Cathedral by Raymond Carver
My rating: 4 of 5 stars A Kinder, Gentler Carver? Reading the Cathedral (1983) collection of twelve Raymond Carver short stories with my graduate student was not something I looked forward to. We had recently finished What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981), and I had become, I thought, saturated with or numb to Carver’s bleak vision and elliptical narration and ill-starred, often passive or self-destructive protagonists. But—gosh—apart from one loathsome story I wish I could unread (Vitamins), I really liked all the stories here a lot, especially Preservation, The Compartment, A Small Good Thing, Where I’m Calling From, The Train, The Bridle, and Cathedral. Like the stories in the earlier collection, here we explore love as we meet plenty of dysfunctional couples, unfulfilled men and women, doomed alcoholics, clueless losers, tragic parents, etc., but somehow Carver has become more hopeful or more sympathetic, and if there are no moments of triumph, there are some of epiphany, and lots of his dry humor and wry vision. In “Feathers,” a hearty dinner eaten by work friends and their wives, accompanied by homemade bread and an ugly baby and an intrusive peacock changes the marriage and life of the narrator in unforeseen ways. In “Chef’s House,” an alcoholic husband says he’s on the wagon, so his estranged wife stays with him in a friend's house in the country, and they have a great summer (she even puts her old wedding ring back on), but such times don’t last for Carver's people, do they? “Preservation” concerns a laid off husband trying to “preserve” himself by living on the sofa, but as a result his wife may be dying inside, and the fridge has failed at preserving their food, and their marriage may be dying, too. Will her husband go with her to buy a used fridge at auction or retreat to his sofa? In “The Compartment” (a rare Carver story in taking place abroad), Myers is on a train to Strasbourg to see his estranged son for the first time in eight years. When last together, they fought, Myers headlocking the boy and threatening to kill him. Just how will he greet the young man? Does he even want to see the “enemy” who caused the break up of his marriage? A strange story about a stranger in a strange land. “A Small, Good Thing” is an extended version of “The Bath” from What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. A birthday boy is hit by car and falls into a coma as his parents try to cope as a baker tries to get a cake picked up. A painful and moving story with an exquisite ending. “Vitamins” is the only story in the collection I disliked. The narrator is an asshole with a girlfriend/wife who’s getting burned out selling multiple vitamins. Portland as a (probably flawed) utopia destination. Nam as hell. LGBTQ phobia, racism, misogyny, all very politically incorrect. All very ugly and coarse. No vitamin enrichment! In “Careful,” a man whose wife has made him move into an apartment by himself eats a breakfast of donuts and champagne and is visited by his wife, who carefully unstops his stopped up ear. You can get used to anything. Or, nothing’s that remarkable if you think about it. In “Where I’m Calling From,” the narrator’s drying out at Frank Martin’s facility, where he meets J. P., who’s also trying to dry out and tells him his story. The unlikelihood of alcoholics staying dry; the mysterious reasons why they became alcoholics; and the fearsome meaning of Jack London’s “To Build a Fire.” “The Train” is a neat continuation of a 1954 John Cheever story “The Five Forty-Eight.” Here Miss Dent has just taught a cad a lesson at gunpoint (“he couldn’t keep trampling on people’s feelings”) and then goes to wait for a train late at night and is joined by an odd couple, an old man without shoes and a middle aged woman in a red dress, and listens in on their cryptic confrontational conversation till a train comes and the trio board. Funny in dry, weird way. In “Fever,” a high school art teacher’s been abandoned by his new age wife, who’s left their two little kids with him and gone to California with another teacher to find herself. Carlyle tries to keep himself and the kids together, but good help is hard to find. Can he ever forgive Eileen for leaving them or come to accept the fact that she’s gone? A moving, nice story. In “The Bridle,” an Arizona apartment complex manager (who does hairdos and manicures on the side) recounts the arrival there of a family that lost everything to a bank in Minnesota. How they try to live there: “Dreams are what you wake up from.” Don’t try to jump into a pool from the top of the cabana while drunk. “Cathedral” is a great last story for the collection. Having a blind man in his home is not something the sarcastic, unpleasant but sympathetic narrator is looking forward to. Friendless, in a flawed relationship with his wife, with no belief in anything, he’s in store for a non-visual, epiphanic surprise, partly because of the food, the cannabis, and the blind man, who’s not your stereotypical handicapped person. A great ending: My eyes were still closed. I was in my house. I knew that. But I didn’t feel like I was inside anything. “It’s really something,” I said. View all my reviews
