Last year I finally made my way through The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. I actually wrote the majority of this post shortly after reading it, and then sat on it for months and months and months. I always feel reluctant to talk about Rand, because she is one of those figures that evokes a strong response. People adore her or they despise her, and its usually the latter.
Personally, I find that I have some pretty serious issues with many of the expressions of her overarching philosophy. And I find that she has some pretty large holes in her logic. Yet, there are some personal expressions of what she says that resonate with the way I approach my own life. But I’m not so sure that it stimulates the healthiest aspects of my own internal identity.
Like a lot of people, my general impressions of Rand have been largely informed by my interactions with people who claim to be her supporters. Their seemingly excessive self-interest and emphasis on the individual above all else, a disregard for the basic welfare of others, and a message of no government regulation of industry had always left a bad taste in my mouth.
In my experience, Objectivists (Rand’s philosophy is referred to as “Objectivism” because of its emphasis on objective reality as opposed to subjective experiences) were people who said that the government had no right to pass restrictions on companies who wanted to violate the earth for whatever purpose they deemed appropriate. They were people who seemed quick to speak out against social initiatives designed to improve the lives of people at an economic disadvantage. They were the jet-setting young republicans who wanted a moral excuse to amass wealth without having to answer to the societies of which they were a part (In short, very few Roarks or Galts among them).
Brash and conservative positions like this only further served to reduce my interest in Ayn Rand and reinforced my impression that hers was a philosophy of pillaging. No responsibility to others. Nothing need be given back. Just an unhindered celebration of capitalism, industry, and the triumphant human spirit, with no acknowledgment of the shortcomings inherent in all three.
So, I didn’t bother reading her books. That is, until someone came along and had this brilliant idea that I should actually judge her on the basis of her work, not what other people claimed she said. After all, people across the centuries have used amazing and rational ideas to further very unscrupulous and irrational ends.
I started with Atlas Shrugged and pretty quickly became a reluctant admirer. Much to my surprise I found a great deal of merit in her thoughts on the importance of the individual and the moral imperative of pursuing personal happiness. Using fiction as a means of transmitting her philosophy, Rand managed to create some unexpected common ground. And while I don’t necessarily agree with the letter of the Randian law, I find my own thoughts on the importance of the self and the value of personal integrity (to thine own self be true) to be very much in harmony with its spirit.
Having found success with Atlas Shrugged, I decided to give The Fountainhead a try. The Fountainhead was her earliest attempt at using fiction as a platform for philosophy, and after reading it, it is easy to see why she felt the need to write Atlas.
The Fountainhead has the feel of something not quite complete. The characters are less compelling and their motives not as clear. In particular, the inclusion of Ellsworth Toohey as the conniving mastermind behind the downfall of society into a celebration of mediocrity seems unbelievable. Compare this to Atlas Shrugged where she conveys a more complete picture of the general downward trend, which appears more organic–the work of many, many people, thoughts, and ideas. In general, I would define the book as a collection of thoughts not fully formed.
Additionally, I find her ideas about sex and relationships to be remarkably, well, disturbing. The first sexual encounter between the male (Howard Roark) and female (Dominique Francon) protagonists is described by Rand as a “rape.” This idea thrills Dominique to no end, and she relishes the experience. In fact, up until then, she was frigid. Incapable of having a sexual response. Then she finds someone worthy of exciting erotic intent in her and everything changes. However, I have a big issue with this being referred to as “rape.” Domination is not rape. Rape is non-consensual sex. Given Dominique’s response, I can’t define what happened in this scene as non-consensual. And while I recognize that these were not times that had a strong feminist voice, I find it extremely difficult to read lengthy passages where a woman celebrates the idea of rape.
Rand’s ideas of sex seem to be all about domination by a worthy opponent, which is definitely appealing to some people. Atlas Shrugged also featured the idea of sex as an animal act of domination and that it was only enjoyable when it was with someone whom you could respect and admire, but I do not recall it described as rape. (Note to Ms. Rand–rapists aren’t heroic.)
I’m not sure if it is an issue of interpretation, but as I read further into Rand’s works, I found that, very much like Jesus’ descriptions of the reviled Pharisees seem applicable to present day “Christian” leaders, Rand’s descriptions of the evil “looters” (her name for people who participate in the system only to leech off of it) seemed an accurate description of the behavior exhibited by people I have met who claim to be her followers. Interesting, no?
I wasn’t sure what to expect with The Fountainhead, but it was not the epic manuscript that Atlas Shrugged had been. At least not for me. In fact, I struggled to make it through. At one point I set it down for several weeks, completely unmoved to pick it up and finish the final 100 pages. Then an unexpected virus attacked and I found myself in bed for a few days and I committed to polishing it off as an act of will.
