Blog - www.richardjespers.com

Fire Is a 'Hazzard'

10/8/2021

A WRITER'S WIT
The healthy and strong individual is the one who asks for help when he needs it. Whether he's got an abscess on his knee or in his soul.
Rona Barrett
Author of Miss Rona: An Autobiography
Born October 8, 1936

R. Barrett

My Book World

Hazzard, Shirley. The Great Fire. New York: Farrar, 2003.

This novel takes place all over the globe, it seems, in the period following World War II. When one first encounters the word “fire,” one believes that the book may be about a single fire. The next false signal is near the end of Part One in which, in a flashback to 1942, one witnesses a plane crash: “There was an explosion after the crash, then a great fire that, despite the rains, smouldered on overnight. The villagers struggled up in the wet, but explosions kept them off” (52). Mere foreshadowing. The main character, Aldred Leith, recalls, as a youth, visiting a monument to WWI in London, one of over 300 steps: “The monument to the Great Fire” (91). Leith, in his thirties, falls in love with a girl of seventeen and eventually marries her, but even that relationship of love cannot save him from the author’s great fire, the war through which he has just lived:

“Even to her, he would not say outright that he was thinking of death: of the many who had died in their youth, under his eyes; of those he had killed, of whom he’d known nothing. On the red battlefield, where I’ll never go again; in the inextinguishable conflagration” (278).

Any war is comprised of fire, from fireball to friendly fire, but Hazzard transforms war from an abstraction into one single, eternal event, as she says, a conflagration.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | TBD

Kerouac: Underground Author

10/1/2021

A WRITER'S WIT
Sometimes we need pure relief. Sometimes we need pure escapism. Sometimes we need major reflection on some aspects of our collective unconscious.
Marielle Heller, Director
Can You Ever Forgive Me?
Born October 1, 1979

M. Heller

My Book World

Amburn, Ellis. Subterranean Kerouac: The Hidden Life of Jack Kerouac. New York: St. Martin’s, 1998.

I got what I deserved for reading this book: perpetual arousal. My God, maybe one of the most sex-laden books of literary biography I’ve ever read: all about one man and his friends and lovers. According to Amburn, Kerouac keeps a sex list of not only his partners but how many times they engage. It amounts to a sexual track meet of stupendous proportions (if self-reporting is accurate): sex with men, sex with women. Maybe the man had a third testicle? Enough of that.

Because Amburn turns out to be Kerouac’s final editor, a young man attempting to make his mark in publishing, he stands to have one of the most tolerant and understanding viewpoints of the controversial author of On the Road and at least a dozen other novels. Like a number of important American authors before him, Kerouac is ahead of his time, ahead of what critics are capable of understanding. Like many writers, he must scramble for money nearly his entire life, never experiencing the adulation that is to come after his premature death, when he dies at forty-seven of alcoholism. But if anything, he remains a hero of young writers of all ages, writers who are willing to put everything on the line, to write novels the way they want to, not kowtowing to editors, publishers, or even the public. For that, yes, he is a true hero.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Shirley Hazzard's The Great Fire

Fond but Sad Farewell

9/24/2021

A WRITER'S WIT
The world is a tragedy to those who feel, but a comedy to those who think.
Horace Walpole
Author of The Mysterious Mother: A Tragedy
Born September 24, 1717

H. Walpole

My Book World

García, Rodrigo. A Farewell to Gabo and Mercedes: A Son’s Memoir of Gabriel García Márquez. New York: HarperVia, 2021.

The son of Gabriel García Márquez writes a brief but compelling remembrance of his famous father and formidable mother. Each of the five parts begins with a brief epigraph from one of Márquez’s works. North American culture has so much to learn from our friends in South America whose profound sense of family—in spite of its many complexities—outshines our own. I found myself envying the relationship that Rodrigo has with his parents, his brother, his own children and his nieces and nephews, aunts and uncles, grandparents long gone but whose influence seems eternal—no wonder Márquez could write a book as profound as One Hundred Years of Solitude. He needed only comb his own ancestry for his complete cast of characters. I envision myself reading this book again and again.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Amburn Ellis's Subterranean Kerouac.

A Magical Doorman

9/17/2021

A WRITER'S WIT
Time is a storm in which we are all lost.
William Carlos Williams
Author of Paterson
Born September 17, 1883

W. C. Williams

My Book World

Arenas, Reinaldo. The Doorman. Translated by Dolores M. Koch. New York: Grove, 1991 (1987).

The more I read of Arenas’s work the more I am charmed by a skilled writer’s use of magical realism. In this instance, Juan, a young Cuban immigrant is hired as doorman by a fairly exclusive residential hotel in New York City. He does his very best to learn the names of all the occupants and their quirks and preferences. He fetches and messages for them. He does his best to learn the names of all their pets as well, a veritable Noah’s Ark from the tiniest to the largest. This odd point is where one begins to sense the leap readers are to make, from reality to magic. The animals begin to speak to Juan in “human language,” and at first that seems fine with Juan. But then the situation evolves into something more complicated (no spoilers). Juan is on a spiritual journey to locate a “door” that will lead him and everyone who wants into a better world. Arenas is skilled in dragging along even the most skeptical of us because he has a larger point to make.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Rodrigo García's A Farewell to Gabo and Mercedes: A Son’s Memoir of Gabriel García Márquez

A Writer's Wit: Ann Beattie

9/8/2021

Quite often my narrator or protagonist may be a man, but I'm not sure he's the more interesting character, or if the more complex character isn't the woman.
Ann Beattie
Author of Chilly Scenes of Winter
Born September 8, 1947

A. Beattie

FRIDAY: My Book World | Carol Leonnig's Zero Fail

A True Crime Scene Postmortem

9/3/2021

A WRITER'S WIT
When you are absorbed in a biographical subject, you get so close you don't realise the potential effect of what you say. You are trying to get at the truth.
Sarah Bradford
Author of Diana
Born September 3, 1938

S. Bradford

My Book World

Brottman, Mikita. Couple Found Slain: After a Family Murder. New York: Holt, 2021.

