A River Runs Through It, and other stories by Norman Maclean

Posted on June 6, 2013 by pagesofjulia

riverNorman Maclean is a poet and a genius. Annie Proulx’s foreword, and Macleans’ own acknowledgements, had me spellbound from the first moments; even before I began the first of three stories, I had to put the book down and meditate on what I’d read. Consider the final lines of the acknowledgements:

This, then, in summary, is a collection of Western stories with trees in them for children, experts, scholars, wives of scholars, and scholars who are poets. I hope there are others also who don’t mind trees.

This is Maclean’s first book, published when he was already an old man. It includes three pieces I have a little trouble categorizing. Short stories? Well, they’re not particularly short, not consistently: the first one is over 100 pages and therefore more properly a novella; the second is 20 pages; the third, 90. They are also nonfiction, which makes calling them short stories or novellas also problematic. Take that as you will. They are very fine, whatever they are.

I am going to write this review much like I did yesterday’s, heavy on the quotations because this writer is such a Writer.

“A River Runs Through It,” the title story and the one best critically received, begins:

In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing. We lived at the junction of great trout rivers in western Montana, and our father was a Presbyterian minister and a fly fisherman who tied his own flies and taught others. He told us about Christ’s disciples being fishermen, and we were left to assume, as my brother and I did, that all first-class fishermen on the Sea of Galilee were fly fishermen and that John, the favorite, was a dry-fly fisherman.

We meet a young Norman and his brother Paul, briefly as boys to establish their personalities and their relationship with fishing (every bit as reverent as those opening lines suggest), and then we delve into their lives in their early thirties. They fish together. Paul is a gifted fly fisherman. They have a noncommunicative (stereotypically male) relationship, but they worship together at the river, hone their craft, share special moments; their world is intruded upon by the unpleasantness of Norman’s brother-in-law, who is (gasp) a bait fisherman. Paul also likes to fight, and he comes to a young and violent end. All these years later, the Maclean who writes this story might be seen as exorcising a youthful trauma; lucky for us it is as thoughtful, wise, delicate, and beautiful as it is.

…I could never be talked into believing that all a fish knows is hunger and fear. I have tried to feel nothing but hunger and fear and don’t see how a fish could ever grow to six inches if that were all he ever felt. In fact, I go so far sometimes as to imagine that a fish thinks pretty thoughts.

Again I see Derrick Jensen here: fish are people, too.

What a beautiful world it was once. At least a river of it was. And it was almost mine and my family’s, and just a few others’ who wouldn’t steal beer. You could leave beer to cool in the river, and it would be so cold when you got back it wouldn’t foam much. It would be a beer made in the next town if the town were ten thousand or over. So it was either Kessler Beer made in Helena or Highlander Beer made in Missoula that was left to cool in the Blackfoot River. What a wonderful world it was once when all the beer was not made in Milwaukee, Minneapolis, or St. Louis.

If you don’t see Hemingway’s legacy there, I don’t know what I can say to help you. Maclean was born just three years after Papa, but Hemingway had been dead over a decade when this, Maclean’s first book, was published, so at least in literary terms they are a generation apart. No one can write prayerfully about fishing and the beauty of a trout stream without channeling that man.

I sat there and forgot and forgot, until what remained was the river that went by and I who watched. On the river the heat mirages danced with each other and then they danced through each other and then they joined hands and danced around each other. Eventually the watcher joined the river, and there was only one of us. I believe it was the river.

Again, talk about prayerful – a word he uses several times, actually, and appropriately. I won’t quote the famous final line of this story for you. Go find it out for yourself. I cannot argue with the accepted notion that “A River Runs Through It” is Maclean’s masterpiece.

Next is “Logging and Pimping and ‘Your Pal, Jim'”, a story of Maclean’s work as a young man on a logging camp, during the summers while he’s not in school becoming an academic. The man who signs his letters as in the story’s title is a mystery, and the fact that Maclean leaves him unexplained felt a little strange but, of course, very real. It’s an entertaining and rather disturbing little tale, worth the time, but nothing compared to River.

And then there is “USFS 1919: The Ranger, the Cook, and a Hole in the Sky,” almost as long as the first story and less well received critically, but in my opinion very striking. It focuses on just a few weeks during the time Maclean spent working for the Forest Service, yes, in 1919, when the world was a little different place:

We were fairly representative of early Forest Service crews as I came to know them – maybe not even that good, because the war had ended less than a year before and many of the best men had not yet returned to the woods, and the earth was still pretty much in the care of the old with corrugated skin and tiny steps and young punks looking for a fight and gassed Canadians and anonymous lookouts who had to be there but can’t be remembered. Not one had ever seen the inside or the outside of a school of forestry. But, as Bill said, we were a pretty good crew and we did what we had to do and loved the woods without thinking we owned them, and each of us liked to do at least one thing especially well – liked to swing a jackhammer and feel the earth overpowered by dynamite, liked to fight, liked to heal the injuries of horses, liked to handle groceries and tools and tie knots. And nearly all of us liked to work. When you think about it, that’s a lot to say about a bunch of men.

