Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness (1990) By William Styron

Although beautifully written, Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness by William Styron is not a book I picked up for pleasure reading.  I read it on the recommendation of a close friend who thought it would help me understand some of what he has gone through in his life.  The book details Styron’s personal experience with depression. 

The book is alarming in that it forces readers to go back over their lives and examine how many times we’ve known people who have faced this crisis while we as “friends” have turned the other way, not wanting to recognize it, rather on talk about it.  Many questions came to my mind.  In my case, I now can recognize the reality that three people in my immediate circle of friends, and at least one relative, have not only contemplated suicide, but have actually attempted it.  These are not unknown details to me, yet how have I failed to tabulate that statistic?  How many others have dealt with clinical depression undiagnosed, or without it advancing to suicide or attempted suicide?  How many instances am I still unaware of?

Is my group of friends an unrepresentative sample, or do all of us have our collective head in the ground on this taboo subject?

 

William Styron is a Pulitzer Prize winning author whose major works include Sophie’s Choice and The Confessions of Nat Turner. When he first wrote about his mental breakdown and hospitalization it was for publication in Vanity Fair magazine in an attempt to break the public silence on the subject. Styron felt confined by the magazine format however, and made the decision to fully tell his story in a book; while still short at 85 pages, it accomplishes its wake-up call.

A word of caution for readers, if you are looking for a definitive answer, there is none.  Part of the difficulty with this illness is that there does not seem be a solitary “cause” of clinical depression. Although many (not all) cases have a relation to a traumatic life event, the nature of the trauma is not necessarily known, and when it is known, not even remotely universal.  But if you are looking for some understanding on what your friends may be going through, or have gone through, then Darkness Visible is an excellent start.  Then you can ask them.

Istanbul Passage (2012) By Joseph Kanon

Istanbul Passage, Joseph Kanon’s most recent book, while an okay book, proved a major disappointment to me.  In part this was due to my false expectations, but it was also due to a promotional campaign that stretched to the very threshold of false advertising.

Kanon, a retired book editor, has found a very successful second career as a writer penning such best-sellers as The Prodigal Spy and Los Alamos.  His novel The Good German was even made into a movie starring no less than George Clooney.  Earlier this year he spoke at the Printers Row Book Fair in Chicago, my neighborhood summer festival.   I went to see him based solely on the title of the new book, a reason that explains my false expectations. 

“My” Istanbul is a romantic fantasy shaped largely by Orhan Pamuk’s beautiful, in fact mesmerizing, book Istanbul: Memories and the City.  Pamuk, a winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, is a native of the city, and it plays a key role, either as Istanbul or as Constantinople, in his body of work.  While Kanon tried to capture the city’s mystic, he failed – though in fairness, I don’t believe he’d compare himself with Pamuk, even if his publishers would.

Equally relentless is the promotional campaign that refers to Kanon as the “heir apparent” to Graham Greene, author of the classics The Third Man and The Quiet American.  Really?

All of this said, it is a good novel if espionage is your genre.  The book is centered on the spy network left adrift in Istanbul at the end of World War II, their mission accomplished, with the Cold War era not quite yet upon us.  The main character, an American named Leon Bauer, is picked to run one last job before being down-sized.  The job puts him in the uncomfortable position of protecting a double/triple agent who is evil incarnate, to deliver a good purpose. Kanon plays this theme of good and evil being situational quite well, and masters the requisite amount of suspense necessary for an espionage novel. There is probably another movie deal here, if so rest assured it will be a controversial movie.

So, do I recommend this book?  Yes, if espionage is your interest.  As for me, let me emphasize that my disappointment was expecting the book to be something that it is not, which is my error more than the author’s.

The Martian Chronicles (1950) By Ray Bradbury

It’s not like I missed the cultural influence of Ray Bradbury, I was, after all, raised on Flash Gordon and The Day the Earth Stood Still, eventually graduating to Star Trek and, dare I admit, all theories pertaining to a certain event that may or may not have occurred in Roswell, New Mexico -- in your deepest soul, you know it did.  Yet, it was only a few weeks ago that I first read Bradbury’s classic The Martian Chronicles.

The Chronicles is a collection of short stories describing the colonization of the Planet Mars by Earthlings.  The stories first appeared in print individually during the heyday of magazine publishing in the 1940s.  They were compiled into book form in 1950.

Think about that date for a moment.  Here is an author who was writing about not just space exploration, but interplanetary travel and settlement -- years before Sputnik, years before communications satellites, a quarter century before Neil Armstrong set foot on the relatively nearby lunar surface, and a half century before NASA’s “Curiosity” began roving around the red planet.  Bradbury was colonizing Mars and running tourist junkets between it at Earth!

