I still wish the story were a bit longer, especially considering the bittersweet ending. There are a few revelations that you barely have time to savor before the lights go out, so to speak.

Often referred to as a novel of ideas — though Kundera likely disagrees, as he considers novels of ideas to be moralistic more than metaphysical — the story traces a couple over the course of their relationship with some digressions into the life another lover of Tomas (whose struggle with how he wound up in a monogamous relationship is one of the biggest themes in the book). While the narrative basically progresses in one forward motion, the book is broken into philosophical sections and at times milestones in the story are related nonlinearly.

Though I had felt watching the movie that major parts of the story must be different, it’s actually very true to the original. The film is presented even more linearly and obviously plot points are pruned in places, but perhaps only the main aspect of the book that gets lost is Kundera’s voicing of the metaphysical aspects of the story. This is the only novel I can think of where the author inserts his own voice and refers to his characters as characters that he’s made up, though I’m sure I’ve read others. Here it happens just briefly maybe twice throughout the story, but it makes it clear that the philosophy is Kundera’s, that the characters exist as a means to explore these themes. Strangely this makes the characters no less real to me.

It was interesting to read this again after at least ten years and wonder what I got out of it when I was so young. I remember enjoying my first reading a lot but now it seems like much of the philosophy must have been too big to really take in back then. But it may just be the sort of book that reads differently depending on what you bring to it.

The title refers to the lake in Naples, Italy regarded by the ancient Romans as the entrance to the underworld, so the poems are largely about the areas between death and life with many winter themes. Interesting and not unlikeable but underwhelming for me.

The Future of Terror / 11

From the gable window, we shot
at what was left: gargoyles and garden gnomes.
I accidentally shot the generator
which would have been hard to gloss over
in a report except we weren’t writing reports
anymore. We ate our gruel and watched
the hail crush the hay we’d hoped to harvest.
I found a handkerchief drying on a hook
and without a hint of irony, pocketed it.
Here was my hypothesis: we were inextricably
fucked. We’d killed all the inventors and all
the jesters just when we most needed humor
and invention. The lake breeze was lugubrious
at best, couldn’t lift the leaves. As the day lengthened,
we knew we’d reached the lattermost moment.
The airlift wasn’t on the way. Make-believe
was all I had left but I couldn’t help but see
there was no “we”—you were a mannequin
and I’d been flying solo. I thought about
how birds can turn around mid-air, how
the nudibranch has no notion it might need
a shell. Swell. I ate the last napoleon—
it said Onward! on the packaging.
There was one shot left in my rifle.
I polished my plimsolls.
I wrapped myself in a quilt.
So this is how you live in the present.

I thought I’d read a book of Harvey’s before, but she must have just gotten lost on a list somewhere. So there are a couple more books to put on my list.

Set between the wars in upper-class England, it is instead an über-nostalgic story of middle-class Charles Ryder’s relationship with the more upper-crust Flyte family and their country estate, Brideshead. The whole story is told as a recollection in the midst of WWII. It’s very absorbing with themes of religion and fluid sexuality (apparently the 2008 movie version ruins this) and messed-up family dynamics. There’s a lovely wistful feeling throughout.

The thing I love about his writing is that he recognizes the need to emphasize with both all caps and italics:

To better understand such a heretical point of view about the programmed demise of the VOICES OF SILENCE, think of the perverse implications of the colouration of films originally shot in BLACK AND WHITE, to cite one example, or the use of monochromatic film in photographing accidents, oil spills. The lack of colour in a film segment of snapshot is seen as the tell-tale sign of a DEFECT, a handicap, the loss of colour of the rising tide under the effects of maritime pollution …

I’m not sure I agree with all his ideas, like that synchronized sound entirely ruined cinema, though I appreciate how he defines genetic engineering as a frightening new version of expressionism. But then there were also a lot of references that went over my head, with the lack of breadth in my mid-20th century art history knowledge. In that regard, I should have definitely attempted reading this somewhere other than on the subway.

Like The Botany of Desire, this book looks at four representative categories, this time different food chains: industrial, organic, local, and personal. The trail of corn in the industrial section is perhaps the most compelling part of this book, though the extensive study of Joel Salatin’s method of farming in the local section is the most inspiring. Pollan’s philosophical approach to attempting to answer the question of eating meat in the personal section (during which he goes hunting for wild boar) will likely sound properly justified to meat eaters and somewhat lacking to vegans/vegetarians. While that aspect of people’s diets may always remain entirely personal, we can only hope that the industrial and “organic” chains are improved or broken entirely by a new system.

