Saturday, December 23, 2017

Book #66 - The Naked and the Dead (Norman Mailer)



War is hell. And that's my rationale for sipping on a Plymouth Navy Strength Gin martini while writing this review.  If I didn't steady my nerves with copious quantities of booze, I might freak out from the trauma of writing about a novel that delves into the horrors of war.  And the Plymouth Navy Strength Gin has plenty of booze.  It's just as delicious as "regular" Plymouth Gin but it's 57% alcohol instead of 41.2%.  Sure it's a bit harsher due to the higher proof, but it gets you there quicker and it's apparently appropriate to use when discussing a war novel because it's approved by the navy.  Although I'm not sure which navy.  Probably the British Navy, but I'm just guessing there.  Ahoy mates, down the hatch!

Anyway, yes, war is hell, even after a martini or two. And this book was hell for me to get through.  Not because its descriptions of warfare are so hellish that I freaked out.  But actually because I found it a bit dull, at least the first half of the book.  In fact, this was my second attempt to read the novel...the first attempt was a year or so ago, and petered out after about a hundred pages.  This time I stuck with it, and I'm glad to say that the novel picked up in the second half in a big way, although the first half was slow going.  War may be hell, but reading about it became less hellish as the book went along.  At least for me, not for the characters.

This was Norman Mailer's first book.  He went into the army after graduating from Harvard (personal note: he was a classmate of my father's at Harvard, although my father never knew him), and served in the Pacific during World War II, and his experiences there formed the basis of this novel.  The theme of this novel is not so much "war is hell" (although it is hell, and some of the characters go through hellish experiences), but more "much of war is absurd and pointless".  This novel follows a platoon of soldiers involved in fighting for the capture of the fictitious Pacific island Anopopei from the Japanese. In the first half of the novel, the soldiers land on the island, have a couple of major battles, and then just hang around in camp while the American and Japanese lines hold tight as they lob artillery at one another.  It's basically a stalemate.  The Americans are a hodge-podge of ethnicities (A Mexican!  Two Jews!) and backgrounds (An Ivy League grad! A working class redneck!), who suffered through the Depression and then volunteered for, or got drafted into, the army.  They're bored and/or scared, except for General Cummings who is in charge of the invasion and is a son of a bitch, as generals are want to be, and Croft, a patrol leader who is a sadistic, hard-driving motherfucker (or in the case of this novel, a motherfugger...Mailer notoriously had to change every "fuck" in the novel, and there are lots of them, to "fug" in order to please his publisher).  Frankly, I found the characters hard to tell apart at times.  Mailer goes into their backgrounds in flashbacks, but many of these are a bit forgettable, and many of the characters blurred together for me.  You can tell this is a first novel...some of the dialog is wooden and not very believable, and the book could have used some editing at over 700 pages.

Anyway, the book picks up in the second half, when the general sends a platoon of soldiers out on a reconnaissance mission.  They are to take a boat around to the other side of the island, where they must make their way inland behind the Japanese lines, to scout out the enemy's positions.  This part of the book is much more suspenseful, and Mailer does a great job with making this part more of a page turner.  But ultimately the mission becomes pointless.  One man is shot and seriously injured, and so four soldiers must carry him back through the jungle on a stretcher.  This makes the platoon smaller, and less capable.  Mailer's description of the soldiers carrying the wounded man back is masterful...it's brutally hot and arduous and completely exhausting, and the wounded man's condition worsens and worsens.  The author really makes you feel the men's pain and exhaustion.  It made me realize, as an old fuck, that war is a young man's domain...old dudes like me never would survive this shit.  In the end, the reconnaissance mission proves pointless...the wounded man dies, and the rest of the men have to turn back when they are savagely attacked by hornets while at the point of complete exhaustion from trying to climb a mountain over to the Japanese positions.  And to cap it all off, while the platoon is on its reconnaissance mission, the Japanese lines collapse due in part to hunger and exhaustion of the enemy, and in part due to a lucky mistake that a junior American officer makes while the general is away, and so the Americans easily take the island without need of the reconnaissance mission.  Mailer is good at making his point that war is absurd and boring and exhausting, and that many people die for pointless and absurd reasons.  But I think Joseph Heller's Catch 22 makes these same points when it came out 13 years later, in what is a much better novel.

