Great Books Archives - Page 25 of 26

Pnin, Portrait of a Professor?

Shortly after I first became a professor, I read Nabokov’s novel, Pnin.

(No, sorry, I have absolutely no idea how to pronounce that name.)

I had fond memories, very fond memories, of the book. In a fit of nostalgia, I decided to reread it.

A stunning experience. Either I have changed a lot since I first read the book or the book has changed a lot. (The latter possibility is tempting to embrace. Imagine a world in which books really do change between readings. You could then go back and reread your favorite books and each time they would not just seem different, they actually would be different. Never mind; that’s a really dumb thought experiment.)

Now it isn’t really all that surprising that after over two decades of teaching, I am a bit different. I’ve read a few books since then, for example. But even still, this novel was nothing like I remembered it.

It still had (obviously) the same episodes I remembered so vividly, but then when I thought about it I realized there were only two episodes I remembered vividly. (Pnin on a bench in the wrong city realizing he could never get to the talk he was supposed to give; Pnin utterly dismayed—indeed more dismayed than any other character in any other book ever—when he hears glass breaking in the kitchen sink.)

The entire story surrounding those two events was extraordinarily different than the story which existed in my memory.

When I thought about it, it really wasn’t hard to see why my memory of the book was so different than the book as it exists. I remembered the book as being all about a befuddled professor wandering around an idyllic campus in the Northeast. It was an amusing tale, capturing life at a New England college perfectly.

Why did the book seem that way? Well imagine being a newly minted Assistant Professor, coming from a 1960s style-concrete-slab-buildings-everywhere campus in California, and arriving at one of the most gorgeous liberal arts colleges in the world, red brick buildings with ivy covered walls set amongst rolling green lawns and sparkling lakes.

Imagine wandering to a library which is gorgeous enough to be a chapel and a chapel which is magnificent enough to be a library reading room. Imagine an office with 12 foot ceilings and wood trimmed windows.

And then imagine reading a book about an old professor pottering around such a campus, slightly bewildered by the world. How could that novel not seem like an idyllic vision of a future life? How could it not be utterly poignant when our professor hero had moments of doubt and pain?

How could said assistant professor not henceforth recommend that novel to I don’t know how many people as the best picture of life at a Northeastern liberal arts college ever written?

I was talking with someone not too long ago about this very problem of a book which once read at a particular moment in life was forever stamped not with the book but with the memory of a book which isn’t exactly the book which is there. He mentioned the idea of going back to write the novel he remembered. An intriguing idea, that.

So, what is this novel? Curiously, it feels like I am about to desecrate the novel by describing it accurately.

That’s not a joke—I am having this terribly sick feeling right now in even thinking about writing down a review of Pnin, the book. I feel like I am about to kill Pnin, the memory.

Pnin, the novel, starts off as the story of a befuddled Russian refugee who is living a tenuous life as a professor at a college in New England. The first six chapters are tales designed to mock the professor, but in every case there is a twinge of pathos mixed in with the mockery.

We find out why in the seventh, and last, chapter. The narrator, someone eerily similar to Nabokov himself, tells us the back story of his own past and his interactions with Pnin. And somewhere in the midst of that last chapter we realize we have an unreliable narrator on our hands.

Pnin stole the love of the narrator’s life and this book is a sort of revenge fantasy, but revenge on a man whom the narrator knows is actually fundamentally good and decent. Indeed, that Pnin as described in this novel, this thoroughly pathetic figure, should have stolen the beautiful woman from our dashing hero seems improbable.

The narrator pretends in that final chapter that it was he who rejected the woman who went on to marry Pnin because our narrator would not have her, but there is something not quite right about that story.

In the first six chapters, one imagines that the narrator knows all these things because he knows Pnin well. Then we discover the narrator has never spoken to Pnin at any point during or after the time when the events related in the book take place.

Every moment in which we saw Pnin’s inner self throughout the book was necessarily pure fabrication. Events which would have just been amusing stories are turned into lampoon by relating the inner thoughts of Pnin.

The book is clever—but you knew that—it is Nabokov after all.

