The Things They Carried (Tim O'Brien)

Once again, I have made a detour off my list of the 105 must-read books.  I'm not sure why, really.  I heard about this book (I'm not even sure where now) and heard it described as a modern American classic.  Having taken a few months to get through "Middlemarch", I was looking for something completely different, and I figured a work about the Vietnam War would probably fit that bill.  Funny, "Middlemarch" takes place at a time when what we think of as the modern world is just beginning...the railroads are just being built, and England is starting to rapidly reform and change.  The Vietnam War, which is the subject of Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried", is a thoroughly modern war, even though it took place over 40 years ago now (wow, hard to believe).  Yeah, they had wars in the 1830s, but it was way different back then.  The mass slaughter of World War I was still 80 years in the future, and a war like Vietnam where the soldiers listened to rock and roll would have been unfathomable to the good folk of "Middlemarch".  But I guess that might be obvious.

"The Things They Carried" is a collection of short stories about the Vietnam War.  Like "Winesburg, Ohio" the stories are related in that the same characters appear again and again.  Here the stories are all about one company of soldiers in Vietnam, including a soldier named Tim O'Brien.  In fact, the author blurs the line between fiction and reality in this book, as the characters and incidents are based on the author's experience fighting in the Vietnam War.  Part of the point of the book is the blurring of what really happened and what is fiction.  The author says at one point that it's his right as an author to change the facts to make the story more real.  In order to convey to someone who wasn't there the true experience of Vietnam, he alters the facts to make the story pack more of a punch, to make it more visceral.  Because when he describes lying in a field of mud and shit (literally, the field was used as an outhouse by the locals), and mortar fire is raining down all around, and his best buddy dies in front of him because he sinks into the mud and shit and subsequently drowns, it's a horrifying and gripping story for softies like me who are reading the book while lying on the couch sipping on a glass of 21 year-old rye whiskey and have never been under mortar fire, let alone enemy fire of any kind, unless you count being jostled while trying to get a place at the bar.  But also, I could imagine that war, and especially this war where everyone is drafted and doesn't want to be there, is a very surreal experience...almost as if the real experience already blurs the line between fiction and reality.

The stories in this book cover the gamut of the war experience...contemplating fleeing to Canada to avoid the draft but ultimately going to war for no other reason than to save face, looking into the eyes of someone you've just killed and wondering who they were and what their life was like, watching your friends die in horrific ways, getting dumped by your girlfriend while at war, going back home and not having anyone understand how empty and alone you now feel.  But as I said, this book also deals with questions of what it means to tell these stories, of how the storyteller can viscerally impact the reader of these stories to make it more like actually experiencing them, but also how the experiences themselves sometimes make it hard to differentiate between fiction and reality.  And some of these stories are told from multiple points of views, and the stories are different from each point of view...sort of Rashomon-esque.  And it's all very meta, because O'Brien will often question his role as a writer, and his reliability as a narrator, making it harder to tell what's fiction, what's reality, and what's just him fucking with you.  It's an odd book, but a gripping one.  And it was a quick read...I plowed through it in a few days, unlike "Middlemarch" which probably no one has ever "plowed through", nor should they.  Along with Michael Herr's "Dispatches" it's probably the best book I've read about the Vietnam War.  So if you too have just read "Middlemarch" and want a change of pace, or if you just want to read a poignant modern American classic, this book fits the bill nicely.

Book #55 - Middlemarch (George Eliot)

Two weeks ago I finished George Eliot's "Middlemarch".  And for the first time since I started this blog, I've had serious writer's block.  Whiskey didn't help, martinis didn't help (although they were made with Plymouth Gin and they were delicious!), and even copious, ice-cold bottles of the new California Lager from the Anchor Steam Brewery here in San Francisco didn't help, despite it's being one of the best new beers I've had in a long, long time.  I thought I might try finding the necessary inspiration by calling up Chloe Sevigny and seeing if she'd want to drive down the California coast with me in a rented 1968 Porsche convertible, but then I thought that would take me even further from my goal of blogging about "Middlemarch".  No, I needed to buck up, man up, saddle up, and sit down and write this damn thing.  So I made a cup of Four Barrel coffee, sat down, and stared at the flickering computer screen until I started typing this out.  But you'll notice I still haven't talked about "Middlemarch".  Damn it!

OK, so why is this so difficult?  Maybe it's because this book has left me stunned.  Reading it reminded me of when I listen to the piano playing of Teddy Wilson and I think "Oh.  So that's what genius is.  I will never be 1/10 that good at anything.  I think I'm going to lie on my couch, have a few California Lagers, and watch old reruns of "Knight Rider"".

This book is a work of genius.  Reading the sentences is like eating a stick of butter...you can't go very fast because it's so rich and thick.  Saying her characters are nuanced is as nuanced as turning off your Kindle by taking a sledgehammer to it.  I mean, her characters are so complex, and so real.  Her writing is like reading a 19th century version of a Hi-Def 3D movie.

But enough metaphors and similes.  "Middlemarch" is the story of the inhabitants of the small English village of Middlemarch in the early 1800s, around the time of the Reform Act of 1832.  England was beginning to modernize as the industrial revolution took hold and the railroads started to link the country together.  It was a time of great change.  The novel focuses largely, but not entirely, on the story of two couples.  Dorthea Brooke is a beautiful, young, smart idealist who marries a much older man, Edward Casaubon, who Dorthea thinks is a brilliant intellectual, but who turns out to be not so brilliant and kind of an asshole.  And "kind of" is being generous.  The guy is old and cranky and insecure and now has a beautiful young wife and he can't deal with it so well.  And then there's Tertius Lydgate...a young, intellectual, ambitious doctor who marries the stunningly beautiful Rosamond Vincy, who has expensive tastes and cares nothing for her husband's ambitions unless they will help him make more money in order to support her in the manner to which she'd like to become accustomed.  Tertius is a bit naive and Rosamond is more than a bit manipulative, much to Tertius's detriment.  Neither marriage goes particularly well, to say the least.  And the ironic thing is that Tertius and Dorthea would probably make a decent couple...they're both ambitious in a sense of wanting to do great work in order to help society.  But they never get together, and their paths don't really cross as much as we expect when the novel begins.