And in the end, this novel seems a bit dated.  When it was written, Mailer's journalistic style, his descriptions of not always admirable common soldiers, and the sometimes brutal nihilism must have all come as a shock to Americans in the 1940s.  But today, the world seems to have caught up with Mailer's point of view.  Movies like Saving Private Ryan, Platoon, and Full Metal Jacket all portray the brutality and dehumanization and absurdity of war in ways beyond what people were exposed to in mid-Twentieth Century America.  And TV shows like Band of Brothers and The Pacific also cast World War II in a more realistic and brutal light (both of which, by the way, are based on real soldiers' stories and are well worth watching, if you haven't seen them).  So yeah, I'm glad I read this book, but it's not one of my favorites that I've read for this blog.  Ah well, so war may be hell, but writing an enduring war novel that remains relevant for centuries may be even more hellish.  Unless you're Homer...his Iliad has certainly stood the test of time.  But then, Homer never got to enjoy a delicious martini.  Poor guy...that in itself is a whole different type of hell.

Friday, July 21, 2017

Book #65 (Part 3) - Sugar Street (Naguib Mahfouz)



Motherfuckers!!  They get me every time!!  So I go to the liquor store, which in my case is Beverages and More (who have now taken to calling themselves BevMo!, apparently because Americans can no longer handle stores with more than one word in their names.  And the exclamation mark?  Is that really necessary?  It reminds me of the time back in the 1980s when the town of "Hamilton", Ohio changed their name to "Hamilton!".  With an exclamation mark.  Seriously, they did that.  Over the years they seem to have dropped it, probably because these days the exclamation mark would more appropriately be a used needle.  But I digress.  I mean, I really digressed!) looking to re-up my gin supply.  My favorites, as anyone who's actually read a couple of my blog posts would know (i.e. no one), include Hendrick's, Plymouth, Tanqueray Ten, and a new favorite Sipsmith London Dry Gin. I'm digressing again, but seriously, that Sipsmith gin is really good shit and makes an awesome martini.  It's from a newish (founded 2009) London microdistillery and these guys have it down...my hats off to them, even though I rarely wear a hat.  Anyway, so I'm at Beverages and More (I refuse to fucking use the name "BevMo!", at least in this post) looking at the gins when a new, shiny bottle catches my eye: Uncle Val's Handcrafted Peppered Gin.  Hmmm, my interest is piqued!  I read the bottle, and this gin is infused with red peppers, black peppers, and pimento.  My interest is further piqued!  It's made by a microdistillery in Bend, Oregon.  I've been to Bend, and it's a lovely town...very outdoorsy, in the middle of Oregon.  So I'm like "Fuck it, Uncle Val sounds like a righteous dude, let's give him a chance".  I pass over Plymouth, Sipsmith, and all my other faves and I take a bottle of Uncle Val's home.  Mmmm.  I make myself a Gibson (more on that in a minute), sit down to start typing out this blog entry, take a sip, and...WTF!?!  This stuff tastes like kerosene infused with gasoline, with maybe a splash of WD-40.  Ugh, not good.  So now I'm stuck with a Gibson made from this rather disgusting gin, while a half empty bottle of Plymouth that I bought previously stares at me from the shelf, as if taunting me about how delicious my drink could have been, if only I didn't stray from the fold.  That'll teach me.  But there are starving children in some country somewhere would would love to drink my Gibson, so I will do my humanistic duty and choke it down, while ranting on and on about booze when I should be ranting about the world's great literature.  Ah well.

Anyway, on to the world's great literature.  No, wait, I promised to discuss the Gibson, my new go-to drink!  I first heard of the Gibson when Cary Grant orders one in Alfred Hitchcock's "North By Northwest" (a movie, BTW, which if you've never seen you need to go out and rent it ASAP.  One of my favorite movies of all time, and the one I consider Hitchcock's best).  A Gibson is a gin martini that contains a pickled onion or two instead of olives.  Seems like an innocuous change, but the onion really adds a flavor to the gin that, while subtle, is very different from the traditional martini with olives.  According to liquor.com (and how can you not love a website who's URL is liquor.com?) "the Gibson is believed to have been created by San Francisco businessman Walter D.K. Gibson in the late 1800s, who thought that eating onions prevented colds".  Good for you, Walter, your contribution to humanity lives on over a hundred years later!  But seriously, I love this drink, or at least I do when it's made with a decent gin, and not this petroleum by-product I'm drinking now.

Alright, on to the literature!  A few weeks ago I finished Naguib Mahfouz's "Sugar Street", the third and final volume in the Cairo Trilogy.  I'm going to sum up this review right away by saying this: read these fucking books!  They are so great.  As I said in my previous two reviews, the first book of the trilogy was outstanding, while the second one dropped off a little, but this book, the third and final volume in the trilogy, was so outstanding, and so moving.  In this book, the parents in the original novel both meet their ends, of old age and decay (sigh...where I'm headed next...).  The patriarch, Al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd, once a stern, strong, commanding, and fearful presence, is now a withered shell, who has lived long enough to see all of his friends die off (side note: they never tell you that about getting old.  People say "Oh look, she lived to 105...that's so awesome, good for her!" when what they don't realize is that a 105 year old has probably seen all of her contemporaries, possibly including her children, put into the ground.  That has to be incredibly dispiriting).  He finally dies one night from stress brought on by a bombing raid (the novel takes place up to and during World War II).  Time is everyone's enemy in this book, as in life.

