Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

Ray Bradbury died this past June, at the age of 91.  In the flurry of articles about his life, writing, and death, this one stands out as exceptional.  Here, Tim Kreider points out Bradbury's astonishing prescience; Fahrenheit 451, his most famous novel, was written in 1950, and predicts our world with uncanny precision.  As he writes, F451:

features wall-size television screens that are the centerpieces of “parlors” where people spend their evenings watching interactive soaps and vicious slapstick, live police chases and true-crime dramatizations that invite viewers to help catch the criminals. People wear “seashell” transistor radios that fit into their ears ... Mr. Bradbury’s vision of “tired commuters with their wrist radios, talking to their wives, saying, ‘Now I’m at Forty-third, now I’m at Forty-fourth, here I am at Forty-ninth, now turning at Sixty-first” has gone from science-fiction satire to dreary realism.

Yes, but as Krieder notes, the novel is not great because Bradbury predicted technologies.  It is great because he reveals the alienation, mindlessness, and violence that he saw as the necessary result of these technologies, and which we live with, hammered into us by the 24-hour news cycle.

I hadn't read F451 in several years, so I pulled down my battered old copy, "borrowed" from a high school English class, and sure to be properly returned any day now.  This copy, printed in 1990, declares its contents to be "MORE IMPORTANT NOW THAN EVER BEFORE," though when it was published, most of the technologies (and their emotional and cognitive offspring) had yet to be released upon us.  These "wonders" -- as they would surely have seemed to their audience in 1950 -- are now so ordinary that the book is barely science fiction, anymore.  F451, then, is more like the works of Margaret Atwood, powerful not for the techno-fun but for the biting critique of our own world, revealed through the mirror of the future or alternate world it presents.  As Krieder writes:

There’s already been a lot of rhapsodizing about Ray Bradbury’s “sense of wonder,” the dark magic and October chill he infused into his work. But let’s not turn him into something harmless, a kindly, childlike uncle spinning marvelous tales of rocket ships and dinosaurs. Don’t forget that he was also the crazy uncle, the dangerous one, a malcontent and a crank, alarming everyone at the dinner table with impassioned rants and dire warnings. 

This is a book about books, a book, like those of Zafón, that encourages us to realize the power of the object we hold as we read it, not the cheerful, quaint fun of reading, but the gut-wrenching, life-changing, world-shifting power of the written word.  This book about censorship should be proscribed reading in all our schools.  If you haven't read it, you must do so.  If you have, you must do so, again.

Carlos Ruis Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

The Shadow of the Wind is the sequel to Carlos Ruis Zafón's wonderful The Angel's Game.  The novel centers on Daniel Sempere, son of a quiet, sorrowful bookshop owner, who adopts a long-lost novel of the same name by the tragic Julián Carax, a woefully failed writer who earns his bread playing the piano in a Parisian brothel.  A faceless man bearing the name of one of Carax's characters has been tracking down every copy of the author's unsuccessful books and burning them.

As in Angel's Game, the prose are beautifully, willfully overwrought, celebrating and reveling the gothic genre, with its abandoned mansions, shady men in overcoats, an etherial, blind beauty, kand rain, always rain.  Zafón's style of writing might well be the subject of a line within his text.

"We'll make a deal," he said. "Tomorrow ... bring your precious find with you so that I can examine it properly, and I'll tell you what I know about Julián Carax.  Quid pro quo."
"Quid pro what?"
"Latin, young man.  There's no such thing as dead languages, only dormant minds."

The novel is willfully, wonderfully antiquated, baroque and intricate.  It is set in the 1950s, a time of great change, and television rears its wretched head now and again, though only as a subject of rhetoric:

'Television, my dear Daniel, is the Antichrist, and I can assure you that after only three or four generations, people will no longer even know how to fart on their own and humans will return to living in caves, to medieval savagery, and to the general state of imbecility that slugs overcame back in the Pleistocene era.  Our world will not die as a result of the bomb, as the papers say, it will die of laughter of banality, of making a joke of everything, and a lousy joke at that.'

