#93.....The Magus

My husband loves psychological thrillers. One of his repeat Christmas gift requests is the Saw box set. The Saw movies come from the Silence of the Lambs genre, and usually depict people that are given a choice between a gruesome, horrible death, and….well….an alternative gruesome, horrible death. “I love that they mess with my head,” he said, when I asked him what the appeal of watching people dig through boxes of razor blades with bare hands was. Suffice it to say the appeal of these movies is completely lost on me, which is why we do not currently own any of them.

Subsequently, the appeal of John Fowles’ 656 page epic The Magus, was also lost on me. Mind games abound in the story of Nicholas Urfe, a middle-class Englishman who ditches his non-committal girlfriend Alison and signs on to teach school on the remote Greek island of Phraxos. That’s apparently not all he’s signed up for. Nosing around on the island, he has the misfortune to meet Conchis, a rich and psychic recluse. Strange things happen whenever Nicholas spends the weekend at Conchis’ house. Conchis tells stories that are ostensibly about his own life, and then portions of the stories are brought to life by the people that live and work for him. Unlike the rest of us, who would run like hell if we saw someone walking around wearing a jackal head, something keeps pulling Nicholas back to Conchis’ house. One of those somethings is the elusive and beautiful Julie, one of Conchis’ friends and the biggest tease of them all. As the story progresses, the lines between fact and fiction become blurrier and blurrier, and Nicholas becomes lost in the bizarre world Conchis has created for him. Does he ever escape? How will this experience change his life?

Honestly? I was pretty much done by page fifty. I sat through Conchis' meandering 20-page stories, only to find out five pages later that they're all lies, and then five more pages later, find out that even the lies are lies. Ad nauseum. By the end of the book I no longer knew who the bad guys were, or who the good guys were, or if there were any good guys, for that matter. Who do you root for when everyone is screwed up? It turns out by the end of the book that Conchis has woven this surrealistic world specifically for Nicholas to teach him a lesson about the kind of person he is, and everyone in Nicholas’ life has been in on the game BUT Nicholas. I couldn’t help feeling a certain kind of pity for him by the end…but then again, he was kind of a dirtbag. I know a couple of guys from my high school days who would be GREAT candidates to go through this, if Conchis is still out there and needs new people :)

So in the end? Not my thing. Kind of like the Saw movies, but without the razor blades. It didn't work well for me as a novel, but it works awesome as a doorstop in the house on a windy day.

Grade: D-

#94....Wide Sargasso Sea

"Coming from the Antilles’, he declared, ‘with a terrifying insight and … passion for stating the case of the underdog, she has let her pen loose on the Left Banks of the Old World”. Ford Madox Ford, describing the writing of Jean Rhys.

Jean Rhys certainly knew her subject when she wrote about Bertha Mason, the tormented ‘madwoman in the attic’ of Bronte’s Jane Eyre in her novel, Wide Sargasso Sea. Born on the island of Dominica, daughter of an English doctor and a Dominican mother, Rhys was also a child of mixed blood who was treated as an outsider in England, where she went to live with her aunt, because of her accent and mannerisms. Bertha Mason, introduced to us as Antoinette, is also a child of mixed blood who is treated as an outsider on the island of Jamaica, where she lives. Mixed blood is considered to be of lower status than black or white in the island’s society. Her mother Annette marries a wealthy Englishman but goes crazy when her house is burned to the ground and one of her children dies. After Annette’s death, Mr Mason takes care of Antoinette, sending her to school and to live with her Aunt Cora. Antoinette’s marriage is arranged to a man who is never named, but is assumed to be Mr Rochester of Jane Eyre. Her checkered past follows her to the island of Dominica, where a distant relative begins to fill Mr Rochester’s head with poisonous thoughts about his new wife and her family, intimating Antoinette could go the same way as her mother. Because Mr Rochester cannot be persuaded to think otherwise, the self-fulfilling prophecy becomes true.

