Great Novels Past and Present: Bookmarks Update, November, 2024

Friends: Since I last sat down to write my monthy update, the election seems to have changed the world. I've always tried to be apolitical in my writing about my reading, but as I write this, the prospect of facing four years with an anti-vaxer at HHS, a hedge fund manager at Treasury, the former CEO of World Wide Wrestling at Education, and the rest of the seven dwarf equivalents fills me with angst and worry. Perhaps that is why my reading this month returned to classics from the past, mindless thrillers, a book about stillness, and humorous treatments of common objects like pencils and islands. (I'm writing this month's update in a house filled with four grandchildren under the age of 10, so forgive any errors of syntax, punctuation, or thought!)

Here's what I read in November in the order read:

The five novels I read this month demonstrate the variety and richness of this genre. From Tolstoy's masterpiece published in 1886 to Richard Powers' brilliant book published this year, the novel continues to provide entertainment, wisdom, information, and the unique ability to unveil the inner lives of people, an aspect of humankind that in real life is ultimately unknowable. In his classic discourse "Aspects of the Novel", E.M. Forster writes "....can we in daily life, understand each other?" He makes the case that it is only in the novel where the characters "have these numerous parallels with people like ourselves; they try to live their own lives.... (but) they are creations inside a creation" and it is the novelist who manipulates their actions and thoughts to "acclimatize and harmonize the human race" enabling us to see into their inner souls and understand their motivations, fears, desires, and struggles.

Tolstoy's "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" provides a profound lesson in how to live one's life, through the examination of how one man dies. From the cynical thoughts of 'friends' and colleagues who upon learning of Ilyich's death immediately begin to think about how that event might advance their careers to the lack of love, caring, and support from his family, Tolstoy shows the reader how not to live a life that leaves one alone and terrified when facing the ultimate universal human experience. This is an extreme example of the ironic "I wish I had spent more time at the office" joke as Ilyich dies alone, lonely, and painfully aware of the futility of the life he had chosen.

Virginia Woolf's "To the Lighthouse" has been a favorite re-read of mine for years. Woolf, along with Joyce, was the writer most responsible for Modernism's turn to the inner life of the mind and stream of consciousness in novels of the early 20th C. The Ramsey family (father, mother, and 8 children) are joined at their summer home on the shore of the Isle of Skye by a cast of characters whose thoughts, emotions, and reactions comprise the body of the novel. Not much happens but we live in the minds of the characters, primarily Mrs. Ramsey, surely one of English literature's great creations. While poking fun at academia, art, poetry, and marriage, Mrs. Ramsey's thoughts turn towards the big questions: " “What does it mean? How do you explain it all?” “Was there no safety? No learning by heart of the ways of the world? No guide, no shelter, but all was miracle, and leaping from the pinnacle of a tower into the air? Could it be, even for elderly people, that this was life?—-startling, unexpected, unknown?….why was it so short, why was it so inexplicable?”; “What is the meaning of life? That was all—a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years.” This is a book to read and re-read, comfortably ensconced in a cushioned chair with a glass of single malt Scotch, contemplating the big questions Woolf raises while reading about an England and a way of life that have disappeared. Despite having read this book several times, the way Woolf conveys the shocking news of Mrs. Ramsey's death still startled me. Definitely worth the time to read this classic.

I have intended to read "Things Fall Apart" for many years, and when a paperback version celebrating its 50th anniversary turned up in a Little Library near our home in Cambridge, the time was right. The title, taken from W.B. Yeats' famous poem featuring the line, 'the center cannot hold' seemed appropriate for this moment, as well. Achebe takes us back to pre-colonial Africa where a rich tribal village life of ancient customs, rites, and traditions provide the backdrop for the story of Okonkwo, an honored warrior and leader. His life has its successes and disasters, as do all lives, but ends tragically with the arrival of the British colonizers. Much of my thinking about Africa has begun with the Middle Passage and slavery or the contemporary chaos that seems to continuously engulf that continent, and Achebe's book opened my eyes to the rich and valuable cultures and worlds that existed before the Europeans arrived. Well written and unusual, this is another book from the past worth revisiting.