0 Comments
The Wine-Dark Sea by Patrick O'Brian
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Jack, Stephen, a French Utopian, Prizes, and Peru “A purple ocean, vast under the sky and devoid of all visible life, apart from two minute ships racing across its immensity. They were as close-hauled to the somewhat irregular north-east trades as ever they could be, with every sail they could safely carry and even more, their bowlines twanging taut: they had been running like this day after day, sometimes so far apart that each saw only the other’s top sails above the horizon, sometimes within gunshot; and when this was the case, they fired at one another with their chasers.” In the sixteenth Aubrey-Maturin novel by Patrick O'Brian, The Wine-Dark Sea (1993), the War of 1812 is ongoing. The Surprise (an obsolete British privateer owned and captained by Jack Aubrey) is chasing the Franklin (a smart American privateer owned by a French utopian aristocrat called Dutourd) towards Peru, where the intelligence-agent (don't call him spy) and Jack’s close friend Stephen Maturin is supposed to help foment rebellion against Spanish rule. Stephen is a hater of tyranny, especially that of Bonaparte (while for some reason finding England a force for autonomy and independence) but also that of Castilian Spain against his Catalan home. A chewer of coca leaves “as a relief from mental or spiritual distress and physical or intellectual weariness as well as a source of benignity and general well-being,” Stephen is looking forward to getting a fresh supply (his previous one having been completely eaten by rats!). An accomplished naturalist, he is also looking forward to seeing South American flora and fauna (like the condor) and geographical features like the Andes. O'Brian efficiently brings readers new to the series up to speed on naval and intelligence matters, as well as on Stephen's wife at home, Diana. He also uses the convenient presence of Stephen's friend and fellow landlubber Martin (ship's chaplain and sub-surgeon after Stephen) to explain age-of-sail nautical matters to the uninformed reader (like this one!). There will be plenty of action in this one: sea pursuits and battles, an underwater volcano eruption, an Andes snowstorm. There will be medical interventions. Vivid descriptions of flora and fauna in varied marine and exotic land settings. Political maneuverings. Informative letter writing (especially by Stephen to Diana), and good violin and cello playing. All quite absorbing and entertaining. It's just always so good to spend some time with the best bosom buddies Jack and Stephen: “Tell me brother, has no one told you what is afoot?” and “God love you Jack, what things you tell me,” and-- “Will I confess a grave sin?” he asked. “Do, by all means,” said Jack, looking at him kindly. “But if you managed to commit a grave sin between the gunroom and here, you have a wonderful capacity for evil.” Stephen took a piece of biscuit, tapping at it mechanically, brushed away the weevil frass, and said, “I was in a wicked vile temper, so I was too, and I flew out at Dutourd and Rousseau.” And the supporting characters like the shrewish Killick and Jack’s natural son Sam and the two Melanesian black girls Sarah and Emily are appealing. Dutourd (an educated man with money to fund his utopian dreams) is complex enough for an antagonist: naïve, passionate, idealistic, and loose-tongued. And there’s just so much prime writing throughout! Like-- The Andes: “He reached the top, but only just, and stood there controlling or trying to control his violent gasps while Eduardo named the great shining snowy peaks that soared on either hand and in front, all rising like islands from an orange belt of cloud, one behind the other, all brilliant in the cold transparent air.” A whale: “To windward there was a vast expiring sigh as a sperm whale surfaced, black in a coruscation of green light, an enormous solitary bull. His spout drifted across the launch itself, and he could be heard drawing in the air, breathing for quite some time; then easily, smoothly, he shouldered over and dived, showing his flukes in a final blaze.” A sudden pitch of the ship: “He was in the act of pouring a glass when the ship pitched with such extraordinary violence, pitched as though she had fallen into a hole, that he very nearly fell, and the glass left the wine in the air, a coherent body for a moment.” View all my reviews