This true crime book prides itself in presenting a story that is different from others about murder within a family, and I do believe it is an interesting approach. Brottman offers only a few chapters about the dysfunctional family of a young man who murders his parents and the circumstances that may lead him to do such a thing. The rest of the book concerns itself with the young man’s incarceration in the state of Maryland’s mental health and legal systems. Young Brian Bechtold, once he realizes the severity of what he has done, turns himself in to the police. He expects he will go to prison, because, of course, he has committed murder. Instead, to this day, over fifty years of age, Brian remains a resident of Clifton T. Perkins Hospital Center. His story is one of abuse by psychiatrists, other patients, and a legal system that does not give healthy support to people with mental problems. If only he were in prison, he would have far more freedom, including the freedom to rehabilitate, serve his time, and get out. But at Perkins he has become a lifer, and oddly, he may be saner than one or two of the professionals who “treat” him. Brottman’s prose is unrelentingly dead, a just-the-facts-ma’am kind of journalism, but perhaps that is what true fans of true crime expect.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Reinaldo Arenas's The Doorman

Capote's Stories Still Vibrant

7/30/2021

A WRITER'S WIT
I quickly realised that it is difficult to get started when writing a novel. You have this dream of what you want to create, but it is like walking around a swimming pool and hesitating to jump in because the water is too cold.
Patrick Modiano
Author of Un Pedigree
Born July 30, 1945

P. Modiano

My Book World

Capote, Truman. The Complete Stories of Truman Capote. With an introduction by Reynolds Price. New York: Random, 2004.

Sad to say that Capote published only twenty stories (as this edition seems to indicate) in his lifetime. The “weakest” stories, if there are any, seem to be his early ones when he is barely twenty and the two written during the last decade of his life. The ones in the middle are for the most part knock-outs. Especially, I’m a sucker for his “orphan” stories: “A Christmas Memory,” “The Thanksgiving Visitor,” and “One Christmas.” In all three he develops the character Sook, an old woman, “a cousin,” who cares for the boy narrating the stories. Apparently based on one of the relatives Capote lived with as a child when his parents abandoned him for a time, Sook can tear your heart out with her generosity and illiterate wisdom.

NEXT FRI: My Book World | Catherine Raven's Fox and I

A Happy Troubled Family

7/9/2021

A WRITER'S WIT
Employment is the surest antidote to sorrow.
Ann Radcliffe
Author of The Italian
Born July 9, 1764

A. Radcliff

My Book World

Haslett, Adam. Imagine Me Gone: A Novel. New York: Little Brown, 2016.

Having loved Haslett’s previous work (luuvved Union Atlantic), I jumped in with all limbs once again, and I was not disappointed. In this novel, an American woman meets a British man, they marry, and settle down for a time in London. All three of their children are born there but wind up being raised in New England, where the mother is from. The father is apparently normal (wife gets one big hint he is not just prior to the wedding, but she does not change her plans) until he is not—first losing his career and then sinking into a deep depression. He’s a kind man, a good husband and father, but he wanders into the woods and kills himself. One no longer has to imagine him gone. The title become a multifaceted jewel in which each member (as the first-person POV indicates) can imagine such a thing for themselves.

Another great feature of the novel is that Haslett passes the narration around from family member to family member, thus lighting every corner of this household (the first person is subjective and messy, but that may be Haslett’s intent). Michael is the eldest child, a brilliant person, who, in one chapter writes letters to his aunt about their transatlantic voyage from America to England, letters parodying perhaps the writing of Oscar Wilde; they are that hilarious. The facts are all there, but he is letting the reader know this is how he expresses himself best—at a sardonic slant. Celia may be the most sensible and peacemaking of the three siblings, winds up being a shrink. Alec, the youngest, finally comes out as gay. I like that his story does not take over the novel, that it is just one of five narratives, yet it is handled as sensitively and fully as the others.

The dynamic that sets the tone for this family is how everyone deals with Michael, who has difficulty establishing himself in a career, is always in debt and dependent on his family for help—a family that through the very end is willing to sacrifice everything to save him. Michael is an ultrasensitive person, feeling the hurts of the world yet a bit deaf to the needs of his family. His character is the one who determines the lives of the other four: his actions, his failures, his medical complications, his addictions. The tragic ending is both expected and not. Michael is obviously on a downward spiral, but one hopes, as do all his family, that he will pull out of the dive before it’s too late.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | TBD

'Jane Eyre': Orphan NO More

7/2/2021

A WRITER'S WIT
When you hate, the only one that suffers is you because most of the people you hate don’t know it and the rest don’t care.
Medgar Evers
Assassinated Civil Rights
Worker
Born July 2, 1925

M. Evers

My Book World

Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. With an introduction and Notes by Susan Ostrov Weisser. New York: Barnes and Noble, 2003 (1847).

I’ve always been a sucker for an orphan story. I just can’t seem to pass them up: Dickens. John Irving. And character Jane Eyre’s story is no exception. Only the revered novel isn’t just any orphan story. It begins that way, of course, with the death of both her parents, whose importance will makes itself clear later. No, it is the life this strong, young, independent woman builds for herself that is most important. She learns early to stand up for herself, but her actions get her into trouble first with the Reed family who have been forced by a dead relative’s request to take her in. Then she is hauled off to a school for poor children, where she again stands up to the authorities until she learns that cooperation will take her much farther in life. Having acquired a certain gentility, she becomes a governess for apparently a bachelor’s young charge. From this point on, readers see Jane Eyre struggle to do what she believes is right for her against others who wish to use her for their own designs. Her story is remarkable, and it is easy to see why this novel is one of the most widely read and re-read in the world. No spoilers here.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | TBD

Camus: Are All Plagues Alike?

6/18/2021

A WRITER'S WIT
Your intellect may be confused, but your emotions will never lie to you.
Roger Ebert
Co-Author of At the Movies 1986 - 2010
Born June 17, 1942

R. Ebert

My Book World

Camus, Albert. The Plague. Translated by Stuart Gilbert. New York: Vintage, 1991 (1948).

I read this book, in part, to see what light, if any, it might shed on the world’s 2020-2021 Covid pandemic. I found some interesting parallels. The city of Oran, Algiers, 194_ of Part One seems to echo our country’s actions concerning a local epidemic, the first signal of which is the estimated death of 40,000 rats: lack of clarity about what the disease is and what needs to be done. In Part Two, the gates of Oran close: “One of the most striking consequences of the closing of the gates was, in fact, this sudden deprivation befalling people who were completely unprepared for it” (67).

The natural impulse seems to be to shut out the rest of the world. People, indeed, do not know what is happening. Go to work or not? Keep my children out of school? Oh, the schools have been closed. “The Prefect’s riposte to criticisms echoed by the press—Could not the regulations be modified and made less stringent?—was somewhat unexpected” (78). In 2020, we demonstrate similar behavior: “At first the fact of being cut off from the outside world was accepted with a more or less good grace, much as people would have put up with any other temporary inconvenience that interfered with only a few of their habits. But, now they had abruptly become aware that they were undergoing a sort of incarceration under that blue dome of sky, already beginning to sizzle in the fires of summer, they had a vague sensation that their whole lives were threatened by the present turn of events, and in the evening, when the cooler air revived their energy, this feeling of being locked in like criminals prompted them sometimes to foolhardy acts” (100). Indeed. Partying at crowded bars and restaurants? Attending large political gatherings?

In Oran, the number of deaths seem to increase exponentially day by day. There is conflict about how to handle their situation: “Cottard stared at him in a puzzled manner, and Tarrou went on to say that there were far too many slackers, that their plague was everybody’s business, and everyone should do his duty. For instance, any able-bodied man was welcome in the sanitary squads” (157). Sounds similar to 2020: Just wear the damn mask. Or, You can’t tell me what to do, you’re infringing on my freedom.

By Part III the people of Oran, Algeria realize that the plague has swallowed up “everything and everyone.” There are no longer individual destinies, only a collective destiny, burying the dead, recycling coffins because enough new ones cannot be manufactured fast enough. Cemeteries are outgrown as it were. In 2020, CNN and MSNBC mount graphics each day of the number of Covid cases, the number of deaths. People of Oran become apathetic: Que sera, sera. If I die I die. Sound familiar in 2020?

Part IV of the novel depicts the exhaustion—physical, mental, and emotional—that the people of Oran are now experiencing after months of trauma. “Whenever any of them spoke through the mask, the muslin bulged and grew moist over the lips. This gave a sort of unreality to the conversation; it was like a colloquy of statues” (209). No wonder everyone becomes sick of masks! We can’t always understand one another, can’t see other’s expressions as to what they are thinking. Though protected by the mask, we are dehumanized by it as well. Part IV is highlighted with a touching moment between Dr. Rieux and his friend and patient, a Father Paneloux, after a child dies by way of an excruciating but tender description by Camus. You know more death is coming. Yes, the priest, too, dies. It is in Part IV that the plague becomes a larger thing, a metaphor for the decay potentially inherent in all humans.

Provided for readers in Part V is a sad denouement in which the plague whimpers to an end, but not before the good doctor who has worked tirelessly experiences the loss of his wife (who is caught in another town throughout the entire epidemic) as well as a close friend. Dr. Rieux ends the novel’s narrative with these thoughts: “And, indeed, as he listened to the cries of joy rising from the town, Rieux remembered that such joy is always imperiled. He knew what those jubilant crowds did not know but could have learned from books: that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen-chests; that it bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, and bookshelves; and that perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and the enlightening of men, it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city” (308). Whoa! What? you say. We could face more pandemics in the future? Simply, yes, if the rats shop with us.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | The Letters of John Cheever

Elegies for Two Homelands

5/14/2021

A WRITER'S WIT
That cry of the soul to be lifted out of the bondage of the narrow circle of life, which carries up to God the protest and yearning of suffering man, never finds a more sublime expression than where humanity is oppressed and religion is corrupt.
Hall Caine
Author of The Shadow of a Crime
Born May 14, 1853

H. Caine

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

Master of Go Go Go

4/30/2021

A WRITER'S WIT
The important thing is not so much that every child should be taught, as that every child should be given the wish to learn.
Sir John Lubbock
Author of The Pleasures of Life
Born April 30, 1834

Sir J. Lubbock

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

Sillitoe: Good Judge of Human Nature

4/23/2021

A WRITER'S WIT
Write. Enjoy writing. Then, and only then, worry about the business end of it. Start loving your hobby, and then you can't go too wrong.
Arthur Phillips
Author of The King at the Edge of the World
Born April 23, 1969

A. Phillips

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.

'The Prophets' More Than Slavery

4/16/2021

A WRITER'S WIT
Wicked gave us a story that The Wizard of Oz did not. Two sides to every story.
Abbi Glines
Author of The Vincent Boys
Born April 16, 1977

A. Glines

My Book World

Jones, Robert Jr. The Prophets. New York: Putnam’s, 2021.

This tremendous first novel seems at once both realistic and impressionistic in its articulation. The former because Jones’s portrayal of slave life in the nineteenth-century American South stinks with human toil and sweat, both black and white: “Mississippi only knew how to be hot and sticky” (27). The only relief may be the Biblical-like Yazoo River’s coolness. The novel is impressionistic in large part because it is as nonlinear as a novel can get: there are slave ancestors, the lives of a female king, whose descendants populate this hot and sweaty setting. If readers think this is only a novel about two young male slaves who have “grown up” together on the Halifax plantation (slaves call it “Empty” or “That Fucking Place”) and become lovers at a young age, may they soon discover their mistake. Single chapters are devoted to various characters within this “kingdom” of depraved corruption of Capitalism. Slaves tell their own truth. Owners live out their own truths: their indifference to pain (except their own), their greed, their ultimate unhappiness brought on by the shame and disgust they must feel (deep inside and unrecognized) at the mistreatment of fellow human beings.

In this book, sex between Samuel and Isiah isn’t sex but a stunning line of poetry that indicates what has happened: their red-and-white barn is an Edenic setting for their love. You sense the act has taken place but it is communicated with ease and subtlety. Neither is the sex graphic, nor is it quotidian, like, say, John Cheever’s Then they rolled over and went to sleep.

I believe I shall read this novel again and again. More than ever, white people need to wake up and see what a terrible blight slavery has been on our country’s history, how its stories cripple our present and our future if we fail to deal with slavery's legacy. Jones’s novel opens wide a window into our history by way of a beautiful and savage piece of art that will only unfold more as time passes.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Alan Sillitoe's The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner

'Appleseed' a Big, Satisfying Novel

4/2/2021

A WRITER'S WIT
You can always find time to do the thing you really, really want to do.
Jennifer Rowe
Author of The Lake of Tears
Born April 2, 1948

J. Rowe

MY BOOK WORLD

Bell, Matt. Appleseed. New York: HarperCollins, 2021.

Every novel creates an environment of its own. Author Matt Bell does so in spades in this ambitious work of three worlds and how they eventually converge. Slowly you do sense the three strands coming together, especially each time that Chapman and Nathaniel come to live with the Worth family and they witness the payoff of having planted apple trees from seed decades earlier.

Bell alternates chapters by way of individual characters beginning with Chapman and Nathaniel (loosely based on Johnny “Appleseed” Chapman and brother Nathaniel Chapman). This strand is set in the 1700s and traces the two brothers as they prepare acres and acres of apple nurseries in Ohio and surrounding states, planting individual seeds rather than using grafting—to earn money in the future. Bell makes Chapman’s character even more legendary by creating him as half human/half faun (a mythological character, not a fawn).

The other two strands—a science-fiction thread set in the latter half of this century, and a thousand years from now when the earth is experiencing a new ice age, creating an environmental plea—alternate back and forth between the Appleseed thread until the cataclysmic climax and almost languorous denouement. Readers must trust author Bell, that he knows what he is doing because at times you feel as if you’re on a runaway roller coaster ride that won’t end. And the fact that he releases details gradually makes the speculative and sci-fi aspects of the novel more believable, more easily woven into its fabric (and your memory). At one point, he lists five and a half pages of what have become extinct species, and you make yourself read every one of them, to the experience the pain of what it would (will?) be like to lose that many creatures in the future.

Bell creates the novel’s own vocabulary, much like Anthony Burgess does in his A Clockwork Orange and other works—they are endemic to that novel. Words like “rewilder” (persons attempting to rebuild the natural world); Sacrifice Zone; Volunteer Agricultural Community (VAC); advertainments; nanoswarms; macrofarms; barkspot; no-when; somewhen. Just a few. (The publisher might wish to include a glossary in the back, in a final edition.) Bell makes a good practice of recapping or summarizing backstory so readers know where they are in the sweep of things.

Perhaps because this copy is the publisher’s “advance reader’s edition,” (I received it as a Goodreads giveaway fulfilled by HarperCollins) it may feature more than its fair share of typographical errors, but I list the ones I found because it’s a thing I do:

Typo: “hope_ are” (184) should be “hopes are”
Typo: “unlike t he one” (232) should be “the”
Typo: “Chapman say_,” (297) should be “says”
Typo: “Eury most not expect” (311) should be “Eury must not
expect”
Typo: “if Earthtrust was a country” (362) should be “if Earthtrust
is a country” to be consistent with contextual use of present   tense.

Reading Appleseed is a big ask, not so much on the part of the author (who is excused on the basis of creative control) or the publisher but on the part of literature itself. One must approach the novel with an open mind, especially if you don’t often read fantasy, sci-fi, or speculative fiction. Bell produces a phrase that might just rise up as a slogan for our earth’s future: Either we all survive, or no one does (159). Frightening but possibly true.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Kendi and Blain's Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019

Universality of Fleshly Ways

3/19/2021

A WRITER'S WIT
Do what thy manhood bids thee do,
from none but self expect applause;
He noblest lives and noblest dies who
makes and keeps his self-made laws.
Richard F. Burton
Author of The City of the Saints
Born March 19, 1821

R. F. Burton

My Book World

Butler, Samuel. The Way of All Flesh. New York: Random, 194- (1903).

I found this late nineteenth-century novel fascinating for a number of reasons. First, Butler undertakes to explore the centuries-old problem of conflict between fathers and sons. The Pontifex family is indeed a family of priests (how audacious of Butler to further his satire by borrowing the word from Roman times). But dear young Ernest Pontifex does not want to follow in his father’s footsteps; and then he eventually does. For a while, anyway. Then he rebels big time, winding up in gaol for molesting a woman, at which time his parents disinherit him. Mr. and Mrs. Pontifex have taken the following line of thinking as they raise their children, including Ernest: “If their wills were ‘well broken’ in childhood, to use an expression then much in vogue, they would acquire habits of obedience which they would not venture to break through till they were over twenty-one years old” (22).

A number of sources advocate for the idea that Samuel Butler was gay, largely because he never married and seemed to maintain a number of close emotional relationships with men. If the subliminal crumb-droppings of this novel mean anything, Butler leaves all kinds of clues that this assertion may indeed be true (as does Maugham in his Of Human Bondage). Ernest’s father, Theobald, says the following: “It is an unnatural thing for a boy not to be fond of his own father. If he was fond of me I should be fond of him, but I cannot like a son who, I am sure, dislikes me. He shrinks out of my way whenever he sees me coming near him. He will not stay five minutes in the same room with me if he can help it” (122). Why is Ernest disposed toward this behavior? Probably because elder Pontifex beats Ernest for any number of reasons (his manipulating mother aids in this process). And which comes first, father’s rejection of son, or son’s rejection of father? When does the endless cycle of enmity begin? At any rate, many gay men are rejected by their fathers because they may see something in their sons that they do not like in themselves. Other clues? Ernest does not marry or marries badly (a bigamist, canceling his marriage) because he doesn’t get women; he has no positive feeling for women (especially his mother, though he forgives her in the end); but he does maintain longstanding relationships with various men throughout his life.

Yet, the most interesting aspect of the novel may be Butler’s treatment of the root of all evil, the way of all flesh: greed, the lust for money. Readers can locate the plot on the internet, but suffice it to say that Butler makes much (a biting satire) of the British notion of passing on wealth to one’s heirs, or not doing so, which action plays a large role in this novel’s satisfying climax and denouement (the elder Pontifexes get their comeuppance for their poor treatment of son Ernest).

Unlike other authors of this period, Butler writes for the most part in a manner that is simple and easy to follow, yet the novel is far from facile. Butler’s is a story that continues to unfold. It echoes throughout homes in England and around the world.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Benjamin Dreyer's Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style

College Tales Always Delightful

3/12/2021

A WRITER'S WIT
I write to find out what I'm talking about.
Edward Albee
Author of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962 play)
Born March 12, 1928

E. Albee

My Book World

Kendig, Robert E. Sojourn at Stevenson College: Campus Tales from a Bygone Era. A compendium of whimsical events that actually did occur, modestly embellished. Wilmington: Winoca, 2005.

This book is a satisfying read because the author opts to tell his story of teaching in a college town in the 1930s in a nonlinear manner. Although some characters carry over from one chapter to the next (like a meddlesome underling in the history department), each tale can more or less stand alone.

This book has its poignant moments, but it is largely about humor:

A filling station owner installs a large speaker under the seat (ew) in his customer outhouse and connects it to a microphone. “‘Lady, would you move over please, we’re working down here’” (46-7).

At Stevenson College, students are a bit perturbed because the faculty are “unnecessarily indolent” (78) in standing for the opening and closing hymns. “During the holidays, some of the students—we never knew who were the guilty ones—gained access to the chapel. They ran uninsulated wires through the tops of the cushions on the front pews, and under the carpeting on the floor to the loud foot pedal of the piano and thence to a substantial dry cell battery located to the rear of the instrument” (79).Well, one can imagine that on that day, every faculty member stood for the opening and closing hymns.

Later, the meddlesome underling commandeers the visit of a literary figure from England, attempting to make his visit as English-like as possible, even to the point of faking a British accent in what is probably a mid-South community. All throughout she rudely attempts to guide the discussion away from the local department and what and how the professors teach. Finally, when the woman expresses her fascination with the spelling of British names, the Brit himself has had enough: “This was more than Sir Reginald could stand. He sat upright in his chair and, looking directly at Mrs. Garber, he responded, ‘No, madam, I am not hyphenated. I am not even circumcised!’” (108).

The story that may touch educators comes near the end when Kendig renders how he advises a star pupil who, upon graduating, has the opportunity either to play a professional sport or take advantage of a Rhodes Scholarship. The pupil asks Kendig what he ought to do. The esteemed professor asks him to ponder the following: “But think about the two opportunities ahead of you and assume for a moment that either one can lead to your being famous. Then you might ask, ‘For what would I want to be famous?’”(165-6). I won’t say which he chose.

This is one of those books published by a small press that may not be picked up because it is “too parochial or too regional” in its nature. Yet it is a book that is well edited, well-designed, and one that is both enlightening and entertaining. Kudos to publisher/editor Barbara Brannon for bringing this book to light for all of us.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh

Coetzee's Diary

3/5/2021

A WRITER'S WIT
I have to have music on when writing, or else the silence swallows me whole.
Sarah J. Maas
Author of House of Earth and Blood
Born March 5, 1986

S. J. Maas

My Book world

Coetzee, J. M. Diary of a Bad Year. New York: Viking, 2007.

Coetzee relates the story of an aging author dying of cancer who hires an attractive young woman in his building to do typing for him. In the evenings the woman relates to her boyfriend what the developing book is like. She also engages in dialogue with the author concerning his strong opinions (also the title of the book). At some point the boyfriend becomes the author’s accountant and devises a failproof plan to cheat the author out of his estate at the time of his death.

What makes this simple plot compelling is Coetzee’s structure: the top third of each page is assigned to fragments from the fictional author’s essays. A middle portion of the page, usually quite slim, is a continuing dialog between the author and the typist, where he discovers she isn’t only pretty but smart as well. The bottom section of each page portrays the relationship between the typist and her boyfriend. At least, in theory, one may read all three parts separately, from front to back because Coetzee presents them as three distinct but interrelated stories. However, I mostly read the book conventionally, attempting to keep each of the threads separately yet trying, at the same time, to see how the three threads related to one another.

This novel is a fascinating read mostly because of the structure. If Coetzee had given the book a more traditional approach with alternating chapters or sections, it might have been a different book indeed, though I cannot predict how. Such is the alchemy of fine writing by a fine author.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Robert E. Kendig's Sojourn at Stevenson College: Campus Tales from a Bygone Era

'Barkskins' Means Some Barked Shins

2/26/2021

A WRITER'S WIT
The English tradition offers the great tapestry novel, where you have the emotional aspect of a detective's personal life, the circumstances of the crime and, most important, the atmosphere of the English countryside that functions as another character.
Elizabeth George
Author of The Punishment She Deserves
Born February 26, 1949

E. George

My Book World

Proulx, Annie. Barkskins: A Novel. New York: Scribner, 2016.

How does one begin to talk about such a magnificent saga of more than seven hundred pages? Start big. Barkskins (a name for tree choppers) features multiple generations of two French Canadian families: the Sels and the Duquets (later to become the Dukes), as well as the Indians (Mi’kmaw) with whom they intermarry. The family then embark on the timber business. Early in the novel, Proulx informs readers where she’s headed (an exposé of the timber industry’s evil effects), albeit in a subtle manner: “With a pointed stone, he [young René Sel] marked the haft with his initial R. As he cut, the wildness of the world receded, the vast invisible web of filaments that connected human life to animals, trees to flesh and bones to grass shivered as each tree fell and one by one the web strands snapped” (12). This invisible web connecting all life to the fate of trees across our vast globe is what Proulx limns for us, as well as what happens when greed and myopia control such an influential industry (for a certain period, until all the old growth trees are gone).

Proulx does a number of things to make reading this novel a pleasure (I read it aloud to my partner over a period of weeks). In terms of structure, she divides the novel into ten major parts, mostly by broad time periods of twenty-five to seventy years. Within each part she numbers continuous chapters (seventy), each with a telling chapter title—making it possible to digest the novel in small parts. Second, no matter how short appearance a character may make, Proulx creates three-dimensional people readers can relate to. Birth and death are near daily events she treats with objective indifference: “He was no riverman. Before he could collect his season’s pay, he drowned below Wolf Falls and, like countless other fathers, slipped into the past” (277). Last, Proulx conveys verisimilitude. She has thoroughly researched relevant geography, relevant history, relevant information about the timber industry from its earliest days in Canada and New England to modern efforts to “farm” timber, i.e. plant trees for future generations. Perhaps, most of all, Proulx makes us love trees, their forests, both extinct and living: all their possible uses besides building building building. Without stooping to didactic methods, she makes us love these leafy beasts, forces us to see how important they have always been and continue to be to the survival of the world.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | J. M. Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year

Inside Martin Amis's Story

2/19/2021

A WRITER'S WIT
I did not lose myself all at once. I rubbed out my face over the years washing away my pain, the same way carvings on stone are worn down by water.
Amy Tan
Author of The Joy Luck Club
Born February 19, 1952

A. Tan

My Book World

Amis, Martin. Inside Story—How to Write: A Novel. New York: Knopf, 2020.

I believe this novel falls under the category of metafiction (Google: fiction in which the author self-consciously alludes to the artificiality or literariness of a work by parodying or departing from novelistic conventions). Martin or Mart becomes a character in his own work (à la Christopher Isherwood and others). His self-consciousness revolves around the writing of his own fiction, that of Saul Bellow, and others. As the customary disclaimer in the front matter states, “Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance . . . is entirely coincidental.” But how coincidental is it when “Martin” or “Mart” spends much of the book citing characters with real names, people like his father, author Kingsley Amis, people like longtime friend Christopher Hitchens, as well as other famous (Iris Murdoch) and not-so figures?

Amis begins and ends (“Preludial” and “Postludial”) the novel by addressing his readers directly, that he is about to give us tips concerning writing techniques. And he does: such advice is scattered throughout the (did I say?) novel, as if indeed, it is a how-to book and not a work of fiction. I like it. It’s odd, but I like it. You can’t help but believe he is digging down deep to reveal what has worked for him and speaks so authoritatively about writing (and with more than twenty-five books under his belt why shouldn’t he?).

However, Amis spends the final 150 pages or so memorializing the life and death of essayist and intimate, Christopher Hitchens. They’re both about the same age. Both straight, both with families. Yet they are Platonic lovers. Martin greets Christopher and sometimes leaves him with a kiss. As his fans will know, veteran smoker Hitchens develops throat cancer, and much of this section takes place at Houston’s MD Anderson Cancer Center. Amis takes readers through every painful step he witnesses in Hitch’s treatment. All to no avail. The man who has always seemed to battle against life and death in equal measures finally succumbs. That is in 2011. Perhaps writing in a fictional mode about this death allows Amis to conceptualize the work differently than if it were in a nonfiction mode. It allows him to eulogize his friend without getting too sentimental about it.

And yet—true to the title’s promise—Amis, I believe, does offer the writer, especially the writer of novels, some sage advice. Oh, and before I list a few nuggets along these lines, I’d like to say I detest the excessive footnotes, particularly in a work of fiction. Is it a kind of laziness by which the author cannot manage to incorporate these ideas into the main text? Or is it a way of padding an already lengthy book and forcing readers to peruse longs passages in teensy weensy little print? Or is it a way of showing off, of augmenting an already verbose passage even more? At any rate, here are some passages about writing:

“So avoid or minimise any reference to the mechanics of making love—unless it advances our understanding of character or affective situation. All we usually need to know is how it went and what it meant. ‘Caress the detail,’ said Nabokov from the lectern. And it is excellent advice. But don’t do it when you’re writing about sex” (27).

Knopf typo: “obviouly” (221).

“Never use any phrase that bears the taint of the second-hand. All credit to whoever coined no-brainer and (I suppose) to whoever coined go ballistic and Marxism lite and you rock and eye-popping and jaw-dropping and double whammy and all the rest of them. Never do it—not even in conversation” (391).

The end of a sentence is a weighty occasion. The end of a paragraph is even weightier (as a general guide, aim to put its best sentence last). The end of chapter is seismic but also more pliant (either put its best paragraph last, or follow your inclination to adjourn with a light touch of the gavel). The end of a novel, you’ll be relieved to learn, is usually straightforward, because by then everything has been decided. And with any luck your closing words will feel preordained (394).

In his Inside Story Amis writes about so much more: Philip Larkin’s death, 9-1-1, crises in the Middle East, his life between the early 1980s through 45’s stint as president. Since the work is fiction can we believe “Mart” when he says this will be his last book? I hope not.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Annie Proulx's Barkskins

The Tragedy of Richard Yates

10/9/2020

A WRITER'S WIT
I grew up in an affluent suburban world and never worried about money until I'd grown up and found wonderfully original ways to screw up my life.
K. A. Applegate
Author of The One and Only Ivan
Born October 9, 1956

K. A. Applegate

Bailey, Blake. A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates. New York: Picador, 2003.

Tragedy is a horrendous thing for any human to endure, and yet we all do endure it to one extent or another: adverse childhood experiences, deaths, career failures, and more. The author of this exhaustive literary biography, Blake Bailey, does not employ the word lightly, neither in the title nor how he uses it throughout the book. Bailey’s subject, novelist Richard Yates, born in 1926, has about as tragic life as one can live, yet Yates uses it to formulate his fiction with a high degree of success, perhaps too well, to listen to some critics, many of whom are put off by his lack of “happy endings” or his “dim view” of humanity.

No matter what, Yates comes by his viewpoint honestly. In short, his parents’ divorce, not to mention he is raised by a mother who probably has a better opinion of herself than her real talents manifest themselves in her life. She believes herself to be an “artist,” and because of her opinion, her two children (Richard and sister Ruth) are always at the bottom of her priorities. On the other hand, she is a highly seductive person, among other things, encouraging her young son to sleep in her bed. On nights that she stays out late or all night, the boy child lies in bed, wondering where she is. And when she comes home and falls in next to him and vomits on his pillow, his rage is stoked in a way that remains with him his entire life.

Some nuggets:

“. . . he fixed on his round eyes and plump lips as physiognomic signs of weakness; more to the point, he thought they made him look feminine, ‘bubbly,’ and he had a lifelong horror of being perceived as homosexual” (39). Hm, I wonder why, with the mother thing he has going on.

Friend and fellow writer Kurt Vonnegut writes about war: “People don’t recover from a war. There’s a fatalism that he [Yates] picked up as a soldier. Enlisted men are surprisingly indifferent to survival. Death doesn’t matter that much” (75).

Friend and former student DeWitt Henry notes: “Dick cultivated an anti-intellectual manner, but there was nothing phony or affected about it. In places like the army and tuberculosis wards he was put in contact with unlettered people, who were just as sensitive as anybody else” (78). Yates did his best to capture natural intelligence in characters, and, in life, in his teaching at the Iowa Workshop, he landed hard on any, any arrogant student who put another’s writing down.

Yates discovers what the term “objective correlative” means: “I had never understood what Eliot meant by the curious phrase ‘objective correlative’ until the scene in Gatsby where the almost comically sinister Meyer Wolfsheim, who has just been introduced, displays his cuff links and explain that they are ‘the finest specimens of human molars.’ Get it? Got it. That’s what Eliot meant” (109). He now gets that Wolfsheim, true to his naturalistic name, traffics in human flesh and uses his understanding to find such tokens for his own characters.
“Flaubert offered a further tutorial on the proper use of the ‘objective correlative’—the telling detail that transmits meaning and emotion without laboring the point” (175)

“The only hope of escape was to write a successful novel—the raw material of which, he already sensed, would be the stuff of his own predicament. But he wanted to transcend the merely personal, to avoid the pitfalls of sentiment and self-pity” (175).

Bailey comments on claims of French critic, Jacques Cabau, that Yates is a master: “Not surprisingly the Frenchman was especially pleased by Yates’s insights into the hollowness of American life: ‘Eleven Kinds of Loneliness—a courageous theme in America, where loneliness is a sin, where success is obligatory and happiness is the first duty of every citizen’” (271).

Long-term friend and publisher, Sam Lawrence, says at Yates’s funeral (more of a come-as-you-are wake): “‘He drank too much, he smoked too much, he was accident-prone, he led an itinerant life, but as a writer he was all in place. He wrote the best dialogue since John O’Hara, who also lacked the so-called advantages of Harvard and Yale. And like O’Hara he was a master of realism, totally attuned to the nuances of American behavior and speech. You know what I think he would have said to all this? ‘C’mon, Sam, knock it off. Let’s have a drink’” (607).

Anyone wanting to get inside the head of one of the greatest American twentieth-century novelists must consider reading this book. It’s that great. My second-hand copy is marked with a “WITHDRAWN” stamp from the Mishawaka-Penn-Harris Public Library in Indiana. Guess it wasn’t much of a hit there.

NEXT FRIDAY: Michael Waldman's The Fight to Vote

A Minister's Journey

10/2/2020

A WRITER'S WIT
Remember that all through history, there have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they seem invincible. But in the end, they always fall. Always.
Mahatma Gandhi
Author of Mohandas K. Gandhi, Autobigraphy: The Story of My Experiments with Truth
Born October 2, 1869

M. Gandhi

My Book World

Robinson, Marilynne. Gilead. New York: Farrar, 2004.

Robinson writes this novel in a very different but masterful fashion from most contemporary novels. She undertakes to have a third-generation (at least) Protestant minister tell his family’s story to his very young son by way of a letter, reviving a long epistolary tradition in storytelling. It is the kind of novel that wends itself back and forth over the same geographical (from Iowa to Kansas, literally on foot) and temporal (several generations) territories. One must retain part of the information, at least, to make sense of it all; yet Robinson skillfully reminds readers of pertinent facts, and they can uncover more as they continue their journey through the book.

The elderly Rev. John Ames, who has married late in life, is fatally ill and thus wishes to share his life with his young son. Early on, he shares that in his life as a pastor he has written and filed away a large number of sermons:

“Your mother . . . was the one who actually called my attention to the number of boxes I have filled with my sermons and my prayers. Say, fifty sermons a year for forty-five years, not counting funerals and so on, of which there have been a great many. Two thousand two hundred and fifty. If they average thirty pages, that’s sixty-seven thousand five hundred pages . . . two hundred twenty-five books which puts me up there with Augustine and Calvin for quantity” (19).

One doesn’t know if the son is impressed because he hasn’t yet read this long epistle, but to the reader it seem be a daunting figure. Even most novelists do not produce that much material in a lifetime. So what occupies the thoughts of a trained minister? Family issues, certainly, and we learn of his older brother Edward who studies in Europe and returns an atheist. One problem with a liberal education is that one is taught to think for oneself and what Edward thinks does not please their father; in fact, he is quite hurt that Edward refuses to deliver the prayer at a meal but even more disappointed that his son will not be following in his footsteps.

Another major thread of the narrative has to do with a fellow pastor and friend, a man named Robert Boughton. (One is not sure if the first syllable is pronounced bough as in a tree’s bough, bow as in bow tie, or even buffton or booton.) Robert’s son, Jack, is a bit of a problem in a number of ways I shall not reveal, and because of them John Ames does not trust Jack. But as a matter of putting his faith in action, he finally steps up to help the troubled young man to grow and move on—his own father, Robert, not ever knowing of Jack’s troubled past. I, too, like Edward, am a former Christian, but I find the book explores the topic of spirituality in a manner that is respectful to all parties who may read the book, and that is a feat difficult to achieve.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Blake Bailey's Literary Biography of Author Richard Yates: A Tragic Honesty

Forster: His Fiction Comes to Fruition

9/25/2020

A WRITER'S WIT
A great piece of music is beautiful regardless of how it is performed. Any prelude or fugue of Bach can be played at any tempo, with or without rhythmic nuances, and it will still be great music. That’s how music should be written, so that no-one, no matter how philistine, can ruin it.
Dmitri Shostakovich
"Leningrad" Symphony, No. 7
Born September 25, 1906

D. Shostakovich

My Book World

Forster, E. M. The Life to Come: And Other Stories. New York: Norton, 1987 (1972).

Oliver Stallybrass offers in his introduction a bit of background concerning these stories. “On his death in June 1970, E. M. Forster left behind, at King’s College, Cambridge, England, a considerable corpus of unpublished literary work, complete and incomplete, and in a wide range of genres: novels (Maurice, published in 1971, and two substantial fragments), stories, plays, poems, essays, talks—to say nothing of letters, diaries and notebooks” (vii). A number of these stories—because Forster creates gay characters and situations that cannot be published at the time he writes them—are instructive for gay writers alive today. One, he is courageous, given his prodigious talent, to write them anyway, not to edit his mind, his heart, his soul. Even if he stashes them away or editors reject them, he senses perhaps that subsequent generations might read and appreciate them. The language and imagery are tame, of course, compared with any so-called gay fiction written since the early 1970s. But the fact that he is willing to portray two men together sexually, employing words like “member” for “penis,” is quite remarkable. Second, he provides a foundation for writers to come, people such as Paul Monette, who, in his book of essays, Last Watch of the Night, pays quick homage to Forster as a mentor. Forster is a formidable and lyrical writer whose work transcends all and deserves to be read by anyone, even fifty years following his death.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Marilynne Robinson's Novel Gilead

Not a Boring Star

9/18/2020

We now live in a nation where doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, governments destroy freedom, the press destroys information, religion destroys morals, and our banks destroy the economy.
Chris Hedges
Author of America: The Farewell Tour
Born September 18, 1956

C. Hedges

My Book World

Lane, Byron. A Star Is Bored: A Novel. NY: Holt, 2020.

Twenty-eight-year-old Charlie leaves his night job writing news copy for a Los Angeles TV station to become “personal assistant” to actor and movie star, Kathi Kannon. When one learns that author Lane once served as Carrie Fisher’s PA, one wants to turn Kathi’s voice into Carrie’s, Gracie Gold’s (Kathy’s mother) into Debbie Reynolds. As with any competent fiction, however, Lane creates two great characters that only reflect that he once knew them both, not that he’s out to recreate them.

And this book is full of so many unforgettable voices. Begin with Kathi’s: off the bat she renames Charlie “Cockring.” From there, it’s only a short step to all the other outrageous things she says while he shops with her, travels with her, sees her in and out of hospitals for . . . well, read for yourself to find out what. Cockring’s head is full of voices: his father bellowing at him through the years by way of sentences in all caps: “WE ALL HAVE TO DO THINGS IN LIFE WE DON’T WANT TO DO!” (66); his own fears as he speaks to his inner Siri: “Hey, Siri, I want to impress. I want to be the best assistant. I want to rescue my failing grade” (77); the voice of Cockring’s Therapista; the voices of all the other PAs to Hollywood stars, all with their own nicknames, who collectively write what is known as The Assistant’s Bible, chock full of information every great PA should memorize.

Cockring realizes early: “I have to be: to accept life as it happens, to be still and rest in knowing the universe is friendly, that good things will come, that good things are already here, that ‘good things’ include tidying her house, getting her car serviced, sorting her pills, surrendering my needs to hers” (91).

At a certain point, however, Cockring will learn this lesson a bit too well, and, like all good young protagonists, will have a crisis of identity. How that turns out will have to be the reader’s adventure. I’m not spoiling it for anybody. For laughs and tears, for good feelings and bad, you must read this book.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | E. M. Forster's A Life to Come

Past Is Still Present: AIDS

8/7/2020

A WRITER'S WIT
Modern life has gotten so strange, we all get 150 emails and text messages a day, and it's hard when things are moving that quickly to keep that sense of wonder about being alive.
Brit Marling
Co-Writer for film Sound of My Voice
Born August 7, 1983

B. Marling

Guibert, Hervé. To the friend who did not save my life. South Pasadena: Semiotexte, 2020 (1990).

It’s difficult to know what I think of this book, thirty years after it is first published. On the one hand, it is a fair representation of what the times are like in 1991 Paris. When the author dies at thirty-six from AIDS, I am forty-three—very much a part of the same demographic. I’ve taken an HTLV test which claims I am negative. Whew.

Yet there is no real relief for anyone: neither the men and women who test positive and will soon die nor for their friends who have partaken of the same risky behaviors and remain free. Guibert portrays for gay Frenchmen, as do many American gay writers at the time, the devastation that overtakes our community from coast to coast. On the other hand, after thirty years, most of the scientific information Guibert possesses is redundant or has been proven wrong. It’s painful to read about either party.

Even if this work functions as a sort of roman à clef by not naming names, it certainly portrays the dastardly acts of treacherous friends. A character named Muzil is supposedly the noted philosopher Michel Foucault; Marine is based on the life of actor, Isabelle Adjani; and yet “Bill,” Guibert’s friend of the title remains a mystery, a traitor who brags about, as a Miami pharmaceutical executive, getting Guibert in on the ground floor of a vaccine, but cruelly fails to do so. This book, a combination of linear and nonlinear elements, takes us back to the past, but it strangely plops us into the present of yet another untamable virus and directs us toward a future of even more death and destruction. Not a gay book in the original literary sense, but so gay in a tragic way.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Thor Heyerdahl's Kon-Tiki