Books (not just) for Men

If you haven’t already heard, there is a baby being raised in Toronto, named Storm, whose parents have decided not to reveal the child’s gender to anyone. Inevitably this has caused quite the stir.

Of course it has; it brings up the old question of whether gender is socially constructed or biological. Do boys really gravitate to blue? Are women only interested in Chick Flicks? Must there be guns and bloodshed to keep men interested?

When the writing is good enough, we hope, the people will read, no matter their gender. Frankenstein was created by a woman, as was Howard Roark, the towering symbol of manhood in Ayn Rand’s always readable The Fountainhead. Conversely, Jeffrey Eugenides, in his Pulitzer Prize winning second novel, Middlesex, wrote seemingly effortlessly about a hermaphrodite.

We like to think we’ve gotten over this, and yet even when classically male types of action stories like the Oscar-winning The Hurt Locker turn out to be directed by a woman (Kathryn Bigelow), this still comes as a surprise to many. To be sure, the marketing people behind these movies generally believe—and probably for good reason—that boys usually like stories about war and girls are inclined toward tales that end in a wedding.

In lieu of Father’s Day then, and bowing to the realities of a gender divide that, whatever your opinion, looks to be sticking around, what follows are a selection of male authors so careful in the words they set down, so effective with brevity and intensity, so adept in not overtly showing emotion, but yet drawing it so powerfully from their readers, that they are surely selections that will not only be great picks for dad, but also for any reader of great fiction.

Continue here to read that list. 

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.

Is Sushi a Moveable Feast? A Weak Imitation of Master Hemingway

In honour of Hemingway Week at ye old PBIHT.. 
[Originally published here on March 19, 2010]

There was a warm, friendly atmosphere in the sushi shop. I sat at the bar of the restaurant, sipped the green tea and pulled my new hard-covered book from my bag. I ordered my usual for a Japanese restaurant so far from Japan, where unless you have the money to blow, you won't get fish good enough for straight sushi. I ordered the rolls that have the shrimp tempura and green vegetables inside and that are topped, each one, with a big generous slab of salmon, an orange not quite the lovely bright you find in Kansai, but still with those white V-shaped stripes that go down the length of the fish. The salmon slithered smooth and sweet down the throat when you ate it. The crunch of the tempura and wedge of cucumber balanced the softness of the fish and the ripe avocado, and then to wash it down with the cold of the Japanese beer I had ordered to go with it. The fresh crispness of the lager complimenting the sweetness of the fish.

It was good to be alone in the restaurant like that, sitting, the only one, at the counter, but comfortable there, absorbed as I was in the flavours, and the slow chopstick way I'd learned from a friend to eat sushi, putting wooden utensils down after eating each piece, making the meal last, allowing the belly to fill. And all the while reading sensous pages far better written than this and so strongly styled, so uniquely written. I felt inspired to rush home (I didn't rush - that's a lie; the weather too spring gorgeous to rush, the night too clear, a sliver of moon high in the clean air) and write about my experience in the style of the book I was reading. Or at least, a lazy approximation of that style, of Hemingway's style, in particular from his great collection of memoirs called, "A Moveable Feast." Cause what I'm really trying to do is recommend this remarkable literary remembrance to you.

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.