Quillifer the Knight by Walter Jon Williams
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “Quillifer, you are singular, like your name. No one knows what to do with you.” Who is Quillifer? A merchant adventurer (owning multiple ships carrying valuable cargo or playing privateer), a pricy jewel dealer (fabricating stories to match gems with their buyers), a knight errant (being called “a rampallian knight” by his betters), a monster slayer (dealing with dragons, iron birds, etc.), a self-promoter (paying a bard to sing a complimentary song about him at a court feast), a natural actor (donning the faces of choirboy, lawyer, country squire, etc.), a serial lover (advising young men to find a wife—another man’s wife), an inventor (creating mass-produced ink, savory cuisine, neologisms, etc.), a target of divine malevolence (suffering the machinations of Orlanda, a goddess who doesn’t take well to being rejected), and, he tells us from the start, a traitor to the crown in some way (working with his current lover on some great treason that will see them triumphant or traitors). Quillifer's constant curiosity, endless energy, and original intelligence kick into high gear whenever he faces a challenge or encounters a stultifying tradition. It’s amusing to watch the nobility scorn and insult him, only for him to get the better of them. And once he conceives a plan, he MUST put it into action no matter how dangerous it may be to the people around him or to himself. And he’s not quite 22. Quillifer lives and operates in an Elizabethan-esque fantasy world of swords and canons, a non-human humanoid species (the Aekoi) that produces pirates and prostitutes (their women can’t be made pregnant by human lovers), a region that spawns chimera and other monsters, and (so far) two dominant human cultures: longtime rivals Loretto (Italian-French-like culture) and Duisland (English-like culture and home of Quillifer). When Quillifer (2017), Walter Jon Williams’ first novel about his protean young hero, ends, the butcher’s son has been made a knight after a big novel full of (mis)adventures including the massacre his family and the sack of his home town by Aekoi pirates, capture by a bandit lord, a key role in foiling a rebellion, a knighting, and the first inimical attention of Orlanda. When the second novel, Quillifer the Knight (2019), begins, Quillifer is narrating his story to his current lover, strategically withholding her identity to us while detonating foreshadowing bombs referring to their treason. He starts his account with his return from a long-distance trading voyage bearing a rich cargo when, not far from his home port, an terrific storm savages his ship. In the rest of the novel, Quillifer conceives new projects, gets new married lovers, takes tennis and guitar lessons, dragon hunts, races in a regatta, hires a manservant/bard, becomes court Warden (i.e., monster hunter), hangs out with his friends (the Duke and Duchess of Roundsilver, Blackwell the playwright, and Lipton the cannoneer), banters with Princess Floria (she and Quillifer are great together), duels enraged nobles (never let Quillifer choose the setting of a duel), not quite works for the scary dead-eyed royal spymaster Edevane, and so on. We start suspecting that Quillifer and his lover are engaged in a little rebellion because of the increasing religious, economic, and political tyranny that Queen Berlauda’s husband from Loretto and his people are imposing on the hitherto independent Duisland. The extended and detailed two-chapter sequence involving storm, shipwreck, and salvage that starts the novel is a bit too long, straining the bounds of credulity as to how anyone (even Quillifer’s lover) could sit still and listen to his monologue story without once reacting or interrupting. In general, the conceit of Quillifer telling the whole novel to his lover stretches past the breaking point before it finally gets interesting in the resolution to the climax. I’d have preferred Williams to just have Quillifer tell his life story to undefined readers. The novel is also a little too heteronormative for today’s world, compared to things like, say, Martha Wells’ Witch King or Murderbot series, but it does feature some formidable female characters, like Lady Ransom (a brilliant astronomer), Countess Marcella (a mysterious Aekoi woman), Princess Floria (a petite, charismatic, careful, and clever young woman), and Orlanda (an apparently spiteful, malificent, and omniscient goddess). There are moments of fine faux Elizabethan