The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
My rating: 5 of 5 stars Charming and Not for Children When he was a little boy, the narrator of Le Petit Prince (1943) gave up becoming an artist because adults thought his drawing of a boa constrictor who’s swallowed an elephant was a hat. Now an adult, he’s all alone in the Sahara Desert thousands and thousands of miles from any human habitation, trying to repair his airplane (a matter of life and death), when a little guy suddenly appears and asks him to draw him a sheep. As the narrator can’t seem to draw a satisfactory sheep, he finally draws a box and says the sheep is inside it, which does the trick. Thus begins the narrator’s time with the Little Prince, which happened, we learn, six years ago and which the narrator has never forgotten. As the Little Prince never answers questions, only asks them, persistently, the narrator only gradually learns his story: he left his tiny home “planet” (asteroid B612, which turns so fast that you can see multiple sunsets each day and has three miniature volcanoes, a flower, and some baobab seeds) to learn how to deal with his temperamental and manipulative rose, whom (he realizes after leaving his planet) he loves. On his way to earth, drawn by a flock of passing birds, he stops off at a series of small worlds inhabited by solitary grownups, a king (who commands you to do what you’re going to do anyway), a vain person (who expects you to applaud and compliment him), a drunkard (who drinks because he’s ashamed and is ashamed because he drinks), a businessman (who has no time for loafing cause he’s gotta keep counting his possessions, the stars), a lamplighter (whose world is so small that he’s constantly having to light or extinguish the one streetlight as day and night rapidly pass), and a geographer (who has been too busy doing geography to explore his world). And so to Earth, where there are orders of magnitude more of each of those “bizarre” adults: “111 kings ... 7,000 geographers, 900,000 businessmen, 7,500,000 drunkards, 311,000,000 conceited men; that is to say, about 2,000,000,000 grown-ups.” During his year on Earth, the Little Prince has met a wise fox, who suggests he be tamed, a snake, who promises to help the Prince return to his home world (and his rose) with a little bite, and then finally the narrator, who befriends the Prince and hears his story and learns to be less uptight about his adult concerns (e.g., running out of water in the desert with a damaged airplane to repair). My high school French teacher took us to see the Bob Fosse movie adaptation (which we enjoyed for the cool songs and dances), I first read the book in a university French class, and I often listen to the wonderful (though unfortunately abridged) 1954 French adaptation on record with Gerard Philipe as the narrator, excellent voice actors for the other characters, and neat background music. And I don’t think it’s a book for children. It’s more a book for adults trying to remember being kids or for adults nostalgically remembering when they thought about remembering being kids. It is full of poetic, potent life wisdom, that would probably go right over kids’ heads, like: “Je suis responsable de ma rose.” (I am responsible for my rose.) And “on ne voit bien qu’avec le coeur. L'essentiel est invisble pour les yeux." (one only sees well with the heart. The essential is invisible to the eyes.) Perhaps the messages re childhood and adulthood and life and love and perception and what’s important etc. get a little . . . strongly delivered. . . But the conversations in the book are meaningful, humorous, and strange, the ending is moving and ambiguous, and the illustrations by the author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry are distinctive charming, minimalist, and beautiful. It is a uniquely appealing work. View all my reviews
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The Doors of Eden by Adrian Tchaikovsky
My rating: 3 of 5 stars “Vivre le difference,” but too much contrived suspense Best friend lovers Lisa “Lee” Chandrapraiar (studying zoology) and Elsinore “Mal” Mallory (literature) are into “cryptozoology,” hunting legendary monsters (“crypoids”) on YouTube, when at 19 they get onto the trail of a “birdman,” visit a rural farm in the South of England, and at the site of three standing stones strangely called the Six Brothers discover that actually finding a monster brings terror and loss. This starts the plot of Adrian Tchaikovsky’s novel The Doors of Eden (2020), which, in addition to Lee and Mal, features the transgender genius mathematician/physicist Dr. Kay Amal Kahn, MI5 agents Alison “Matchbox” Matchell and Julian “Spiker” Sabreur, nationalist-fascist-xenophobe-homophobe wealthy businessman Daniel Rove and his military-veteran thug Lucas May, as well as an assortment of “monsters,” aliens from a variety of alternate Earths where alternate time lines have produced alternate evolutionary paths and sentient beings, from pacifist Neanderthals, dinosaur-bird-people, and rat-ferret-people to immortal vast spaceship trilobites, frozen fish computers, and an ediacran sponge thing covering an entire Earth. As a character says at one point, “Vivre le difference.” “Their Earth was part of a sequence of variables, each one branching off from the next… and now the principles that had separated them were failing.” Yes, Tchaikovsky is developing a theme present in his sf