Tag: Book

Review: Howl and Other Poems

Review: Howl and Other Poems

Howl and Other PoemsHowl and Other Poems by Allen Ginsberg

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?

On my recent trip to San Francisco I was obliged to buy a copy of this book from the City Lights bookstore. Well, that isn’t the whole story. I visited the book store without knowing anything of its history, left with a copy of Galileo’s Sidereus Nuncius, and then shamefacedly returned to pick up this book when my mother informed me, five minutes later, that it is famous for the “Howl” trial. I had heard recordings of Ginsberg reciting “Howl” many times, but I had never actually owned a copy of this poem. Now, thanks to the timely intervention of my mom, I am bona fide hip.

Like so many obscene books of bygone ages, “Howl” seems remarkably tame nowadays, and it is hard to believe any institution would go through the bother of banning and confiscating it. As in so many other cases of censorship, the attempt to suppress the work backfired, helping to turn poem and poet into icons. In our present, enlightened age, we have realized that, when anything can be published, nothing can be shocking or subversive; so oversaturation accomplishes in a stroke what censorship failed to accomplish in generations. But I am getting rather off the track of this book review.

It is difficult to evaluate “Howl,” since everything innovative about it has been thoroughly absorbed into the culture: obscenity, drugs, jazz, eastern mantras, free-form poems that follow the breath, and so on. Ginsberg’s voice is still with us; and you can hear it for yourself if you go to the right college campus—to pick just one example, New Paltz, in upstate New York, has many psychedelic, socially conscious, very enlightened free-form poets. This is not to say that this poem is no longer enjoyable, only that its appeal is more as a fossil than as a revelation now.

But it is a delightful fossil. For with Ginsberg’s “Howl” I hear the first grumblings of a new phenomenon in society: a group of disaffected youths becoming self-aware as a loose movement—as a counter-culture. Now, there have always been disaffected people who have turned to alcohol, drugs, sex, foreign faiths, and in general that peculiar mix of mysticism and hedonism that gives solace to those who feel they do not have a place in their own society. Yet it was not until the Beats, I believe, that this now quintessential experience was turned into art that defined a whole generation. The irony, of course, is that as soon as a counter-culture becomes faddish, its harmless aspects are absorbed into society, and its radical aspects swept to the side, until the revolt loses its teeth.

In both Ginsberg’s “Howl” and Kerouac’s On the Road I see young men, profoundly disenchanted and disconnected with their world, deeply disgusted with the values of their society, but without much to offer in the way of replacement. Instead they wander “starving hysterical naked” across the country, in search of some sort of epiphany that will clarify their predicament—an elusive truth, to be pursued on highways, in bedrooms, and in the altered states of the mind. Yet until they reach this truth, all they have to offer in opposition to “Moloch” is hedonism—which is exactly the same dilemma unsuccessfully faced by Babbitt.

Needless to say I do not find either alternative convincing, but that does not mean I cannot enjoy Ginsberg’s poems. Now, I do think the book format does not do Ginsberg justice, since the lines are organized by his breath and demand to be read, preferably by him. I will always remember laying awake in my bed in high school, listening to Ginsberg reciting “Howl” and “America,” and feeling strange stirrings of literary rebellion that I could not hope to articulate. A literary triumph, perhaps not, but an essential landmark on the country’s and my own maturity.

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Review: The Great Bridge

Review: The Great Bridge

The Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn BridgeThe Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge by David McCullough

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

… on a day when two young men were walking on the moon, a very old woman on Long Island would tell reporters that the public excitement over the feat was not so much compared to what she had seen “on the day they opened the Brooklyn Bridge.”

On the inside cover of my copy of this book its previous owner has inserted a little love note. The brief message is written in a very neat script, in red ink, apparently on the eve of a long separation. Now, you may think that a book about the Brooklyn Bridge is a rather odd gift for a lover—and, considering that the book ended up in a used book shop, this may be what the recipient thought, too—but, now that I have read McCullough’s chronicle of the Brooklyn Bridge, I can see why it might inspire such sentimental attachment. For it is a thoroughly lovable book.

This is my first McCullough work, and I am pleased. He is a fine writer. His prose is stylish yet unobtrusive, striking that delicate balance between being intelligible but not simplified. He has a keen eye for the exciting details of a seemingly dry story; and effectively brings together many different threads—the personalities, the politics, the technology—in such a way that the past looms up effortlessly in the imagination. The only parts which I think could have been improved were his explanations of the engineering, since he used too many unfamiliar terms without explaining them, perhaps thinking that such explanations might swell the book to unseemly proportions. In any case, he is a writer, not an engineer, and he shines most when discussing the human experience of the Bridge.