The first line introduces our narrator:

I was young and I thought I was tough and I knew it was beautiful and I was a little bit crazy but hadn’t noticed it yet.

And there is wisdom about nature:

…the mountains of Idaho, poems of geology stretching beyond any boundaries and seemingly even beyond the world.

And work:

The unpacking was just as beautiful – one wet satin back after another without saddle or saddle sore, and not a spot of white wet flesh where hair and hide had rubbed off. Perhaps one has to know something about keeping packs balanced on the backs of animals to think this beautiful, or to notice it at all, but to all those who work come moments of beauty unseen by the rest of the world.

And as a historical moment in time, I found it only a hair’s breadth less impressive than River. I like to read about the Forest Service, and I can’t wait to get into Maclean’s Young Men and Fire, about the Mann Gulch forest fire of 1949, in Montana, where a bunch of young smokejumpers were killed. (My fascination with forest, and fire, holds over from Fire Season, obviously.)

I am reeling from this book. Especially having read A River Runs Through It back-to-back with The Solace of Open Spaces, and with the two set side-by-side (or, top to bottom) in Wyoming and Montana, I feel swept away. Sometimes our reading happens this way, that a set of books come together to effect more than the sum of the parts. So, like Ehrlich’s lesser-known work, I will say that Maclean’s is… wise, compassionate, lyrical, and so important and beautiful in its honoring of a dying version of our world. Highly recommended.

Rating: 9 beads of sweat.

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The Solace of Open Spaces by Gretel Ehrlich

Posted on June 5, 2013 by pagesofjulia

Edit: see Pops’s review here.

solaceThe observation that sticks with me most from this slim, beautiful book is: it’s interesting how poetic nature writing never grows old for me, even though in some ways Ehrlich’s work here is not particularly new. She is unique, like every one of us snowflakes – I don’t mean to call her derivative; read on – but she definitely follows in a tradition; and what I’m trying to say is, I am always ready for another literary descendant of Thoreau, Leopold and Abbey. Especially when she’s a woman and offers a little different take in that respect.

Gretel Ehrlich is decidedly special, for all that I’ve compared her to the greats that she has followed. For one thing, her writing is exquisite, like perfect drops of water with points of light shining on them. Her story is her own, too. She was a filmmaker in New York City who traveled to Wyoming in 1976 to shoot a film, and also to escape the way in which her life was falling apart: the man she loves, her business partner, had just been given only a few months to live. She hangs around sheep ranches until she becomes one of them, a sheepherder, a ranch hand, a rancher. She visits with the dying man, keeps in touch, in pain, and then he dies far away while she’s preparing to fly home to see him. So her time in Wyoming, in the wild, on the frontier, with animals and laconic men, is a time of mourning and healing, as in Mountains of Light, or somewhat as in Fire Season.

Ehrlich’s wild is not Ed Abbey’s, or Phil Connors’, or Derrick Jensen’s, or Aldo Leopold’s wild; hers is populated by humans, nonnative stock animals and plant species, and irrigation. But it is far wilder than New York City, and far wilder than most of our country then and certainly most if not all of it now. It retained a wildness, including a human wildness. I love her descriptions of the human and animal personalities she comes to know. I also love her discussion of what it is to be a cowboy (or cowgirl, of which there are also several stunning examples).

But the best part has got to be her writing. And as I’m inclined to do in such cases, I’m trying to write less myself and share more of her lovely thoughts and phrases.

Disfigurement is synonymous with the whole idea of a frontier. As soon as we lay our hands on it, the freedom we thought it represented is quickly gone.

The old conundrum. We love it; we want to save and preserve and conserve it so we can enjoy it; but every act of enjoying is a failure of preservation. If we all lived in the wild it would be gone. (Which we’re headed towards, anyway.)

True solace is finding none, which is to say, it is everywhere.

As the title indicates, Erhlich is seeking solace – in the mourning of her lost partner, but also in the need for change more generally, I think.

Because she is the granddaughter of Ralph Waldo Emerson, I imagined she possessed unusual reserves of hardiness. But she protested. “I don’t do a very good job of it,” she said modestly. “I get in these hoarding moods and get mad at myself for all the stupid things I do. Then I pick up this old kaleidoscope and give it a whirl. See, it’s impossible to keep just one thing in view. It gives way to other things and they’re all beautiful.”

Isn’t that lovely? It’s always changing, and always beautiful. (Can’t say I’m not partial to an Emerson allusion, either.)

Winter scarified me. Under each cheekbone I thought I could feel claw marks and scar tissue.

Great imagery here, about the harshness of the world out there, in a Wyoming winter.

The seasons are a Jacob’s ladder climbed by migrating elk and deer. Our ranch is one of their resting places. If I was leery about being an owner, a possessor of land, now I have to understand the ways in which the place possesses me. Mowing hayfields feels like mowing myself. I wake up mornings expecting to find my hair shorn. The pastures bend into me; the water I ushered over hard ground becomes one drink of grass. Later in the year, feeding the bales of hay we’ve put up is a regurgitative act: thrown down from a high stack on chill days they break open in front of the horses like loaves of hot bread.