It’s been too long since I’ve seen the movie version with Gary Cooper, but I remember liking it a lot better. The simplistic and epic feel of the book lends itself well to a movie adaptation. In fact, if you wanted to skip the book and just see the film (Rand wrote the screenplay, after all), you wouldn’t be missing anything. In fact, just skip it altogether and go read Atlas Shrugged if you’re interested in what Rand had to say. (It’s never a bad idea to try and at least separate the philosopher from his/her disciples and their ideals from their actual behavior).
I have to admit that I find her fascinating. And I often wonder what she would have to say now about things like her obnoxious devotees, the current economic crisis, or the environmental destruction wrought by unfettered industry. It’s hard not to be interested in someone who says things like:
“My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.”
So, what do you think of Rand, The Fountainhead, and her objectivist ideals? Is she the matron saint of a destructive type of self-interest or the main proponent of a religion celebrating the (overstated?) glory of humankind?
Tagged:Remainders. | No Comments »
SPOILER ALERT: This book is impossible to discuss without revealing a few key details from the book. I don’t reveal the particulars at any point, but I do discuss things that are not fully made clear until much later in the story. If you are the type of person who likes to be surprised by everything, you may want to skip this review.
My favorite dystopian novel of all time would have to be The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood. It is a brilliant, visionary piece of fiction. I read it every few years just to remind myself why I am a feminist, what it means to be brave, and who I want to be. Yes. It is that powerful.
The Handmaid’s Tale is the book that put Margaret Atwood on my short list of must-read authors. And I can honestly say that nothing of hers has ever disappointed. That being said, when I finished Oryx and Crake this past summer, I set it down feeling vaguely dissatisfied. Because that is not the norm for an Atwood book, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about why and I’ve come up with a few ideas and, consequently, developed a greater appreciation for the book.
Oryx and Crake is written from the perspective of Snowman, who is, as far as he knows, the last surviving human on the planet. Despite being the only known survivor of a catastrophic virus, Snowman isn’t a particularly sympathetic character. In fact, if one person had to survive, I don’t think anyone would have chosen him. Nobody, that is, but Crake.
Living alongside Snowman are a group of green-eyed creatures he calls the Crakers (named so after their creator). These human-like creatures look to Snowman as a sort of tribal priest and intercessor. His interactions with them seem to only intensify his lonely existence. It isn’t hard to see why. While they appear human in their near-perfect physical form, the extensive alterations and modifications introduced by Crake into their very DNA, seem to give these simple creatures more in common with the rakunks and pigoons than with humanity as we (and Snowman) know it.
And yet, they still retain this spark of life that is recognizable as human. Despite Crake’s best efforts, in their search to understand–themselves, their surroundings, their interactions–they begin to create stories. Like early humans, their stories are metaphors and myths. They are simple and crude. And they are distinctly familiar. Crake, Snowman tells us, would be so disappointed.
So how did the Crakers come to be? How was the world unmade? Snowman is here to help us, and the Crakers, understand.
Throughout the book Snowman serves as our tour guide, taking us all they way back to his earliest memories and his time living in the gated corporate community of OrganInc Farms, up through his young adult years, and finally ending with his time working for Crake at the RejoovenEsense compound–the place where the world finally began to unravel.
Through his recollections, he builds an image of a future that is both foreign and frighteningly familiar (all good dystopian futures have enough of the familiar to make us uncomfortable). We learn that Snowman and Crake met as teenagers. On the surface, their differences are such that they made unlikely friends, but what binds them together is much stronger.
Crake, it is clear from the start, is one of those people who is almost too smart for his own good. He is thoughtful, speculative, and above all, a master at playing the game. While he is much more daring, dangerous, and subversive than Snowman, he always appears as the model citizen. Crake is the type of person people are encourage to emulate. And because of that, he is given considerably more freedom–a freedom he eventually uses to his full advantage. You wonder if, given some guidance and attention, and a little less emptiness and tragedy, he might have become something better. I think the answer is probably no.
Oryx enters the picture when she appears as a young girl in a truly disturbing reality show that Crake and Snowman are watching. I am not kidding when I say that reality TV has been taken to its inevitable extreme. The numbing results are hard to take. At one point, Oryx looks directly into the camera. This look reaches out and does something to these two young men that they don’t really know how to classify. It’s as if they are momentarily shaken out of their complacency and neither one is sure what has just happened. Snowman becomes obsessed with her. And later we come to understand, so has Crake.
What happens to and between these characters clearly makes for an interesting read. Even so, it didn’t grab me by the guts and carry me along like The Handmaid’s Tale does. At first I thought I just wasn’t connecting with the male protagonist. He seemed so flat. Shallow. Apathetic. But everybody in this book comes off that way to some extent. None of the characters’ reactions are ones you necessarily want to emulate, but I think they are the modern day archetypes for how we deal with the world.
Oryx adopts a cheerful, naive optimism that eschews analysis and opts instead for getting what you can out of this moment. She is a “free spirit” in that she is entirely disconnected from any pain she might feel. Crake imagines what the world could and should be, and in his hubris, attempts to recreate it in his own image. He is a modern day Dr. Frankenstein, playing god. The Snowman, who interestingly enough is the only survivor, settles for hedonism. He is content to follow his mundane desires, going after whatever brings him pleasure–food, sex, entertainment.