As a portrait of life in a New England college, it’s not exactly right. A bit too much caricature designed to make Pnin look like a fish out of water.

As a portrait of a professor, again it’s not quite right.

As a means of thinking about how we do in fact create narratives of others, it’s pretty good. How many people exist in our mind’s eye exactly the way we really wish they were?

Pnin, the book, is quite good. I recommend it.

But: R.I.P. Pnin, the memory.

Is This My Autobiography?

From Dorothy Sayers’ The Mind of the Maker:

“But the writing of autobiography is a dangerous business; it is a mark either of great insensitiveness to danger or of an almost supernatural courage. Nobody but a god can pass unscathed through the searching ordeal of incarnation.”

Sayers is using that observation as the conclusion of a chapter discussing the writing of autobiography, a particular form of art which has obvious relevance to a rather noteworthy Creative Act of God. What follows is not directly related to what Sayers is arguing, but, since Sayers was writing a Great Book, it set my mind wandering into all sorts of directions.

After reading Sayers’ chapter on autobiography, I got to ruminating about my own life (shocking) and once again faced the realization that a biography of my life would be pretty dull stuff.

When I have said this to people in the past, there is almost always an immediate objection. It seems that saying one’s life would make a dull biography is taken as a strong version of self-deprecation.

There is apparently rampant confusion of the two sentences: 1) “My biography would be dull” and 2) “My life is worthless.”

But, those two sentences are not even remotely the same. My life is not worthless, yet I have a hard time imagining anyone wanting to read a book-length treatment of it. I was born, grew up, went to school, got married, got a job, had kids. Nothing exciting there. So, I cannot even imagine writing an autobiography.

This made me wonder about whether Sayers’ remarks quoted above were accurate or not. How would I know?

Then it hit me. I have a blog. This blog has no real content other than a Faithful Record of My Thoughts over Time. Which strangely sounds a lot like autobiography. Am I writing an autobiography without even knowing it? The mind reels.

If so, which is it: do I have an insensitivity (Sayers’ “insensitiveness” is a rather ugly word, no?) to danger or a supernatural courage?

Clearly the former. Then again, there really isn’t much of a danger here—after all, I am a tenured professor.

(My wife is constantly worried that my blog will somehow lead to some dire result, but when pressed, she can never actually figure out what could actually happen to me if someone (who?) took offense. My wife has neither an insensitivity to danger nor supernatural courage—and perhaps not coincidentally, she doesn’t write autobiography. More from my wife anon.)

Pursuing the Blog as Autobiography line a bit further: is this blog an honest autobiography?

As Sayers notes, no autobiography can be the whole of the author, it is inherently a partial revelation due to the limitation of the form. Obviously I am more than my blog.

But, if we imagine handing a set of blog entries to a person who knew nothing about me, would the impression formed from nothing other than what was written in this place bear any resemblance to Reality? What strange creature would be conjured up by the contents herein?

That is one of those questions which would generate an answer which it is probably better not to know. Yet, it is also one of those questions that once asked, makes one wonder.

And then: if this blog is a form of autobiography, then perhaps my autobiography isn’t as dull as I would have thought. While my conventional biography would be quite dull, I have read some Great Books and had some Great Conversations over the years, and a record of those books and conversations is potentially not without interest.

And suddenly I realized that the most famous biography of all time details a life in which absolutely nothing happens—one reads Boswell to see Johnson’s wit, not his activities.

At this stage in my ruminations, I broached the subject at the dinner table. Lo and behold, my wife was channeling Samuel Johnson. She quickly concluded that blogs were akin to autobiography.

However she added that blogs were much worse than autobiography. Traditional autobiography required that the contents pass muster with an editor before they were broadcast to the world. Blogs have no such editor.

These days, anybody can feel free to broadcast his life and thoughts to the world, whether such writing is worthy of attention or not (and for some reason, my wife looked at Your Humble Narrator with a knowing glance when mentioning the latter option).

