Oh Danny Boy

The Gathering (2007 Booker Prize Winner) somehow slipped under the radar for me.  Totally missed it.  The Green Road is Anne Enright’s latest, it’s been favorably reviewed, so why not?

It’s the story of a modern day Irish family headed by a domineering and emotionally limited mother. Each of her children follows their own distinct path, some successful, some not, but each is crucially influenced by the unintentional yet inevitable inadequacies of the mother.  For me the most pleasing aspect of the book is the careful balance between overall plot and sectional episodes.  The novel is divided into several parts, each devoted to a particular character and time, and culminating in a holiday gathering at which the entire family ‘comes together’.  The sections are in essence short stories and vary in tone, setting, and time.  There are large chronology gaps between sections that the reader is left to piece together on his own.  Seems to be a bit of a trend these days …. short stories that connect, novels that are comprised of stories, etc.  Enright pulls it off nicely with just the right proportions of explicit revelation and tantalizing gaps.

The climactic holiday gathering is a bit predictable, but Enright at least resists the temptation to tie it all up with a neat ribbon and bow.  We’re left to speculate about how the characters will go forward, but I for one was happy to spend a few days with them.

Enright’s writing doesn’t have the spectacular Irish depth and warmth of Banville.  She relies more on plot and traditional structure, but I rarely found the writing clunky and awkward.  These are real characters that I ended up caring about.

Booker worthy?  Not sure.  I’ll have to try The Gathering.

Unsettling

In 2001 Michel Houellebecq published Platform, about a Western-owned sex resort in Asia which is brutally attacked by a Muslim fundamentalist group. Timing is everything.  The book was written and published just before 9/11/2001, and it eerily anticipated some of the main themes and the brutality that was seared into our consciousness that month.

Now we have Submission, a 2015 Houellebecq novel about France in 2022, the fictional year in which France, in a political crisis engendered by large-scale Muslim immigration, adopts a limited version of Sharia law.  Yes, it seems entirely implausible.  But reading this book during the recent Paris attacks was very unsettling.  Some of the novel’s political figures are taken from real life, and to be reading about them in the book and hearing them on the news the same day is very strange. I’m not sure of much, but I am pretty sure that we really don’t know where all this is headed.  Fear mongering abounds, and it seems that just about anything can happen now, be it a swing far to the left or to the right.

Accidental oracle?

First, let’s acknowledge that Houellebecq is a French intellectual, and as such just about everything he produces is cloaked in abstraction and intellectual tradition.  The protagonist in the novel is a scholar specializing in Huysmans, hardly an everyday writer for American readers.  And much of the cleverness of the book relies on that conceptual underpinning.  The bored protagonist at the beginning of the novel struggles for sexual and existential fulfillment.  By submitting to Islam at the end, he ends up exactly where he wants to be, except without the struggle.  In certain ways this parallels Huysmans life, and that’s the intellectual conceit here.  It’s very clever, it’s contrived, it’s intricately planned, it’s annoyingly abstract.

But how does Houellebecq seemingly anticipate current events with uncanny accuracy?  I’m sure he’s not happy that Paris was attacked, but he can’t be discontent that sales of his book will undoubtedly skyrocket as a result.  The book has a ‘look at me!’ smugness about it that is not attractive.  A bit too clever, too abstract, and also perhaps unsettlingly plausible.

Pikkety Lite

Pikkety’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century is one of those big books that I optimistically pick up just about every time I see it in a bookstore. I really would like to be someone who would read it cover to cover.  But when I leaf through it in the store I realize I’m not that reader.  It’s too technical for me.  I’d never make it halfway through.

So that being the case, what’s next best?  Perhaps Joseph Stiglitz. He falls into a similar camp and his writing is much more accessible.  I searched for the most popular Stiglitz and came up with The Great Divide.

My liberal leanings on inequality are pronounced, but I don’t have a wealth of technical knowledge to back them up.  The Great Divide provides some of that backup, but not a lot.  The book is a compilation of many short magazine and newspaper articles by Stiglitz, and it is fascinating to see what he was writing as our economic story has unfolded over the last twenty years.  So many of his predictions have come true (unfortunately). The pieces tend to be largely political and not technical.  And unfortunately so many of the pieces make the same points over and over.  It doesn’t really add up to a coherent and well organized book.

I find myself agreeing with Stiglitz at just about every point, but not much better armed to defend my position at a cocktail party.  Preaching to the choir, I guess.  And that’s part of the problem with political discourse today.  There are so many parallel channels, and if we keep our attention focused on a particular channel we miss out on real interchange of ideas.  If we only listen to those we already agree with, we don’t make much progress.

Nonetheless, I did find Stiglitz’s larger concept of ‘rent’ enlightening.  And the contrast that he draws between grabbing a larger piece of the pie and working to make the pie larger is also telling. To what degree inequality is an inevitable part of capitalism is something I'm not qualified to judge.  I was hoping for more enlightenment, but Stiglitz is light on theory, heavy on polemics.  I’m still looking for the economic guru who can explain our current plight and take into account opposing viewpoints.  Don’t just say trickle down doesn’t work, show the numbers and explain the underlying theory.

Well, Pikkety Lite is definitely less filling.  Doesn’t taste bad either.  But is there a full-bodied brew that is drinkable?

Wars of Commerce

I loved Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies, the first installment in his trilogy about the Opium Wars in China in the mid-19^th-century. Yes, I learned something about history, but I was entranced by his playful use of language.  The Opium Wars represented a mixture and clash of many cultures and languages, and Ghosh reveled in the richness of the stew.  The writing is playful, clever, and often downright funny (almost like Victor Borge or Syd Caeser doing their language schticks). Yes, there is a conventional plot, but for me it doesn’t matter much.

The second installment, River of Smoke, was a little disappointing.  Less playful, more plot driven, more seriously historical.

The third and last of the trilogy, Flood of Fire, unfortunately continues the trend.  The language just isn’t much fun anymore, history dominates in a less interesting way, and Ghosh spends lots of time tying up plot lines from the previous two books.  But I didn’t care much about those plot lines when I read the earlier installments, and I didn’t even remember them clearly on reading the third. 

So I was disappointed in the finale.  Ghosh ends up focusing greater attention on the weaker points of the series, and neglecting what made the first book so enjoyable.

Well, I do know a lot more about the Opium Wars now. It's interesting to think about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars in the context of the Opium Wars.  Nonetheless, Flood of Fire is not what I was hoping for.