Hey, that was pretty good, right...I mean, I actually wrote an entire paragraph about "Middlemarch" without getting writer's block and thus resorting to stupid techniques like breaking the chain of thought just so I could go all "meta" and start ranting about writer's block.  Oh wait.  Crap...maybe this is what happens as middle age progresses slowly towards senility.  Maybe my blog posts, as infrequent as they have now become, are just going to get more and more rambling and crotchety, like they were written by some old guy who's totally past his prime and yet still dreams about Chloe Sevigny like he's some damn teenager or something.  Did George Eliot ever get writer's block?  Probably not.  She probably hammered out "Middlemarch" in a week or two, then traveled to the south of France where she hung out on the beach and drank strawberry daiquiris while waiting for the royalty checks to come rolling in.

I think the daunting thing about writing about this book is that it's so good and so rich...I can imagine reading this book ten times and getting more and more out of it each time.  The book is not just the story of the two couples and their unhappy marriages.  For one thing, the book is about the whole town of Middlemarch.  There are many other characters, each one fully drawn and fully human, whose lives impact the principles, and who have stories of their own.  In fact it seems to me that a big part of the book is about how the society we live in affects our lives...how social customs, the people around us, and what others think about us, is as important to our characters as our own characters are.  The marriages in this novel turn out the way they do not just because of the temperaments of the individuals in the marriages but to the social pressures and conditions in which they live.

I was also struck by how George Eliot is not Jane Austen.  With the latter, the novel would have had a happy ending and everyone's problems would be solved when they finally got married to the right people.  Eliot's novel does not end happily.  Well, it doesn't end unhappily either, really.  In the end, people just sort of muddle through.  Dorthea is able to move on from her marriage to Casaubon (spoiler alert:  he dies, she falls for someone else, complications ensue (lots of them), they finally get together) but she never able to change society and contribute to the betterment of mankind nearly as much as her desire and abilities for this would allow.  Fuck, that sounds like my life.  We all have high hopes and in the end 99.999% of us fail to meet our own expectations.  The idealism of youth slams into the brick wall of the reality of life.  Our situations and failings impede the realization of what our talents and desires might have added up to.  We muddle through.  And poor Tertius stays married to Rosamond, never very happily, and (spoiler alert!) instead of curing typhus and making huge advancements in the science of medicine he ends up working in a resort where he helps cure rich people of their gout.  The lives people live in "Middlemarch", like the lives we live in San Francisco, or Akron, or London, or wherever we're living, never get as far or are as happy as we imagine when we're young and innocent and ambitious.   As those great philosophers They Might Be Giants wrote: "Everyone dies frustrated and sad, and that is beautiful".

This is a beautiful, brilliant, complex book, as rich as anything I have read.  It's not a quick and easy read, just as this has not been a quick and easy post to write, but if you love literature and writing and humanity then it's well worth the effort.

Woah, did I really finish?  Meh...kind of a lame review but fuck it, it's whiskey time.  This review is not what my ambitions and expectations were at the beginning, but whatever...time for a shot of whiskey, a few California Lagers, and a few episodes of season 2 of "Knight Rider"!

The Age of Innocence (Edith Wharton)

Holy Mother of Pearl!  Let me just say this was a really great book.  And that's not just the Limoncello talking.  Yes, I had a bottle in the freezer left over from when I visited Italy last year, and I polished it off tonight.  I still can't figure out if I like the stuff...it has a nice flavor, but it's a bit too sweet for my tastes, I think.  Edith Wharton, though, is none too sweet.  I read "Ethan Frome" in high school and "The House of Mirth" in college and there was nothing at all sweet about those books.  Man were they depressing...hellish glimpses of people coming to horrible ends after getting fucked over in relationships.  So why would a guy like me, without a girlfriend at the moment, have the balls to read more Edith Wharton?  Did I think it was going to motivate me to run out there and get hitched up?  Nah, actually I had the book on my shelf, and it intrigued me, and even though it's not on the list for this blog I decided to take a break and read it.  And wow, am I glad I did.  This book maybe my new favorite of all the ones I've blogged about so far, right up there with "Silas Marner" and "Anna Karenina".  It was entertaining, it was intellectually stimulating, and it made me weep.  I mean seriously, this book hit me over the head with an emotional frying pan at the end and had me totally bawling, and that's not just the Limoncello talking.  But then, we'd already established that last point.