Until "The Country Girls" was featured in "Great Short Books, a book I recommended last month, I had never read any works by Edna O'Brien who died his year at the age of 93. The author of 18 novels and the recipient of Ireland's Nobel-equivalent, O'Brien had managed to sail under my radar despite acclaim for her most recent novel published only five years ago. "The Country Girls" was her first novel, published in 1960. It tells the tale of two girls from their pre-teen years in a small Irish village to their adventures in Dublin as young working women. Caitleen and Brenda could not be more different, and O'Brien's novel explores the torments and delights of friendship and girls growing up. It's a quiet, lovely, and moving tale.

So having started in 1886 with Tolstoy and worked my way up to 1960 with Edna O'Brien, I was ready for Richard Powers' new book published this year. I have been promoting Powers in these updates as perhaps America's best contemporary novelist since I read his "Echo Makers" in 2006. Since then he has written 13 novels, some honored with a National Book Award and the Pulitzer like the 2022 "Overstory", but many slipping by relatively unnoticed. I think with "Playground" his achievements will become more widely known and deservedly so. His past novels have been deep dives into topics as diverse as environmental destruction, mental illness, and AI, at least 20 years before it became a household word. He immerses himself deeply into those topics as he writes, to the point where in writing about forests and trees in "Overstory" he became so enthralled with the topic that he moved to the Appalachian Mountains where he lives in the woods today.

"Playground" introduces us to an intriguing cast of characters who become best friends as college students at the University of Illinois in the '60's, take wildly divergent paths into adulthood, and come together in a stunning climax on a small island in French Polynesia in a Pacific Ocean that is being ravaged by environmental damage. Like Achebe's books, Powers writes about the terrible legacies of colonialism. As in his other books, Powers introduces the characters in the opening chapters which move slowly and can put off the easily distracted reader, but hang in there. It is worth the effort to read this spectacular book by a MacArthur Award winner.

Moving from the novels to the mysteries, I have to admit deep disappointment in some of my favorite writers in this genre. I've read all or nearly all of Donna Leon's Venice-based Commissario Brunetti books, Harlan Coben's Myron Bolitar/Wynn Horne Lockwood III's novels, and Lee Child's Jack Reacher books. Their books have brought me escape, laughs, and some sleepless nights as the heroes struggled with the bad guys to save, if not the planet, than at least some defenseless soul or souls. But now, failure.

Each of these writers has turned out books nearly every year---Leon's 33 Brunetti books since 1992; Coben's 12 Bolitar books since 1995; Child's 28 Reacher books since 1997---and like too many good things, their series have come to a bad end with these latest additions. All three of their characters are wonderful creations. Brunetti's Venice-based investigations have always been enriched by his colleagues at the Questera and his wonderful family as well as the fascinating Venice. Bolitar, the Jewish, 6'4" former Duke All-American basketball player similarly had a great supporting cast comprising the premier WASP Wynn Horne Lockwood III, his office staff of Esperanza and Big Cyndi (a former wrestling twosome), and his aging parents, and the series provided great dialogue as well as feel-good wins for the good guys. Reacher, another huge guy and a retired Major in the Army Military Police, was a drifter traveling with only a toothbrush, an expired passport, and an ATM card who managed to drift into one incredibly complicated and evil caper after another in his travels, always eliminating the bad guys and saving the innocents.

Sadly, however, the bloom has evidently departed from the rose for these three writers. Leon's "A Refiner's Fire" is built around a slim plot line and features Commissario Griffoni much more than Brunetti, perhaps an acknowledgement that the latter has outlived his usefulness. Similarly, Coben's "Think Twice" has very little sparkling repartee and a plot that is so forgettable that I can't recall it as I write this and evidently didn't find it interesting enough to summarize in my review. Oy! Finally, Childs' (plural since Lee has added his younger brother to his writing team probably in acceptance of his own dwindling talent) "In Too Deep" starts with an amnesic Reacher handcuffed to a steel table and wondering how he got there. I ended up wondering why I'd spent several hours reading this silly book.