This actually adds to the artificial feel of Atwood’s wholly depressing future, but I wonder if that is also what keeps me feeling a bit removed from it?
The sad part is, the more you read and are exposed to the culture of this world–from the genetically altered frankenfood (ChickieNobs Bucket O’ Nubbins, anyone?) to the ultimate dehumanization of their reality TV programs–the more you see that these characters are not capable of becoming the archetypal heroes we might recognize. They simply lack the basic building blocks for it.
In fact, it doesn’t take long for you to decide that the future Atwood shows us in this book is one that really ought to be done away with. That is the master storyteller at work. She actually sets you up to come to the conclusion that Crake himself reaches. But when it comes down to it and you realize he is unmaking this world and recreating it in his own flawed idea of what humanity ought to be, it is so horrifying you wonder how you could have thought it. Maybe you even try to convince yourself that you would have decided something better. Which again, puts you in the position of playing god. And isn’t this the problem that is highlighted here?
Crake is both a hero and a monster. The Crakers, who were supposed to be designed specifically to do away with all that is wrong with humanity, still will resort to the same things we do, the things Crake could not stand. They will have their own mythology, their own gods. The rhythms of sex and reproduction will map their existence.
In his ultimate creation, it seems Crake essentially hoped to engineer the journey out of man. He tried to genetically remove pain from their existence. And in doing so, he removed the things that make life interesting, even in the bleak and empty landscape we are presented with in this horrible future.
But is the landscape really that bleak and empty? Reading between the lines we get glimpses of life with texture–within the pleeblands (ungated areas where the common people lived), through the revolutionaries words and deeds, through Oryx’s sanitized version of her life story. We met artists and activists and we saw how the corporations used the CorpSeCorps to maintain control.
This is the world through Jimmy’s eyes, and to some extent, Crake’s. I think we are meant to question the accuracy of their vision. I think we are meant to understand it as myopic. Incomplete. And I think we are meant to see that in their arrogance, they didn’t know enough to know that they knew so very little. This is the curse of the ruling class, no? And, I suspect, why Oryx found Snowman “funny” and yet was compelled to believe in Crake.
Obviously this is a book that leaves you with a lot to think about, and I suspect it is one I will revisit again someday in the not too distant future. That being said, if you don’t have room in your life for two dystopian future novels from Margaret Atwood (and why wouldn’t you, for goodness sake?!), I still think The Handmaid’s Tale is your better choice.
Also, I’m going to need to read something from Atwood that has a male protagonist I like before I decide if her choices were as deliberate as I am giving her credit for or if she just writes female characters better. Knowing what I do about Atwood, I think she fully deserves all the credit I am willing to lay at her feet and much, much more.
That’s my two cents. Anybody else care to comment?
Tagged:Book Reviews, Books, Dystopian Futures, Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake. | 4 Comments »
The Road by Cormac McCarthy is by far one of the most arresting novels I have ever read. On the surface, it is a dystopian novel about a very bleak future and the dark underbelly of survival in a true post-apocalyptic environment. But at its heart, it is the story of a man trying to be a “good” father under impossible circumstances.
How this father and his tender son got where they are, and what happened to bring about such a dire future, is almost irrelevant. In fact, we receive only disjointed and incomplete clues about what may have happened via the father’s feverish dreams and in rare moments when he allows himself to remember. And even then—the memories, the dreams—they are all personal, void of any social or political concerns.
What we do know quite clearly is that there was fire—fire so intense and so fierce and so engulfing that it literally scorched its way across the land, leaving everything in its wake stark, brittle, and hostile. Ash falls from the sky like snow, obscuring the sun. Night is so thick that it cannot be penetrated. Even the feeble fires they build for warmth seem to be struggling against the oppressive weight of the blackness. Nothing has gone untouched, and you realize rather quickly that nothing will ever grow here again. In short, this is a desperate world.
The entire thrust of the story is the attempt of this father and son to survive by migrating south to escape the cold. It is a grueling journey. And what are they surviving to? That is the unspoken question littered across each page. The road always creates more questions than it answers.
In an earlier post this summer where I discussed my current dystopian reading habits, Kaizerin left an amusing and thought-provoking comment in which she paraphrased a quote made by Stephen King. Essentially, he said, the reason people like stories about the end of the world is because they imagine they will be the ones to survive and they’ll get to keep all the stuff. I really think that there is something to that idea. Many (if not all) stories about the end of civilization have a strong scavenger component to them. 
Hunting and gathering takes on a new twist in a post-consumer, post-apocalyptic landscape. Finding what is useful, sifting through the rubbish to identify food, shelter, clothing–these are the essential skills of a survivor. Frequently, even more than the necessities, we are fascinated by the luxuries that survive (even WALL-E had an iPod). But in the dystopian world of The Road we are years beyond what was “the end.” In the time following whatever conflict or war or tragedy took place, supplies are dangerously absent. In this place, survival means something different. It means finding other sources of food that may be more abundant. It means turning on your fellow man.
