the town sees, among other things, several restless young girls leaving their houses, a failed 39-year-old writer's wanderings, an auto mechanic in love with a shop window mannequin, a beach that's home to both lovers and loners, and a group of teen girls that break into people's houses, snack in their living rooms, and leave a note saying "We are your daughters". This is a really fantastic piece of writing - lyrical, evocative, and full of heart. Millhauser has taken all the magic of summer nights and put it in between two covers. 'Because when you are known, then you lose yourself, but when you are hidden, then you are free.' (pg.105)
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The Perennial Philosophy (1945)
by Aldous Huxley
312 pages - Perennial Library
'To find or know God in reality by any outward proofs, or by anything but by God Himself made manifest and self-evident in you, will never be your case either here or hereafter. For neither God, nor heaven, nor hell, nor the devil, nor the flesh, can be any otherwise knowable in you or by you but by their own existence and manifestation in you. And all pretend knowledge of any of these things, beyond and without this self-evident sensibility of their birth within you, is only such knowledge of them as the blind man hath of the light that hath never entered into him.' - William Law (quoted on pg. 130) In this book Huxley examines the writings of all the major monotheistic religions (Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, etc.) to draw a unifying picture of what he terms a 'Perennial Philosophy', as all these testimonies describe a 'divine Ground' with similar characteristics. This is a God that is both immanent and transcendent, a Creator who is the source of all things, but primarily love, and the experience of which is open to everyone be they willing to undertake the proper physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual steps. Indeed, Huxley's view of the material world is that it is entirely supported by God, and that the purpose of everyone's existence is to arrive at a union with Him. It's a very impressive book in terms of its scope and depth, but I have to say that it takes a lot of work to get through - I've probably been reading this in bits for a few months, and that's after it's been on my shelves for years. The only things I'd read previously from Huxley were Brave New World and Brave New World Revisited so it was a bit surprising to discover how intensely religious he was. The book is somewhat a product of its time and, written right after the Second World War, Huxley directs a lot of blame at technology and the march of 'progress' - something I don't entirely agree with. He does make an interesting comment near the end about how one of the utilitarian goals that we should have in creating the society we live in is to minimize the influences that 'lead us into temptation,' which take advantage of people's weaknesses and distractibility; and so with those negative influences minimized, increase the possibility of every person realizing their potential. This is almost entirely opposite to the society we're living in now, which seems to prize and honour the person who can create things which other people buy into by thoughtless reflex, and which eat up hours and hours of the limited time they have on earth. I guess a one-word summing-up of what this book is about is 'mysticism'. But Huxley does take pains to state again and again that this isn't something just for a chosen few or the specially gifted, but available to everyone who wishes to glimpse the way things really are; to let God's presence grow within themselves. It made me think that one of the unfortunate aspects of the modern world's gradual drift away from religion (even though I feel that the pervasiveness of religion in the past is way overstated, because of the type of record it's based on) is that by exiling God from life in the community people grow ignorant of even the potential of any supernatural assistance (I'm not talking about physical miracles exclusively). The book ends thus: "It is they [mystics] who, dying to themselves, become capable of perpetual inspiration and so are made the instruments through which divine grace is mediated to those whose unregenerate nature is impervious to the delicate touches of the Spirit."
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Fifth Business (1970)
by Robertson Davies
273 pages - Penguin Books
'Fifth Business' is a term (according to Davies) in opera or theatre which refers to a character that is neither hero or heroine, confidante or villain, but is still integral to the plot. In this case that role is played by Dunstan Ramsay, who is relating his experiences, but finds himself a supporting character in his own life story.
Dunstan Ramsay is born in the early twentieth century in a small Ontario town, and as a child he has an experience that will affect him the rest of his life: his lifelong friend and enemy Boy Staunton throws a snowball at him, but Dunstan ducks and the snowball hits the pregnant Mrs. Dempster instead, which leads to the premature birth of Paul Dempster. It's an event that haunts Dunstan with guilt all his life, but also opens up possibilities for all three of Dunstan, Boy, and Paul that wouldn't be there otherwise.
Dunstan goes on to fight in the Great War, and then becomes a teacher at a private school. One of his main interests in life becomes saints and the stories around them, and in fact he believes Mrs. Dempster to be a saint of a kind, and attributes three miracles to her. Dunstan (like the author Davies) is a Protestant, and hence there is some tension in his fascination with saints, as he belongs to a branch of Christianity that still honours the old saints, but doesn't recognize any in the modern age, as if sainthood was something that had gone out of style, or as if God had once been present in the world but has now departed.