The book is immensely thought-provoking, providing some early discussion on the arrogance of interacting with beings from another world from an assumed position of superiority. It preceded by years the publication of Rachel Carson’s environmental epic Silent Spring, not to mention the public debate about global warming, and offered commentary on how we were/are destroying Planet Earth.  Its anti-war commentary remains frighteningly on target.

But the book is also fun, nowhere more so than in the tale of the first successful landing on Mars, as foreseen in a Martian woman’s dream.  She tells her husband that in her dream a man from another world -- who she is clearly enthralled by -- will arrive via rocket ship the next night in a nearby meadow.  As the next night falls and the first Earthling lands his rocket ship on Mars and disembarks, he is immediately shot dead by the jealous husband.

It takes several attempts before Earthlings are finally able to successful establish an outpost on Mars, beginning the colonization process whereby they work to remake the planet in Earth’s image.

To my surprise, Bradbury also incorporates some rather biting social commentary into his book by capitalizing on the time period it was written in, the years immediately after World War II when the American military was still officially segregated, and the Jim Crow-era was still uncontested in the South.  I don’t know if my favorite author, James Baldwin, was a Bradbury fan, but I believe I can safely surmise he would have applauded the chapter titled June 2003, Way In the Middle of the Air.  It tells the story of how overnight the entire African American population of a small Southern town packed up without notice to begin their interplanetary Great Migration to Mars.

At only 182 pages, this book is a fast read.  My advice though is to savor it, reading no more than a couple of chapters a night, and then read it again.  I already have.

Leopold & Loeb: The Crime of the Century (1975) By Hal Higdon

The competition from Chicago alone includes many legendary crimes: John Wayne Gacy, the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre & the entire Capone-era, Silas Jayne, the Spilotro brothers, and Richard Speck; yet only the Leopold & Loeb murder earned the moniker of The Crime of the Century.  Although the crime took place 88 years ago, its major details are still well known.  Hal Higdon’s book on the crime, trial and aftermath fills in the less current details in a manner that leaves one rapidly turning to the next page, as though it were a “who done it” on a best seller list. 

The book recaps the true story of a pre-meditated murder, with a victim picked at random.  The victim, Bobby Franks, and his murderers Nathan Loeb and Richard Leopold Jr., were all college students living in Chicago’s Kenwood neighborhood, then the address of the city’s elite.  What was their motive?  It is thought to have been curiosity, thrill, and a belief that their intellectual superiority entitled them to test out if they could commit the perfect crime.

If you are a resident of Chicago, the names and places are completely familiar. The book reads much like Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City in its connection to the city’s geography and social structure.  An equally frightening comparison would be Gene O’Shea’s nonfiction book Unbridled Rage: A True Story of Organized Crime, Corruption, and Murder in Chicago detailing the murder of three boys who disappeared on their way to a movie in the Loop in 1955, but expanding well beyond that incident.

The book Leopold & Loeb plays out on so many levels that it is difficult to structure.  First of course, is the crime story itself.  How these two young men planned this murder down to minute detail, and yet in retrospect, seemed to want to get caught.  In fact, in those days, long before the Miranda decision, they confessed to nearly everything, even aiding police in locating missing evidence, seemingly pleased with their efforts, though disappointed they made an error.

Yet another level involves the time period, 1924, the mid-point of Prohibition, the ascendancy of the Capone reign of terror in Chicago.  Yet the endless front page coverage that summer wasn’t about Al Capone, Bugsy Malone or blatant police corruption, it was about two egg-heads, one even an ornithologist, who committed just one of the 177 murders registered in the city in the first six months of the year. 

It was the period of Chicago history immortalized in The Front Page by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, when six daily newspapers fought for circulation by trying to out scoop and out sensationalize each other.  The story was ready made: two kids from good families, prominent in the business community, students at one of the most prestigious universities in the world, both with genius IQ’s, and rumored to be “perverts,” an emphasis considered more damaging than the murder.  And it was a story with the never completely answered question: why?

And then there was the trial, with the combatants being a States’ Attorney whose political career could be made, or broken, by the case; versus Clarence Darrow, arguably the most famous attorney in American history, and himself a Chicago resident.  The murder case was almost incidental to the two legal questions fought over: the moral underpinning of the death penalty; and the claim of mental illness as a mitigating factor in criminal responsibility.

And then there was the post-trial story, which extended to the summer of 1974.