like the Children trilogy and in his fantasy like Redemption’s Blade: although the alien Other is often terrifying, cultures are stronger in proportion to the amount of difference they accept from within and without. He likes to depict aliens interacting with each other as he tries to make us open our eyes and minds and get past difference to find common ground. Repeatedly in his work, he arranges things so that embracing the other leads to survival and thriving (“Difference is strength”), while remaining unable to handle “Bugs and monkeys and vermin and queers” leads to collapse and death. Tchaikovsky excels at imagining different ways of living and being and thinking according to different environments and variables. Here he inserts between chapters excerpts from a book on alternate evolutionary paths of different Earths, with a variety of sentience and civilization, including scorpions, cockroaches, mollusks, trilobites, spiders, monkeys, and more. And his writing is clean, witty, and fast-paced. However, I found this book less impressive than the others of his I’ve read. For one thing, he writes only human point of view characters (while I loved the spider and octopus and microorganism aliens of the Children trilogy). His point of view characters come in a varied group (lesbian, trans, hetero; military, MI5, scientist; evil mastermind, good; white, dark; etc.), but they’re all human and all British. Furthermore, I regret his making the trans woman Dr. Khan a foul-mouthed chain-smoker who doesn’t emit any genius mathematician-physicist vibe. The characterization of Khan is stereotypically female as a man and stereotypically male as a woman, and it’s never easy to believe that she’s a unique genius vital to the survival of multiple alternate Earths. And for the sake of his non-stop frantic action plot, too many of his characters do unbelievable things given their character development, like Lee, Julian, and Alison being too xenophobic at key points, given their experiences and situations. And the reverse movement happens with the Neanderthal types, who early on perform (offstage) sensational ultra-violence in beating a few white nationalist thugs to death with furniture but later are said to be, due to their biology, environment, and culture, averse to conflict and violence. A related problem is that the fractures between the alternate Earths are too plot convenient, letting Tchaikovsky do all sorts of suspense-inducing tricks at will by opening “doors” between Earths and instantly moving people into or out of tight spots or not opening “doors” and keeping people where they are. At one point he has his characters fall into our Earth on the 80th floor of a tall building and then makes them climb up 15 flights of stairs to the top while everything’s breaking apart around them, when he could have just had them fall into our Earth on the top of the building, but then that wouldn't be so exciting. He works in plenty of popular culture references (because his story largely occurs in contemporary London), like Narnia, Star Wars, James Bond, Flatland, The Hills Have Eyes, The Lord of the Rings, Apocalypse Now. Such things are fun, but fix this novel in time more than his Children trilogy. Finally, Tchaikovsky does nifty things with alternate endings based on alternate choices made by the characters that along with the wonderful excerpts from the book on evolutionary biology in between chapters (almost) makes the book a four-star novel for me. But though I’ll surely read more books by him, this one was rather forgettable. View all my reviews
Derai by E.C. Tubb
My rating: 3 of 5 stars Dumarest in Love with a Fragile Telepath In Derai (1968), the second book in E. C. Tubb’s 33-volume (!) Dumarest series, E. C. Tubb’s hero Earl Dumarest, a penniless traveler searching for Earth, has made it to Kyle, a tourist world holding a festival celebrating life and death with all these creatures in the sky mating and being fought over and eaten (not unlike krill and larger predators in the sea), while on the ground hucksters tout VR torture and sex: “Hey, you there! Want to know what it’s like to be burned to death? Full-sense feelies give you the thrill of a lifetime! Genuine recordings of impalement, live-burial, flaying, dismemberment and many more. Sixteen different types of torture! You feel it, sense it, know what it’s like. Hurry! Hurry! Hurry!” Dumarest is there earning a pittance by fighting people for entertainment. When his sadistic fighter partner Nada suggests pairing up with him, he refuses, quits the business, and runs into a monk of the (possibly benevolent) Universal Brotherhood who arranges for him to escort a strange silver-haired, long-necked aristocratic young woman called Lady Derai of House Caldor to her homeworld, Hive. Dumarest reckons that Derai’s fears that someone is trying to kill her are mere paranoia and takes the job because he wants to go to Hive anyway and because his pay will be two expensive High space travel tickets. He soon discovers that Derai is a telepath (a handy ability for gambling) and that she and he are falling in love. On Hive, Tubb introduces more point of view characters: Derai’s bastard half-brother Blaine (musing about the fate by which their father didn’t marry his mother but did marry hers and about how the suitable motto of their House, “the Grasping Hand”); her uncle Emil (wanting to keep Derai under wraps to exploit her telepathy in