The book follows Dunstan's life until he's about sixty years old. I find it hard to relate the quality of this book, but it is very good, and is not only Davies' best, but could quite easily be considered the greatest Canadian novel ever. It stands alone, but it can also be read as the first part in The Deptford Trilogy, which also includes The Manticore and World of Wonders.
'He told us, quietly and in the simplest language, that he had to run his Mission by begging, and that sometimes begging yielded nothing; when this happened he prayed for help, and had never been refused what he needed; the blankets, or more often the food, would appear somehow, often late in the day, and more often than not, left on the steps of the Mission by anonymous donors. Now, pompous young ass that I was, I was quite prepared to believe that St John Bosco could pull off this trick when he appealed to Heaven on behalf of his boys; I was even persuaded that it might have happened a few times to Dr Barnardo, of whom the story was also told. But I was far too much a Canadian, deeply if unconsciously convinced of the inferiority of my own country and its people, to think it could happen in Toronto, to a man I could see.' (pg.128) correction:Fixed which war he fought in; WWII would obviously make no chronological sense.
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The Seven Storey Mountain: Fiftieth Anniversary Edition (1948)
by Thomas Merton
467 pages - Harvest
This is the autobiography of Thomas Merton, from his birth until the time when he took his vows at a Cistercian monastery at the age of 33. Merton was born in France, but in his early years his family moved often between France and Britain and the US. His mother died when he was young, and his father also passed away before he entered university. Merton first attended Cambridge University in England, but because of his freewheeling ways he was made to understand that he did not have a future there, and so he moved back to America and enrolled at Columbia. It was during his time at Columbia that he became more and more drawn to the Catholic Church, finally converting and being baptized. In his post-university years he did some teaching as he tried to discover his calling, finally becoming a Trappist monk and closing himself up in monastic duties for the rest of his life; as he put it, "the four walls of my new freedom." His only sibling, a brother, died soon after Thomas had entered the monastery, while fighting with the Royal Canadian Air Force in World War II.
This is quite a remarkable book, and the above summary doesn't do much justice to it at all. People have compared it favourably to St. Augustine's Confessions, but I thought that while that book was somewhat dull and obtuse, this one was full of life and immediacy. But perhaps that's just because Merton's times are so much closer to our own. Merton does not talk down to the reader, but he doesn't try to make things too complicated either. You can see that he's intelligent and well-read, but not without his faults or weaknesses. Perhaps the book's greatest strength is that it doesn't come across on simply an intellectual level, or as a recorded series of events, but with the full force and richness of life experience. Which is what Merton thought literature should truly be.
The book was written with Merton still in the first fervour of his conversion and his decision to dedicate his life to being a Trappist, and so it can come off as very fiery and a bit absolutist at times; and I think I was helped by my earlier reading of The Life You Save May Be Your Own, which was a biography of four American Catholic writers, including Merton, and illuminated some of the things Merton continued to struggle with, drawing especially from his journals which were published after his death. Merton certainly wasn't perfect, and he sometimes seems even quite flaky and restless, but the great advantage of the sacrifices he made and of his works is that they afford the possibility for the reader to recognize some common ground in each individual soul's struggle towards the light.