"The Age of Innocence" takes place in Old New York.  I'm guessing 1870s/1880s, when high society folks lead rather trivial lives of socializing according to very defined rules.  Everyone knows what the rules are, but no one really talks about them.  Spouses don't really communicate on a deep level.  Everything is formal.  Newland Archer is a rich young lawyer who grows up in this world and gets engaged to his sweetheart, May Welland.  May is gorgeous, and Archer loves her.  All seems good.  Then May's cousin, Countess Ellen Olenska, comes to town.  Ellen grew up in New York, and was a childhood friend of Newland's, but she married a rich Polish count and moved to Europe.  The Polish dude turned out to be a total asshole and cheated on her, so she ran off with his secretary, and then came back to the US. Everyone in New York high society is freaked out because she'd been living in Europe, and everyone knows those European people have mysterious ways that can't be trusted, plus why would any woman leave her husband?  Her family, and Newland, work to get her integrated back into New York society but she's always regarded with suspicion.  She's too free and unconventional, and everyone hates that.  Except Newland.  No, poor Newland suffers the fate of realizing how confining his pitiful life really is, and he totally falls for Ellen.  Especially as he slowly finds out his wife doesn't have much of an interior life.  He longs for more.  He tells Ellen he loves her, but they both agree they shouldn't upset other people with such trivial feelings such as love, so Newland goes ahead with his engagement and he and May get married.  Oh fuck, people, is it EVER a good idea to get married when you're in love with someone else?  No, but Newland and Ellen were trapped by their society so they decided to try to ignore their feelings.

Newland and May are married and settle down to their life in New York.  Memories of Ellen fade from Newland's mind until he runs into her again on a vacation out of town.  Ellen promises not to go back to Europe while they're still in love, but once again she says they must not act upon their feelings.  But after awhile, when Ellen moves back into New York City to take care of her grandmother who has had a stroke, she meets Newland again and they decide to consummate their affair.  FINALLY!!  But before that can happen Newland learns that Ellen is moving back to Europe, and May announces that they are to have a farewell dinner for her cousin in their house.  Newland is freaked out by all this, and not at all happy, but what can he do?  So they have this huge dinner party, and May makes him sit next to Ellen, and it's then he gets this totally paranoid feeling that everyone at the party thinks he and Ellen had an affair, and that this send-off is the best thing for him since it gets this adulterous bitch out of town so that Newland can focus on his wife who has always been true and faithful.  Or is this really merely paranoia?  After the guests leave, and Newland says goodbye to Ellen for what he presumes to be forever, May comes in to the study and tells him she's pregnant.  She also says she told Ellen this a few days ago, right before Ellen suddenly decided to go to Europe.  Ohh, snap!  This woman, May, who Newland regarded as innocent and unobservant has apparently engineered the removal of Ellen from the scene.

Flash forward twenty years.  Newland and May had several children.  Newland's life with May was content, and his longings for Ellen slowly receded, and when May dies of pneumonia he is genuinely sad.  He travels to Europe with his oldest son, who's grown up in a new generation where things aren't so stifling socially.  These modern kids, they hang loose!  In Paris his son suddenly says "Hey let's go visit our cousin Countess Olenska.  You really loved her, didn't you Dad?"  Newland's mind reels..."WTF did you just say, son?"  His son tells him that his mother (May) said to him on her deathbed that their father would take care of him and his siblings, that he was a good man because he gave up what he wanted most so as to keep his marriage vows and stay with his family.  This is where I started bawling.  Newland had felt so alone in his suffering over Ellen.  I know what unrequited love feels like and he suffered his over the course of years with a wife he didn't communicate with at a deep level.  And yet, all long she knew how much he had loved Ellen, and she knew what a sacrifice it was for him to give her up.  He hadn't been alone, but yet he never knew it.  He had regarded his wife as someone who was oblivious to life and yet she was way more clued in than he ever imagined.

Anyway, his son drags him to see Countess Olenska.  She's single and living in Paris.  Newland reflects that he's only 57 years old, and that times have changed and no one would think twice if he took up with Ellen.  They get to her apartment and Newland sends his son up, telling him he needs a moment.  Newland sits on a bench, reflects that he prefers to remember the Countess as she was, that she was more real to him in his memories, and so he gets up and walks home without going up to see her.  The End.  Wow, not a sad end, but not a happy one either.  Much like life sometimes.

I pondered the title "The Age of Innocence".  Is Wharton referring to the days before World War I, when society had these rigid rules of conduct?  Is she referring to youth...to the young Newland Archer who thought he could have it all, who didn't really know WTF he was doing emotionally?  I don't know.  After all, what do I know about literature, as I'm a biochemist tipsy on Limoncello?  But I do know I loved this book.  So sad, so wistful, and Wharton nails the psychology of her characters.  If you're looking for a great book to read, try this one.

Book #54 - Uncle Tom's Cabin (Harriet Beecher Stowe)

I found this gem of a quote in the news yesterday:

"The institution of slavery that the black race has long believed to be an abomination upon its people may actually have been a blessing in disguise. The blacks who could endure those conditions and circumstances would someday be rewarded with citizenship in the greatest nation ever established upon the face of the Earth."

-- Arkansas state Rep. Jon Hubbard (R), quoted by the Arkansas Times

I seriously doubt that Jon Hubbard ever read "Uncle Tom's Cabin".

There have been several books I've read for this blog project so far that have dealt with slavery.  Frederick Douglass' and Booker T. Washington's autobiographies, along with "Pudd'nhead Wilson" and "Beloved" all dealt with the issue in different ways, but none were so blunt and direct and powerful as Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin"...well, OK, maybe "Beloved" but that was written years after slavery ended.

Harriet Beecher Stowe was an abolitionist and the wife of a seminary professor.  In 1850, congress passed the Fugitive Slave Law, which outlawed people in the north assisting runaway slaves.  In fact, if a runaway slave was caught in the north they had to be returned.  This fanned the flames of northern outrage against the institution of slavery and inspired Harriet Beecher Stowe to write "Uncle Tom's Cabin".  Published in serial form, the book became a HUGE bestseller, and one source I read said it was the top-selling book of the 19th century.  The book drew widespread praise in the north, and condemnation in the south.  After the Civil War broke out about ten years later, Harriett Beecher Stowe was invited to a White House dinner, where Abraham Lincoln allegedly said, upon meeting her, "So you are the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war".