The bridge’s designer was John A. Roebling, who deserves a book unto himself. An eccentric polymath, who among other things studied philosophy under Hegel, he came to America to found a Utopian village and ended up the foremost expert on suspension bridges. The Brooklyn Bridge was his project; but tragically he died during the first year of the project, after his foot was crushed, his toes amputated, and he contracted tetanus. His son, Washington, immediately took over—in many ways just as remarkable a man. A Civil War hero with a tenacious memory, the bridge ruined his health, too, through a combination of stress and the bends.

In those days the bends were known as “caisson sickness,” named for the compartment sunk underwater in order to excavate for the bridge’s foundations. These were filled with pressurized air in order to prevent water from seeping in. Unfortunately, in those days the dangers of rapidly depressurizing were not understood, so many people fell ill during the construction—including Roebling himself, who spent the final years of the bridge’s construction as an invalid, observing the work through a telescope from his apartment. Luckily for him, his wife, Emily, was a remarkable woman—diplomatic and brilliant—and helped to carry the project to completion.

These personalities come alive in McCullough’s narration, turning what could have been a dry chronicle into an enthralling book. And this is not to mention the political corruption, the manufacturing fraud, the deadly accidents, and the glorious celebrations that took place during the fourteen years of the bridge’s construction.

Yesterday I revisited the Brooklyn Bridge, which is beautiful even if you know nothing about it. As a friend and I strolled across in the intense summer heat, elbowing our way through crowds of tourists, I blathered on about all the fun facts I had learned from this book—which I am sure my friend very much appreciated. Sensing his discomfort, I made sure to emphasize that a fraudulent wire manufacturer had tricked the engineers into using sub-par cables, and that a panic broke out a week after the bridge’s opening, which resulted in twelve people being trampled. You see this book has already helped my social life. Maybe next I can write my own love note inside.

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Review: Travels with Charley

Review: Travels with Charley

Travels with Charley: In Search of AmericaTravels with Charley: In Search of America by John Steinbeck

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In literary criticism the critic has no choice but to make over the victim of his attention into something the size and shape of himself.

This little volume must rank as one of the great American travel books—though I am not quite sure what that means. Travel literature, by its nature, finds itself in a paradoxical position: to search for truth by becoming briefly acquainted with a wide and disconnected series of experiences. Steinbeck addresses this in his opening salvo: “So it was I decided to look again, to try to rediscover this monster land. Otherwise, in writing, I could not tell the small diagnostic truths which are the foundations of the large truth.” But the riddle is to figure out which truths are diagnostic and which distractions. Steinbeck seems later to have thrown up his hands in despair at the prospect, as he retreats into subjectivism: “I feel that there are too many realities. What I set down here is true until someone else passes that way and rearranges the world in his own style.”

Yet if the cliché is true, and the journey is more important than the destination, then Steinbeck’s search for America is more important than what he finds. That sounds reassuring, at least. In any case, the search is a pleasure to read. Steinbeck presents himself as an aging everyman, puttering about with his poodle and his camper, making small-talk with locals, sampling diner breakfasts, and getting lost on country roads. Very little of consequence happens; nothing much is discovered that the fifty-eight year old author did not already know; and it is lovely to read about. True, Steinbeck could, and did, narrate a fly buzzing around a dirty kitchen and turn it into poetry; but his writerly skill is not the only virtue this book possesses.

The book’s most consistent note is that of resigned obsolescence. Steinbeck looks upon the country—one which he once knew so deeply that he created its most representative novels—and finds it unfamiliar. He is past his prime, and knows it; and, more impressively, accepts it. He was writing in the wake of On the Road, another iconic travel book; and though Steinbeck’s work is far more mature and, I think, much better written, it nevertheless fails to capture the ethos of the time in the way Kerouac or, indeed, the younger Steinbeck was able to do. I am not saying this in criticism, but in admiration, since Steinbeck still managed to create a classic book. Like any great artist, he found the great universal in his tiny particular; and he transformed his sense of being out of touch into a great sighing comment on his changing country.

Now, of course much of this book isn’t true. All novelists are born and bred liars. But it sounds true enough, and that is all I want from a travel book.

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Review: The Mountains of California

Review: The Mountains of California

The Mountains of CaliforniaThe Mountains of California by John Muir

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Few places in this world are more dangerous than home.

It is difficult to spend any time in northern California without coming across the name of John Muir. He is the patron saint of the state’s wild beauty. The John Muir Trail, passing through Yosemite Valley and the Sequoia & Kings Canyon National Parks, and Muir Woods, home of the majestic redwoods, are just two of the most prominent monuments to his life’s work.

