Turn of the Hoo

That would be a good title if Henry James collaborated with Dr. Suess. Having made that declaration, I thought it would be a good idea to read one of James' most famous "nouvelles", his 8,000 word The Turn of the Screw. This is a good length of a book to commit yourself to as you await the arrival of your next full length Civil War battle history, via Amazon's free standard shipping (3-5 busines days).

Reading James in the wake of Hemingway is like driving a school bus - albiet a very stylized one, with Victorian arm chairs instead of bench seats - after having just driven an Italian sports car. His writing is dense, slow, and plodding. The sentences go on, and on, and on. At the end, you are left wondering if he was actually mocking the circumspect way people approached sex and morality in his day. In fact, upon further consideration, he was.

This was no ghost story. Someone asked me if the book scared me. That person, a close relation of the older generation, grew up in an era that had its share of scary movies (Frankenstein, Dracula, etc). But after having seen The Sixth Sense and Signs, a few English spooks puttering about a country house in 1898 won't give me nightmares.

Rather than being about ghosts then, The Turn of the Screw is about how when people try too hard to shield children - and adults - from sin and temptation, they often end up causing more harm than good. I feel now like I just ate a big bowl of spinach salad. I really didn't enjoy it, but I feel better for it. I may read James' The American one of these days (I started it and put it down about 15 years ago); but only if Amazon is really, really late on a delivery.

The Sun Also Rises

Re-read Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises this week after twenty-two years since the first time I read it. Re-reading a book like that is a great way to sensitize yourself to how much wisdom and experience you gain as you get older. It is a completely different - and better - book the second time around. On the first read, I viewed it as a great travelogue that gave me an intense desire to hang out in sleepy Spanish towns, drink the wine of the country, and fly fish. On this read, it fed the same compulsion, but also allowed for reflection on current and past friendships and the nature of women. Two of the most complicated and intriquing subjects known to man. Again, a strong book recommendation.

After two novels this month, I feel the Civil War jones coming back. Will read part two of Rhea's account of Grant's 1864 overland campaign next. The first part, read last fall, dealt with the Battle of the Wilderness. Now we are on to Spotsylvania, to be followed by North Anna River and finally Cold Harbor. Intend to have the whole series done by mid-2006.

Added Preposition

A missing preposition has been added to the description of this blog. Hat tip to the woman from the waterside compound.

Shantaram

I posted a review of two books I read earlier this summer on July 16, and the response was so underwhelming, that I thought I would post another. As loyal readers may recall when I wrote that review, I said that a friend had lent me a novel of almost 1,000 pages, and that the review would be posted long about November. So what am I doing here, on August 8, a mere three weeks later?

As it turned out, the book, Shantaram, By Gregory David Roberts, was only 933 pages long. Yet they were about the best 933 pages I’ve read in any novel for at least the past ten years. Every now and then in life, the perfect book comes along at the perfect time, and this was one of those cases. Shantaram was only recently released, and supposedly a movie of the same name is coming out next year. Much to my chagrin, Johnny Depp is slated to play the main character. As you might imagine, we are not big Johnny Depp fans, notwithstanding his half-decent Keith Richards impersonation.

Anyway, I don’t want to give much of the story line away. Basically, Shantaram is a semi-autobiographical account of a man who escaped from a maximum security prison in Australia, fled to Bombay in the early 1980s, and created a new life for himself working for the Bombay mafia as a counterfeiter and black market currency trader, living in the slums, operating a free clinic for the people who lived in the the slum, and fighting the Russians in Afganistan. As action-packed as all this sounds, and it is as action-packed as they get, the book has much more to do with the our purpose in life, the meanings of love, hate and forgiveness, and how people struggle with and overcome the very difficult challenges that we all inevitably face from time to time. It demands a fair amount of deep introspection and reflection – between detailed accounts of knife fights and all manner of intrigue.

The book was recommended by PH, and he’s never steered my wrong on a book before, nor I him, and I won’t steer you wrong either.

The next posting will deal with more mundane topicality. I still have that big backlog from June to deal with. It’s been a busy, busy summer. But some free time is coming up over the next three weekends, so expect lots of new stuff and a new name for the blog as well. We are still evaluating ideas, so keep those cards and letters coming.