The Road as Metaphor
But this book is about so much more than the survival of a father and his son. With every page, I could see more and more clearly that The Road served as an analogy for what it means to live as a man of principle in this modern world—a place populated by metaphorical “cannibals” who would survive at any cost, even the cost of their own humanity. The road is more than just the path this pair struggled down in search of something better. It is the road each of us walks down. And what does our journey look like?
The father in this story is caught in a trap. As he tries to create a worthy example in a corrupt and desolate world, he is continually forced to face his own limitations and those that have been imposed on him. Yet, he keeps trying to push through beyond that. He keeps trying be worthy, to meet the expectations he has of himself and those he imagines other people (most notably his son) have of him as well.
And isn’t this a familiar path? In the end, the book speaks to each of us. It talks about expectations, it talks about moral absolutes, and it talks about how failure can sneak up on even the most uncompromising and noble. In the end, it talks about forgiveness and what it means to leave the world behind you just a little bit better. It is about survival even when you don’t want to survive. It isn’t about hope exactly, but it is about the hope for hope. And it is about love.
Tend Your Garden, Carry the Fire
At some point, fairly early on, you begin to ask, “Why? Why struggle so hard to survive? Is it even worth it?” The situation seems hopeless to the reader. It seems hopeless to the characters. Still, they continue to push forward as if they are driven by something. And they are. Something beyond survival—almost mystical, or at least mythic. They have a mission, this father and his son. They have a responsibility to, as they put it, “carry the fire.”
This almost cryptic statement conjures up such powerful images. They survive to carry the fire. The world has collapsed, and someone must carry the fire. This is what good men do, they carry the fire.
The charge to carry the fire reminded me so much of the famous closing advice from Voltaire’s Candide, which is equally potent, primitive, and open to tremendous speculation and varying interpretation. “Tend your garden,” he tells us. In the face of a seemingly incomprehensible world, in the absence of a benevolent higher power, in the shadow of existential absurdity, what do you do? You tend your garden. You carry the fire.
Within the story, where this idea of carrying the fire came from is unclear. Whether the father truly believes it or it was just something he made up to keep his son moving forward (or even to protect him from hopelessness?), it doesn’t matter. This has become their mission.
Fed on his father’s need to believe in something bigger than himself, the boy’s world is simple and clean. We are the good guys because we don’t eat people. And because we are good guys, we carry the fire. Even in a post-apocalyptic world, myth survives. Metaphor continues to have meaning. And these clean lines and neat definitions are both the easiest thing in the world and the hardest. Nothing changes, and nothing stays the same.
And more than that, the contrast of this fire (the carrying of which is such an ancient and deeply symbolic duty) with the destructive force that has completely destroyed the land they are making their way through is so potent. The father doesn’t know how to explain it, but in this cold, desolate place left in the vacuum of a blazing inferno, fire is a very fitting symbol and it is at the center of their journey. This is what keeps us men; we survive to remain men.
Final Thoughts
I honestly can’t say enough good things about this book. The quality of the writing, the care with which each detail is added, the deliberateness of each character choice, the layers of meaning—all these things create a story that I will carry with me for the rest of my life. And I feel, in a sense, that my carrying this story with me as I move forward is a lot like carrying the fire into the world myself.
I’ve had an interesting relationship with Penelope Lively’s Moon Tiger. Some time ago, Ramona sent me a copy and asked me to read it. She was reading it herself, on the recommendation of a friend, and having a hard time getting into it. “I feel like I must be missing something, the way everyone else raves about it. Read it and let me know what you think,” she said.
I didn’t like it very much at first, either; I didn’t like the protagonist, Claudia Hampton: brilliant and beautiful, but selfish and more than a little unkind. I had a hard time caring that she was nearing the end of her life in a London hospital, egotistically drafting a history of the world as illuminated through the prism of her own life. I kept at it, buoyed along by some sparkling passages and a narrative device that indicated the author didn’t intend us to take the old dragon too seriously: in many scenes, after Claudia has given her version of events, another narrator jumps in and gives us the perspective of one or more other characters, letting us know that Claudia is far more fallible than she would ever let on.
And Claudia, for all her faults, has some interesting notions about the power of language. This early passage was the point where I knew I would finish the thing, despite my objectionable hostess:
We open our mouths and out flow words whose ancestries we do not even know. We are walking lexicons. In a single sentence of idle chatter we preserve Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Norse; we carry a museum of words inside our heads, each day we commemorate peoples of whom we have never heard. More than that, we speak volumes — our language is the language of everything we have not read. Shakespeare and the Authorised Version suface in supermarkets, on buses, chatter on radio and television. I find this miraculous. I never cease to wonder at it. That words are more durable than anything, that they blow with the wind, hibernate and reawaken, shelter parasitic on the most unlikely hosts, survive and survive and survive.