I picked up a copy of this book on a recent trip to North Cali, while visiting the Donner Museum—near Donner Lake, up in the Sierra Nevada—which commemorates not only the unfortunate party of lost pilgrims, but some of the other epochal events of the region, such as the goldrush, the building of the North Pacific Railroad, and construction of the major highways. Not many years after the Donner Party lost themselves in the Snowy Range, this infrastructure tied the previously isolated region to the rest of the country.

Perhaps it would have seemed grimly ironic to the Donner survivors that, a generation later, people would be fighting to keep this dangerous place pristine, resisting the encroachment of civilization. Yet in hindsight we can only regard this effort as prescient. That there is any nature left at all is largely thanks to Muir and his ilk, who not only directly intervened to preserve wilderness, but through his writings helped to evoke a groundswell of appreciation for natural beauty.

This book is a piece of propaganda on behalf of wilderness. Though Muir was highly knowledgeable in botany, geology, and in the study of glaciers, the information he presents is strictly secondary to his fundamental purpose: to evoke the beauty of the place. Few people in history, if any, had such a sensitivity to nature. Squirrels sent him into ecstasies, bird calls lifted him into mystic regions of delight, and mountain scenery brought him close to death with pleasure. Indeed, one quickly gets the impression that he could be equally happy in the rainforests of South America, the deserts of Arabia, or the bogs of Scotland. This, ironically, makes the book rather monotonous. Since the bees and birds, the flowers and ferns, the pine trees, fir trees, cedars, sequoias, and all the rest are equally majestic, noble, exquisite, etc.—in every season and all times of day—the descriptions become difficult to attend to. The emotional tone is endlessly euphoric.

Muir’s writing comes most alive when he switches from descriptions of nature to first-person accounts of his explorations. For he was not a note-taking Darwin or a rhapsodizing Wordsworth with a walking stick, but a serious adrenaline junkie. He describes, for example, climbing to the top of a 100-foot tall tree during a heavy storm, and clinging to the end while it got whipped about in the wind, and assures us that “never before did I enjoy so noble an exhileration of motion.” He goes on to describe the experience:

The slender tops fairly flapped and swished in the passionate torrent, bending and swirling backward and forward, round and round, tracing indescribable combinations of vertical and horizontal curves, while I clung with muscles firm braced, like a bobolink on a reed… I kept my lofty perch for hours, frequently closing my eyes to enjoy the music by itself, or to feast quietly on the delicious fragrance that was streaming past. … from the chafing of resiny branches against each other, and the incessant attrition myriads of needles, the gale was spiced to a very tonic degree.

Passages like this are entirely typical. Never is there even a hint of discomfort or fear. Everything he does is unselfconsciously joyful. Muir gives us a (perhaps unwitting) self-portrait in his description of the Water Ouzel: “he never calls forth a single touch of pity; not because he is strong to endure, but rather because he seems to live a charmed life beyond the reach of every influence that makes endurance necessary.” The rest of the descriptions applies equally well: “For both in winter and in summer he sings, sweetly, cheerily, independent alike of sunshine and of love, requiring no other inspiration than the stream on which he dwells. While water sings, so must he, in heat or cold, calm or storm, ever attuning his voice in sure accord; low in the drought of summer and the drought of winter, but never silent.”

So must Muir sing his cheerful tune, whether hanging from cliffs, being buffeted in snowstorms, or crawling through thick brush on all fours. It is hard not to envy a man so seemingly impervious to all negative feeling, sensation, or thought. One suspects that Muir is not giving us the whole picture; but he could not have lived such a life if it did not fulfill him. And, as Bill McKibben states in the introduction, in many ways Muir falls comfortably within an American cultural tradition, running from the exhuberance to Whitman, the nature-worship of Thoreau, and the transcendental enthusiasm of Emerson, on through Muir to the drug-fueled ravings of the Beats and beyond. Muir is a shining exemplar of the outdoorsy woodsman, actuated by individual grit and positive thinking, that is so dear to the national myth. And, in truth, he did a lot of good.

All this being said in his praise, I still must give this book a middling rating. Muir is a prime example of a writer who excels on the level of sentences—writing lyrical, poetic descriptions of all he sees—but who falls short on the level of the whole book. The enthusiastic tone and passionate descriptions drift off into homogenous yelps of beauty. And, while evocative and impressionistic, Muir fails to give a fleshed-out, coherent picture of the mountain wilderness. Still, in his best moments Muir is unforgettable; and I confess that he did inspire in me some faint longings to go out hiking myself—though I would prefer a well-marked trail.