Like any underdog story, the story of Antoinette’s turbulent childhood and the self-fulfilling prophecy of her madness is compelling and tragic. Rhys portrays the racial discrimination and isolation Antoinette experiences with great poignancy, having endured it herself to some degree in her own childhood. The stubborn blindness of Mr Rochester, who married for money and not love and who crushes his wife’s spirit by changing her name into something as ugly as Bertha, is infuriating. You will want to crawl into the pages of this book and beat him.

I haven't read Jane Eyre (believe it or not) and so I came to the end of this book wondering if I missed some subtle nuances in this story because of that; but as a stand-alone story I thought it was very well-written. You would have to have a heart of stone not to root for and sympathize with Annette’s plight.

Grade: B+

#95....Under the Net

"Events stream past us like these crowds and the face of each is seen only for a minute. What is urgent is not urgent for ever but only ephemerally. All work and all love, the search for wealth and fame, the search for truth, like itself, are made up of moments which pass and become nothing."

Iris Murdoch’s 1954 novel, Under the Net, has been described as an example of the ‘picaresque’ novel, which Wikipedia terms as “an episodic recounting of the adventures of an anti-hero on the road”. There is no better one-sentence summary of Under the Net and its roguish ‘anti-hero’, Jake Donaghue, out there. Jake, a thirty-something, self-obsessed, angst-ridden slacker who spends his time translating cheesy French novels and mooching off his friends, is kicked out of his house by his ex-girlfriend. Having no real source of income and lots of free time, Jake decides to hunt down another ex-girlfriend for a place to stay, and it is there that the long-winded and pointless escapades of an uninteresting, unemployed single guy begin. Fiances of old girlfriends, horse racing, dog-stealing, binge drinking and skinny dipping abound in spades, as Jake flounders around London trying to find himself, or a place to stay, whichever comes first.

One thing I noticed (and disliked) about this novel was the amount of time Murdoch spent in Jake’s head. The book was essentially written like one long stream-of-consciousness, like Jake’s brain with closed-captioning. In keeping with the Existentialist tradition, of which Murdoch was a proponent, she gets into the minutiae of Jake's life in order to more clearly define him....what he thinks about people, what he thinks they think about him, why he's going to do something, what might happen if he does it, what he thinks people will do when he does this....ad nauseum. It was ‘too much information’ for me, personally. I wasn’t sure if I didn’t like Jake’s character because I knew everything he was thinking, or if he just wasn’t all that interesting. Probably a bit of both. Hugo, the one character I would have liked to know more about, and someone Jake found so interesting that he wrote an entire book on his philosophy of life, would have made a much more fascinating main character, but alas, Murdoch chose to go with Everyman instead. Lucky us.

I’ve read several other reviews from people who loved this book and its irreverant style. I hate coming to the end of books feeling like I missed something, but I just didn’t find it with this one, and I blame myself.

Grade: C-

#96...Sophie's Choice

"Is it best to know about a child's death, even one so horrible, or to know that the child lives but that you will never, never see him again? I don't know either for sure. Suppose I had chosen Jan to go...to go to the left instead of Eva. Would that have changed anything?" She paused to look out through the night at the dark shores of the Virginia of our destination, removed by staggering dimensions of time and space from her own benighted, cursed and--to me even at that moment--all but incomprehensible history. "Nothing would have changed anything," she said."

For two weeks after the attacks on September 11, 2001, I was unable to sleep with the lights off. I lay curled in my bed every night, with the horrifying and grotesque images we were constantly being shown on TV scrolling through my head like the CNN crawl. I was firmly, irrationally convinced that the terrorists would show up any minute in my tiny little town of Chico, California, and take over. Watching the unimaginable happen that week--airplanes slamming into buildings, buildings I had visited as a child collapsing--anything seemed possible. The terrorists had not only invaded New York, they had invaded my head.