In Memorium

The recent passing of James Salter saddened me, especially since I have been so lazy in getting around to reading his fiction. He spent his entire adult life writing from his heart and I have taken far too long getting around to reading it.  I’d read only two of his novels to date.

Light Years is perhaps his most renowned work, and rightly so.  Salter is a writer’s writer.  I don’t think I’ve read better writing anywhere, anytime.  I’m not sure it all adds up a great book, but paragraph after paragraph are simply stunning.

A master

You can pick just about any passage, but here’s one chosen at random from near the end of the novel.  It’s about the main male character, late in life, alone on a cruise to Europe:

Viri dined at the second sitting. He had a drink at the bar, where people entered with cries of greeting to the bartender. In the corridor were women of fifty, dressed for dinner, their cheeks rouged. Two of them sat near him. While one talked, the other ate long, triangular bread and butter pieces, tow bites to each. He read the menu and a poem of Verlaine’s on the back. The consommé arrived. It was nine-thirty. He was sailing to Europe. Beneath him as he lifted his spoon, fish were gliding black as ice in a midnight sea. The keel crossed over them like a comb of thunder.

And Salter writes about sex better than anyone I’ve read.  In this book the writing is not especially explicit (as it is in A Sport and A Pastime) , but he gets to the crucial point, every time.  He understands the significance and manages to communicate the essence.  I’ve never read anyone quite like that.

The story is a straightforward one about the history of a couple, from young adulthood to old age.  Salter maintains a very objective point of view.  We don’t see much drama first-hand.  Instead, we get a view from elsewhere, observation after the fact, and much reflection.  The result can feel detached, and that’s the main downside of his writing.  We don’t so much feel the experience as the ripples and consequences of the experience. We are left knowing we have witnessed lives honestly led.

I don’t know how else to say it.  The writing is phenomenal.  It’s a tour de force.  The writing itself almost overwhelms the book.  As when you read poetry, just savor every moment.  You hold in your hand a finely chiseled piece of art.  Enjoy each moment.

So sad that he is gone.

Freud Revisited?

Kazuo Ishiguro has for me been a master of mood, setting, and atmosphere.  The Remains of the Day is one of my all-time favorite books, and Never Let Me Go is a stunning achievement.  As I read the press releases and reviews I was a little skeptical about his latest novel, TheBuried Giant.  But it’s Ishiguro.  Gotta go there.

The underlying themes are compelling.  Memory (its reliability or lack thereof), the need to forget, the central importance of love, the eventual emergence of truth.  All of these are fascinating and worthy of exploration.  But the tone, the plot, the vehicle Ishiguro chose to carry those thoughts didn’t work so well for me.  It all seemed a bit like a cheap Prince Valiant story, something not for serious consideration.  The end moved me deeply, but along the way I was annoyed that it took so long in the book to know what it’s really about.  That comes back to my lack of enthusiasm for the medium, for the story, the time, the characters.  It just didn’t mesmerize me the way Ishiguro has in other novels.

To spin a yarn like this one just about every aspect of the thread has to be interesting and compelling, and I just didn’t find it so.  Perhaps it’s a book that demands a second read to see how the themes are actually carefully woven in from the first page.  But I don’t have the patience to wade through all of the scenery and plot again.  At least not right now.

In a way the book is a metaphor for psychoanalysis, a process designed to recover accurate memory, see the past more usefully and allow us to move forward without the unnecessary constraints of experience. But it also has to provide page to page interest as a narrative, and there I was disappointed.

Inside Out

Since my daughter pointed me to The Windup Bird Chronicles several years ago I’ve been a big Murakami fan. For me, his writing reverberates in unexpected ways.  I don’t know where he’s going until all of a sudden I’m there. I’ve tried to figure out how he does it, but alas I’m no literary critic.  I just know that for the most part it works for me.

Two thoughts come to mind about his fiction.

First, the point of origin in many of his storied is stillness, a Zen-like neutrality in which no much is moving and listening is intense.  From that meditative emptiness often emerge interesting and bizarre plots which couldn’t happen without the previous silence, without the intense listening. From the quietness the ideas seem to evolve on their own in natural if unusual ways.

Second, the story lines often externalize internal conditions and emotions.  The stillness opens a path from the deeply personal out into the external world.  Sometimes the outward representation is ostensibly realistic, sometimes fantastic.  But more often than not the externals represent a kind of creative prismatic refraction of an inner state.  And that complex shimmering tunnel of light between inner and outer can be striking. We see the outside, we look inside, our gaze is reflected back out, then in. And it’s all made possible by the stillness that allows that special vision to penetrate along the Murakami path that connects the two. 

I’ve read most of the novels, will catch up on the ones I’ve missed, and will certainly read everything he publishes (in translation) going forward. Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman is a collection of twenty four short stories. They are all worth reading though there is quite a bit of variety in the collection. In looking back through the book a few weeks after finishing it I’m struck that each story evokes in me that specific memory of the inner/outer connection, that special pathway that Murakami uncovers. He doesn’t so much forge the pathway in an aggressive way, but rather out of stillness just shines an enticing dim light in a place we didn’t know existed.  Except we really did know, we just chose not to connect the dots.

Why Trollope?

I’ve always felt warm, cozy, and comforted reading Trollope.  I know I’m in good hands.  While I probably won’t be totally blown away, I won’t be seriously disappointed either.  The novel will be long, it won’t have the Dickensian emotional climaxes that would make the book un-put-downable, and it will require a steady reading effort over a few weeks.  But there will be consistent human interest, many unexpected rewards along the way, a good deal of revealing historical context, and a satisfying conclusion. All in all, not a bad bargain, for me at least.

Adam Gopnik’s New Yorker piece notwithstanding, there seems to be little interest in Trollope’s novels these days. Perhaps I need to hide in Victorian obscurity or achieve some kind of status from reading a 'classy' author that my friends don’t read?  Nonetheless, every so often I need a dose of Trollope.  I’ve read maybe a dozen of his 47 novels, so thankfully I’m not going to run out any time soon.  If I ever come across a complete Trollope, I’ll buy it.  I own a complete Dickens and a complete Balzac.  I’d be tickled pink to add the quasi-obscure Trollope to that modest collection.

The six Palliser novels stand apart as a monument to Victorian political history.  I’d read the first three.  Time to move on to the fourth, Phineas Redux. 