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Review: Vanity Fair

Review: Vanity Fair

Vanity FairVanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The world is a looking glass, and gives back to every man the reflection of his own face. Frown at it, and it will in turn look sourly upon you; laugh at it and with it, and it is a jolly kind companion; and so let all young persons take their choice.

There seems to be little to say about Vanity Fair that is worth the time in saying it. This is an open book; its appeal is direct, its themes obvious, its interpretation unambiguous. It is an extended satire of Victorian England—what more is there to add?

I was prepared for the nineteenth-century prose; indeed, Thackeray’s unadorned style has aged uncommonly well. I had readied myself for its protracted length and copious cast of characters. I was even prepared for the strong authorial voice and frequent asides; in this, Thackeray follows Henry Fielding quite closely. But I was not quite ready for such a depressing novel. For the secret of Vanity Fair’s lasting success is not, I think, due merely to Thackeray’s execution—brilliant as it is—but owes itself far more to the novel’s triumphant immoralism.

Like many great novelist, Thackeray opens the book by introducing to us a pair of characters, Becky Sharp and Amelia Sedley, who are to be foils for each other. Amelia is simple and good, while Becky is calculating and wicked. Following the standard conventions, we should expect Amelia to emerge triumphant and Becky to be foiled. And yet Thackeray consistently and persistently flaunts this expectation. Instead, he throws his characters into a world full of cowards, egoists, hypocrites, dullards, drunkards, gluttons, dandies, and every other species of vice—in short, Vanity Fair—and shows us that, in such a world, virtue is a luxury few can afford.

Indeed, the frightening thing about this novel is that Thackeray gradually pulls us into sympathy with Becky Sharp. The daughter of a painter and a dancing master, she hoists herself up from the lowest to the highest ranks of society using only her wit. In the process, it becomes clear that she is a sociopath in the proper sense of the word—seeing others as mere instruments, unable to care for anyone but herself. And yet we feel—we are made to feel—that she is not morally lower than those around her (who also only care for money and status), only cleverer and more determined.

In a word, Thackeray’s thesis is that, in our depraved world—where people care only for vanities, and where unjust accidents such as birth determine the distribution of these goods—the only logical course of action is to be ruthless. Thackeray completes this impression by showing how commonly virtue leads to misery. Amelia’s virtue, though genuine, is consistently made to look foolish. Her dedication to her husband is rendered ridiculous by her husband’s unfaithfulness, her dedication to her son rendered absurd by her son’s unconcern with leaving the house, and so on. For my part I found it very difficult to like her, and more often found myself rooting for Becky.

William Dobbin is the only character who is allowed to appear really admirable. Yet his virtue, too, is for most of the story ignored and unrewarded. And when he finally obtains his goal—by which time he has grown bitter with waiting—this is arguably caused, not by his action, but by Becky Sharp, the only effectively active character in the book.

The final result of this has been to leave me with a feeling of emptiness. Thackeray’s portrayal of Vanity Fair is convincing enough to leave the reader with a numbing sense of cynicism, scarcely pierced by the novel’s few tender moments. Despite this, I must recommend the book highly. Thackeray has, in many ways, aged better than his chief rival, Dickens. His prose is leaner and sharper, his characters more realistic, and his ethos free of Dickens’ dripping sentimentality. This is satire raised to a sweeping view of human life—which does not make it any funnier.

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Review: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

Review: The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi GermanyThe Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany by William L. Shirer

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Reading this book is an ordeal. It is very long and very depressing. Charting the Third Reich from the birth of Hitler to the collapse of Germany, Shirer tells the whole story with the sweep of a novelist and the detail of an accountant. He wrote the book after having access to huge stores of documents captured by the Allies after the war. Diaries, schedules, testimonies from the Nuremberg trials, the minutes of meetings, and much more were the raw material marshalled to create this tome.

As is often noted, Shirer was a journalist, not a historian, a fact that helps to explain much about this book. He lived in Berlin as a foreign correspondent from 1933 to the end of 1940, reporting on the rise of Hitler and the beginnings of the war, until the threat of the Gestapo forced him to return home. This firsthand experience lent color to his narrative, but also focused his attention on readily observable events. Rather than talk of larger trends—social shifts, economic pressures, cultural developments—Shirer focuses almost exclusively on the doings of individuals in power, such as he had been reporting on.

This focus makes the narrative vivid and pleasingly concrete, but also results in a superficial analysis. A historian would naturally spend more time on the rampant inflation of the times, the institutional weakness of the Weimar Republic, the wider political trends in Europe, the mechanics of a totalitarian state, and so on. Further, Shirer’s explanation of why Germany embarked on such a destructive enterprise boils down to: because it is peopled by Germans. That is, he locates a kind of cultural essence in the German people, an essence stemming from the Reformation and especially Martin Luther, added to by Hegel and then by Nietzsche, which came to full fruition in National Socialism. But this sort of cultural essentialism is, for me, just intellectual laziness. It can be used to explain anything or everything, since these posited cultural qualities are vague and unobservable.

