#40 - The Waste Land

So it took me 12 hours after the initial reading, but I get it! And it's beautiful, it really is. I enjoy so much of the other work of the era, it's hard not to - although there is some manner of extra intensity added to it through poetry. The Fisher King, fertility and futility, Eastern and Western approaches, all very cool post-war themes that were expertly explored in this surprisingly short poem. 

I read my girlfriend Amy's (still love saying that) version of The Waste Land from the Norton Anthology of Literature. It was annotated, which was great and I later discovered wholly necessary if I were going to get through any of the work and its multiple languages, but it also wasn't typeset to preserve the breaks as designated. This gave me some initial confusion as to the different paragraphs and voices found in the work, something that I found a lot smoother in my subsequent reads.

The thing that aggravated me about The Waste Land wasn't the references or changing voices or the different potential explanations. It was the lack of that accessible - or nearly-accessible - base way of understanding it that gives the reader something to grasp on as they got through it. I found that even after I finished the first read, the core concept of the 'waste land' was somewhat lost to me. My first annotated read with Amy was better, but then I started being faced with denial - why my limited understanding was wrong, why this subverted that - and I was left even more frustrated, because there wasnt that starting frame to try and work higher-level thought off of. Reading more analysis and then rereading it made the poem now digestible, but it still lacked any kind of real resonance for me because I lacked that base plank.

Ulysses, in the end, after all of the form and structural changes, can be about an average day in Dublin, if you TRULY insist. There is the second reachable version of the Odyssey, bringing a thorough second set of meanings to every piece of the book. Then there are the thousands of references and allusions and things which add colour and interpretation and connection to other art, which make it magical, but only as something to look out at beyond the piece.

Instead, this felt like hanging from the monkey bars. My feet had nothing to stand on, so I couldn't appreciate the bars I was reaching desperately for, and I certainly couldn't enjoy the sights and stars around me. 

It is a great work, and I know it's only because I haven't given it time to open itself up to me, but this just wasn't impressive for me.

6/10

#39 - A Tale of Two Cities

This is my second crack at Dickens, having read and not enjoyed Oliver Twist when I was younger. His was actually my first experience with 'serial writing', something that I've now had a lot more experience with through the list. With Tale of Two Cities, Dickens manages to hit both the good and the bad of serial writing. The format allows, even indulges you to riff on something without real purpose. In the case of Melville, that means pointless chapters on colours and pseudoscience and architecture. But in the best cases, like Tolstoy, key moments of the story can be given their due. Dickens does both, with some fluff and some excellent diatribes.

Some of his best extended passages were in the settings and characterization. The book was really cinematic - not beautiful necessarily, just specifically very logical to film. There have already been 7 movies produced based on the book, as well as all other manner of adaptation. In part this speaks to the thoroughness of Dickens' descriptions, but also to what he doesn't show. Many of the characters were two-dimensional and created to represent one trait or archetype. While there was some ambiguity on it in the early stages, by the end of the story there was a clear delineation of good and evil, with only a couple of exceptions (Jerry) to prove the rule. For a refreshing change, it wasn't only the women - though Lucie was the innocent angel on a pedestal, and Madame Defarge was a bloodthirsty monster, they also had the incorrigibly stuffy Mr Lorry, and Charles as too-noble-to-be-noble. The only two characters that showed any change showed it as a direct reaction to the extent of their characters - the Doctor's shoemaking and Carton's final decision show what happens when their archetypes get pushed to breaking.

Because of the richness of the visuals, as well as the predictability of the characters, the whole story had something like a sense of fate to it. I know that the point Dickens wanted to make about the French Revolution was one of chaos, but it didn't come across that way to me. When things happened, they may not have made sense, but they all had a certain sense of divine fate around them. Whether they were factually innocent or guilty, what must be, will be. Darnay's acquittal in the first trial seems just as predestined as his guilt in the second. That's what makes the ending so much more satisfying - it's really the first example of a character in the book taking charge and breaking the natural flow of history. Even the Defarges eventual rise was dependent on waiting for the time to be right - but Carton's actions were something truly special.

Based almost solely on the ending, I'm going to give Dickens a solid grade on this one.

8/10

#38 - Lolita

Lo lee ta. I have some trouble placing this cleanly into a category. The author is Russian, writing in English, about a European protagonist living in America. It's got heavy elements of dark comedy, but the core is still tragic. It's not pornography, as many people thought when it came out. And it's not paedophilic, either, just so you know. It's actually hebephilic, the equivalent term for adolescents. In any case, it's a controversial novel, for pretty understandable reasons.

The story is told as a confession from Humbert Humbert, the brooding, supposedly-attractive older man with a Freudian penchant for young girls, or specifically "nymphets", the girls he describes as "the little deadly demon among the wholesome children". Humbert reminds me a lot of Raskolnikov, an egoist who is so assured of his own intelligence that he can't help but to try and manipulate those around him. In this case, Humbert continually twists his story, making him one of the least reliable narrators I've had on my list. He changed perspective - mostly in the early, more predatory chapters - from first to third person whenever he wanted to distance himself from the action. He confides in the reader how he hoodwinked his psychoanalysts - a group of crackpots, according to him, even though he is well-versed in their literature - with tales of impotence, then tells the same stories to the reader later on. He insists on his innocence, then gives excuses, then pleads remorse, all for the same acts.