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Bread and Wine (1936, revised 1955)
by Ignazio Silone, translated by Harvey Fergusson II
286 pages - Signet Classics
'"We all live temporary lives," he said. "We think that just for now things are going badly, that we have to adapt just for now, and even humiliate ourselves, but that all this is temporary. Real life will start someday. We prepare to die with the complaint that we've never really lived. Sometimes I'm obsessed with this idea. You live only once, and for this one time you live a temporary life, in the vain hope that one day real life will begin. That's how we exist. Of those I know, I assure you, no one lives in the present. No one thinks that what he does every day is anything but temporary. No one is in a position to say, 'From now on, from whatever day this is, my life has really started.' Even the ones who have power and take advantage of it, believe me, live on intrigues and fear. And they're full of disgust with the prevailing stupidity. They live temporary lives too. They're waiting just like everyone else."' (pg.46) This story takes place in the mid-1930s, during the rise of fascism in Italy. Pietro Spina is a man who has cut himself off from his wealthy family, and gotten into trouble for his activities as a communist organizer - first being expelled from his native Italy, and then drifting around various countries of western Europe, being expelled from many of them as well. He now decides that he must come back to Italy, but soon after his arrival the few who want to help Spina decide it best that he take the disguise of a priest, and go live in a small town in the mountains, saying that he is recovering from an illness. Spina tries to re-organize the dispirited and scattered sympathiezrs of socialism, while usually encountering people who have no interest in another ideology, and while he himself begins to doubt the value in simply taking orders from totalitarians in Moscow rather than totalitarians in Rome. At the same time, as he presents himself as a priest, even one who is resting and cannot perform the duties of his office, many come to him trustingly and open up with their daily worries and cares. This was a really brilliant, captivating novel; the best I've read in a long time. I might even say it's possibly the best novel I've ever read. There's something wonderful on almost every page, and Silone is able to handle a deep theme while still doing justice to many small things, like little humourous moments of interaction between people, or lovely descriptions of the natural landscape. One of the main themes is the maturation process where youthful ideals and theories crumble and take a lower priority as compared to the actual experience of an individual life. I've always felt there was too much of an emphasis on 'ideas', both in literature and generally in life, and in this novel Silone also shows them to be an inadequate base for life when compared to non-theoretical reality. This book really makes me want to track down more of Silone's work, as well as more italian literature in general. 'The story of the martyrs was always different and always the same. It was a time of beatings and persecutions. There was a dictatorship with a deified leader. There was a moldy old church which lived on handouts, and an army of mercenaries to guarantee a peaceful digestion to the rich people. A population of slaves. Incessant preparations of new wars of loot to bolster the prestige of the dictatorship. Meanwhile mysterious travelers were coming from the east. They whispered of miracles which had happened in the orient. They announced the good news: Liberation is at hand. The boldest, the poor, the hungry, met underground to hear of this. The news spread. Some left the old temples and embraced the new faith. Some of the nobles left their palaces. Some centurions deserted. The police raided some clandestine meetings and made some arrests. The prisoners were tortured and sent to a special tribunal. There were some who refused to burn incense in front of the state's fetishes. They recognized no God but their own. They confronted the tortures with a smile on their lips. The young men were thrown to the wild beasts. The survivors kept faith with the dead and constructed a secret cult to them. Times change and clothes change, along with food and work; languages change; but at bottom, it's the same story all over again.' (pg.263)
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Monsieur Monde Vanishes (1952)
by Georges Simenon, translated by Jean Stewart
174 pages - Harcourt Brace Jovanovich
'He was lucid, not with an everyday lucidity, the sort one finds acceptable, but on the contrary the sort of which one subsequently feels ashamed, perhaps because it confers on supposedly commonplace things the grandeur ascribed to them by poetry and religion.
What was streaming from his whole being, through his two eyes, was all the fatigue accumulated during forty-eight years, and if they were gentle tears, it was because now the ordeal was over.' (pg.43) Norbert Monde is the head of a successful business that he inherited from his father. He also has a wife, and an adult son and daughter from his first marriage. On his forty-eighth birthday he takes out some money from the bank and walks away, taking a train for the coast. As his family and business associates wonder what happened to him, Monde tries to immerse himself into a common, unremarkable life. When he runs into someone from his past who needs assistance, he needs to make a choice as to what sort of life he wants to live. In the beginning, this does play as a somewhat common fantasy of getting away from it all, but quite quickly you see that Simenon is doing something a bit different. Rather than fleeing responsibility, Monde really has few obligations to the people he leaves. Part of escaping is acting on a thought he had since childhood, a fantasy of blending into the common stream of humanity, that he never had the nerve to act on before. And then he matures a little more when he accepts that there's really no such thing as a clean break from who you have been in the past, unless you want to be running and hiding all your life. This is a really excellent novel, and does a wonderful job of illustrating the existential dilemma of one person alone against the world. 'He was a man who, for a long time, had endured the human condition without being conscious of it, as others endure an illness of which they are unaware. He had always been a man living among other men and like them he had struggled, jostling amid the crowd, now feebly and now resolutely, without knowing wither he was going.