Summer reading does not get more engrossing than this.

Death Is A Lonely Business (1985) By Ray Bradbury

A month ago Ray Bradbury died just shy of his 92nd birthday.  All I knew about him was that he was an incredibly successful writer in the “future fiction” genre.   His first big commercial success was with The Martian Chronicles, published back in 1950.  I’m not really sure why, but I don’t recall having read any of his works, though I did see the movie version of Fahrenheit 451.  

In a case of good timing, a friend sent me Bradbury’s book Death is a Lonely Business a few weeks ago.  It is set in Venice, California, circa 1949, as the menagerie that was the Venice Pier is being torn down in an early version of re-gentrification.  All of the book's characters are part of the world being left behind, be they academics, former opera divas from Chicago or silent film stars -- yes, there is a variation of Norma Desmond!

The main character is a struggling young writer living in the Venice fog.   One night the writer comes across a body that has somehow become entangled in an abandoned circus lion’s cage, submerged at high tide.  The rest of the book involves the writer’s quest to investigate this incident, and convince the local detective that it’s part of a pattern of serial killings.  An important subplot is convincing this same detective to complete his own unfinished book.

While the plot construction of Death is a Lonely Business might be a tad convoluted, it’s easy to pick out the reasons for Bradbury’s success as a writer.  I dog-eared about a dozen pages that condensed into a few sentences what could easily be stand-alone novels, my favorite tells of a dream.

"I was a writer in a small, green town in northern Illinois, and seated in a barber chair like Cal’s chair in his empty shop.  Then someone rushed in with a telegram that announced I had just made a movie sale for one hundred thousand dollars!

In the chair, yelling with happiness, waving the telegram, I saw the faces of all the men and boys, and the barber, turn to glaciers, turn to perma-frost, and when they did pretend at smiles of congratulations their teeth were icicles.  Suddenly I was the outsider.  The wind from their mouths blew cold on me.  I had changed forever.  I could not be forgiven."

From Wikipedia, I learned that the “green town in northern Illinois” alludes to Waukegan (just north of Chicago) where Bradbury was born.   Although this was not my plan, my decision to read this book was influenced by Bradbury’s death – which seems appropriate because it is a murder mystery dedicated to the memory of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, two of the masters of that genre.  

The Mother (1934) By Pearl Buck

China has been “discovered” by the West many times, dating from the Travels of Marco Polo in the late 13^th century, to Richard Nixon in 1972.  Yet despite occasional waves of interest, native Chinese have largely remained an unknown to most westerners, though the history of Chinese immigrants in the U.S. is fairly well documented.

A few years ago I read the emotionally jarring Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang, and was surprised at how ignorant I was on this subject.  I asked my mother, who was in her teens at the time, how much of this story hit the American press.  Her answer was none that she could recall explaining that part of the world did not exist to most people [Americans] until Pearl Harbor.  

Once World War II was over, China again mostly disappeared to the American public (with the cinematic exception of The World of Suzy Wong, starring William Holden and Nancy Kwan), hidden behind the “bamboo curtain” drawn closed by Chinese leaders, and by a door slammed shut by American politicians; one of whom, Richard Nixon, made a career out of China-baiting. Ironic then that he is credited with reopening the door 25 years later.

In the years before World War II however, before the civil war was won by Mao Tse Tung resulting in the creation of a two-China policy in the West, there was a flickering of interest in the Chinese people.  That interest was almost single-handedly the result of author Pearl Buck, the daughter of Presbyterian missionaries from West Virginia, who spent most of her childhood and early adult life in China. Ages ago, I think when I was in high school, I read Buck’s novel The Good Earth, which won her a Pulitzer Prize in 1932.  Subsequently she won the Nobel Prize in Literature in recognition of her books set in China.

Recently I revisited Buck, reading her 1934 novel The Mother.  The story tells the story of a peasant woman whose husband has abandoned her, leaving her with the responsibility for not only their 3 children, but also her aging mother-in-law.   Her struggle to survive in a culture where women are decidedly second class citizens, and peasants are no more than feudal serfs, is gripping, and surprisingly universal, even to a westerner. This is feminist literature at its creation.  It is also a primer on the day to day challenges faced by the masses in China which set the stage for the rise of Communism.  The Mother’s second son would become an early Communist insurgent, though politics is something she herself never understood, or even questioned.

In her works Pearl Buck mastered these human stories of the peasantry, making it all the more ironic that she was later banned re-entry to the country, branded as a tool of West.  To her credit, even though she was disavowed by the new power structure in China; her personal philanthropy clearly never abandoned a concern for their people.