Eventually I got swept up in the story–it got interesting for me about the same time it did for Claudia: when Tom Southern strolls into it. Their intense, cruelly brief affair in wartime Cairo transforms the book, and our picture of Claudia. She may have been born selfish and demanding, but it was the loss of Tom, and her child by him, that made her unloving and brittle. For the first time, we see the mean old Claudia we’ve met isn’t necessarily the person she was destined to be; had things gone differently, she might have settled into a warm and loving family life, and be facing a more contented death–one that wouldn’t have motivated her to write her self-serving history of the world.
Caught up in the story, I stopped critiquing it and rushed through to the end to render judgment: should Ramona finish it? Oh yes. Would she ever like Claudia? No, and I don’t think the reader is necessarily meant to. But you do come to understand her and feel sympathy for her. You might not like to invite her for tea, but you can empathize with her suffering–no mean feat on Lively’s part, you have to admit. The book is about war, I told her, the way it transforms whoever you were before into something else; the way it does this to everyone it touches. Whether you were kind or selfish, good or bad, happy, in love, or miserable, when war comes it leaves nothing unchanged.
Ramona asked me to write up a piece on Moon Tiger, and I let it languish too long and got distracted by other things. But it took root in the back of my mind; bits of the book would come back to me at odd times, and other works kept reminding me of it. I saw and read several things right in a row that had a theme of “We were happy, and then he went to war, and nothing was ever the same again”–My Boy Jack, Lost Girls, Foyle’s War, Finest Hour: The Battle of Britain, even some Miss Marple mysteries. The theme recurred so many times that I finally decided to settle in to work on a review of Moon Tiger, expounding on the Universality of War theme.
Funny thing, though, when I re-read the book to refresh my memory of it and pick out a few glittery passages to share, I found it wasn’t about war at all, but history and language as intertwined and warring forces.
And when you and I talk about history, we don’t mean what actualy happened, do we? The cosmic chaos of everywhere, all time? We mean the tidying up of this into books, the concentration of the benign historical eye upon years and places and persons. History unravels; circumstances, following their natural inclination, perfer to remain ravelled.
I have put my faith in language — hence the panic when a simple word eludes me…I control the world so long as I can name it. Which is why children must chase language before they do anything else, tame the wilderness by describing it, challenge God by learning His hundred names.
History, personified in the book by both war and the desert, will inevitably destroy us all and erase any trace of our existence.
This thousand square miles of emptiness has been wrestled over for five days and nights; it has exacted the lives of several hundred men. And it is untouched, thinks Claudia. Already the sand is starting to digest the broken vehicles, the petrol cans, the tangles of wire; a few more storms and they will sink beneath it. In a few years’ time they will have vanished. She watches Tom Southern pore over his maps; these scribblings too are arbitrary — the sand has no boundaries, no frontiers, no perimeters.
History is the true antagonist in this book; war is only its most efficient handmaiden. When war took Claudia’s father away, her mother responded by retiring from history. “She had drawn south Dorset around her like a shawl and blocked out as many aspects of our times as she could. … History is of course crammed with people like Mother, who are just sitting it out.” In the same circumstance one World War later, Claudia refuses to quietly fade away; she will spend the rest of her life writing her story as largely as possible on history’s blank and terrible page. Until the very end, Claudia hurls herself at history, grasping for any hold; history is damn well not going to get away with treating Claudia Hampton this way!
Instinctively, Claudia has reached for the one weapon that will let her defeat history’s inexorable march toward obliteration: language. She puts her trust in the immortal power of stories, and late in life, she receives confirmation that she was right to do so. Forty years after his death, Tom speaks to her again out of the sands of time; a newspaper article on Claudia’s adventures as a war correspondent leads Tom’s sister to work out that she is the mysterious “C.” Tom wrote lovingly of in his diary, which she sends on to Claudia. It brings back to her all she felt when they were together, and gives her a picture of herself through his eyes. It makes her feel all she has lost out on, and in a small way, brings back to her the one person she loved openly, generously, unselfishly.
It’s the moment where I feel most kindly toward Claudia. It’s a priceless gift, an expression of love from one long dead, and yet, imagine the exquisite pain it must cause her to know for certain that there was a happier and more beautiful life for her, that she didn’t get to live.
We are no longer in the same story, and when I read what you wrote I think of all that you do not know. You are left behind, in another place and another time, and I am someone else…inhabiting a world you would not recognise. I am twice your age. You are young, I am old. You are in some ways unreachable, shut away beyond a glass screen of time; you know nothing of forty years of history and forty years of my life;…Death is total absence, you said. Yes and no. You are not absent so long as you are in my head. …I preserve you, as others will preserve me. For a while.
Read this book? Yes. And read it again, and again, and appreciate the loveliness of its message: though we must all die, we may live on, in the stories we leave in the minds and hearts of those who survive us.