And now, in the moonlight, he suddenly saw life differently, as though with the aid of some miraculous X-ray.' (pg.156)
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Apparitions (1975)
by Celia Green & Charles McCreery
218 pages - Hamish Hamilton
The authors of this book have assembled the contained accounts mostly from an appeal for people to send in written accounts of their experiences with 'apparitions'. These were then followed up by extra questioning to obtain more detail. The term 'ghosts' really isn't appropriate, because only a small portion of these apparitions are of people that are dead; there are apparitions of the living, of animals, inanimate objects, and even apparitions of the percipient themselves.
I found this a really wonderful book that was fascinating to read through. Contrary to most horror stories and films, the real-life experience of an apparition doesn't seem to hold much terror, and in fact in some cases provides a comfort or benefit to the person who is having the experience. A lot of these occur at the moment of death or distress of a loved one who is far away, where the person passing away makes something of a last visit. Another common theme is encountering someone in a regular situation (such as gardening in their yard, or a pet coming to greet you) before receiving the knowledge that they'd already died some time ago. In the cases of repeated appearances of an apparition, it seems that discussing it with others and gaining some sort of consensus about your experience, and what the figure is, tends to prevent further appearances. There also seems to be a whole subcategory for apparitional cats that are unknown to the percipient, but then not only appear regularly, but follow a person around when they change residences.
Though the authors only speculate about various theories, they don't seem to be inclined to think that the experiences are literally 'real', and tend more in the direction of them being a way that the mind presents information to the consciousness after it has received information in some subconscious manner. But the real value here is in the accounts from regular people, and they are fascinating and really make you wonder about the structure of reality. For the record, I've never had an experience of any kind of apparition, though after reading this I think I'd be a lot less anxious about it; as even during experiences that might sound like they'd be scary, it seems that something makes the person treat them in a very matter-of-fact way while they are taking place.
'...I was working as housekeeper, and was preparing the midday meal, which had to be ready by one o'clock. I wanted to see the time, and stepped to one side, from the cooker, to look into the next room where the clock was. The door to the room was open, as I only had to look across to the dresser where the clock stood, but standing looking at me was another me, dressed the same and looking very calm and spotless. I have never understood the meaning of it. It seems a wonderful thing to have happened.' (pg.184)
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The Martian Chronicles (1958)
by Ray Bradbury
267 pages - Time Inc.
Somewhere in between a collection of short stories and a novel, this book uses a series of stories to track the colonization of Mars by humans. Mars here is very much fictional, with a breathable atmosphere, water-filled canals, and most impressively a race of Martians who are many tens of thousands of years old, and have already left behind many ancient dead cities before they are almost entirely wiped out by new diseases from Earth. Near the end of the book nuclear war on Earth seems inevitable, and the continued existence of civilization on either planet is put in doubt.
This book is so amazing. It reminds me of why Bradbury was my favourite author for so many years. Just the writing itself is fantastic, but the imagination behind the stories is even more impressive. This is obviously not a history that could ever really take place, but is metaphor, mythology, and dream. The one thing I was surprised by in re-reading this is that a few of the Mars stories by Bradbury that I was expecting aren't even in this book; I only realized later that they're in other collections, even though they take place in the same chronology.
There was apparently a disappointing television mini-series based on this book, as well as at least one adaptation that I remember on Ray Bradbury Theater, but while I was reading this I was thinking that the only way it might be possible to do this book justice would be to use the rotoscoping technique found in animated movies such as Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly. That would be something to see.