The book is an interesting read to say the least.  First of all, it's almost impossible not to think about its historical significance when reading it.  Nowadays we are accustomed to thinking of slaves as real human beings who lived and suffered and died under terrible circumstances.  In particular, I can remember as a kid when "Roots" was on television, and it was a huge event.  And books by modern authors like Toni Morrisson have brought to life the experience of living under slavery.  But "Uncle Tom's Cabin" was a first...it brought slave characters to life, and depicted in great detail the inhumanity of slavery to an audience that oftentimes did not regard slaves as quite being human.  In particular, the author was a mother who had lost a young child, so she was very good at depicting the horrors of children being separated from their mothers, and of families being broken up by the slave traders.  It's hard to imagine how shocking this book must have seemed to readers in the 1850s.  IT gave them a new way to look upon their world.

To a modern reader, even to one slightly tipsy from a delicious snifter of brandy (the most prevalent form of alcohol consumed in the book...which is weird because I kind of doubt that would have been the go-to drink of southern plantation overseers.  But then I would also bet that Harriett Beecher Stowe did not often encounter alcohol up close and personal, so maybe she was just improvising here.  But I digress...), the book can seem dated.  For one thing, it's very preachy.  HBS leaves no doubt as to her feelings on slavery, and she is not afraid to hit you over the head with it every few pages.  Characters go into long speeches debating slavery, which almost turns sections of the book into sermons rather than conversations between characters in a story.  And in the final chapter, after the story formally ends, HBS just comes right out and speaks directly to the audience about the horrors of slavery, and claims that all the characters and their lives are based on true incidents that she has known or has heard about.

Also the book is VERY religious.  Uncle Tom is a devout Christian, as are several other characters, and you are hit over the head with the idea that Christ helps them make it through their terrible struggles, and that they will be happy in the afterlife because they have lived good Christian lives.  I don't think I've read this religious a book in a very long time, maybe not since I read the Old Testament.  There's no doubt that the author was a very devout Christian, and she does not let you forget it.  However, she is not preaching Christianity at the audience like she is preaching abolition...instead, you can tell that she assumes her audience is Christian and she has no need to preach about that...instead she is hammering home the idea that since you (the reader) are a Christian, then you cannot possibly be supportive of slavery, because look how awful it is and look what good Christians some slaves are.

And finally the book seems dated because it's pretty damn melodramatic.  The author really knows how to pull at the heartstrings!  Beautiful angelic children die, and teach their parents the joy of accepting Christ as they pass away!  Hardworking, scrupulously honest, devout Christian slaves are tortured and beaten to death!  Beautiful young women slaves who are devout Christians are sold to gross, sleazy men who will use them for...well, you know what they will use them for!  Slaves escape to the north, barely eluding their pursuers at every turn, saved only by devout Quakers who have their backs!  And these same Quakers, when the evil slave pursuers are injured, nurse them back to health where they will learn to accept Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior and live good lives from now on!  Oh, the humanity!  And yet, one has to admit that yes it's all melodramatic, but the author does melodrama really, really well.  The book is a page turner, and is only slowed down here and there for some serious anti-slavery preaching and diatribes.

Not only is the novel melodramatic,  but the characters often seem like stock figures and not real human beings.  The character of Uncle Tom is one example.  Uncle Tom is a good man...portrayed as being completely honest, very hard-working, intelligent, loving to all children (both black and white), and an incredibly devout Christian who sings Methodist songs, reads the Bible, and teaches his fellow slaves about Christianity and the Bible.  He pretty much has no flaws.  Through his owners financial woes and death, he ends up on the plantation of the evil sadist Simon Legree, where he is flogged for not wanting to flog his fellow slaves, and where he is finally beaten to death for refusing to divulge the whereabouts of two fellow slaves who have run away.  He's too good to be true.  Which brings up an aside which has me puzzled after reading this novel...in popular culture, at least nowadays, an "Uncle Tom" refers to a black man who is obsessively subservient to white people, or to authority figures.  Now the Uncle Tom in the novel definitely respects the authority of his owners, and is an extremely hard worker, but he refuses to beat his fellow slaves when ordered, and he refuses to rat on his fellow slaves who have run away.  I see him as a character almost like Ghandi, or Martin Luther King...a man who practices non-violent, religious-based civil disobedience when asked to do something which would compromise his religious principles.  He goes along with his owners most of the time because he's a slave and doesn't know anything else and is a hard-working man, but his greater allegiance is to his God and Christ and he will not compromise those for any man, even if the man owns him, has a whip, and is not afraid to use it.  For this reason, Simon Legree hates Uncle Tom, because he knows that he can never terrorize him like the other slaves, and will never be able to break him, because his Faith keeps him strong.  Stock character or not, you have to admire the man.  He's definitely no Uncle Tom.

Most of the other characters seem like stock figures too...in particular, the angelic little white girl Eva, who Tom meets when he saves her from drowning when she falls off a riverboat, and who then convinces her father to buy Tom.  Eva has no faults and as a six year old can see the abject horror of slavery and is beloved by everyone in the household, both owners and slaves.  Of course, she's too good for this world, and dies of tuberculosis.  But she is unconcerned about her death because she believes in Christ and knows she's going to a better place.

