perpetual memory loss

A couple days ago I finished Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad and over the last few days I have been letting it digest in my brain. I decided to read this book because while I’ve always wanted to watch Apocalypse Now I’ve just never been able to make it through the movie. I figured I’d read the book that inspired it instead. Heart of Darkness is a short, easy read that I found extremely enjoyable. The book is narrated by Charles Marlow, a sailor, as he recounts his journey down an African river into the Congo as a Captain of a steamboat. The entire book is basically Marlow describing this journey to some other men one night. There are only a handful of times where Marlow stops telling his story to make a comment or to interact with one of the listeners. Otherwise the book is basically one giant quote. Now I consider myself fairly well-read but I can’t remember another book that I have read that relies this much on straight narration by the main character. (Now you might say well any book that has a narrator is relying on the narrator. But HoD is different, I think, because almost the entirety of the book is a quote and it feels like listening to a ghost story next to a camp fire, which is much different than a book like The Great Gatsby. That’s just my opinion though.)

The symbolism in HoD is pretty straight up and hard to miss. The book centers on Marlow’s mission to go find Mr. Kurtz deep in the Congo. The further down the river he travels the darker it gets, much like Dante but in a more literal sense. Along the way Conrad alludes to the darkness of the continent, the Native Africans, the Colonial enterprise, and humanity in general. Throughout the book I kept waiting for some dramatic reveal about Mr. Kurtz or Africa or something but there isn’t anything like that. The journey down the river is the point. The end is incidental to tue journey-which makes sense when you finish the book.

The book is definitely worth picking up and reading, if only to get a sense at some of the practices and attitudes that were prevalent during the colonization of Africa. So if you’re looking for a good book to occupy your time for a day at the beach or a car ride you could do much worse than picking Heart of Darkness.

Next up Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era by James McPherson. I’m about 150 pages into and so far I’m extremely impressed with it.

This year I was lucky enough to receive a Kindle for my birthday (thanks pheebs). I’ve been in love with it since then and have already bought a ton of books. I’ve found myself reading during virtually all my free time now, which I like. The first book I finished was Once There Was a War by John Steinbeck. Steinbeck is one of my all-time favorite authors and I feel like pretty much everything he does is phenomenal. He is always at his best, however, when he is describing the average man. This book is a compilation of his war correspondence during WWII.  It’s a book I’ve always wanted to read but I could never find it in a book store and I’ve always been too lazy to order.

The book follows him as he arrives in England, then to Africa, and finally to Italy. Throughout he describes, in a way only Steinbeck can, the life of a soldier. He doesn’t concern himself with Generals and grand strategies but instead what it’s like living, training and then fighting, throughout the beginning of the war. Steinbeck even throws in some fake humorous stories that would’ve made Mark Twain proud. If you like history, journalism, or Steinbeck then this short book is worth the read.

I recently finished Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book Team of Rivals and it is an incredibly good read.  The book begins on May 18, 1860, the day when the Republican Party was set to select their Presidential candidate, and shows the demeanor of the four potentials: William Seward, Salmon Chase, Edward Bates, and Abraham Lincoln.  After this chapter ends she begins a multiple biography detailing the lives of the the four main rivals.  For the next ten chapters she deftly details these men’s lives from their beginnings all the way until the election of Lincoln. Throughout she also sprinkles in the lives of other notable people:  Mary Todd, Stephen Douglas, Edwin Stanton et. al.  She does this by focusing each chapter on a period of time and then splitting the chapter into four pieces.  Although it may sound awkward it works well and the reader is carefully guided through with her strong narrative.  To further help the casual reader she has removed all footnotes and instead has opted for extensive end notes (while the historian in me misses the footnotes the end notes are extensive enough that most people won’t miss them but will probably be glad that they are gone).  Her prose is clear and concise and she deftly weaves multiple story lines together so that the reader can follow along easily.