The Circus in Winter (2004) By Cathy Day

I enjoy reading, yet routinely I’m ready for a book to end long before I get to the final page; but with The Circus in Winter, I would have been perfectly content for it to go on for another 300 pages.  That may be the strongest recommendation I’ve ever given a book.  A none-too-small part of that gush is the book’s relevance to my childhood -- settle down, I wasn’t a circus kid.

It’s an odd book; a collection of related short stories about people in the quasi-fictional town of Lima, Indiana.  I say “quasi” because Cathy Day, the book’s author, grew up in Peru, Indiana, where history has it a now long defunct circus spent its winter months.  This geography and the town folk are something I’m rather familiar with, being a native of northern Indiana. I particularly relate to the underlying subplot shared by all of the characters: the “comfort” of living in a small Midwestern town, versus the “get me outta here” dynamic. I knew this dilemma personally – one foot in then-small town Portage, the other foot in “the Chicago metropolitan area.” In my case, Chicago won out, though most of my large family remains in Indiana.

The book begins with a short biography of Wallace Porter, one of the "leading citizens" of Lima. On his annual business trip to New York he falls in love and marries.  His new wife however is rapidly stifled by life in a small town. In chapter 2, after it becomes clear she does not have long to live, he decides to buy a circus so that they can travel endlessly ... her dream.  She dies that day.  Afterwards, he keeps the circus, and it becomes his family. Just as it became his family, it also became a part of the fabric of the town.

There are chapters in this book that are just priceless, such as the Gypsies at the KOA camp.  But I’ll let you learn this on your own.  A note of caution: this is not a children’s book.

I found out about this book because it was referenced in the course material for a seminar on Sherwood Anderson (Winesburg, Ohio) at Chicago’s renowned Newberry Library. The materials placed her in Anderson's genre.  Fair enough, though she has a style that stands on its own quite sufficiently.  Further inquiry lead me to discover that a recent class of the Theater Department at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana (a.k.a. Middletown) turned the book into Circus in Winter, The Musical. I truly would have loved to have seen that!

The World in the Evening (1954) By Christopher Isherwood

I am somewhat at a loss to describe The World in the Evening by Christopher Isherwood.   The word “vast” comes to mind, though that seems vague and somewhat misleading.  By “vast” I don’t mean lengthy or inaccessible, or even epic, it is none of these.  I mean it is vast in the range of life experiences that are explored.

The book follows the early adult life of Stephen Monk, from his postgraduate days through two early marriages.  To tell his story Isherwood merges two established literary genres: the Masterpiece Theater formula of the British gentry aimlessly wandering through Europe, and the formula of American youth “finding themselves” on "the" continent, after graduation, before returning to the States to begin their adult lives.

The first marriage is to a British author named Elizabeth, who dies of a heart ailment -- the title is taken from one of her books.  His second marriage is to Jane, an American party girl. The book begins as Stephen’s marriage to Jane is dissolving, and is primarily told through a series of flashbacks triggered by his reading of Elizabeth’s personal letters as he is convalescing from a serious accident.  

Readers of this book will fall for Stephen as they page through his life story.  He is a likeable, almost charismatic figure, though he is not a particularly admirable human being, which perhaps adds to his attraction. 

While The World in the Evening is a personal story, it plays out mainly in Europe over a momentous period of history – World War II is underway by the book’s end.  This backdrop is rarely the focal point of the story, but its presence grows as the book unfolds.

Isherwood is regarded as an early witness of the rise of Nazism, and notes it frequently in his writings set in the 1930s, including this book.  Yet, what has always left me questioning is whether he recognized the early beginnings of this decline into an abyss as it was occurring, as his books suggest, or if it was with a flawless 20-20 hindsight.  His books were, to my knowledge, written years later, after the full extent of the holocaust became widely known to the rest of the world.  I may have to add an Isherwood biography to my reading list to better address this question (though that’s no guarantee of an answer), and let me point out that the question does not pertain solely to Isherwood.

And finally, this would not be an Isherwood novel were it not to include some gay characters.  One seems particularly worthy of mention because he seems out of context.  Stephen’s doctor has a young lover named Bob, who like Stephen was raised a Quaker.  From a literary standpoint, Bob’s primary purpose in the book is to allow Isherwood to explore the subject of religious pacifism at the advent of a war against an unmistakable evil. But the interesting thing about how Bob is portrayed is that he is philosophically an unapologetic gay man, who clearly would have become a “militant” gay activist if he lived in the 1970s or later, yet the story takes place in the 1930’s and was written in 1952 when this topic was still very much “the love that dare not speak its name.”