Derrick Jensen would like that. Ever since I read him (and before; but especially since), I’ve been thinking about the concept of land ownership, so this struck a chord.

And finally –

Leaves are verbs that conjugate the seasons.

Could a person ask for more than this? Leaves as verbs. Gretel Ehrlich, you have won me over.

Rating: 9 cowboys.

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guest review of sorts: The Other by David Guterson, from Pops

Posted on May 30, 2013 by pagesofjulia

In the same spirit in which we both read Endgame and Ishmael, Pops has recently read David Guterson’s The Other, and I have some snippets of his thoughts to share with you. For a little background, I read The Other too, a number of years ago (and pre-blog). I liked it very much; I found it thought-provoking and wise, and it reminded me of a very dear friend. I later read Guterson’s better-known Snow Falling on Cedars, and found it fine but not comparable – so there’s yet another case in which the general opinion differs from mine. Now I will turn this over to Pops, whose thoughts are just represented in brief passages here for you, along with those bits from the book that he found memorable. As ever, thank you Dad for sharing with us.

other

I just finished reading The Other, and it was quite stunning. In fact, it was nearly literally stunning. (Starting a book with a story about a couple runners is quite a hook for me anyway!)

Why did I wait this long to pick this book up? It has been on my shelf for years and I almost discarded it unread several times without ever knowing why I kept it other than a vague knowledge that it came recommended. I’m embarrassed to find that Julia even referenced it in publishing my comments about Fire Season! How could I have overlooked it for so long? Was this book exercising an independent will, waiting for a certain moment?

I don’t remember terribly many details of the plot from my years-ago reading, but I’ll try to assemble a quick synopsis from memory: two young men, Neil and John William, are friends in high school. They run together. After high school ends and they transition towards adulthood, they head in different directions. Neil becomes a teacher, and John William retreats towards the wild. He camps out in the woods, hikes, lives off the land. He is simultaneously very cerebral, reads poetry, discusses it with Neil; they correspond. They play chess. John William is the superior player. Gradually, JW withdraws more and more from society and from his family; he enlists Neil’s help in disappearing entirely. He wastes away out in the mountains alone in ways that look unhealthy to our eyes as trained by society. He also rejects some things but not others, in a way that looks hypocritical but, I came to feel, highlights the contradictions in us all, in society, in what the world has to offer us. I’m not expressing that well; I blame my distant and vague recollection of the book. JW comes to a less than savory end, and Neil is left with his own compromises.

My father does not discuss plot much here. He and I may have to have our own, off-the-record discussion; as I said in my review of Endgame (link at the top of this post), these issues are very personal, and at some point fall outside the scope of this blog. But in the briefest, sketchiest way possible, Pops says…

What is this book about? Why the impact?

• Two runners with a life long bond
• Seattle, the Olympics and other northwest locations evoked with affection and an insider’s eye
• Timing: in the midst of a streak of eerily connected non-fiction, a novel that matches the others for relevance
• Particularly & effectively juxtaposed with my other current read: E.O. Wilson’s The Social Conquest of Earth (an informed scientific look at “who we are”)
• John William, the character focus of much attention, seeks and ultimately sees too clearly the reality of human’s place on earth, and suffers the fate of such seekers; he becomes an isolated loner in an insane world, tragically fated to be branded insane himself (“the other”)
• Neil, the other character and narrator, who is painfully wedded to the civilization torturing his friend yet arguably as alienated in his own way, and ultimately as tortured by his addiction, notwithstanding sudden wealth
• Though only tantalizingly developed, I loved the character of his wife, Jamie.
• Why are Neil’s sons never named? There are more significant characters in the book, all named; but these are the beloved offspring of our narrator!
• Inspiring contemplation on humanity’s endless, frivolous and prideful introspection in pursuit of explaining who we are, while we never grasp the greater tragedy of our puny yet destructive role in the natural world
• The futility of wealth solving any of our problems – and thus the trivial & sad quest for it
• Brouwer’s, the notable Belgian beer bar in the UW area, is specifically described.

Following are some passages, to offer just a few places where I stopped to reread and contemplate.

This paragraph I reread many times, due to the language and the message hidden there; not an easy one to parse out!

“A light he was to no one but himself” – that’s a line from a Frost poem, “An Old Man’s Winter Night,” which a lot of students don’t respond to very strongly. “A light he was to no one but himself” – I wouldn’t choose that, and if I have to suffer it one day, because of circumstances, I’m fairly certain it will lead to my demise, because that cast, that illumination, is foreign to me – I’m finally saddled with my take on things as ineluctably as I’m slowed, and pained, by the neuroma in my foot. So be it. I have the beauty that I have, and none other, in the meantime. One thing has led to the next in my life, but like lines of a poem. I suppose I’ve thrown in my lot with love, and don’t know any other way to go on breathing. I embrace this world – the world my friend hated – and suffer it consciously for its compensations, and fully expect to awake one day to the consequences of this bargain I’ve struck, since life, eventually, closes in.