She tries her best to get to the facts about who Lincoln was and what he believed, and she does this by using, not only his words and actions, but those of his rivals.  One of the main strengths of this book is that you can see how all of these men’s opinions about Lincoln changed as they got to know and appreciate his talents.  One person in particular, Edwin Stanton, dismisses Lincoln as a “long armed ape” upon his initial meeting with him; but years later, after working with Lincoln through the Civil War, he becomes so distraught at his assassination that he has trouble functioning.  This happens time and again throughout the book, and even more stunning than their changes of opinion is that Lincoln took all of these slights without bearing any animosity towards these people.  One of the worst characters was Salmon Chase (I really grew to dislike him) who was way too sanctimonious and kept working against Lincoln, even while he was on the cabinet.  However, Lincoln kept taking the high road because Chase’s talents were needed for the war.

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I finished A Farewell to Arms today–it was a really quick read–and this will be the last time I ever go from a Steinbeck novel to a Hemingway novel.  Their styles are so different that I think I don’t like A Farewell to Arms as much as I may have.  One reason for this is because, if you know anything about Hemingway, you know that his prose is short and succinct.  Where Steinbeck gives the reader an epic description of a sunset, the tilled earth, and a grasshopper Hemingway tells the reader that it is cold and muddy.  And it works it really does there is something about his sparse style that is really gripping and leaves you wanting more.  He gives you the bare essentials and then moves on; it’s almost like watching a chase movie where you have to watch it a few times before you catch everything.  Since this is one of Hemingway’s earlier novels, however, it is also not as strong or polished as his later works and it is easy to tell that he is still trying to perfect his style.  All that would be forgivable if it wasn’t for the fact that the I hated the characters.

A Farewell to Arms is a love story set in World War I betwixt Lieutenant Fredric Henry, an American serving with the Italian army, and Catherine Barkley–a British nurse.  There are a lot of good elements in this story and some very good scenes, but the crux of the story depends on the love affair between the two protagonists, and that element fails.  I never for a second believe in or care about these two characters.  Catherine Barkley seems like a precursor to the babbling bitches from The Hills that infect our airwaves on a daily basis.  The dialog between the two is mind-numbingly terrible and reminds me of the high school couple that would argue about who is going to hang up first.  Bleeetch.  Henry doesn’t fair much better.  He is developed a bit better than Catherine, and instead of being one-dimensional he is one and a half dimensional.  They basically become two characters who I don’t care much about and I tend to root against  instead of for.  Their first few meetings are cringe worthy and I totally don’t buy their summer love-affair, but that’s just me maybe I’m just a cynical Grinch.  Lucky for me it’s a Hemingway novel so you know that it isn’t going to have some crappy Disney fairy book ending.  For me the last thirty pages made up for the first 300.  If you have read For Whom the Bells Toll then you know what Hemingway is capable of.  The relationship between Robert Jordan and Maria is so much more compelling.  By that time Hemingway’s style was set, his dialogue was great, the story was amazing so I think that maybe I was expecting a bit too much out of this one.

There is still a lot to like about this book despite the fact that it’s never going to be, for me, one of those epic books.  Even in this early stage Hemingway’s sentence construction is fascinating, and there is really no one else that does it like him.  He will go from a regular sentence, to a long sentence, to a three or four word sentence that concludes his point succinctly.  Most of his sentences though are brief.  He also has this habit where he will overuse ‘and’ in one sentence and then not use it in the next sentence in an obvious situation.  Like I mentioned above his descriptive prose left a lot to be desired but the more I read of it the more I liked the sparse descriptions.  It works especially well when the characters are in life or death scenarios and instead of plodding through these he briskly describes them and then moves on quickly giving the reader a sense of immediacy that would not come as easily with long plodding prose.  If I want pointers on how to write a brief concise sentence Hemingway is the man.  It’s not as easy as it sounds especially for people who like to write and who like to be as thorough as possible in all of their sentences.  Sometimes it is easy to forget how much can be said with just a few words.  If this book was a movie I would say wait for the DVD.  It’s worth reading if you’re a fan of Hemingway, but don’t buy it just check it out from the public library.  I will refrain from leaving an excerpt this time too as the only part I would like to excerpt might spoil it for those of you who haven’t read it and want to read it.  Tomorrow I will start Team of Rivals and hopefully I can finish that before school starts.

After reading this book I can now say that I finally get this song.  I really don’t know why it took me so long to get around and read this book.  Unfortunately, I think I let some idiot’s opinion–dry, long, boring–influence me waaay back in high school.  The sad thing is that if I would have read this in high school I would have enjoyed it, but I don’t think I would have appreciated it as much as I do now.