Which brings us to Haze, Dolores, aka Lolita. After all of the cultural references and homages and song lyrics (I had Lana Del Ray playing as my background music for this, I felt it fitting), I expected her to be more...well, more like a nymph. There were elements of it there - she was knowledgeable about sex, she too knew how to manipulate others to get what she wanted - but very soon it became clear that there was nothing special about her, that she was just a little girl. Then again, it's very difficult for anyone to know what Lolita thought of the whole thing, and how it affected her growth, because Humbert's story has the very thorough effect of removing all personality from her. She is objectified in the clearest sense of the term, used as the actualization of his desires and removed from any personal context. It didn't matter who she was, it mattered what she was, and that realization is what removed the (impressively lingering) doubt I had about Humbert's virtue. The story is about love, but about the vicious, damaging obsessive love that ruins lives. It's creepy, yes, but only in that he continually manages to have you so close to believing every word he says. I thought it was powerful, I thought it captured a twisted mind, and I need to go take a shower and look at buxom women.

9/10

#37 - The Grapes of Wrath

Steinbeck said that his goal was "to put a tag of shame on the greedy bastards who are responsible" for the Great Depression, and boy howdy, he achieved that. At odds with all of my business-school learning, The Grapes of Wrath brought with it a thundering condemnation of big industry, preaching liberal, even communist economics in the face of wealth disparity. In fact, it really started to get under my skin just how much of the message of the book applied to the things I was learning about today's business world - from the rise of temp agencies doing piecework manual labour to sub-prime mortgages to commercials I'm watching right now about individual farmers growing from 160 acres to 20,000 acres, it seems as though nothing has changed.

It's also why I think that The Grapes of Wrath is an absolutely fantastic book for teaching in schools, both in the US and Canada. It gives a clear picture of the Great Depression in every conceivable way. The book talks about how they slaughtered animals and managed early cars, how the typical work-day happened, the way that the Okies spoke. It also talks about how the incumbent population responds to an influx of poor immigrants, regardless of how similar they are otherwise. It talks about how companies and banks respond to times of crisis by pushing against the middle and lower classes, and how the middle and lower classes find their opportunities limited to starving, becoming migrants or helping to force their fellows to make the same choice. It has lessons for history, economics, geography, science, any of the social studies.

But it isn't necessarily a great book for an English class. It has some wonderful passages, and indeed some beautiful chapters. Steinbeck used an alternating chapter format where he wrote a short chapter describing a facet of Depression-era life in a broad, imagery-filled way, using no real characters or plot. Then he'd go back to the Joad family and follow them as they ran into the same sorts of problems covered in the "artsy" chapter. The themes were there and clearly visible, but there weren't many, and they weren't complex. Finally, it had the weirdest little ending I've seen so far, and I'm still not sure what was going on with it, and I've showed it to a few people and reread it with them to no avail. It was nice, it was excellent to read, but it wasn't artistically challenging.

8/10

#36 - The English Patient

I don't know if I have ever read a book that is so intricately crafted in every way. Fitzgerald edited, sure, and others made deliberate decisions and worked sentences and paragraphs, but never have I seen something that was such a clear display of work as The English Patient. It had short, clipped phrases - Sinners in a holy city. - that, unlike Hemingway's natural quick patter, were used to trip the reader. But it also had long passages and internal monologues, the un-punctuated her hair her shoulder her vaccine scar on her right arm rambling of Kerouac. It leapt between raw and stiff, between flowery and precise, and every one of those changes had a deliberate rationale behind it that I could spend days thinking about. And the writing is good, really - I completely agree with his accolades and everything else that has been bestowed upon him. But midway through the book, I realized I wasn't going to give it 10/10, and I still don't know why. Maybe it's that he felt like more of a craftsman than an artist, or maybe I feel like you need to be subversive in some way, or maybe I just read it while I was near my family. But I just didn't feel like it got there, somehow.

There were many awesome things I wanted to point to. The big "plot" reveal was brilliant - I'll be nice this time, or mean depending on if you came here looking for a synopsis. It is apparently a work of Historical Metafiction, which is just...do the Dear Canada books count for that as well? Speaking of Canada, this is one of the greatest Canadian novels ever written - by a Sri Lankan-born author, featuring an "Englishman" who explored North Africa, a Sikh from India trained in Britain, and is set in a villa in Italy. Which, upon further reflection, probably makes it one of the most Canadian great novels, as well as a great Canadian novel. We can't all be Alice Munro talking about the prairies. The book is mind-blowingly researched, and the fact that the largest influence on the novel was from Herodotus should show just how academic the book can be. But I don't consider that a mark against, either - I'm glad that one of the rules Ondaatje followed was to "write what you know".

There is a phrase that I've heard used to describe loads of books, and I've never quite believed in the comparison, until now. The English Patient truly is a rich tapestry of a book, and yet again, the Oldfield Option scores big.

9/10