Meanwhile Al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd's son Kamal, who suffered through unrequited love in the last novel, is still a teacher, still writing obscure intellectual tracts, and still a bachelor.  By chance he meets up with Budur Shaddad, the younger sister of the woman he was so very in love with so many years ago, and they have a brief flirtation, rekindling many of the old feelings in Kamal's heart.  But in the end he can't pull the trigger, and he lets her get away.  It's sad and frustrating, because you want those two to get together, and you want to kick Kamal in the ass for being such a dick, but it's just who he is.  It seems pretty clear Kamal will be a bachelor for the rest of his days.  We are who we are.
Then there are Al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd's three grandsons, each of whom takes a remarkably different path in life.  The most successful of the three is Yasin's son Ridwan, a really hot-looking kid who turns out to be totally gay.  He starts sleeping with a powerful politician, which allows him to rapidly rise through the ranks of the civil service.  Meanwhile Khadija's two sons, Abd al-Muni'm and Ahmad, take completely opposite courses from each other.  One becomes a Muslim fundamentalist, more and more militantly devout.  The other goes into political journalism, and becomes a committed activist and Marxist.  Ironically, despite these divergent paths, they both get arrested for being politically subversive and end up sharing the same jail cell.  Two divergent roads leading to one convergent end.

Years ago I read "Buddenbrooks" by Thomas Mann, a classic novel of a middle class German family through the generations.  The Cairo Trilogy reminded me of that sprawling novel, tracing the story of the changing fortunes of a family through the generations.  These two works share that sense of time and change and yet the continuity of the bloodline.  But for me, a white dude from middle America, the story of a German family, despite the cultural differences, seems much more akin to the milieu I'm used to than the back alleys of early 20th century Cairo.  But the genius of Mahfouz is that he makes his characters so familiar and so human that they transcend the foreignness of the culture and become instantly relate-able.  Whether we speak English or Arabic or German, we all have the same emotions, and we all grow old and have the same frustrations.  I highly recommend these books, they're some of the best I've read for this blog.  And have a Gibson while you're at it.  Trust me.  Just use a good gin.

Monday, May 1, 2017

Book #65 (Part 2) - Palace of Desire (Naguib Mahfouz)



Sometimes I look at my life and I ask "What the Fuck"? Especially after a delicious Plymouth Gin martini, like I'm drinking now.  I mean, seriously, WTF??  I used to be an avid jogger, but I had to stop last year because my right knee started bothering me.  And by bothering me, I mean that I was barely able to walk up stairs.  "Osteoarthritis" said the doctor, and I was like WTF?!?  That only happens to old people!  So fuck, I'm now officially old and falling apart.  I mean, I knew that already but to have blatant confirmation of the fact from a medical doctor is very unnerving.  Meanwhile two weeks ago I had to "March for Science", because apparently there are lots of idiots in our government who claim they are "not a scientist" and therefore can't evaluate scientific knowledge and therefore decide they can ignore it with impunity when making decisions that affect the future of ourselves, our children, our nation, and the world.  I mean, seriously?  Get with the fucking program!  I'm a scientist with osteoarthritis and I'm telling you that a nation that ignores science is a nation that's going to fuck itself over big time.  If you don't trust science then stop using your computer and your iPhone and your TV and the electric grid and medicine, because all that shit came from the science you don't believe in.  Motherfuckers!  Am I ranting?  Hell yes, I'm ranting!

Whew, that was the gin talking.  Calming down and feeling better now.  Perhaps it's the second martini that's helping.  But you know who's not feeling better?  Our man, Al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd al-Jawad (see previous post).  In the second novel of Naguib Mahfouz's Cairo Trilogy, "Palace of Desire", poor Al is getting old just like I am.  The despotic patriarch is feeling his old age when he courts Zanuba, a lute player.  When he was a younger man he could charm any woman he wanted, with or without a little cash changing hands, but now Zanuba will only get with him if he sets her up in her own place and totally supports her.  Damn, she plays a hard bargain!  But speaking of hard, Al is totally infatuated with her, so he goes for it and plays the part of sugar daddy.  Naturally his wife is none the wiser.  Al enjoys himself for awhile but then finds out that Zanuba is fucking another, younger man.  Whaaa?  "Not cool", thinks Al, but then he finds out that the other man is his own son Yasin!  Al is conflicted.  He's jealous, but he also thinks that well, Yasin is a part of him so it's not really a betrayal, and this helps him calm down.  He's sure Yasin doesn't know he's been fucking Zanuba (he doesn't), and he's not sure Zanuba knows that Yasin is his son (she does), so he's actually cool with it.  But then Yasin marries Zanuba and he is not at all pleased, because his son is marrying a whore.  Is that a double standard?  Hell yes.  But they get married anyway, and then Al has a stroke when he goes back to party with his old friends.  He recovers, but the point is made:  Al is getting old and falling apart.  I wonder if his knees are arthritic like mine?

