A Novel Bookstore by Laurence Cossee

One could hardly say that Paul Neon's 

disappearance caused a stir in the canton 

of Biot, where he had apparently settled 

for good, nor in Les Crets, the scrawny 

village where he inhabited the very last 

house.

Opening to 

A Novel Bookstore

by Laurence Cosse

translated from the French by

Alison Anderson

This is the most pornographic book I've read all year.

My definition of pornography is probably different from yours.  Pornography offers its viewers a fantasy depiction of something they cannot have, usually a sexual fantasy.  At some point in life, one finds  that Playboy, or Blueboy, or whatever, has been largely replaced with Architectural Digest-- pictures of beautiful people give way to pictures of beautiful homes.  Middle-aged pornography.  But at heart, you're still lusting after things you're not going to get. 

Some readers fantasize about owning a bookstore devoted to the kinds of books they love, especially readers who've never worked in a bookstore like me.  (My own fantasy bookstore is called Wuthering Heights Books--it carries a wide range of books, arranged geographically by original language, on a wide range of topics but is best known for it's section devoted to books by and about the Brontes.)  Most of us will never work in our fantasy bookstore, let alone own it.  Frankly, we're lucky if we're able to shop in it now and then.

So, under my definition of the term, A Novel Bookstore by Laurence Cosse is the most pornographic book I've read all year.  

In the novel's opening scenes, Ivan and Francesca meet in an little known bookstore in an Alpine resort town.  Ivan runs the store which he stocks with the novels he admires instead of the current best sellers.  While his sales never amount to much, he does develop  devoted followings who seek him out in between runs on the ski slopes to ask if he has discovered anyone new they should be reading.  

When Ivan is eventually fired in favor of someone who will stock best-sellers, he and Francesca, one of his more devoted customers, join forces to open up their dream bookstore,  The Good Novel, which will not only sell just novels, it will sell just "good novels."  The rest of the book describes how the two set up and run their bookstore in spite of a publishing establishment that is not only against them but apparently willing to resort to violence to stop them if necessary.

I don't know if Mr. Cosse has ever worked in a bookstore, but reality is beside the point in A Novel Bookstore.  The  day to day operation of The Good Novel is of interest because it is a fantasy.  We don't care how real bookstores are run; we want to know how our dream bookstore would work.  Francesca and Ivan allow Mr. Cosse to give his own book snobbery free reign.  The two select a committee of eight authors whom they admire. This committee will operate in secret, the eight do not even know who the other members are, to select 600 novels each.  Their combined lists form the initial stock offered for sale at  The Good Novel and is added to each year as new books come out and as the committee finds unfamiliar titles they deem worthy.  

Rival bookstore chains and jilted authors set out to sabotage The Good Novel from the start, but enough readers find the store to make it a hit.  That's it's located in Paris helps both the store and the book's readers.  Isn't your fantasy bookstore in Paris?

A Novel Bookstore is a novel, and there is enough romance and mystery to make up an engaging plot, but I was most interested in the operation of the bookstore.  It was nice to find out who really loved who and all, but things like store's initial advertising campaign interested me much  more.  It's best bit, a full page ad featuring "a background of the type of Restoration painting that is often too hastily described as 'a minor oil': a patch of Roman countryside with a Tilbury briskly trotting by and in it's window you would recognize, if you had any literary background at all, the profile of Stendhal" with the words "All the books no one is talking about" across the front.

All right, I'm a bit of a snob, but not enough of one that I didn't have to look up Tilbury.  It's a type of carriage with one seat and two large wheels.  So, if you're someone drawn to the books "no one is talking about," A Novel Bookstore may bring you more pleasure than a year's subscription to Architectural Digest.

Tuesdays with Dorothy

"Salary is no object: I want only enough to keep body and soul apart."


Dorothy Parker, New Yorker (4 February 1928)




Dorothy Parker attended elementary school at the Convent of the Blessed Sacrament in New York City's upper west side.  She was asked to leave following her characterization of Christ's conception as "spontaneous combustion."






Full disclosure:  All biographical information regarding Dorothy Parker comes from Wikipedia.org, but I do check the footnotes.

The Death of the Author by Gilbert Adair

When she told me what she meant 

to do, my initial instinct was to 

look at my watch.

Opening to 

The Death of the The Author

by Gilbert Adair

In the mid-twentieth century the author died.  At least as far as many university English departments were concerned. After critic/scholar Roland Barthes published his essay "The Death of the Author,"  whatever the author intended ceased to be of interest to a critical establishment determined to study the text and how it worked devoid of any reference to the author who created it.

I'm oversimplifying an idea I largely support here.  I am interested in the lives of authors, painters, poets and other artists, but at the end of the day, I believe, their work must stand or fall on its own.  Once the book has been published, the author no longer has exclusive rights to how it should be read.  The author may have wanted me to interpret a work a certain way, but after publication, that is no longer important.  As readers we are in charge interpretation.

This idea is attacked in Gilbert Adair's take-no-prisoners satire, The Death of the Author.  In his novella Léopold Sfax,  literary critic, writes a book about "The Theory" which holds that the life of the author is unrelated to the author's text.  Sfax's theory takes the post-war academe by storm, sweeping through university English departments worldwide.  What the world doesn't know is that Sfax created this theory in part to hide his own dubious history.  While living in occupied France as a young man, Sfax wanted so desperately to become a writer that he was willing to work for the Nazi forces writing propaganda pieces  under an assumed name.  It's fear of exposure that leads him to invent "The Theory" as a means of securing his post war work's reputation even if he cannot protect his personal one.


Later in the novella, Sfax comes up with the idea of denying the existence not only of the author but of the text itself.  In a brilliant bit of satire on Mr. Adair's part, this new theory holds that the only agent truly acting is the reader, that the text itself is meaningless, too amorphous to be pinned down and commented on with authority.   Through this essay, entitled Either/Either (pronounce Eyether/Eether - this is important), Sfax hopes to make it possible for his followers to continue their devotion to him once his own biography and his early propaganda become known.  By denying both authorial and textual intent he can establish that his writing cannot be pro-Nazi, only readers can be pro-Nazi since the reader is the only true agent in the production and consumption of art.


If you keep the title in mind as you read, you'll know what's going to happen to Leopold Sfax.  But knowing this won't spoil the fun of The Death of the Author.  Mr. Adair has enough tricks up his sleeve to delight his readers right up to the book's final sentence. 


