God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965) By Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Kurt Vonnegut was one of the “cutting edge” authors of my teen years, and beyond. His novel Slaughterhouse-Five was literally required reading. However, I was never that into his writings – my reading interests back then were almost exclusively nonfiction. This year, I’ve been revisiting some of his many other works: Galapagos during my winter vacation; and now God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater.

This novel is set largely in fictional Rosewater County in Indiana – for the record, Vonnegut was raised in Indianapolis. Generations ago the Rosewater family settled the county and built and grew their business, (a sawmill and other profitable businesses) making them exceedingly rich, and easily the most prominent citizens in town. Their status in the Hoosier state was not unlike the (real life) Ball family of Ball Industries (glass jars for food canning) in Muncie where Ball State University is located, or even the fictional Magnificent Ambersons, portrayed in Booth Tarkington’s classic also set in Indianapolis.  

The Rosewater accumulated fortune went into a charitable foundation, control of which has been passed on to Eliot, the grandson of the company’s founder.  How proper control of the Foundation is viewed is the subject of the novel. Does one have buildings named after the Rosewaters? Does one bankroll important philanthropic causes? Does one buy fire trucks? Does one just give money away?

The plot details an attempt to wrestle control of the Foundation away from Eliot by having him declared mentally incompetent.  The novel is deeply and deliciously cynical, with a just and quite funny ending. 

Recommendation:  Yes, definitely a thought-provoking book, particularly for those of us who spent our careers working in nonprofit organizations.

Things Fall Apart (1958) By Chinua Achebe

Heinemann Publishing founded the African Writers Series in 1962 to facilitate bringing an international audience to African authors.  The first novel they selected to print was Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe a Nigerian who wrote in English. It is the first book of his African Trilogy, which collectively tells of the impact of European colonization on the Africa continent. The other two are No Longer at Ease (1960), and Arrow of God (1964).  Achebe was presented with the Man Booker International Prize in 2007 for his lifetime of achievement.  He passed away in 2013.

Achebe opens his novel with an overview of village life, its family hierarchy, its belief structure with multiple Earth gods, and customs – seen through the eyes of Okonkwo, a leading Igbo warrior and farmer.  Some of the customs may seem barbaric today, but they worked successfully as a societal structure for generations.  When the Christian missionaries arrive (the “advance team” of colonization), things slowly, then quickly, begin to change, or as the book title put it, “things fall apart”. 

The novel is a remarkable piece of history-based fiction. I will read the other two books in the Trilogy.  The theme of Things Fall Apart parallels closely with a memorable book set in Tasmania that I read and blogged about several years ago: Doctor Wooreddy’s Prescription for Enduring the Ending of the World, by Mudrooroo.

I’ve read only a few books by African authors, including Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih (Sudan) written in Arabic; Palace Walk by Naguib Mahfouz (Egypt) also written in Arabic; and A Palace in the Old Village, Leaving Tangier, The Last Friend, all by Tahar Ben Jelloun (Morocco) written in French. Dalene Matthee’s Fiela’s Child (South Africa) is on my summer reading list. As you can see, I've read next to nothing by sub-Sahara authors. Recommendations of other African authors will be appreciated.  

Here is the list of books published in the African Writers Series.

Recommendation:  Definitely.

At the Mountains of Madness (1931)By H.P. Lovecraft

Occasionally I pick up a book to read for purely escapist reasons. These are often adventure books such as The Bounty, or Voyages of Discovery, with themes of exploration. With that in mind I selected a collection of H.P.Lovecraft’s tales (an author I was unfamiliar with) because it included At The Mountains of Madness, a book written in 1931 which I thought was about Antarctic exploration. Surprise! 

Well not completely, the book is in fact about a geological expedition to Antartica, but it eventually turns into a book of science fiction.  And as I would find out later, is considered by many as the first publication of some key concepts/theories which are a staple of the sci-fi genre.  During the expedition, a side trip not on the original itinerary is made to an unexplored area of the continent named The Mountains of Madness.  The entire group of scientists on the side trip disappear from the communication grid. When found by a search party, it becomes clear they’ve been killed, not by weather, but by some unknown and decidedly unhuman entity.  The official journal of the expedition mentions nothing of this.  The purpose of the book, an addendum to the journal, is to dissuade a new exploration from taking place.