dialogue, like “You purpose to fight dragons now?” and “I am charged to bear this message.” “Do not then lose your bearings, for what you bear is beyond all bearing.” There are also many fine, vivid descriptions, like this: “The dragon lay in the sun on a tawny field spotted red and white with murdered sheep. It rested on the grass in shimmering, tumbled coils, and it seemed to gleam with shifting colors like a fire-opal. I had seen that scintillation before, in that great serpent that rode the storm earlier in the year, and I knew it was a sign of the supernatural power that animated the worm. The drake was difficult to look at, and I did not care to look at it directly, but only from the slant of my eye, and even then I felt uneasy, and there was an eddy in my thoughts at the touch of the extramundane.” Ralph Lister reads it all with aplomb and a wry, almost insouciant manner that enhances Quillifer’s wit. The large novel is mostly quite absorbing, and it features a great surprise revelation near the end of the climax, and I’m looking forward to the third book, Lord Quillifer (2022). View all my reviews
Readable, Funny, Sad, Less Is More Short Stories What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981) collects seventeen Raymond Carver short stories featuring flawed characters whose lives are unfulfilling if not disastrous. Much is left out of the elliptical narratives, so the reader has to read between the lines and speculate a lot as to character motivation and plot events. They have an odd appeal despite their often sordid or tragic turns, partly because of Carver’s restrained, dry, ironic approach to storytelling and narration. In “Why Don’t You Dance?” a guy has moved his possessions into his front yard, including his bedroom set and TV and record player, when a young couple happens by the “yard sale” to bargain him down on prices and drinks with him and dances for him, the young lady telling him he must be desperate, but we suspect she may be the desperate one. In “Viewfinder,” a man with hooks instead of hands is photographing the house of the narrator, who gets almost insultingly curious about the guy, inviting him in so he can see how he drinks coffee etc., only to have the guy say it’s “sad” that the narrator is alone. “Mr. Coffee and Mr. Fixit Man” depicts bad relationships, the narrator seeing his mother kissing some guy and then musing on his wife having an affair with a man she met at AA. He asks his wife for a nice supper, and she tells him to wash his hands. In “Gazebo” a husband and wife take less good care of a motel when their marriage starts falling apart because Duane’s been having an affair with a Mexican cleaning woman. In “I Could See the Smallest Things” the first-person narrator Nancy can’t sleep, has a nighttime encounter with her neighbor, the former best friend of her husband, now his enemy, who’s outside killing slugs, and when she returns home she sees her sleeping husband as a slug. In “Sacks” a man with some problem with his marriage learns more than he wanted from his father about why he and his mother divorced. Almond Roca and Jelly Beans are inadequate peace offerings. “The Bath” is about the fragility and irony of life, the helpless love of parents for their damaged children, the blithe indifference of doctors. In “Tell the Women We’re Going” best friends from childhood get together with their wives, Bill sensing Jerry (presumably happily married with little daughters) isn’t allright. The guys go out for some billiards and beers and see a couple girls bicycling along, and-- In “After the Denim” a retired accountant and his wife go out for a night of bingo, where the man sees a young hippy couple cheating, which incenses him, and on the way home, his wife tells him something’s wrong “down there,” and he wonders why that cheating young couple can’t get sick instead. In “So Much Water So Close to Home,” the first-person narrator is disturbed when her husband tells her that he and his buddies stuck to their usual weekend fishing-camping routine despite having found the dead body of a girl in the river. “The Third Thing that Killed My Father Off” relates the ruin of the friendship between the narrator’s father and a mentally-challenged co-worker called “Dummy” over some imported bass fingerlings. “A Serious Talk” is a cheery Christmas tale featuring a delusional ex-husband having a brief Christmas gift exchange with his wife and their kids, leading to some near arson and a clumsy pie theft and a clumsier attempt to apologize. In “The Calm” a hunting story leads to conflict at the barber’s, where the narrator is more than calmed by the hands of the barber. In “Popular Mechanics” a couple breaking up engage in tug of war over