I learned quite a bit about fox hunting, about anti-Semitism in 19^th-century Britain, about sexism, about Parliamentary politics, about London political newspapers.  I had the pleasure of renewing my acquaintances with some characters from the first three books in the series, and getting to know some new ones, some scrupulous, some not so much. I got to watch them act under stress and react to the opportunity for transformation.

Flawed?  Yes.  Your alternative?

Trollope’s strength is not setting or metaphor, not description or poetry, but rather a straightforward and seemingly (deceptively?) objective depiction of character: personal motivation conditioned by place in contemporary society.  Unlike Dickens, Trollope doesn’t openly advocate for a particular point of view (though his personal opinions are thinly veiled). Yet for each character it all makes sense from that particular (and particularly flawed) point of view.  Trollope’s most poignant passages are those in which he lays bare the personal and emotional forces which motivate each individual or group.  At their best these novels are sociological, political, and personal deconstructions. And the main characters are significantly transformed by the end.  Some are defeated.  Some triumph.  Most of the minor characters just go on as they were. Each of the major characters is marked in his own way by a combination of inherent makeup and socio-political context. While the major characters may not have the depth and contradictory traits we find in Dostoevsky or Tolstoy, they're not two-D Dickensian placard bearers either.  

Trollope is on my list of historical figures I’d most like to have dinner with.  Had to be a great conversationalist.  But maybe not.  He worked like an automaton (churning out novel after novel).  If he had enormous personal charm maybe he would have been distracted and lured into society and written less. I want to have dinner with the mind behind these characters and these plots, the mind behind those insights and that jaded but fascinating point of view.  It may be that the actual individual Trollope himself didn’t well represent that mind.  But he gave us that mind in his fiction.

Again, not a bad bargain.  I’m good.

Literature: Spirit and Mechanics

I’m not sure why I hated just about every literature class I ever took.  High school, college, whatever.  I still can’t read most of the authors we read in those classes because of the bad memories.  I got good grades.  I just hated it.  Didn’t see the point.  Not sure if I wasn’t ready, or if they were really that bad.

Since finishing school I’ve been a pretty active reader.  That’s probably not a coincidence. I’d love to take a good literature class now, but I’m afraid that I’d have the same bad reaction (probably because of me, not because of the class).  So the next best thing is to read books about literature.  Not as good, but better than nothing.

My latest foray into that genre is James Wood’s How Fiction Works.  Wood is a book critic for The New Yorker, and I often enjoy his pieces.  This is a small book that doesn’t pretend to be definitive on any of the many topics he touches on. There are chapters on voice, on detail, on character, on language, on dialogue, and on truth and convention.  Woods refers to many works from the standard canon, and he quotes quite a few at length. His discussions are almost always telling.  I particularly enjoy his ‘rewrites’ of some passages that he quotes, his attempt to show what it might be like if the author did it a different way, and why the author’s way is better for what he’s trying to accomplish.   As someone who doesn’t write fiction it’s hard for me to imagine alternative versions; I just can’t put myself in the author’s place making decisions about how it might go.

There are many references to books I haven’t read, and some of the discussion is over my head.  Nonetheless I found it a very useful book. It has already changed the way I read.

Was I just not open to this kind of thinking when I was in school?  I know I’m not especially good at being open in situations where I don’t feel competent.  That undoubtedly got in my way.  Reading about it privately feels safer to me. Or maybe I just ended up with the bad teachers?  Or some of both.

Edward at Esalen

As a big fan of St. Aubyn’s five Patrick Melrose novels, I wondered what else he’d written, so I picked up On The Edge (1998, in the middle of the Melrose books).  It’s a comic novel of a young disenchanted Brit who is trying to track to a German woman with whom he had a three-day love affair. His search lands him at a New Age institute at Esalen.  The satire of guru California from the point of view of a staid Brit is funny and often telling, but here St. Aubyn doesn’t achieve the same level of costly autobiographical insight that permeates the Melrose books.  Rather this is a more traditional comic satire.  In that I was a bit disappointed. 

This passage sums up the Brit’s take on New Age America:

Peter wanted to ask Crystal to sit with him, but in the communal dining room he felt the usual sense of personal and social meltdown known locally as ‘lodge psychosis’. Instead of the sense of community it was designed to promote, the lodge shipwrecked its occupants by presenting them with a series of treacherous whirlpools and rock dilemmas. Acquaintances imagined they were friends, friends turned into strangers, seminarians were looked down on by residents, and residents exploited by staff, teachers appeared to be available to students but were suddenly ringed by jealous lovers and competitive sidekicks. Anyone at any time could come and ‘process an issue’ with you, however turgid or trivial, whether you could remember meeting them before or not. The person to whom you told the secret of your mother’s mental illness the night before might not remember your name by lunchtime the next day. The permissiveness that made sex seem pleasingly inevitable made you realize more sharply the internal constraints that prevented you from approaching the object of desire, but the same permissiveness could not stop the bore you most dreaded from bearing down on you with greedy tactlessness when you were deeply engaged with someone else. Like the place as a whole, the lodge made a partial transcendence of the formalities and hypocrisies of ordinary social life, but at the same time generated a longing for the good manners and the privacy which those formalities, until they became corrupted, were designed to protect.

Or on a more positive note:

Esalen

These Buddhists were certainly on to something. The exhausting business of turning his colliding and scattered emotions into a story about who he was was matched by the exhausting business of editing it into a story he liked. The first thing he asked about a situations was whether he liked it or not, and the next question was how it would ‘turn out’, which meant whether he would like it or not later on.

The plot is thin and the characters shallow, but there’s fun to be had.  Peter does find the German woman he was looking for, but when he does no longer desires her.  He has been changed by his Esalen experience, and at the end we have some hope that he will achieve better balance in his life.  Or maybe he’ll just careen in a different direction next time.

I miss the bitterness and painful sincerity of the Melrose books.  I’ll have to reread them.

Knausgaard

The six-part autobiographical novel My Struggle by the Norwegian Karl Ove Knausgaard has made a huge splash in the literary world.  In Norway the books have sold in unheard of numbers, and since the English translations have started to appear, they have received immense critical acclaim here as well.