Insensitive to the danger (see above), I then asked why people would feel the need to write an autobiography. “Narcissism.” My wife didn’t miss a beat in giving that answer. Blogging is the ultimate form of narcissism, concluded my wife. One assumes that one’s every thought is worthy of attention and so one blogs.

Apparently my wife thinks I am a Narcissist.

A Real Horrorshow Book

In the category of violent books: Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange.

O my brothers, Your Humble Narrator would like to tell you it is a real horrorshow book, the kind thou ought to recommend to all thy droogs.

But, it’s not really all that amazing. It’s good, to be sure. It is fun to read. But it is not nearly as deserving as the praise it receives would suggest.

As for the movie—just stay away. Part of the problem this book has is that it spawned a feverish adolescent fantasy in the mind of the movie’s director, Stanley Kubrick.

This is a case where the movie not only isn’t as good as the book, but if one sees the movie before reading the book, then it will be very hard to read the book on its own terms.

Without a doubt, the prose is the only thing which really gives this book any chance of being worthy of attention. It is a joy to submerse yourself into the jargon and style of the narrator, Alex. (The narrator is the original Your Humble Narrator.)

From the inspired coinages to the mock Shakespearean style to the elaborate euphemisms for the ultraviolent acts of a depraved youth, uncovering what Alex means is a treat.

The first time I ever read the book, the version had a glossary in the back to translate Alex’s language. That is the sort of innovation which utterly destroys a book like this. If you are going to read it, just read it.

The argument of the book? It is an exploration of the nature of Free Will. The book tries to isolate why people have a hard time with the idea of determinism and free will.

Do we choose to do Evil? How important is it that we preserve the ability to do Evil? If we could condition Evil people to do Good deeds by making it so that the very thought of an Evil Act induced overwhelming physical revulsion, would that be a good thing to do? If people are compelled to Act Properly because we had made it impossible for them to Act Improperly, then have we made society better?

People like the idea that they choose to do good things. But, they also like the idea that they do not choose to do bad things, that when people do bad things it was somehow determined by Forces Beyond Our Control.

What this book does is ask which of those two things is more important. Is it more important
1) to preserve the idea that we choose to do good, or
2) to preserve the idea that evil is out of our control?

If the latter, then should we alter the deterministic aspects of evil so that nobody will ever choose to do evil? If we end up doing good because doing so is beyond our control, are we better humans?

But, if we want to preserve the idea that what makes us human is the ability to choose to do good deeds, then doesn’t it necessarily follow that we must celebrate the ability to choose evil? We don’t have to celebrate evil itself, but don’t we have to celebrate the possibility that we choose to do evil?

The biggest problem with the book is that it cheats in the end.

The original last chapter is an argument that Free Will triumphs. But, since Alex chooses to Be Good in the end for no apparent reason, the book ends up reading like some fairy tale of an evil youth maturing and magically becoming a good member of society.

Dropping the last chapter (as was done in the original American publication) isn’t an improvement—then we end with an evil character whose evil is somehow stamped on his soul with no possibility of choice. This is also simply a cheat because we know that there used to be a different last chapter with the opposite conclusion.

If the entire rest of the book can be an argument for completely opposite conclusions, then it is really obvious that this book is not actually arguing anything.

Nice prose in the service of a Big Question but providing No Answer, not even a bad answer, just no answer at all.

So, read it for the prose, which is a real joy. But, don’t spend too long imagining it is a deep book.

Recommending Mario Vargas Llosa

Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter by Mario Vargas Llosa.

This is the seventh novel by Llosa I have read. I have also read a collection of his non-fiction work.

I am thus reasonably certain that I enjoy reading Llosa.

(Well, it’s either a) I enjoy reading his work or b) I am supremely masochistic when it comes to reading. I am fairly confident that it is the former, but would entertain arguments that the latter is more accurate.)

So, having now finished eight books by Llosa, it seems reasonable that I would be able to answer a rather simple question: What makes Mario Vargas Llosa (a Nobel Laureate, no less) someone whose work is a pleasure to read?

And now the problem for the day. I have no idea why I like Llosa. None.

I have read eight books he wrote, but to the best of my recollection, I have never once recommended his work to anyone.