On heading into the woods, only to find that your mind is not quite with the program for some reason…

The place felt sinister though. Your imagination can get the better of you where a road ends against a forest. It’s easy to feel trapped with your back against trees. Vulnerable to all of this, I got on the trail and tried loving my solitude, but this was a futile and self-conscious effort. I didn’t want to be there, by myself, while the sun went down. I didn’t want to be hiking in such a tense silence. The maple leaves were youthfully green, but that didn’t ameliorate my nervous view of things. Before dark, I bivouacked, tentless, by the river, banking up a fire in front of a boulder and basking in its heat with my journal and The Collected Eliot, 1909-1962, which an excitable professor had asked me to scour, and although all of that might sound pleasant enough, or not a bad way to pass evening hours – especially with the din of water on the gravel bars and my view of stars illuminated silhouetted hills – I didn’t enjoy being there. I suppose you could say that my aloneness got the better of me, or that I felt fear that night, by the river, by myself – but fear of life, and not of animals or the forest. “The Hollow Men” didn’t help, because I couldn’t disown its mood, or break its hold on my thoughts, as I lay in my sleeping bag by those smoking coals, and though this temper made me tired, it also left me agitated enough to prod, more often than I needed to, the sticks I was burning. I mostly felt wistful. I didn’t want to have behind, already, some experiences I couldn’t have again. Reading Eliot by flashlight was like deciphering runes, and made it more difficult to sleep.

On how ephemeral is “reality” about ourselves (individually or as humanity), and how our “advanced” minds can create such enormous conceit out of nothing…

…maybe the truth is that truth is too complicated. If I extrapolate from myself, there’s a lot of deceit in the world without a beginning, middle, or end. The way it really works, a lot of the time, is that you suffer from the weight of what happened, from what you said and did, so you lie as therapy. Now the story you make up starts to take up space otherwise reserved for reality. For phenomena you substitute epiphenomena. Skew becomes ascendant. The secondary becomes primary. When it’s time to confess, you don’t know what you’re saying. Are you telling the truth, or do you confuse your lies with reality? The question is comical. The answer is lost in the maelstroms of consciousness. It’s even possible to pretend, eventually, that the question wasn’t asked. You’ve been kidding yourself about yourself for so long, you’re someone else. Your you is just a fragile fabrication. Every morning, you have to wake up, assemble this busy, dissembling monster, and get him or her on his or her feet again for another round of fantasy. Is this what some sutras by Buddhists are about? Maybe. The book-length bromides on mental health? At times. The biographies on politicians? Take Nixon or Clinton. Anyway, I don’t know anything about Rand or Ginnie. I don’t know if anyone tried to strangle John William. I don’t really know who tormented whom, or why, or if anyone was even tormented at all. I don’t even know much about myself. I only know that Ginnie protested with Chronic Obsessions pressed against her bibbed chest. Then she kicked me out.

And finally, two paragraphs near the book’s end, set apart in a section on their own, on the emptiness of wealth against a background of questioning…

Jamie and I turned in the ’92 Civic and bought a hybrid, which we recently took to the Canadian Okanagan – the Napa of the North that Wiley and Erin told us about. We walked, swam, biked, sunned, tasted wines, ate well, bought pottery, and watched the sun go down, and though all of this was fun, none of it made us happy. We both wanted something else that was unnameable. It might be forever unnameable. In this regard, money changes nothing, which Jamie and I knew before we had it.

When I think about my friend, I think about someone who followed through, and then I’m glad not to have followed through, to still be breathing, to still be here with people, to still be walking in the mountains, and to still be uncertain – even with all this cash on hand – in a way I seem to have no choice about. I’m a hypocrite, of course, and I live with that, but I live.

Powerful stuff.

It is powerful stuff. I realize we haven’t given you much of a review to speak of, here. But I hope we have expressed that Guterson tells a unique tale in an evocative fashion, that has managed at least to provoke two of us to further reflection and discussion.

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Out of Their Minds: The Incredible and (Sometimes) Sad Story of Ramón and Cornelio by Luis Humberto Crosthwaite

Posted on May 29, 2013 by pagesofjulia

A bizarre and entertaining tale of two Mexican norteño musicians guided by God–and the price they pay for their fame.

outoftheirminds

Luis Humberto Crosthwaite’s Out of Their Minds, a novel first published in Spanish in 2001, is a motley collection of fictional interviews, dreams, dialogues and sketches. It’s centered on Ramón and Cornelio, a couple of bored kids in Tijuana with a bajo sexto and an accordion. Then God speaks to Cornelio, offering to write his songs for him, and the duo known as los Relampagos de Agosto (a sly reference to Jorge Ibargüengoitia’s satiric The Lightning of August?) takes off.

Greeted onstage by screaming women throwing underwear, their world explodes in undreamed-of decadence and groupies. Fast forward a few years, though, and Ramón and Cornelio’s lives are sadly riddled with drugs and superficiality. Unsurprisingly, the two lifelong friends no longer see eye to eye, and the rock-and-roll lifestyle has dimmed their fire. Where they used to lie awake at night and discuss the perfect girlfriend (she must have pretty feet), now their wives have left them and Ramón talks to his accordion instead.