their baby, which, if the physics of Popular Mechanics obtains, will not survive intact. “Everything Stuck to Him” is a story in a story: a father tells his grown daughter about the time he and her mother were young and in love and parents for the first time and made up after an argument over hunting vs. family. (The only happy ending in the collection?) In “One More Thing” an alcoholic husband drunkenly criticizes his fifteen-year-old daughter, throws a pickle jar through the kitchen window, and is told to leave by his wife, falling speechless after threatening his wife and daughter with “one more thing to say.” The title story concerns two couples drinking gin while talking about love: is it found in abusive and obsessive relationships? In relationships where the surviving partner when one dies will fall in love with someone else? In relationships that turn to hate? In friendships like that between the two couples? Will they go out to eat or stay drinking in the darkness? This was the first Carver collection I’ve read, and I found the stories quite readable, being short, provocative, and sad. I liked reading the stories (especially Why Don’t You Dance? Viewfinder, The Bath, After the Denim, So Much Water So Close to Home, A Serious Talk, and The Calm). They are often funny! They often have grabbing openings that make you think, “What the what?” and want to read on to find out what the situation is and how it came to be that way. They often have ambiguous “open” endings where, for instance, some violence is prophesied or hinted at or worked up to without actually being shown. He captures how people talk (or talked in the 70s and 80s). They are all talking about love in one way or another. They reminded me of Charles Bukowski’s short stories, but are typically set in the northwest rather than LA, are less gross and graphic (no detailed sex or toilet scenes), don’t feature an obvious and recurring Carver alter-ego (no Henry Chinaski type), don’t morph into urban fantasies or surreal flights as some of Bukowski’s stories do, and depict men as victimizers of women more often than victims (more male violence towards women through rape or murder or indifference or infidelity in Carver). Both writers tend to write from the male point of view more than the female one, but Carver writes two stories in first-person female narration, and I can’t think of many Bukowski stories like that. Carver’s stories started losing their luster when read in a large group, similar to how I feel after reading a Bukowski collection. The disastrous relationships (divorces, break ups, murders, failures of communication and/or understanding) start numbing. I am glad to have read the stories, but if my grad student weren’t planning to write his thesis about Carver, I don’t know if I would seek more of them out.
The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy by Jacob Burckhardt
My rating: 3 of 5 stars Too Much Labor Listening Without Enough Learning In The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860), Jacob Burckhardt relates the causes, nature, culture, and effects of the Renaissance in Italy—in exhausting detail. The best part for me was Part One, The State as a Work of Art, a grim but witty survey of 14th- and 15th-century Italian despotism and mayhem: feuding families, bastard inheritors, Condottieri rulers, nephews assassinating uncles, popes inviting rivals to Rome and then beheading them, and suffering commoners. Interestingly, the leaders of such tyrannical and chaotic Italian states lavishly patronized the arts, as in Petrarch’s poetry and Raphael’s paintings. In addition to The State as a Work of Art, Burckhardt covers the following major topics: Part Two: The Development of the Individual Part Three: The Revival of Antiquity Part Four: The Discovery of the World and of Man Part Five: Society and Festivals Part Six: Morality and Religion Although it doesn’t directly and detailedly talk much about particular works of art or their creators, the book indeed contains much interesting information and many interesting ideas about the Renaissance and related matters. Like the following: --The Reformation led to the salvation of the Catholic church in the Counter Reformation. --Copiests were in great demand to help disperse the writings of the ancients. -- In Italy, poetry was a hundred years ahead of painting in becoming more observant of and admiring of the world and humanity. --“…women stood on a footing of perfect equality with men” and mixed in intellectual circles as participants and patronesses and were permitted as much adultery as their husbands. --The excessive crime and lawlessness (murder of passion, murder for hire, vendetta, rape, brigandage, destruction, etc.) of