Desert Island Novel to Read and Read Again # 2: J.D. Salinger's "The Catcher in the Rye" - Part I

HAPPY 60TH "THE CATCHER IN THE RYE"

[Originally published December 25, 2008]
[Click Haruki Murakami's "Norwegian Wood" for Desert Island Book to read and read and read #1]



The Catcher in the Rye made me feel less lonely at a time (15 years of age) when all I touched, as Salinger put it in one of his Nine Stories, seemed to turn to complete loneliness. It's the reason I started writing. It was the first work of fiction to break my heart as it healed my soul. And God Bless, because this Jew interested in Buddhism had found his truest religion.

THE INFATUATION
For the longest time I tried to keep my obsession with Salinger's only full-length novel to myself. Oh I would tell people I loved The Catcher in the Rye, or that Salinger was my favourite writer, but I honestly tried to not go further with it than that, to put a lid on it. I'd never have admitted that it wooed me to falling in love with New York forever, never mind the number of times I have read it, not including random flips for favourite passages. Or the fact that I somehow managed to write my Masters thesis on it, when my Masters was supposed to be in applied linguistics and what the hell did that have to do with English literature.

That first 15 year-old time was not for school, which may be the key to everything. I read it fast, just a few days and I was not (and am not) a fast reader. Holden Caufield's breezy first-person narration was so much like conversation you just zipped through. The book's famous opening:

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. 

The book read so fast, so easy, so true I was convinced it was pure autobiography. Not even, cause autobiography still implies some semblance of putting together, of structure, work, effort. The Catcher in the Rye, to me, that first read, and the way it stayed in my mind long after (cause I wouldn't re-read it for at least five years, afraid of tainting that first read experience) was, I was sure, simply, if beautifully, Salinger writing his thoughts and experiences in a journal. The book was a particularly fascinating series of diary scribblings. This to me was profound because it felt like the true heart of a person, which has always captured me more than the mind, and the gimmicky tricks it can play (much as a twist ending is always exciting it's not the kind of thing that'll make it to my island).

WHAT LIES BEYOND POP IN MUSIC, AND HARRY POTTER IN FICTION
Digging through my big sister's records back when I was 12 (and big sisters had records to dig through) I discovered Pink Floyd, the song 'Comfortably Numb' in particular. It was a revelation - my first listen of something other than the bubble gum pop that really got me. I mean REALLY. This wasn't just music, this wasn't just wanting to hear Paula Adbul's latest hit for the umpteenth time cause it made you feel chipper or helped you not think about things; this was different, this was soul food, this was necessary - this made me think about things; shit, this was gonna bring me closer to God. Or, at the very least, help me get through grade seven, which as we all know is a crap age.

The Catcher in the Rye was not a story, not in the Narnia, Hardy Boys sense. It spoke the truth about things that I was living, that I was struggling with. The "Hardy Boys" was like Coca-cola, a treat I could have on weekends. The Catcher in the Rye, on the other hand, was water. I needed it.

HIS TRUTH
Holden spoke of things I'd never heard anyone say. He spoke the thoughts I had in my head. About the phoniness of people. About dishonesty and how hard life can be. And somehow, in travelling with him as he sneaks out one night to leave Pencey Prep forever (the school he is about to be kicked out of anyway) and trains it to New York, I felt less lonely. This kid was searching for something as I was, as so many kids do as they hit that age when they start to become aware of the world. And what I love is that the novel is as much about grand philosophies, on death, and what it means to live, and about losing the innocence of childhood, as it is about the simpler (or maybe more complicated) things. Like girls.

I was half in love with her by the time we sat down. That's the thing about girls. Every time they do something pretty, even if they're not much to look at, or even if they're sort of stupid, you fall half in love with them, and then you never know where the hell you are. Girls. Jesus Christ. They can drive you crazy. They really can.

