Or, “George Saunders study course of exemplary Russian short stories.” In paperback.

The title comes from Chekhov’s “Gooseberries” when the character Ivan does exactly that: he takes a long dip. There is a metaphor at work here, involving happiness, venturing, immersion. But enough of that right now.

Derived from his creative writing class at Syracuse University, the book is a thorough examination of the form. As the reader reads each story, Saunders offers literary analysis and specific remarks on the author’s technique.

Saunders’ analysis preaches efficiency and relevance. He reminds us that every line and every detail counts. His perspective on story beginnings (“juggler pins are thrown in the air, and later must be accounted for”) and forward movement (“a series of calls and responses”) gets the reader involved and engaged in the early pages.

The first two model stories are presented in segments followed by Saunders’s discussion, and the rest are presented in full at the beginning of each chapter, with Saunders’ color commentary and “afterthoughts” presented in subsequent pages. All the included stories are terrific. This will renew your enthusiasm to read Chekhov, Tolstoy, or Gogol.

The overall effect is like taking the course itself. The reader is a student studying without papers to turn in or a classroom of writers to kibbitz with. In the appendices there are three exercises which are largely mental calisthenics more than short story drills. I found Saunders’ format similar to a University of Iowa short story course (which I took via Distance Learning) that featured the same basic setup of example story plus analysis. The difference in that course is, the stories under the microscope were by James Joyce — and students had to write and submit three original short stories.

I’ve been in the fiction-writing ballpark since the 1970s and believe it’s never too late to learn or get refreshed. I devoured the course during one of my getaway-from-the-draft breaks when I often venture into some sort of accelerated, self-inflicted writer’s boot camp or rehab. Largely however, I believe the book is aimed at new writers eager to learn the form, grind through their MFA program, get in the submissions game and have their short fiction recognized.

Recommend highly!

I was never in the military but I grew up in a military town and knew friends who were directly or indirectly part of it. In the 1970s this was the book of choice for them. They spoke enthusiastically about it, saying it was “so true,” even if they did qualify the statement by labeling it as after all fiction, but a scarily real and funny portrayal of how things are. It’s largely a guy book. One of the last good ones.

War is evil, other novels tell us. Or noble. Or unjust, inevitable and pitiful. Or cruel to the women who lose out because of it. The author and cast of Catch-22 imply that while all of that may be true, we’re not really getting into all that. We’re focusing on the absurdity of war and its horrors and how ridiculously inept and comical the military structure is set up to handle it. Here, the higher ranking officers are the bad guys, the no-good bums who bungle things and are lost in their own vanities. The B-25 flight crews, forced to make an increasing number of combat missions, are the pawns and the victims. Or in some cases accidental heroes.

The book is episodic and relies on an intertwined collection of interactions between various members in the flight squadron. Because these relationships are ultimately one in the face of battling the enemy, Heller repeats and reiterates the factors in these relationships. As pages go by, we learn our level of sympathy or disdain for each character, and there are some gems. Near the end, we see the evil in the high-ranking officers emerge, as the despicable (and morally blind) colonels compromise the hero Yossarian, which pushes him over the edge and sends him packing into the unknown.

Only Mailer had the literary audacity to write a novel that presents the “Greatest Story Ever Told” in 1st person Jesus. We get to read him speaking as a human, this plain carpenter and purported Son of God who broods with anecdotes about his birthright, and ruminates over his own flaws in contrast to the expectations put upon him. This personal narrative voice is distinctly different from the entrenched 3rd person accounts of a perfect and divine Jesus, as portrayed in the Gospels according to his top-dog apostles, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

Mailer presents the geography and the people with prose mostly free of enigmatic rhetoric. Scenes we all know well, such as conception or manger scene, are easy pickings for Mailer. He brings them alive on the page without flowery verse and stiff vocabulary musty with history and biblical stylistic haze. Even to an agnostic reader, this rendition of the Miracle Story is illuminating, educational, and engaging to read.

With the Devil leading the dialogue department, Mailer portrays Jesus’s meetup with him in the wilderness near the end of J’s 40-day fast. Old Mephisto appears several times, nagging the conscience of The Chosen One.