Suddenly A Knock On The Door (Hebrew 2010; English Translation 2012) By Etgar Keret

I had the pleasure of seeing Etgar Keret in lecture about a year ago, and raved about it endlessly. He was back in town recently to kick off a book tour promoting his latest collection of short stories, giving a lecture at the Chicago Sinai Synagogue.  I unfortunately had a scheduling conflict, my loss. I however have now read the new book, my gain.

Etgar Keret is a much acclaimed Israeli author, currently teaching a creative writing course at the University of Illinois at Champaign.  This new book is his fourth collection of short stories to be translated into English.  His stories are irreverent and priceless.  The cover blurb on The Bus Driver Who Wanted to be God captures the essence of his work perfectly: “warped and wonderful short stories.”

The title story from Bus Driver is a completely “wonderful” fable, and the “warped” description fits The Son of the Head of the Mossad perfectly.  Totally off the charts however is Kneller’s Happy Campers.  It tells the tale of several characters that have “offed themselves” by committing suicide – but, instead of going to heaven or hell, they are assigned to a suburb of Tel Aviv.

The first collection I read was The Nimrod Flipout, which includes a marvelous little story called Eight Percent of Nothing.  The Girl on the Fridge opens with the one paragraph, mega attention-getting, short story titled Asthma Attack, and includes a totally sad but funny story titled A No Magician Birthday.

The new release, Suddenly, a Knock on the Door, includes another mythical place: Lieland.  It is a world where all of the characters that one has ever incorporated into one’s little white lies reside in their lied about state: i.e. I can’t come to work today because my grandmother fell and broke her hip.  And my favorite fable, which is too short to summarize: Guava.

Almost as warped as some of the stories are the covers of two of these books:  The Bus Driver features a smiling suicide; while Nimrod’s Flipout features an Elmer Fudd-like character in an orange rabbit suit.

All of the 133 stories in these four collections were originally published in Hebrew.  You can order one of these books, but you might as well save yourself the trouble and order all four ... because you will want all four.

The Rise and Fall of Alexandria (2006) By Justin Pollard and Howard Reid

Complete this title:  The Rise and Fall of …

Most likely your answer was “the Roman Empire.”  World history, after all, is all about those people or countries known for their brute strength, i.e. Ghenghis Khan, Napoleon or Alexander the Great. 

But, history does offer other measures of greatness.    

The Rise and Fall of Alexandria, Birthplace of the Modern World provides one such alternative.  While Alexandria may be named after the epitome of military strength, its importance to the history of the “civilized” world is based on knowledge. 

Recently I read a great book titled The Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt, about how so much of ancient Greek culture was lost to the world.  It is largely the legacy of Alexandria that much of it also survived. The city, through the express design and force of will of its Ptolemy rulers (the Greek Dynasty) choose to collect the knowledge of the world in one place.  The Rise ... details: the selection of this northern Egyptian port as Alexander the Great’s chosen foothold on North Africa, how after his death it rapidly became the world’s first truly multi-cultural city and a practitioner of religious tolerance, it’s Wonders -- The Great Library, and The Great Lighthouse – and its many living legends, not the least of whom was Cleopatra.  The Fall ... details: not one sudden catastrophe, but dozens of causes, including the advent of religious fundamentalism, of the Christian kind.

Great stuff if one is a history buff, and completely readable.

A Single Man (1964) By Christopher Isherwood

This book begins with a strikingly familiar scene, perhaps too close to home:  George, a man in his late fifties awakes and goes through his morning routine.  He stares into his bathroom mirror and sees in it little reminders of the various stages of his life, hidden within its current self.  “What it sees there isn’t so much a face as the expression of a predicament.”  He is a single man because he is the survivor of a long term relationship with a man named Jim.

His singularity has multiple sources.  First and foremost, he is alone because few people ever acknowledged their relationship, despite its obvious existence.  He is alone because he can no longer self-define as half of a couple, though he has not a clue how to define his current state.  And, he is alone because is a gay man living an existence a decade before the sexual revolution. 

The book is written by Christopher Isherwood (1904 – 1986) who is best known for Berlin Stories, the source of the movie Cabaret.  I’ve recently begun reading his other works, and I am touched by the staying power of his observations.  Like Berlin Stories, A Single Man, has also been turned into a movie.  It scored a well-deserved Oscar nomination for Colin Firth.  I waited until I finished the book, before watching the movie last night.