In any case wider historical analysis plays a very small part in this book, which is mainly a record of the decisions and actions of the leading men of the Nazi regime. That is to say that this book is a political and not a military history. The Second World War is discussed, of course, but only insofar as its developments affected or were caused by the Nazi leaders. Shirer is mainly concerned with charting the rise to power of these ruthless men: how they outsmarted the Weimar Republic leaders, fooled the international community, bullied and threatened their way to conquests, and finally instigated a war that resulted in their own ruin.

The balance of the book is tilted heavily towards the rise of the Third Reich. This can make for some dreary reading. In retrospect it is stupefying to witness how blind, inept, and spineless were Hitler’s opponents, first within Germany and then beyond its borders, until the final crisis spurred the world into action against him. Though Shirer’s sturdy prose is normally quite plain and unadorned, he has a steady instinct for the dramatic and writes several unforgettable scenes. Nevertheless the scale of detail Shirer saw fit to include sometimes weighs down the narrative into benumbing dullness. The endless, petty diplomatic maneuvers that preceded the beginning of the War—negotiations, ambassadors, threats, ultimatums, calculations, second thoughts, and so on—made it a relief when the soldiers finally started shooting.

These political dealings of the Nazis constitute the vast bulk of this book. It is a masterclass in how far a little cunning, shameless lying, and absolute ruthlessness can get you. It is also a lesson in the need to cooperate to take decisive action against common threats. In the years since Vietnam, many have concluded that the main lesson to be drawn from America’s foreign policy is the folly of interventionist wars. After the First World War, the Western powers were understantly ever more chary of violence. And yet, at least in Shirer’s telling of the history, a timely show of force could have nipped Hitler’s rise in the bud. If England and France had upheld their treaties and defended their territories and their allies, Hitler could not have amassed so much power at a time when the German military was still small. (Though it must be said that Shirer’s intellectual weakness appears here, too, since he attributes this inaction to pure cowardice.)

In any case, this does bring out an interesting dilemma in foreign policy concerning the benefits and risks of violent intervention. In the case of Hitler, timely action could have prevented a disastrous conflict. And yet in many other historical cases, such as with Saddam Hussein, the threat of non-intervention was vastly overestimated, while the cost of intervention vastly underestimated. The word “estimate” is key here, since these decisions must necessarily be based on guesses of future threats and costs—guesses which may easily be wrong. Since it is impossible to know with certainty the scale of a threat that a situation may pose if left unchecked, there is no surefire way out of this dilemma. This, of course, is just a part of a wider dilemma in life, since so many of our everyday decisions must necessarily be made based on guesses of what the future holds.

You can see that this book, though a popular account, is not lightweight in its details or its implications. Yet it does show its age. Published in 1960, it was written before many valuable sources of information became available, such as the French archives. It also shows its age in its occasional references to homosexuality, which Shirer treats as a perverted vice. This is, of course, morbidly ironic, considering the Nazi persecution of homosexuals (something that Shirer fails to mention). But all in all The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich remains a gripping popular overview of this nightmarish time.

(Cover attributed to Bundesarchiv, Bild 102-16196; licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0; taken from Wikimedia Commons.)

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Review: Lazarillo de Tormes

Review: Lazarillo de Tormes

La vida del Lazarillo de TormesLa vida del Lazarillo de Tormes by Anonymous

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

One can imagine the anonymous author of Lazarillo de Tormes sitting down to write in a mood similar to that of Erasmus when he penned In Praise of Folly, or of Voltaire when he composed Candide: full of the wry amusement of one engaged in a learned, witty, and irreverent literary exercise. And yet this book, like those other two, quickly became something far more than an elegant diversion. For with Lazarillo the author spawned an entire literary genre, the picaresque, creating a character and a story that have retained their charms long after the targets of the author’s satire have passed out of this world.

The most conspicuous target of the author’s derision is the church—which is likely why the author wished to remain unknown. Pardoners, priests, friars, and chaplains are exposed as hypocritical sinners—as gluttons, profligates, and fornicators, with a pious word for everybody. But the writer also takes aim at the inflated sense of honor that infected society in his day, which most famously compels a starving knight to go about town, pretending to be well off, preferring to suffer and even to die rather than have his poverty revealed.