Part of the reason that I have never recommended him is that I would have a very hard time picking which book of his to recommend.

I’ve liked every one of them enough to think I should read another book. Yet, they all have this quality about them, this undefined quality, which makes me think, “Well, I liked that book, but I am not really sure who else would like that book.”

Consider the novel I just finished. Young Peruvian author—who currently writes news blurbs, but wants to write novels—hooks up with his older, divorced, Bolivian Aunt. (Don’t worry too much: there is no blood relation between the Young Peruvian and the Aunt.)

Meanwhile, the Young Peruvian novelist regularly interacts with a scriptwriter for radio serials. The Aunt and the Scriptwriter meet once, but otherwise the stories do not overlap.

Every other chapter in the novel is a short story which is the storyline from one of the radio serials written by the scriptwriter. The main story meanders along in the odd numbered chapters.

Eventually Young Peruvian and Aunt get married much to the distaste of the larger family. The scriptwriter goes insane. In the epilogue, we find out the marriage does not last.

End of story.

Now, I have a hard time imagining that anyone read the preceding description and thought, “That is a book I simply must read.”

So, is it the prose style which makes the book sing? It can’t be—the book was written in Spanish, so this is a translation, and his novels, all of which I have enjoyed, have different translators.

So, it must be something about the way the stories are told which makes him so compelling.

And that is what puzzles me—after seven novels, it seems like I should have some ability to describe what it is that makes Llosa novel so good, and yet I cannot.

It also seems like after seven novels, I should be able to tell someone, “You really ought to read book X. It’s really good—I think you’ll like it.” Not that I should be able to tell everyone that—but I should be able to tell someone that, right?

At this point, my inclination is to conclude with a recommendation that you, The Reader, should read Book X. But then I think about the novels I have read, and I cannot figure out which title to substitute for X.

After a lengthy pause, staring out my window, I arrived at the following, thoroughly unsatisfying conclusion the present post:

Dear Reader, Mario Vargas Llosa is a Nobel-prize Winning Peruvian novelist. I have enjoyed every novel of his I have read. You should try reading him. A good place to start is (select one) [Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, Death in the Andes, The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto, In Praise of the Stepmother, The Storyteller, The War of the End of the World, Who Killed Palomino Molero?]

And right after finishing that conclusion I realized, that all books are not equal. So, really, start with The Storyteller if you like the idea of reading Peruvian short stories; The War of the End of the World if you like long Victorian British novels; Death in the Andes if you like vaguely disturbing endings; or Aunt Julia if you like clever short stories which feel like they just continue after the story is done.

Next up on my Llosa reading list, by the way: The Feast of the Goat.

Losing Your Dharma

“It’s impossible to fall off mountains you fool.”

If your response to the preceding is “Wow, man. That’s deep. Really deep,” then I have a book for you.

If you respond like any sane person and say “Uh, not only is that untrue, it’s a rather stupid mantra,” then sorry, No Book for You.

The Book: Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac. The bit above is the high point of the tale.

It occurs when Kerouac’s alter ego is climbing a mountain and gets scared he will fall off, and then realizes he shouldn’t have been scared. Deep. Seriously Deep. Like Wow. Metaphor for Life, you know.

Two hundred pages of that and you have one seriously Deep Reflection on, like, you know, Life and Stuff.

You think I’m making this up? No way, Man. Let me quote the Master:

This is it. “Rop rop rop,” I’d yell at the weeds, and they’d show windward pointing intelligent researchers to indicate and flail and finagle, some rooted in blossom imagination earth moist perturbation idea that had karmacized their very root-and-stem….It was eerie.

At this point, you have already clicked the above image of the book in order to go straight to Amazon to buy the book in some hallucinogenic haze or decided never to even think about reading this book.

I read it with one of my tutorials. Each of the five students picked a book. From that list, this was the book I least looked forward to reading. I had already read On the Road a few years back in a different tutorial and thought it was a tedious waste of time.

On the Road is better than The Dharma Bums, though. However, that may be because I read the former longer ago and so the pain of reading it has dulled.

