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FRIDAY: My Book World | Albert Camus's The Plague
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FRIDAY: My Book World | Albert Camus's The Plague
Actually, I am going nowhere for two weeks. Just taking it easy on a little staycation (all we need after 14 months, right). Hopefully, next autumn? Before I sign off, however, I would like to share two bits of good news.
First, my memoir, That I Do Not Lose You: One's Man's Family Roots, recently earned one of six finalist positions for the William Faulkner - William Wisdom award in nonfiction for 2020. It is sponsored by the Pirates Alley Faulkner Society of New Orleans. I'm hoping this award will help me to place the manuscript with a publisher some time in the near future. Wish me well! Next, as an amateur photographer, I like to enter photos in exhibitions. Recently two were accepted for one called Monuments of the World - 11 X 14 Works on Paper, sponsored by the Office of International Affairs at Texas Tech University. Up until mid-July, 2021, the show can be viewed in the spacious gallery found at the International Cultural Center. M-F, 8-5. If you wish to take a look at a handsome virtual tour, click here to view digital versions of monuments found around the world. NEXT POST: June 16, 2021 | Hope to see you then.
My Book World Groom, Winston. A Storm in Flanders. The Ypres Salient, 1914-1918: Tragedy and Triumph on the Western Front. New York: Grove, 2002.
The author of Forrest Gump changes his hat to historian here. In 276 pages he does a superb job of summarizing this one battle of World War I. In some ways the war is a family squabble: “England’s George V, Russia’s Nicholas II, and Germany’s William II were all cousins, either directly or through marriage, descendants of England’s Queen Victoria” (6). Mostly, Groom documents the wastage: the millions of soldiers’ lives lost on all sides, the Brits, the Belgians, the French, and the Germans. (Not to mention civilians, the Canadians, and others who aid the Allies.) The huge “puddles” caused by shelling and excessive rain. The Christmas where all fighting stops and soldiers from both sides “celebrate” together. (What? you ask.) The lack of quality leadership on all sides. One failure passes off his work to another failure of leadership. And the only people who suffer are the men in the ranks and civilians. I don’t know about the Triumph Groom references in his title (except that the Allies “win”), but there is certainly a lot of Tragedy. Millions of people of one generation are never able to see their lives come to fruition, mostly because of the hubris of a few men. NEXT BLOG: Tuesday, June 15, 2021
TOMORROW: My Book World | Winston Groom's A Storm in Flanders
FRIDAY: My Book World | Winston Groom's A Storm in Flanders
FRIDAY: My Book World | Winston Groom's A Storm in Flanders
My Book World Flores, Dan. The Horizontal Yellow: Nature and History in the Near Southwest. Albuquerque: U of NM Press.
First of all, I love that Flores takes possession of this subject right away with the term, “Near Southwest”—a region stretching from eastern Louisiana and including all of Texas and New Mexico. I come over twenty years late to reading this elegantly scripted book about the area’s ecology, but the ideas he expresses here seem to gain urgency as time passes. Flores alternates sections of family history (French and Spanish) and other histories with first-hand accounts of living, say, on the Llano Estacado, as well as poetic and lyrical sections of fiction to bring alive said histories. Flores is always on the move. After advanced schooling at Texas A&M, he explores, to mention a few places, the Chihuahuan desert, the Southern Plains of Texas (Llano Estacado or Steaked Plains), Abiquiu, New Mexico—finally lighting in Montana. But the Horizontal Yellow of which he speaks is the once real, now metaphorical, wave of yellowing grasses that cover what locals call, with a certain inelegance, the South Plains. It is where he builds a primitive place to live in Yellow House Canyon, about thirty minutes from where he teaches at the local university. It is where he lives with two wolf-dog hybrids as their alpha male (a role he doesn’t particularly relish; it’s the critters’ idea). It is a place remaining in his heart as he makes his home up north, where he can establish and retain a closeness to nature that the Texas South Plains has mostly expunged from its existence. His is an admired life but one I’m not sure I could pursue myself. I adore my life in town—Internet, TV, central heat and air—a bit too much. NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Winston Groom's A Storm in Flanders
TOMORROW: My Book World | Dan Flores's The Horizontal Yellow
FRIDAY: My Book World | Dan Flores's The Horizontal Yellow
FRIDAY: My Book World | Dan Flores's The Horizontal Yellow
My Book World Akhtar, Ayad. Homeland Elegies: A Novel. New York: Little, Brown, 2020.