Mailer creates a heightened role for John the Baptist, who’s a sort of Jesus forerunner, depicting his teachings and influence, his baptism of J in the Jordan, and eventually his imprisonment and death by the hands of the Herod administration. John’s severed head is delivered to the King on a silver platter while Salome dances.

Mailer doesn’t go too far astray in his language. Much is paraphrasing, and he avoids sarcasm and modern lingo.

The first exorcism (vivid) and other various miracles performed are often described in terms of their draining effect on J, who constantly frets over proper appropriation of his super-energies. He tries to protect them, while the mass’s demands and the scribe paparazzi pursue him. A mere unwanted touch of the robe leaves him gassed.

Mailer ratchets up the suspense with a buildup of fear and resentment against J, who flees to hideaways like a shepherd’s shack and then a boat in the Sea of Galilee where he manages to preach in sort of a floating pulpit.

The story picks up pace and intrigue as Jesus selects and grooms his “cabinet” of twelve apostles. He has Personnel problems. Jesus commands them to spread the word and rations them on slivers of bread, so the guys argue about food and develop a “what’s in it for me?” attitude. Finally, Jesus manages to get them under control and on the road to Jerusalem.

There, they display radicalism going into the temple. Defiance of convention. Jesus dresses down the Pharisee moneylenders and wealthy merchants as greedy agents of Mammon. He matches wits with the Master of the Temple, whose name is not provided. There is plenty of angst among the group, as Jesus continues to play things fast and loose with the Romans.

Since Jesus is a clairvoyant at this point and already knows his and others’ fate, the starch comes out of his narration and he hurries toward the crucifixion.

Jesus is humbled by and often at odds with the Father. The question looms as the unhappy ending occurs: Does Jesus eventually fail his Father? Or vice versa? And was the resurrection story a bit of improvised feel-good coverup for a divine tragedy?

I’d likely have a more favorable opinion of this book of short stories had she given it a title other than “Florida.” The stories that are actually set in Florida reveal few features of the state that have not been harped on and exploited before, or features that could be anywhere. Maybe the title came from a designated period in her writing life, being a FL resident and teacher and writer up in the northern central part of the state, where perhaps she wrote and bundled these stories and sees them as her “Florida” experience. Which is fine, but is the material representative of the state as a whole? No.

Ubiquitous reptiles, lurking gators, bugs, heat, and lots and lots of snakes. Yes. Stereotypical, but okay.

Hard times, odd characters, crazy-ass rainstorms. Yes. Okay. (although the best storm description occurs in Brazil (in “Salvador”).

Degenerate husbands and other male losers. To the point of grinding an axe. No. Please don’t identify my state with that sort of stuff.

Women being self-reliant and heroic (and adoring of children). Well, okay, but not when it’s excessive and at the price of all those “male losers.”

Mechanically, Lauren Groff writes like a seasoned craftsman. She weaves some great sentences into engaging sequences. She can build a great story. Problem is, some of her FL stories stop cold when they should keep going. Readers are left in the lurch at odd moments. Even so, the book – grim as it is – leaves impressions and causes an imaginative stir.

Bad title is not a big deal. After all it’s only a book of short stories. Writers can find their fame more often by producing a good novel rather than in placing hyper-realism stories in the New Yorker. Believing this to be true with Groff (and always rooting for writers in Florida), I’m looking forward to reading her newest novel, “Matrix.”

….Some unorganized comments about three or four books I recently read or re-read (maybe the sixth time for Catcher). They came across my nightstand one after another. All of them, coincidentally (or maybe by subconscious choice), portray craziness.

The trend began with Jonathon Franzen’s new novel, Crossroads. By comparison to the other books mentioned here, Crossroads is a very mild trip. The craziness in his cast of Middle American church-going suburbanites is less visible, cloaked by appearances. Being whacked out to one degree or another is typical. As such, one is subject to mistakes and exposure within a close community of other whackos. Franzen’s skill as a writer here is in showing how insidious and damaging hidden problems can be. It’s a systemic sort of craziness.