I expect The Death of the Author is a book I will re-read on a regular basis. 

Sunday Salon: Back to School and Bye, Bye Borders

Picture day is this Friday.

This was the first week of school so not much reading was done in my house.  Ironic, yes?  When English teachers go back to work, they stop reading.

My year is off to an excellent start.   I'll soon be  in full swing with the whole getting up early business which means I'll have time to read again.  My commute gets me up at 5:00 so this week I've been too sleepy for much reading.  I was lucky to get through two chapters of Holy War, a new book about Vasco de Gama that I'm reading for an upcoming book tour.  I have until Septermber 23 to post my review, so I'll be fine.  I'm not so sure about my up-coming book club book, Cutting For Stone which I have not started yet. We meet in just three weeks.

Yesterday, I visited a Borders Bookstore in Vacaville, CA where I bought two sets of books for my classroom bookclubs, Ranger's Apprentice: The Ruins of Gorlan and The Pigman.  Both of these titles will be perfect for some kids this year.  That's what 7th grade is like.  Most of the books left at Borders are celebrity autobiographies and political books by T.V. pundits.  Will no one in Vacaville buy Sarah Palin's new book, even at 70% off?  There's still a stack of them at Borders in Vacaville.

I hope to be back up to full speed this week, so I should be able to start reading not only books, but book blogs again.  Of course, even with only three days of school, there is already a stack of papers that need grading....

Dakota's Favorites: Les Miserables by Victor Hugo

In the year 1815 Monseigneur Charles-Francois-Bienvenu Myriel was Bishop of Dinge, He was then about seventy-five, having held the bishopric since 1806.



Les Miserables by Victor Hugo certainly takes its time getting started. No "It was the best of times; it was the worst of times," or "Happy families are all alike," here. Mr. Hugo seems confident that his readers will indulge him while he takes 150 pages setting things up. Those who do will be rewarded for their efforts.

I've decided to break up my reading of Les Miserables into parts. The book itself is broken up into five parts each of them as long as a typical novel making for 1229 pages in the Penguin Classics edition I'm reading. Les Miserables took more than a decade to write. Hugo completed it while living on the Channel Islands during a period of exile from France. He began life as a conservative royalist and ended up almost an avowed socialist. Clearly he had a lot to say, and Les Miserables was his chance to say it. Hugo is clearly making his case, laying out his critique of French society in Les Miserables; at points he simply preaches his sermon openly, but he is also telling a compelling story, one that generations have found difficult to put down. After reading Part One: Fantine, you can count me as a fan.

Fantine is the story of three people. The first is Bishop Myriel, the Bishop of Dinge and that rare person a truly upright clergyman. We are told the better part of his life story, given several examples of his charity and his moral behavior which is always guided by what is the right thing not just for a man, but for a man of God to do. He is an extreme example, certainly, but he serves to advance the plot and to advance Mr. Hugo's case against a clergy and a society that falls so short of what the New Testament expects.

One night Bishop Myriel meets the second person featured in Fantine, Jean Valjean, a convict newly paroled after serving 19 years hard labor. Valjean is unable to find work, unable to find lodgings even unable to find anyone who will sell him food because whenever he enters a town he must first register with the local police as an ex-convict and no one will do business of any kind with an ex-convict. When Valjean finds lodging with the Bishop, he cannot believe the priest is really as good as he appears to be. How can this man trust him? How can he see good in him? During the night, Valjean steals valuable silverware from the Bishop and runs away. He is caught and brought before the Bishop, accused of the theft. Rather than turn Valjean in, the Bishop gives him the rest of the silverware and two valuable silver candlesticks claiming that was his intention all along and that Valjean is innocent.

In the meantime, young Fantine has fallen in love with a wealthy man. She spends one magical summer with him, his three friends and their three girlfriends, only to be dumped when the four young men return to their wealthy families and the better lives and wives promised to them. The other three girls laugh it all off because they were not really in love after all and there will be other men. Fantine, completely in love at the time, is with child. She is abandoned to her fate by everyone. Alone in the world she leaves Paris, daughter in her arms, and heads for her hometown where she hopes to find work. Along the way she leaves her daughter in the care of what she believes is a good hearted family of innkeepers. Once home she finds work in the new factory of Monseiur Madeline, who is really a reformed and incognito Jean Valjean. Ill fortune follows Fantine everywhere and she eventually is reduced to prostitution. But Monseiur Madeline is also an upright man. At her worst moment, he takes her under his wing, provides for her care and plans to reunite her with her long lost daughter, Cosette.

This is pure melodrama in its most manipulative form. The entire first part reeks with Victorian sentimentality a walking exampler of what Virginia Woolf called a "baggy-pants monster." Hugo is trying to build a realistic novel, his attention to detail is great, but these characters are so over-the-top they defy reality, they could never really exist. But it all works. It works very well. Somehow Victor Hugo makes the reader care deeply about his characters, though they are more archetypes than people. They cannot escape the wheel of fate that they are trapped on, but this does not mean the reader won't root for them anyway. I'm reading Hugo's prose in translation, I admit, but few people can turn on the suspense or build up the excitement like he can. Part one ends with Jean Valjean racing to Arras where another man is on trail, mistakenly charged with being Jean Valjean. The roads are bad, his carriage breaks down, his horse becomes exhausted, the courtroom is so crowded he can't get in... It felt like reading the final sequence of a silent movie adventure serial with an innocent girl tied to the tracks of an oncoming train.

Fantine is only the first part of Les Miserables, but it does satisfy like a novel. There is clearly more story to tell, but the ending is an ending not a to-be-continued. So Les Miserables goes back on my shelf until next month. There are five parts to it and at the rate of one part per month I'll finish it sometime in May. That should leave me with enough time to read Tristram Shandy before the end of the year.

While I did go on to finish Les Miserables only a little bit behind schedule, I didn't get around to Tristram Shandy until this year.  While I'm behind schedule with it as well, I'm loving it and will finish it all too soon.

Modigliani: A Life by Meryle Secrest

My search for Modigliani began a 

few years ago int he East Wing of 

the National Gallery of Art 

in Washington.