When people talk about the Holocaust, most people point to the horrifying number of people killed in the concentration camps over a 5-6 year period. What many people don't focus on is how many walked away from that. Barrington James estimates that 6.5 million Jews survived the Holocaust. Imagine what the survivors of the most atrocious violation of human rights ever in our history must have witnessed while in captivity...and then imagine not only trying to live with those images in your head night after night, but also trying to live with the guilt of being one of the 'lucky ones' when so many others died. It makes my television experience of 9/11 look painless by comparison.

William Styron’s fifth novel, Sophie’s Choice, published in 1979, is a very deep and intense story that takes readers into the heart of the Holocaust, told from the viewpoint of one who endured and escaped its persecutions, and her attempts to live with what she experienced. Stingo, the book's main character, is a dislocated Southerner and embittered wanna-be author, who befriends Sophie, a Polish emigrant, and her paranoid schizophrenic Jewish boyfriend Nathan, in a Brooklyn boardinghouse. Sophie and Nathan’s relationship is tormented and passionate, and it is in between their arguments that Sophie opens up to Stingo about her experiences of the Holocaust from her life in Poland, leading up to the terrible choice she is forced to make on the platform at Auschwitz. The struggle of Sophie and Nathan to deal with their pasts and their own personal demons is heart-rending and uncomfortably fascinating. Kind of like a car crash; you don’t want to see it, but you can’t look away.

It is Styron’s treatment of memory and how the characters chose to remember events that happened in their lives that touched me the most during the course of the novel. When Sophie would tell a story to Stingo, she would begin with the glossed-over, more palatable version, but then later would tell the true, much more painful version. The lies the characters were telling to themselves to escape the guilt and sadness they had experienced, while understandable, were heartbreaking. I was not sure at times that Sophie was lucky to have escaped with her life. Is it harder to live with the memories of something awful, or to be dead? That is the question Styron asks.

In the end, Styron shows us that the dead of the concentration camps were not the only victims of the Holocaust. Those who lived through its horrors like Sophie, and those who stood passively by, like Nathan, were just as deeply affected. The true horror of the Holocaust is and always will be that it was allowed to happen at all. Thanks to the experiences and images of the Holocaust, horrible events in our modern times like the genocide in Bosnia and 9/11 no longer go unchecked and ignored. Sophie’s Choice is a fantastically deep and moving novel I hope you will enjoy as much as I did.

Grade: A

Libris Interruptus...Bedside Table Confessional

Taking a break from the lighthearted fiction I've been reading lately :)

I woke up this morning and realized that, in addition to Sophie's Choice, I have three other books stacked up on my nightstand, all of which I am about halfway through reading. Wondering if maybe I should seek some help. :) Here is what I currently have stacked up:
Julia Child, My Life in France
Philippa Gregory, The White Queen
George Washington's Mount Vernon (don't ask! :)
Anyone else out there incapable of reading one book at a time? Share with us what you're in the middle of. We should support each other!

#97....The Sheltering Sky

“And it occurred to him that a walk through the countryside was a sort of epitome of the passage through life itself. One never took the time to savor the details; one said: another day, but always with the hidden knowledge that each day was unique and final, that there never would be a return, another time.”

The Sheltering Sky was Paul Bowles’ first novel, and his most famous. Seeing as Bowles spent the majority of his life as an American expatriate living in Tangiers, Morocco, there’s no one better equipped to write about the experiences of clueless American tourists in the wilds of Northern Africa. And that is the basic premise of Sky: an American couple, Port and Kit Moresby, and their friend Tunner have decided to do some traveling in and around this area of Africa, despite travel warnings in this area which Port knows about but neglects to mention to his wife or friend. Port is already unfaithful to his wife within the first six chapters, and Kit’s pretended or real nonchalance sets up the dynamic that is to continue between the couple. As the group travels deeper into Africa, they get further from civilization as they know it, and that’s when things get interesting. The experience of what was to be a fun foreign sojourn changes three lives forever.