Italy derived from its virtues as the leading land of the individual (excessive independence and egoism), as well as from the corruption of the church, which offered no moral compass to the people. Burckhardt does occasionally reveal his 19th-century European Christian prejudices by, for instance, commenting that women wearing too much make up in the Renaissance were equivalent to “the painting of savages” or by referring to Muslims as barbarians. At the same time, he also often transcends his era by, for example, revealing that it’s unfair to condemn women for committing the same sins as those committed by men. And Burckhardt is often engaging, even entertaining. Here’s an example of what I like about his writing when he’s on his game: “Compared with the sharp pens of the eighteenth century, Aretino had the advantage that he was not burdened with principles, neither with liberalism nor philanthropy nor any other virtue, nor even with science; his whole baggage consisted of the well-known motto, ‘Veritas odium parit.’ He never, consequently, found himself in the false position of Voltaire, who was forced to disown his ‘Pucelle’ and conceal all his life the authorship of other works. Aretino put his name to all he wrote, and openly gloried in his notorious ‘Ragionamenti.’ His literary talent, his clear and sparkling style, his varied observation of men and things, would have made him a considerable writer under any circumstances destitute as he was of the power of conceiving a genuine work of art, such as a true dramatic comedy; and to the coarsest as well as the most refined malice he added a grotesque wit so brilliant that in some cases it does not fall short of that of Rabelais… The tone in which he appealed to Clement VII not to complain or to think of vengeance, but to forgive, at the moment when the wailings of the devastated city were ascending to the Castle of St. Angelo, where the Pope himself was a prisoner, is the mockery of a devil or a monkey.” Granted, I don’t know quite what “Veritas odium parit” and “Ragionamenti” mean and had never heard of Aretino, I love Burckhardt’s character sketch of the notorious satirist. But there are also too many passages with too many names and titles etc. that go in one eye and out the other, like this one: “By the side of these local temples of fame, which myth, legend, popular admiration, and literary tradition combined to create, the poet-scholars built up a great Pantheon of worldwide celebrity. They made collections of famous men and famous women, often in direct imitation of Cornelius Nepos, the pseudo-Suetonius, Valerius Maximus, Plutarch (Mulierum virtutes), Hieronymus (De Viris Illustribus), and others: or they wrote of imaginary triumphal processions and Olympian assemblies, as was done by Petrarch in his ‘Trionfo della Fama,’ and Boccaccio in the ‘Amorosa Visione,’ with hundreds of names, of which three-fourths at least belong to antiquity and the rest to the Middle Ages. By-and-by this new and comparatively modern element was treated with greater emphasis; the historians began to insert descriptions of character, and collections arose of the biographies of distinguished contemporaries, like those of Filippo Villani, Vespasiano Fiorentino, Bartolommeo Facio, Paolo Cortese, and lastly of Paolo Giovio.” Eek! Such passages soon started numbing me to the interesting information and ideas elsewhere in the book. I retained so little of what I heard. I didn’t learn enough to offset the eye-glazed labor of listening to it. Gods! I’ve never felt so relieved to have a book finally end than I did with this one. Even the normally splendid Ralph Cosham (who does perfect Louise Penny, Watership Down, A Little History of the World, the Alice books, and so on) couldn’t help here. In fact, I even wearied of him! Burckhardt’s book became the perfect storm of a monotonous reader and a dryly (if wittily) written subject with myriad unfamiliar names as examples. I’m not sure if a different reader would have improved it or worsened it. A special shout out to the producers of the Blackstone audiobook, for putting on the “cover” the *egregiously* anachronistic painting by William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825-1905) The Birth of Venus (1879). It is a lovely, realistic, sexy painting, but it is a 19th-century Academy painting, not a 14th- or 15th-century Renaissance painting. Far better to have used Botticelli's much more charming RENAISSANCE painting of the same scene. View all my reviews |
Jefferson Peters
This blog is for book reviews. Please feel free to comment on any of the reviews! Categories
All
Archives
June 2024
Jefferson's books
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 ...
|
My Fukuoka University