Opening to

Modigiliani: A Life

by Meryle Secrest

While Modigliani: A Life by Meryle Secrest was not exactly the biography I was looking for, it is an entertaining, educational read that has much to offer both fans of the artist and general readers.

Several years ago I picked up a copy of Becoming Judy Chicago more or less on a whim to discover one of my favorite reads of 2007.  Turns out I enjoy reading critical biographies of artists.  (Finding a new sub-genre you enjoy is one benefit of reading outside your box.)

Ms. Secrest's book on Modigliani is not really a critical biography.  My loose definition of a critical biography is a book that looks at an artist's work in an attempt to illuminate how it came to be, to examine how it works, and to evaluate its overall quality.  Of course, much of the artists personal life will be covered but it is not the focus of a critical biography.  Ms. Secrest covers all of Modigiliani's life which is her main focus.  She does spend plenty of time discussing how he came to be an artist and explaining both how is art works as well as why it is significant, but the life of the man takes precedence.  Hence the title, I suppose.

It's an interesting life.  If you were one of the many people participating in the recent Paris in July by day-dreaming about being an artist in Paris during the heyday of Monet or Picasso, you will find plenty to enjoy in Modigliani: A Life.   Amedeo Modigliani arrived in Paris from Italy, in the early days of the 20th century.  He lived among the major artists of his day, became friends with Pablo Picasso, was the center of attention in avant-garde social sets, and lived la vie Boheme on nothing a year.   He struggled as a sculptor for years until he found his signature style as a painter.  While he never became rich or famous during his lifetime, he did live to enjoy some success before dying  at the age of 36 from tubercular meningitis.   In Modigliani: A Life you'll find a rich story of struggles with art, family, women, and day to day existence in Paris of the early 20th century, when the art scene left Montmarte for cheaper quarters in Montparnasse.

Jeanne Hebuterne (aka In Front of a Door) 1919.

Ms. Secrest attempts to correct several aspects of Modigliani's reputation, namely that he helped bring about his own early death through excessive drink and the use of narcotics.  She builds a strong case.  What struck me most is the idea that he drank as a means to control the symptoms of tuberculosis which he kept secret until just before his death.  His fear that he would have been ostracized by just about everyone if his condition became known was probably correct.    

If, like me, you're looking for information about his paintings, you'll find it towards the end of Ms. Secrest's book.  Modigliani was at the height of his skill during the final year of his life.  He had been painting portraits of friends for several years, he worked with anyone who would sit for him without pay because he had no money to hire models, but these did not sell.  In Modigliani's day, if the sitter didn't buy the portrait, no one did.  Once he moved on to painting nudes, his work began to sell, and he painted what many argue are his best works.  

Like Picasso and many other artists living in Paris at the time, Modigliani was heavily and clearly influenced by the African masks which were beginning to appear on the art market in Europe.  Ms. Secrest writes about the mask like faces in Modigliani's work:

"The more he (Modigliani) paints individuals the more their particular features fade into the background, and the more faces seem encased in a smooth shell as hard as a carapace.  As Pierre Daix observed, the comparison between Picasso's revised portrait of Gertude Stein and Modigliani's mature style is apt.  Modigliani, however, never took his experiments with features further than that. Unlike Picasso, who has already turned his women's faces into beak-like appendages by the time he is working on Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, Modigliani's noses stay where they were put, the mouths fall beneath them, there are no double profiles or eyes placed in the middle of foreheads. Picasso's interest is schematic, to see how far he can rearrange facial features and still have them be recognizable.  Modigliani's interest is otherwise. He is trying to simplify and reduce to the irreducible minimum the essence of a personality without actually losing it altogether.  The masks of the commedia dell'arte wore, as Pierre Louis wrote in The Italian Comedy, "an indefinable expression as full of possibilities as of impossibilities, like the Mona Lisa, which every generation interprets differently." Modigliani's self-imposed challenge, to see how far he could venture into abstraction without ending in either anonymity or caricature, must be one of the most difficult any artist since the Renaissance has attempted."

The artist in his studio

So why is Modigliani not held in the high esteem less able painters like Picasso are or recognized alongside the great painters of his generation like Matisse?  Ms. Secrest blames three major culprits.  The first is the author's own personal reputation.  Modigliani's private life was one of near complete chaos which gave him a lasting bad reputation deserved or not.  Second, because his work is so easy to fake and because he did not keep accurate records of the work he did, he became one of the  most frequently counterfeited artists of the 20th century.  For a long time, there was really no way to be sure you were buying a Modigliani.  Finally, his artwork itself worked against a lasting reputation.  Because Modigliani worked to create his own signature style, he was not included in the early narrative of 20th century art.  He is neither a cubist nor an abstract painter nor does he fit within any other school of art.  His work stands outside the rest and was often left out of the early histories of 20th century art as a result.

Fans of Modigliani, like myself, can hope that as more and more people begin to see how inferior Picasso's work is to that of Matisse, that other excellent painters like Modigliani will be given their due.  Ms. Secrest's book is a step in the right direction.

Tuesdays with Dorothy

"And she had It. It, hell; she had Those."




Dorothy Parker regarding a character in Elinor Glyn's novel It; in her review, "Madame Glyn Lectures on 'It,' with Illustrations" in The New Yorker (1927-11-26).








In 1927 Parker was arrested in Boston while protesting the executions of Sacco and Vanzetti.  She pled guilty to "loitering and sauntering" and paid a five dollar fine, just over 60 dollars when adjusted for inflation.

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Lawrence Stern, book VI

We'll not stop two moments, my dear Sir,--only, as we have 

got through these five volumes, (do, Sir, sit down upon a set--

they are better than nothing) let us look back upon the country 

we have passed through.--

Opening to Book VI of

Tristram Shandy

by Lawrence Sterne

How can you not love an author who begins book six of his ten book novel by asking the reader to have an seat on books one, two, three, four and five?

I have three wonderful things to share from book VI of Tristram Shandy.

First, after the cast of characters debates at what age a young man should begin his education, the sooner the better it turns out, Lord Shandy describes what he seeks in a suitable tutor for his young son:

...the governor I make choice of shall neither lisp, or squint, or wink or talk loud, or look fierce, or foolish; --or bite his lips, or grind his teeth, or speak through his nose, or pick it, or blow it with his fingers.--
   He shall neither walk fast, --or slow, or fold his arms, --for that is laziness; --or hang them down,--for that is folly; or hide them in his pocket, for that is nonsense.--
   He shall neither strike, or pinch, or tickle, --or bite, or cut his nails, or hawk, or spit, or snift, or drum with his feet or fingers in company; --nor (according to Erasmus) shall he speak to any one in making water, --nor shall he point to carrion or excrement.