Meanwhile, Al's other son, Kamal, has totally fallen in love.  Since the last novel ended, Kamal has grown up into a soul-searching intellectual who decides to go to teaching college instead of becoming a lawyer or government official as his father had hoped (in one memorable passage, his father (who is not at all an intellectual) can't decide whether Kamal is an idiot or insane for wanting to go to teacher's college and bypassing other more lucrative career options).  One of Kamal's friends is the son of a rich, cosmopolitan family, and Kamal soon falls madly in love with his friend's sister, Aisha.  Aisha is smart, witty, and beautiful, and a couple of years older than Kamal.  Kamal is completely smitten and falls into a terrible, tortured unrequited love.  This part of the book is a great description of young love, and what it feels like, and the reader develops a great sympathy for poor Kamal.  But at the same time, it becomes a bit tedious as it goes on and on and on for pages and pages and you know that Kamal is never going to get with her, and you're like "Jesus, Kamal, this is not going to happen!".  But yet, isn't that the epitome of unrequited love?  To the person in love it's the entire universe, and they can think of nothing else, but to everyone else it's like "Oh God, just fucking get over it and move on because I'm bored to death of hearing about this crap".  So it goes.  Anyway, of course Kamal ultimately gets disappointed when his love is ignored by Aisha and she marries a mutual friend.  Ouch!

This novel was good, but it didn't quite rise to the level of the first novel in the trilogy, which was amazing.  This seems more like a "middle novel".  But I'm anxious to see what happens next, and thus I'm looking forward to reading the third and final part of the trilogy.  Assuming I don't keel over dead from osteoarthritis before I can finish it.

Saturday, March 4, 2017

Book #65 (Part 1) - Palace Walk (Naguib Mahfouz)



It used to be when you got a gin and tonic in a bar, or made one at home, you'd get some rotgut gin mixed with some Schweppes or Canada Dry tonic water and a slice of lime.  QED, done.  But thanks to the invention of hipsters, even this simple drink has now gone upscale.  In addition to the obvious plethora of fine gins, many of which have been discussed in detail in this blog (which really should be focusing on fine literature but often gets remarkably distracted by booze), one can find all kinds of "artisan" tonic water.  Naturally it comes at a premium price, because capitalism, but the advertisements and word of mouth make it seem so worth it.  Delicious, sparkling, GMO-free, vaccine-free tonic water, ready to add to your expensive gin and a slice of fresh, locally-grown, orchard-to-market lime, and you're off to paradise! And this insanely spectacular hand-made tonic water is available at a semi-reasonable price that's only five-to-ten times that of Schweppes.  Go for it, dude!  Your great-grandfather drank Schweppes, and now he's dead, probably from the tasteless gin and tonics he was forced to drink because there were no hipsters around yet to imagine up the idea of artisan tonic water.  Poor guy!  It's your duty to your dead ancestors to drink an abundance of the awesome premium gin and tonics that today's technology has made possible.  I jumped on this peculiar but totally reasonable bandwagon myself tonight by making a gin and tonic using Plymouth Gin and Fever Tree Indian Tonic Water, plus not one but TWO slices of lime.  Fuck yeah!  If the British had this gin and tonic 100 years ago they'd still have an empire!  It's that good!  Or maybe I'm just writing that because this is my second one, and they're pretty stiff drinks.  That would explain my overuse of exclamation marks.  Meh, whatever, I'm having a good time.  Maybe a third is in order?  Definitely...hold on a second!!