So what’s the book about, you’re saying, what are these grapes and why are they so wrathful.  First, however, I’d like to say that I think that this book and Oil! should be companion pieces as they are two sides of the same coin.  One dealing with the greed and corruption of corporations and the other deal with the consequences, for the normal have-nots, of said greed and corruption.  What make it even more compelling is that even though it is a work of fiction it is describing real events and could easily be used in a history class to give events a more personal feeling without losing sense of the scope of what was happening during this period.

Steinbeck accomplishes this duality by splitting up the book into alternating chapters that shift from a macro to a micro perspective.  One part deals with the nameless, faceless everyman who is moving west in an attempt to scratch out an existence.  These chapters are short (5-6 pages) and they serve a couple purpose.  One is to remind the reader that there are literally hundreds of thousands of people in the same situation as the Joads.  It also serves to help progress the story as he uses these chapters to introduce the next stage in their journey and heighten the conflict in the story.  These chapters although short are masterfully done, and are some of the best chapters in the entire book.  It’s in these chapters where Steinbeck’s descriptive prose is nothing short of amazing.  There are a lot of great writers and a lot of great books, but then there are those–books and authors–that are just on a higher echelon than the others.  This is one of those books and is easily the best Steinbeck novel I’ve read.  Steinbeck really knows how to transport you into the story.  His descriptions of the land is so earthy and real that it gets into your pores, you can almost feel the dust and the dirt on you.  In his descriptions of these nameless people you can see the worry in their eyes and feel the pain and desperation in their hearts.  It is in these chapters where I realized just how good Steinbeck is.

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After watching this superb mini-series on HBO I decided to pick up Generation Kill.  I took it with me to Houston, and I was able to pretty much read the whole book in the airport because of all the delays that came from Tropical Storm Eduardo.  As good as the mini-series is the book, for me, is even better.  Evan Wright goes step-by-step in his journey with First Recon, and events that get cut short in the show are more fully explained in the book.  The greatest strength of the book is the fact that Wright doesn’t try to turn the book into some treatise into why the war is bad, or good, or any other crap like that that usually gets in the way.  Instead he makes it unpolitical, and just tries to relay to the reader what life is like for the these Marines in a war zone.  He doesn’t hold back with the language or in any of the events that happen throughout the march to Baghdad.  I really found it to be a fair and impartial account of life in the Marines during the invasion.  This book is an incredibly smooth and easy read, and as long as you can handle reading a book with often times filthy language you should be able to cruise through it no problem.

One of the best parts of this book was that my old battalion got a little shout out, and I found out something that I have been wondering about for a long time.  This chapter was cut down a bit in the show, but in the book it goes more in depth.  The set-up is that a Marine is killed, and his body is taken into the town of Ash Shatrah and mutilated by the populace.  My company was called in, along with others, to look for his body.  The CIA was also called in, because supposedly Ali Hassan al-Majid or “Chemical Ali” was hiding out in the town.  Probably one of the most bittersweet moments of my life leading a patrol to find this Marine and getting complimented by the CIA, but yet not being able to find the Marine.  We didn’t not find him for lack of looking though.  We tore up the hospitals and other locations, and ended up finding intel on other terrorists, but not the missing Marine.  We were told by some of the elders that his body was taken out to the desert, and given a Christian burial.  However, we all knew this was bullshit.  Unfortunately we didn’t get Chemical Ali either, and after looking for him, and looking for the lost Marine again we had to leave for another mission.  I have often thought about the guy since then.  Who was he? was he ever found? does his family know how hard we looked for him?  Things like that, and then I read:

The body of this Marine is discovered a week later by other American forces.  They find him buried in Ash Shatrah’s trash dump.

Over six years later I finally find out what happened to the missing Marine.  That alone makes the book worth the read for me.  It feels good knowing that he was found, and that his body was brought back to the US to his family.  It’s just too bad that it took six years for me to find this out.