It's reassuring to me to see that parental expectations for teachers have been outrageous since at least 1760. Just keep on waiting for  Superman.  He'll show up someday.   I confess that Lord Shandy has six reasons not to hire me as tutor to young Tristram but I stand, arms akimbo, refusing to tell you which six.

Second, towards the end of  book VI, Tristram tries to explain what he has written so far and why he has gotten off track so many times.  He begins chapter 33 by explaining how difficult it is to write a book the way he is writing it, namely that he must go backwards and forwards so often in order to keep things straight in the reader's mind that he often becomes lost himself.  He actually abandons chapter 33 after a few paragraphs because he has become too lost in his explanation to go further; he starts over again in chapter 34.

Finally, Tristram offers the reader some encouraging thoughts for the remaining books. One, the widow Wadman, Toby's love interest will soon arrive. Because she is so beautiful that Tristram cannot adequately describe her, he leaves an entire page blank for the reader to draw a picture of the most beautiful woman he can imagine as a stand-in for widow Wadman.   Then he explains that the story will become easier to follow once the widow Wadman arrives.  He offers these little drawings as plot maps of books one through four:

He admits that book five was certainly no easier to follow even with annotations:

But, he promises that the next book, book seven, will have a simple straight plot line. 

________________________________________

I'll need to read it to believe it.  If this turns out to be true, I'll be very disappointed.  If I've learned anything from reading Tristram Shandy this year it's that the joy in life comes from its digressions.  

Sunday Salon: The Book Room, Bookmooch, Built-in Book Shelves

Contractor's design for the bookshelves we're hoping to 

add to our new library/den in the upstairs guest room.

What can I say.  We're on a budget.

Three topics today, only one of which should be counted as a rant.  Another is slightly rantish, but not really, the third is meant to be 100% celebratory.

Back to School

I went back to school full time this week.  Things look very good at my new school overall.  As it is whenever you start a new job, things are a bit rough around the edges, but I'll be ready for opening day Wednesday.

The most aggravating thing so far, really the only one, is that the district will not allow us to have any of the books from my previous school, the one they shut down.  Instead, they plan to keep all of the books at the old site and let us check them out for two weeks at a time after filling out the appropriate paperwork at least one week in advance.  It's difficult to understand the wisdom behind keeping a middle school library of over 10,000 books aimed at 10-14 year-old readers at a site with no middle school students.  I guess the high school students in the continuation program now there are much more interested in The Lightning Thief and The Big Book of Dogs than I would have been at their age.  I'm trying to get a couple of teachers to join me in an attempt to liberate several class sets of The Outsiders.  This would be an act of literary piracy, so we may wear eye patches and carry plastic swords when we make our move.  "Give us all your S.E. Hinton novels, matey, or you'll be sleeping with Davy Jones tonight!"

I'm trying not to be cynical this early in the year, but this level of disrespect towards teachers, none of whom were involved in this decision,  is now typical of the district where I work.   They are also keeping  the computers at the former middle school instead of sending them on to where the middle school students now are.  My old school had three full computer labs, 90 or so computers.  So we won't have enough books or enough computers to do class research projects at my new school.  But, I've survived worse than this during 20 plus years as a teacher.  At least I won't be buying my own copy paper this year, as far as I know.


Bookmooch

Bookmooch has not been working very well for me so far.  I let my points at Paperbackswap.com run out just before summer started and switched over to Bookmooch.com.  I was happy with Paperbackswap.com, but I'd heard so much mention of Bookmooch on the book blogs that I thought I'd give it a try.  15 of the 18 books I posted were requested within the first week, and I got a book from the U.K. a week later, too.  Since then, nothing.  The U.K. book cost three points instead of one because it came from so far away, which is fine with me, but I've not had a peep in almost three months.

Well, two peeps.  The problem is that I have so little time to reply when a book on my wishlist comes up that I've missed out on both.  Paperbackswap.com allowed several days to reply when a book became available.   Apparently, Bookmooch just gives you a few hours, because by the time I get around to my email, the book is already taken.

I'll stick with Bookmooch until my points run out, but I'm probably going back to Paperbackswap.com after that.  Has anyone else had a similar experience?


Bookshelves and Book Collecting

We're adding built-in bookshelves to one of our upstairs bedrooms to turn it into a library/den.   The contractor will be by tomorrow with a full plan to bid for the job.  I'm so excited that I'm thinking about taking up book collecting again.  I know; what a nerd.   For several decades I kept all the books I bought, only to be overwhelmed by them.  So for the last five or six years, I've given most of them away and only kept the very  few I'm sure I'll read again someday or the ones I use as for reference.  (And some with pretty pictures.)  But now I'm thinking about collecting these wonderful series I keep seeing: The Art of the Novella books, the New York Review Books, Europa Editions, Virago Press.  And once we have the new bookshelves installed.....

It's a sickness; I know.

Friday Picture Reading - Dogs Reading

Dogs Reading Scripture

Original Caption:  Laddie (left), top dog of the study group, hopes that their new painting, “Dogs Reading Scripture,” will make them role models for other dogs caught in the vicious cycle of canine gambling. Says the collie leader, “Our next goal is to stop drinking out of the toilet.”

Deathworld by Harry Harrison

With a gentle sigh the service

tube dropped a message capsule

into the receiving cup.

Opening to Deathworld

by Harry Harrision

You're walking down a dimly lit aisle of a second hand bookstore, the kind with lists of genres on index cards tacked up at the end of each set of shelves.  You're looking for the mystery section which for some reason is always next to science fiction.  You see stacks of old paperbacks lying on the floor in front of the M-N shelf.  Lurid covers.  Men in space suits.  Ridiculous alien monsters.  Colorful ringed planets with rocket ships passing through fields of asteriod debris.

Who would read this stuff, you ask.  Okay, maybe you didn't use the word 'stuff.'