In the discussion about the book with my students, I gamely spent two hours trying to convince anyone in the tutorial that this book held the Secret of the Universe.

I failed.

Perhaps it is not their Dharma to see the truth that becoming a Dharma Bum holds such marvelous possibilities. All the students seemed to think this book was just about a bunch of Losers in the 1950s who decided to pretend their Aimless Lives had Meaning.

The students also made some disparaging remarks about hipsters.

One student seriously objected to the portrayal of women in the book. Every woman in the book exists solely in order to have sex with Our Heroes. I tried to convince her that this was the Dharma of those women; that to exist solely as sexual objects for the Dharma Bums was a Deep Meaningful experience, but she didn’t buy it. Like I said, I really tried very hard to sell this book. I failed miserably,

I did learn something from reading this book. It is even easier than I thought to spin out an ersatz Buddhist philosophy and pretend you are saying something even when you know what you just said means nothing at all.

Once you realize you can’t fall off a mountain, your Dharma is realized to entail a self-actualization of a what we might ignorantly call a Soul screaming to abandon the Norms of a society which denies its Oneness. That was Deep, wasn’t it?

My other odd realization: Kerouac’s alter ego in this book spends time in a fire watchtower in the middle of nowhere. It serves as a time for reflection.

The titular characters in Mark Helprin’s Freddy and Fredericka also spend time in a fire watchtower in the middle of nowhere reflecting on life. Presumably there is a connection, but I’d have to reread Helprin’s book to figure out what it is.

Helprin’s book, by the way is worth reading.

In fact, a few years ago, the Mount Holyoke News ran a feature on Professors and the Desert Island Test for books.

(It was not a long running feature, by the way—I was the first and last entry—I guess my answers were too dull to make the series last two issues.)

I was asked to pick three books to take to a desert island, but I couldn’t pick any three books. I had to pick one book from my discipline, one recent book, and one free choice.

The recent book was the hardest choice. Seriously, how many recent books are you confident you would want to read over and over and over for years on end?

So, I picked Freddy and Fredericka because it fit the category and I had recently read it and I really liked it and I figured maybe some student would actually read it.

So, I’ll repeat the advice again: it’s a really good book—well worth your time.

The other two books are also worth your time, but were much more predictable choices. So predictable that I suspect that even if I didn’t say what they were, anyone could guess what I said.

But, to confirm your guess: The Wealth of Nations, which is a massive work of philosophy with endless side notes and ruminations masquerading as an economics book. I’d rather read it over and over than, say, Friedman and Schwartz’s A Monetary History of the United States.

The free book? The Bible. That answer had the virtue of
a) being true—I really would take it—and
b) being nicely scandalous for a publication at Mount Holyoke.

Does Life Have Meaning?

A history of human stupidity.

I am not about to write such a thing, but the idea is amusing.

Sadly, the book would be too long to read in a lifetime—and that is assuming you were just reading the abridged version.

But, we have the next best thing: Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle. It’s nominally fiction, but fiction of the sort that says something truer than non-fiction.

This is Vonnegut’s fourth novel. Insofar as there is a thesis in this book it is this: History is just one stupid human act after another and in the end we all die and it was perfectly meaningless.

Yet, this is no cause for despair. Because, when you look at it, when you really look closely at it, when you press your eyeball right up against history and stare as intensely as you can at it, then you see that all this human stupidity is really quite funny.

You just have to stop taking everything so seriously. You have to stop striving for some Big Think overarching narrative story that makes sense of the whole thing in terms of Grand Causes or Grand Cosmic Ends. Just chop up reality into really tiny parts (this Library of America version of this book is 183 pages long and has 127 chapters—you do the math) and look at each part on its own and realize that each part, which follows from what went before and leads to what comes after, each part individually is just another senseless act of stupidity in a long string of actions of senseless stupidity all leading to yet more acts of senseless stupidity.

In the end, we all die. But, don’t get all worked up about that either—even our death is just one more small little bit of human stupidity following inexorably from what came before. So laugh. Really, just laugh.

This is a brilliant book. Wrong, of course—there is a Grand Overarching Cosmic Narrative—but wrong in a useful way.

