→ October 22, 2014
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War and Peace.

Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace appears on most lists or rankings of the greatest novels ever written; Daniel Burt had it second in his all-time rankings in The Novel 100, and it appears on the Bloomsbury top 100 Classic Novels list as well. Ernest Hemingway considered its passages on war the archetype of writing about combat, and Tolstoy’s contemporaries – Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Goncharov, Levsky – all heaped praise on the novel. Its girth (well over 500,000 words) put me off for years, especially because I found Anna Karenina overlong due to Tolstoy’s lengthy philosophical diversions, but War and Peace sticks to the plot far more faithfully, reserving the Big Thinking stuff for the book’s tiresome Second Epilogue instead.

The war in question is the Napoleonic war, with most of the book’s action taking place in the early 1810s, with Napoleon’s ill-fated invasion of Russia taking up much of the second half of the novel. Tolstoy presents us with four families – the Rostovs, the Bolkonskis, the Bezukhovs, and the Kuragins – and puts them through the wringers of war while running them through the usual who’s-marrying-whom plot lines that drove almost every major novel written before the late 1800s. What appears to begin as a trite story of an unexpected inheritance and women chasing the suddenly eligible bachelor becomes a densely woven story of families coping with losses both personal and financial while dealing with upheaval in their aristocratic world. One of the central male characters becomes a tragic hero in the great romantic tradition, while another undergoes multiple spiritual transformations that foreshadow the rise of the Bildungsroman in the late 1800s and early 1900s in Russian, German, and British literature. While Tolstoy’s female characters aren’t as well-developed as the male characters, they’re a little more than just props waiting around for their men to come back from the war or battling to win the affections of the latest heir apparent.

The apparently happy endings of the book’s First Epilogue seem illusory, as the old way of life for the upper classes of Russia is winding down, with Tsar Alexander I moving away from the liberal policies of his early rule to a postbellum period of decreasing political freedoms, presaging the disastrous reign of his younger brother, Tsar Nicholas I. This contrast may also have been Tolstoy’s way of emphasizing the importance of personal and spiritual satisfaction, especially that of the family, rather than the pursuit of power or of material gain, goals he depicts as empty throughout the novel. It’s an awkward conclusion to a grim novel, however, one that relies heavily on historical records – it’s among the earliest historical novels to attempt to accurately capture events of the time period covered, with Napoleon, Alexander I, and many of their leading military commanders appearing in the book as characters, even interacting with Tolstoy’s fictional ones.

Reading a book of this length, even one as plot-driven as War and Peace is (as opposed to the tangent-laden Les Miserables), is a significant commitment of time and attention; it took me 22 days to get through, reading pretty consistently every day, including most of the footnotes and occasional references to other resources so I could keep all the characters straight. (Really, Leo, you had to name two of the characters Nikolai?) I was blown away by Tolstoy’s ability to draft a novel with such a broad scope without letting the story spiral beyond a reader’s ability to follow it. A lot happens to the dozen or so key characters, but nothing so improbable that I felt cheated by the story; if anything, Tolstoy’s adherence to realistic depictions of the battles seemed slow given my experience as a modern reader, where I’m still recovering from an education in books where every chapter ends in a cliffhanger and stuff explodes every few pages. I never found myself forced to continue reading through a tedious section until the second epilogue (a waste of time, largely), but also never got lost in the story or found myself pulling for particular characters. I doubt I’ll ever tell anyone they just have to read War and Peace, but I’d never discourage anyone from trying it.

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That completes my run through the Bloomsbury 100 Must-Read Classic Novels, a list of 99 novels all published before 1950, plus the short stories of Chekhov. I could quibble with many titles on the list – the omission of The Master and Margarita and the inclusion of News from Nowhere stands out – but as a primer of great works of western literature, particularly British (42 titles), it’s solid and informative, pushing me to read a number of books I might not have otherwise tackled, and introducing me to some less-known works and authors. War and Peace was also the 89th book I’ve read from the Novel 100, although I don’t plan to finish that list, with the Finnegan’s Wake, the Molloy trilogy, and The Man Without Qualities all among the remaining eleven titles.

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Next up: Something a little more recent, Neil Gaiman’s book American Gods, named by author and critic Lev Grossman as one of the ten best novels of the first decade of the 2000s.

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→ November 16, 2010
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Cities of Salt.

Reminder that part one of my history of board games series is up on mentalfloss.com, with part two going up this afternoon. UPDATE: Part two is up, covering go, mancala, and pachisi.

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‘Abd al-Rahman Munif’s novel Cities of Salt has, according to a few critical reviews I’ve read, legitimate claim to the title of the great Arab novel, at least of the last century. The first in a five-book novel sequence (where only the first three have been translated into English), Cities of Salt tells the story of the discovery of oil near a small, isolated wadi in an unnamed Persian Gulf kingdom, and follows the migration of that village’s people as their traditional home is destroyed and their way of life is thrown into disarray by the arrival of Americans, modern technology, cultural gaps, and a whole new kind of local economy.