Book 1 is over 400 pages and focusses on the teenage and young adult years of the ‘fictional’ character Karl Ove Knausgaard. The autobiographical subject and the intense inward focus can't help but point to Proust, but it’s hard to think of Marcel’s life as a struggle exactly.  It’s a life full of emotion, color, close observation, some pain, and relentless self-examination, but it doesn’t come off as a struggle.  There’s too much pleasure and a surprising amount of comedy for that.  But for Knausgaard it is indeed a struggle.  There’s little self-pity here but true empathy for others is also in very short supply.  This is a character (are we talking about a character or about Knausgaard himself … or both?) with limited social skills, strong self-reliance, and a seemingly unlimited capacity to keep staring into the void no matter how uncomfortable he becomes.  He just keeps looking even if it makes connections with others difficult

. 

The books best moments are about silence and stillness.  Here Knausgaard offers real insight into the mind and its ability to project thoughts and feelings and read them back as observation.  It’s like meditation in a way.  Just keep the stillness.  Let the thoughts come, let them go.

There are also interesting passages about art and aesthetics that are truly provocative.  It’s a very personal vision and doesn’t attempt to explain anything other than what he himself is trying to accomplish.  In spite of the overwhelming amount of knowledge and virtual experience available to an educated person today, Knausgaard ‘struggles’ to stay in contact with the unknown, and especially the unknowable, because for him therein lies the inexplicable beauty, the truly aesthetic experience.  This is not an easy task for someone who is a bit of a know-it-all asshole, and the obsessiveness with which he sticks to the mission is both admirably self-effacing and egotistical at the same time.

It’s easy to see that he’s profoundly scarred by his awful father.  The scenes surrounding the death of his father are difficult to read, and we are left to wonder how Karl Ove manages any kind of quasi-normal life for himself.  Of course we don’t know how much is real.  We do know that some members of the author’s family were very upset by the books and felt that various family members were not accurately portrayed.  But I don’t think truth is exactly the point here.  He does have an uncanny ability to put the reader inside his head.

But I’m not sure I want to spend all that much time there.  We'll see.

Return

I took down my copy of The Library of America’s collection of later Updike stories from the shelf.  Nine hundred pages.  Eighty-five stores from the mid 70’s to 2008.  Most were first published in The New Yorker, where Updike’s editor for many years was Roger Angell.  Reading the first twenty or so of the stories was like going home for me.  Some of them I remembered from their original publication; a few others I had encountered in other collections.  Some were new to me.  The collection is presented in the order in which they were written, so the ones I read were from 1974 to 1982, a time when I was a young adult.  Most take place in the eastern USA, or at least the characters are from there.  So it seems familiar.

But familiar isn’t necessarily just positive. I’ve learned a lot since then. My geographic, cultural, and personal horizons are broader now.  We’ve all grown up a bit.  But Updike is so good at depicting particular times and places.  The attitudes, norms, and trends from those times might seem antiquated now, constrained by tradition, perhaps missing the point, perhaps making too much of ordinary difficulty, maybe all to complacently accepting the paternalistic and elitist heritage from the post-war generation. 

For the most part Updike doesn’t preach, he simply reports what he sees. And the reporting is often brilliant.  These stories avoid the showy overly complex and learned language of many of the novels.  (Updike has been described by a certain feminist as ‘a penis with a thesaurus’.)  They’re simpler and more straightforward, and in each one he has clear and for the most part narrow purpose.  Often the story points to a particular moment, a subtle tipping point that the characters will only understand in retrospect. My favorites include ‘The Fairy Godfathers’ (a telling commentary on psychiatry and relationships), ‘From the Journal of a Leper’ (maybe a bit obvious but a nicely executed O. Henry-like story), ‘Morocco’ (wistful thoughts about family). 

Updike as a wonderfully graceful and telling way of shifting the tone near the end of a story.  It’s the place where we sense he’s going to stop describing and meandering.  Here he’s getting to the point of it all.  It’s not pedantic or moralistic, but it is telling.  It’s where someone reading the story aloud would change tone, slow the pace a bit, and look us in the eye.

Even if his vision was somewhat constrained by circumstance (he was very much a creature of his time and social status), he was a supremely skilled writer that genuinely loved the craft. There is much to be learned and experienced from reading him. And a visit home can warm the heart, even if I know and am in part grateful that I no longer live there.

Therapy

Philip Roth’s fiction shares many qualities with effective psychotherapy.  Both require a big leap of faith, both are self-absorbed, unconstrained by reality, seemingly unorganized, undirected, and ultimately very revealing.

I’ve read most of his fiction, and he remains one of my literary heroes. Somehow I missed The Ghost Writer (the first in the Zuckerman trilogy), and if you can place yourself on that couch, be open to his unconscious as well as your own, it’s a great read.  Who else would consider the quandary in which Anne Frank would find herself had she lived to see the publication of her diary?  Who else has so much to say on being Jewish in 20^th-century America?  Who else so effectively and simultaneously looks back to his narrow past and forward to a wholly different future?  Who else so carefully considers (obsesses about) the writer, his role, his obligations and responsibilities, his shortcomings and limitations? Who else can do this in such a short book and in such a creative way?

I’m the first to admit that Roth is not everyone’s cup of tea, but neither is Pamuk, or Yan, or Naipaul.  And Roth has serious academic credentials and literary street cred.  Can we get political correctness out of the way and just give him the Nobel already? Please.

Amateurs

I read the New York Times semi-regularly.  I find quite a few articles to be interesting and informative.  Then I come across an article about a subject I know well.  If I have a good amount of technical and factual knowledge about the subject, I’m often aghast at the inadequacies of the article, what it got wrong, what critical points were omitted, how clumsy and hodge-podge it all seems.

The same with legislation.  Yes, our lawmakers do the best they can given the limits of the system in which they work, but when I read legislation in the telecom industry (that I know fairly well) I just can’t believe how amateurish it all seems.  These people really don’t know what they’re doing.  The process of making legislation is scary, and the resulting sausage is just not very good. Where are the adults?

Paul Theroux makes a similar point about terrorism in his mid-70’s novel The Family Arsenal.  The book takes place in London and concerns the IRA terrorist bombings that plagued the city at that time.  I very much like Theroux’s travel writing, and many of his novels profit from his special ability to blend place/time with character/plot.  For him they are pleasingly inseparable.  The Family Arsenal is not so strong in this aspect, or maybe I just don’t find London in the 70’s all that interesting.

But Theroux is very effective at demonstrating that most terrorists are not professionals deeply motivated by a political cause.  Most are young people with serious unresolved issues looking for a convenient outlet for their violent tendencies.  They latch onto a cause because it’s there, for a time they lend their energy and get their thrills from the action, and then they move to other outlets, get distracted by mainstream life, or they actually find at least partial resolution for their personal issues.