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Rest of article accidentally deleted
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I wrote an excellent post defining the pleasure of reading pulp novels using  Harry Harrison's Deathworld to illustrate  the points I was making, I've found myself reading a lot of pulp novels this summer, but as soon as I finished I pushed one of those indeterminate combinations of keys on my laptop and lost everything after the word 'stuff' above.

I just haven't the heart to recreate the whole thing, even though it was excellent.

All I'm going to say is that pulp novels are fun to read.

That's why I read them. 

Tuesdays with Dorothy

"This wasn't just plain terrible, this was fancy terrible. This was 
terrible with raisins in it."


Dorothy Parker




At age 21 Dorothy Parker sold her first poem to Vanity Fair magazine in 1914.  A few months later she was hired as an editorial assistant at Vogue.

Hothouse (The Long Afternoon of Earth) by Brian Aldiss

Obeying an inalienable law, 

things grew, growing riotous 

and strange in their impulse 

for growth.

Opening to Hothouse

by Brian Aldiss

I don't know how I get into reading these books.

My first contact with Brian Aldiss came from watching a strange independant movie called "Brothers of the Head" about conjoined twins, one gay and one straight,  who become punk rock stars.  It was weird and wonderful and willing to bravely go there, so I decided to look up the book it was based on.  I couldn't find it.  Mr. Aldiss is not exactly an easy author to find in the U.S.

I did find Hothouse. (The alternative title is much better if you ask me.  Really, publishers should ask me first.  I could tell.)  Hothouse won the Hugo award in 1962 for best short fiction.  Turns out, the novel is a collection of five novellas.

Some will argue (especially the winner's publishers) that the Hugo is the most prestigious award in the Science Fiction genre.   It's winners are selected by members of the World Science Fiction Society who must attend the annual convention in order to vote.  We're talking about devoted fans of the genre; It's safe to assume that they read most if not all of the nominees each year.   Does that mean their choices will be a consistent marker of quality?

Hothouse is one long trip.  (Feel free to read several meanings into the word 'trip.')  The story takes place in the future when the sun is in the early stages of super-nova and the earth has stopped rotating.  The sun side of the earth, where most of the story is set, has become overgrown with thick forests of giant plants, evolved enough to prey on one of the few remaining animals-- humans.  Humans have evolved as well, or devovled, into small, greenish creatures of limited mental capacity. They can still talk and solve problems, but they aren't the inventors they once were.  The novel follows a small group of humans as they leave the tree that was once their home, wondering in search of other humans and a place where they can live safely in a world devoted to eating them.

It's ridiculous, but it's kind of fun.  One soon gets the feeling that Mr. Aldiss is making it all up as he goes along, throwing in a race of insectoid creatures here, a siren like vine monster in a cave there whenever things get too dull.  This technique certainly worked for Lewis Carroll's Alice books and it's what makes The Hobbit so much fun.  I was willing to play along with Mr. Aldiss until the intelligent fungus from space took possession of the hero.

I draw the line at intelligent fungi taking possession of the hero.

Maybe this was the best thing going in 1962, I cannot say.  I can say that Hothouse contains some very bad dialogue in a genre stereotypically full of bad dialogue.  Judge for yourself.  Here's a random page:

     "How can morel protect us from the terrors of the Ground?" Poyly asked after a spell.  "How can he protect us from a wiltmilt or a dripperlip?"
     "He knows things," Gren said simply.  "He made us put on these fruit skins to hide us from enemies.  They have kept us safe.  When we find this other tribe we will be safer still."
     "My fruit skin chafes my thighs," Poyly said, with a womanly gift for irrelevance that eons of time had not quenched.


I kind of wish I knew people who used phrases like "protect us from the terrors of."  The above passage is  actually not all that bad, now that I reread it.  I did pick a random passage so I'm not going to look for a worse one.  You'll just have to take it on faith that they there.

I only mention the Hugo award because of a post I read on someone's blog last week.  A friend of the blogger's had just discovered Science Fiction and Fantasy so he was reading through the Hugo winners to give himself a general education on the genre.  After Hothouse, I have to wonder if this is a terribly good idea.

But if you know someone with an extra print copy of Brothers of the Head they're willing to part with, please let me know.  I have eleven Bookmooch points and I'm willing to negotiate.

Sunday Salon: Gone Fishin'

Not quite, but we saw people who were fishing.

CJ and I took a brief holiday to the town of Lakeport up in Clear Lake this weekend, so there will not be a full Sunday Salon post today.  Instead, just a few pictures of the Clear Lake area.

The Forbestown Inn in Lakeport where we stayed.

Picnic grounds at the Langtry Estate winery.  Lake County Wineries
are growing in number but still one of the better kept secrets in
Northern California. We loved the valley views from the tables seen here.
We're already planning a picnic.
(Don't tell anyone.)

View of the boat dock at the Ceago Vinegarden.  That's Clear Lake
in the background.  

Next week we'll return to our regular, bookish programming,

Dakota's Favorites: Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Update: This book was eaten by Dakota on July 6, 2009.  Bad dog.



On an exceptionally hot evening early in July a young man came out of the tiny room which he rented from tenants in S. Place and walked slowly, as though in hesitation, towards K. Bridge.

I've been saving my review of Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky for several weeks; a book like this requires some reflection. It was not what I expected. I have read lots of 19th century fiction, most of it English fiction, so I was expecting Dostoevsky to fall in place neatly alongside Charles Dickens. Dickens wrote about crime and criminals in several novels and was said to be a fan of Dostoevsky's work. I was wrong. Rashkolnikov, the murderous anti-hero of Crime and Punishment bears little resemblance to any of the criminals in Dickens's novels--the two authors have little in common in their approach to the subject at all.

Even in Charles Dickens's most intimate story the reader gets the impression that he is in an expansive universe. The richness and the variety of characters imply that there is a colorful world out there if only we can go and find it. I think this is even true in a novel like Little Dorrit much of which is confined to small rooms the Marshalsea prison. Even in prison the characters create a world. I had the opposite sensation with Crime and Punishment. Throughout the novel I felt that the world was collapsing on Rashkolnikov. Although there is a large cast of characters, many colorful enough to be in a Dickens novel, everything seems to close in on Rashkolnikov's lonely room. To the point that when he left it, he was still in it. He takes his isolation with him when he enters the world, rather than bringing the world with him into prison as the characters in Little Dorrit do.