More specifically, Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye is loaded with personal neurosis and dangerous self-destructive behavior. In his monologue Holden points out many parts of life that he calls phony. He goes crazy trying to deal with phony people and all the harsh and bogus aspects of the world. His diatribes often echo what many of us have also considered true. There is an undercurrent wish of “if only things weren’t this way.” The irony is heavy: how can someone depressed and alienated be such an astute observer and seem so right? He scares the bejeezus out of us with his erratic and risky choices. He encounters what he had hoped to avoid by running loose and leaping recklessly into the very depths of American crazinesss.

Carlos Castaneda’s landmark account Journey to Ixtlan is like a condensed primer to his series of seven books about the narrator’s apprenticeship to the sorcerer Don Juan Matus. Don Juan is a philosophic genius, teacher, magic man, and also flat-out crazy by normal standards. His instructions to disassemble our own conventional lives and put ourselves into some sort of neutral fog require a willingness to be crazy. The narrator begins as a logical research scholar and is inexorably pulled into the exercises and tenets. He questions his own sanity.

Squeeze Me is a contemporary novel by Carl Hiassen, noted for his satiric descriptions of deranged life in Florida. (Florida is likely to never recover from the tag as America’s ultimate haven of crazy people.) The target in Squeeze Me is Palm Beach high society, where the decadent rich exist outside reality and hide behind piles of money. The plot enables Hiassen to take well-deserved potshots at the crass and corrupt, as well as zing the craziest fucker of them all, the ex-POTUS, who operates now out of Casa Bellicosa (aka in the real world as Mar-Lago).

I like all of these books a great deal. But am currently searching for a book that features sane people.

[On-going w/the most recent posts last. Spoiler alerts apply]

Oct. 16

The opening chapter and its slow unraveling of family description brings to mind the novel “The Corrections.” There, Franzen gave each sibling from the Lambert family their own volume within the multi-part novel. There were two sons and a daughter, all young career-working adults. Whereas in “Crossroads,” the siblings of the Hildebrandt clan are teenage and below, growing up in the 1970s, and we are introduced to them in sequential chapters. There is one daughter (homecoming queen-type Becky) and three sons, two of whom are in trouble already with drugs and poor life choices.

A problem right off is they are the children of a pastor, Russ, a strong socially active liberal who has a weak innate sense of guidance and self-control. As the story goes in the early stages, the kids drift away from Dad and his older ways, a human turnoff, and become followers of a progressive church group leader named Ambrose, who practices realism over idealism. It doesn’t take long for conflicts to show up.

The opening chapter’s style is notable in that it’s framed artfully within the context of an oncoming storm. Gray clouds at first then ominous snow falling at the end. The storm keeps brewing into subsequent chapters. Becky is changing her ways, demonstrating how imperfect she is, how possessive and self-centered. Perry is wasting his high IQ and drifting deeper into drugs; and Clem is 18 and headed to the Vietnam war zone, after having been addicted to sex with a “mouse” of a girl who he abandons. The parents are pious on the surface and morally unstable underneath. Mama Marion hovers but tends to overlook. Only young Judson seems safe so far.

Things are about to break apart. Everyone is looking for wrong or right, approaching or in the midst of a crossroads, get it? The sun is ripping red gashes in the sky. The Crossroads church group has a mutiny during an Arizona field trip, and father and son face some truths. Patiently and without a load of purple prose, Franzen has revealed a family slowly becoming embroiled in crisis. Yet it’s early. It’s a long book, and only the first of a projected trilogy covering a generation of Hildebrandts.

---

Oct. 19

The pastor’s wife’s (Marion) chapter uses the narrative format of a discussion between patient and psychiatrist. Her long, self-pitying accounts are met with a few neutral lines from Sophie, the head doctor. Lots of pain is accounted for, with a hint of even more still under the wraps. The world is tainted by Marion’s desperation and pessimism. There is little humor in the exchange, much less a friendly vibe or even an intimate one, unlike, say, the sexual romp that develops in the patient-pyschologist setup in Larry McMurtry’s novel Duane’s Depressed.

Franzen, God bless him, is hitting his novelist’s stride now, delving into the personal history of one of his main suburban characters, presenting her case and allowing the reader to reach their own judgments. It’s more difficult to do than it sounds. He is a novelist following his heart and gut about these people, baring them rather than drawing and delivering pat, intellectual profiles.

