The Eternal City

I read Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

Using Kafka-esque characters and conflict, Heller relates the cost – in young lives – of war.

Major Major Major Major

A man whose rank, first, middle and last name are Major takes his meals in private, refuses to see anyone and jumps out his back window when he has a visitor.

Doc Daneeka

Doc Daneeka's name erroneously appears on the flight manifest of a plane that crashes. This letter is sent to his wife:

Dear Mrs., Mr., Miss, or Mr. And Mrs. Daneeka:
Words cannot express the deep personal grief I experienced when your husband, son, father or brother was killed, wounded or reported missing in action.

Mrs. Daneeka collects more than one life insurance policy and receives other benefits because of her husband's supposed death. At the base, Daneeka's squadron mates ignore him and he pilfers food because being dead disentitles him to eat in the mess hall with the enlisted men.

Milo

Milo is an entrepreneur who uses government resources to smuggle food and manages to turn a profit despite impossible odds: he buys eggs at seven cents apiece and sells them at five cents apiece. His endeavors are so successful that grateful cities elect him mayor. The savvy importer/exporter is widely revered, holds positions of state in many countries and demigod status in primitive cultures.

Lieutenant Scheisskopf

Scheisskopf cannot hold parades but is allowed to schedule and cancel them. It is better if he doesn't schedule the parade at all then posts a notice that it has been postponed. It looks like this:

Due to circumstances beyond my control, there will be no big parade this Sunday afternoon.

Yossarian

Yossarian fakes illnesses to avoid flying. When he is forced to fly, he doesn't care if he hits his target or not as long as he makes it back alive. He wants to go home but must first complete a mandatory number of missions. Unfortunately, each time he approaches the magic number it is raised.


Each chapter of Catch-22 gets its title from the character who is dominantly featured in it. Yossarian – the main character of the book – must wait until the final chapter for his.

The book's thesis can be found in a passage from one of the final chapters. While on leave in Rome, a soldier named Aarfy kills a young woman by throwing her out a window. Yossarian admonishes his dumbstruck friend as the police knock down the door: “You can't take the life of another human being and get away with it, even if she is just a poor servant girl. Don't you see? Can't you understand?” Heller hopes the reader will. But, in the nonsense world these characters inhabit, Aarfy is not arrested for killing the girl. Instead, Yossarian is punished for being in Rome without a pass.

He refuses to fly more missions and is told he can go home.

Of course, there is a catch.

Humpty Dumpty

I read The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster.

Auster refused to pare his ideas to one story.

So: he wrote three.


City Of Glass

Quinn writes mystery novels under the pseudonym William Wilson. One night, he receives a phone call intended for the private detective Paul Auster. He pretends to be Auster and accepts the case.

Many years ago, a man named Peter Stillman locked his infant son in a room for more than ten years as part of a psychological experiment based on a wingnut theory about the Tower of Babel and universal language. Unhappy with the results, he set the house on fire. His son was saved and Peter Stillman went to prison.

Stillman is released and it is Quinn's job to protect the son – also named Peter Stillman (maybe) – from his father. Quinn tails Peter Stillman, Sr. as he wanders aimlessly around the city, picking up trash. More than once, Quinn engages Stillman, claiming to be Henry Dark or his son Peter. He researches Stillman's work, invents patterns in Stillman's wanderings and records it all in a red notebook. When Stillman, Sr. disappears, Quinn stakes out Stillman, Jr.'s residence to protect him. Refusing to abandon his post, Quinn barely eats, rarely sleeps, doesn't bathe or shave and slowly loses his mind. When Peter Stillman, Jr. disappears too, Quinn reaches out to the real Paul Auster, who turns out to be the author Paul Auster and not the private detective Paul Auster and is unable to help. Quinn enters the Stillman's abandoned residence and finishes filling his red notebook before disappearing himself. Paul Auster finds the notebook and gives it to an unnamed individual who is the fictional author of City Of Glass.