the service of the House commerce in a jelly called ambrosaria made by mutated super bees); her cousin Ustar (a real aristo piece of work, sadistic, spoiled, entitled, and reckoning that he’ll marry Derai and control the House); the Old Man (the House patriarch kept alive on ambrosaria as a rotting vegetative bag of guts); and Regor (the House cyber, a creepy robotic man really working for “The power of central intelligence, the tremendous cybernetic complex which was the mind and heart of the Cyclan,” which wants to rule the human galaxy). Oh, and, for the first time in the series, a person of color, Yamay, a shrewd black businessman who’ll help Dumarest as far as it’ll be profitable for him (and maybe a little farther). *Although Tubb has started introducing characters of color into his saga, he still isn’t writing LGBTQ characters (although Blaine perhaps leans a LITTLE that way vis-à-vis Dumarest). The story is a compact, lurid, page turning, fast moving, interesting, unpredictable, pulpy space opera. It will soon have Dumarest et al traveling to a third world to participate in a deadly competition reminiscent of a Hunger Games for adults. Neither young nor old, Dumarest is a tall and handsome loner who’s visited multiple worlds on his quest for his homeworld, the mythical Earth, which he knows is a blasted world with some life surviving underground, while people he asks about it often respond, “Earth? Every world has earth!” He’s not a superman, being capable of making mistakes and getting injured, but he’s fast, ruthless, clever, cool, compassionate, reliable, and aware. Belonging to the less is more ethos of the late 1960s and early 1970s sf publishing world, the novel has some neat sf writing: “He [Regor] became a living part of an organism which stretched across the galaxy in an infinity of crystalline sparkles, each the glowing nexus of naked intelligence. A skein of misty light connected the whole so that it seemed to be a shifting kaleidoscope of brilliance and form. He saw it and at the same time was a part of it, sharing and yet owning the incredible gestalt of minds.” Tubb writes some cool dialogue featuring the dry Dumarest: ‘Finish your wine,’ said Dumarest, ‘and learn something: trouble does not vanish because you run away from it.’ All that said, he can also write some corny and or stilted dialogue: “‘Eat, My Lady,’ he said curtly. Didn’t she realise the importance of food? ‘Eat,’ he said again, his tone more gentle. ‘It will do you good.’ ‘My name is Derai. Yours is Earl. Must we be so formal?’” There is some sixties sexism and too much of the hero (ala James Bond, Conan, and Captain Kirk) being too irresistible to women while not needing to end up tied down: “I like to keep moving.” The fragile Derai is dependent on Earl and given to nightmares and fears. “‘You are a strange man,’ she murmured. ‘I have never met anyone like you before. With you I could be a real woman—you have strength enough for us both.” Earl says brusque things to her like “Stop acting like a child.” She is another woman (like the Matriarch’s ward in the first novel) who lacks experience with the realities of life for the majority of people. Tubb’s bete noirs are cruel aristocrats like Ustar and cybers like Regor. He favors practical, hardworking, smart, outsider types like Yamay and Dumarest. Tubb’s vision is grim. Of the three worlds here, Kyle, Hive, and Folgone, none are any kind of utopia or arcadia. “Folgone was a bleak place, a world of ice and frozen gases, the single planet of a white dwarf star. The surface was sterile; what life existed was buried deep in gigantic caverns lit and warmed by radioactive elements … a sealed prison of a world from which there could be no unauthorised escape.” Of the characters, many are vile, and the relatively decent ones, like a few who get close to Dumarest, are unsafe. And there are plenty of bleak insights into human nature: “‘When are you going to learn that subconscious thoughts have nothing to do with intended action? We are all of us beasts,’ he added. ‘Most of us learn to correctly judge what we see and hear.’ It was a lesson he had tried to teach her during the entire journey. He’d had little success.” I am liking the Dumarest books plenty and will soon forge on to the third-- View all my reviews
The Nutmeg of Consolation by Patrick O'Brian
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Pirates, Rats, Coca, and Purgatory (Australia) The 14th Aubrey Maturin Age of Sail book, The Nutmeg of Consolation (1991) begins with our bosom buddies Post-Captain Jack Aubrey and naturalist-surgeon-spy Stephen Maturin and the survivors of their wrecked frigate the Diane running out of food on an uninhabited island in the South China Sea. To raise the men’s morale Jack sets the sailors against the marines in a hotly contested cricket match. Stephen, having no interest in cricket but being the designated hunter of the mission (because he’s so hopelessly useless in the vital task of fashioning a schooner from the wreckage of the frigate), goes off on his own looking for increasingly scarce wild pigs or monkeys. Through Stephen’s point of view, Patrick O’Brian concisely reminds us of what happened in the 13th novel: ambassador Fox winning a coup (thanks to Stephen’s vital but resented assistance) by getting the Sultan of a piratical Malay state to sign a treaty with the British instead of with the enemy French, and then prematurely sailing off