Rashkolnikov is a young student in St. Petersburg, Russia, just eking out a living barely able to pay for his classes and his own support on the money his family can send him. He reaches a point when he can no longer even do this and is faced with paying the rent. He reasons that his life is worth more than that of the local pawnbroker, that if he were to kill her and to rob her he would be no different really from a Napoleon who did just that on a much grander scale and is hailed as a genius and a hero for doing so. Men of genius are not subject to the law and morality of ordinary men according to Rashkolnikov, so what would be an act of murder for one is not so for the other.

Raskolnikov kills the old woman and her servant only to be tormented afterwards by guilt and be the fear of discovery. He becomes ill as a result. His friends and neighbors along with his mother and sister arrive on the scene, each one voicing their own theory as to why he is ill and how to cure him. They hover over him in his tiny room talking about the flu while he is consumed with guilt and the suspicion that they all know what he did and are mocking him. Once he recovers his health he must deal with a police inspector who has found a witness, a young neighbor girl whom Raskolnikov has fallen in love with in spite of her lower status and suspect reputation. In what many, myself included, find a weak ending, she brings him to redemption.

This all takes place in the space of a few days and it all makes for compelling reading. I don't know why that surprised me but it did. I was expecting Crime and Punishment to be something of a slog, but I found it difficult to put down right from the start. Parts of it are actually very funny, but what is most interesting is the study of a single criminal mind. I felt like I was reading a case study in a book by Sigmund Freud. Since the main reason I read Crime and Punishment in the first place is that Matt has talked about it so frequently on his blog A Guy's Moleskin Notebook, I decided to ask him about this. His reply follows:

I haven't stumbled upon any published literature that Freud has written on Crime and Punishment. Fyodor Dostoevsky began to write this novel in 1859, the last of his ten years of exile in Siberia. Living a life of suffering, he created the character of Raskolnikov with the preconceptions of his own harrowing experience. I have read volume after volume of critical essays on where Raskolnikov's suffering originated, which is, from the frame of the novel itself, in his murder of the pawn-woman. The lectures on the novel in my undergrad class also focused on this topic. But Dostoevsky's main concentration I believe is why suffering must exist and how one can overcome this suffering.

In part one of the novel, Dostoevsky describes Raskolnikov as "having been in an over strained irritable condition, verging on hypochondria" for some time past. When out in public, he is almost always preoccupied with his own agitated thoughts or muttering to himself in a state of feverish confusion. These irregular characteristics indicate Raskolnikov’s nervous anticipation of the murder that he plans to commit. The guilt that he experiences after carrying out the murder further amplifies his irritable condition, thus plunging him into a period of illness and delirium. A reader would conclude, therefore, that Raskolnikov’s mental state is directly linked to the guilt about the crime.

As a neurotic, Raskolnikov is unable to suppress his instincts as effectively as a regular person. He engages in these palliative measures for the same reasons as everybody else does, yet is unable to achieve the same results due to the abnormal strength of his instincts. When the instincts of regular people come into contact with their palliative measures, they are instantly subdued. But when Raskolnikov’s powerful instincts come into contact with his palliative measures, they combine with the palliative measures, thus turning them into extreme and distorted mental obsessions.

How is it that Raskolnikov’s aggression still exists, when the conditions of civilization are supposed to repress such instincts? Freud maintains that civilization "is built up upon a renunciation of instinct, how much it presupposes precisely the non-satisfaction (by suppression, repression, or some other means?) of powerful instincts." In order to answer our question, we must again remind ourselves that Raskolnikov is a neurotic character with instincts that cannot be repressed as readily as those of normal people. He maintains his aggressions, therefore, while others find their aggressions limited by civilization.

Freudian analysis of Raskolnikov might indicate that complex connections exist between civilization and the human psyche—connections which are impossible to completely sever. The presence of these connections make it impossible for us to try to oppose the structure of civilization without ending up in the same plight as Raskolnikov. Thus, both Freud and Dostoevsky seem to suggest that it is necessary for us to adapt ourselves as best we can to the pre-existing constructs of civilization and learn to accept its less pleasant aspects.

Reference: Freud, Sigmund. "Civilizations and Its Discontents." The Freud Reader. Ed. Peter Gay. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1989.


I find this to be the key point Matt makes: "Raskolnikov is a neurotic character with instincts that cannot be repressed as readily as those of normal people. He maintains his aggressions, therefore, while others find their aggressions limited by civilization." This should be a major point of debate: does civilization place a positive limit on more natural instincts towards violence? By the end of Crime and Punishment I suspect Dostoevsky's answer would be yes, but I'm not sure mine is. While Raskolnikov is punished and does come to repent his actions, Napoleon is still considered a genius and is still praised as a hero. You can visit his tomb in Paris and see the bas relief sculptures that portray him as the great unifier of Europe. I'm left to wonder if Raskolnikov's great sin is not that committed murder but that he thought he was the kind of man who could get away with it.


I'd like to thank Matt for his participation in this project. I envy his students. I bet his classes provide lots of food for thought.


Dakota's Favorites are reviews from the archive here at Ready When You Are, C.B.  What's in your archive?

Murder at the Savoy by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo

The day was hot and stifling, 

without a breath of air.

Opening to

Murder at the Savoy

by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo

Translated from the Swedish by

Amy and Ken Knoespell

Can a Swedish detective novel be funny?

This summer, while I've been reading all ten of the Martin Beck novels which together make up The Story of Crime by husband and wife team Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo, I keep running into articles and introductions that mention how funny the novels are.  

I can say that  I've enjoyed all six of the novels I've read so far, I haven't been paying much attention to the use of humor. Isn't that one of the things that gets lost in translation?  So, I decided to pay close attention to the use of humor in book six, Murder at the Savoy.    It's pretty funny.  Take these examples:

The novel's murder victim is a wealthy businessman shot in the head.in the middle of a popular restaurant while giving a speech.

   At the table three windows away a diner in his fifties became rigid and stared with amazement, a glass of whisky halfway to his mouth.  In front of him was a book that he had been pretending to read.

   The man with the suntan and the dark-blue shantung suit was not dead.

   Stirring, he said, "Ow! It hurts!"

   Dead people don't usually complain. Besides, it didn't even look as if he was bleeding.

