Vonnegut on the Read/Re-Read

Today I finished re-reading Kurt Vonnegut jr’s Slaughter-House Five for about the fifth or sixth time.  Even considering that I pretty much know the book by heart now I still love reading it again and again.  it is very easily high up on my list of favorite all-time books and Vonnegut himself might be in the top five of my all-time favorite authors (if not actually being my solely favorite author). 

I won’t claim that I really got anything new from the book this time around.  As usually I just appreciated its wit and wisdom.  As in the past readings I finished the book feeling a mixture of great happiness and positinve outlook on life while at the same time feeling terribly sad and despaining about the way the world is.  Vonnegut had possibly the most amazing ability at creating this sense of bittersweetness in his stories.

Besides Slaughter-House Five I also bought his short story collection Welcome to the Monkey House on Saturday.  Welcome to the Monkey House has probably one of my all-time favorite short stories in it, that onebeing “Harrison Bergeron.”  In fact it was reading “Harrison Bergeron” my freshman year of college which really got me started with loving the works of Kurt Vonnegut.  I had read Slaughter-House Five as a freshman in high school but something about it had been lost on me back then and so it would take another four years before I re-discovered it and found the real genius of Vonnegut. 

I have not read eveyone of his books (though I’d greatly like to).  I hope I can get to them all in the not too distant future.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. fell down a flight of stairs my junior year of college and only a few short days after that died.  So it goes.

The Sun Also Rises Again

I am currently re-reading Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises for the second time (which will make it my third reading altogether).

As I have likely mentioned in previous posts, The Sun Also Rises holds a special significance to me, in that I think it is really the one book which demonstrated my growth as a reader and lover of literature.  When I first read the book, my junior year in high school, I loathed it and found it difficult to complete.  I wish I could offr more of an explination as to why this was, but my teenage brain and thought process is quite alien to me now and thus, in all honesty, I really am unsure as to what it was specifically that I disliked about the book back then.  What I can say was that at the time I was quite satisfied with the notion of never picking up Hemingway again.

My first re-read of The Sun Also Rises occurred during my junior year of college, four years after I had had my first painful encounter with the book.  In truth I had not intended to re-read the book at all, but a professor of mine challenged me to give it a second chance and see if I still hated it.  I didn’t.  In all honesty it was almost a mystical experience or something.  I breezed through the novel the second time (which really isn’t much of a challenge considering tha tit is quite a short story) and found myself enjoying every moment of it.  I discovered a humor to the book that I had comepletely missed the first time around.  I also found myself enjoy the tact and skill with which Hemingway had committed words to the creation of a story.  Nothing seemed wasteful with Hemingway’s writing style.  The man had written exactly what he intended to write without needing to over elaborate or becoming clumsy with his style.  As a writing major at the time I found myslef greatly appreciating the use of language that Hemingway had employed in the story and how it maintained a steady motion and consitent sense of character.  Four years prior I had been greatly mistaken, The Sun Also Rises was indeed a fantastic novel.

So that brings us to my current reading.  I had bought the book some weeks back in a used copy of The Hemingway Reader which I had found at a GoodWill store.  This past Sunday I picked it up in the morning as I sat out on my porch and drank a cup of coffee.  It was very relaxing beginning the story again.  I was familiar with it, comfortable with it.  Whereas during my second reading I had picked up the story with a cynical belief that I’d find no more joy in it than I had with my first read, this time around I knew that the story would be a pleasure to work through again.

While I cannot avoid noticing again the magnificent use of language that Hemingway employees in The Sun Also Rises I find that so far during this read (I’m about halfway through currently) I have been paying far more attention to the characters in the story, especially the narrator Jake Barnes.  I know that during both of my previous readings I was well aware of the personalities and characteristics of the main cast of the story, but this time it seems that I am far more interested in the intricacies that make them all at once compelling but also tragic.  Jake has emotion, that much in unquestionable, yet he approaches the story with a certain stoic attitude which shapes our perception of the whole story.  There is a kind of defeatist quality to Jake’s narration which makes us feel that even in the dazzling swinging times the characters might be having in appearance, that in truth there is a lingering sadness and malaise to all of their existences.  In this way we, the readers, truly encounter that “Lost Generation” with which the book so intimately deals.  To be lost is to be without direction and that is exactly what the different characters are, directionless, wanering around, pursuing the semblance of happiness and enjoyment all the while spiraling furthing into indifference and defeat.