Great art is about connection. At 15 I was sure I was Holden. At 23 it was Salinger I wanted to emulate most. The real point though is about what makes a book great, what makes something worth re-visiting. Holden, of course, says it better than I can:

What really knocks me out is a book, when you're all done reading it, you wished the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it.

This is the end of Part I.
[Click Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye Part II  for part II.]
[For Desert Island Book to read and read again # 3 click Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things]

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Desert Island Novel to Read and Read and Read Again #1: Haruki Murakami's "Norwegian Wood"

[Originally published November 28, 2008]

I once had a girl
Or should I say, she once had me

I was living in Osaka, Japan, teaching at a conversation school in a place called Takarazuka the first time I read "Norwegian Wood." When I reached the last page of the novel, after reading its pitch-perfect last line, due to an utter unwillingness, a near inability, to leave the beautiful world Murakami had created, I proceeded to immediately flip back to the first page and start all over again. That was seven years ago. I've read it again since. More than once. I've also gone on to read and buy every book of Murkakami's translated into English, including his short story collections, and non-fiction.

Why? Because "Norwegian Wood" hit a place in my soul, it became a mate to my soul, a heart to beat along next to mine.

The Beatles song Murakami's 1987 novel is named after is on surface listen a pretty two minute ditty. A pretty, but sad, thing. The tone of Murakami's novel has something similar gently pulling the reader through. It is also equally deceptive to the song in how simple it seems, how easy it reads. Yet, beneath a book that reads like almost pure autobiography, and a song that listens like effortless melody, lie layered artful structure, and things thematically heavier than meet the eye.

The Beatles' song that is so melodically sweet ends with a man taking revenge on a girl who would not sleep with him, by burning down the furniture in her room.

Murakami's narrator does no such thing. But his book too juxtaposes a gentle tone with themes of longing, of loss and of what can and will never be.

To be intentionally vague (no plot spoilage here) and very brief, "Norwegian Wood," set in the Tokyo of the 1960s, is a love story. Basically it is a sad story. Most all the love in the book is of the unrequited variety, and there is more than one suicide. The book has much to lend itself to feeling blue, like Miles Davis on his muted trumpet. But for every lonely moment, you get a scene with a character like Reiko, a friend like Reiko, a woman who should be tragic considering her history but who, by the time we meet her in a sort of sanatorium for sad or screwed up people, turns out to be that rock solid salt-of-the-earth type who seems like the mentally healthiest person in the book. Better still, though no longer the piano virtuoso she once was, she plays a mean guitar, Beatles song included.

The magic of Murakami's "Norwegian Wood," is that a book so focused on sad subject manner manages to have what all books need to be great - a sense of adventure. Not, of course, in the children's literature sense of the word, but in the 'you've gone off to another place' sense.

... the bus plunged into a chilling cedar forest. The trees might have been old growth the way they towered over the road, blocking out the sun and covering everything in gloomy shadows. The breeze flowing into the bus's open windows turned suddenly cold, its dampness sharp against the skin. The valley road hugged the river bank, continuing so long through the trees it began to seem as if the whole world had been buried for ever in cedar forest - at which point the forest ended, and we came to an open basin surrounded by mountain peaks. Broad, green farmland spread out in all directions, and the river by the road looked bright and clear. A single thread of white smoke rose in the distance...

Best of all is the poetry is in the book's balance, as alongside depression and suicide, you also get a character like Midori - one of my favourite in all modern literature.

At 5:30 Midori said she had to go home and make dinner. I said I would take a bus back to my dorm, and saw her as far as the station.
"Know what I want to do now?" Midori asked me as she was leaving.
"I have absolutely no idea what you could be thinking," I said.
"I want you and me to be captured by pirates. Then they strip us and press us together face to face all naked and wind these ropes around us."
"Why would they do a thing like that?"
"Perverted pirates," she said.
"You're the perverted one," I said."

And really, what else do you need to help you cope with death, and the kind of love that will never be, but perverted pirates?