Anyway, despite the melodrama and the anti-slavery diatribes and the overbearing Christianity and the stock characters I think this book is well worth reading.  For one thing it's worth reading for its historical value, because if we forget the huge horrific inhuman role that slavery has played in the history of this country then we're condemned to have to listen to idiotic quotes like the one at the start of this post.  Racial injustice and prejudice are still something we deal with in this country, and reading this book helps give a historical perspective on how far we've come (hey, we have a black president!) and how far we still have to go.  It's amazing that all this happened not so very long ago really.  It's part of our history and that history still continues.  But the book is also worth reading because even if it's often a contrived melodrama with stock characters, it's a damn good story.  Oops, I shouldn't say "damn"...

Book #53 - The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Victor Hugo)

After marching across the Persian Empire with Xenophon, I decided I wanted to take it easy.  All that marching got my throat dry and my feet tired and my mind weary, so I figured it was time to sip on a real nice glass of rye whiskey (the Van Winkle 13-year old Family Reserve always will do in a pinch, or any other time for that matter) and kick back with a light-hearted fairy tale of a novel.  At least that's what I thought Victor Hugo's "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" would be like...you know, a kind of Disney-esque gothic romp featuring an ugly but loveable hunchback who gets the girl in the end because she learns to see past his hideous visage.  Well, Jesus H. Christ in a chicken basket was I ever off the mark.  This book is way more Brothers Grimm than Disney.  It deals with serious fucking issues, like the persecution of women, and the depravity and corruption of the church, and in the end almost everybody dies a horrible and tragic death.  A fascinating book, but man what a downer.  I definitely needed an extra glass of whiskey at the end of this one.

Victor Hugo actually named this book "Notre Dame de Paris", since the great Gothic cathedral is where most of the action takes place.  In fact it's almost like the Cathedral and the city of Paris are the central characters in the book.  Hugo goes to great lengths to describe and praise the architecture of the cathedral, and to describe what Paris was like in the 1400s, when the novel takes place.  It's clear Hugo loves Paris and its great Gothic cathedral.  The book was written at a time when Gothic architecture was out of style, and looked upon as primitive and archaic, and Hugo's novel was a love note to Gothic Paris, and proved instrumental in getting the attitudes of Parisians to change in regards to their architectural heritage. It was after this novel that the cathedral was renovated and preserved from a state of descent into disrepair.

The three main characters in the novel, not counting the cathedral and the city, are a priest, a hunchback, and a gypsy girl.  Of course there are other characters too, like a soldier, an impoverished poet, and even the King of France.  In fact, one of the revolutionary things about this novel was that the characters spanned the gamut of Parisian society, from the lowest street people up to the very top of the pecking order with the King.  The priest, Claude Frollo, is the archdeacon of Notre Dame.  His parents died of the plague, and his only family is a younger brother, who he raised after their parents died, and Quasimodo the hunchback, who he adopted after he was left abandoned on the church steps.  Claude loved these two, and raised them as family, but the brother turned out to be a drunken bum, and Quasimodo is, well, a grotesquely ugly and deaf hunchback (he's deaf because his job is to ring the church bells, and they're really, really loud).  Claude is incredibly smart, and has studied everything there is to study (he was clearly an overachiever as a young man).  So at some point he continues his search for knowledge by studying alchemy and the occult.  This makes the parishioners think he's a sorcerer, and he becomes isolated from them.  That's clearly not good for his mental health, since his brother and Quasimodo don't make such a great social circle.

Then Esmerelda, a stunningly beautiful and free-spirited gypsy girl, comes to town.  She hangs out in the town squares, making money by dancing and having her trained goat perform tricks.  The crowd is convinced the goat's tricks are actually witchcraft, but they don't care because they're so entertaining.  But then Claude Frollo sees her, and all is lost.  He becomes hopelessly besotted and completely obsessed. So Quasimodo tries to go kidnap her and bring her to the priest.  But Quasimodo is fended off by some royal soldiers as he attempts to snatch Esmerelda up off the street, and Quasimodo is sentenced to be beaten in public and chained up for public humiliation.  As he is chained after his beating he cries out for water, but none of the good citizens of Paris come to help him, since he's a scary, hideously ugly hunchback and not only are they all pretty much afraid to approach him, but they're also getting pleasure out of seeing him suffer.  So as he cries for water, only Esmerelda approaches and she gives him a drink from a pitcher.  He cries the only tear he has ever shed, and he is instantly and eternally grateful.  His heart has changed from this gesture of compassion.

But in the meantime Esmerelda has become hopelessly besotted and completely obsessed herself...with the soldier that rescued her from the attempted abduction.  This is the second love in the novel, along with Claude's love for Esmerelda, that is blind and obsessive and leads to tragic consequences.  And actually the two other loves in the novel, Quasimodo's love for Esmerelda, and Esmerelda's mother's love for her daughter, all don't turn out so hotly either.  Hmm, I wonder if someone had broken up with Hugo before he wrote this.  Anyway, Claude learns of Esmerelda's infatuation with the soldier, and doesn't like it one bit...so he formulates a sneaky plan.  He befriends the soldier, gets him drunk, and learns that the solider is going to see Esmerelda that evening in a hotel room.  The soldier is clearly a cad who just wants to bang the hell out of the poor but gorgeous gypsy girl before dumping her and moving on.  Claude convinces the soldier (who doesn't know Claude is a priest) to let him hide in the room and watch while he porks the young gypsy.  The solder, apparently thinking that this will lend some extra kinky energy to the evening, readily agrees.  So as the priest hides, the soldier leads Esmerelda up to the room.  He then slowly proceeds to get her to relax so he can make his move.  She's nervous and shy, because she's an innocent virgin, but she's so over-the-top crazy for the soldier that she soon decides to let him have his way.  And at that moment, as the solider climbs on top of Esmerelda, Claude leaps out from his hiding place and stabs a knife right through the soldier's back.  Ouch!  The priest runs off and the landlady downstairs hears the soldier's scream and calls the cops, who come and take Esmerelda away.  She is put on trial for murder of the soldier (never mind that there's no evidence, or that the soldier actually recovered from his wound and rejoined his unit).  The judges are convinced she's a sorceress (come on, a gypsy with a dancing goat?  That's gotta be witchcraft...there's no other explanation) and she is found guilty and sentenced to death.  So in a public ceremony watched by a huge crowd, she is hauled in front of the cathedral as archdeacon Claude Frollo comes out.  He is supposed to lead her in an apology to God, and then she will be dragged across the square to the gallows.  Claude whispers in her ear that he still could save her if she just lets him have his way with her.  She is disgusted and refuses, so the priest says the benediction and then turns away and lets her go to her fate.  Then, right before she's lead off to the gallows, Quasimodo swings down on a rope like some crazy hunchback Spiderman, grabs Esmerelda and disappears into the church with her, yelling "Sanctuary!!!".  The crowd goes wild with excitement, because what they just saw was so damn cool.  Anyway, Esmerelda is now safe inside the cathedral, because it's sacred space that's beyond the law.  But of course, now she can never come out.  Oh, and I know you're concerned, so I'll just say that Quasimodo had the presence of mind to save the goat too.