In the ever-shifting perspective of this strange world, where God worries about producing fresh material (“he doesn’t want to be judged as a repetitive God, with few ideas”) while a friend of Cornelio dies over and over again, the duo’s career arc clearly references the Beatles–but places them in Mexico’s norteño music scene. Wry, lyrical and frequently funny, the story of Ramón and Cornelio is indeed incredible and sometimes sad; but the music plays on and we continue to revel in it.

This review originally ran in the May 24, 2013 issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun!

Rating: 6 blurry nights.

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Endgame, Volume 1: The Problem of Civilization by Derrick Jensen

Posted on May 23, 2013 by pagesofjulia

endgameHow to write about this book for you here? Derrick Jensen fearlessly assesses the terrifying state of our world, for us as people and as not-the-only inhabitants of a globe that is sick with our presence and practices. It is difficult to write about what he has to say and my reactions to it; it’s very personal, because I and/or people I love may or may not be trying to follow some of Jensen’s teachings even as we speak. What I really want to say in this so-called “book review” is, go read Jensen now, and then do something about it.

The concept of endgame is familiar to me from chess. The idea is that we’re trying to get to a final outcome of this chess match, trying to establish a winner and a loser, and there’s no sense hanging on to all these pieces and stretching things out. Instead, I will happily give up my bishops (knights, rooks, queen, all of ’em) in exchange for yours, in order to hurry up the desirable end of the game. Endgame takes the same concept – a desirable hurrying of this game onto its inevitable finish – and applies it to our world, or rather, to civilization. He tells his reader why and how our civilization or culture is hopelessly, insanely f*cked up. He argues that we ARE headed for an end to civilization – and quite appropriately and desirably so – and that we should be hastening this end, the sooner that we can then begin living more sanely (if there’s any “we” left), and the healthier that the planet and anything left on it will be post-endgame.

This may very well sounds nuts to you, if you haven’t given things like global warming, mass extinctions, water shortage, and worldwide social injustices much thought. But it might make a great deal of sense – especially if you let Derrick Jensen tell it, which I really recommend, as he does a far better job of it than I do. Perhaps my first surprise in reading Endgame is that there were no surprises. Jensen makes these arguments so incredibly articulately, cleverly, even funnily, and backs them up so solidly, that I am wowed; but nothing he had to say was entirely new or surprising to me (sadly). He does a really fabulous job of expressing clearly what I already knew, suspected or feared. He also presented some new angles that I hadn’t much considered; and he expands the scope and scale of our problems in a way that I appreciate and found thought-provoking. Make no mistake: Jensen is a philosopher, a thinker, a cerebral guy who has clearly done copious research and spent time talking with some of the smartest people out there. Would that we all had time to do this kind of research and thinking! (Since we don’t, read Endgame.) My father has noted that even climate change experts like Bill McKibben stop short of the dire predictions Jensen posits. I think considering these scary truths is useful, instructive, and constructive, even while it’s sad and terrifying.

If you believe that we just need to drill for more oil; that those with lots of money have the right (and the duty) to protect what’s theirs; and that poor people in poor countries that still have some trees (oil, etc.) left should just move over for those of us that know better – Jensen is unlikely to convince you otherwise. He doesn’t really bother with you, in fact: you are not his audience. (“I was going to suggest those who think the U.S. invasion [of Iraq] has nothing to do with oil should put the book down, but realized they’ve probably already tired of the big words.”) And maybe that’s as it should be, too. Convincing those people is a big job – possibly an impossible one – and there’s other important work to be done. I don’t know that we should be wasting our Derrick Jensens on convincing the hardline fans of civilization that they’re wrong.

Aside from the clearly central issue that I appreciate what he had to say, see the wisdom of his arguments, and applaud his articulations, I also really enjoy Jensen’s conversational style. He can somewhat ramble, but is abundantly coherent for all that; maybe it was just my deep interest and passion for what he was saying (I’m nodding and saying “yea, yea!” as I read), but it all flowed very well even while jumping around a little. Of course I must say too that I loved his love for parentheticals (he mentions how much this frustrates his editor!) because, can you tell, I share it. I believe it was on his website that I read that he completes each page (or several), completely, before moving on to the next: that is, when he’s writing page 11, pages 1-10 are done. I find this fascinating. (I’m always interested in the mechanics of my favorite writers.) And it allows for a journal-like feel: he’ll break off from an argument he’s making to tell an anecdote, like “tonight I gave a talk, and at the end a woman said…”, and the reader is right there in the present with him. He wrote that paragraph on the night that that woman said that thing.

I would also like to make a contrast to yesterday’s DNF book, and say that a key piece of Jensen’s structure here is in stating at the start 20 premises he believes in. He writes,

I want to lay them out as clearly as I can, for you to accept or reject. Part of the reason I want to do this is that the questions I’m exploring regarding civilization are the most important questions we as a culture and as individuals have ever been forced to face. I don’t want to cheat. I want to convince neither you nor me unfairly (nor, for that matter, do I want to convince either of us at all), but instead to help us both better understand what to do (or not do) and how to do it (or why not). This goal will be best served by as much transparency – and honesty – as I can muster.