Aaah, now that's refreshing.  Wait, now where was I?  Oh yeah, "Palace Walk" by Naguib Mahfouz.  This is one of the best books I've read in a long time, hands down.  I mean, I really loved this book, almost as much as I'm loving this third, very delicious and refreshing artisan gin and tonic.  This book is brilliant.  And why do I say that?  Is that just the gin and tonic talking?  Well, maybe, but let me try to explain and then you can decide.  Naguib Mahfouz was an Egyptian author, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1988.  Apparently it was only after he won the Nobel Prize that this book, "Palace Walk", as well as the two other books in this trilogy (called the "Cairo Trilogy"), were translated into English, even though this book was first published (in Arabic) in 1956.  How sad.  Especially because this book is brilliant!  Did I mention that?  This book takes place in the very early 1900s, during and just after World War I, and focuses on the lives of a family living in Cairo, Egypt (not Cairo, Illinois...a totally different place.  Trust me, I've been to both and there's no confusing the two).  The culture and way of life of this family is totally different from what I experience as a white guy in 21st century America.  I mean totally different, starting with the fact that the family is Muslim, and religion plays a big role in their lives.  And they live in an entirely different social and political world as well, one totally alien to what I've experienced in my very long, gin-soaked, and almost completed life.  And yet, the characters!!!  Mahfouz's writing and insight into his characters is exquisite.  Even though they lived in a distant time and place, with different social norms, a different religion, and a different culture, they are so human, so like the people I know in my life, and so like myself.  The author is a brilliant observer of how humans think and behave, and despite the differences in the character's background and my background I could totally relate to them...to how they felt and thought and behaved.  This book really hits home that humans behave like humans behave, and it doesn't matter if it's in Trump's America or in British-occupied Muslim Egypt 100 years ago.  People are people.  Fuck this book was good.  It's the work of a great writer.  If you like literary fiction, you should read it.  I can't wait to read the next two parts of the trilogy.  Woah, this third gin and tonic is fully kicking in.  Hmm, maybe I need a beer chaser.  Would that be prudent?  

This novel doesn't really have a central character, because it's about a whole family, but the central character in that family is Al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd al-Jawad, or Al-Sayyid Ahmad for short.  Maybe for the purpose of this blog I will just call him Al, because that's easier to type out post-gin and tonic.  Al is the father, or more accurately the patriarch, of the family.  Al lays down the law!  His friends and co-workers (he owns a general store) love the guy...always laughing, always friendly and in good spirits...a real nice guy and everybody's pal.  But they only see half of his personality.  Because when he's at home he's a complete tyrant, who is feared by his entire family.  He's stern, he's angry, he's fearsome.  His wife, Amina, is the exact opposite...very sweet, docile, and submissive.  In fact, so submissive that she hasn't been out of the house in years, except to visit her mother, and all travel must be approved and accompanied by her husband.  However, I must say that this seems not untypical for this society, as everyone else acts like this is normal for wives to be so cloistered, although Al seems to lay a heavier hand on his family than most.  One time while Al is out of town for a few days, Amina's children convince her to take the opportunity to get out of the house.  They encourage her to have the youngest son, Kamal, accompany her to the local holy mosque that she has always longed to visit (she's a very pious woman).  After much hesitation and angst, she does so, and the visit to the shrine means a lot to her, but on her way back she freaks out due to guilt and to all the commotion in the street (which she is not used to) and faints in the street, breaking her collarbone.  Her children urge her to lie about what happened, but she cannot do that, so when Al returns home she tells him everything that happened.  He waits until her collarbone has healed, and then he kicks her out of the house for daring to leave without his permission.  She stays with her mother for awhile, and thinks the marriage is over, but eventually Al summons her back when their youngest daughter gets engaged.  But everyone gets the message:  don't fuck with Al.

The family has five kids:  Yasim, a son from Al's first wife (they divorced), Fahmy (another son), Khadija and Aisha (daughters) and the youngest son, Kamal, a smart and sensitive 10-year old who apparently is closely modeled on the author himself.  Again, these characters are all wonderfully drawn.  Every one of them feels so real to me, and they all have such distinct personalities.  Damn, this guy is such a great writer!  Fahmy is very idealistic and practical and earnest, but always seems like a character bound for an ill fate (Spoiler alert: he is).  He's a law student who gets obsessed by politics, and becomes active in the revolution against the British that occurs near the novel's end.  Khadija, the eldest daughter, is not a very physically attractive girl, but has a very strong personality.  She's quite smart, and uses her caustic and bitter wit to constantly cut others down.  Aisha, the other daughter, is the opposite.  Everyone is in awe of how physically beautiful she is, but she takes more after her mother in her personality...very upbeat and pleasant and pretty mellow.  Kamal, the youngest son, as I said, is a very smart, sensitive, curious and fearless ten year old.  When the British soldiers occupy their street, terrifying the community, Kamal goes up and befriends them.  But perhaps my favorite of the children is Yasim, the eldest.  Not because he's a good guy, but quite the opposite, because he's so bad.  Yasim takes after all the worst traits of his father.  He's a total hedonist, who lives a life of wine, women, and song.  Which is what his father does when he goes out at night, leaving his family behind.  In fact, fairly early on Yasim accidentally encounters his father while out whoring around one night.  Yasim secretly observes his father womanizing, laughing, and drinking.  All Yasim has ever known of his father is the unsmiling angry tyrant at home, so seeing his father in this manner is an eye opener.  It gives Yasim a newfound respect for his father, and makes him understand where his own bad tendencies come from.  Remember, these people are all supposedly pious Muslims, and the father is very religious and strict, so drinking is a total non-sequitur.  But then again, that's the human condition, isn't it?