This is some powerful shit, theme-wise.  Hugo is dealing with issues like the corruptness and power of the clergy in French society, sexual repression in the clergy and its unfortunate results, and the mistreatment of women.  God forbid you're a beautiful woman who innocently shows off her sexuality and performs tricks with a dancing, counting goat.  You will clearly be sentenced to death under some pretense because, well, you're stepping out of line there, even though it's titillating...or perhaps because it's titillating.  Interestingly, Hugo describes how when Esmerelda is being dragged in front of the church and then to the gallows her dress barely covers her and is shockingly revealing.  Yep, let's show off the gorgeous girl's body before we kill her as a witch...only seems fair.

Anyway, now that she's stuck in the cathedral, the priest goes to her and tries to rape her, but is fended off by Quasimodo.  The priest is like a father to Quasimodo, because he raised him, and Quasimodo has loved and revered the priest, but his attempted rape against Esmerelda turns the tables for him, and Quasimodo realizes what an evil scumbag the priest has become.  And of course Quasimodo now loves Esmerelda, since she's the only person who has shown him any compassion.  Esmerelda appreciates the hunchback, who helps her be comfortable in the cathedral, but she's too frightened by his appearance to ever really totally appreciate him as a man and fellow human.

Anyway, the priest is pissed because he can't rape who he wants to rape when he wants to rape her.  So now he wants to get Esmerelda out of the church so he can either (1) rape her somewhere that Quasimodo won't find them and then beat the living crap out of him, or (2) have her captured and executed because if he can't have her, well then no one can.  Yeah, nice guy this priest.  Anyway, the priest hunts around for an idea to get Esmerelda out of the cathedral, and finally approves an attack on the church by a mob of poor people who want to loot the place and set her free.  The indefatigable Quasimodo defends the cathedral the mob, at least for awhile, and kills lots and lots of the attackers, including the priest's drunken brother.  But finally, through some confused signals, the king (who is shown to be a buffoon) sends in the army to both kill everyone in the mob, and seize Esmerelda from inside the church so she can be executed, sanctuary be damned.  But then Esmerelda escapes, just in time!!  Oops, but then she gets caught, but not before she is reunited with her birth mother, who long ago gave her up for dead when gypsies carried her off.  But dammit, as the soldiers seize Esmerelda they also kill her mother, so the happiness of reunion that they've each waited for all their lives lasts only about five minutes.  And that was the happiest part of the ending of the novel.  For Esmerelda is hung in the public square, and as the priest watches her die from the tower of Notre Dame, he laughs.  Quasimodo is so pissed at this that he throws the priest off the tower to his death.  Then Quasimodo goes and lays down with Esmerelda's body inside a paupers tomb, where he stays until he too dies of starvation.  The end.

Yep, Hugo has written a life-affirming Disney-esque tale, full of magic and gypsies and a loveable hunchback and an innocent goat performing cute tricks.  Oh, and attempted rape, crazy obsessive stalking, and death...all due to a priest's sexual repression.  Man, that's still a hot topic, even today.  This book seemed much more modern than I thought it would be.  Way more depressing, and way more modern.  Which made me really appreciate and enjoy this book...once I got over the depressing and shocking ending.  Man, I think I need another whiskey just thinking about it...

Anabasis (Xenophon)

 
Meanwhile, back in the Persian Empire...

Yes, I have deviated from my top 105 books yet again, motivated in part by my recent reading of "The Histories" by Herodotus.  If you'll recall from my recent post on that book, which I KNOW you've read, Herodotus describes the invasion of Greece by the Persians, under the kings Darius and Xerxes, from about 493-479 BC.  But what happened to the Persian Empire after the invasions of Greece failed?  Well, in 404 BC Xerxes great grandson Artaxerxes II was crowned leader of the Persian Empire, much to the dismay of his brother Cyrus the Younger.  Cyrus was the Satrap (ruler) of Lydia, a kingdom in what is now western Turkey, but Cyrus was not happy with that.  He wanted to be leader of the whole damn empire, and so he formulated a plan...and that's where the story in "Anabasis" opens.