This is one of the most enjoyable and yet profound contemporary novels I have read in a long time. I had to keep reminding myself that it was indeed a novel, so interwoven is the plot with events we’ve all lived through in the last twenty years. The protagonist’s parents, both physicians, move from Pakistan to Staten Island in the early 1960s. When he is still young, the family relocates in Wisconsin. Throughout, readers get a feel for what it is like to live in America if you are not white-skinned, if you speak with an accent, or in any way attempt to retain religious or cultural customs from your former country. Not pleasant, to say the least. At one point the car of the protagonist (by now a renowned playwright) breaks down in Scranton, PA. He is directed by a kindly highway patrolman (ah, good) to a mechanic who turns out to be related to the patrolman (uh oh). He is quoted a particular price for one problem, but when he picks up his car, he ascertains there is a second problem he’s not been informed about and is charged almost three times the original quote. He must phone his bank and make arrangements to raise his credit card level (and interest rate) to cover the cost. The white-skinned reader must take note. This part is NOT fiction; this sort of explicit bias happens every day to dark-skinned, “other” people in America. People who work hard, people who pay their taxes, people who try hard to color inside the lines but somehow come up short in the eyes of so-called natives (whose ancestors were immigrants). The novel is really about how this man and his father handle their American lives differently: one an elegy for Pakistan and one for the USA. It is worth every minute of the reader’s time to live vicariously through these brave souls who come to American to build a better life. Theirs are true profiles in courage. NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Dan Flores's The Horizontal Yellow
TOMORROW: My Book World | Ayad Akhtar's Homeland Elegies
FRIDAY: My Book World | Ayad Akhtar's Homeland Elegies
FRIDAY: My Book World | Ayad Akhtar's Homeland Elegies
My Book World Ellmann, Richard. Oscar Wilde. New York: Knopf, 1988.
This book of exhaustive research concerning Wilde’s life is a pleasure to read from his family history to his imprisonment years later and his resulting exile in France. Prior to reading this book, I had always had the impression that Oscar Wilde’s life (except for prison) was one wild ride (pardon the pun). And in some ways it was. He, even after experiencing financial success, was always in want of money, primarily because he was such a spendthrift, spending or giving away money he honestly didn’t have. He cared not about what people thought of his extravagant ideas, his extravagant living. Yet Wilde faced great public disapproval of how he lived his life. His only friends were other homosexual men or those liberal enough to accept him. His downfall came in the package of one man, Lord Alfred Douglas, a much younger man, an aristocrat who both loved and used Wilde. If Wilde had never met him, he might have met his match with some other party, but I doubt it. The latter part of Wilde’s sad life was battling Douglas’s father in court. Lord Percy Douglas, Marquess of Queensberry, managed to have Wilde sent to prison for two years because he didn’t want Wilde near his son. Wilde did his prison time, and it broke him, both physically and emotionally. He never wrote anything substantial again, was always begging others for money, and suffered physical ailments that eventually brought on his premature death at forty-six. Ellmann’s distinguished book, more than thirty years old now, does great justice to the life of an extraordinary writer who lived, until he could no longer bear the speed of light, entirely ahead of his time. NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Ayad Akhtar's Homeland Elegies
TOMORROW: My Book World | Richard Ellmann's Oscar Wilde
FRIDAY: My Book World | Richard Ellmann's Oscar Wilde
FRIDAY: My Book World | Richard Ellmann's Oscar Wilde
My Book World Kawabata, Yasunari. The Master of Go. Translated by Edward G. Seidensticker. New York: Vintage, 1972 (1951).
Western readers should probably read more eastern literature, myself included; it would give us a broader view of the world. Wikipedia defines the game of Go in this manner: “Go is an abstract strategy board game for two players in which the aim is to surround more territory than the opponent. The game was invented in China more than 2,500 years ago and is believed to be the oldest board game continuously played to the present day.” In this book (hybrid of novel and nonfiction), the game has moved to Japan. For Kawabata the game of Go provides a wonderful extended metaphor for one man’s life. Shusai, Master of Go, spends time toward the end of his life in battle with a player named Otaké, a fine player but hypochondrial man. The game moves from venue to venue, where players may take hours to decide a play, where weeks may pass before the continuation of the game. There are end notes that help to explain the game. A brief but head-spinning read. NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Richard Ellmann's Oscar Wilde
TOMORROW: My Book World | Y. Kawabata's The Master of Go
FRIDAY: My Book World | Yasunari Kawabata's The Master of Go
FRIDAY: My Book World | Yasunari Kawabata's The Master of Go
My Book World Sillitoe, Alan. The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner. New York: Penguin, 1992 (1959).
I enjoyed this mid-century collection of stories by British writer, Alan Sillitoe, because each male protagonist is a bit different, sometimes very different, from the leading bloke in one of the other eight narratives. Whether it is the sarcasm of the famed title character or one who wonders why his ex-wife has pawned a painting he thought she wanted back for sentimental reasons or the quizzical nature of a young man who narrates Eddie Buller’s sad story, each character is honed from Sillitoe’s astute observations of human nature. NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Yasunari Kawabata's The Master of Go.
TOMORROW: My Book World | Alan Sillitoe's The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner
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AUTHOR
Richard Jespers is a writer living in Lubbock, Texas, USA. See my profile at Author Central:
http://amazon.com/author/rjespers Archives
May 2021
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