[Click J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye for Desert Island Book to read and read and read again # 2]

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Desert Island Novel to Read and Read and Read Again # 6: Ernest Hemingway's "Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises"

In honour of Hemingway Week at ye old PBIHT.. 

[Originally published here on August 13, 2010]

For Desert Island book to read and read and read again #5 click Steinbeck's "East of Eden"



Fiesta or The Sun Also Rises is perhaps more heart breaker than soul healer; it's a dark world Hemingway paints, but it's also enormously exciting, adventurous, honest and so beautifully written. Sometimes the most heart breaking of art works heal our soul by the beauty of their construction. The content may be dark, but the architecture is the part that uplifts. When it comes to his fellow man Hemingway was rather the cynic. But in nature or when it came to women, he was a romantic in the extreme. 

No Old Man, Barely any Sea
I was so intimidated by Hemingway's very name, as I think we all are by the big classic names in literature that, as I wrote about in my last Novel to Break Your Heart Even As It Heals Your Soul piece on For Whom the Bell Tolls, that first encounter with the author on my friend's toilet was a genuine relief. That - on my friend's toilet - is where I discovered Fiesta or The Sun Also Rises. It was my first Hemingway and for that I think I'm lucky. Too many were forced, or at least misled to choose, to read The Old Man and the Sea. This is a tragedy cause it would have you believe that Hemingway is always boring, long-winded, portentous and pretentious. He's not. The Old Man and the Sea, as the name so aptly describes, has nothing in it but an old man and a great big sea. There are no women folk. There is no love story, and as I've said here before, that's the big secret about Hemingway. The big lug was a full-blown romantic at heart.

This was Brett that I had felt like crying about. Then I thought of her walking up the street and stepping into the car, as I had last seen her, and of course in a little while I felt like hell again. It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night is another thing. 

His earlier novels are far more interesting for this - they aren't just about man and nature. In fact, in the beginning it was far more human drama, far less about nature. I'd argue it was actually Hemingway's ability to break up his long passages of human drama with scenes of people-less nature that created a kind of perfect balance in the work (a kind of balance sorely lacking in the The Old Man book, where I'd have killed for a little human-on-human drama).

Rather the Book Than the Man
There are so many things about Hemingway I don't like, but most have more to do with the man than the writing, though of course the man is in the writing all over the place. What's not to like? Oh I don't know, the antisemitism, the utter male chauvinism and worst of all the self-aggrandizing macho bullshit. And Hemingway can, at times, be totally full of it, like a bad Marlboro commercial's version of the caricature of what a man "should be." For guys that buy into beer commercial definitions of gender. 
 
Fiesta is great cause it has far less of the macho. There is no old man, there is no fishing, there is little to no sea. It's not a book about war either. Now, yes, there is a whole slew of information about bull fighting, but it's quite interesting and it's not overlong, not a tenth of the hundreds of pages of French history you get in, say, Hugo's Les Miserables. Also, it's set amongst a fiesta, a truly Spanish celebration of seven days and nights of madness and drinking and unhappiness and elation and the way people are when there are no consequences. 

Plotless Wonder
My all time-favourite books, of which I count Fiesta or The Sun Also Rises one (the former was Hemingway's original title, used in Britain; in North America, however, the book was renamed The Sun Also Rises) manage to not feel like they have any plot. This is the most dangerous kind of story writing because usually it is bound to fail on its ass. Though you've probably never before heard Fiesta compared with Murakami's Norwegian Wood or with The Catcher in the Rye, I think they share something structurally. None of these books follows the kind of obvious plot line that is common to more traditional modes of novel writing.