That's pretty funny for a crime scene.  The man frozen in shock about to drink his whiskey is a comedy cliche, a silent movie era double take you'd expect to find in a 1970's John Landis comedy, but the detail about pretending to read his book is unexpected.  "Dead people don't usually complain" is a bit adolescent but the final remark about how insignificant his wounds appear is a surprise again and a comment on the nature of murder in Martin Beck books in general.    The crimes in The Story of Crime sometimes look like they might expose a vast conspiracy, instead they tend to turn out to be very common.  Murder at the Savoy which looks like a political assasination in the beginning,  turns out to be a simple case of revenge in the end.

The main detective, Martin Beck, has a cynical outlook typical of fictional police detectives, and the wit to match.  He sees the victim's boat which he describes as constructed to time honored principles because it was built in 1945, "When boats still looked like boats."   When his superior ends a speech by asking Beck to excuse the trite expression he's used Beck replies "It's better to use a trite expression than one that doesn't make any sense."   Here's the exchange Beck has with his superior towards the end of their scene:

   (Malm) continued: "It'll be a feather in your cap, at the very least."

   "I don't have a cap."  (Beck replied.)

   "This is nothing to joke about. "

   "I can always buy one though."

Murder at the Savoy takes place in the early 1970's when anti-government demonstrations were common in Sweden and often threatened to turn violent.  Career detective Gunvald Larsson is unhappy with how this takes so many officers away from more important police work.  

A large part of the uniform force stood glowering outside of various embassies and tourist agencies.  Doing no good at all, furthermore, since they couldn't accomplish anything constructive if sabotage or demonstartions were in the offing.  Now the national Cheif of Police had even forbidden the men to play with their batons, which had been the only bit of entertainment this senseless, deadly dull work had to offer.

Policemen standing guard, forbidden to twirl their batons.  I think that's pretty funny. 

This acerbic, jaundiced humor appears throughout Murder at the Savoy but never interferes with the novel's work.  This novel is the most openly political of the six I've read so far. The author's uses the cynical humor of their police officer protagonists to critique the Swedish government in particular and society in general.  Their humor keeps the novel's more polemical aspects in check up until the last few pages of the novel.  It also forms the basis of the author's characterization.  These are some funny cops.  I liked them before, but now that I'm paying attention to how funny they are I like them even more.  

Four more volumes to finish before New Year's.

Tuesdays with Dorothy

"She realizes she doesn't know as much as God but feels she knows as much as God knew when he was her age."

Dorothy Parker

Dorothy Parker was born in Long Branch, New Jersey where her parents had a summer beach cottage. According to Ms. Parker, her parents took her back to Manhattan soon after Labor Day which makes her a true New Yorker.

In a Lonely Place by Dorothy Hughes

It was good standing there on 

the promontory overlooking the 

evening sea, the fog lifting itself 

like gauzy veils to touch his face.

Opening to 

In a Lonely Place

by Dorothy Hughes

In 1947, an excellent thriller needed only four characters: two women, one a respectable policeman's wife the other a woman of questionable character, and two men, one a police detective the other a serial killer.  With these four characters and a small supporting cast, Dorothy Hughes created an excellent noir thriller In A Lonely Place that can more than hold its own against any of her male contemporaries.  I'd argue it can hold it's own against anyone writing crime novels today, as well, and it may end up one of my top ten favorite reads this year.

The Los Angelos of In a Lonely Place is in the grip of a serial killer, a strangler who has murdered one woman every 30 days for the past six months, when Dickson  "Dix" Steele decides to contact his old war buddy Brub Nicolai.  The two have lost contact since the war ended and they each returned from England.  Brub is married now--his wife Sylvia is nervous about the strangler and worried for her police detective husband who has been working the case for months.  Dix tolerates Sylvia while milking Brub for details about the strangler case claiming they will help him with the detective novel he is writing, secretly excited by the thrill of being so close to the police officers who are hunting him.  

Dix stays in the apartment of another war buddy, Mel Terris, who has left Los Angelos for a job in Rio.  His neighbor is Laurel Grey, twice divorced wanna-be movie star.  The two quickly fall into bed and then into love, but Laurel knows that Dix is broke, living on the charity of a rich uncle, and the terms of her divorce are such that she loses all alimony if she remarries.  Their affair is doomed long before she begins to suspect Dix has not told her the truth about where Mel Terris has gone.

Although In a Lonely Place is about as bare bones as a detective thriller can get,  Dorothy Hughes creates a tension filled, page turning noir story without depicting a single death.   The reader learns that Dix is the killer by the end of chapter one.  The rest of the novel follows him as he grows closer to Brub and becomes more involved in the investigation of his own crimes.  Knowing that he is the killer gives each scene in the book an undercurrent of dramatic tension that builds nicely as the pages turn.  All the narrator has to do is tell us Dix is alone in the room with Syliva, and the reader becomes concerned for her.  

It makes for a fun book.

Dorothy Hughes

But why is it a feminist book?  (My edition is part of The Feminist Press at the City University of New York's Femmes Fatales series of pulp fiction re-releases.)  For one thing, while she is not well know today, it's clear that Dorothy Hughes can write a detective story as well as any of her male peers.  Take this description of Laurel from her first meeting with Dix Steele:

She was like all women, curious about your  private life.  He laughed at her; she'd find out only as much as he wished.  "An old friend," he laughed.  "Pre-war.  Princeton."  Princeton meant money and social position to her, calculation came quickly under her skin.  She was  greedy and callous and a bitch, but she was fire and a man needed fire.  "I'm from New York," he threw in carelessly.  It sounded better than New Jersey.

"She was fire and a man needed fire."  Okay, that's a bit cheesy, but it's true enough and certainly a driving force in noir fiction of the pulp era.  There's an undercurrent of sexuality in noir pulp that exploits as much as it illustrates the moment in American history that produced it.   But how does In a Lonely Place advance a feminist critical stance?

In her afterward to the novel, which is well worth reading, Lisa Maria Hogeland makes the case that Ms. Huges is critiquing Dix's misogyny as she depicts it.  Take the quotation above and the way it links the hatred of women with lust for them.  The novel stays focused on Dix throughout, though it is not a first person narrative and no attempt is made to offer a psychological explanation for Dix's psychopathology.  Ms. Hogeland believes this is itself a feminist writing at a time when bad mothers and early experiences with women were often  blamed for misogyny.  Think of how sorry we are meant to feel for Pyscho's Norman Bates once we learn how terrible his mother was.  Additionally, Ms. Hughes never places blame on Dix's victims.  They are never "that sort of girl" like the victims in 1970's  and 80's slasher films so often were.  Even Dix himself never puts the blame on his victims, they were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.  That crimes against women are solely the responsibility of the men who commit them was a strictly feminist notion in 1947, it may still be today.