Although the Director has taken some artistic license with the script, he has not harmed the impact of Isherwood’s story.  In fact, I will argue that some of the chapters perhaps worked even better on film – the flashbacks telling of George’s relationship with Jim in particular.   The role of his close friend Charley was somewhat enhanced to take advantage of the stature of actress Julianne Moore, but fortunately no attempt was made to assign them a relationship beyond what was in the book. And the role of Kenny, a college student, was somewhat downgraded, unfortunate because actor Nicholas Hoult clearly could have handled the character’s complexity.

As always, my recommendation would be read the book, but knowing that most people will not, let me say the movie is also a recommended – both however, would be better.

Doctor Wooreddy’s Prescription for Enduring the Ending of the World (1983) By Mudrooroo

Who could resist a book with a title like this?  This book is truly not for everyone, but if you are into anthropology, Australia, or colonialism/Christian missionaries-run-amok, then this is your book. Mudrooroo, one name (a.k.a. Colin Johnson), is an Australian who is an expert on the history of that continent’s aboriginal population.

The lead character of the book is Doctor Wooreddy, a member of a tribe that once occupied modern day Tasmania.  His story tells of the death and cultural devastation brought on his people by the arrival of the “ghosts” – white colonizers from Great Britain, mainly convicts, as Australia was primarily a penal colony.  The lead English character is a Mister Robinson, a missionary who thinks he is being helpful by bringing the natives to “civilization” and “Christianity,” In truth; Mister Robinson is a textbook example of a clueless “do-gooder” with an underlying personal ambition of securing a government pension to retire back to England with.

From a literary standpoint, the imagery of the book is wonderful, as the author, through his native characters, coins terms to describe what is happening to them. 

From a history/anthropology perspective, there is little new here.  The stories told all have counterparts in the history of native peoples everywhere.  If you have read Trail of Tears by John Ehle, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown and James Mooney’s excellent Ghost Dance, then you’ve got the picture; though since most people know little about the early history of Australia, it remains a worthwhile read.

One of the most interesting chapters of the book occurs near the conclusion. As “the ending of the world” is approaching, two of the main native characters escape from Mister Robinson’s “civilizing” influence and return to the land.  They are from different tribes with different religious beliefs, particularly as it relates to origin and the "location" of a supreme being.  Their respectful discussions on comparative religion could be a lesson for the “civilized” world.

Camino Real (1953) By Tennessee Williams; Staged at the Goodman Theatre, Chicago (2012)

You can count on one hand, with fingers left over, the number of playwrights of the stature of Tennessee Williams.  He’s written some of the classics of American theater, including A Streetcar Named Desire, and The Glass Menagerie.  But then, he also wrote Camino Real, a critical bomb when it opened.  When Chicago’s Goodman Theatre announced they would produce this play, written in 1953, the year I was born, I couldn’t resist.  Why were they doing this?

When possible, I will read the script of a play prior to seeing it, so I pulled out the Library of America’s collection of Williams’ work and began.  It took me only pages to realize why it was a bomb in the 1950’s.  Although Williams made a career out of characters with delusions, the entire cast of Camino Real, seems other worldly. 

Camino Real translates as the Royal Road.   It is set in an undisclosed town in the middle of tropical nowhere.  The plot, for lack of a better term, involves an American prize fighter named Kilroy, who has had to give up boxing for health reasons.  He left the U.S. on a merchant tub, hated it, and jumped ship.  When he discovers the town square, he gets robbed of everything but his championship belt & golden gloves – therefore joining the other residents at the end of their personal journeys.  The rest of the script is comprised of “Blocks” of how each of them got to this point in their lives.

Critics and biographers have explained that the play was written in “a dark period” of Tennessee Williams’ personal life.  Perhaps, but it reads to me as though “highly illuminated” by hallucinogens of one kind or another might be a more accurate description.

Not so, the stage production.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C90QtYssSa4

The Goodman recruited Calixto Bieito from Barcelona, Spain to direct this staging.  His adaptation is mesmerizing.   While remaining largely faithful to the script, Bieito has crafted this play into a fascinating work, featuring some rather spectacular individual performances – although the hint of hallucinogens remains in the tropical air.  The play runs through April 8^th, see it if you can.

A Palace in the Old Village (2009 in French, 2011 English translation) By Tahar Ben Jelloun

If the setting were North America, his name would be Jose, but it is not, the story is set in Europe, so his name is Mohammed. 