He then spends 450 pages proving his premises.

I appreciate this clarity. Frankly, I was already on board with his assumptions, but agree wholeheartedly that this is far too important a problem to make assumptions about; the intellectual exercise of questioning our assumptions is absolutely necessary. I like that he is so reflective, asking questions he can’t answer, reconsidering. This is too important a moment for blustering false positivity. Therefore, even though I was willing to buy into premises like, “The culture as a whole and most of its members are insane. The culture is driven by a death urge, an urge to destroy life,” I still value having them proven to me. Jensen questions himself and his own motives. And that’s something I respect.

A solid ‘A’ for style, then, but the real ‘eureka’ for his thoughts and arguments and philosophies. I can’t wait to read Volume II: what we’re going to do about it.

Rating: take note: 10 salmon.

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did not finish: Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy by Eric Metaxas (audio)

Posted on May 22, 2013 by pagesofjulia

bonhoefferI’ve gotten better at putting down books I’m not enjoying. As I keep repeating to myself & others, there are far too many excellent books in this world for me to ever read them all, so why would I spend my precious, limited reading time on less-than-excellent books? But I guess I’m still working on applying this same policy to audiobooks. They are fewer, and a little harder to get my hands on, so I find myself taking more chances with audiobooks. But somewhere between a third and halfway through Bonhoeffer, I gave up.

This is the biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German pastor and theologian who lost a brother in World War I and was more prescient than many during Hitler’s rise to power. He was already involved in “the church,” but as Hitler’s government worked to take over the German church establishment, Bonhoeffer became even more active. I didn’t get this far, but apparently he also acted as a spy (for the anti-Nazi Abwehr), and was involved in a plot to assassinate Hitler.

As a non-Christian, I thought I would be able to appreciate this as a work of history and biography. But I found myself too much irked by the unspoken premises: that Bonhoeffer, as a good Christian, was a good guy; that he could do no wrong; that the Christian church was inherently good. Christian readers of this book (who I can only assume are the majority, and its target audience) will naturally not be offended by these assumptions; but I am bothered by premises being treated as fact. Bonhoeffer comes off as a good and likeable man, and I may even miss him; but he’s presented as a totally good man, and I just can’t buy that about any human being. In other words, I don’t think Metaxas treats him objectively, and that tends to bother me a great deal in my reading. The religious bias, combined with copious quotations from the Bible, proved too much for me. In a shorter book, I would have hung in there: I made it 8-10 hours into its 22 hours! But I could go no farther.

I am happy to accept that Bonhoeffer was, on balance, a force for good against Hitler’s evil; but in a lengthy biography I would expect a little more objectivity, and would prefer a nonreligious starting point for study. I found his life interesting and would read another book about him. But not this one.

Rating: 2 sermons.

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Ishmael by Daniel Quinn

Posted on May 20, 2013 by pagesofjulia

ishmaelIshmael comes recommended by my father, and that’s enough for me.

It’s an environmental novel published in 1992. So, dated? Or prophetic? I’m afraid it stands firm today; we can debate whether it’s overly alarmist (ha) or overly optimistic (sigh), but I didn’t run across anything that dated it especially for me. The premise is: our narrator (who, I’m pretty sure, remains nameless) is a disillusioned 30-something who, as a teen, had looked for someone to guide his idealistic, revolutionary, 1970’s-style environmentalism, and come out disappointed and cynical. Now that it’s “too late”, he’s frustrated to find the following advertisement in the newspaper:

TEACHER seeks pupil. Must have an earnest desire to save the world. Apply in person.

(Is “newspaper” the term that dates this story?) Narrator responds jadedly, assuming this is a charlatan, a scammer; but still he goes to the address listed, because he has to satisfy his curiosity (and presumably because some part of him hopes that someone out there can really teach him how to save the world). In this anonymous retail space, he finds… a gorilla. A big, scary gorilla behind a glass wall; and on Narrator’s side of the wall, a chair. He eventually sits, and our gorilla – Ishmael – “speaks” telepathically to him. Ishmael relates his life story, and they begin discussing What’s Wrong With The World And What We Can Do About It.

Leaving aside the rather strange element of the telepathic and exceptionally well-read gorilla, the structure of this story is much like Sophie’s World, a novel I read pre-blog (thus no review here, sorry) and really, deeply loathed. It is credit to my faith in my father that I picked up Ishmael, knowing it was at all like that other. The structure I’m referring to is part of what I disliked about Sophie, although it works slightly better here: there is no plot, no action in the story, and no character development, because our characters don’t do anything. They form a didactic construction that allows Quinn, in ill-disguised fashion, to voice his own thoughts. If he were doing this in dialogue form, it would make a little more sense; but unfortunately the dialogue mostly consists of many paragraphs by one character, punctuated by the occasional “yes,” “true,” or “I don’t quite understand that part; can you tell me more?” from the other. Now, I liked what Quinn had to say, and I frankly liked the gorilla Ishmael, and so this framing element bothered me far less than it did with Sophie (shudder). But I still felt that it was unnecessary, distracting, and ill-concealed. I’d rather Quinn had just written a manifesto frankly stated as his own.