Tagged:Book Reviews. | 7 Comments »
We ran errands in the Hollywood district today: post office, farmers’ market, antique shop. A pleasant, and common, Saturday morning for us. I’ve been craving kohlrabi in much the way I imagine Rapunzel’s mother craved that rampion, and I had six (!) Bookmooch books to send off. That made a total of 10 sent this week; my effort to clear up some space in the library is proceeding nicely.
Or, it was, until we stopped in at the antiques mall downstairs from the post office.
Oh, dear. I’ve given back more than half the territory gained by getting those 10 books off the shelves, and spent a tidy pile doing so. Well, the encyclopedia and grammar book fit so nicely in my collection of early 20th-century reference works; the 1943 Once and Future King is in excellent shape and is a book I will re-read over the years, and the book of Latin insults is pretentious good fun. Besides, they each cost only a few dollars. No, the problem is that little red book right on top.
Alphonse Daudet’s Lettres de Mon Moulin. Don’t worry if it doesn’t ring any bells for you–it doesn’t me, either. I don’t know Daudet, and am entirely unfamiliar with the Letters from his Windmill (a metaphor for the heart, do you think, or for the mind?) Also, it’s in French, a language I can only pick through for occasional nuggets of comprehension. Nevertheless, this unknown work by an unfamiliar author in an unreadable language is exactly the kind of book I find irresistible. It’s a tiny, antique book in excellent condition; the leather is supple, the binding is tight, the endpapers are glossy and the gilt is bright and shiny–it’s a jewel of a book, lovely to gaze upon, a book to own for the sheer pleasure of having it: precisely the sort of thing that arouses my booklust. Even more precious (and compulsion-buy inducing) is the history inscribed on its front pages.
” To Margareta Broocke: When you reread this page, darling Reta, think of me.” I may not know French, but I can parse that much from it. There’s a reference to “l’ami absent et l’ami mort”, friends absent and friends dead, and it’s signed “Irene de Noilles, Xmas 1913″. There’s much more, and I’ll labor a while with BabelFish to work it all out, but this was obviously a sentimental present between tender hearts, nearly a century ago.
But even that was not the thing that made me relinquish an excellent-condition Rubaiyat in favor of this small treasure. No, that was the second dedication:
“To my dear friend Mr. T. Harris Bartlett, on the occasion of his 84th birthday. Portland, Oregon, May 31, 1947. Margaretta B. Look.” It’s my birthday, yes–or, it will be, some two decades hence. But look at how much story is implied between the two dedications: at some point, our chere Reta has made her way from Europe (the Dutch surname and French primary language suggest Belgium) to Portland, and changed from Margareta Broocke to Margaretta B. Look–by marriage, mostly likely, but possibly for other reasons. And who is Mr. Bartlett to her, that she would give him Irene’s precious little gift of love and memory, kept immaculately safe for thirty years through two world wars and across at least two continents? Aren’t you desperately curious? I am.
I cannot judge M. Daudet’s stories, but his readers certainly write a compelling, if elliptical, tale.
I am a sucker for just about anything dealing with a dystopian vision of the future. That fascination is exactly why zombies, particularly the Romero-inspired planetary epidemic version, hold so much appeal for me. I am always on the lookout for intelligent, entertaining, and thoughtful explorations into a darker view of what is to come. So when I read a glowing review of World War Z (a fictional account of a global zombie war), I immediately requested a copy from the library.
I think I’ve mentioned before that I can be a little obsessive focused when something captures my attention. So I guess it shouldn’t be at all surprising that World War Z took my summer reading in a decidedly dystopian direction.
After World War Z, I moved on to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, which was utterly captivating and beautifully written. I tore through it, and when I finished it this weekend, I realized I hadn’t really settled on what to read next. Honestly, I thought the next book in the Twilight series would have been in at the library by now, but no such luck. So, I halfheartedly picked up The Subtle Knife by Philip Pullman, but I was only a few pages into it before I had to admit that I was really not feeling done with the dystopian theme. So, I walked over to the bookshelf and picked up Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood, who is one of my personal heroes and the author of my favorite dystopian novel of all time–The Handmaid’s Tale. Looks like I will continue down this path for at least a little while longer.
Given this particular obsession, I started thinking about why it is I connect so strongly with these types of stories, and a few things emerged.
One, I am interested in survival. Or, more accurately, what people think is the key to survival in a desolate and dangerous world. From story to story, why does one person make it and not another? Is it luck? Intelligence? Fate?
Second, I am fascinated by the treatment of what I loosely define as hope, although it could just as easily be labeled motive power. In other words, what I am looking for in these books (or movies or television shows) is what keeps the hero/heroine going. What belief drives their survival? How do they maintain their sanity? What are they moving towards? Survival for the sake of survival is always the initial response, but what happens beyond that? When things seem hopeless, why do they keep trying? And in the absence of hope, what is there? Duty? Honor? Habit?