Ghosts

White hires the private detective Blue to watch Black through the window of his building. Day after day, Black sits at a desk, reads and writes in a notebook. Blue watches him, tails him whenever he leaves and writes a daily report that he delivers by post to White. Black and Blue are mirrors of each other and – to the detriment of Blue's fragile psyche – their identities merge. Frustrated with his job and unsure of his employer's motives, Blue begins wearing disguises to talk to Black. White writes Blue to back off but Blue sneaks into Black's room and steals some of his papers. To his dismay, the pages he recovers are his own. He returns to Black's room and discovers Black is really White. Black/White wears a mask, wields a gun and threatens to kill himself and Blue. Blue struggles with White, overpowers him, beats him unconscious, takes all his writings and leaves. He returns to his room, reads his own story and provides its ending by leaving the room.


The Locked Room

Fanshawe disappears. A private detective named Quinn declares him dead after a lengthy, fruitless investigation. Obeying Fanshawe's wishes, his widow entrusts a friend with a closet full of unpublished writings. Being a writer himself, he recognizes his late friend's literary genius and publishes his novels and poems posthumously to critical acclaim. He marries Fanshawe's widow and adopts his son. One day, he receives a letter from Fanshawe – who is alive! – thanking him for taking care of his wife and son and warning him to never try to find him. Ignoring the request, he proposes to write a book about Fanshawe's life and uses his research into Fanshawe's past as a ruse to track his movements. In Paris, he loses his mind but finds a man named Peter Stillman whom he believes to be Fanshawe and suffers a beating at his hands that brings him to his senses. He returns to his wife and receives another letter: this time Fanshawe wants to meet. At a vacant house, he has locked himself in a room with a gun and threatens to kill himself and anyone who enters. He reveals the mystery of his missing years and delivers a red notebook to his friend which he says is the culmination of his work.


Private detectives, pseudonyms, insanity, red notebooks and merging identities appear in all three stories which are really the same story told three ways. The Locked Room is the most viable, Ghosts has the most potential and while the recurring characters and themes are engaging, none have a satisfying ending. Auster raises questions and presents mysteries but never provides answers or resolutions.

In the final pages of The Locked Room, Auster – perhaps with a wink – provides analysis of his trilogy by describing the contents of Fanshawe's red notebook:

If I say nothing about what I found there, it is because I understood very little. All the words were familiar to me, and yet they seemed to have been put together strangely, as though their final purpose was to cancel each other out ... Each sentence erased the sentence before it, each paragraph made the next paragraph impossible ... He had answered the question by asking another question, and therefore everything remained open, unfinished, to be started again.

The Locked Room closes with each page torn from the red notebook and dropped in a trash bin. Perhaps my copy of The New York Trilogy should join it there. Auster presents two entertaining theories about the Tower of Babel and Don Quixote that deserve a second look but everything else is rubbish.

I've read one other book by Paul Auster: Travels In The Scriptorium. In it, an aging author is imprisoned in his mind by the characters from his stories. Like The New York Trilogy, Auster builds suspense with mastery but struggles with the denouement. His questions are consistently more satisfying than his answers.

But Here There Is No Light

I read Tender Is The Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Fitzgerald spent nearly ten years of his life writing this novel and it shows. He does not waste a page. A tender moment when Dick Diver receives news of his father's death or a simple exchange between him and his young son while he shaves before dressing for work can be mined for insight. I was intrigued by Fitzgerald's use of rainstorms at two key moments: once when Dick and Nicole first kiss and again when Dick kisses his mistress Rosemary (the actress who shuns fame, yet whom everyone recognizes from her role in 'Daddy's Girl.')

Dr. Dick Diver and his wife Nicole are introduced among the carefree, affluent, idle and bored who laze in the sun, swim and attend parties at the Riviera. But Nicole is a recovering schizo and the good Doctor feels intensely inferior because it is his wife's wealth that bankrolls their extravagant lifestyle.

The secret of NIMH is revealed when the narrative flashes back to Dick and Nicole's first encounter. The nonlinear storytelling initially disorients but the novel hits its stride once the characters are familiar and the disjointed plot concatenates. The book is presented in three parts and the second might be the finest piece of writing ever put to paper.

Everyone believes Nicole is an eyelash away from another psychotic break but she flashes more moments of self-awareness than those close to her give her credit for and her redux coincides with her increasingly estranged husband's descent into bitterness and alcoholism.