One turning point in the book is the night Aisha, the youngest, extremely beautiful daughter, gets married.  Her father has arranged a marriage to the son of a distinguished and wealthy family.  There's a big party, and Yasim gets drunk, while hiding his drinking from his family, of course.  Yasim returns home very late at night, and feeling very horny, he tries to rape the family servant who is sleeping outside in the courtyard due to the hot evening.  This woman has been with the family for years, and is quite old.  When Yasim climbs on top of her as she lays there sleeping, she awakens and jumps up and screams, awakening the entire family.  Scandal ensues.  Al decides that the best thing for Yasim would be to get married, to give him an outlet for his physical desires, so he arranges a marriage between Yasim and the daughter of a friend.  Yasim is totally pumped...woo hoo, a chance to have sex any time he wants!!  But after a few months of marriage, he starts to get bored and goes back to his old ways of whoring around town.  Ah well, nice try.  Eventually they get divorced, because while Al's wife may put up with this type of behavior from her husband, Yasim's wife is younger and more modern and isn't going to put up with any of this bullshit.  Poor Yasim.  He eventually goes on to try to rape another servant (and fails once again, and the whole family finds out once again to great scandal) but that's another story.

More things happen.  Khadija marries Aisha's brother-in-law, Fahmy gets caught up in the revolution, etc. etc.  The times they are a changing through the course of this novel, and that's the point.  The ancient ways are giving way to the modern age, and Al is trying to hold it all together with his angry authority.  Will he succeed?  It's getting more and more difficult as the book goes on.  And the family receives a staggering blow at the end of this first novel of the trilogy.  I've just started on the second novel, "Palace of Desire", which occurs five or six years after the events of "Palace Walk", and the reverberations of this tragedy, and of the continually changing times, are being made clear.  Changes are coming, and I will get into that in my next post.  But for now, like the Egyptians struggling to come out from under British rule, I need to escape from the effects of these delicious gin and tonics.  Time for a lot for water and sleep...

Tuesday, January 10, 2017

Book #64 - Gulliver's Travels (Jonathan Swift)



We're now a couple of days into the year 2017, and it's time for me to take stock. I started this blog nine years ago, when I thought I was old but I was actually NINE years younger than I am now, which makes me really old now. The years of drinking and swearing and reading great literature have slowly taken their toll: my knees hurt, I have to eat antacids like they're candy, and my brain doesn't remember things the way it used to.  Wait, where was I?  Hmmm.  And then there's the whole 2016 election, which has thrown me for a loop.  I have never gotten political in this blog, but the thought  of Donald Trump with his hands on the nuclear codes makes me feel like the whole world has gone topsy-turvy.  Fortunately my aching knees and a steady diet of martinis keep me from thinking about this all the time.  And right now I'm drinking an ice cold Plymouth Gin martini.  Long time readers of this blog, of which there are none, will recognize this as one of my "go to" gins for martinis...smooth, delicious, not too forward.  And I have in it habanero-stuffed olives, which gives the drink a nice kick at the end.  And since my brain doesn't remember things the way it used to, this can mean a pleasantly unexpected surprise at the bottom of the glass.

Taking more stock: when I started this blog, book blogs were a thing.  Are they still?  I think everyone has migrated to sites like Goodreads and their ilk, making solo book blogs like this one a throwback.  But that's OK, I am so old that I'm considered "retro" and am thus now hip again.  Or so I tell myself.  But it's OK, in a few minutes my martini and encroaching senility will have wiped the memory of these thoughts out of my brain and my mind will have happily moved on to some other thought, like how much my knees are hurting.

But I need to try to focus my rapidly decaying and gin-soaked mind on the issue at hand: Jonathan Swift's "Gulliver's Travels", the full title of which is "Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships".  Whew!  This book couldn't be more relevant in this day and age.  The strange reality in which Lemuel Gulliver travels through is no less strange than the reality where Donald Trump is elected president.  I mean, what the freaking fuck??  Donald Trump?!?  Wait, I digressed again, didn't I...?