Ms. Hughes never depicts Dix's crimes on the page which Ms. Hogeland reads as a feminist stance in that this makes it impossible for anyone to enjoy their depiction.   Watching the murder of a woman is not  part of the fun in In a Lonely Place the way it is so many detective thrillers.  

Ms. Hogeland argues that Dorothy Hughes present three possible motivations for Dix's crimes.  Early in the novel he is presented as a veteran having some difficulty readjusting to civilian life.  A former pilot, he is nostalgic for the life he lived during the war.  Even at that time the psychotic war veteran was a familiar trope in pulp fiction.  Before he knows who the killer is, Brub argues that the strangler is a killer because he kills, refusing to look further than that for a motive.  By the end we discover that Dix's murders began when he killed the first girl he ever loved out of jealousy.  Whatever the reason for his crimes, Ms. Hogeland believes that what matters in the end is how normal Dix appears to be.  The fact that he is not visibly different from the men around him is meant to bring the masculinity of the late 1940's itself into question.  It's not a comforting idea.

Dorothy Hughes published 14 crime novels during a ten year period, ending her work to take care of her ailing mother. She continued to publish criticism and biographies of the mystery genre and its authors until her death in 1993.  Today only two of her books remain in print.

Maybe a publisher could  re-issue them with fancy covers and new titles, say "The Girl in a Lonely Place."  I'd love to read more of Dorothy Hughes.

Sunday Salon: I'm One of the Gaurdian's Internet Picks of the Week!

The number one "Internet Pick 

of the Week," Good Show, Sir  

features unusually bad science 

fiction covers like this one.

Johnny Dee who writes about technology for the Guardian.co.uk website named Ready When You Are, C.B. one of his Internet Picks of the Week yesterday.

How cool is that?

This led to the highest Saturday traffic Dakota and I have ever had.  It's great to know someone at the Guardian is reading my blog, but I don't know about this description:

"Putting non-chronological books in chronological order and other nerdy reading pursuits."


I'll cop to "other nerdy reading pursuits;" this is a book blog after all.  (I hate to be the one to break it to everybody-- if you're keeping a book blog, you're a nerd.)   But I've never put non-chronological books in chronological order.  I'm not ever sure what that means.  The only thing that comes close is reading all  the Martin Beck mysteries in order, but they are in chronological order as far as I know.  Maybe reading Tristram Shandy one book per month?  


The other book blogs Mr. Dee picked are lots of fun.  A couple are dedicated to unusual covers and editions, one is by a woman who's reading one Vintage Classic a week, all of the pre-1970.  Though I can't help but think Mr. Dee meant got me mixed up with someone else, I'll take all the publicity I can get.


Maybe I'll even find that elusive 150th follower.


If you live in the U.K. can you let me know if we made the print edition?  That would be awesome!

Friday Picture Reading - Peter Ilsted

"A Girl Reading in an Interior" by Peter Ilsted

Double Idemnity by James M. Cain

I drove out to Glendale to put three 

new truck drivers on a brewery company 

bond, and then I remembered this 

renewal  over in Hollywoodland.

Opening to 

Double Indemnity 

by James M. Cain

Man, what a ride!

Back when the giant "Hollywood" sign still ended in"Land," Walter Huff, long time agent for a small time Los Angelos insurance company stops at the Nirdlinger home to get Mr. Nirdlinger's signature on a routine renewal form.  Nirdlinger's wife Phyllis informs Huff that she's alone.  The two quickly begin an affair that ends with a plot to kill Mr. Nirdlinger and claim his 50,000 dollar accident policy for themselves.

Since Mr. Huff knows his business well enough to fool any insurance investigator, the police won't be a problem.  The two take their time, plan the murder to the smallest detail, wait for the right moment, and almost get away with it.

And that's all I'll tell you. Except to say that the book is different enough plot wise and ending wise to surprise fans of the 1944 Billy Wilder movie starring Fred McMurry and Barbara Stanwyck.  It's just as sexy, too, even if Mr. Cain does go places we might not rather he did.

Walter Huff narrates the novel in classic noir fashion with an attitude jaded from years in the insurance business, but it's Phyllis Nirdlinger we want to follow.  While Mr. Cain portrays Phyllis as softer in nature than Barbara Stanwcyk does in the Wilder movie, she's still manipulative, cut-throat, willing to do whatever she needs to gain control of Nirdlinger's oil money.  She manages to conceal the complete extent of her criminal nature from everyone but Nirdlinger's teenage daughter and Mr. Keyes, head of the claims department at the insurance company.  To hear Keyes talk, no one ever died of natural causes or actual mishap.  No one with life insurance anyway.

Because Double Idemnity's plot will rule the book in the end, Mr. Cain sketches in the setting and the characters with just a few key details.  He manages to provide all we need to know about his Los Angelos setting with a few remarks: Nirdlinger's Spanish style house with a red tile roof like all the others;  blood red draperies hanging from an iron rod; a Spanish looking tapestry of a castle, made in Oaklnad, over the fireplace; Spanish furniture "the kind that looks pretty and sits stiff."  When Huff first meets Phyllis he sees "a sweet face, light blue eyes, and dusty blonde hair.  She was small, and had on a suit of blue house pajamas.  She had a washed out look."   She has a washed out look, and the book has a washed out feel.  The reader can fill in the rest of the details as needed; Mr. Cain moves quickly on to the action.

And action there is plenty.

James M. Cain was a failure in Hollywood before he was a success.   Early in his career he worked as a screenwriter, but his name appears in the credits of only three films.  However, three of his novels--Double Idemnity, The Postman Always Rings Twice and Mildred Pierce--became cornerstones in the film noir genre earning multiple Oscar nominations and placement on most top 100 films of the 20th century lists.  Below is a clip from the first scene Fred McMurry and Barbara Stanwyck share in Double Idemnity.  The dialogue is mostly by Billy Wilder's co-writer, Raymond Chandler.  The two felt that Mr. Cain's dialogue worked only on paper.