The Shadow of the Wind is, at base, a love story, but not the love story of any of the star-crossed lovers who fill out its plot -- of Daniel and Bea, of Julian and Penelope (or Julian and Nuria), nor even of the rakish but lovable Fermín and his unlikely paramour Bernarda.  It is the love story of those few of us who truly love books, preferably old book, forgotten books, unwanted and abandoned books, of those who think that books are not only worth reading, but worth living and dying for.

The bookshop allows us to live modestly, but I can't imagine myself doing anything else.  Our sales lessen year by year ... Bea says that the art of reading is slowly dying, that it's an intimate ritual, that a book is a mirror that offers us only what we already carry inside us, that when we read, we do it with all out heard and mind, and great readers are becoming more scarce by the day.  Every month we receive offers to turn our bookshop into a store selling televisions, girdles, or rope-soled shoes.  They won't get us out of here unless it's feetfirst.

While The Shadow of the Wind begins more slowly, and has more light and humorous moments than Angel's Game, by the end it is just as compelling and absorbing.  Read it, and see what all this fuss about books is about.

Satan Burger, Carlton Mellick III

I have read a lot of strange books.  Some really strange ones.  But I do believe that, true to its billing, Carlton Mellick III's Satan Burger is about as odd as a book can be while still being intelligible.  It is a sort of science fiction dystopia in which the earth -- a sentient being -- has decided it doesn't like any of its inhabitants (nor does God, and Jesus is working as a janitor in the burger joint run by Satan), and is using their souls to power a giant vulva that transports aliens to earth in massive numbers.  The writing is not especially good, and there are a number of problems with the representations of women, of homosexuality, hell, of humanity as a whole, but the creativity is sustained well throughout.  While Satan Burger is not a great novel, or even a good one, it is consistently interesting.  If you want to read a good, solid drug-trip novel, try Denis Johnson's Already Dead.  If, instead, you want to read a grim, funny, offensive, demented trip of a novel, try this.

Ken Follett, World Without End

World Without End is the sequel to Ken Follett's best-selling The Pillars of the Earth, originally published in 1989.  The sequel did not appear until 2007, and had been sitting on my shelf since then.  I read The Pillars of the Earth when I was in graduate school studying the Middle Ages, and recall it as being rather breathtaking in its scope and sweeping presentation of history, as well as in the manner in which it humanizes this history through likable characters.

I was therefore fairly surprised to find World Without End, to be a rather schlocky attempt.  The characters are, for the most part, cardboard cutouts, and some grow increasingly so as the hefty 1000-page novel moves on.  Still, the soap opera drama of the interrelations between the characters is compelling enough to keep a reader turning page after page (after page after page).  I was quite surprised to find myself both disliking the book and unable to put it down.

Set in fourteenth-century England, the novel's action centers on Merthin, great-grandson of Jack Builder, the central character in Pillars, and Caris, daughter of a wealthy wool merchant.  We track them from childhood into middle age, as they and the characters around them struggle against a repressive and close-minded church, evil lords, and ultimately, the Black Plague, which comes in waves that decimate the population of their city.

All the "good" characters, with whom we sympathize, are those able to see outside of the mindset of the Middle Ages in which they live.  Caris, running a hospital, intuits the process by which diseases spread.  Merthin, designing a new spire for the cathedral built by his ancestor, develops one radical innovation after another.  And both care not a whit for the church, especially in regard to the sexual mores it insists upon.

Similarly, all the "bad" characters, some of whom we despise, are those whose attitudes reflect the medieval setting of the novel.  There is one evil, conniving church leader after another, one rapacious lord after another.  This is a real problem for the novel, since there is no reason to think that everyone living in the Middle Ages, who thought as a medieval person would have, was also a terrible person.  It is a cheap way to play on our sympathies, by suggesting that we should like the characters who think like we do.  It would have been far more challenging for the author -- and for his readers -- to grapple with the feelings and thoughts of those who do not share (totally anachronistically) a modern outlook on disease, architecture and engineering, sex, sexuality (there are a few gay characters, and our modern-thinking "friends" in the novel are progressive thinkers on the subject who would clearly have voted against Prop 8!), and so on.  As is, the book requires very little of readers, and does not at any point really ask us to step outside ourselves, even while reading about the distant past.