More stabs of pain and misery come again in the subsequent chapter in which Russ, Marion’s husband, finds he can’t cope with the frank revelations by his wannabe mistress. He’s in a game he isn’t equipped for. Hints of more moral catastrophe. The scene becomes hellish. The two are quarreling inside Russ’ sedan, and soon we are half-expecting to see Russ break down and weep. Or will he feign bravado and put on a different kind of act? Yet to be seen. Meanwhile for the two would-be lovers, there’s no convenient means of dodging issues, and beyond the wiper blades the snow continues to fall.

Franzen’s instincts may have told him it’s time for a lighter, sillier chapter. And we get that next with Tanner and Becky giving us a flat and predictably schmaltzy episode of Teenagers Playing Little Games about Love. Snowballs hurled by “juvies” against Tanner’s VW bus don’t add much. The dialog is MST3000 material, ripe for lampooning. Tanner talks big boy garage band talk, and Becky is jealous of their female singer. Zzzz. One wonders if Franzen is going to suddenly go horror movie on us and send in hungry zombies to eat the teenagers and end the scene.

Becky says it herself: “Everything has gone to shit.” Her return to the house (aka “the parsonage”) offers some redemption for the sin of bad editing. She and Perry seem to come to a lukewarm detente in their conflicting sister-brother relationship. Meanwhile, in two days it’ll be Christmas Eve. And Mom (Marion) is late returning from her shrink appointment. Uh-oh. Why?

Visions of this novel as a series on Streaming TV disturbed my fictive dream, at least for a moment. Please God, no, I prayed. Tell us the author is virtuous, if none of his cast are, and he doesn’t care about such commercial notions.

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Oct. 20

As expected, the dramatic events intersect, and all sorts of tangled problems occur. We are given a buffet of respect-resentment and love-hate between characters in conflict. People play some dirty games to put down those they don’t like. Our emotional response, the one Franzen artfully evokes, is to feel like we need to choose which side we are on. And, we wonder, does virtue matter or is goodness just plain out of date? Does renunciation equate to evil?

Russ vs. Frances Cottrell. Perry vs. Becky. Then Perry vs. astounded clergymen at a mannered party when he gets teenage drunk on a whisky-laden punchbowl and has a meltdown (a superior Franzen twist, reminding me of the crazy effects of the miracle drug aboard the cruise ship in Corrections.) Then Becky gets stoned, and Laura bullies her. Becky sees the light of heaven when the pot kicks in. Mama Marion changes her ways, smokes Luckies, and toughens up. And so on.

The narrative lures us ahead, episode by episode. Even when we find some of the people loathsome, or the scenes didactic and corny. The novel offers us situations where the message of literature battles with its like-ability. Yet on we go, some Christian chord perhaps struck inside us. But how bogus is it? What is wrong? Is it all so gravity-bound to church camps and horny pastors and earthly fools that we miss the entire point of a God up there in the sky?

________

Oct. 22

3/4 of the way through this heavy tome. In the story there is nearly a foot of snow on the ground. Meaning, I’d lost sense of how compressed the timeline is. Flakes fell in chapter one. There’s been a lot of chapter shifts and overlap of chronological piece parts.

Events are colliding and reaching combustion. Russ, Marion, and Becky have traded their virtues for self-satisfaction. They are clawing against the side of a cliff, trying to hold on.

Instances of Christian fellowship abound, and now Franzen kicks it up another level to moments of bible story parallels. The washing of feet is a big one. The duping of a man by a designing woman, check. Sacrifice of self for another, check. The wages of sin, check. Turn the other cheek, check. Love and forgiveness, check. And so on. It may sound facile, and at times reading it is like a dip into some TV show sanctioned for its wholesomeness and message. But Franzen is up to something else, it seems. Knowing this is part one of a trilogy leads me to suspect we may be left hanging, at least on certain items.

________

Oct. 24

Marion’s new compulsion for Lucky Strikes emulates the self-destructive behavior of her children and signifies her revolt against the twenty conventional and unhappy years she’s spent being married to Russ. Her actions lean toward anger and self-forgiveness rather than liberation. The family is now officially broken. Some friends are going down with it. They turn to prayer for self-therapy. The sense of worship is lacking. God is like a Hotline.