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The Further Teachings of Lao-Tzu: Understanding the Mysteries: A Translation of the Taoist Classic Wen-Tzu
translated by Thomas Cleary
184 pages - Shambhala
The Way is so familiar it cannot be estranged, so close it cannot be put at a distance. Those who seek it afar go and then come back. (pg. 118) Lao Tzu, thought to have lived in the 6th century BC, is mostly known as the reputed author of the Tao Te Ching, a work structured as poetry. However, he is also at the centre of a prose work much less known in the West, called the Wen-Tzu, after one of his students who appears in many of these pieces asking Lao Tzu questions. As befits a prose work, this is a lot less ambiguous than the Tao Te Ching, and offers wisdom both for an individual's life as well as for that of a statesman. To let concerns produce concerns, and then take concern to stop concerns, is like brandishing fire and not trying to burn anything. To let knowledge produce troubles, and then to use knowledge to prepare against them, is like stirring water in hopes of making it clear. (pg.75) I had a really interesting experience reading this, where at times it felt really dense and hard to get through, but other times the text was speaking to me incredibly clearly and directly. I think one of the things that I realized most powerfully, and that sounds like such a piece of pop-psychology pablum, is that very often what I'm frustrated by are concepts in my head; it's just my own (likely inacurate) ideas, and not even the real world. Also, a person's determination and will can only do so much, mostly things are going to happen or not happen outside of your own control, and trying to force stuff just leaves you out of touch. These are things that are easy to say on an intellectual level, but getting a full understanding is different and much more valuable. The Way is to straighten oneself and await the direction of destiny. When a time is going to arrive, you cannot go out to greet it and bring it back with you; when a time is going to leave, you cannot stop it and pull it back. (pg.55)
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Lieh-Tzu: A Taoist Guide to Practical Living
translated by Eva Wong
247 pages - Shambhala Dragon Editions
The Lieh-Tzu is a book traditionally attributed to a person of the same name who lived in the 4th century BC. Along with Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching and the book of Chuang Tzu, it is one of the three main texts of Taoism. This is presented as not just a translation but a "hermeneutical opening-up" of the text, which essentially means that the aim is more to get across the various layers of meaning, rather than to make a literal translation of the original text.
This is just my latest time re-reading this book, but I always find it delightful; both comforting and thought-provoking. Most of the text is short tales that span a page or two, and remind me a lot of western fables or parables. A lot of the emphasis is on the usual Taoist themes of ambivalence about the cares of the world and acknowledging our uncertainty and lack of knowledge of even the most basic aspects of our lives.
( Excerpt: 32 - Who is confused? )
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Seductive Poison: A Jonestown Survivor's Story of Life and Death in the People's Temple (1998)
by Deborah Layton
309 pages - Anchor Books
Deborah Layton came from a well-off, highly cultured family. Her mother's side of the family were non-religious Jews who fled the rise of Nazism in Germany, while her father was a prestigious university professor before he took a job with the US military working with chemical weapons. Deborah was a very rebellious, troubled youth, but in her late teens she found the structure she needed by becoming involved with the Peoples Temple, headed by Jim Jones. Other members of her family were pulled into the church too, before and after her, and Deborah become a trusted operative (as well as victim) of Jones, stashing away millions of dollars in secret accounts, participating in publicity and intimidation campaigns, and building the blackmailing database. She eventually flew down to the 'Promised Land' of Jonestown in Guyana and became a prisoner in the horrific forced-labour camp. Re-gaining a bit of the trust of Jones, she was able to go on a mission to Guyana's capital after five months, where she made her escape, despite the (purposeful?) bungling of the American embassy. Her decision to go public with her concerns once she returned to the US is part of what prompted congressman Leo Ryan to investigate Jonestown in person, where he and several reporters were killed and then almost 1000 people went through with their well-rehearsed mass suicide plans. I was motivated to read this after watching the documentary Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple.
This is an incredibly gripping and engaging book. It's written in a style that is a lot like a novel, and much of it is conversations between the author and others, which are re-created from memory and from many volumes of tapes which were made immediately after her escape. I suppose in a few spots the conversation seems to be 'better than real', but for the most part I'm sure it at least represents the core truth of events, and doesn't seem to be needlessly exaggerated. The final escape may be related in a suspenseful way, but it's also very muddled and confused, and I suppose Layton was trying to relate her mindset at the time, though at the end it also does bring up a question of how much of the actions of the American embassy might have been trying to stall her departure from Guyana.
One thing I found quite interesting is the minimal role that religion seemed to play in the actual life of the members of Peoples Temple. Though Jim Jones called himself 'Reverend' and occasionally related stories from the Bible, he considered religion 'the opiate of the masses' and most of his spiritual ideas that he ingrained in his followers had to do with auras, mind-reading, staged 'healings', and a vague concept of reincarnation. People such as Mao, Lenin, Che Guevara and Castro were held up as heroes, and Deborah Layton and others believed that when they were setting up blackmail lists, taking away medications from the elderly, working long days in the fields while the Temple had millions in the bank, and torturing those who didn't follow the rules, it was all for the glory of socialism. In an ironic sort of way, the psychosis and lies and degradation and murder of Jonestown closely resembled many of the other communist utopias set up around the world.
Anyhow, a really great book in which you very vividly get to spend some time in another person's shoes.