These are my favourite kinds of books. They aren't epic in scope. They don't involve casts of thousands. And no codes need be broken, no vampires spoken. The mystery - and genius - of them is that they read like life and yet of course are so much bigger than that. This is the danger with Hemingway, I'll acknowledge. Without a wee bit of patience, The Sun Also Rises can read almost mundane at times, the way a simple day is described. To me though, the utter beauty of a "simple" Hemingway description ... let's just say he might be the most evocative writer of a scene I've ever read. Certainly in terms of capturing the beauty of nature; few writers I've ever read better put a picture in my mind (and teach me how few adjectives and big words are necessary to get the job done right).

In the morning it was raining. A fog had come over the mountains from the sea. You could not see the tops of the mountains. The plateau was dull and gloomy, and the shapes of the trees and the houses were changed. I walked out beyond the town to look at the weather. The bad weather was coming over the mountains from the sea. 

The flags in the square hung wet from the white poles and the banners were wet and hung damp against the front of the houses, and in between the steady drizzle the rain came down and drove every one under arcades and made pools of water in the square, and the streets wet and dark and deserted ...

The utter simplicity of the language, the near child-like simplicity of it (the repetition of the words, for example) all the more beguiles the reader when considering how much misdirection there is in this book. You are already some thirty pages in before you've even been given a hint of what the story is truly concerned with. (It's not bull fighting).

The Spanish fiesta itself, of the binge drinking and bull running, does not begin until halfway through the novel, and much of the book's contents, be they in Spain or France, are about the underbelly of human relationships. So much of this story is of people eating good food and drinking copious amounts of wine (no writer makes me hungrier or thirstier), and in the midst of all this it is about how people can be so jealous and cruel, of love and hate, of friendship and misery.

Roger Ebert, the film critic, said the following of film, but it of course goes doubly for literature as well: The greatest works are always something of a mystery - that's what keeps us coming back.

Desert Island Novel to Read and Read and Read Again #7 - Haruki Murakami's "Dance Dance Dance" (or "Dansu Dansu Dansu" in Japanese)

[For Desert Island Books to Read and read and read again # 6 click Ernest Hemingway's Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises]

PART I 

Surprise Ain't the Only Thing That Translates

At the New Yorker Festival talk Haruki Murakami gave a couple years back, describing the effort of writing books, I swear Japan's now most famous author must have told the audience that writing was "fun!" at least five times. And when I say "fun!" I  mean that he said it (I know, I was there) with a near shoulder-shrug, high-pitched ease, like the way your ten year-old nephew would nearly indifferently describe his gloriously perfect day at Canada's Wonderland. Murakami wasn't being obnoxious; he wasn't saying writing a novel like Dance Dance Dance was easy; he was just trying to say that he enjoyed the process as much as he did. Still, you're sitting there listening to your favourite writer, taking furious notes like the wonder-student you never were, hoping to learn a few things, and there he is shoulder-shrug, high-pitched saying, "It's fun!"

You think I wasn't jealous?

There's an expression popular amongst those of us with writerly aspirations: No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader. If you've plotted and planned out every detail of your book you'll never truly throw your reader for a loop. If, however, on page 342, as you're finishing your first draft, you realize that - holy crap! - your heroine is going to commit suicide, chances are you'll be instilling a rather holy crap feeling in your reader as well. They never saw it coming and how could they? You didn't either.

This of course doesn't only apply to surprises. Joy also translates and that fun Murakami feels in the crafting of his stories is evident throughout his extensive body of work. There is, as I've said on this blog before, a lightness to his stories no matter the subject matter. I don't mean they're all airy-fairy popcorn (for airy-fairy popcorn see Banana Yoshimoto). They aren't. But even when death is a theme it manages not to veer into the hopeless or nihilistic. His stories can get sad; they just never seem hopeless. There is an acceptance there, an always calm acceptance of what life is, of what it will deal. In turn, there is always a light behind, beyond or just the other side of whatever darkness Murakami might present.

As the Kyoto born novelist has said, he is always looking for balance in his writing and thematically he is unparalleled at coupling light with dark, especially in his later works.