It’s quite a crew. Russ wants to correct or punish everyone else out of line except himself. Clem pretends to go back to college and then decides to take off to New Orleans. Perry breaks his vow of giving up recreational drugs and finds a dealer offering speed. Becky offers herself to an influencer so that Tanner’s band can get a contract. Laura Dobronsky is the only free-spirit hippie-like character Franzen portrays (the other hippies are shown as communal enclave types who are faceless and benign and unaddressed by the narrative). Laura D is a natural talent in the band, but after Tanner betrays her, she’s leaving the hippie house where she is staying and packing to go West to make the Haight-Ashbury scene. A big whoopdedoo ensues about whether or not the band unites for the big show. Meanwhile, Marion is fasting to get thin again, smoking and cursing now, and disses Russ openly every chance she gets. Russ is pitifully head over heels about Frances, but she is toying with him. He is blind. It is possible in a novel loaded with bible lore, someone will make him see. Frances’ motives are as yet unclear. Meanwhile young and innocent Judson (he might be really something in the later books) is locked into his Stratego board game, planning his next moves far in advance.

________

Oct. 25

It’s awkward. About 40 pages of backstory interrupt the narrative train’s immediate journey into the last scenes. I waded through some of Russ’s history then skipped it, in order to get back to the drama. Pastor Russ (emerging now as the protagonist) has Frances alone as his partner, at last. The once-meek Russ develops as a character, we can assume, because he is now more assertive and devil-may-care. The indication is that Marion was a source of serious emasculation all those years, and Frances brings out his manly mojo. Do his actions seem a little too full of bravado? And isn’t he the rare, exceptional male character in novel-land who doesn’t fail and come up short when he finally makes it with the woman of his dreams? Instead, it is her who has problems: she’s too tight to let him in.

As a patient reader since all these 500 pages or so, I’m feeling a bit manipulated. There are still some pages left, but the turn from jerk to macho hero seems too much to readily accept.

_________

Oct. 26

The last section summarizes how family members keep their heads barely above water and find a temporary peace. Knowing there is a sequel (and then a third) influences the way I look at the ending. Setup or wrap? There are loose ends and some gaps I’d guess Franzen will enjoy going back to fill for us (e.g., Russ and Frances’s affair). I was unmoved by the reunion of Becky and her brother Clem. She is married to Tanner and they have little Gracie now. Ho hum. I am not bummed out by the fall of failed drug dealer Perry into detention centers and courtrooms. We see Russ break down again (loses his hero points). He and Marion reconcile (apparently because she gets horny) and move to deeper into middle America suburbia, once again as prayerful pastor hubby and pastor’s wife.

There is for me no wow factor at the end, no strong feeling of anything. The only scene that widened my eyes was Becky being transported in a Benz at warp-Autobahn speeds.

All told, it’s a novel that features characters and family dynamics. Capturing an era is not really the big show here. The backdrop is not sparkling in detail, even if the scenes of drug-partaking are vivid and realistic. There are references to pop songs and products of the times, automobiles and clothing etc., but Crossroads is not a depiction of the early 70s and its on-going cultural revolution with longhairs and hippies. The Hildebrandt kids are suburban-cut blanks that get tainted by the wilder and more sordid world around them. But they are not at heart peaceniks or beatniks or paradigm-changers like so many of the others. They are churchy and square. Vain and begrudging. The parents are hardly role models. They are tired of each other, punitive toward the kids, and in a no-win situation against the Rick Ambroses of the world.

Many will write of the Christianity aspects, and I have only alluded to a few. Is the religious theme a subject of satire, or a warning, or an objective presentation left for us to weigh? A bit of all, I think.

Now it’s over and the dust settles until the second book comes out. My bet is Franzen still has something more sensational up his sleeve. Like many fans, I’ll be there for the next one.

Haibun.

It’s a genre I had never heard of, but the structural soul of this novel. A popular haibun by the revered Japanese poet Matsuo Bashó shares nearly the same exact title.

A haibun, from what I’ve learned so far, is based on the reporting of history. But it also contains imagistic writing, poetic material in some way intensely expressed like haiku yet in prose. It can relate a journey, a life saga, or even minutes, a moment. While Flanagan’s book is kindred in spirit and has these elements, it is first and foremost a novel.