The book is a little writerly for my taste. Theroux takes himself seriously, and sometimes he misses the mark. But there is much to appreciate here.  Especially these days when young people from Europe and America are travelling to the Middle East to fight for ISIS, we would do well to consider what their motivation might be.  Do they really believe in the cause, or are they just unhappy in their own personal way, frustrated, and looking for acceptance, excitement, and an outlet for their anger?

I guess we’re all amateurs at the game of life, though it is possible to gain real professional expertise in specific areas.  And when we do, we realize how much we’ve differentiated ourselves from others. I’d like to think that there really are no professional terrorists, but rather just amateurs dabbling at destruction.  That would at least give law enforcement a small leg up.  But that may just my own lack of expertise talking.

Downton Abbey in a More Revealing Light

I saw the movie of The Remains of the Day in the mid 90’s and was very impressed by the performances of Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson.  Something about that film has haunted me ever since. Having read and much appreciated Ishiguro’s more recent NeverLet me Go, I thought I really should read The Remains of the Day.  Booker Prize in 1989.

Two damned good actors.

So glad I did.  Ishiguro is a master of tone and nuance.  Nothing much happens. Recollections of the past and small but telling moments in the present. The book is written in the first person from the point of view of an aging British butler, Mr. Stevens is struggling to keep together a postwar 'aristocratic' household whose past is being called into question, and whose future is at best uncertain. He's stuck in the past and ill-suited to the demands of the postwar present.  But he is also severely limited in the emotional realm, and much of the fascination of the book is that his limitations are revealed only gradually. We come to know him bit by bit through his account of the present and his recollections of the past.  Always it’s the tone that is paramount, and that is constricted by Stevens’s limitations.  There’s much talk of ‘dignity’, and lots of derision of ‘banter’, a modern form of repartee that Stevens finds foreign and repugnant.  But it turns out that 'dignity' can be a way to justify crippling emotional limitations, and 'banter' is a way of representing spontaneity and freedom of expression.

It’s been many years since I saw the film, but memory tells me that it is a faithful expression of the novel’s essential message.  That’s not so common in these days of film adaptations that veer off into Hollywood themes that have little to do with the original text. I’ll revisit the film soon.  Gladly.

For now, I’ll say that Ishiguro is a master prose poet. The writing emits an aura that perfectly describes Stevens’s state of mind.  It’s a chance to enter another’s world, a chance to feel what another feels (or doesn't feel).

Such is good fiction.

Detachment

Nicholson Baker: one strange dude.  Undeniably and proudly male. Also unarguably odd.

I have many reactions to The Fermata, his novel about a young adult male who has the power to stop time (he can act while the rest of the world is paused), and uses that power almost exclusively to kindly and lovingly undress women, to masturbate to the sights, and to indulge his sexual fantasies.  He is for the most part harmless and perhaps even loving in his way, but also tellingly irrelevant in a social connective sense.  Nobody knows what he’s up to, and he seems to prefer it that way … at least for most of the book
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A knowing look, isn't it? Et tu?

We’ve all experienced the feeling of existing outside of time.  We’re so completely absorbed in what we’re doing that when we finally look up we don’t know if five minutes have passed or five hours.  And we don’t really care.  I often have that feeling in doing musical work.  I also remember it distinctly when emerging from a movie theater by myself after seeing Bergman’s The Seventh Seal for the first time.  I had no idea where I was, what time it was, or who was around me, and that was just fine.  I wanted to stay in the Bergman movie world.  I was experiencing a sort of cultural/social version of the bends as I gradually and somewhat painfully adjusted to being back in reality.

Baker’s protagonist regularly experience this kind of displacement when he stops time. He considers the ability to be a great gift, but the resulting isolation is stifling.  Only at the end does he realize that he might be better of being more honest with those around him, even if that means sacrificing his special powers.  The need for real connection does, in the long run, trump all.

But for 95% of the book, the protagonist is stuck in a powerful but lonely place, a spot where he can manipulate, he can fondle, he can masturbate, he can fantasize, but he can’t truly connect.  He recognizes the powers are irresistibly attractive to him but he also knows on some level that in accepting the devil’s bargain he is condemning himself to a life sentence of isolation, endless striving, and perhaps despair.

But the language is so rational, so reasonable, intellectual and compelling. Also funny, and sharply insightful. Who wouldn’t want that protected and special perspective?

Maybe it’s a bit like walking out on that glass-floored space over the Grand Canyon.  You should be falling.  You feel so very strongly you should be falling.  But the colors are beautiful, and you look down and think of certain impressionist paintings you love.  You’re isolated in your wonder as you at least temporarily“don’t fall”.

Or maybe like a doctor who operates on himself.  He makes the incision and pulls back the tissue to reveal a beautiful tumor.  He can’t help admire the sight, like looking at clouds in the sky and finding first a dog, then seconds later a flower, then a tree … all in the shifting cloud shapes.  But he’s really looking at his own disease, his own demise. But it’s still beautiful.

Or maybe it's just a fun and fanciful metaphor for hard won male wisdom

Is there a female in the world that can appreciate Nicholson Baker?  Doubt it.

I was so relieved that in the last twenty pages the protagonist takes a step toward an honest relationship, and learns to sacrifice the privileges granted by his special powers.  If he can learn, maybe there’s hope for us all.

There’s chick lit.  Then there’s Nicholson Baker.

Worlds Colliding

Inventory of my life realms (in no particular order): partner and lover, father, friend, extended family member, professional IT developer, musician, tennis player, cook, reader, consumer of popular culture, etc.

Each one of the above has its own concerns, contacts, and ambitions.  The Venn diagram that would include them all would show significant but limited overlaps. I don’t think it’s uncommon to have so many spheres, but I’m not sure what the implications are.  Enrichment from any source is a good thing, so there may be a gain from each. But I can only function optimally in one realm at a given moment.  And the inevitable intersections and collisions can be awkward; yet unanticipated connections are also so rewarding. To the extent that life is divided into separate spheres we risk losing ourselves in a maze of multitasking.  And the keeping any secrets, anything that is known in one realm and kept from another is a recipe for psycho-disaster.