In none of his novels, however, is there anywhere near as much fun (and not all that much dark) nor as many flights of fancy - to my mind, at any rate - as with his sixth novel, Dance Dance Dance (1988), a book so much about the "advanced Capitalist" age we're in and how much of our lives are now spent killing time, or trying to figure out how to kill time. To be honest the novel does very little heart breaking, but I'll call it soul healing and it does (heal my soul) by dint of its glorious ability to take me to another world - that bedtime = story time thing we've forever asked of fiction, especially on cold, wet autumn eves.

Planes, (Bullet) Trains and Subarus

There's a movie about to be released in theatres about a guy stuck in a wooden coffin. That's the setting for the entire feature. A coffin. Sounds about as pleasurable as being ... well, stuck in a coffin, which I suppose is the film's claustrophobic point, but doesn't sound like any kind of entertainment I'd enjoy. In my stories I like movement. Even on stage I've always preferred if there could at least be a kitchen for a character to walk over to and pour a stiff drink, so that you're not always just stuck in that living room. People talking in one room for scenes on end makes me tired.

I am, I fear, the same way in life. My favourite kind of dinner party allows me to be at one table, then another and then outside with the smokers (I haven't smoked cigarettes in years but haven't stopped sympathizing with and understanding the break-away-from-group-need that is so much of what feeds the habit).

I love Dance Dance Dance for its sense of adventure - for the various journeys it takes you on. The story doesn't stay in one place or even one city or even one country, and crap, it turns out the limitations of my life are such that I can't hop on airplanes nor afford bullet trains and go on vacation on a monthly basis. A book ain't a bad alternative sometimes. 

When I revisit The Catcher in the Rye I always forget how long the opening chapters in Holden Cauflield's school, Pencey Prep, really are. In memory the story spends a few pages at the school and then we're off and running away from school in the night with this teenager, spending the few days and nights that follow round New York. Going back, though, I realize there's a significant and rather dense portion of text (and the time required to develop some truly memorable characters - pimple popping Ackley kid, any Salinger fanatics out there?) set in the school. I mention this here because if one of the funnest things great books do is take you on a journey, then the only way to do that is by firmly situating you someplace first.

With Dance Dance Dance Murakami situates us first in Saporro, on Japan's northernmost island of Hokkaido, which has a lot in common, I'm told, with Canada. (Canadians visiting Japan don't always gravitate to those northerly locations with climates and snow falls and greenery simliar to home - go figure.)

The streets were covered in a thin layer of slush, and people trained their eyes carefully at their feet. The air was exhilarating. High school girls came bustling along, their rosy red cheeks puffing white breaths you could have written cartoon captions in. I continued my amble, taking in the sights of the town. It had been four and half years since I was in Sapporo.

And whilst there the narrator is staying at the Dolphin Hotel, a once shoddy place that has now been demolished, replaced by an over-branded five-star hotel. So there you are in the slush and snow, or in the hotel lounge watching the swirling snow while sipping your drink and then he has you - I mean the narrator - sort of fall in love with a woman who works at the hotel's front desk before you're flying to Tokyo with a rather precocious thirteen year-old girl (speaking of Holden, and this is not Murakami's only novel with such a character - did I mention that Murakami wasn't satisfied with the Japanese translation of The Catcher in the Rye and so did a new translation himself a few years back?). And then it's her story, the thirteen year-old's (Yuki's) and the story of her clueless mother, who is a great artist but a terrible mother (eg. leaves her thirteen year-old to fend for herself in Sapporo, when home is Tokyo).

So now you're in Tokyo where you'll meet a movie star you once knew in high school. In Tokyo, back in your apartment, with your little Subaru and your music and your kitchen where you can cook the dishes that'll make all your readers ravenous (more on that later).

But just as you've settled into a book set in Tokyo, a hundred pages later (give or take - I didn't count) and you're suddenly on a trip to Hawaii. And really, who doesn't like to take spontaneous trips to Hawaii? Who, for that matter, doesn't want to read a book that makes you hungry and horny and so much more?