We see all this through the eyes of Lázaro, a man of humble origins whose highest ambition is to have a full belly. This proves extremely difficult, however, as he goes from one master to another, each of them proving unable or unwilling to satisfactorily feed the ravenous rogue. Like all picaresque heroes, Lázaro is, at bottom, simple and good, with a robust and hearty humor, but who is nevertheless forced into cunning and trickery by hard circumstances. This formula—so successful in the age of television—was used to its full potential in its first historical appearance. Even through the difficult lens of old Castilian, Lázaro’s schemes to steal some crumbs of bread or some swigs of wine are still wonderfully funny.

But the novella is more than a slapstick comedy. The necessities of his belly and the earthiness of his mind allow Lázaro to penetrate all the hypocrisies of those around him—since, after all, hypocritical words cannot be eaten. Lázaro thus proves the ideal vessel for exposing the gulf between being and seeming. The reality he faces is bleak: full of sin, suffering, and poverty. And yet his society is in a state of constant denial, covering up this bleak reality with noble phrases and unheeded pieties. That this is more or less always the case in human life is why this book remains one of the jewels of Spanish literature.

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Review: Frankenstein

Review: Frankenstein

Frankenstein, or The Modern PrometheusFrankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Mary Shelley was just eighteen when she wrote this iconic novel, which you might think is extraordinary; but considering who she was, it would have been even more extraordinary, perhaps, had she not done so. The daughter of William Godwin, idealistic philosopher, and Mary Wollstonecraft, the feminist champion, she was wooed and conquered by Percy Bysshe Shelley, who then took her on a vacation with his good friend, Lord Byron, when a cold-snap caused by the ashes released into the atmosphere during the 1815 eruption of Mount Tamora forced them to stay inside for days on end, where they found entertainment by telling ghost stories. If she had not done something memorable in such circumstances, it would have been nearly obscene.

This book was the first “classic” I read on my own initiative. I was the same age as was Shelley herself when she wrote the book. I had just gotten to college, and the experience so impressed me that I thought I had better do something to cultivate my mind. My vocabulary was so feeble at the time that Shelley’s nineteenth century prose—quite overwritten—was like another language. Still, I pressed on to the end, and the experience was enjoyable enough that I immediately went on to read Dracula (which I preferred). Still, the impression lingered on afterwards that there was something not quite right with the book, like a dish that had been somehow botched. Now that I finally read it again I can say why.

What irks me the most is that I find Dr. Frankenstein absolute implausible as a character. If he earnestly thought that he was unlocking the secret of life—a noble goal—why would he keep his work such a secret? And how could such a cold scientific genius, who had just been sewing together corpse parts, be so overwhelmed by the ugliness of his creature’s face that he faints away? How could such a brilliant man not foresee that the monster’s threat about his wedding day was not directed at him? Time after time he makes decisions or has reactions that are, to me, inconsistent and unbelievable. Indeed, I recently read an adapted version for ESL learners which palpably improved the story, I think. Instead of Frankenstein fainting away and falling into a nervous fever for months at the mere sight of his monster, for example, the laboratory catches fire from the lightning and he falsely assumes the monster escapes.

I know, I know, I am supposed to suspend disbelief. But what jarred me was not the lack of scientific plausibility, but the lack of psychological plausibility of Frankenstein’s character. I could hardly believe that Frankenstein, who had unlocked the secret of life and death, did not even momentarily consider reviving his loved ones. I also had trouble believing that Frankenstein could complete 90% of the work on the monster’s bride, and only consider the dangers of doing so at the last possible moment. And a man who is supposedly in the depths of despair or thirsting with mad revenge, but who continually pauses to give loving descriptions of his alpine hikes and his travels through Europe, all the while professing not to have enjoyed them—it swerves into the absurd.

This psychological implausibility infected every other character. The monster’s long speech at the end about his tortured conscience rang more falsely than tin cans. And the bland goodness of Frankenstein’s friends and family made them impossible to mourn—pure white lambs prepared for the slaughter. The general impression is that the characters’ personalities are driven by the necessities of plot, not vice versa, which is never good. Frankenstein is a genius when the story need him to discover life, and an oaf when the story needs him to make a mistake; his monster is ruthless and demonic when tragedy is called for, eloquent and pitiable when things take a more plaintive turn.

But the book would not have become such an inescapable classic, and an integral part of pop culture, if it did not have compensating virtues. The most striking aspect of the book, for me, is its imagery. Many scenes are so vivid that they are always remembered. Shelley’s swollen prose is ill-suited to the quiet moments of the book, but flies free of excess in the novel’s many dramatic climaxes. And of course the novel’s premise was radically original and proved extremely influential. A ghost story without a ghost, a fantastic tale where technology provides the fantasy—it had not been done before. Its premise, too, has proven extremely rich and relevant, an allegory for humanity’s arrogance and the perils of creation. These virtues will ensure Frankenstein a place in English literature as permanent as Percy’s poems, which may indeed outlast Ozymandias’s statue and still be read when we are able to resuscitate corpses.