Third, I am interested in the questions that are asked about the devolution of society and the answers that are given to explain what has gone so horribly wrong. All you have to do is turn on the television, listen to the news, or open up your internet browser to see that we are heading toward what seems like a very dystopian future. The type of pessimistic speculation that goes on in literature (and film and other media) is an ideal playground for exploring the problems inherent in our modern lives. The types of questions asked and the answers that are given can help us make sense of what is going on right now and perhaps even impact how we approach the future.
There are other things as well (themes of loss, loneliness, trauma, rage, destruction, greed), but I’m just getting started with my dystopian summer. As I mentioned, I’ve already read World War Z and The Road (reviews to follow in later posts). I’m starting on Oryx and Crake. I’ll probably take another read through The Handmaid’s Tale. Anybody else have any favorite dystopian novels they would recommend adding to the list?
The first time I saw Philippa Gregory’s books, I was amused that the cover artwork followed the Chick Lit standard of clipping off the covergirl’s head (sample gallery here, in case you’ve never noticed the trend), even though these were, presumably, a bit weightier than the rest of the genre, what with the history and all. I’ve now read the book, and am considerably less amused to find the writing on the light end of the Chick Lit standard scale.
It started off well enough, setting up the contrasts between Elizabeth I and Lady Amy Dudley, fatal rivals for the love of Lord Robert Dudley. In the early going, it did a nice job of laying out the political landscape and making clear challenges facing the young queen, the struggle she faced to reach the throne, and giving interesting hints to the powerful monarch she would become. At her accession at 25, her throne and her very life depended on her marrying quickly and getting an heir; we know from history that she did neither, and yet ruled long and gloriously. This was a magnificent woman who faced down empires to retain her independence and power.
Too bad that in the latter half of the book, she becomes a simpering, nail-biting idiot who can’t say no to the domineering lover who seeks to usurp the kingship from her. Amy Dudley, a doormat of a female, does a better job standing her ground against Robert Dudley’s relentless ambitions than does Gloriana. The mighty queen, unwilling to share power and unable to refuse Dudley anything, whines and moans to her most trusted councillor, and he finally does something about the Dudley problem–after several times feeding Elizabeth her most famous “girl power” phrase–you know the one, about having the body of a weak and feeble woman, but the heart and stomach of a king? Yeah, Gregory gives that to William Cecil, later, presumably, to be cribbed by an Elizabeth dependent on the men around her for everything, right down to her self-image.
Were this an entirely fictional work, the weak female characterizations would be annoying enough; involving historical women who lived and suffered, triumphed or failed bitterly, is particularly repellent character assassination. Gregory has slain Amy Dudley again, and Elizabeth with her; well, I guess that’s one way to be certain it was murder.
Tagged:Book Reviews. | 9 Comments »
This is my pet jellyfish:
I haven’t named it; I’m not sure it needs a name. At any rate, it hasn’t suggested one yet.
The Oregon Coast Aquarium is equipped with an extensive and alluring gift shop, and they were featuring these beautiful jellyfish-glass objets d’art in the front windows–and zoop! I was drawn in! They had plain off-white, blue- and pink-tinged, and dark reddish ones in two sizes. I was awfully tempted by them, especially once I discovered they were glow-in-the-dark, but I tried to resist their glow-in-the-dark jellyfish-under-glass charms. Ken, perhaps having a clearer vision of the immediate future, decided the trip home would not be bearable if I left them ALL behind, and very nicely bought me the most beautiful and perfect one in the whole shop.
We brought it home and discovered that exposure to a little UV light (like the one emitted by my Official Dr. Who Replica Sonic Screwdriver) makes it light up like a nightlight, so that’s how I use it. I charge it up, snuggle down, and lie there thinking peaceful, floating-in-the-depths thoughts until I drift off into slumber.
Tagged:Travel. | 6 Comments »
Oh my, I am such a rotten blogger–I can’t maintain a slack every-Federal-Holiday schedule for even half a year. We’re all lucky my charming and thoughtful co-blogger gives us good, solid posts to chew over. And in lieu of a similar thoughtful, meaty post, I now propose to fob you off with pictures from our trip to Newport weekend before last. Bad, lazy blogger! But, ooh! Pretty pictures!
We stopped at the first scenic overlook that gave us a glimpse of ocean, because that first sighting is still so thrilling to me:
We had lunch in Lincoln City (at a Li’l Sambos–no, really! No relation to the infamous chain, however) and then pushed on. Just outside of Newport, we stopped at the Yaquina Head Lighthouse for a photo op. We stopped first at the visitors’ center (which claims to have been there since 1996, though we totally didn’t notice it when we were there in 2002), then walked around to the lighthouse for pictures. We stayed inside a bit too long, however, for we had barely set up and started shooting when we were set upon by a fast-moving and relentless fog:
The time between the first and second shots is 3 minutes; from first to last is 4 minutes. We could see the fog rushing up the cliff face toward us–it was one of the coolest things I’ve ever witnessed. But it did put a damper on the sightseeing, so we packed up and headed for the hotel, trusting that Newport was still somewhere in all that pea soup.