Lemuel Gulliver is working as a ship's surgeon when a violent storm cause a shipwreck that kills all of his crew mates. He manages to swim ashore and falls asleep in exhaustion. When he awakens he finds he's been tied town by tiny ropes, as illustrated in the photo above. I don't know about you, but this is the one image from "Gulliver's Travels" that I have had since childhood, but it's also the only thing I really knew about the story.  Turns out that Gulliver has washed ashore onto the land of Lilliput, which is occupied by tiny people a few inches tall.  At first the residents are freaked out by him, hence they tie him down, but eventually they learn to trust him, and Gulliver makes the effort to understand them and learn their language.  As he does, he becomes a favorite of the Royal Court.  He also learns that some of their ideas are crazy and capricious, as illustrated by the fact that bitter political rivalries have formed over such things as a disagreement over which end of an egg should be cracked first.  Swift is a master satirist, and this is one of the many times that he skewers English society in this novel, here making fun of how bitter disputes can form over seemingly small differences in custom and religion.  I take the egg-cracking dispute to satirize the differences between Protestants and Catholics, which caused centuries of bitter warfare in Europe after the Reformation, even though both sides were Christian, read the same Bible, and worshiped the same God.  Gulliver helps the Lilliputian emperor by attacking their rivals, the Blefuscudians (whom they disagree with on the egg-cracking issue), and stealing their naval fleet, which he does by wading through the channel separating their islands.  But the Lilliputians turn on him when, in one pretty hilarious scene, he puts out a fire in the royal palace by urinating on it.  While he saves lives and property, the Lilliputians cannot forgive him for this, even though it seemed like a pretty resourceful idea to me.  When he learns that they have decided to punish him by blinding him, he flees to Blefuscu, where he finds a "normal"-sized boat that is shipwrecked offshore.  He manages to recover and fix up the boat, which he sails back to England.  There he makes a living exhibiting miniature animals he has taken from Blefuscu.  All's well that ends well.
And yet, Gulliver can't resist the urge to travel once again.  Come on, dude, stop pressing your luck! Still, he sets sail working on another ship.  All goes well for awhile, then they put ashore on an unknown island.  As Gulliver is puttering about on land, he sees the ship taking off without him due to a giant chasing after the boat.  Turns out Gulliver is stranded in Brobdingnag, which is a land populated by giant creatures, including people.  Basically it's the opposite of Lilliput...this time it's Gulliver who's the little person.  Gulliver is discovered by a farmer and is cared for (in a cage) by the farmer's daughter.  The farmer makes a good amount of money carrying Gulliver around in his cage and showing him off at fairs, until the queen purchases him from the farmer.  So then he hangs out at the royal court where they are amused by his tiny size.  He has discussions with the king about England and its politics, which the king finds ridiculous since Gulliver and his people are so tiny.  How could they have any significant thoughts and politics since they're so tiny, the king wonders, and it's perhaps a good point.  How can such tiny creatures think themselves so important and take themselves so seriously?  Gulliver is offended and tries to impress the king by telling him about gunpowder, which the Borbdingnags have no knowledge of, only to find the king repulsed by the invention when he realizes the horrible things it could be used for.  The end result is that the king has even more scorn for England and its people, the opposite of what Gulliver intended.  The passages where this is all described are pretty funny, and a pretty good satirical damnation of western society and its ways.