For example—take this moment. I want to, and truth be told, you Dear Reader also want to, imagine that this moment is larger than it is, that there is some Great Purpose to this moment, that this moment cannot be stripped out of eternity and held up like a 1.44 page chapter as an entity unto itself and laughed at. I (and you) want to believe that there is some larger meaning to all this, that I am not simply adding to the chronicle of human stupidity by writing this and that you are not adding an even greater stupidity by actually reading this. We, you and I, Dear Reader, want to weave this moment into something meaningful.

Yet, is it? Can I honestly say that by writing these rambling semi-coherent reflections I am adding to human wisdom? I am rehashing a book which I read before and promptly forgot because it seemed so purposeless and now I am calling it brilliant because I found some purpose in a purposeless book and you are reading my second-hand reflections on the book hoping to discover…what? What, Dear Reader, did you really hope to attain in the few moments you read this blog post? Did you honestly expect to become more wise, to lessen the amount of human stupidity in history by charging forth after reading this to revolutionize the world? Did you really believe that by reading this blog post you would make the world would a better place?

I just opened Cat’s Cradle at random. Chapter 98. We read in that chapter:
“I agree with one Bokonist idea. I agree that all religions, including Bokononism, are nothing but lies.”

Is that Bokonist Idea the truth or a lie? That of course is the Joke. As the Cretan said, “All Cretans are liars.” The apostle Paul said that. Now Paul was writing to Titus when he said that and Titus was ministering to the people of Crete and Paul used that joke to remind Titus about the sort of people he was serving. Paul wasn’t kidding; he added, “that statement is true.” Paul has a sense of humor too. So, opening up Cat’s Cradle at random, truly at random, I suddenly found Vonnegut and Paul sharing a joke and then I wrote about it, and you Dear Reader, read about it, and what did we all, you, me, Vonnegut, and Paul, just accomplish? This paragraph you are reading is 2000 years in the making, and we just advanced humanity…how?

So, while I believe in the Grand Cosmic Narrative, while I believe there is a teleological point to human existence, it is hard to escape the Vonnegutian Perspective. Moment by moment, history sure does seem like just one stupid thing after another. Moment by moment, those acts of stupidity are pretty funny. I am very amused that you are actually still reading this, Dear Reader. At what point did you miss the cue that there is nothing here worth reading?

Page 47. I picked that page number at random. (Was it truly random? Why 47? I have no idea.) I am about to turn to page 47 and will transcribe a sentence from that page. I note this to give you fair warning. Do you really believe there is any possibility that something on page 47 of this book will generate an observation which is worth your time, Dear Reader? Think of this as the Rorschach test moment. If your answer to that was “Yes,” then what, Dear Reader, gives you any hope that a sentence on a random page from a random book on a random blog written by Your Humble Narrator will have meaning? And, if your answer was “No,” then why are you still reading (that isn’t a rhetorical question)?

From page 47: OK. I’ll admit it, this is really quite eerie. The first thing on page 47 is the end of chapter 32:

But all I could say as a Christian then was, “Life is sure funny sometimes.”
“And sometimes it isn’t,” said Marvin Breed.

Here is the part I find seriously troubling. I really did just pick the number 47 at random, wrote the preceding paragraph and then turned to page 47 and there it was. I did not rewrite the preceding paragraph after turning to page 47. I, of course, have absolutely no way to convince you, Dear Reader, that this was, in fact what happened. Indeed, I suspect you think this whole thing is rigged.

Honestly, if I was reading this blog post I would think this whole thing was some lame attempt to make a point. I can’t think of anything the author could write that would convince me otherwise. But, as the writer of this blog post, I know something you, the Reader, don’t know. It really did happen. It wasn’t made up.

I am troubled. This is just too strange for my tastes. I mean I get that God has a sense of humor too, but to orchestrate things so that I would turn to that page at the end of this blog post and find those two sentences right at the top of the page…well, that is just a bit too much Grand Cosmic Narrative for my tastes.

I am seriously troubled. (Really, no joke here.)