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Instant Light: Tarkovsky Polaroids (2004)
edited by Giovanni Chiaramonte and Andrey A. Tarkovsky
135 pages - Thames & Hudson
 From 1979 to 1984, filmmaker Andrey Tarkovsky owned a Polaroid camera and used it to capture images of interest. Now, I mostly associate instant Polaroids with cheap and bad photos whenever I'd visit my grandmother, so it is stunning to see the beauty of these photos which were made with the exact same sort of idiot-proof camera most of us have handled. Most of the photos are either of the landscape and people around his country home in Russia, or taken during his time in Italy. Occasionally, the page opposite a photo has some text from poems or thoughts that Tarkovsky wrote down in his journals. This is really a stunning book, on so many images the play of light is so exquisite that the image feels like something from your own memory, some moment in the soft sunlight that you can suddenly half-remember. The images also strongly evoke Tarkovsky's mystical Christian faith, which all his work was steeped in, and so every person is there with the consciousness that God lives in each one of them, and animals such as dogs and birds are symbolically God's messengers, but not 'just symbolically', and not even a field of scrabbly wildflowers or a leaning weathered fencepost will ever truly be forgotten in this world that God created out of His love; and then perhaps when we take the step out of the flow of time to live solely in eternity, we will come back and re-visit that wooden table at home with dishes of food casually assembled on it by a loved one's hand, run through a dewey wood accompanied by a panting dog, or stand on the shore's edge as mist rises off the water as it's touched by the morning sunlight. Perhaps all of this only metaphorically, but there is no concrete truth beyond metaphor. This Guardian page has a few more of the photos. Andrey Tarkovsky was greatly influenced by his father, Arseny, a poet, whose work was featured in many of his son's films, and some of his work is quoted in this book: Death does not exist
we are all immortal
and everything is immortal.
At seventeen
one should not fear death, nor at seventy.
Being and light alone have reality, darkness and death have no existence
Were are all already on the shore of the sea
and are among those who drag the nets
while immortality gleams behind them
Live in the house and it will not fall down.
I shall call forth any century at all,
to enter into it and build my house.
This is how your children and wives
will sit with me at the table.
One sole table for ancestor and descendant.
The future is happening now.
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Ghost and Horror Stories of Ambrose Bierce
199 pages - Dover Publications
The introduction to this book, written by E. F. Bleiler, paints a portrait of Bierce as a very unpleasant man, full of anger, hatred, misanthropy, and devoid of much sense. In fact, the introduction is so negative that I put this book away for a while before getting into the stories, as it didn't sound like it would really have much value. However, when I did finally end up reading it, I was pleasantly surprised at how good many of the stories were: well-written, imaginative, deep, and affecting.
Many of these stories take place in the American west, which is a fresh change from the usual ghost story trappings of England or New England. Also very refreshing is Bierce's spare, direct prose; most of these stories are 10 pages long or less, but that space is used very effectively, as Bierce can create a world and set it alive with movement in a single eloquent paragraph. There is also a depth that is sometimes explored in these stories, of metaphysical speculation, emotional feeling, moral values, that makes it ridiculous to think that the author was only the arrogant rude jerk of the introduction - there had to be another side.
"An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" is probably the most famous story here. Among those I really enjoyed were "Moxon's Master", which is about the creation of a chess-playing automaton that takes on a life of its own, "Beyond the Wall", an eerie ghost story set in shabby decay, "The Suitable Surroundings", about a dare to read a horror story in the most appropriate setting, "John Bartine's Watch", a one-trick story with a pretty good trick, and "An Inhabitant of Carcosa", which is a very otherworldly tale of an ancient spirit walking through a graveyard. Also included are what seem to be 'factual' items from Bierce's newspaper reporting, such as sections entitled "Some Haunted Houses" and "Mysterious Disappearances" - ironic, because Bierce eventually Mysteriously Disappeared himself.
There's a few stories here that are maybe a bit overwritten, and try a bit too hard for a clever laugh, but mostly they are lean and mean tales that explore various states of dread. In a way, this struck me as the sort of thing that H. P. Lovecraft wished he could have written if he had been a more discerning and vicious self-editor. Powerful stuff.
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I Never Liked You: A Comic-Strip Narrative (1993)
by Chester Brown
185 pages - Drawn and Quarterly
A sparsely illustrated work that relates some episodes from Chester Brown's youth. A lot of it deals with the uncertainties and insecurities of growing up. At school, kids pick on him, and try to get him to swear. Some girls at school seem to like him, but he's not sure what to do, and sometimes finds it easier to not take a chance and just close himself off. His distant relationship with his parents worsens when his mom goes into the hospital with mental problems.