Munif uses an unconventional structure in Cities by forgoing a clear protagonist or even set of them; the central characters in the book’s first dozen chapters are gone by the final third of the book. Instead, the central characters are settings: The wadi that is destroyed in the first movement, and later the town of Harran, which goes from a backwater to a booming oil town, with a walled-off American district and an Arab shantytown, and in which all of the book’s action takes place after the pipeline is laid from the wadi to the Harran coastline.

That lack of a main character combined with Munif’s habit of using multiple honorifics to refer to the same character (often “Ibn,” meaning “son of,” and “Abu,” meaning “father of,” although the latter may also be used symbolically) left me frequently confused about exactly who was involved in any particular scene. Instead, I eventually settled on reading the book as a series of connected stories about the people affected by the arrival of Big Oil – Munif delivered his satire or presented sympathetic locals through winding anecdotes, such as the folk doctor who becomes a target of the foreign medical doctor, who brings science to his practice but also uses his connections to attempt to eliminate the folk doctor’s competition.

No one comes off well in the book, but Munif’s primary targets seem not to be the Americans, whom he largely depicts as aloof, money-minded bumblers, but the Arab powers-that-be who throw away their own heritage, ignore the needs of their people, and become addicted to the needle of American money. Later in the book, the emir who rules over Harran becomes childlike when presented with American toys like a radio or a telescope, making it that much easier for the Americans to do as they wish in creating a segregated Harran and flouting local Islamic laws and mores.

The strength of Cities of Salt was his sharp satirical edge, as nothing Munif depicted in the Americans or the installed Arab kleptocracy seemed remotely unrealistic. This isn’t parody – satire through ridicule or exaggeration – but satire through exposure: Here’s the sort of thing that happened, and viewed from above the situation, it looks awful. I found those portions more compelling than the often sad depictions of the Arab peasants whose lives were uprooted because, whether we like it or not, economic and scientific progress nearly always leaves some victims – the buggy makers who were run over, figuratively, by the automobile, for example. The issue is not how progress treats those victims, but how those in power use progress to enrich or protect their own interests and create more victims or worsen their plight along the way. I thought Munif’s greater contribution, at least in terms of the human element of his story, was shining some light on the migrant workers who move to work in the oil industry but who are treated in this novel as disposable resources by the oil company. Without cultural, linguistic, or social grounding in their community, treating them as such is a recipe for disaster, and in fact leads to the only real open conflict in the entire book.

Munif was born on the day in 1933 when Saudi Arabia signed the first concession agreement of any Gulf state with an American oil exploration company, a neat coincidence given (or perhaps driver of) his eventual choice of subject matter. He was stripped of his Saudi citizenship for his political views; after receiving a law degree from the Sorbonne and a Ph.D. in oil economics from the University of Belgrade, he worked in Iraq’s oil ministry and became a member of the Ba’ath Party, then quit the job and party when he became disenchanted with the government policies. He chose to channel his frustration with the region’s political state into his novels, focusing on the rise of oil-backed autocracies and the way the United States props them up with money and technology. Whether this is the great Arab novel, I can not say, with almost no experience with the region’s literature. Daniel Burt chose it for his Novel 100 at #71, the only Arabic-language novel on the list, although it wasn’t clear to me whether he was including this novel or the entire pentalogy. It had to be there for its cultural import, as it breaks no new ground in literary technique or storycraft, with thematic similarities to Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and the setting-as-star setup with multiple characters sharing center stage in the narrative seems descended from John Dos Passos’ U.S.A. Trilogy (both also on Burt’s list). Its value to me, however, was its window into a part of the world of which I know little and understood less, and that is enough for me to eventually read the two remaining books of the pentalogy that have been published in English.

Next up: I’m already into Giles Milton’s first novel, Edward Trencom’s Nose: A Novel of History, Dark Intrigue, and Cheese, available new through that link for the bargain price of $1.35. Milton’s bestseller Nathaniel’s Nutmeg is one of my favorite nonfiction books on any subject.

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→ April 11, 2009
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Lonesome Dove.

Winner of the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove is a broad epic of the American West covering the hardships – many self-inflicted – of settlers and would-be settlers moving into the western plains. The focus is on a pair of former Texas Rangers – the original kind – leading a cattle drive from southern Texas all the way to the unsettled territory of Montana, with each of a half-dozen major characters getting his or her own storyline.

McMurtry’s great skill is in that ability to splinter the story without destroying the narrative greed of the novel. As a new major character is introduced, McMurtry carves out a new plot line, although they all eventually intersect and not always in credible ways. Each of the major characters is deep and complex and given adequate “page time” to give the reader the full sense of the man or woman – particularly Gus McCrae, who would probably make my list of the top 20 protagonists in any novels I’ve read, with a shot at the top 10 – and even the secondary characters were three-dimensional with perhaps the lone exception of the biggest villain, the murdering Native American named Blue Duck.

Lonesome Dove is mammoth – I think it’s the third-longest novel I’ve ever read* – but the variety of storylines and significant quantity of dialogue kept it moving. Where the novel was light, for me, was in what I usually call literary value. When reading most books I can pick up on themes or metaphors without really trying; my wife, an English major in college, always tells me that if you have to work that hard to find them, they’re probably not there at all. Without that, Lonesome Dove felt more like great popular fiction than great literature, which isn’t a bad thing, but it makes it hard for me to rank the book as highly as some of my favorite novels, which had the same evocative prose and intriguing characters as Dove but add more weight from the themes they tackle.