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Review: The Letters of Vincent van Gogh

Review: The Letters of Vincent van Gogh

The Letters of Vincent van GoghThe Letters of Vincent van Gogh by Vincent van Gogh

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

For great things do not just happen by impulse but are a succession of small things linked together.

The main problem when encountering Van Gogh is that his life has become the quintessential artistic myth of our age. The obscure genius ahead of his time, toiling in solitude, tortured by personal demons, driven by a creativity that sometimes spilled over into madness—and so on. You’ve heard it all before. You have also seen it before. His paintings suffer from the same overexposure as does his life story. Starry Night hangs, in poster form, in dorm rooms and offices; it is used in commercials and as desktop backgrounds. The challenge, then, as with all iconic art, is to unsee it before it can be properly seen.

The best way to pop this swollen bubble of this myth is, I think, to read these letters. Here an entirely different Van Gogh is revealed. Instead of the mad genius we find the cultured gentleman. Van Gogh could read and write English, French, and German fluently, in addition to his native Dutch. He peppers his letters with references to Dickens, Elliot, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Balzac, Zola. His prose is fluent, cogent, and clear—sometimes even lyrical. His knowledge of art history is equally impressive, as he, for example, compares Shakespeare’s and Rembrandt’s understanding of human nature. Not only this, but he was far from insulated from the artistic currents of his day. To the contrary, he was friends with many of the major artists in Paris—Seurat, Signac, Gauguin—and aware of the work of other prominent painters, such as Monet and Cézanne.

But, of course, Van Gogh’s myth, like many, has some basis in truth. During his lifetime he did not receive even a fraction of the recognition his work deserved (though if he had lived a little longer it likely would have). He was often unhappy and he did suffer from a mental illness of some sort, which did indeed lead him to sever a portion of his own ear. What is less clear is the role that his unhappiness and his mental illness played in his work. In our modern world, still full of Romanticism, we are apt to see these factors as integral to his artistic vision, the source of his inspiration and style. Van Gogh himself had, however, quite a different opinion, seeing his suffering and illness as a distraction or an obstacle, something to be endured but not sought.

The letters in this volume span from 1872 to 1890, the year of his death. Most of them are addressed to his brother, Theo, who worked as an art dealer in Paris and who supported Vincent financially. There are also a few letters to his sister, Wil, and to his artist friends. From the beginning we see Van Gogh as an enthusiastic and earnest man, very liable to be swept up into passions. His first passion was the church. Following in his father’s footsteps, Van Gogh went to England to work as a preacher. His letters from this period are full to bursting with pious sentiments; in one letter he even includes a sermon, which he composed in English. He quickly grew disenchanted with conventional religion, however, and soon he is pining after his cousin, Kee, who rejects him and refuses to see him. Not long after that he takes in a woman named Sien, a former prostitute, and his letters are filled with his dreams of family life.

But in all of these letters, even before he decided to take up art—which he did comparatively late, at the age of 27—Van Gogh shows a keen visual awareness and appreciation. He includes long, detailed, and sometimes rapturous descriptions of towns and landscapes. He is also, from the start, independent to the point of stubbornness. He persists in trying too woe his cousin even in the face of his whole family (including Kee herself) discouraging him. He insists on taking in Sien despite the disapproval of nearly everybody, including his brother and his mentor, Mauve. When it came to art he was absolutely uncompromising, refusing to paint anything just for money, and getting into passionate disagreements with some of his artist friends (Gauguin, most notoriously).

Van Gogh’s intractability often landed him in trouble. He had a bad relationship with his parents and often quarrelled with his brother, Theo, who was his closest confidant. But it is also, I think, the quality that is ultimately most admirable in him. His personal standards drove him to work hard. He was no savant. His letters are filled with exercises and studies. He was tough on his own work and constantly strove to improve it. And though he sometimes got discouraged, there is never any hint of quitting or compromising. This is the classic story, often told. But it is easy to lose sight of how dreary and dispiriting this life could be, day to day. In films the struggling artist is enmeshed in a moving drama, and the audience always knows it will come right in the end. But for Van Gogh this was a plodding daily reality of struggle and failure, with no audience and no guarantee of ultimate success.