When Sky was first shown to Doubleday Publishing in 1949, it was rejected because it was not felt that the book was really a novel. It’s not hard to see why Doubleday might have felt this way. It reads somewhat like a travelogue of Northern Africa, and may have been thought to be more autobiographical than fictional. The descriptive language Bowles uses is pure and beautiful. Bowles obviously gives his setting great importance and wants the reader to see where they are. You can feel the flies as Port drives the jeep through the swarm. You can smell the garbage laying around the hotel in Ain Krorfa. Having never been to Africa, I needed Bowles' help to imagine what it would be like, and he definitely came through for me.

Against this rich backdrop are the morally questionable characters of Port, Kit and Tunner. Interestingly, Bowles keeps them at an emotional distance from the reader by pointing out their myriad faults early and often, emphasizing lies, infidelity and insecurity. I never felt truly sympathetic to anyone except maybe Tunner, who is the quintessential third wheel and keeps getting the shaft. What made this book fascinating for me was how each character reacts to the diminishment of civilization in their environment. Tunner freaks out about weevils in their soup, yet Port and Kit unhesitatingly finish their entire bowls of soup despite this. Kit’s desperation and helplessness in the middle of nowhere, far from medical care when Port becomes sick, is palpable. How well would any of us hold up in this same situation? How much does it take for someone to be pushed across the line between sanity and insanity?

The last third of the book was, for me, where the momentum really picked up. Finally, I cared about one of the characters, yet still in a limited way. I wanted to know what would happen to Kit and if she would make it out of the wild. Not all of the book was coherent or readable (the section describing Port’s typhoid delirium is a good example), but the overall message of living every day in the present because there may not be a tomorrow is profound and sobering. It didn’t make me want to go on a trip to Tangiers any time soon, but thanks to Paul Bowles' beautifully descriptive prose, I was able to visit it in my imagination just as if I had been there.

Grade: B-

#98....The Postman Always Rings Twice

"I'm not what you think I am, Frank. I want to work and be something, that's all. But you can't do it without love. Do you know that, Frank? Anyway, a woman can't. Well, I've made one mistake. And I've got to be a hell cat, just once, to fix it. But I'm not really a hell cat, Frank."

James M. Cain, author of The Postman Always Rings Twice, refused to be locked in to his reputation as a member of the “hard boiled school of crime fiction”, commenting "I belong to no school, hard-boiled or otherwise". In fact, Cain had wanted to be an opera singer, but didn’t have the voice for it. As a journalist for the Baltimore Sun and the New York World in the 1920’s, Cain was probably exposed to sensationalist stories similar to the story he tells in Postman, which is reputed to have been based on a real life case. Drifter Frank Chambers is the wrong man in the wrong place, when he walks into a small café in the middle of nowhere and collides with Cora Papadakis, the wife of the café’s owner. Frank takes a job there and sparks fly between them, and Cora decides the only way out of her loveless marriage is for the two of them to kill her husband Nick. Nearly caught on the first attempt, the second attempt is successful, but brings more consequences than either Frank or Cora imagined.

Cain’s main characters were “often self-destructive, or used by stronger women.” Postman is no exception to this. Although Frank has a rough edge to his character, Cora is truly the ‘hell cat’ she describes herself as. Their affair is passionate, anything but tender, and unfortunately Nick’s death does not bring them the happiness they seek. Both toy with the idea of killing each other and Cora even gives Frank a chance to do this. Accountability for crimes is a dish best served hot.

As I’m sure millions of other readers have done, I looked throughout the book for any mention of a postman ringing twice, or even once, and came up with nothing. I found this quote to explain the title’s origin on Wikipedia:

"With the "postman" being God, or Fate, the "delivery" meant for Frank was his own death as just retribution for murdering Nick. Frank had missed the first "ring" when he initially got away with that killing. However, the postman rang again, and this time the ring was heard."

The book was rather short and the story pretty straightforward. Like with any murder mystery, it was very suspenseful and I do believe everyone got what was coming to them in the end. Not high in the profundity department but enjoyable nonetheless. Anyone from the John Grisham school will be happy.


GRADE: C+