For that you'll have to click on Murakami's "Dance Dance Dance" that makes me hungry and horny Part II.

Desert Island Novel to Read and Read and Read Again # 5: John Steinbeck's "East of Eden"

[For Desert Island books to read and read and read again #4 click Ernest Hemingway's "For Whom the Bell Tolls"]

I usually love writers with an especially strong sense of style. Previous inductees into the The Desert Island Rereading list (masters Murakami, Salinger and Roy) have it in spades. Though there is of course no lack of lyrical prose-poetic moments in all of Steinbeck's great works, this is not why John Steinbeck's East of Eden is one of the best books ever.

I'm lugging the six-hundred plus page tome to the island because, like a Bernard Hermann score (Psycho, Citizen Kane) or a Lasse Hallstram movie (Cider House Rules, Chocolat), there is next to no ego in the last book John Steinbeck ever wrote. You finish East of Eden and you remember the characters not the writer. You remember Lee, who is so selfless and good and wise; you remember the two sets of brothers, Adam and Charles, and Cal and Aron; and with a series of spinal shudders you find you cannot forget Cathy (or Catherine) who has to go down as one of the most sinister - and interesting - characters in all fiction.

No tricks, no overly clever plot-twists or wordplays, this is just a straight-ahead, old-fashioned, fascinating story about the greatest biblical theme of them all: people's struggle with good and evil. But that's not all. It's so much more than that. [Ok, nerdy confession time:] I drew up a list of all the great themes East of Eden covers but have since scrapped it because Steinbeck does precisely that in the book's appropriately humble epigraph, delivered as a simple letter to a dear friend:

Dear Pat,
You came upon me carving some kind of little figure out of wood and you said, "Why don't you make something for me?"
I asked you what you wanted, and you said, "A box."
"What for?"
"To put things in."
"What things?"
"Whatever you have," you said.
Well, here's your box. Nearly everything I have is in it, and it is not full. Pain and excitement are in it, and feeling good or bad and evil thoughts and good thoughts - the pleasure of design and some despair and the indescribable joy of creation.
And on top of these are all the gratitude and love I have for you.
And still the box is not full.
John

What more need be said? 　

[Click Ernest Hemingway's "Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises" for Desert Island Books to read and read and read again #6]

Desert Island Novel to Read and Read and Read Again # 4: Ernest Hemingway's "For Whom the Bell Tolls"

[For Desert Island Book to read and read and read again #3 click Arundhati Roy's "The God of Small Things"]

On My Friend's Toilet

I remember when this title intimidated me. I remember when "For Whom the Bell Tolls" was not a Hemingway novel or part of a poem by John Donne (the one about no man being an island, desert or otherwise). No, the title was a Metallica song. Oh yes (teenage Jon Mendelsohn of the long hair, and three gold loop earrings; let me tell you how the girls swooned). I remember before that, when the name Ernest Hemingway was a turn off. I had that younger reader's attitude (I still sort of do, to my embarrassment): old classic = booooring.How could I know how soul stirring a guy named Ernest could be?

I don't think I would have even approached Papa Hemingway if it hadn't been for my friend Jon Cheszes (who would, as it happens, equally indirectly be the cause of my meeting the love of my life - but that's a different story).

I was at Jon's apartment from years back. Bachelor days. I was going to the bathroom, if you must know, and as one who needs to read when he does his business, I went into Jon's bedroom to find material. (Jon and I have travelled extensively together - Western Europe, Costa Rica, Quebec - so going into each others' bedrooms without permission is ok. Like the people you went to camp with. You've been through the deepest, darkest forests of Ontario with these folks. Sharing deodorant is no big deal.) Jon's desk was a bachelor's pile of crap. Match boxes and loose change and papers and books, etc. Somehow though Hemingway's "The Sun Also Rises," (totally worth schlepping to the island) stood out. I took that with me to the facilities and like all those who fall for Hemingway, I was more than pleased to find that not only was the writing not obtuse or pretentious but it was interesting. I read so many pages on that toilet that my legs went numb. But let's leave the old wash closet, shall we?