Embedded in this story are a couple of sci-fi creation myths “fathered” by Lovecraft now used and expanded on by numerous other sci-fi writers.  These include The Call of the Cthulhu, about the occupation of Earth by intergalactic beings at war with each other; The Elder Things, which went underground in the aftermath of the wars; the Shoggoths, created to serve the Elder Things (and includes six-foot penguins); and the Necronomicon (aka: Book of the Dead) an ancient history text. All of these myths are also plot topics in several other Lovecraft short stories from the 1930s included in this Library of America collection of his works.

This short animated video is not bad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2wLC_vByu0k

Recommendation:  Yes, fun.

Ulysses (1922) By James Joyce

For decades Ulysses has been on my reading list, I have started it numerous times, never getting beyond the first hundred pages. With the assistance of retirement and a pandemic shelter-in-place order, I have now succeeded in completing what is considered by many a literary masterpiece. Like most “Lit geeks” I would like to claim bragging rights for finishing the book. Instead, I am just happy to be done.

I completely understand why it has won its place in the English language canon. Parts of the book are brilliant. It documents Joyce’s command, his sheer mastery of literary styles. He has few rivals. Impressive as that may be, it is also perhaps the reason I feel disappointed. It is not a novel. It is a textbook on various writing formats. A good textbook mind you, but one which lacks a compelling story.

While Joyce’s mastery of prose is on display, his storytelling is not. Yes, he can write a scene, but if one is expecting a beginning, progressing to an end, look elsewhere. What Ulysses delivers is a start and a stop. Not a finish, a stop. Yes, Joyce can write. Wilde, Dickens and Shakespeare could also write, but they could also tell stories at the same time. Call me a traditionalist.

  

Why one should read Ulysses? – video

The plot, if one wants to be generous and call it that, is a day-in-the-life of three main characters, Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom and his wife Molly Tweedy Bloom.  A friend who has read the book described Stephen as a “horndog,” a not inaccurate term. I could never understand how a book first serialized in 1914 and not published in book form until 1922 could be banned, now I do (though book banning is not something I will ever approve of).

Ulysses is not an easy read.  It begins with Stephen’s morning shave and continues on through 768 pages of one digression after another, which seldom return to the topic at hand. That this is a truthful representation of a day-in-the-life story, while not necessarily inaccurate, is all the same sad and, frankly, uninteresting.

Recommendation:  No, I did not find it worth the investment of my time. I will however recommend two of his other books: The Dubliners, and Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man. Both were excellent.  I’ve yet to read Finnigan’s Wake

Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1939) By Katherine Anne Porter

Two of my recent reads have been set during pandemics: They Came Like Swallows and Death in Venice. They were of interest because they recorded details about how people reacted to health crises a century ago absent effective drug treatments, against how we as “a people” have been facing the challenges posed by Covid-19 today.  I have now added Pale Horse, Pale Rider a short story by Katherine Anne Porter (1890-1980) to this genre. 

Porter’s story is based on her own experience as a victim of the 1918 Spanish Influenza. A survivor, her recovery was never certain, and very painful physically and mentally. She was hospitalized for months.  

In the book, the protagonist is a young newspaper reporter named Miranda who has fallen in love with Adam, a young soldier temporarily on leave awaiting orders to ship out for Europe to do his part in World War I. Their relationship cannot help but be impacted by the threat of death from influenza, or on the frontline of battle. Miranda falls ill and is hospitalized. Adam is not able to see her because the hospital has barred all visitors during the epidemic. When Adam is shipped out, he can only notify her with a letter left with hospital staff, a letter he does not even know for sure Miranda will ever see.

   

Porter’s personal pain and near death as a patient is apparent in every thought the character Miranda has. It is equally clear the author has experienced the kind of pain only love can cause. 

Pale Horse, Pale Rider is the first work of Porter’s I have read. It was published in 1939.  In 1962 her only novel Ship of Fools was the top-selling book of the year. Three years later, with the publication of her Collected Short Stories, Porter won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Recommendation:  Yes. Though this was my introduction to Porter, it definitely will not be the last of her stories that I will read.

Death in Venice (German 1912, English 1925) By Thomas Mann

Death in Venice by Thomas Mann is a literary classic I am almost embarrassed to say I had never read before this week; nor had I ever seen Luchino Visconti’s film adaption of it, considered by many an Art film masterpiece.  Still controversial today, Death in Venice most have been explosive when first published in Germany in 1912, even as carefully written as it is.