Diver's heavy drinking and embarrassingly bad behavior (he starts a fight with a cabbie over fare and punches the plain clothes detective that arrests him) reach critical level when a patient being treated for alcoholism at his clinic complains about the 90-proof doctor. His partner ousts him and he retreats to the Riviera for a final rendezvous with Rosemary who has outgrown him. Nicole no longer needs him, either, so the diminished Diver wanders aimlessly and unsuccessfully, aged and alone.

A Ghost Story

I read Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte.

Jane follows a heroine's journey from mistreated youth and overachieving boarding school student to governess and school teacher, nearly embarks on a life in service to God as a missionary abroad, falls in love, gets married and ultimately becomes a mother. There are enough plot conveniences, family ties revelations and rags to riches orphans to fill a Charles Dickens novel but the feature that strikes me most about Jane Eyre is the incredible amount of supernatural activity. The folks who brought us Pride And Prejudice And Zombies and Sense And Sensibility And Sea Monsters would have a field day with Jane's extrasensory perception.

Stranger things than Jane's visions and dreams are happening at Thornfield, though. A specter hovers over Jane's bed and symbolically rends her wedding veil on the night before she is to wed Edward Rochester. But the attack, two attempted murders swept under the rug and unexplained wailing in the attic is not enough to make Jane pack her bags and leave the haunted mansion. Rochester evades Jane's questions and implies Grace Poole is responsible for the mayhem. Despite a clear and present danger to her personal safety, Jane stays until the mystery assailant is revealed and her circumstances become unbearable. On her final night at Thornfield, Jane dreams of a white light (similar to the one that struck her unconscious as a child at Gateshead) that resolves into a human face – perhaps that of her dead mother! – and tells her to flee. Both times, this mysterious light heralds an exodus for Jane. She flees Thornfield sans her possessions and begs for bread before a familiar light leads her cross country to the home of St. John and family.

I have to mention Rochester's young ward and Jane's pupil: the French speaking Adele. She cannot be understood by the monolingual reader like myself. I skimmed the French lines and attempted to infer their meaning by Jane's response and the context of the action surrounding her.

Several years ago I read a novel by Jasper Fforde called The Eyre Affair. Its narrative dovetails with the plot of Jane Eyre in a Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead -way. The protagonist works for a literary police force that patrols the book world. The final conflict with the villain results in the blaze at Thornfield and Rochester's injuries and explains the otherwise unexplainable call that Jane hears while at the house of St. John. Consequently, the original ending in which Jane goes to India with St. John is replaced by this new one which is considered an improvement by all.

If you please – draw me a sheep!

I read The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery.

Saint-Exupery was a pilot and once crashed his plane in the Sahara desert. He experienced auditory and visual hallucinations and nearly died from dehydration. The Little Prince is his story. Some of the illustrations – drawn by Saint-Exupery himself – are as essential to the story as the text. The author dedicates the book to a friend of his, then amends the dedication to his friend 'when he was a little boy,' reinforcing a theme that is introduced early in the book that children can see things in ways that adults cannot.

The narrator is a pilot who crashes his plane in the Sahara desert. There, he meets the title character, a young boy from another planet, who, after visiting earth for one year, decides to return home. The prince asks the narrator to draw a sheep but is dissatisfied with each of his attempts. Exasperated, the narrator draws a box and tells him that the sheep is inside. This satisfies the prince. He plans to take the sheep home but he fears that it might eat his flower. To allay his fears, the narrator draws a muzzle for the sheep. Though this satisfies the prince, it is never explained how a drawing of a sheep could threaten a flower and is one of many nonsensical elements prevalent in the book that will delight young readers.

During seven days together in the desert, while the narrator repairs his plane's engine, the little prince recounts his experience since leaving his tiny, home planet. He visited six other worlds, each populated – like his own small world – by only one person, each more absurd than the last, including a king who has no subjects and a businessman who thinks he owns all the stars because no one else thought to claim ownership. Of the six, the little prince can most relate to the lamplighter, who must extinguish and reignite his lamp every sixty seconds because of the quick revolution of his tiny planet. The prince asserts that he, at least, thinks of something besides himself. He envies the lamplighter because he is blessed with 1440 sunsets per day. (There is a mistake here which I assume occurred in translation from the French. One day, no matter the length, can have only one sunset. Unless the planet has more than one sun. On the lamplighter's planet, there are 1440 sunsets in a twenty-four hour period - which is perhaps the phrase that should have been chosen. Of course, because of the small size of his planet he could easily walk at a leisurely pace and see a continuous sunset. I digress.)