This experience reminds me of the advice I provide to some of my clients to whom I provide coaching. Finish strong; leave them wanting more; work is not as important as family, friends, and contributing to your community. Had Leon, Coben, and the Childs brothers heeded this simple advice, many trees would have been spared and we would have been left with fond memories of their earlier impressive achievements rather than disappointment.

That brings me to the usual odds and ends read during the month. In November, they included "Stillness Is the Key", "Pencil", and "An Atlas of Extinct Countries". I would normally have shunned "Stillness Is The Key" by Ryan Harper as one of the dozens of self-help books featured near the cash register in bookstores, but this one came highly recommended by a friend. It was a good suggestion. Harper combines the best of mindfulness practice, ancient wisdom (Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, Ovid) and modern examples (Tiger Wood, JFK) to provide specific, useful recommendations on how to achieve stillness and inner peace in a turbulent world. Not hokey at all, I enjoyed it.

"Pencil" is a delightful romp through every possible element related to that writing implement, something that we've all been using since childhood. Published this year as the 99th entry in a series called Object Lessons, Beggy's book explores the history and various styles of these writing implements, the famous users (Nabokov, O'Neill, Capote, and others), and myriad other aspects of this simple device. If you click on the hyper-link, you will find a photo of my own pencil collection, 298 pencils from museums, libraries, universities, golf courses, hotels, etc. from all over the world. While I could manage without my Cross pen, life would be less interesting without my Blackwing pencil from MOMA with the Ed Ruscha quotation which I use to take notes while reading. If you're not drawn to this topic, you can explore other Object Lessons books on golf balls, hyphens, shipping containers, glitter, or dozens of other everyday things.

"An Atlas of Extinct Countries" is a funny and informative exploration of 48 countries (very loosely defined) which existed for periods as brief as overnight (The Republic of Rough and Ready) to as long as decades (Yugoslavia) and then disappeared. The story running through most of these 'nation states' is that these entities were often frauds perpetrated by a charlatan liar who created a pseudo-country for his own benefit and enrichment. Sound familiar???? It's light reading accompanied by maps and biographies of some of the weirder people and places of the past. A fascinating sidelight is that instead of designating the locations of the countrys' capitals with longitude and latitude ala GPS, Defoe uses an app called What3Words. Developed in 2013, What3Words has divided the globe into 57 trillion boxes measuring about 10 feet on each side and then used a random system to assign three words to each box. There are 40,000 English words in use along with about 25,000 words in 50 other languages. For example, my Cambridge address is stones.plus.cook, and you can find me in Vermont at promoting.finance.farmed. Beats me why this is useful or important, but there it is. If you can master What3Words, come visit.

While I continue to work with my webmaster on resurrecting the Poetry Tree on the Charles, here are some poems that our family chose to share over the Thanksgiving Table this year.

I'll conclude with a lengthy portion of the dying Ivan Ilyitch's thoughts from the eponymous work by Tolstoy: "The example of a syllogism which he had learned in Kiezewetter's "Logic": 'Caius is a man, men are mortal, therefore Caius is mortal' has seemed to him all his life to be true as applied to Caius but certainly not as regards to himself. That Caius--man in the abstract---was mortal, was perfectly correct; but he was not Caius, nor man in the abstract; he had always been a creature quite, quite different from all others. He had been little Vanya with a mamma and a papa, and Mita and Volodya, with playthings and the coachman and nurse; and aferwards with Kaya and with all the joys and griefs and ecstasies of childhood, boyood, and youth. What did Caius know of the smell of that striped leather ball Vanya had been so fond of? Was it Caius who had kissed his mother's hand like that, and had Caius heard the silken result of her skirts? Was it Caius who had rioted like that over the cakes and pastry at the Law School? Had Caius been in love like that? Could Caius preside at sessions as he did? And Caius was certainly mortal, and it was right for him to die; but for me, little Vanya, Ivan Ilyich, with all my thoughts and emotions---it's a different matter altogether. It cannot be that I ought to die. It would be too terrible."

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