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Treasure Island is Robert Louis Stevenson’s iconic pirate adventure story.  Although Stevenson didn’t create the whole pirate genre he helped define it.  Treasure Island became the standard bearer in the adventure story genre becoming a best-seller, and staying a best-seller for over a hundred years.  The story is fairly straight forward.  There is a treasure map, where X marks the spot, and rivaling factions of buccaneers are battling for the map.  What makes this work is Stevenson brings plenty of realism to the characters and the story through his writing, and by filling the story all kinds of real world knowledge of pirates and sailing.  Unlike Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, however, Stevenson doesn’t allow these facts to hijack and become his story, otherwise we would have had a story filled mostly with pirates sailing around the ocean being piratey but never actually doing anything.

Instead Stevenson puts just enough of these facts and nautical jargon in to help immerse the reader into the story even further.  Otherwise Stevenson omits all the superfluous details.  For example there are long sea voyages in this book, but instead of telling the reader about tacking jib sails, or of the doldrums, or any other boring stuff, he just skips it and has the narrator fill in any important details.  What this does is it allows the action to stay center stage, and it keeps the novel moving at a furious pace.  Each chapter is like its own self-contained story, and every chapter is like an episode of a TV show.  It really reminded me of those old Saturday morning serials that were on TV back in the day.  This set-up keeps the reading moving along at a fast and easy pace.  This is one of the most readable books I have read in a long time, and plus it’s a lot of fun to read.  I had a ton of time to read this weekend, with all the trains and buses I had to take, but the time flew by while I was reading.  Then again how can you not enjoy reading about pirates and treasure?  This is a highly influential book, and in reading it I can see how many archetypes came from this book.  Like I said before much of the pirate lore and mythology was codified by this book

Jim Hawkins – is the narrator and hero of the story.  He is the one that initiates the adventure by getting his hands on the treasure map.  His ensuing story is not only one that appeals to young boys, but to anyone who has ever had dreams of sailing the open seas looking for adventure.  Jim Hawkins can be added to the short list of child narrators in literature that work.  For me the only other one that worked was Huck Finn.

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The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov, is a hilarious, but deep book.  Although I have never read Faust this book is influenced by it.   The Master and Margarita deals with what happens in Moscow when the devil comes to town for a visit.  The devil comes with his gang of miscreants that include a humongous talking black cat, a pirate, a naked witch, and Korovyov the choir master.  They descend upon Moscow wreaking havoc wherever they go.  However, since Muscovites don’t believe in God or Satan, they have to find some way to explain all of the strange occurrences that are befalling the city.  This was a great book to read after The Brothers Karamazov, because one of the themes that Dostoevsky explores in it is the struggle between science and religion.  In Dostoevsky’s work, one of the prevalent fears throughout is the loss of faith of the Russian people–especially in The Demons.  He sees that nihilism is becoming too prevalent among the Russian people, and Dostoevsky worries about what may happen if this trend continues.  Bulgakov’s book is written in the 1930′s when the ideals of communism are in full force, and many of Dostoevsky’s fears have been realized.  Despite seeing the unbelievable and the supernatural the citizens of Moscow refuse to believe, and they actively try to dispel any notions that Satan is real.  The devil and his retinue are hilarious, and yet, very scary.  This is a devil that seems real.  He is intelligent, conniving, and ruthless; although his gang is even more ruthless, and at times have to be restrained by the devil, but not often.  These characters absolutely love creating chaos and mayhem, and although it can be a bit unnerving it is nevertheless an extremely enjoyable read.

The Master, however, is one of the few who dares to not only believe, but to write a story about Pontius Pilate.  His story of Pontius Pilate and Jesus is like nothing you have ever read before, and is highly entertaining.  It is this story that gets him into trouble, and eventually garners the attention of the devil.

Margarita, is the women who loves the Master.  She loves him so much, in fact, that she is willing to do anything for him.  She goes through her own heroes journey in the book, and proves that she is willing to move heaven and hell for the love of her life.

Bulgakov masterly interweaves history with fantasy throughout the novel.  The book at the same time is a scathing review on Soviet life under Stalin.  It was censored in by the Soviet Union, and was not published uncensored until late in the 20th Century.  Like I mentioned above what is this book really comes down to is a realization of the fears that Dostoevsky perceived to be coming more than fifty years before this novel was published.  Unlike other Russian novels, which are extraordinarily verbose and lengthy, The Master and Margarita clocks in at 335 pages.  So if the long novels are too daunting for you than this is a much shorter novel, and more readable than Dostoevsky.  It was an enjoyable read, and a very good book, but for me it still not as good as either The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment, or The Idiot.  But then I am also a bit of a masochist and I really enjoy long, long well written novels.  And now for the excerpt.  During this scene the devil and his evil gang make their official entrance onto the Moscow scene in the form of a magic show at the Variety Theater.