Margaret Atwood, Year of the Flood

 I have at last gotten around to the sequel to Margaret Atwood's breathtaking Oryx and Crake.  The Year of the Flood is not a temporal sequel.  It does not continue the plot where the first novel left off.  Instead, it runs through the same events, from a different perspective.  Oryx and Crake centers on the masterminds at the center of a massive, intentionally engineered bio-disaster.  The Year of the Flood, instead, narrates the events from the perspectives of a handful of minor characters mentioned at the fringes of O&C.  The main characters are members of God's Gardeners, an eco-vegetarian-religious cult led by the prophetic Adam One and his ancillary Adams and Eves.  Their theology is dopey, conveyed in clumsy rhymes and songs for their youngest members, and yet, as the world falls apart around them, they seem increasingly to be the only people both fit enough to survive in the new world they inherit, and descent enough to deserve it.

Atwood's characteristic creativity is here, but since I had already heard many of the most delightful inventions in O&C, I was less stunned by them as they unfolded.  Similarly, the plot is largely a given.  Individual lives are up for grabs, of course, but the larger, world-changing narrative is not.  As a writing exercise, it is a fascinating idea to write a complete novel twice, from two different points of view (and, according to the cover of my copy, there will be a third in the "MaddAddam Trilogy").  As a reader, though, I think I might have preferred to have the two interlaced together as one hefty novel, switching back and forth between perspectives.  I wonder -- could they be read that way, against Atwood's planning, one chapter of each in sequence, all the way through?

NY Times Article on Novels

I have said it over and over, and here is a nice, short NY Times article corroborating my assertion:  Reading novels is good for you, and makes you a better person:

Reading great literature, it has long been averred, enlarges and improves us as human beings. Brain science shows this claim is truer than we imagined.

So go get a novel and start reading!

Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous

Ok, strictly speaking, this is not one of my regular reviews.  It is an announcement about MY latest book!

The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous, co-edited by Peter Dendle and myself.

Advanced reviews are very strong:

'This volume awakens the monster as an academic topic. Combining John Block Friedman's historical-literary approach with Jeffrey J. Cohen's theoretical concerns, Asa Simon Mittman and Peter Dendle have marshaled chapters that comprise a seminal work for everyone interested in the monstrous. Wide-ranging chapters work through various historical and geographic views of monstrosity, from the African Mami Wata to Pokemon. Theoretical chapters consider contemporary views of what a monster is and why we care about them as we do. Taken together, the essays in The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous reveal that monsters appear in every culture and haunt each of us in different ways, or as Mittman says, the monstrous calls into question our (their, anyone's) epistemological worldview, highlights its fragmentary and inadequate nature, and thereby asks us … to acknowledge the failures of our systems of categorization.' 

David Sprunger, Concordia College, Minnesota, USA 

'An impressively broad and thoughtful collection of the ways in which many cultures, ancient and modern, have used monsters to think about what it means to be human. Lavishly illustrated and ambitious in scope, this book enlarges the reader's imagination.' 

Professor Lorraine Daston, Director of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Germany 

Like all such projects, the book had a long gestation, but the authors were wonderful to work with, and I am thrilled with the final volume.  Order a copy for your library, today!  Order one for yourself, two for your parents, three for your kids, and a dozen for the monsters under your beds, in your closets, and creeping down your walls.

Michel Faber, The Crimson Petal and the White

Watch your steps.  Keep your wits about you; you will need them.  This city I am bringing you to is vast and intricate, and you have not been here before.  You may imagine from other stories you've read, that you know it well, but those stories flatter you, welcoming you as a friend, treating you as if you belonged. The truth is you are an alien from another time and place altogether...