Several weeks ago I read Leaving Tangier, a novel by Tahar Ben Jelloun telling the story of a young man and his sister who had emigrated from their native Morocco to live in Spain. In this book A Palace in the Old Village he tells the story of Mohammed, an everyman character who had left his home in the Maghreb to become a “guest worker” in an auto plant in France.  He brought his family over as soon as he could afford to.  

  

He was a simple man, a hard worker who never complained about anything, and was appreciative of his ability to make good wages in that new country.  He made a good life for himself and his family.  But after 30 years on the job he reached retirement, which was mandatory in France.   This “tirement” however, was something foreign to him. 

He tried going to the plant for several days afterward, offering to cover for men who were absent for one reason or another. He’d volunteer, they need not pay him he explained.  But it wasn’t allowed.  Mohammed knew not what to do with himself. 

Since he had first arrived in France, he had returned to his village in Morocco each summer during the month long summer holiday, showering his distant relatives and childhood friends with presents.  Now, he was making the decision to return to the village for good. 

Using his entire savings, Mohammed built the largest house in the village.  Keeping with the traditions he had grown up with he wanted his entire family, and their families, to live with him.  He knew this would not happen, but at least all of them would spend their summer holidays with him, he thought.

But time had escaped Mohammed.  His children were independent and modern.  He never sought French citizenship, but all of his children had.  

The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (2011) By Stephen Greenblatt

This marvelous little work of nonfiction has everything: philosophy, theology, history, atomism, mystery and a large dose of irony.  Among other topics, the reader will discover a several page discussion on bookworms (the insects, not the geeks), a short history on the demise of the Great Library of Alexandria, a discourse on the literary circles of William Shakespeare, an overview of monastic life in the upper Germanic provinces of the Holy Roman Empire, and a short history on the creation of Times New Roman typeface – none of which is the main plot of the book.

The main plot is the story of how Poggio Bracciolini, a Vatican scribe and off-hours scholar, brings back from near extinction the tenets of Epicurean (Humanist) Greek philosophy, by rediscovering Lucretius’ poem On The Nature of Things: and how this book hunter’s find in 1417 helped shape the course of -- the swerve of (atoms) -- the Renaissance.   Author Stephen Greenblatt’s book, carries the subtitle of How the World Became Modern, but I’d like to suggest another:  The Crucifixion, Resurrection and Spread of Humanism.  Amen.

Poggio was a major official in the Vatican bureaucracy, serving five Popes during the 15^th century, two of whom were bounced from office for corruption (or more accurately, for having the wrong set of corrupt allies).  That this man would rediscover and reproduce this then controversial masterpiece debunking the core tenets of western theology is the ultimate irony.  That he did this at a time that the Vatican was routinely burning people at the stake for heresy, adds to the story.

Many of the works of the ancient Greek philosophers were lost during the Middle Ages.   Some works were suppressed as Roman culture asserted its control by purposely abandoning what came before; others because Christianity sought to destroy all history of polytheistic thought; and many others succumbed to natural causes, such as bookworms and fire.   Poggio’s intellectual hobby was to find as many lost classics as possible and translate them to Latin, making them accessible once more.   That many of those finds were at remote monastic libraries, adds to the irony.

This book, while short at 263 pages, is not an easy read.  It also contains 263 Notes (the last of which pertains to Thomas Jefferson’s personal library, which included a copy of Poggio’s Latin translation of On The Nature of Things), and a 27 page bibliography.  

The Pillars of the Earth (1989) By Ken Follett

There are chapters in history so complicated one needs a score card to understand them.  Ken Follett’s The Pillars of the Earth provides that score card for the 39-year period of English history (1135 through 1174) marking the end of the reign of Henry I (son of William the Conqueror); the ensuing civil war between Stephen and Matilde; the ascendancy of Henry II; and the assassination of Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury.

Even in novel form, it’s a complex story.  Follett masterly crafted a work of fiction to simplify this timeline, yet even his telling of it runs to a tome of 973 pages.   His success at this however is underscored by its international bestseller status.  This is an amazing accomplishment for any book, rather on one on a deeply important yet dry bit of medieval history: the prelude to the eventual break between the Roman Catholic Church and the state-sponsored Anglican Church of England, three Henrys down the road.

This may very well be the most carefully constructed book I’ve ever read, and I use the world “constructed” quite specifically.  The fictional story Follett tell this history with involves the construction of a Gothic cathedral in Kingsbridge, England – a project which spans the entire book.  The parallels between the book’s literary construction and the cathedral’s structure are remarkable; it will be the topic of many Literature PhD projects in the years to come.