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I should begin by stating that I absolutely love Dostoevsky, and Russian Literature.  This is the fourth major novel of his that I have read.  The other three are Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, and The Demons (also alternately titled The Possessed ).  This novel I would rank after Crime and Punishment and probably just in front of The Idiot.  Although The Demons is a good book is lags well behind the others.  Reading Dostoevsky is daunting.  Every time I start on page 1, and realize that I have 700+ pages left, I feel that I will never finish.  His books are long, methodical, and incredibly verbose.  For many people this is unacceptable, and they can’t stand reading books that long.  I, however, really enjoy long, well written books.  In this day and age of instant gratification, even in modern novels, it is nice to read a book that takes its time.  Like his other books, this one starts out slowly plodding along like an old horse.   It is his prose and his ability to write consistent, believable characters that makes his books so enjoyable.  He is a true master, and I learn something new about writing every time I read his work.

The Brothers Karamazov, in my opinion, is a much more lofty and mature work.  It is rightly considered his greatest work, because it is his most ambitious.  It seems as if he took everything he learned from his previous novels–including the grand themes from each–and combined them into one glorious masterpiece.  Dostoevsky’s greatest strength is how he writes his characters.  He is able to take the reader into the mind of these fabulous–and many times dark–characters.  In Crime and Punishment the whole novel is about the inner workings of the mind of a murderer before, during, and after his murder, and subsequently into his path to redemption.  Dostoevsky was able to expand on that, and other themes that he had explored in previous books.  He brings in his ideas of God, science, nihilism, corruption, good and evil, and many others from The Idiot and The Demons.  Like in The Idiot, an epileptic character plays a major role in this novel.  The Brothers Karamazov is about so much more than parricide.  The book was published during 1879-80, and during this time science really started to conflict with religion.  Dostoevsky uses this book, in part, as a treatise on the fundamental questions of the relationship between religion and science.  Can they co-exist?  Does God exist or is he just a construct of man?

These are some of the questions that are raised in the book, and these questions help to drive the story.  One question posed is if God doesn’t exist, and is just the creation of man, then there is no sin.  Sin only exists if God exists, and therefore, if God doesn’t exist, then everything is legal, and nothing is prohibited.  Dostoevsky writes convincingly in favor of each stance, and shows a real knowledge about both topics.  (Dostoevsky, in fact, knows deeply about both topics.  He was sentenced to death for his radical socialistic views–a sentence which was rescinded.  He ended up spending four years in exile, in prison, in Siberia.  It was here where Dostoevsky renounced his radical and subversive views, and became deeply religious.  It was also here in Siberia that Dostoevsky’s was in the company of the worst sort of people: murderers, rapists, robbers, and other corrupted men.  It is through his close proximity to these people that allows him to write about these characters so convincingly.) These ideas of religion, science, and reason are characterized by the three sons of Fyodor Karamazov: Dmitri, Ivan, and Alexey (who is the hero of the novel).

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I’ve been meaning to read Catch-22, by Joseph Heller, for years, and I have finally gotten around to it.  I just finished it yesterday after reading it obsessively for the last few days.  It has to be one of the funniest books I have ever read.  I don’t even remember how many times someone stared at me because I was laughing uncontrollably on the subway, coffee shop, or walking down the street (yes this book was so good I often read it whilst walking down the street).  There were more laugh out loud moments than most comedies.  Besides being hilarious the book was also pretty deep.  The book, for those that don’t know, is about bomber pilots in World War II.  Invariably when you add war and death to a book it’s going to be deep; but Heller does it in a way that doesn’t get the reader depressed.  The book has everything from an anti-war message to hilarious stories about Italian whores.  If you are looking for a new book to read make it this one; and if you’re already reading a book make this one a priority to read next.  There are a literally tons of great scenes in this book; unfortunately I couldn’t find my favorite online–I’m way too lazy to type it–so instead I will post one of the best that I could find online enjoy.

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