The most off-putting aspect of the book is its varying tone. It’s like a Hollywood blockbuster that tries to be both tragic and comic. This doesn’t always work out. At least with The Food of the Gods the tone changes more or less continually from jaunty and light to serious and subversive. And in the end you get the feeling that the story had become something it was never meant to be - but which Wells probably found unavoidable given its trajectory.
This interesting book was put in my hands by a good friend whose literary suggestions are sound without exception. It is not, as the title may suggest, a tell-all like Pepys’ diaries, or even, really, a private memoir at all. It’s a striking early example of nontraditional narrative structure, predating many other adventurous novels and reportedly inspiring Stevenson’s Jekyll & Hyde.
It’s remarkable for the transparency of its misdirection, which leaves the reader constantly unsure exactly what is true, and rarely pins anything down with certainty. So the reader, like the protagonist in fact ends up at one point in the novel, is suspended between several points of view and unable to make any definite conclusions.
The War Of The Worlds is, most importantly, a book about the dangers of complacency. While Wells’ imagination and knack for a rolling narrative are worth applauding any day, the book is not at its heart a heroic adventure. Like The Time Machine, it is a warning. In that book he caricatured the erosion of humanity’s most important qualities; in this one, his message is more direct: the road of complacency leads to destruction - destruction of the literal and immediate variety.
When you really come down to it, there really isn’t much to The Secret Agent, Conrad’s schizophrenic ensemble piece describing several “anarchists” in a sort of imagined historical account of the real Greenwich Observatory bombing of 1894. Yet its pages are rich and meticulously crafted, full of detail which could only be supplied by someone completely involved with his work. The framework of the novel, though, its “skeleton,” as Conrad refers to it in a conciliatory 1920 preface, is only the barest suggestion of a story. The title might lead you to think it’s a tale of espionage and high drama, but in fact it’s more of a progression of baroque character studies.
The progenitors of science fiction had more right to call it “speculative” than the technobabblers of today who flinch at the apparently derogatory term sci-fi. Novels like Frankenstein, The Invisible Man, and 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea showed how man and the world would naturally react given the novel stimulus of an impossibility turned possible. Change one thing and watch events play out naturally with normal people, with the narrative usually some distance past the actual change. Now it seems that authors change everything but the stories; switch up everything in the universe and watch the old familiar thriller play out as it has for hundreds of years. Having learned nothing about The Inverted World before reading it, I wasn’t sure which to expect. As it turns out, it’s among the best examples of the old sci-fi I’ve ever read.
The Wind-Up Girl came highly recommended by my family, and of course the usual breathless praise from within the sci-fi community made it out to be nothing less than a Neuromancer for this modern age. Biopunk, a dystopian future made from the fresh fears of today. It partially delivers on this promise, but also fails in the ways modern books tend to fail.
Acquired: Audubon’s Birds Of America watercolors (New York Historical Society folio, 1966)
Literature which was considered shocking on its debut is but rarely shocking three hundred years later. The Monk is no exception (as opposed to, say, Fanny Hill), though it’s easy to see how in a time of great piety and fear of the church, a tale of this type might be both universally reviled and devoured.
There are a few stories loosely interwoven, all based in or around a convent and monastery in 18th-century Madrid. The primary story is of Ambrosio, a supremely virtuous monk who has never left the monastery since infancy. His bubble of sanctity is punctured by a young monk who (spoiler warning) reveals himself to be a woman, a beautiful woman at that, and what’s more, utterly dedicated to Ambrosio in every way. There are also the stories of Lorenzo, whose sister is trapped in the convent under the watch of an evil Abbess, and Don Raymond, who is in love with that sister, having met her in a series of adventures ranging from banditti ambush to ghostly possession. The three stories play themselves out, the characters occasionally encountering or indirectly affecting one another.
The Monk was written by a 20-year-old nobleman, and was instantly banned upon its release for being lewd and sacrilegious. And so it is: Ambrosio indulges in a laundry list of violent and carnal sins, all the while justifying it with a perverted religiosity, and the other religious figures are either evil and conniving or useless nonentities. There is frequent sexual violence, which is not to say (for the most part) rape, but a frank and unflinching treatment of the dark side of human sexuality, where it overlaps with other appetites and vices.
For all its worldliness, the book is clearly an amateur effort, though a largely successful one. Lewis was a talented writer (even his most vehement critics admitted so), and his style adapts equally well to the internal struggles of Ambrosio as to the romantic adventures of Don Raymond. Sentence by sentence Lewis is unimpeachable, and occasionally inspired (some of his poetry, inserted awkwardly into the narrative, is quite good), but the narrative barely hangs together and the characters seem arbitrarily motivated, traversing the book like wind-up toys. The pace is unsteady and the tone unregulated. The strength of expression and lack of structure remind me very much of another young author’s first novel: Fitzgerald’s excellent but lopsided This Side Of Paradise. Both are worth a read, though both are more enjoyable for the promises they make on their authors’ behalf.
This winning book was a find in the “Old and interesting” section of Half Price Books. I learn from the foreword and some little research that it was a wildly popular production early in the history of Scribner, in which the author muses about love and life, riffing on whatever is nearby. This admittedly sounds like a recipe for a sentimentalist disaster, or a collection of trite epigrams, but the author’s talent for expression, direct and conversational tone, and the (slightly glib) truths he utters are actually compelling, even affecting.
The first reverie is upon a fire in a charmingly-described country cabin. First there is “Smoke - Signifying Doubt,” in which the benefits of bachelordom are expressed. Then comes Blaze, which brings to mind hope to our narrator, and all the possibilities of a loving union. Last is Ashes, a heartbreaking meditation on loss and desolation, most simply and poignantly summarized: “Ashes always come after blaze.”
Then follow three more reveries - with similar sentiments arising from coal in a city fire grate, three methods of lighting a cigar, and the phases of the day. The collection isn’t really meant to be read straight through; if you do so, you risk emotional overload.
The book succeeds on its most powerful passages, and glides by during the rest on the strength of the author’s easy style. The first reverie begs to be read aloud, and resonates with the trepidation towards commitment and fear of abandonment common to most humans. There is little literature of this sentimental, musing type these days and Reveries of a Bachelor is a refreshing break.
I have yet to meet a single person who has heard of, much less read, Ten Thousand A-Year. Yet it was extremely popular in 1855, from which period much literature is generally remembered. It is a British legal drama-comedy concerning the rise and fall of one Tittlebat Titmouse, a miserably poor London dandy who lives in squalor but aspires to aristocracy, not to say gentlemanhood.
He comes unexpectedly into an enormous fortune after some legal hijinx displace the Aubreys, a placidly virtuous family occupying the country seat of Yatton. They are thrown down and he is elevated to wealth and popularity. As one might expect, the experience is edifying for the pious Aubreys and nearly fatal to the unprincipled Titmouse.
Here are the cover and the first two pages of comics. Yeah, those are some big images. The book itself is coffee-table size.
Click through to get the full size.
Page 1
Page 2
Isn’t this stuff absolutely amazing? It just gets more insane, and the stories run into one another like movements in a ridiculous space symphony.
All art, music, words © their original authors.