This one is more science fiction than magical realism, but it’s equally hilarious and allegorical. A socially cranky professor in Moscow accidentally discovers a light ray that seems to accelerate the growth of cells under its light around the same time all the chickens in the city mysteriously die in a sudden epidemic. This inspires the creation of a State Farm to use the ray to solve the sudden disappearance of chickens, but a delivery mix-up leads the whole effort astray. My favorite part is the occasional newsboy yelling out the headlines: every major news story is described as a nightmare (“Nightmare murder on Bronnaya Street!!”).

The structure of the book itself is confusing, as she shifts around just enough that it’s hard to follow the sequence of events, plus there are many little digressions within chapters that don’t seem to add to the story. Though the book is ostensibly centered around the reading group she begins with some students after leaving her teaching position at the University of Tehran when the veil is imposed on all female professors, most of the book is not about this reading group but the events leading up to the formation of the reading group. Despite this, Nafisi goes into detail describing each of the students in turn at the beginning of the book. Yet, possibly because she has mixed up the details to protect everyone’s identities, they still appear hazy and undefined. This is kind of a petty complaint, but several times she makes comments about “reading Lolita in Tehran” in a manner that suggests it must not have been the original title, otherwise why would you namedrop your title SO MANY TIMES in the book?

I made it through about two-thirds of the story before skimming through the rest. I can’t figure out if the book wasn’t edited enough or was edited too much — likely for the protection of those involved, but to the detriment of the story. It’s disappointing as it should be an incredible account of a tumultuous time and place in history, but Nafisi comes off kind of smug and her story, convoluted.

Steinbeck alternates chapters between a general narrative about aspects of the Dust Bowl migration with the specific story of the Joad family being forced off their land and deciding to head to California. The technique serves to show the breadth of the problems, that these events weren’t just something happening to one family, while the Joads personalize it and show how truly awful everything was.

The general narrative can be annoying the way groups of people are lumped together, for example recurring descriptions of “the men” and “the women” was distractingly essentialist. But then the gender roles overall are annoying. In the course of the Joad story, Ma keeps stepping up and taking charge and then Pa will threaten to take a stick to her in someday when things are better and then Ma admits that she’d deserve it. Really, John? Would the lady really think she deserved being smacked with a stick by her husband for attempting to keep the family alive and together?

The ending is fairly controversial but mostly it was just sad (and creepy) to me. It doesn’t give closure but hints that the life of the Joad family finally reached a point where it would just be way too depressing to continue documenting.

This critical edition includes all sorts of letters and essays and excerpts from Jane Eyre, which I only skimmed through but might come back to on a future reading. There are so many levels on which to appreciate this book: from Rhys’s interpretation of Ms Brontë to her firsthand knowledge of the post-colonial Caribbean islands most of the book is set around to the shifting narrative style.

This is the first book I’ve actually missed my subway stop while reading; I came close a few times with Valley of the Dolls but Wide Sargasso Sea obviously wins.

Overall it’s a pretty amazing narrative on the toll of war on every day life.

Do you weep for the present? Well, know that the days to come will be worse still. That’s why they made this war, to poison the womb of time, so that the present would give birth to monsters instead of hope … They have stolen so much from you that not even your dreams are your own, nothing of your land belongs to you, and even the sky and the seas will be the property of outsiders.

But there are two parts to this book: the first is the group of stories that have nothing to do with each other (yet kind of feel like the same story) and second is three “stories” that comprise the tale of Hema and Kaushik. Even though this second part is not drastically different in subject matter, character type, or setting, it did feel like a break to me. The stories can’t really stand apart from each other, but they are distinct in voice alone. In the first Hema speaks to Kaushik, then Kaushik to Hema, and a good twenty years later they are brought back together unexpectedly. Lahiri seems to tap into something deeper here, even if many of the nagging consistencies are still there. It might just be letting the characters talk to each other that drew me in.

I poked through reviews, and it seems that a lot of people love this collection while there are also many disappointed in the lack of breadth. I can definitely see that perspective too, but Hema and Kaushik took me out on a high note.

The book and the movie are very similar yet curiously differ in big ways. Characters disappear or get melded together into the movie, which is to be expected, but then there are several major plot points that were reworked entirely. The movie ends up being overall more hopeful, but the book in many ways seems more realistic (if soap-operatic fiction can come across like realism).

Now I just need to see Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, a “pastiche” of the movie. IMDb reports, “Susann submitted a screenplay for a sequel to Valley of the Dolls, but when Fox found it unsatisfactory, Susann’s contract gave them the right to concoct a follow-up of their own. This was the result.”

I took too long to type this up and don’t have the patience to page through and find all the parts I liked. I recall “The Library of Babel” was one of my favorites. Oh, I also related the bizarre gambling outlined in “The Babylon Lottery” several times.