in a pinnace to announce his triumph only to drown with all hands during the typhoon that wrecked the Diane. Jack is hoping to finish the makeshift schooner and sail off to Dutch-held Batavia when some pirates (led by a bare-breasted young lady with filed incisors and a sharp kris) pay a call. The novel features about the usual limited but vivid amount of action for an O’Brian book, a ferocious land battle, a suspenseful sea chase, and a small-pox ravaged island, and then settles in for a long stretch in the then new colony at New South Wales, Australia, and Sydney Cove, as Jack tries to get his ship repaired and outfitted while dealing with hostile and corrupt local officials and foolish and wild sailors, and Stephen sojourns around the Australian outback, observing the exotic flora and fauna (including kangaroos, platypuses, and “the small, flat, gray animal that sleeps high up in a gum tree and claims absurdly to be a bear”). Stephen also wants to do something to help the convict Padeen, his former ship’s surgeon’s assistant who in an earlier book in the series accidentally became addicted to opium, got arrested for breaking into an apothecary’s shop, and then got transported to Sydney, where he’s just received 200 lashes for trying to escape. The scenes describing the new British colony (“an utterly inhuman place” set in a “dismal plains of purgatory” outback) are fascinating: gangs of chained convicts doing slave labor and getting brutally flogged, British officers land-grabbing the best land and importing sheep into it, corruption rife at every level, and everywhere the cruelty attendant upon “absolute power and the absence of public opinion.” The book respects the aborigines while showing the pernicious effect British rum has on them. Add to all that the harsh wilderness, and Stephen can’t help but wonder why it was ever thought a good idea to make a colony there! As in the other books in the series, I love the moments when Jack and Stephen express their friendship for each other (e.g., “Why there you are, Steven, how glad I am to see you.”) And I enjoy the all too human characters, like, of course, Jack and Stephen, but also minor ones like fractious, nasal Killick. Like the other books, this one has plenty of humor, like when the frigate rats start acting strangely tame because, it turns out, they’ve gotten into Stephen’s supply of coca leaves and eaten all of them, which provokes in Stephen a bad mood to match that of the rats when they finally realize there’s no more coca. “He was not the first sailor to be deceived by a rat.” Lots of witty lines, like “Stephen was convinced that moral advantage was a great enemy to marriage” and “What are the three things that cannot be concealed? Love, sorrow, and wealth… and intelligence-work comes a very close fourth.” Lots of savory period vocabulary and expressions, like “What joy!” or “’God's blood—hell and death, so I have” Or “made their staggering crapulous way to the strand...” Lots of details on what it was like to be aboard a ship of the line in the age of sail, from Jack's favorite suet pudding, “boiled baby,” to the tons of fetid fluid in a man of war, deriving not only from the sailors who sometimes, especially during storms, relieve themselves wherever they get a chance, but also from the cables that conduct into the ship the refuse and sewage and slaughterhouse run off from the ports they call at. Lots of O’Brian’s sublime descriptions of the sea and sky seen from a sailing ship, like: “She reeled off her twelve and even thirteen knots throughout the sunlit hours and even seven or eight by night, with the topgallantsails taken in and in spite of her foul bottom; and all this through a hugely rolling sea that varied from the deepest indigo to pale aquamarine but that always (apart from the broken water) remained glass-clear, as though it had been created yesterday.” In addition to such features, audiobook reader Ric Jerrom is so ideally suited to O'Brian's work that I always feel good to read another Aubrey-Maturin novel, so I’m looking forward to the 15th in the series. View all my reviews |
Jefferson Peters
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by Sabaa Tahir
A Young Adult Epic Fantasy with Lots of Violence & Romance
Elias is an elite Martial soldier, Laia a naïve Scholar slave. As they alternate telling their stories (in trendy Young Adult first person, present tense narration), we soon rea...
"It must be due to some fault in ourselves"--
George Orwell's Animal Farm (1945) is an anti-totalitarian-communist allegory in which the exploited animals of the Manor Farm kick Farmer Jones out and set about running the farm. At first...
by Lu Xun
Perfect Stories of Life in Early 20th Century China
Chinese Classic Stories (1998) by Xun Lu is an excellent collection of seven short stories by perhaps the most important 20th century Chinese writer of fiction. Lu Xun (1881-1936) stu...
Fine Writing, Great Characters, Immersive World
The Surgeon's Mate (1980) is the 7th novel in Patrick O'Brian's addicting series of age of sail novels about the lives, loves, and careers of the British navy captain Jack Aubrey and the ...
An Overwritten, Oddly Compelling Gothic Father
Matthew Lewis' notorious and influential Gothic novel The Monk (1796) takes place during the heyday of the Spanish Inquisition. Ambrosio, the monk/friar/abbot/idol of Madrid, is nicknamed ...
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