"Anabasis", or "The March Up Country", is a memoir by the Xenophon, written in the third person.  Xenophon was a wealthy aristocratic young Greek...what we might refer to as a "country gentleman".  He was clearly ferociously intelligent and charismatic, and was a friend of Socrates.  When Cyrus the Younger hires an army of 10,000 Greek mercenaries to allegedly fight enemies in Ionia (the Greek region on the west coast of Asia Minor) Xenophon decides to go along and check out the action.  Little does he or the army know, but Cyrus has other plans for them.  The army marches east, but doesn't fight anyone.  Hmm, that's odd.  They keep marching east.  "WTF?" asks the army. "Where the Sam Hill are we going?"  Soon it becomes clear...Cyrus is taking the army east to attack his brother and claim the throne of Persia for himself.  The army rebels...it's one thing to fight for booty in Ionia, but to go into the heart of the Persian Empire and overthrow the king...now that's way too much for them.  Heated discussion ensues, but Clearchus, a Spartan, convinces the Greek mercenaries to continue with the expedition.  After all, imagine how generous Cyrus will be to them if he becomes leader of the Empire.  The booze, the broads..totally worth it.  So the army marches on, deeper into the Persian Empire.

Meanwhile, Artaxerxes II hears of this, and assembles an army to go meet his brother's forces.  Their armies clash at Cunaxa.  The Greek mercenaries rout their Persian foes, but Cyrus and his bodyguatds spy Artaxerxes II and charge in to kill him.  A javelin is thrown, piercing Cyrus through the eye, and he dies.  Uh oh.  It is not immediately apparent to the Greeks what has happened, because they won their part of the battle, but when they learn about Cyrus's death it dawns upon them how totally fucked they are.  Now they're deep in Persian territory, Cyrus is dead, and they have no food, friends, or supplies...so all they can do is run for their lives.  They start to retreat, but are pursued by the Persian army.  Artaxerxes II would like to see them all dead, to teach a lesson to any would-be revolutionists.  The general of the Persian army, Tissaphernes, has a problem, though.  The 10,000 Greek soldiers are to large a force to directly attack, and they need a lot of food, since 10,000 mouths are a lot to feed.  So Tissaphernes comes up with a plan.  He tells the Greeks he will make peace with them and lead them out of Persia, and the generals of the Greek army should come to his tent and have a feast to celebrate and make plans for the assisted withdrawal.  So the leaders of the Greeks all go to Tissaphernes' tent, where he has them seized and beheaded.  If General Ackbar had been there he would have shouted "It's a trap!", but alas that did not come to pass.  Now the Greeks are so totally fucked it's not even funny.  They could have split up and been picked off one by one, but somehow they pull their shit together and elect new leaders from the within ranks...and Xenophon is chosen to lead the whole army.  Which he does.

What follows is an incredible tale of adventure.  I don't want to go into a lot of details, because I highly recommend this book and you should read about what happens yourself.  But imagine Xenophon's problem...you have to lead 10,000 men on a very long trek home through enemy territory.  And we're talking 10,000 men!  Xenophon's army is basically a wandering plague of locusts, stripping the countryside bare of food, firewood, and other provisions (including, probably, women) and no doubt leaving behind a trail of garbage and, well, human waste.  They pass through some barbarian lands, where the barbarians run into the surrounding mountains and throw rocks down upon the army.  I mean, what else could they do...you can't fight a 10,00 man army, but you don't want them to stick around and destroy your crops and villages and then move on.  Xenophon tries to keep the army in line, and not have them suck up everything in their wake, but what can he do...there's 10,000 hungry young men to feed!

As the army marches along it's one damn thing after another.  Attacks!  Treachery!  Snow and bitter cold!  The story reminds me a bit of the Shackleton story...adventure upon adventure, with each escape miraculous, often involving cunning, strategy, or brilliant oratory by Xenophon.  Someone should seriously turn this book into a comic book or graphic novel.  It's unbelievable, and yet it all really happened.  Of course, in Shackelton's ill-fated Antarctic expedition not a single man was lost.  In Xenophon's case, only about 6,000 of the original 10,000 made it out alive.  Still, that's not bad, given the obstacles they faced.  Even once they make it "safely" back to Greek territory they are still in danger.  The Greek cities don't want them around, again because they're like locusts.  People try to hire them, but there's always a catch.  Finally, a Spartan hires them and the army, now being gainfully employed once again, sets off to fight.  It is here that Xenophon takes his leave.

This is a much more personal book than Herodotus.  You can imagine yourself with Xenophon and his men, battling their way from WAY behind enemy lines.  If you ever saw the movie "The Warriors" you'll know what I mean.  And if not, just read the damn book.  It's a good one.

Homage to Catalonia (George Orwell)

I was reading in the news today that Spain is having some kind of financial crisis or something.  Greece, Italy, Spain...come on Europe, get your act together.  Although actually I don't follow the financial news all that thoroughly, which combined with my hobbies of reading, blogging, and drinking fine American whiskies probably accounts for why I'm not going to be able to retire for another 94 years.  Nonetheless, even I know that something is amiss in Spain, and it sounds like no good will come of it, whatever it is.  Bonds, maybe...something to do with bonds.  Or banks, or maybe the Euro.  Whatever.  But as bad as it might be at the moment, and we'll just assume that it really is dangerous, it can't be anything like the Spain that George Orwell describes in "Homage to Catalonia", his memoir of the Spanish Civil War.  I mean, as he describes it that place was seriously fucked up.