Which includes in this case, a story of war and being a prisoner thereof. Aussie prisoners in WWII are enslaved by the Japanese army and forced to build a railroad through an impossible jungle, all in the name of the Great Emperor. The novel includes accounts from the days both before and after war. Near the climactic end, the protagonist is assumed dead. But no, he has survived his long, grueling trip (Spoiler Alert) and becomes a renowned international physician. Back home in Australia, married and settled, he happens to see the woman he once loved. She has seen him too, we find out later. Neither knows, neither acknowledges. The man’s heart is reaching an end, like Zhivago sighting Lara from a bus. She is ill. The two pass by on a bridge, going in opposite directions. It is all part of the tragedy.

Flanagan’s account is wrapped around, no – it features, such an extraordinary love story. It’s delivered to us in unapproachably vivid scenes with simple yet complex writing (like a haiku). It is the best writing of a love affair written by a male author that I can recall in a very long time.

Dec. 5, 2020

Now that I finished it, I can say that what comes first later comes last. Throughout the book, the narrator speaks of time being more circular than linear and demonstrates it when all is said and done.

My conclusion is at the end of the post.

The opening chapter’s skillful language drew me right in. I wanted to find out about the narrator’s mind-altering and enthusiastic reaction over a book on fish, which he plans to duly explain to us. It’s apparent we are in for something out of the ordinary.

Syd Barrett (one of many aliases for the narrator) is a huckster antique dealer who happens on a magical book on fish and becomes obsessed with it. After making serious inquiries of its origin and shopping it to the experts, he is discouraged by their disinterested reaction and ends up hanging around a bar where he loses the book when he steps away to take a leak. Immediately he compares the loss to the desertion of a lover: the one that ripped your heart out, leaving a contagion to find her again. Our narrator seems a sensible sort, however, and eventually attempts to overcome the loss by re-creating the book, using the pictures of a second similar book, which he happened upon but which has no prose.

The story has a sudden section shift, and there’s a new narrator. Now, apparently, the Fish book will be given its full history, as narrated by the author/artist William “Billy” Gould. He’s held prisoner in a coastal cave that fills with sea water to near ceiling level when the tide comes in. During the day when he’s not being abused by the guard, Gould draws and paints all the marine life around him. That much is sanctioned by his captors, but he is forbidden from writing text of any sort. He does so on the sly, using any colored substance including blood and octopus goo that functions as ink.

Continued 11/18/20

Various despots come in and out of Billy’s life on the island. He is only too glad to consent to do painting at their bidding, thereby avoiding the worst of prison life. By far the strangest character who orders him around is the Commandant, a shipwrecked pretender to his role as grand master of the island. His minions build a locomotive from shipped parts and lays out a railway that runs in one small circle, then commissions a grand MahJong Hall as the national palace, where Billy Gould paints the walls with the words from the Commandant’s unseen love and pen pal, Anne.

Eventually Billy’s painting and labors of mural art in both the train station and the Mah Jong Hall fall to ruin, as nature takes over during a lull in construction. An outside nation comes in to buy the guano deposits.

He goes back to painting fish, fretful of their future existence. Billy Gould is a visionary of the sterile and loveless world we are all heading into (though he sees it from the 19th century, and we see it likely too late).

Continued 11/29/20

Over the next hundred pages, we see Gould’s exciting discoveries of a secret room holding an enormous library of documentation, tirelessly hand-written and assembled by Jorgensen, the island clerk. Billy Gould eventually kills him by pushing over a bookcase. He is stuck in his cell with the decaying body until he escapes (thanks to robbing Jorgensen’s corpse of its money) the Sarah Island colony and journeys alone into the interior, pulling the island’s volumes of history in a sled behind him. So we see poor Gould bearing the brunt of history and all its human indignities. He retains hope that all their truths will fall into the right hands, and the scandals of the island revealed for posterity. He travels relentlessly to seek out the Tasmanian territory’s rebel liberator, Matt Brady.