That we admire Van Gogh for persisting is, in large part, because his art was truly great. But what would we think if he was mediocre? This, you might say, is the paradox of persistence: We admire those who persist in the face of struggle when they have genuine talent; but when they do not, the spectacle becomes almost pathetic. What would we think of a man financially supported by his brother, constantly quarrelling with and alienating his parents, toiling away in isolation, who produced nothing beautiful? We might be inclined to call such a person naïve, foolish, or even selfish. Whether we admire or scorn stubbornness, in other words, depends on whether it eventually pays off. But in the meantime nobody can know if it will, least of all the stubbornly persistent person. It is, in short, a great risk.

Yet it cannot be said that Van Gogh wagered everything on his talent, since there is not even a hint of calculation or self-interest in his continuing persistence. He is so manifestly, uncompromisingly, absolutely obsessed and absorbed by art that there is no other option for him. Even when institutionalized and hospitalized he thinks of nothing but when, how, where, and what he can paint next. And though he at times expresses regret for the sacrifices this entails—he is especially vexed by the toll it takes on his love-life—he never discusses art with even a touch of bitterness. He is willing to live in a hovel and survive on crumbs if it means he can afford paint. To see such unqualified devotion, not in a novel or on a stage, but in the real, intimate context of his daily life is (to use a hackneyed word) inspiring.

Vincent’s story had a tragic ending. On a summer day in July he walked into a wheat field where he was painting and shot himself in the chest. He survived two more days, finally passing away in his brother’s arms on July 29. The circumstances surrounding this death are rather remarkable, and I don’t wonder that two biographers, Naifeh and Smith, have raised questions about it. The tone of his final letters, while troubled, are far from despairing. He even includes an order of paints in his final dispatch to Theo. And it is also extraordinary to think that a man who had shot himself in the chest could walk a mile back to the inn, or that a man locally known for his mental instability could get a gun. The recent film, Loving Vincent (which I haven’t seen), is focused on this question.

Theo did not long survive his brother: he succumbed to syphilis within just six months. Theo had married his wife, Jo, less than two years earlier, which proved an extremely fortunate circumstance—for art’s sake, at least—since it was Jo who championed Vincent’s legacy and who published his correspondence. Theo and Jo’s only son, named after his uncle Vincent, was responsible for founding the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, which I recently visited. To any who get the chance, I highly recommend this paired experience, for the letters and the paintings are mutually enriching. Few people in history seemed to have lived so entirely for the sake of posterity: churning out paintings which few people saw, writing letter after letter few people read, creating a story and an oeuvre that now have the power to tear you in two.

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Review: Miró—Painter of the Stars

Review: Miró—Painter of the Stars

Miró: El pintor de las estrellasMiró: El pintor de las estrellas by Joan Miró

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Although Joan Miró’s name is hardly less known than that of Dalí’s or even Picasso’s, his art seems strikingly less popular. I have been told by several people that they cannot appreciate it. And, indeed, I was often left cold by the works I had seen in the Reina Sofia—some of which seems to confirm every negative stereotype about modern art. But I wanted to give Miró another chance; so I visited the Fundació Miró in Barcelona, and read this book.

One of the most difficult tasks before any young artist is to develop her voice. By “voice” I mean many things: style, philosophy, identity, themes, and so on, which taken together make an artists work immediately recognizable as hers. In a word, this requires originality. One might be inclined to think that originality is the easiest thing to achieve—being the natural product of everyone’s differences. But to produce a deeply original work—one that could not have been produced by anybody else—is anything but easy. Artistic voice emerges in a dialectical process with one’s influences, as they are first mastered and then synthesized, until gradually something appears which cannot be traced to any influence.

This process is most easily seen among painters. And it is wonderfully illustrated in Miró, whose work incorporated fauvism, surrealism, and cubism. But it wasn’t only artistic trends that shaped the young painter. He was deeply inspired by natural sights—particularly the countryside near Montroig (near the city of Tarragona, in his ancestral Catalonia). The voice that Miró developed through his formative experiences and influences is unmistakable—displaying a sensibility for forms and color that no other artist could replicate. And consequently one feels, upon entering the Fundació Miró, the same way one feels upon entering the Dalí Museum in Figueres—that one is entering a new visual universe that obeys different laws.

In short, I have come to enjoy Miró’s work far more than I had. I find in it a sense of playfulness, and sometimes a sense of peacefulness, that is deeply appealing; and I enjoy watching his manipulation of forms shift throughout his work, while remaining recognizably Miró, like a theme and variations. But I still must admit that it does not affect me very deeply. My appreciation, in other words, is more intellectual than emotional. And I think that would have suited Miró just fine.

This little book is full of glossy pictures and does an excellent job in covering the different phases of Miró’s career.

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