The story, in an oh so brief summary, tells the story of Gustav von Aschenbach, a famous author (composer in the movie) living in Munich who has writer’s block and is in poor health.  His friends and doctor order him to take a sabbatical.  He tries a number of locales but ends up taking a holiday trip to Venice.  He arrives during a “scirocco,” a late summer storm.

 

There are two major plots: his obsession with a beautiful teenager, and a cholera epidemic in the city.

Aschenbach checks into the luxurious Grand Hotel des Bains on Lido, Venice’s offshore beach resort. At the Hotel he notices a blonde and slim teenage boy, the very definition of the ancient Greek “classic beauty” [I disagree]. The boy is vacationing in Venice with his mother and siblings.  Aschenbach, a widower, becomes obsessed with the boy, whose name he finds out is Tadzio, and begins to follow his every move.  Tadzio notices, responding at first with nervous curiosity, and then with seductive teasing.  Importantly, they never connect or even speak.

When I say the book, published in 1912 is carefully written, I mean Mann’s narrative, considered semi-autobiographical, is that Aschenbach is enchanted by the boy as a personification of artistic beauty, not as a sex object.  Today, one would lean toward calling him a pederast.

Aschenbach is also concerned about growing old, and worried about his health.  When he notices people beginning to die suddenly, and sanitation notices going up around Venice he begins asking the hotel staff and local merchants what is going on.  They all recite the party line, that “these kind of orders are issued all the time to combat the ill effects of the heat and scirocco."  Finally, a manager at the  currency exchange recites the party line, but then pulls him behind closed doors to whisper to him that the city is experiencing a cholera outbreak and tells Aschenbach that he should leave town immediately.  Asked why the authorities are not informing people, the manager tells him that to do so would be bad for our tourist economy.  He decides to leave.

 

Death in Venice 1971 Movie Trailer

When Aschenbach returns to the Hotel he decides to must tell Tadzio’s mother she must take her family away from Venice as quickly as possible.  But by the time he works up the nerve to risk talking to Tadzio's mother, he discovers they are already preparing to leave.  All will depart at Noon.  Aschenbach goes out to the beach to pass time until the launch will pick him up and take him to the train station.  In a very memorable closing movie scene, Aschenbach dies in his beach chair while watching Tadzio walking into the water.

Recommendation:  Yes, for literature buffs, both book and the 1971 movie.

They Came Like Swallows (1937) By William Maxwell

In 1937 William Maxwell penned a book about the 1918 Spanish Influenza pandemic mostly as seen through the eyes of an eight-year-old boy named Bunny, and his twelve-year-old brother Robert. The story was set in small town central Illinois, where Maxwell grew up. The book, They Came Like Swallows, is short at 124 pages, but captures a hugely significant story. The title is inspired by William Butler Yeats’s classic poem Coole Park because it encapsulates the boys’ mother so perfectly.

                They came like swallows and like swallows went,

                And yet a woman’s powerful character

                Could keep a swallow to its first intent,

                And half a dozen in formation there,

                That seemed to wheel upon a compass point,

                Found certainty upon the dreaming air.

I read this book several years ago, although beautifully written, I basically cast it off as “ancient history” and forgot about it. Today, it re-reads as “current events.”  The course of the Spanish Influenza ran from 1918 through 1919, killing an estimated 50 million people worldwide, including 675,000 Americans, 5-times the death toll of US soldiers who died in World War I, which ran concurrently.

Today (April 24, 2020) just over a century later -- and only 3 months into the Covid-19 pandemic – 2.8 million people have been diagnosed worldwide, with 202,000 having died.  In the U.S. 52,234 people have already died.  After the first wave of infections, if history repeats, a second wave of the pandemic will occur, and absent a vaccine, will be far more deadly.

The effectiveness of Maxwell’s book is that he did not write to shock the reader with statistics, he wrote about one family, in one small Midwestern town. 

Of pointed significance in the book is that some of the actions used in 1918 to effectively slow the epidemic are being used again today, and meeting the same resistance, such as school closings.  When Bunny becomes ill, his mother’s lament is “If I’d only taken Bunny out of school when the epidemic first started.”  When Robert is told that he can’t leave the yard, his response “What good was having school closed?  What good was all the time in the world? So long as he had to stay in his own yard, what good was anything.”  The rumors spreading through town then was that the influenza was sent to the U.S. by German submarines.  Today, it is the Chinese.  And ministers, ordered not to hold public services, then like now, complaining about religion being more important that some disease, and God will protect them.

Recommendation:  Absolutely.