In the novel’s most vivid scene, Gould is sleeping in the wilderness with aborigines, two of whom he knows from the past. The man is dying of wounds and disease, and the woman is “Two Penny Sal,” a striking mulatto who was once his (and many others’) courtesan. When the man, Tracker John, dies in his sleep in the middle of the night, the woman builds a bonfire fueled largely by Gould’s sled-full of history books. Much to Gould’s shock, the past and its pages of history he dragged cross-country are quickly destroyed. Sparks of dust and nothingness rise into the desert skies, while the woman and Gould strip naked, apply ochre paint, and dance like savages well into the night.

They separate, and Gould finds shelter in a hut, where (as it turns out) Brady once lived. He is disappointed on finding Brady’s journal, as to its shallow content and trifling concerns. It is a hollowing out of his soul, and he feels as if he has nothing left to live for.

In Conclusion…

I realize I have repeated too much of the storyline rather than commenting on it, so will not get into the ending which comes in one stunning revelation after another and is best left unsaid.

In sum, Richard Flanagan has written a masterpiece. Who would think that from an Aussie author from Tasmania? It’s a mix of all sorts of influences from Vonnegut to Sterne to Dickens to Pliny and DeQuincey and Voltaire and Fielding. It is as unrelentingly violent as the film “The Revenant’ but with a humorous filter. It is part Gabriel Garcia-Marquez in that reality ventures off into the impossible and fantastic. It is philosophy and comedy, tragedy and history.

During my career I wrote many procedure manuals, and ever since have noticed how small or non-existent they are. I’m always on the lookout for the “The World’s Smallest Printed Procedure Manual.”  

The text and diagrams inside this one are unreadable without a magnifying glass, which of course is not supplied by the product owner, ANKER. The product is an emergency iphone charger.

Notes from my slow, on-going read of Arundhati Roy’s “The God of Small Things.”

1. So far, the book is showing signs of time-skipping. Events move backwards in the chronology from effect to cause. As with the twins, once separated and now united, then nope, they’re actually not–we’re going back to when they were kids next.  Roy used some non-sequential sections to great effect in “The Ultimate Ministry of Happiness,” a novel I’ve labeled as my favorite read in the past year.
2. TGST is filled with family characters, and though their names are odd and distinctive, I still get them confused, and this is a big distraction when reading.  Much of this is cultural unfamiliarity: to me, the name Estha sounds like it should be a female, and Rahel male; I don’t get the “baby” nametag; I don’t get the “chi” added to Pappa and Mamma. Chacko sounds like a cartoon character. And, to add to the confusion, there are often too many characters jammed into a scene or expository section.
3. I sensed (and was enchanted by) the poetic and/or lyrical bent of Roy’s prose on page one. As the pages move on, the quips and images become a little edgier, not so cozy. Sometimes the lines are satiric or bumbling Indian humorous, I suppose. I fear slapstick, but know there is seriousness at the underbelly. Indians have a complex caste system and a Whitman’s Sampler of religious and political persuasions. Certain behaviors are expected. Are readers in store for random dysfunction and microscopic accounts of trifling occurrences? What is the Indian way of writing, the posture, in this book? I have many pages left to learn more. The UMH novel, if I were running a comparative poll, is still way ahead in my estimation as the better novel. Early factors why:  readability and sophistication of subject matter and poetic ingredients.
4. Almost a third in, and for the first time my attention is held for several pages. There is momentum and conflict. It happens when the family at last gets to the cinema to see (once again) “The Sound of Music.” They set out to do this many days ago, and ever since I had been reading and reading, trudging through some digressive if not inane sections. Roy’s clever weave of movie scenes into the character’s adventures at the theater, however sordid with urination, child molestation, and  a hint of twins incest, keeps me actively engaged.
5. The family’s meet-up with Chacko’s ex and the bratty daughter at the airport. Class warfare is evident. Kids behaving badly, their evasive instincts correct. Hints of tragedy and irreconcilable facts. The presence of concrete kangaroo-shaped trash receptacles.  The Bluer Plymouth and all its tail-finned glory awaits in the parking lot.  Every sentence pregnant with meaning, the thematic texture of the book compounding  and taking on more weight of meaning, and we’re only at the halfway point.  It seems God the Lyrical Prose Writer is looking after Roy’s choice of words.