Don't be Stupid
Simplicity can be mistaken for stupidity. It shouldn't be. Because otherwise much of the great Beatles' work would be overlooked. What is more, where would we be without profoundly 'simple' books like "The Little Prince"?

Hem's sparse style leaves only what's absolutely necessary - as he famously said when once asked if writing was hard: Is it hard? No. Not when you're writing for yourself. But when you're writing for others, you damn straight it's hard. (Or something to that effect.) The masterful author with a style so unique he has been said to have changed modern prose forever uses the most elementary language, downright biblical language, to draw crystal clear images in the reader's mind as with "FWTBT's" opening:

He lay flat on the brown, pine-needled floor of the forest, his chin on his folded arms, and high overhead the wind blew in the tops of the pine trees. The mountainside sloped gently where he lay; but below it was steep and he could see the dark of the oiled road winding through the pass. There was a stream alongside the road and far down the pass he saw a mill beside the stream and the falling water of the dam, white in the summer sunlight.

The Thickest Tension Is Rarely on the Battlefield
The novel is set in Spain during the Spanish Civil War. Hemingway's protagonist, his hero, Robert Jordan, is an American fighting with a guerrilla unit against the fascists. He's been sent to the mountains to blow up a bridge. So yes, this is a war story. There are guns, threats, fights, bullets and horses. And don't be mistaken; the story is fraught with tension, though most of it is not played out with dynamite or guns, or even between the rebels and fascists. Rather it is the far more complex tension of supposedly civil human interaction. Much of the story takes place in the mountain cave where the rebels Robert Jordan has joined have made camp. It's here in this cave, at night, over red wine and rabbit stew, that Robert Jordan faces a real force of evil, a bastard of a character that can't unfortunately, without a good deal of context, be encapsulated in a pithy passage. You'll just have to trust me. Or read the book. I can say though that as with the Kate (Catherine) character of "East of Eden," the evil character here raises the little hairs on the back of your neck, sharpens your senses, makes you want to sharpen your claws, find better ways to protect yourself, steel yourself against one cold, bitter bastard.


The Bigger They Are the Harder They Fall...In Love
What's brilliant about "FWTBT" is the way the psychologically violent scenes chokingly full of tension and hate are so artfully balanced with scenes of passionate, unafraid love.

Hemingway was a big man, in size and myth, and his great passions, bull fighting and hunting and war, are the subjects of his novels. They are, however, also just macho trimmings, the thin exterior that like late career Mickey Rourke (aka "The Wrestler") cover a blatant romantic. Like "The Sun Also Rises" and "A Farewell to Arms" (yet another island worthy schlep) "FWTBT" is a love story; it also happens, in my opinion, to be Hem's masterpiece (you can keep "The Old Man and the Sea" - that's right; sorry; it bored me).

He was asleep in the robe ... The robe was spread on the forest floor in the lee of the rocks beyond the cave mouth ... waking, he wondered where he was ... He had one arm around the pillow.
Then he felt her hand on his shoulder and turned quickly, his right hand holding the pistol under the robe.
"Oh, it is thee," he said and dropping the pistol he reached both arms up and pulled her down ... he could feel her shivering.
"Get in," he said softly. "It is cold out there."
"No. I must not."
"Get in," he said. "And we can talk about it later."
"Get in, little rabbit," he said and kissed her on the back of the neck.

Read the book, and if you are so lucky as to get caught up inside of it, you too will get transported, out to that mountain, to sleep by night with the lovers outside the cave. Because Hemingway makes you feel. Nature, the wetness of the ground after a rain, say, or the clearness of a night sky. You taste the food Hemingway's characters eat, you drink much liquor with them. This is experiential reading at its best. It seems so simple but yet no one makes me as hungry, or as desirous of many swigs of wine, never mind one who can make me feel love, passion, fear, excitement, the whole array of human emotion in such a visceral way.