Quinn’s thesis in a nutshell is that our world is badly f*ed; humans have done it by behaving badly; and we need to change quickly if we hope to salvage the earth itself, its very deserving fellow occupants like butterflies, tigers, flowers and rocks, and any of ourselves. I find this thesis abundantly easy to follow. For decades we’ve known that we were badly screwing up this planet (unless you’re Big Oil and have found a way to put your head under the sand (to look for more oil) in which case you’re probably not reading Ishmael, or this blog). Actually I found the third part of the thesis – that we need to hurry up and change so that we can save the world – hardest to follow, because I think things are worse off than Quinn paints them to be. Of course, I’m writing this more than 20 years later, so I’ll give him a pass there.

That said, the friendly gorilla and the simply stated philosophical approach that he shares with our Narrator make an accessible argument. I could see this being a good entry-level discussion piece – or a jumping-off point for further discussion in a reading group or classroom setting. Ishmael is likeable, and the philosophy is mostly sound (at least until the part about how we can change; I am less hopeful than Ishmael is), and readable.

I am not sorry I read this. But I like Derrick Jensen’s Endgame better, even though it doesn’t have as happy an ending. More on that book to come.

Rating: 5 sessions.

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The Lost Summer of Louisa May Alcott by Kelly O’Connor McNees (audio)

Posted on May 16, 2013 by pagesofjulia

louisaThis is a fictionalization of one season in the life of Louisa May Alcott, author most famously of Little Women. Louisa and her family are very like her famous fictional creations in many ways. The eldest daughter, Anna, clearly models for Meg of LW; then there’s Louisa/Jo, then Lizzie/Beth, and then Amy/May. Louisa’s mother Abba does go by Marmee, as in the book; the first glaring departure from Alcott’s novel in her real life is that her father, Bronson, is not away at war. Instead, Bronson was a transcendentalist scholar and friend to the likes of Thoreau and Emerson, disinclined to work for a living (being principally opposed, you see); he founded a Utopian commune in which his family lived for a time, and otherwise they scrimped, borrowed, and got by how they could. [I know this is confusing: I am writing a review of a fictional book, about a real-life woman, who wrote a fictional book, about her real-life family. So far, in these bare details I’ve named, I am referring to the real-life Alcotts as well as the Alcotts represented in Kelly O’Connor McNees’ novel.]

In The Lost Summer of Louisa May Alcott, McNees sets the six Alcotts in Walpole, New Hampshire, living for the summer in a home that belongs to relatives, because they are poor and hungry and have to go where they can. The premise is that Louisa May Alcott – in real-life a confirmed spinster – had a brief love affair that summer that informed the rest of her life. History yields no indication that such an affair took place, so this is where the fiction begins.

The plot is simple and uninteresting, certainly not the strength of this book. The family is new to Walpole; Anna has recently decided that she is interested in getting married (as any good girl of her era would be) and works to make herself presentable to the town’s young men. Louisa is, as ever, hot-headed, passionate, interested mostly in her writing, and does not intend to marry because it would disrupt her freedom (to write, and otherwise). She is firmly a feminist, and deeply interested in her father’s friends Emerson and Thoreau, and in a new book of poetry called Leaves of Grass by somebody named Walt Whitman. Lizzie is sickly and fussed over. May is obnoxiously free from the privation that the rest of the family feels; Marmee is rather frustrated with her lot in life; and Bronson is thoroughly exasperating in his refusal to get realistic and provide for his family. Anna meets a boy. And Louisa meets a boy, and in stock romance-novel style, finds him unbearable right up until she falls in love with him. They are thwarted.

The strengths of The Lost Summer are in its subjects: lovers of Little Women will be charmed by the fictional-real-life models for Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy. The setting is rather charming, as well, and Joseph Singer (Louisa’s love interest) is likeable. But unlike the characters in Little Women, Anna, Louisa, Lizzie and May are underdeveloped. To be fair, it is a shorter book, and spans a much briefer time than its more famous model, so perhaps this should be excused. But I’m not really that forgiving, as I’ve seen masterful character development in mere pages (see: short story masters like Hemingway and de Maupassant). To be further fair, I’m not a fan of romance novels. (Maybe I should never have picked this book up?) That said, I was impatient with the plot line that had Louisa grumpy toward this man she simultaneously felt pulled towards – she went weak in the knees, etc., etc. – and then suddenly sick with love. It’s just too familiar, ho hum. And finally, too many of these characters were unlikeable (May, Bronson, even Marmee; Louisa for her bullheadedness; minor characters Margaret and Catherine, ugh!) for my tastes. I sort of felt that this story had misplaced its heroine.

Of some interest was the opportunity that McNees took to outline Louisa’s feminism and her limited options. I confess I did buy into the romance enough to wish that Joseph and Louisa could be together – could marry, or simply cohabitat – which latter option I realize is my modern-woman’s solution, and wasn’t really available to Louisa at all. Louisa talks and thinks through their options and what they would mean to her: how, for example, marriage would mean endless drudgery and housework for her, and the loss of her ability to write. This is a message that needed communicating, and I found it interesting and instructive to consider the limited options of a woman of this era. So a few points were regained here. However, these musings were only thinly veiled as dialogue or internal thoughts of the characters; I felt I could see McNees holding the strings.