Picking up books abandoned in cafes, hotels and guesthouses seems to be an excellent practice.  Doing so has led me to several books I would never have bought, never have even noticed in a shop, including this strange one, and this stranger one.  This time, I was in a guesthouse in Granada, Spain and, having finished the spectacular Spanish novel I brought with me to read on my travels, I rummaged about the common room in search of something to read.  The only English-language book in the place was a massive thing with a fairly gaudy title, The Crimson Petal and the White, by Michel Faber.  It hardly looked like something of interest, but just as I must eat daily, so too, I must read, so I picked up my cup of tea, and opened the cover.

The writing of this epic is so lively, so humorous and dark and compelling (and sexy -- at times very sexy) that I was rapidly drawn into the story, and its setting of 19th-century London.  The book begins with a string of red herrings, following characters for a few pages and then dropping them just as they become interesting (somewhat in the manner of Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler), so that it is not immediately clear who the book will really be about. Until we meet Sugar, so utterly, clearly, magnetically the star. We find her as a prostitue in the foulest slums of London, but it is clear form her intelligence, and equally from her naked and unabashed ambition, that she will fight her way out of them with any means she can.

This is a book about prostitution, about industry and guts and sex, about the relationship of power and money, and it handles all these subjects masterfully, but it is also a book about writing.  Several of the characters spend time writing texts of various sorts.  Of course, this being a period piece, there is considerable letter writing, but there are also books being written by characters major and minor, none more significant than the violent revenge-fantasy-pseudo-autobiography Sugar is writing, titled "The Fall and Rise of Sugar."

The style of narration is unlike that of any other novel I have read. The narrator acknowledges from the start (quoted above) that we are modern people, reading a book set over a hundred years before we have lived. This anonymous, omniscience narrator speaks directly to the reader, offering to take our hand, to guide us through this unfamiliar and dangerous world, at one point even breaking in to say:

If you are bored beyond endurance, I can offer only my promise that there will be fucking in the very near future, not to mention madness, abduction, and violent death.

And, indeed, there is.  The book as a whole is thick with emotion, evoking disgust as often as sympathy and more rich with unsympathetic characters than likable ones.  But I dare you to start it, and then try to stop.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Angel's Game

I was on my way to Spain (lovely photos available here), and in need of a novel for the trip.  I had been saving Carlos Ruiz Zafón's The Angel's Game for just such an occasion, since it is set in Spain. Barcelona, 1920s.  An abandoned mansion.  A mysterious stranger.  A poor young man, struggling to make his way in the world and to win the love of a beauty, and then struggling against what may be his growing madness.

The first 10 or 20 pages are glossed with a nostalgic tone that is deadly for a novel, blunting all the edges and softening all the blows.  But this fades rapidly, and leaves in its place a dark, gaping hole that grows and grows as the novel progresses.  The Angel's Game is filled with all the stock elements of a gothic tale -- a lonely writer laboring under the press of madness and in the grip of alcohol, frail and beautiful women, decaying mansions and cemeteries, and nights obliterated by powerful rainstorms.  The plot becomes increasingly compelling, and characters more compelling and sympathetic, and the prose more ornate as the novel progresses.  The narrator draws us along, as inflames us with his desperation:

"Please," I murmured, fighting back the tears, a defeated man pitifully begging a God in whom he had never trusted. I looked around at that holy site filled with nothing but ruins and ashes, emptiness and loneliness and knew that I would go back to fetch her that very night, with no more miracle or blessing than my own determination to tear her away from the clutches of that timid, infatuated doctor who had decided to turn her into his own Sleeping Beauty. I would set fire to the sanatorium rather than allow anyone to touch her again. I would take her home and die by her side.  Hatred and anger would light my way.

Sink into this dark tale, lose yourself in its twists, and listen for the drip of the water along the rotten plaster, that will draw your attention to the secret door behind the wardrobe, the source of the foul stench that has been slowly spreading through the old house and out to the slums crumbing around it.