The drawings are fairly basic, and there's actually more blank paper than illustrated space, but it's effective in sketching out small episodes over time, and even the quiet moments like watching nonsense on TV, or thinking about throwing yourself into passing traffic. I read Brown's Louis Riel some time ago, and I think I didn't really like it (though I don't remember why), but this was quite effective, and a quick read too.
edited to add: I woke up really early this morning and read this quickly. I find I've been thinking about it all day, and it's had a really strong effect on me, so I'm elevating my evaluation of it. It's great.
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Inside (2006)
by Kenneth J. Harvey
282 pages - Random House
After fourteen years in prison for murder, the protagonist Myrden is freed because of new DNA testing done on a crucial piece of evidence, and he returns to his old neighbourhood in St. John's, Newfoundland. It's a neighbourhood stuck in poverty, alcoholism, and violence, and his wife has been living with another man, and his entire life has been wrapped in trouble: his father murdered his mother, and most of Myrden's children have been in trouble with the law, some already dead. But also, because of being incarcerated so long, he is guaranteed a big payout by the government, a benefit that Myrden as a hard time appreciating.
This book. It's written in a style. That's very abrupt. With lots of short sentences. Very. Short. You get used to it. It actually works. Still feels weird, though.
There's a lot to like about this book: emotional intensity, honesty, a realism that doesn't become outrageously gritty. I think the author makes a brilliant decision in that Myrden's situation is simply that the evidence that convicted him has been invalidated; he's not actually innocent, even the truth that he tells himself is that he probably didn't kill the girl, though he was too drunk to remember anything that happened that night, and it was either him or about three other people that were with him that night that did it. I also like how, though the characters are mostly stuck in squalid lives, they're not stereotypically ignorant: they have artistic talents that they've developed to some degree (even though their environment usually encourages them to keep these under wraps), they're aware of the better parts of town and how people live there.
I suppose there's things you can nitpick about the book, perhaps occasionally sliding into dramatic cliches (the bar-brawl where the 'good' person beats the 'bad' people to a pulp, the kind-hearted mentally handicapped character who is misunderstood by the world around him), but when is that not the case? It's a really intense read that had me absorbed, and really affected me as the story developed, and I think that's the main thing.
( quote )
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A School for Fools (1976)
by Sasha Sokolov, translated by Carl R. Proffer
228 pages - Ardis
'It would appear to me that we have some sort of misunderstanding and confusion about it, about time, not everything is what it should be. Our calendars are too arbitrary: the numbers that are written there do not signify anything and are not guaranteed by anything, like counterfeit money. For example, why is it customary to think that the second of January comes right after the first, and not the twenty-eighth right away? And in general can days follow each other, that's some sort of poetic nonsense--a line of days. There is no line, the days come whenever one of them feels like it, and sometimes several come at once.' (pg.33)
Sasha Sokolov is actually a Canadian citizen, as he was born here during WWII, while his father was assigned to the embassy in Ottawa. He was raised in the Soviet Union, but repeatedly clashed with the order of things and was eventually allowed to leave. This was his first published work, and the one to achieve the most success; his later books are deemed to be untranslatable. According to Wikipedia (a dubious source at the best of times), Sokolov continues writing to this day, but does not wish to be published.
A School for Fools is narrated by a character that is mentally unbalanced and attends a school for the disabled, and whose narrative voice is actually at least two voices having an argument with each other. Much of the book consists of descriptions of the community of summer residences where the boy spends his time, and the story also focuses on several characters at the school, in the town and in the family. The prose style is the real highlight of the book, as it's told in a sort of poetic, stream-of-consciousness flow which constantly displaces the flow of time, and would probably defy rigorous logical analysis, but it works wonderfully well, even in translation.
There were times that I was reading this when I felt like this might be the greatest book I ever read. It does kind of plateau in the middle, and doesn't throw off fireworks constantly, like it does in the opening and closing chapters, but it is still such an amazing book. There's probably more of a story than I gathered at first reading, as much of the time I didn't try to puzzle out all the concrete details, and just flowed along with the words. For all the strangeness and unconventionality of the style, I don't think there's anything 'experimental' about it, that would associate it with post-modernists or the avant-garde; the form suits the content, and that's all there is to it.