One day, on a trip to the beach, Gulliver is in his cage when a giant eagle grabs the cage and carries Gulliver out to sea.  The eagle eventually drops him into the ocean, where he is rescued by a passing ship and returned to England.  Gulliver goes back to his wife and kids but stays only two months before setting out once again (I feel for this dude's family...I mean, he's constantly abandoning them!).  Once again, tragedy strikes and his ship is attacked by pirates, with Gulliver ending up marooned on a strange island.  But then he's rescued by an even stranger island...an island called Laputa that floats in the air!  This turns out to be one of the weirdest places Gulliver visits.  The residents of Laputa are obsessed with math and music, but because of this they are totally spaced out.  They need special assistants who slap them on the ears when they need to listen and slap them on the mouths when they need to respond, because they're so lost in thought they'd otherwise forget and drop the conversation.  Actually, I have encountered a few scientist colleagues myself who are like that.  The floating island is controlled by astronomers, who move around a large magnetic stone to change the island's movement and position in the air.  The king can position the island over lands he controls, and can subjugate the populations by blocking out the sun with the floating island or dropping rocks on the inhabitants below.  In today's political discourse the Laputans would be called "the elites", because they're out of touch with the people below whom they rule over...the royals on Laputa never go to the lands below, and they live in this abstract world of thought and math and science.  Gulliver finally manages to leave Laputa because he is bored to tears...no one there is interested in him, because they're lost in mathematical and musical thoughts.  Gulliver then goes to one of the lands below called Balnibarbi.  Here he finds a land that is in ruins, with misshapen houses, and crazy, unworkable farming techniques.  He discovers that years ago some of the inhabitants went to Laputa, where they learned a little science and math, and when the returned they founded an academy to study science and discover new techniques.  However, their newfound enthusiasm for science and math didn't match up to their intellect, and their schemes for remaking society were all crazy and unworkable.  Gulliver travels to the academy where he learns of some of their latest research, such as trying to extract sunbeams from cucumbers, building houses from the roof down, mixing paint by using smell only, and turning excrement back into food.  Obviously these projects aren't going well, and schemes of this type explain some of the disorder and ruin he finds in Balnibarbi.  Swift seems not to be satirizing science itself, but in its misuse to develop crazy fanciful schemes.  In other words, he worries about what human folly will do when it acquires scientific knowledge.  He foresees both science being a tool of terror (using the floating island of Laputa to rule over others by blocking the sun and performing aerial bombardment) and as a tool of folly.  Both of which are still concerns today, actually, although I like to think that science has also done a lot of good for humanity (see, for example, penicillin, and the iPhone).  Still, his idea of using science for terror purposes presages much of the twentieth century.  After leaving Balnibarbi, Gulliver visits the island of Glubbdubdrib, an island of magicians who conjure up ancient historical figures for Gulliver to chat with, and the island of Luggnagg, where he meets people called struldbrugs, who are immortal.  You'd think being immortal would be awesome, but the struldbrugs don't stay young even though they live forever...they just grow old, stubborn, prejudiced, greedy, and sad.  They have most of their estates away from them at the age of 80 or else they would eventually acquire all the nations wealth and end up destroying society.  Interesting...there's lots of talk today on how we can extend the human lifespan, but Swift has a good point here, in that this might not be good at all for both the individual and for society.  Gulliver then leaves Luggnagg, makes his way to Japan, and from there returns to England aboard a Dutch ship.

Gulliver's last and final voyage is the one I found most entertaining.  He returns to sea (leaving behind his newly pregnant wife....that poor woman!), this time as the captain of a boat, but his crew mutinies and abandons him on the shores of a strange land.  He encounters a savage race of hideous human-like creatures (I imagined cavemen in my mind) called Yahoos (Wow, so that's where the word comes from!  Who knew??).  He then encounters the Houyhnhnms, a race of talking horses.  It took me a while to get the joke, but if you say aloud the word "Houyhnhnms" in a rough manner it sounds like a horse neighing.  The land that Gulliver finds himself in is a land where horses (Houyhnhnms) are the intelligent rational creatures, who rule over humans (Yahoos) who are brutal savages.  Gulliver sympathizes with the Houyhnhnms, and loves hanging out with them, and tries to get them to appreciate him, rather than classify him as another Yahoo, which they are prone to do.  Gulliver wants to stay with the Houyhnhnms and doesn't want to return home (again, that poor wife of his!).  Gulliver also tells the Houyhnhnms all about European society, but the Houyhnhnms decide that European humans are not so different from the savage Yahoos, they just have more developed systems of government and learning.  Oooh, SNAP!  Gulliver is housed by one of the Houyhnhnms, and is quite comfortable, but his master eventually tells him that the other Houyhnhnms are upset that he has a Yahoo living in his house, and the Houyhnhnms decide that Gulliver must be banished.  By this time, Gulliveer is a total misanthrope, and thinks of all humans as savage Yahoos, so he doesn't want to go back and live with humans again.  But a European sailing vessel finds him and takes him back to England.  He returns to his family, but is miserable and doesn't want them to be near them.  Instead, he hangs out and converses with his horses.  Thus the story ends with Gulliver a rather crazed misanthrope who would rather be with animals (horses) than humans.  And yet the world of the Houyhnhnms that he longs for wasn't really all that great...the Houyhnhnms seemed to just hang out and not really do anything or get excited about anything.  They just existed...they peacefully existed, but there was no life there.  While Gulliver may have gotten disgusted with human society, it's the foibles and failings and quirks of humanity that keeps us interesting.  Gulliver never quite got that.

And so this novel seems very relevant today, as the Donald Trump administration is about to begin here in the U.S.  The president elect seems irrational and unpredictable, and the world seems to have gone as crazy as a world populated by giants, or little people, or odd intellectuals, or talking horses.  But despite the feeling of losing our bearings, one cannot argue that the next four years won't be interesting, and it's humanity's foibles and failings and quirks that keep us wondering what's going to happen next.  Whatever it is, we're all Yahoos, so it should be interesting.  One thing is for certain, though: the martinis will keep flowing.