 

Charles D’Ambrosio shows us in his essay collection, Loitering, that language is a strain that runs through all of our worlds.  How I address my partner, my daughter, my friends, my colleagues, my friends on the tennis court, how I read … language runs through it all.  And looking carefully at language can teach us quite a bit about ourselves.

D’Ambrosio is a complicated man with a messed up family history and lots of personal issues, but he’s managing to sort it all out through writing, through language, through careful thinking about words.  This rewarding but uneven collection covers lots of territory.  My favorites include “Casting Stones”, about a famous trial and all of the personal, legal, and cultural implications of the outcome, and “Hell House”, a telling essay on the contrast between true horror and political propaganda.

D’Ambrosio is a serious thinker and an even more careful writer.  He slices very thin, very thin indeed.  His observations are keen, thought provoking, sometimes controversial, and even at times infuriating.  But his careful prose is alive, breathing, and needs to be taken seriously.

Is there some Utopia in which each of us can live a truly united life, where it all fits together seamlessly and we don’t have to keep explaining parts of ourselves to those outside that particular circle, or just keep sucking up the tension created by the collision and staying quiet?  Maybe there once was a way to do it, but probably there is no longer.  But applying the same kind of rigor to our use of language in all spheres will help us understand the commonality.  It’s literally a kind of verbal psychoanalysis.  It is both paralyzing and liberating. A double edged sword, and a sharp one at that.

Sex and the Anglo Saxon

I remember riding a crowded bus in London in the 1970’s and noticing a seated young adult male who was holding a small dark wooden box in his hands.  After a while he opened it and just stared at the contents for several minutes.  I thought it might be a special piece of jewelry or a religious icon of some sort.  I moved a little so I could see over his shoulder.  It was a simulated human rear end lovingly mounted in burgundy velvet, a small doll’s ass, realistically colored, just there to be admired.  He was fascinated by it, and didn't care who observed him enjoying the sight and feel.  It struck me then that yes, it really is true.  The Brits have their own strangeness about sex.

 

There's a movie version with Haley Mills. I dare you.

Kingsley Amis’s Take A Girl Like You is a comedy of manners that satirizes class, academics, marriage, and even a little politics.  But it’s mostly (actually pretty obsessively) about the social aspects of sex, pure and simple.  Yes it moves to a typical Kingsley Amis climax (sic).  In Lucky Jim it was a speech, here it’s the main character losing her virginity (willingly … sort of).  It’s all so very upper class British.  So many inside jokes, so much snobbishness and conceit.  On the whole, not very attractive, and more importantly not all that insightful about sex and intimacy.  I’ll take James Salter on this topic any day.  A Sport and A Pastime is marvelous.  As for Amis, his traditional British reserve, ultra-sophisticated understated and indirect language, and his satirical intentions don’t combine for me to produce insight about physical intimacy, or at least not in this case.  There’s some fun along the way, but for me anyway not the kind of ‘happy ending’ I hoped for.

The Fog of Life

What is real?  What is not?  What needs to be real? Can we live with an open question?

Can art ever be real?  What about fake art? Is there such a thing?

Do we ever truly connect with another, or is it an illusion, albeit a grand one?

The master prose stylist John Banville weighs in on these issues in Athena, a novel from the mid 1990's.  It's one of the strangest books I've ever read.  Banville manages a very delicate balancing act. The characters are real and they're not. It's funny and yet very poignant.  We never quite know where we stand, and that's part of the beauty of it all.

Through it all Banville the writer comes through again, weaving his webs of words with skill and dash. Consider the following passages on a sexual encounter:

Once more I am lying on my side, facing as before towards the window and the dwindling rain, cradling her in my arm now as she snuffles and twitches, and my arm has gone numb but I will not shift it for fear of disturbing her, and besides, I feel heroic here, young Tristan watching sleepless over his Irisch Kind; heroic and foolish, unreal, anxious, exultant. And slowly there unfolded in me a memory from the far past, when as a child one summer afternoon on a holiday at the seaside I stepped out of a tin-roofed cinema expecting rain, fox, boiling clouds, and found myself instead standing in the midst of rinsed and glistening sunlight with a swollen cobalt sea before me upon which a boat with a read sail leaned, making for the hazed horizon, and I felt for once, for one, rare, mutely ecstatic moment, at home in this so tender, impassive and always preoccupied world.

,,, :How palely delicate she was.  She glimmered. Her skin had a grainy, thick texture that at times, when she was out of sorts, or menstrual, I found excitingly unpleasant to the touch. Yes, it was always there, behind all the transports and the adoration, that faint, acrid, atavistic hint of disgust, waiting, like pain allayed, waiting, and reminding. This i am convinced is what sex is, the anaesthetic that makes bearable the flesh of another. And we erect cathedrals upon it.

The voice in places is reminiscent of Philip Roth.  The self-conscious narrator, full of spirit, and also cursed with self doubt. Never sure of where he is, always on shaky ground, but shockingly observant of every detail.  The contradiction between blindness and keen sight is always puzzling, always making the reader reconsider, think again about what is real and what is not.  The plot is tied to other Banville novels, but no matter.  The writing stands on its own. He is a modern master.

A Cautionary Tale

Ian McEwan's latest novel, The Children Act, shows us what can happen when you dare to listen to your inner desires, when you take risks and try new paths, when you rock the boat.  According to McEwan the result is not pretty.  Better to stay inside by the fire, repress those nagging urges, and get on with your conventional pale existence.

That's a depressing message in a number of ways. Desire and fantasy are often the breeding grounds for future adventure and happiness.  There are times when the boat needs to be rocked because like it or not the boat is on a disastrous course.  And of course so many people don't have that comfortable well stocked and fortified position to hide in.  They're out there in the world without the protection of an approved and comfortable role.

The Children Act is a novel about a judge and the law.  What could be more conventional, more about restrictions, prohibitions, and societal approval?  The three main characters (a female judge, her husband, a teenage boy whose illness and religion create a legal controversy) each take a tiny step outside their conventional boundaries.  The husband has a short and abortive affair (reminiscent of the sad and funny wedding night scene in On Chesil Beach), the teenager temporarily abandons the protection, limitations, and comforts of a strict religious lifestype, and the wife (childless herself) opens up to a true emotional bond with the young boy. All three beat a hasty retreat.  They are simply unwilling to endure the hardship of finding their own way and dealing with the contradictions and discomfort of reconciling inner and outer lives.  How sad.