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Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema (1986)
by Andrey Tarkovsky, translated by Kitty Hunter-Blair
256 pages - University of Texas Press
 Andrey Tarkovsky was a Russian filmmaker who worked in the second half of the twentieth century, and is widely regarded as one of the greatest directors in the history of world cinema. He battled with Soviet censors and bureaucracy to get his films made, and died young of cancer, so that he only completed seven feature-length films: Ivan's Childhood, Andrey Rublev, Solaris, The Mirror, Stalker, Nostalghia, and The Sacrifice - the last two made in Western Europe as an exile. Tarkvosky's films are notable for their long, meditative takes, minimal dramatic narrative, and preoccupation with philosophic, artistic, and religious themes. He worked on this book for several years and the last chapter was dictated a few weeks before his death. This isn't just a book about film-making, but about art, and life in general. There is a long middle section that deals with various issues specific to cinema, but overall Tarkovsky talks more generally about his vision of the world and the meaning and necessity of art, love, and faith. It can be a dense read, and I don't agree with everything he says, but reading it is a very deep experience in which you get very close to someone who entirely bares his soul in his quest to find kindred spirits, and to provide the 'experience of art' to others, because he believes it is in our contemplation of masterpieces of art that we begin to discover the existence and depths of our own soul, the potential of our lives, and the possibility of choosing goodness. Also included are many black-and-white stills from his films, and some of the poems of his father, Arseniy, which have been featured in the films. It's hard to imagine a stranger character emerging from the oppressive and restrictive Soviet cultural apparatus. Though Tarkovsky was concerned most of all with the oppressiveness of materialism, the religious experience, and the necessity of turning to God, he had to work under a system that explicitly suppressed religion and even demanded that he scratch out the word 'God' in many of his scripts. I think that, apart from the intrinsic value of his work, which is immense, Tarkovsky, in his pioneering work in expanding cinematic language, serves as an excellent model for the religious-minded artist in the modern age. His work does not wallow in sentimentality or provide simple-minded historical or moral lessons, and more importantly he is very much of his times, fully embracing the present, in a world in which religious passion and idealization of the past are often horribly confused. 'I see it as my duty to stimulate reflection on what is essentially human and eternal in each individual soul, and which all too often a person will pass by, even though his fate lies in his hands. He is too busy chasing after phantoms and bowing down to idols. In the end everything can be reduced to the one simple element which is all a person can count upon in his existence: the capacity to love. That element can grow within the soul to become the supreme factor which determines the meaning of a person's life. My function is to make whoever sees my films aware of his need to love and to give his love, and aware that beauty is summoning him.' (pg.200)
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Darkness at Noon (1940)
by Arthur Koestler, translated by Daphne Hardy
211 pages - Penguin
This short and intense novel is concerned with Rubashov, an old hero of the Communist Revolution in Russia who has fallen into the disfavour of No.1 (the unnamed Josef Stalin), and is thrown into prison again. Along with most of the leaders of the original revolution, who are being pushed aside and/or 'liquidated', he has already experienced midnight arrests, questionings, and signed statements admitting to trumped-up charges that meant death for his former friends and lovers. But this time it is unlikely he will escape execution. The novel follows his life in prison, his memories of the past, as well as his inner thoughts and feelings.
Koestler was a communist in his youth, but after seeing evidence of the theory in action he became a vocal opponent of its dangers. Rubashov, though he disagrees with the current administration, always remains dedicated to the party and its theories, and wracks his brain creating logical justifications and scientific theories that would make sense of the brutality he witnesses and is subject to, and starts to find patterns in history with which he convinces himself that it's right that he join in with his jailers to proclaim lies as truth. Occasionally he feels little promptings and impulses from what he calls 'the grammatical fiction', the conscience or the soul or the 'I', something which doesn't enter into the party's scientific theories of world history.
This novel has somewhat of a narrow focus and limited scope, but it examines its selected area thoroughly. The fleeting moments of contact between prisoners held in solitary confinement, tapping out a code through the walls, are gripping. I suppose Communism is an excellent example of the horror that can occur when anyone tries to think ideas through to the end, to create plans and ideals in the mind, and then implement them in reality no matter what. Life isn't a medium strictly for thought, and anyone who closes themselves off into only science and logic and facts and theories amputates their own life.
This would be a good companion to Camus's The Rebel.
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