The earth is the seventh planet he visits and the only one bigger than a house. There, he befriends a fox who relates one of the book's themes: “To me, you are nothing more than a little boy who is just like a hundred thousand other little boys. And I have no need of you. And you, on your part, have no need of me. To you, I am nothing more than a fox like a hundred thousand foxes. But if you tame me, then we shall need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world...” This is an especially important lesson for the little prince because on his home planet, he left behind a flower which he believed to be the only one of its kind. On earth, he found five thousand flowers identical to his in a single garden. He cries when he realizes his flower is a common rose. According to the fox his rose is unique because he watered it, sheltered it and cared for it. The fox has one more bit of wisdom to impart, which the little prince repeats to himself so he won't forget – and later poignantly teaches to the narrator: “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”

The prince finishes his account but the narrator laments that he has run out of water and will die of thirst. The prince suggests they look for a well. During the trek, the prince grows steadily weaker – though not from thirst – and spouts aphorisms like: “What makes the desert beautiful is that somewhere it hides a well.” For the prince, the stars are beautiful because he knows that his rose is among them.

The end of the book is tragic but ambiguous in a way appropriate for children. The little prince returns home but not in the same fashion as he arrived. It is subtly inferred that he was a hallucination caused by the narrator's dehydration. Six years after returning from the desert, the narrator still looks for him and implores the reader to look at the stars and wonder if the sheep has eaten the rose and if – or how – that changes everything.

Saint-Exupery disappeared on a flight in 1944; one year after the publication of his allegorical masterpiece. Like his prince: they never found his body.

Desolation Before Troy

I read The Iliad by Homer; translated by Robert Fitzgerald.

This is the ninth year of the battle of Troy.
Greeks v. Trojans.
Oh, and some other guys, too.
There are no wooden horses, here.
This is for real.

Translated, The Iliad probably loses some of its poetic quality but Fitzgerald presents page after page of beautifully written, violent imagery. The effects of spear and arrow attacks are viscerally described: bowels spill, blood pours from wounds and corpses are dumped in the river and devoured by fish.

A general knowledge of the pantheon of Greek gods is useful because Zeus, Apollo, Athena, Poseidon, Hermes and Ares all make an appearance – some are major players in the war. Homer attributes the ups and downs of each sides' fortunes to the works of providence and often describes the gods fighting alongside men – when they are not scheming against one another. A truce is reached at one point but Apollo instigates fighting when he helps an inadvertently fired arrow hit its mark. In an odd sequence, Zeus is lulled to sleep by Athena while Poseidon roars to the aid of the Greeks. When Zeus awakens from his slumber, he restores order by banishing Poseidon back to the depths of the sea.

Gods are major players but the main characters are the mortal heroes: Akhilleus, Hektor, Patrokles, Agamemnon, Odysseus, Priam, et al. Homer introduces a slew of cannon fodder, even devoting a line or two of back story to most, before killing them on the battlefield. Long passages describe the strength of numbers on both sides of the conflict but it becomes clear that the most important battle will be the personal, ineluctable clash between Akhilleus and Hektor. Hektor kills scores of Akhilleus' comrades but only draws his ire when he kills his good friend Patrokles. Akhilleus vows to kill Hektor and a potentially never surceasing cycle of retribution killing ensues. But first, Patrokles' mourners participate in impromptu Olympic Games: competitions include a chariot race, archery tournament, track & field and wrestling. Hektor and Akhilleus finally meet at the end of book twenty, but when Akhilleus attacks with his spear, Hektor is whisked away in a cloud by the gods. Akhilleus vows to fight him again when both have gods in their corner. That time arrives and only one survives. Battle is suspended once again for the mourning of a fallen hero and The Iliad ends the only way it can: with a funeral pyre, a feast and the promise of more fighting.

451 Challenge

I entered the 451 Challenge.

I picked 7 books - BLAZE level - from the 451 Master List to read by November 30, 2010.

These are the seven I plan to read:

1. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

2. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

3. Rabbit Is Rich by John Updike

4. Tender Is The Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald

5. The Iliad by Homer

6. The Little Prince by Antione de Saint-Exupery

7. The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster