Review: Journey to the End of the Night, by Louis-Ferdinand Céline

Journey to the End of the Night is like a travelogue of a journey into the darkest parts of the human soul. It is a dark, pessimistic, almost nihilistic work. Not written like a story, there is no plot to follow, and there are several sharp turns and hidden corners where, as a reader, you might find yourself digging deep to catch up. For all that, this is a great book.

I picked this book up originally because I'd heard it had influenced Vonnegut in Slaughterhouse Five and Heller in Catch-22. Liking both of those I decided to go back to their purported beginnings. It is easy to find Catch-22 in Journey, but that is only a small portion of the story, which begins in World War I France, moves to colonial Africa, with a strong flavor of Heart of Darkness (published long before Journey), then moves to the United States before heading back to France. This physical traveling, the moving around from continent to continent, aside from being part of the work's semi-autobiographical nature, mirrors the mental journey of Bardamu as he travels deeper and deeper into a dark human psyche. Céline examines the darkness of war, of capitalism, and of a shrinking world, touching on religion, science, gender relations, and madness as he does.

There is a lot more that can be said about this book, a lot more about symbolism and nuances, but those things are best explored by reading it. Céline was on the front of the 20th century literary movement, and his writing style is a mixture of descriptive prose and vernacular, is rife with satire, and has a rhythm all its own. My only disappointment is that I cannot read French because I think a lot can be lost from a book like this in the process of translation. I have also read that the newer translation is too contemporary and that to get a better feel for Céline's talent one must read the original translation by John H. P. Marks. That is now something on my list of things to do.

14 down on my way to 52 in 2011

Review: The Magic of Oz, by L. Frank Baum

The penultimate book in the series as written by Baum. If there weren't another twenty-some more books widely considered as part of the Oz canon I think I would be very sad. As it is, I think I still am. I think it's possible to make these books feel fresh and new, even twelve books into the series, because anything, and I mean anything, can happen in Oz, so there are no contraints, natural or artificial, binding the author's creativity. Of course the plot line doesn't change all that much from book to book—there's only a handful of those to choose from here—but the intriguing and unique characters that fill in the bare bones of the plots are what make the books enjoyable one right after the other. The Magic of Oz is another winner for me, full of just enough adult-size humor to give depth to the child's fairy story. This is children's fantasy at its best.

Review: Slaughterhouse Five, by Kurt Vonnegut

"God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to always tell the difference." - Vonnegut in Slaughterhouse Five

I was surprised by two things reading this book. One, I had no idea that this was the origin of the above quote. Two, this was a very different book from Cat's Cradle. I'm not sure why I expected the books to be more similar than they are, maybe I've read too many one note authors, but while Vonnegut's voice is still clearly present, the two books are talking about very different things in very different ways. Slaughterhouse Five actually reminds me a lot of Joseph Heller's Catch-22, which I read last year and enjoyed. The post-modern anti-war flavor is strong in both books, and there's a pretty strong similarity between their loose play with time, too; These are not linear books. Catch-22 is more darkly humorous, though, like Cat's Cradle in that respect, while Slaughterhouse flirts with science fiction in a way that leaves the reader wondering what really did and did not happen. I love being left with that question. I also enjoyed the way Vonnegut called out the hypocrisy of war. I didn't care for this one as much as Cat's Cradle, and between them I think I liked Catch-22 better, but this was a good book. And it introduced me to the book I picked up to read next, Celine's Journey to the End of the Night, which I understand may have influenced both Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse and Heller's earlier Catch-22.

Book 13 on my way to 52 in 2011

Review: Cat's Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut

Vonnegut's writing is an exercise for the sharp, witty, satirical mind. Every page, every sentence. When I read (only when I'm reading my own non-collectors copy of a book, of course) I dog-ear pages, pencil notes in margins, and keep a running tab near the front for important page numbers, quotes, or connections between ideas. That was not really possible in Cat's Cradle because everything was worth looking into. I stopped the dog-earing after the first 50 pages because almost 25 of them were folded and it seemed pointless.

Obviously I really enjoyed this book, but that's my post-modern, dystopian predilection showing. Cat's Cradle is not a story book or a character study, it's more of an anthropological argument, and in fact it was this book that earned Vonnegut his masters degree where an earlier thesis had failed him. Science, religion, politics, patriotism, it all comes under fire here, and every shot is set up to make the reader laugh first, then think deeply. Vonnegut's disdain for blind patriotism and war is not hard to read here, but more deeply nuanced is his argument between science and religion. Blind pursuit of scientific knowledge leads right up to the book's doomsday ending, but while science, written as a heartless man, kills the bulk of life, religion is portrayed as a blatant lie intended to guide and ease suffering, in the end failing to do either. Middle of the road it is, then.

Book 12 on my way to 52 in 2011

Review: Swan Thieves by Elizabeth Kostova

Like The Historian, Elizabeth Kostova's first novel, Swan Thieves, her second, is a mystery that is told through a variety of time periods and voices. Unlike The Historian, which is a fantastic retelling of the Dracula story, it makes no reference to mythical or folkloric components. Kostova's writing tends to be lyrical, descriptive, and she gives herself an easy subject for this in Swan Thieves: art. Swan Thieves is about works of art and artists and she writes on several of these, some real and some make-believe. And, as we wind our way through places, and places in time, discovering art and pasts and secrets, there is also a love story, or at least the bare bones of one.

There is a theme here of self discovery, and it's really a pretty good theme. Does one choose to follow a dream, and for how far? Does one live for self or for others in order to find fulfillment? The thread is there and it's an enjoyable under-the-surface discussion that gives the otherwise light book a little more depth. But the book has its flaws. The characters are not entirely believable, especially the main narrator and hero, Dr. Marlow. The majority of the book is spent solving a mystery that was probably solved by the reader in the first few chapters, and then wraps it up with a heavy dose of deus ex machina that rears its ugly head not only to solve the mystery but also to wrap up the character relationships. Still, it was an enjoyable light read.

Book 11 on my way to 52 in 2011

Review: The Tin Woodman of Oz, by L. Frank Baum

There are only two more books, after this one, left in the Oz series as written by Baum, and I am sad to see the end so obviously in sight. While there are yet another 26 books in what is considered the Oz canon, I am a sentimentalist, and it will be hard, and a little nerve wracking, to break into the Oz world as imagined by other authors. I am hoping that, if so many other Ozites consider these other books to be canon, we will be just as happy with them as we have been with Baum's vision, and certainly there are far more than 26 other Oz books out there, so selectivity did come into play. My fingers are crossed and my breath held as we near the end of Baum's road, though.

The Tin Woodman of Oz, though, was also a slight variation from Baum's usual, and I've heard that this, and the last two books in the series, are dark by comparison to his previous books of wonder. In the Tin Woodman, in fact, the reader is reminded of the Tin Woodman's somewhat gruesome past, and also meets his severed head, on the tinsmith's shelf, and many of his former body parts, now glued back together to create a different being. And, if these anomolies are not enough, there is definitely a thinly veiled question here about makeup of a soul, and the value of a body. Which, after all, is the real Tin Woodman, Nick Chopper? Is it the head, with the brain, the body, with the heart, or the new tin creation, with the memories, the creature we have all become accustomed to? There is really a lot of symbolism and imagery in all of Baum's work, much of it being politically motivated by the situations of the early 20th century, but this is perhaps the most striking, and the most demanding, of them all.

For all of that, however, much of this is naturally over a four-year-old's head, and since I did not see fit to draw attention to these complex themes, although I'm sure we could have discussed them, Calvin enjoyed this book as he has all the others: deeply and with great excitement.

Review: Beloved, by Toni Morrison

I picked up the Gloria Naylor's book, Bailey's Cafe, just out of the blue, remembering how much I'd loved her previously, but that got me thinking more about African American fiction, and that led me straight to Toni Morrison. I had a copy of Beloved on the shelf, picked up from the library sale, so I went there next, which was fun for the compare and contrast. While they are both late twentieth century writers, Morrison's treatment of fiction is more classical, Naylor's more contemporary, Beloved takes place around the time of the Civil War, not the second World War, like Bailey'sm and Beloved offers both physical and meta-physical explanations while Bailey's is entirely other-worldly. Morrison is tackling the subject of self and slavery while Naylor is tackling its contemporary realization in the form of modern subjugation.

Toni Morrison is an enjoyable writer, but Beloved is not really an enjoyable book, nor is it meant to be. It's about slavery, after all, and the destruction it perpetrated. The book's characters, mostly former salves, fight to rid themselves of the past, but to deny the past is to deny one's sense of self and without self there is no future. To have any hope of future together they must first return to face the past they have so carefully left behind to live in a tenuous today with a non-existent tomorrow. As readers we begin the story somewhat lost, because that is where our characters are, and the book becomes more clear to us as life and self becomes more clear to them. It is this battle with the past, both real and imagined, that makes up the book. It's a depressing subject at best, but a well written comment on slavery and self, and like Bailey's there is much, much more to be said, to be studied and parsed, but that's where I'll leave it for now.

Book 10 on my way to 52 in 2011

Review: Bailey's Cafe, by Gloria Naylor

"Godfather always said that he made me, but I was born of the delta...I had no choice but to walk into New Orleans neither male nor female—mud. But I could right then and there choose what I was going to be when I walked back out." -Gloria Naylor, Bailey's Cafe

There is an Eve in this book. She is born of the earth alone, not born of man, and she is forced to make a pilgrimage. From the delta, the fertile womb of the earth, she walks to New Orleans, arriving caked in earth, stripped of the gender that has long been her assignment of sin. What she is when she walks back out is what makes this story a contemporary African American tale even more than the struggles endured by the rest of its characters, because she isn’t Eve of the bible and she isn’t the mother figure of European pagan beliefs. She is part earth, part magic, and she can conjure like a voodoo queen.

Eve's story is just one of many told here, but she is more ubiquitous than she at first seems, while the seemingly omnipresent personage of the narrator, Bailey, turns out to be just a supporting character. Bailey, after all, is Christianity's representative, and those in power get to write the histories, even those of contemporary Eve and her wards. Eve lets him tell it. That's the smallest of her battles. Religion as we know it, after all, and secular culture, are a man’s world, and Eve, as drawn by Gloria Naylor, has arrived to reclaim it.

I am a huge fan of Gloria Naylor's "Mama Day", which I read for the first time back in college and have revisited at least twice since, and Bailey's Cafe is another beautiful example of contemporary African American writing by this talented author. I love this book. I love its primal, driven message and the words with which it is told. Naylor's writing is clean and concise—she does not spend vocabulary on setting the scene, but uses every word to take the reader deeper into the lives of her characters, and her characters are most certainly deep. While at first glance, Bailey's Cafe is a handful of character studies tied together by a shared narrator, a member of their unique and mystical community, Naylor's real story is embedded in the depths of her characters and in the religious symbolism throughout. This isn't your run of the mill twentieth century religious symbolism, but a message about the violent struggle being played out between women, particularly African American women, and the patriarchal religions of the world.

Book 9 on my way to 52 in 2011

Review: The Land of the Painted Caves, by Jean M. Auel

Children were not separated from adults and regularly taught in an organized way. They learned by observation and trial of adult activities, for the most part. Young children were with a caring adult most of the time, until they showed a desire to explore on their own, and whenever they expressed a desire to explore on their own, and whenever they expressed a desire to try something, they were usually given a tool and shown how. Sometimes they'd find their own tool and try to copy someone. If they really showed an aptitude or desire, child0size versions might be made for them but they weren't toys so much as smaller-size fully functional tools.
...
Community activities always included children. They were all encouraged to join in on the dancing an d singing that were a part of various festivals, and some became quite good and were encouraged. Mental concepts like counting words were usually picked up incidentally, through storytelling, games, and conversation, although one or more of the Zelandonia would occasionally take a group of children off to explain or show some particular concept or activity.

From The Land of Painted Caves, by Jean M. Auel

Learning from life. There is no better description of this philosophy of education than above, and there will always be people who disagree, or who would argue that our times have changed so drastically since those days of prehistory that such learning is no longer possible, but when I read this passage from Auel's new book I marked it and had to go back and reread it. It was a like a mantra.

It was also the only really good part of her new book. I should have known that after such a long wait nothing could live up to expectations. Beginning in the very first chapter it is clear that the author has lost touch with her characters. They aren't as rich and well drawn in this book as in her previous ones. I wondered if that was part of the plan, since some of the story deals with difficulties in their relationship, but since it picks up right about where the last one left off, the change is sudden and doesn't feel like a natural one.

The book also suffers from increasing long-windedness. This was not unenjoyable in earlier books, when she was describing the landscape as our heroes traveled from place to place, but in Painted Caves we spend the entire middle section (the second of three) touring caves with them, and this is not a case of "no two caves are alike". Monotony and repetition. Monotony and repetition. We spend 25 pages touring one cave, at the end of which I was skipping paragraph upon paragraph of descriptions of strange animal representations and images of female genitalia.

Editing, or lack thereof, is another problem. Repetition has always been Auel's style, but in the past it was part of natural flow in the story while here it seems like a way to fill up pages and make the story seem thicker. As time passes I would expect our characters and the story to dwell less on the past, recapping less of the previous books, but we never get such a reprieve. And some of her "in-book" repetition ends up being contradictory. At one point in the middle of the first section our heroes come up with a seemingly brand new ingenious idea, which would be fine if they hadn't already discussed it at the beginning, and then at the end of the section the concept is revisited again as if it has already been worked out at a point before their second brainstorm. That lack of continuity happens more than once, but it isn't nearly as disruptive as the feeling that Ayla, our heroin, continues to be a source of surprise, and sometimes angst, to the people of her mate's cave. Even in the final section, after she has lived with them for six years, and even to her mentor of as many years. Really, they have to know her by now.

Part three of the book, the final section, is its saving grace. While it still feels contrived and disjointed, and while the characters are still missing the depth of personality we've been treated to in past books, there is at least somewhat of a return to a focus on social interaction. There is a strange feeling, though, when, now six years later, some story threads from the fifth book are picked up as though no time passed at all. This was okay with me—they are familiar and comfortable threads—but really they are out of place.

I didn't hate the book, but honestly if I hadn't read any of the first five I think I would have. The only thing that kept me engaged throughout was my previous attachment to the characters themselves. And if I read it again I might just skip the middle section. This is supposedly the last book for the series, but Auel leaves a door wide open at the end, and as our people begin dealing with the first flushes of monogamy she hints at a possible major twist. That's as close as I'll come to giving anything away, but I wouldn't be surprised if there was a sequel at some point. I think she's threatened never to write again before anyhow.

Book 8 on my way to 52 in 2011