The same goes for McEwan as an author these days.  The prose is crystalline, very carefully laid out. The plot is very well ordered.  It's all so well put together, and yet devoid of passion and raw emotion.  I lose patience after a while.  I want someone to scream, someone to make a serious error that they will learn from, someone to dig inside themselves and be uncomfortable for a while.  It just doesn't happen.  It's a depressing and limited world view that even in late middle age makes me bristle.

It's the quintessential conservative message.  I didn't like hearing it from my parents, and I still don't like hearing it as an adult.

Iambic Tetrameter

A novel in verse?  In old-fashioned iambic tetrameter?  Who would dare to try?

Vikram Seth did in 1986.  The Golden Gate is a novel written in traditional stanzas of iambic tetrameter. Experimental, retro, daring, historical ... all rolled into one.  The story takes place in the Bay Area in the early 80's.  Yes, it's a bit dated now, but many of the same issues are still kicking about out here.  Tech boom, the intersection of politics and technology, income inequality, sexual identity, personal integrity.  The more things change.

For me there was plenty of delight in the verse itself. It's at times corny (especially the rhyme schemes), pleasingly rhythmic, and often very clever.  Following a traditional plot through a few hundred pages of verse is an unexpected pleasure. Indeed, prose is only one way of skinning the cat. Sometimes particularly good prose, prose that offers its own pleasures is the real point.  And here it's verse, to be appreciated for its own merits. Words for words sake.  There's pleasure in just putting words together in pleasing and clever ways.

I don't think the character and plot issues are particularly profound, but Seth offers us a very pleasurable verbal pastry.  Savor it.  Enjoy it for what it is: a forward looking retrogression, a look at the present through an ancient literary lens.  The Brits endowed India with a brilliant literary heritage, and here Seth exhibits a rare fluency and reverence. It's like a modern composer writing a traditional fugue.  It's a tribute to the past, a reinterpretation, a new version of something old.  That kind of constraint has its limits, but it's an interesting niche.

Next, a new short story in Middle English?  A 21st century Yiddish classic?

Meanwhile, anxiously awaiting Seth's overdue A Suitable Girl, the sequel to his epic novel A Suitable Boy. Originally expected in 2013, it is now slated for publication in 2016. No matter how long, I'll read it.  Total immersion in another world.  I'm ready.

Enon

Sometimes just plain really good writing is enough to carry the day.  Tinkers won the Pulitzer, and I can't quibble with that decision.  Enon, Paul Harding's next novel is equally as good.  A small family is utterly destroyed by a cycling accident that kills the 14-year-old daughter.  This short novel follows the father for the calendar year after the incident.  It's not a pretty picture.  The marriage ends quickly and abruptly.  He descends into a hell of guilt, grief, and substance abuse.  By the end he does reemerge into the light, but very much wounded and transformed.  Life will never be the same.

Of course the roots of much of the trouble were there before the accident, but sometimes fate has a way of intervening and tipping the balance. The book contains many reminiscences of his relationship with his daughter.  Of course they are slanted and a bit unrealistic.  But that's the nature of grief.  We mourn what we've lost at the same time that we're figuring out what that loss might be.

Maybe the best way to recommend the writing is to quote a few passages at length.  These appear near the end of the novel. I hope that the act of copying them here will teach me just a little about good writing.

I walked across the meadow and into the woods, into the Enon River sanctuary near where my grandfather and I and Kate and I had fed the birds from our hads so many times. I imagined the birds dropping dead from the trees until the ground was covered in a tangled mass of corpses, the beak and broken wings and soiled feathers and needle-thin bones of one animal interlaced and looped with those of the next and all the bodies knitted together. And I imagined that the plaited bodies might be lifted in a single pane and draped over my shoulders and clasped together at my throat with claws and worn like a cape or robe. It would be very light, made as it was from feathers and hollow bones. It would be very long and I would wander from the tame boundaries of the sanctuary out into a real wilderness with a great train following me that would comb up insects and grass and bark and snag on stumps, and that would constantly force me to stop and turn to gather or yank free or untangle, only to have it catch again a moment later on another barb. Bones would snap and wings unscrew from their sockets and I would leave a trail of looping feathers and scattered limbs. My thrashings would knot the garment as much as they rent it. The garment would attract living, wild birds as I passed below their nests and they would alight on it and become entangled. Over time, the garment would be transformed, expelling those first, tame birds and accumulating dark pheasants and crows and elusive little songbirds. After many years, the cape would no longer contain any of the birds from which it had been originally formed. It would become more and more gruesome as it metamorphosed from entirely dead birds to a mixture of the dead and the living. It would writhe and twist with black and brown and flutter scarlet and yellow and purple.  The snared birds would peck one another bare and pick out one another's eyes and preen themselves and eat one another an defecate upon one another and couple, all while they screeched and sang and made nests and brooded over eggs that were not theirs but had boiled up beneath them through the thickets of bones and plumage, even as their own eggs had sifted away to hatch somewhere else or fallen from the cloak onto the ground or in cold puddles, where their quickening yolks would cool and cloud to mere jelly.  Sparrows would raise waxwings and crows beget finches and there would be generations of birds that were born, lived, sang, struggled, and died wholly ensnared in that monstrous cloak.

And from just a little later:

My grandfather always told me that whether or not I believed in religion or God or any kind of meaning or purpose to our lives, I should always think of my life as a gift. Or that's what he told me his father had told him and that his father had told him, In a tone of voice that suggested that such a way of thinking had seemed to him as remote and as equally magnificent and impossible as it did to me, even as he passed it along as practical advice. But it's a curse, a condemnation, like an act of provocation, to have been aroused from not being, to have been conjured up from a clot of dirt and hay and lit on fire and set stumbling among the rocks and bones of this ruthless earth to weep and worry and wreak havoc and ponder little more than the impending return to oblivion, to invent hopes that are as elaborate as they are fraudulent and poorly constructed, and that burn off the moment they are dedicated, if not before, and are at best only true as we invent them for ourselves or tell them to others, around a fire, in a hovel, while we all freeze or starve or plot or contemplate treachery or betrayal or murder or despair of love, or make daughters and elaborately rejoice in them so that when they are cut down even more despair can be wrung from our hearts, which prove only to have been made for the purpose of being broken. And worse still, because broken hearts continue beating.

The writing takes on a life of its own.  The rhythms and sounds are often more important than the meaning of the words.  Yes, nothing much happens in this book.  Bur read it as poetry, and enjoy the creative use of language. I'll happily read anything he publishes.