For a quick, superficial, comfortable visit with the beloved Alcotts, come on in to Lost Summer; but if you’re looking for more, look elsewhere.

Audio edition was fine but unremarkable.

Rating: 4 oh-so-important ribbons.

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Yellowstone, Land of Wonders: Promenade in North America’s National Park by Jules Leclercq

Posted on May 15, 2013 by pagesofjulia

An unprecedented English translation of a travel narrative from the early years of Yellowstone National Park.

yellowstone
In 1883, a well-traveled French lawyer, writer and judge named Jules Leclercq explored the newly designated Yellowstone National Park on horseback. Three years later, he published a book praising the area’s strange and wondrous marvels–but the book is not simply a lovely appreciation of natural scenery. Leclercq also researched the history of the region and its people in order to write a scholarly study, a snapshot of a place in time. And yet there has never been a complete English-language translation of his original text until Janet Chapple and Suzanne Cane’s Yellowstone, Land of Wonders.

Leclercq is most fascinated by Yellowstone’s geysers: “The mind is so occupied with the extraordinary geological phenomena bursting upon one at every step,” he writes, “that one views the scenery only abstractedly.” He does, however, turn his pen to Yellowstone Lake and Falls; he considers the latter far superior to Niagara. He also includes a chapter on the park’s wildlife, and warns that whole species will be exterminated if hunting continues unchecked.

Leclercq’s narrative is imperfect. He sometimes quotes without attribution from contemporary sources and gets geological details wrong. But Chapple and Cane meticulously keep readers informed on such points. Their translation and editing–with copious notes–is thorough in confirming and expanding Leclercq’s points, offering commentary not just on Yellowstone but on the author and his era. The result has more than just historical value; as Leclercq concludes (and as is still true today), “All this grandeur inspires grave and religious thoughts.”

This review originally ran in the May 10, 2013 issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun!

Rating: 6 geysers.

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Other Voices, Other Rooms by Truman Capote

Posted on May 14, 2013 by pagesofjulia

othervoicesOther Voices, Other Rooms was Truman Capote’s first novel, and I have picked it up because it was referenced in The Used World. Such is the power of Haven Kimmel.

This is a strange, spooky, sad tale, beginning with an unwanted child: we meet 13-year-old Joel as he’s hitching a ride en route from New Orleans to a crumbling estate in Mississippi. He had been living with his aunt following his mother’s death; now he has been summoned to his father, who he’s never met. Upon arriving at Skully’s Landing, he finds no father, but an odd stepmother and her even odder cousin, Randolph. Approximating friends are a neighbor tomboy named Idabel and a black servant named Zoo. Eventually Joel’s father is revealed, mute, bedridden, and as horrifying as everything and everyone else at the Landing. Among these horrors are a ghostly woman in a window where no woman belongs; a cottonmouth “thick as his leg, long as a whip”; and a mule who hangs himself.

Randolph is clearly gay, and a model for the effeminate Joel to consider, for better or for worse – sexuality aside, Randolph has a dubious moral code. He relates (among other things) the story of how he met Joel’s father, in an episode that rather reminded me of The Sun Also Rises, in which a motley mismatch of characters in a debauched setting (here, New Orleans) are remarkably frank about who wants who sexually. Later, when Joel attends a country fair with Idabel, things turn more towards Alice in Wonderland, in its sinister moments. But Capote is in his own class here, regardless of my literary comparisons. He evokes a startling, ghostly, creepy, sleepy yet stark atmosphere, and for me, that atmosphere was the great accomplishment of this novel.

Plot-wise, Joel’s story is one where not a great deal happens but a major life change takes place, anyway. This is a coming-of-age story, in which Joel starts off decidedly a child but finishes – just a few months later – a young man with a somewhat clearer picture of himself. (But, I think, no happier.) Part of that coming-of-age regards his sexuality, but only in an unstated, amorphous way, which is a fair description of the whole book, really. In fact, I have to admit to some trouble following things, as so much is unstated and wavering and strangely expressed from varying and unreliable viewpoints. That this novel is at least vaguely autobiographical I guessed; that there were themes of understanding one’s sexuality and coming-of-age was clear to me. But the rest was less clear. In fact I was reminded somewhat (to drop another literary name) of Faulkner, a la The Sound and the Fury. I won’t bother regurgitating it for you here – they are not my own interpretations – but even Wikipedia (for example) gets way more out of this story than I got. Go figure.

I think Other Voices, Other Rooms is likely to be another great candidate for a “close reading” with a knowledgeable guide – I picture my high school English teacher, Mrs. Smith – to direct related readings and fill me in on the background. Without such assistance, I still enjoyed a creepy, weird tale of cobwebbed, forgotten Southern grandeur and depravity. Take it as you will. If nothing else, Capote’s talent shines through and foreshadows his future success – but I still prefer In Cold Blood.

Rating: 6 bluejay feathers.

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