Now I know, you're thinking "WTF is he writing about this book for, because it's not on his list?  Maybe he's so addled by old age at this point that he doesn't even remember he has a list, or something like that".  Well, I may indeed be addled, but as I've said before in this blog, I will occasionally read a book not on my master list just because I want to.  In this case, this book has been sitting on my shelf for about 25 years (I kid you not).  I was stirred into reading it after watching "Hemingway and Gellhorn", a made-for-HBO movie about Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn, a war correspondent who eventually became Hemingway's wife and later went on to become Hemingway's ex-wife.  It was an amazingly shoddy movie, especially given the cast and given that it was HBO, but regardless it stirred my interest in the Spanish Civil War and so I decided to read Orwell's book since I really did buy it about 25 years ago and figured it was now or never for reading it.  Especially since my brain apparently is becoming addled with age.

The Spanish Civil War was unlike any war today.  For one thing, artists, writers, filmmakers, and other creatives of all caliber seemed to flock to the thing and pick up rifles and fight.  Boy, that would never happen now.  I don't see Seal or J.K. Rowling picking up some body armor and rushing off to Afghanistan.  In fact, if anything, they'd stay as far the fuck away from that place as they could, or from any other war zone for that matter.  But something stirred the creatives of the world to flock to Spain in the 1930s and pick up arms against Franco and the Fascists.  I guess everyone could agree that the Fascists were bad, but then can't we all agree that the Taliban is bad?  Whatever.  But as we all might suspect, it turns out that artists and poets make pretty crappy fighters because eventually Franco and the fascists won.

Orwell, however, did not know the eventual winner of the war when the events in the book take place, and he didn't even know when he wrote the book.  That in itself is poignant enough, but what really makes this book memorable is his descriptions of life at the front, and life in Barcelona during a period of street fighting.  Orwell headed to Spain and signed up to fight with a regiment made up of members of a political party called P.O.U.M.  No, that's not the Pomegranate Juice...P.O.U.M. was the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista, or the Worker's Party of Marxist Unification.  There was a whole alphabet soup of political parties in revolutionary Spain, and while Orwell goes into great detail about the different parties, this was one part of the book that was hard to follow, and frankly a bit dry.  It seemed like P.O.U.M. were communists associated with Trotsky somehow, as opposed to other communist parties which were not, and possibly associated with Anarchists, but also maybe not.  I don't know.  The take-home message was that there were a lot of parties all struggling against one another and trying to position themselves, while maybe they all would have done better if they just focused on fighting Franco and the Fascists together.  Which they did, when they weren't undermining and fighting one another.

Orwell talks about when he arrived in Spain there was truly a revolutionary atmosphere.  Workers had seized all the buildings and communist, revolutionary, and anarchist flags were everywhere.  Everyone called each other "comrade".  No one was allowed to tip, and even in the army everyone was assumed to be equal (which would seem to make it hard to fight a war if everyone could question their commanders).  In short, a revolutionary worker's paradise.  Unfortunately of course, it didn't last.

Orwell joined a P.O.U.M. militia unit and was sent to the front to fight the fascists.  He describes what it was like to fight at the front in very evocative details.  He talks about the sights and smells of living in the trenches (to sum up: it's all bad) and he talks about the ubiquitous rats and lice that plague everyone (memo to self: avoid lice.  Also avoid trench warfare).  These parts made the most interesting parts of the book.  Orwell alternates between (1) telling his story and describing what his life in wartime Spain was like, and (2) describing in detail the political machinations between the various parties and factions.  In other words the chapters alternated between gripping and not so gripping.

After spending time at the front, Orwell returns on leave to Barcelona, where he notices the revolutionary fervor that was so rampant when he first arrived is completely gone.  The workers have been beaten down and are back in their places.  But more importantly the P.O.U.M. party that he has been a member of is suddenly outlawed, which is not good for him.  They have been accused of being Stalinist sympathizers, or maybe Trotsky sympathizers, or maybe fascist sympathizers.  As a result, the government militia, or maybe its the communists, have turned against them.  But wait, are the communists and the government working together...or do they hate each other?  Ah, who the fuck knows.  Why couldn't these fricking Spaniards have a regular civil war like we had in the good old U. S. of A...you know, the North against the South, Yankees vs. Johnny Reb, freedom vs. slavery...with just two sides, making it easy to figure out who's who and what's what?  That would have made things a lot simpler in Spain, and who knows, maybe the good guys would have won then.  But now I'm getting off track.

And speaking of which, I just need to say that I'm drinking a Margarita in order to salute my Spanish heritage, which consists of having ordered burritos in taquerias all over California.  Those things are Spanish, right?  Along with the Spanish flu and Spanish fly...

So where was I?  Oh yeah, so P.O.U.M. gets outlawed and street fighting breaks out all over Barcelona.  Of course in all the revolutionary confusion it's not clear who is street fighting against whom.  That's the problem with street fighting, as opposed to two armies facing one another across no man's land while hunkered down in lice-filled trenches.  Nonetheless, Orwell survives the fighting and confusion in Barcelona, and survives the P.O.U.M. purge, and makes it back to the front lines of the war, where in short order he is shot in the neck.  He is seriously injured but he survives (as evidenced by the fact that he wrote this book).  His doctors tell him that "a man who is hit through the neck and survives is the luckiest creature alive", but Orwell wonders if it would even be luckier not to have been hit at all.  So Orwell lingers in Spain for a short time longer, but then leaves the country in order not to be killed in the continuing P.O.U.M. crackdown.  The End.

One can think of the Spanish Civil War as a prelude to World War II, with communism and democracy fighting against the fascists.  Yet the fascists won the Spanish Civil War, and his experiences lead George Orwell to write "1984".  I suppose all ideological moments end in frustration and apathy, and this one was no exception.  Still, one can't help but wonder what would have happened if Seal had picked up arms and joined Orwell on the front lines of this conflict.  Perhaps history would have turned out completely different and this whole financial crisis thing would have been averted.  Or not.