The fictional story line at times gets as complex as the historical one with multiple and overlapping plots.  And with so many religious figures in the mix one expects a lot of claims to moral authority, and there are many, many claims.  But in my read, there is only one totally moral person in the book, the character of Ellen, who is, of course, branded as a witch.

My only complaint (and that is really too strong a term) is that if one knows English-British history, then there is no suspense here.  And with the fictional story, one always knows what will happen in the next chapter because the groundwork is so carefully prepared in the current chapter.  That said, it’s a great read.

Leaving Tangier (2006 in French; 2009 English translation) By Tahar Ben Jelloun

Tahar Ben Jelloun is an international bestselling author from Morocco.  He’s written 30 some novels, though he is a “new” author to me.

I picked Leaving Tangier as my first read because it is from one of my favorite genres, immigration stories, in this case that of “los moros” moving northward across the 8-1/2 mile straits separating Morocco from Spain. The story is told through the characters of Azel, his sister Kenza, and a benefactor named Miguel, from Barcelona, who facilitates their exit.  A central theme of the book is the desperation a lack of opportunity breeds among the young in Morocco.  This reality, both economic and societal, is what leads Azel, Kenza and tens of thousands of others to take whatever routes available to flee for the chance at the proverbial “better life” in Europe.

It’s not a new story, change the names of the countries and this is a common history threading through many great works of literature.   The North Africa to Western Europe immigration versions I have read however have always been written by Europeans, patronizing Europeans.  What makes Leaving Tangier different is the knowing perspective brought to the story by Ben Jelloun, a native of Fez, who now divides his time between Tangier and Paris.  His eyes are critical of Morocco mind you, and one must wonder how he has avoided arrest all of these years.  But his eyes are equally critical of Europe, a balance not usually found in discussions on this topic.

The book is written in realism, but also weaves in a few good dream sequences.  For the conclusion, it incorporates a fantasy tract ranking among most amazing I’ve ever read, as both Flaubert and Don Quixote board a ship “of five and twenty.”

I’d also like to comment on the character development in the book, because it is significant and very well done, but alas to say more would entail a spoiler alert -- you’ll have to read it yourself, and yes, that is a very strong recommendation.

The Path to the Spiders' Nests (1947 in Italian; 2000-revised in English) By Italo Calvino

Path to the Spiders’ Nests is the first novel of Italian author Italo Calvino (1923-1985); his other works include Invisible Cities and If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler.   I’ve not read any of his works before, though they are readily available in English. 

A short book, Spiders’ Nests is set in coastal Italy in the middle to late days of World War II.  It does not have much of a storyline, a rather fabricated one actually, which serves as an anchor for several character studies.  It does however have an extremely memorable main character: Pin, a pre-adolescent boy living with his prostitute sister, they have been orphaned by the death of their mother and abandonment by their father.  The story covers about a week of Pin’s life as he is attempting to grow up in the nonfunctioning environment that constituted the Italian State and its coalition-of-convenience resistance movement.  Wise beyond his years, Pin has little association with children his age, and is bewildered by adults … all adults.  I kept thinking of Huckleberry Finn while reading this, yet Spiders’ Nests has a vastly different setting.

Because of Pin this is an interesting read, though the story is not near as interesting as the Wikipedia biography of its author (born in Cuba, moved to San Remo, Italy when he was 2, trained as an agronomist, his masters thesis was on Joseph Conrad).

A Memoir: Happy Accidents (2011) By Jane Lynch

I usually alternate my reads, something heavy, followed by something light.  My last post was on endless warfare and genocide, it was truly time for something light. 

Happy Accidents is a Memoir by Jane Lynch, of Glee fame.  I’m not generally into celebrity autobiographies, something to do with their general tone of self-importance and the always evident self-censorship.  I would not have bought this book.  But, it was gifted to me, and a great gift it turned out to be.  What made it different?

Well, Jane Lynch is a Chicagoan – a product of Thornridge High School, a fan of the Brady Bunch and Happy Days, who paid her dues at Second City and the Annoyance Theater.  I do not know Jane, but I know this woman.  She was a Catholic girl with coming out issues and a related teenage drinking habit.   She had hysterically funny crushes, both real and imaginary.   And to top it off, after she finished college she apparently lived around the corner from me, often drinking the day away at The Half Shell … so that’s who that funny blond woman in the corner was! 

She’s ended up a Hollywood star (The 40-year Old Virgin, Two and a Half Men, and Glee), with a compelling story, worthy of an introduction by the one and only Carol Burnett, and has modestly termed her life a “happy accident” -- as was my decision to read the book.