I think it might be easy to enjoy the book solely for the nostalgic feel of the 1920s in Europe with lots of drinking, late nights, and parties but this approach to the story misses the key point which it that all those things were merely a shell or a mask put on over the real quality of the people who performed the parts.  There is an existential note to it all, not necessarily the angsty existentialism which emerged after the second world war, but instead, agian, that defeatism in the face of reality.  Jake, deeply in love with Brett knows there is no chance of happiness with her because of his injury in the war (WWI) and Brett, equally in love with Jake, knows that she lacks any ability at actually loyalty which would ever allow for them to be happy.  Instead of seeking some kind of resolution the characters seem to avoid their problems by pursing outside entertainment and a ton of drinking.  As such the story can come across as being without any real sense of resolution or closer, which I suppose might be frustrating to some, but in the end that is entirely the point, that there is no closer because the characters are completely incapable of making such a thing happen.  Thus the story is a tragedy of characters and their inabilty to save themselves from their own directionlessness.

Truly fantastic.  The Sun Also Rises is one of those books which I strongly suggest to anybody who enjoys good writing and storytelling but also likes the challenge of pulling more from a story than may initially be apparent about it.  Hemingway has remained a classic for a reason and The Sun Also Rises is a great example of why that is.

Memories in “Ulysses”

I love The New York Times for many many reasons (great science articles, interesting political perspectives, etc.) but perhaps one of my favorite type of articles that often appear in the newspaper are the various editorials and op-eds.  For a great example I point you to Colum McCann’s “But Always Meeting Ourselves.”  The piece is a wonderful contemplation of a real life, of a famed novel (Specifically James Joyce’s Ulysses), and ultimately the power within a piece of fiction to draw out truths about those real lifes with live and interact with.  A beautiful little piece, that touched me greatly.  It also contians a wonderful quote by Vladamir Nobokov (no literary light-weight — think Lolita) about the power and purpose of storytelling (I’ll let you find the quote in the article yourself).

Breifly on Ulysses. I have never read the vast and well known Joyce novel myself, though, through discussion and having read about it, I know quite a bit of the plot and premise of the work.  It has for a time now been one of those books that I’ve been interested in picking up, and yet I am hesitant to do so.  A lot of what I have heard about Ulysses is that it is one of the most difficult and complex books in the English language, and that over the years it has spawned all sorts of analysis and criticism.  It is is such details of the book that both intrigue and discourage me.  Ultimately, I feel that I should read it out of principal alone(that being that I should challenge myself to read as many great novels as I can), which might not be the best of reasons to pick up a book, but I doubt it is also the worst.

That being said;  Happy Bloomsday today.

The Lasting Popularity of “The Catcher in the Rye”

The BBC offers an interesting article examining the long lasting popularity of J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye.  I feel it is worth sharing here, considering that the popularity of the novel is unquestionable.

That being said, I personally really do not like The Catcher in the Rye.  I think my reason for this really comes down to two main things.  One, I didn’t read it in high school like so many other people.  In fact I did not read The Catcher in the Rye until the end of my junior year in college, and then I only read it because a couple of my friends insisted upon it (the reason I hadn’t read it up until then was due primarily to being uninterested in the book).  But anyways, I did finally read it, but ultimately was not all that impressed.  I won’t go so far as to say it was the worst book I have ever read (I have read quite a number of worse books) but there was nothing about it that really struck me as all that great, as so many people had  insisted it was.  In truth I found the novel overall rather smug and callous, which I realize is part of the characteristics of Holden Caulfield, the narrator, but still, in the end, it kind of annoyed me.

What further has made me have a dislike about the book is the name Holden Caulfield itself.  You see my middle name happens to be Holden and for as long as I can remember people have been say/asking to me “Oh, your middle name is named after Holden Caulfield?”

No, no it is not.  Holden is just a name that my parents liked.  In fact I don’t think my father has ever read The Catcher in the Rye himself, and I am pretty certain my mother has told me that she didn’t care for it when she read it.  I just hate the assumption that because part of my name is Holden that it must certainly be because of Holden Caulfield.  There are plenty of other people (real people might I add) who have Holden as part of their names and I am just as likely to take it from them.  Or, as is the actual case, it could be assumed to just be a liked name my parents picked.  The further annoyance with people making the comparison was that before I had read the book I wasn’t certain who Holden Caulfield was and so wasn’t  sure what people were talking about.

I’ll admit that part of my dislike might stem partially from a desire to be a contrarian in the popular literary field.  But really I think the two above points are my main reason.  I don’t begrudge others for liking The Catcher in the Rye it just isn’t really all that high up on my list of enjoyed books.

On the Re-Read . . . Jonathan Safran Foer’s “Everything is Illuminated”

While I was cleaning my room this past weekend I came upon my paperback copy of Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated and decided, because I did not currently have any demanding books on my read list, that I’d reread it.  Everything is Illuminated is probably one of my favorite books published in the past decade, and this will be my third reading of it since I first picked it up in early 2006.

The way in which I came upon Everything is Illuminated strikes me as rather interesting.  Truth is I had never heard of the author or the book, and probably never would have if it weren’t for my parents plugging the movie version of the story.  While I was in college my parents loved to suggest tons of movies to me (actually they still do this, but now that I have Netflix I actually get around to watching most of them).  So they kept mentioning this film Everything is Illuminated starring Elijah Wood and how great it was, and my response was something along the lines of “yeah, yeah, awesome, I’ll keep my eyes out for it,” knowing full well that I probably wouldn’t bother looking for it at all.  Apparently the fates that be had a better idea in store.

I was working at the library at school (where I worked for all four years in which I was in college) and was shelving books in the main browsing section (just a collection of popular titles, not necessarily new or anything, just books that had good reviews and seemed popular) when I came upon a copy of Everything is Illuminated.  I recognized the title almost immediately as “that movie I hear about every time I talk to my parents.”  Because I wasn’t reading anything at the time I thought, “hell, why not give this a try, in the very least it might get my parents to leave me alone about the movie for a bit.”  So I picked it up and began reading.  Needless to say, due to my openning of this post, I was captivated.

I will say that Everything is Illuminated might not be for everybody.  The story style can be kind of confusing seeing as it jumps around some between narrators and time period (personally I got used to it pretty fast), it is also kind of a bizarre story to begin with; lots of strange characters, use of strange language, and an overall different driving plot.  But I think once a person gets over the initial difficulties that the story presents they find themselves reading a truly magnificent and moving novel.

I’m trying to avoid spoiling the book too much here.  Basically I think Everything is Illuminated is all about the development of a narrative.  In some ways it presents purposely unreliable accounts of similar events to reiterate the fact that a narrative is reliable only in the perspective of a given party at a given time.  The concept of history playing a direct role on present events is also a very strong theme throughout the book (something which it shares with Foer’s second novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close).  All and all, the relationships that develop throughout the novel between characters, past and present, creates a marvelous interplay of emotion and narrative, culminating in a mixture of tragedy and transcendence.  The book really does have some of the saddest moments I’ve read in any books in recent years, enough to pretty much cause a few tears.  But there is also a really good feeling about it, even in the moments that lack true resolution, because it seems strikingly real.

For anybody who is interested in a slightly different novel structure, a story about family and history, as well as a book about travel and exploration, I would greatly suggest looking into Everything is Illuminated (you also may enjoy Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close which is a great novel in its own rights).  I will also give big credit to the film version of Everything is Illuminated which, while it changes some aspects, is a remarkably well made and enjoyable movie that remains relatively true to the book.

Theater of the Absurd

I’ve be reading/rereading a number of plays this week that are often lumped in a classification of “Theater of the Absurd.”  So far I have read/reread Samuel Beckett’s “Endgame,” Edward Albee’s “The Zoo Story,” and John-Paul Sartre’s “No Exit.”  Besides these three plays, I also watched the film version of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” which is likely Albee’s best known work.  All of these rank as some of my favorite pieces of literature, and part of my purpose of reading them is that I intent to revamp, if not rewrite entirely, a paper dealing with these plays.  I won’t go into much detail (that is what the paper will be for), beyond saying that it will probably be about the relation of interpersonal relationships within the plays as well as the effects such relationships are intended to solicite in a captive audience.  I’ve also got a number of other Albee plays on my list to read, and Beckett’s masterpiece “Waiting for Godot.”

Truth is I love reading plays.  I am not sure when I really realized this, but it is something of which I am unashamed to admit.  Back in college I picked up a number of pieces of drama for mere pleasure, specifically a couple of Shakespeare works that I had wanted to reread and get a better understanding of (such as “Julius Caeser” which may be one of my favorite plays of all time).  I assume a part of my enjoyment of reading a play has to do with the fact that I used to enjoy performing in theater myself.  I saw “No Exit” as a live performance several years prior to my first reading the actual play.  The thing that  find interesting is that drama is written entirely with the intention of it being performed. It is this fact that I think makes it an interesting area of literary inspection.  How does writing change when it is made for a performance in front of an audience.  Really fascinating if you think about it, the fact that the majority of people who are apt to interact with the text do so not as readers, but as either audience or actors (which I suppose an actor/actress counts as a reader in some sense, but I could argue, in another sense, that they are still not).

If you have never read a play before, I challenge you to.  I won’t claim that they are always easy.  I’ve known a number of people who find it hard to read them.  My best advice, would be while reading a play, try to imagine it performed.  Depending on the playwrite’s decisions there may be a lot or very little stage direction in the actual text.  As you read try and visualize how the characters move, what the set is like, etc.  I find that this really helps bring into focus some of what the  writer is attempting to portray.  Then, if you feel like it, or are fortunate to get an opportunity, try and see the play performed live.  I can almost guarentee that it will help solidify an understanding of what you have read.  Really, try it out, it can be fun.

By the way, while probably not quite the same as watching the liver performance, the film version of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” is really a wonderful work of art, and the acting is magnificent.  It is a strange, uncomfortable, all around disturbing story, but ultimately I think it presents one of the most thought provoking looks at mid-20th century American life.  Quite a good comparison and contrast can be drawn between it and Albee’s other play “American Dream.”

Rivka Galchen’s “Atmospheric Disturbances”

So I am reading this book called Atmospheric Disturbances, by Rivka Galchen, and I am finding that I really enjoy it.  The the fact that I am really enjoying it is not all that special in and of itself, seeing as I have a habit of enjoy a lot of the books that I read.  But my reason for my enjoyment is something which I have not experienced for a great while with a book.  This reason is in that I feel that Atmospheric Disturbances is a book which should be read and discussed in a college environment, because it is the type of book that promotes contemplation about the characters and situations and everything.  It is, so far as I can tell (only being about 70 pages into it) a truly literary work.  To me this makes it wonderfully enjoyable, my only real regret being in that I am not reading it in a classroom where I can talk to others and hear what they make of it as well.  Not only is the story compelling, moving, a wonderful display of postmodern thought and story device, but the very language is just saturated with intelligence, cleverness, and all around beauty.

That being said, I will say that I cannot consider Atmospheric Disturbancesto be, by any means, an easy read.  For a novel of only around 240 pages, it has thus far presented itself as being dense, full of cerebral content and articulate wording.  I would not recommend this for a simple browsing read, because in doing such, one is guaranteedto miss important parts of the story.  This is a book that almost demands close reading and that is why I feel it would be so in place in a college classroom.  I want to write a paper about it, pulling in material from the likes of Freud and Baudrillard both (the latter especially because of the concept of “simulacrum” that exists throughout).

It is fantastic . . . there, I have said it.  Don’t take that to mean that the book is “good” because the measure of goodness is not an easy thing for one to objectively classify.  But it is fantastic in the sense of being a piece of literature that sparks further contemplation beyond just the initial act of absorbing the story.

Urban Fiction

I read a really interesting article earlier today about the emergence of a relatively new genre of fiction and how it is impacting readers and libraries, especially in urban areas.  The article, titled “Urban Fiction Goes From Streets to Public Libraries” by Anne Bernard appeared in today’s issue of The New York Times and focuses on the rising popularity of a genre that is called, as you may guess from the title, Urban Fiction.  What I find most interesting about the article is the degree of controversy that can arise over a certain genre or literary style.  Urban fiction has been criticized for being overly violent and/or sexual and for romanticizing “gangster” lifestyles.  In fact many of the criticisms of urban fiction parallel those made on Rap music which is closely associate incidentally in both location and within the writing itself.

What I really find interesting is that this isn’t the first genre or literary form to be criticized in similar fashion.  Romance novels have long been looked down upon.  Until rather recently comics were not generally considered of much literary value (a topic I hope to write about in further detail at a later time).  At the same time other styles of writing, which once dominated what was literary have fallen out of popular favor.  Poetry was once the way to write, and it made up much of what people read.  The case is not quite the same today (not that people do not still read poetry, I personally love it myself, it is just not as popular as it was in the past).  

As I have written before I’m sure, I will state again that there is a certain degree and mindset of literary elitism.  It is the stance that people take saying that “this” is a work of literary worth, while “that” is quite base and low, solely intended to entertain the masses. I admit a guilt to this kind of thinking occasionally myself.  I personally have great dislike for some very successful novels such as “The Da Vinci Code” and “The Kite Runner” and have made arguments about them being of low literary worth.  At the same time I am currently in the midst of Stephen King’s “Duma Key” and considering authors who have received significant criticism for not creating works worth literary praise King is high up there.

I have tried to relax my bouts of overpowering literary elitism by taking a proactive stance of “if it is getting people to read more than it cannot really be all that bad.”  I suppose in the long run time will tell, as the scholars of literature in the years to come determine which works are worthy of continual inspection and which others disappear into the metaphorical cracks of literary history.

Of Literary Value; Continental Consideration

While primarily I would like to use this blog to discuss specific books that I am either reading, have read, or plan to read, I feel that this is also an appropriate space for me to discuss some things of interest in the greater realm of literature as a whole.  Ideally I would like to someday go back to school for some more degrees and for a couple years now I have thought that it would be pretty great to get a PhD in some study of literature.  Any advanced degree is likely still several years away, but that is no reason for me to sacrifice thinking about literature and the studies that surround it.

That being said I point you to this AP article that appeared on CNN.com earlier today.  I encorage those who ahve interest to read the article themselves, but will sum it up by saying that it is about how Nobel Prize permanent secretary Horace Engdahl thinks that literature from the U.S. is overall lacking and that that is why most Nobel Prize winners are European (and note that I am summarizing nicely, Mr. Engdahl more specifically referred to U.S. writing as “ignorant”). 

With bold statements such as those said by Mr. Engdahl it should be no surprise that there has been some raised debate about the merit of literature on both sides of the Atlantic.  Of course there always exists debate about the merit of literature as there has to be by the very nature of the art.  How is it determined whether or not a piece of writing is one of literary worth?  Of course there are many criteria to consider and disagreement on the value of the criteria is part of the whole discussion.  If a book achieves great popularity does that automatically make it of value in the study of literature?  Does it all rely on the critics who either praise a work of writing, or scoff at it and call it dirt?  What about when the piece is read?  Just because something is considered of value today will it be tomorrow?

The thing is that the study of literature cannot truly posses an objective degree of value.  There is no universal rating that marks some writing on the level of mere amateur garbage while it lists other pieces as near divine writ.  Yet it can be agreed that some writing has had an impact of great significance and thus must indeed be of “literary value.” Consider Shakespeare, or Crevantes‘ Don Quixote, there is not much argument that these are people or stories that are considered to have quite a bit of “literary value.”

So what does it mean that a European very intimately involved in the Nobel Prize thinks poorly of American writing?  I would say it really depends on where you stand, not just in the Continental sense, but ideologically in regards to what constitutes literary worth.  Personally I think there is a good deal of writing coming out of the States, as well as out of Europe, that is worth literary priase and recogntion.  A comment that suggest that one geographic region continually creates better works of writing than another region should be regarded as exactly what it is; a completely subjective statement.  As such the offense that Mr. Engdahl may have caused some may not be due so much because he does not appreciate American literature but more so because he would so confidently assert that somehow the writings of European origin are superior without considering the absolute impossibility of there existing any objective proof of this idea.

This article made me really excited when I read it earlier today because it allows the kind of discussion that I so love in regards to literature.  I hope other people have thoughts on this.  If you do please share them with me, I’d love to hear what you think.