Desert Island Novel to Read and Read and Read Again # 3: Arundhati Roy's "The God of Small Things"

[Click The Catcher in the Rye for Desert Island Book to read and read and read again #2]


 
May in Ayemenem is a hot, brooding month. The days are long and humid. The river shrinks and black crows gorge on bright mangoes in still, dustgreen trees. Red bananas ripen. Jackfruits burst. Dissolute bluebottles hum vacuously in the fruity air. Then they stun themselves against clear windowpanes and die, fatly baffled in the sun.


This is the opening of Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things, a novel I didn't like the first few times I tried reading it. It couldn't approach my heart or soul. I thought it was boring, and kind of bad poetry. The slog that was those first pages, those first few tries.

A question: must you finish a book even if you aren't enjoying it? Some take the marathon runners view. I must finish it, I must finish it. I will not stop, I won't, I won't. Others say screw it (or phrase it more eloquently). Life is too short. There's too much out there I want to read. And put the book down.

There are plenty books I've not finished. Many I have barely started. (This coming from a guy who re-reads his favourite authors ad nauseum and only has about five fingers worth of them writers.) And yet if not for perseverance I'd never have finished Don Quixote, which I did not enjoy while reading but that has certainly stayed with me the way most books never do. Ditto for Joyce's short story collection The Dubliners which was pure dictionary-sending-me-to slog when read, on assignment, for uni, but that I find myself now going back to and admiring the hell out of. Dare I say, loving.

Like its opening, the first pages of The God of Small Things are dense poetic description. The kind that often frighten off those of us interested in coherent plot. I worried this story would be all abstract prettiness with no purpose or concrete narrative line. But then I must have listened to Miles Davis' Kind of Blue [see soundtrack for samples] ten times before it stopped sounding like elevator music and became what to date is my all-time favourite, or at least most listened to, album. In short, I probably give up too easy, too often (10 pages of Ulysses), but sometimes it really is worth the effort.

Roy's only novel to date (it's been over ten years; the writer now works on global political issues) is made like a puzzle. Roy, it seems pertinent to note, was trained as an architect, and the careful design of the novel is such that you need the final puzzle pieces (late pages of the book) to see the big picture, to "get" the story. This at first can be frustrating. But if you make it through the dense opening pages - barely aware how effectively she has pulled you into the humid air of a South Indian town, through swampy smells and mango trees and insects you've barely heard of - you realize that like the director of a good movie, she is taking you on a narrative journey that is far more coherent, with each passing page, than you might at first expect.

The book makes it to my island because the clever design is not just circus tricks. In The God of Small Things Roy is dealing with those subjects we usually cannot talk about. This for me is the purpose of good fiction. The exact opposite of polite conversation. The novel is anything but polite, or easy. It is difficult. The issues are difficult, and I'm being vague in the extreme to not ruin anything.

There are so many storytellers (writers and directors both) who present bleak narratives. Stories that don't hide away and pretend pain isn't real, that hardships aren't universal. But there is a sharp division between those artists that manage to put a little humanity in their stories (and by humanity I do not necessarily mean fairytale endings) and those, like Dancer in the Dark director Lars Von Trier, who seem only to want to lift a reader up to then God-like manipulatively drop them down. There are puppet-master storytellers who are sadistic like that. Arundhati Roy is far, far from.

Her story is undoubtedly painful. But its pain - the whole story - has a beauty - which the single paragraph from the novel I have quoted speaks to - a beauty of hidden realities that bruise our histories but also, hopefully, shine a light all the brighter on the reasons why we are alive.

[For Desert Island Book to read and read and read again  #4 click John Steinbeck's East of Eden]