 

Extrapolation

The Tenth of December made such a splash (and was IMHO so good) I'm continuing to catch up with Saunders's earlier work.  In Persuasion Nation (2006) is another collection of stories.  While not as varied, far ranging, and ambitious as The Tenth of December, these stories nonetheless are inventive and provocative.  Saunders excels at creating a particular slant, a certain view that is key to each story.  He requires a bit of trust and patience from his readers. At first you may not know where you are, what is real, what is not. But through skillful and creative use of language Sauders manages to paint a singular picture in each story.  It's a picture you view at first from only an inch away. Gradually you pull back and get the full image and the larger significance.

Saunders is particularly good at positing new future realities based on extrapolation of troubling trends observed in our present. In other words, if we take these disturbing present-day tendencies and follow them into the future, we might get this peculiar picture. He presents the image with verbal nuances and tricks, and part of the fun is gradually figuring out in each story what we're actually reading: working back from the strangeness of what we read and finding today's familiar reality embedded in the narrative.

It's a formula that can get tiresome, but there is plenty of inventiveness, humor, pathos, and just plain good writing here. My Amendment is a brilliant satire of conservative view on gender.  In Persuasion Nation is a terrific send up of ubiquitous marketing images. Brad Corrigan, American is a telling exaggeration of current trends in reality television and pop culture.

For someone so solidly entrenched in academic and highfalutin' literary circles Saunders is surprisingly in touch with popular culture. His eyes are open, and he's not spending all of his time in the ivory tower.  He's out among us observing, indeed perhaps taking notes as a secret agent that reports back the latest to headquarters. I hope HQ is listening.

Father Knows Best

Mention the name Amis to a reader today, and everyone assumes you're referring to Martin.  But let's not forget Kingsley Amis, Martin's father.  OK please,  we're not exactly talking Chaucer here. Kingsley was born in 1922 and died in 1995.  He wrote his fiction from the 50's to the early 90's.

Lucky Jim was his first novel, and it remains my all-time favorite novel about academia.  It's simply hilarious but also dead serious.  If you don't know it, just get it and read it. If you've ever lived in academia, you'll laugh out loud.

The Russian Girl is one of his last novels (from the early 90's).  I vaguely remember reading it when it came out, but it didn't make much of an impression.  When I saw a paperback version in a used bookstore a few years ago, I couldn't resist picking it up.  Not sure why it took me this long to get to it, but I'm so glad I did.

First of all, Kingsley Amis has to be the master of the British comic novel of the second half of the twentieth century.  It's P. G. Wodehouse combined with Fawlty Towers. Yes, it's so so British and all that, very proper and buttoned down.  The contrived style can be a bit off-putting at times, but do try to go with it. Think Maggie Smith at her best. But there's real heart, genuine modesty, and strong opinions to be reckoned with.  And then there's the writing itself, which will delight you unexpectedly.

OK it's old-fashioned, it's a bit sexist.  Yes, he was an alcoholic with all the issues that come along with that particular shortcoming.  But there is also genuine craft here, a writer that took care with words, with structure, and with ideas. In The Russian Girl, Amis manages to express some very serious thoughts on how various worlds can collide in an individual life.  There's our everyday outer life (the face we show to society), there's literature (and art in general), there's politics, there's academia, there's our inner emotional life, there's sexuality.  All of these overlap in countless ways, and those overlaps while sometimes fruitful, often simply contaminate one another. How do we sort it all out?

Art is art; life is life.  We do our best with personal morality.  Why confuse morality with politics and literature?  We vote, we have political affiliations, as citizens we must make expedient political decisions.  Why mix that up with art or personal morality?  Sorting all that out is the real subject of this book, and Kingsley's advice is well taken.  Do the best you can at the moment.  Don't make connections between worlds that are not there in the actual real-life context.  Artificial and contrived connections are dangerous and may lead to serious error.  And real contradictions and conflicts are inevitable, and we must be prepared to deal with them, no matter how confusing.

Funny, but that's not the whole story.

Most of all, Kingsley shows tremendous faith in our ability to get it right in the long run, or at least be more correct as we stumble down the road of life.  Yes, the book has some plot contrivances. Yes, it all doesn't quite play out believably, but then again what's so realistic about Solzhenitsyn's fiction?  Yes, there are deux ex machina moments, characters that are introduced simply to express an idea, and then they disappear.  I get it.  In the end I was happy to know Amis's thoughts, and I was reassured with his assessment that though in the small scale we often get it so so wrong, we are always capable of growth and insight.  No matter what bad choices we've made in the past, we can continue to learn.  If we're willing to pay the price (without resentment) for those bad choices, we can begin again ... and again ... and again as needed.  Maybe it's the alcoholic needing forgiveness or trying hard to reconcile his capabilities with his failings.

Is it all about redemption?  Perhaps. I haven't read much of Martin Amis, but what I have read (and I get the tremendous intelligence, the literary skill) makes me despair that redemption is just another illusion.  For now I prefer Kingsley's outlook, and I will dream on. It might be painful to truly look at ourselves, but in the long run it's the only way to find a better path. Pain itself cannot be the only end.

I prefer to think of life as a comedy. Full of errors, pain and pathos, but nonetheless a comedy.

Once Upon A Time

Murakami has given us a little bonus, a little something extra for his American fans.  It's actually a new American edition of a 2008 Japanese novella, and it’s handsomely and cleverly designed with many colorful and striking illustrations.  Kudos to the designer, Chip Kidd.  The Strange Library is a modern fairy tale.  It contains none of the modern cultural references that Murakami is so fond of in his novels.  It’s quite abstract, timeless, yet narrowly focused.  The symbols are striking and thought provoking.  It’s about growing up (as so many fairy tales are) and the changes and sadness that come with leaving childhood behind.

The typical protagonist in a Murakami novel is a young adult male, alone, rather withdrawn and prone to contemplation and stillness.  This tale might be seen as a prequel of sorts, an account of how a more-or-less normal child might grow into that particular adult state.

It’s certainly not my favorite Murakami, but it’s worth a read. It will take you less than an hour.  You could almost read it aloud to a child, albeit not a very young child. At least it’s worth thinking about in that way, as if we were reading it to the child in ourselves.  Don’t look for the obvious.  Just let the mood and the crazy symbols resonate in your mind.

I’ll bet you’ll want to read it again.  Just like the child that wants to hear that same book over and over.