Sunday, we went to the Oregon Coast Aquarium to see the current show, Oddwater, and to visit all our old favorites (jellies!) I liked the Oddwater show a lot–it was all funky, lumpy, ugly, strange creatures of the deep, and they’d decorated the tanks with art glass–very cool!
I looked at these bits of glass for a while before I noticed one of them was alive. He’d be awesome at freeze-tag!
These are Lookdown Fish, well named because they do, indeed, look a bit down. Maybe because that pretty grass is really glass?
Do the glass baubles in this tank look like fish heads to you? More importantly, do they look like fish heads to the fish?
The critters were in saucy moods: we saw seals racing; otters playing; rays picking on a fledgling skate; penguins um, er,’fighting’; a splashy puffin:
a chilled-out starfish:
and a hilarious octopus who was obviously entertaining himself by teasing the gawping tourists: he’d hide off in the corner of his tank, nearly invisible among rocks, and then SPROING! He’d jump out and splay himself against the glass. He really seemed to be having fun.
Yeah, I’m anthropomorphizing, but man–he was making me laugh!
Hey, you think you hate doing windows? Try doing them in scuba gear, in a tank full of sharks:
And, best for last, my favorites: the jellyfish! They seem so serene as they float along, following the circulation of their tanks.
I could watch them for hours, just hanging there weightless and mostly aimless, occasionally getting up the gumption to motor somewhere, then relaxing back into the float:
Such tiny, delicate animals, almost structureless, but by no means defenseless:
Translucent, ethereal creatures, ancient and unchanging:
And yet with lessons for us, highly-evolved creatures though we may be. You might think that being a faceless, nameless, nearly formless mass of gelatin amongst thousands of identical creatures would condemn you to mindless conformity, but check out this guy:
Dare to be square, jelly-dude; dare to be square!
Naturally, I had to bring one of these beautiful creatures home. It sits beside the bed, and I watch it floating effortlessly in the dark, until I join it the weightless depths of sleep.
Tagged:Travel. | 4 Comments »
I haven’t mentioned it here before, but my clever sweetie created a REALLY fun card game called Renown. The first incarnation of the game was actually played at our wedding reception in Minnesota nearly four years ago. Over time the game has evolved and become a component of the role playing system/world that Corvus has been developing for the last 20+ years.
The deck itself is called The Book of Yetl. In the history of Corvus’ world (called Taompei), it is a storytelling/fortunetelling deck that is also used to play a variety of games. Within the storyworld of Taompei there are various theories about where The Book of Yetl came from, but ultimately, no one is really sure of the deck’s origin, which lends a nice air of mystery and leaves it wide open for a broad range of interpretations and uses.
Renown, the first of many games that will be developed for The Book of Yetl, explores an interesting time in Bleynac (one of Taompei’s main tribes) history where the traditional matriarchal line was disrupted by the male heir of one of the tribe’s queens. When the queen passed on without leaving a female heir, her son seized the opportunity and grabbed power. For three generations the Bleynac had a male ruling class. The gameplay itself is intended to express the sense of intrigue, political scheming, and cutthroat espionage that exemplified this tumultuous period.
A couple months ago we had some beta decks printed up and recruited a group of smart and clever folks to help with testing the game. These wonderful people (who are located all over the world!!) have given us excellent feedback and really helped us refine the game to a sharp point. The results are amazing.
I am currently working on revising the rules/manual since, by his own admission, Corvus sucks at writing them. Once I have a decent version done, I’ll be sure to post them here along with instructions about how you can turn a regular deck of playing cards into a Renown deck or how you can print your own beta deck from home.
In addition to beta testing with remote players running their own sessions, we have been doing some local testing with anyone willing to join in on the fun. Last night we met up with a sizeable group (there were 9 of us all together) at The Bubble House near UPenn for an evening of revelry and Renown. It was SO MUCH FUN! And that’s not just the sake talking (mmmmmm sake).
The players were amazing, fully jumping into the spirit of the game, forging alliances, pursuing their own agendas, and thwarting their competitors. I thought I’d just share a few of the pictures that Corvus managed to snap of the event. Because there were so many of us, we ended up forming teams to play. They were:
The Cocksure Catfish
Shiatsu Fury
Nuclear Christmas
Team Mongoose
Counting Political Favor: Gee, I wonder who is going to win?
Gameplay Underway!
We have another session scheduled for the 6th of July at our house. We’ll be cooking up a big batch of super yummy summer veggie enchiladas made entirely from scratch (yes, we make our own green and red sauce with only the freshest ingredients). I’m sure there will be homemade guacamole and some sort of tequila drinks as well. We’ll definitely be getting in a few more sessions here in Philadelphia before we head off for that other coast in September. And we’ll definitely schedule something for Minnesota while we are there, and, of course, Portland.