*My best guess at the longest novels I’ve read, going by pages since word counts aren’t available for some of the titles:

1. Don Quixote – originally published as two books, now sold as one; over 1000 pages
2. Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell – over 1000 pages
3. Lonesome Dove – roughly 940 pages
4. The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling – 860 pages of tiny print
5. The Pickwick Papers – 840 pages of not-much-larger print
6. Vanity Fair – over 800 pages
7. The Sot-Weed Factor – around 750 pages
8. Anna Karenina – over 700 pages
9. The Woman in White – around 650 pages
10. The Three Musketeers – around 650 pages

Oddly enough, all of those books that I had read before assembling the Klaw 100 are on the list, and all ten will probably be on the next iteration.

Part of why McCrae was my favorite character was his slight obsession with food, not the least his ten-year-old sourdough biscuit starter. One wonders how cowboys lived so long on diets that would make the food Nazis at CSPI have aneurysms, but reading about them certainly put me in the mood for southern breakfasts.

Since I have nothing else intelligent to say on this novel, I’ll just move along and mention that I’m following up one of the longest novels I’ve read with one of the shortest, John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps.

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→ April 23, 2008
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The House of the Spirits.

The House of the Spirits, by Isabel Allende, is one of the great works in the magical realism movement prominent in post-colonial literature, especially that of Latin America. While it lacks the broad scope and dreamlike qualities of the genre’s paragon, One Hundred Years of Solitude, it is still an epic combining romance, the rise and fall of a great family, and the turbulent political history of the never-named country of Chile. (The book also appears in the “second 100” list of honorable mentions in the Novel 100.)

The central thread in the story is the Trueba family, introduced after what amounts to a lengthy prologue on the daughter of a prominent local family who is betrothed to Esteban Trueba. When that girl, the beautiful Rosa, dies suddenly, Trueba heads to his family’s property in a remote section of the country and builds a modern-day plantation, sublimating his grief into work. He returns to marry Rosa’s younger sister, the clairvoyant Clara (Spanish for “clear”), and the two enter a long and ultimately stormy marriage, begetting three children and one grandchild who will become central in the book’s rapid-fire conclusion during the overthrow of the democratically elected government of The Candidate. (Never named, the Candidate is obviously Salvador Allende, the author’s uncle, who was overthrown and assassinated in a US-backed coup in 1973 that installed the brutal dictator Augustus Pinochet into office and plunged Chile into over a decade of political and economic misery.)

The emphasis of the story is fluid, with early emphasis on the passionate yet dispassionate love affair between Esteban, who on some level still yearns for his deceased lover, and Clara, whose connection to the spirit world puts her beyond Esteban’s emotional reach:

He wanted far more than her body; he wanted control over that undefined and luminous material that lay within her and escaped him evening those moments when she appeared to be dying of pleasure.

Esteban is, despite humble origins, a reactionary, an ardent defender of The Way Things Are and The Way We’ve Always Done It, putting him in conflict with his wife, his daughter and her revolutionary lover, and eventually his granddaughter and her own forbidden paramour. The father’s sins are ultimately visited on his progeny, especially granddaughter Alba, who ends up a political prisoner of the Pinochet regime.

Allende mixes narratives, with most of the novel told by an omniscient narrator with a wry outlook and hints of sarcasm, broken up by occasional soliloquies from Esteban Trueba, speaking in his last years as he looks back over his life and those of his family members. Trueba’s sections drag relative to the remainder of the book because we know that his perspective is tainted by his political leanings and complicity in much of the violence that peppers the book. The third-person narration also has a near-monopoly on the book’s subtle humor, which never dominates the text but slips seamlessly into the narrative, such as the description of one of Esteban’s sons, returned from a spiritual journey in India:

… his skin clinging to his bones, and that lost gaze so often observed in those who eat only vegetables.

Or, in my favorite line from the book, in the discussion of how most families have one member who’s certifiable, while the Truebas appear to have avoided that affliction:

No. Here the madness was divided up equally, and there was nothing left over for us to have our own lunatic.

Allende clearly favors the progress of modernity over the rigid hierarchy of the old economic system and the autocratic system used to prop it up, but there’s a recurring note of wistful nostalgia for the culture of the earlier years. The book’s spiritual underpinnings, ranging from Clara’s communications with the spirits living in their urban mansion to her ability to play Chopin on a piano that’s several feet away to the simple naturalism of the peasants on their rural estate, are all presented favorably, even admiringly, and are set off from the obstinate conservatism of Trueba and the old guard.

The novel undergoes one abrupt change after Clara dies and the coup to overthrow the Candidate begins, turning from an epic romance/family saga into a political or psychological thriller. Allende takes us into the political prison with Alba while we also see the frantic efforts of her aged grandfather, now politically impotent after years of playing a critical role in the government, to free her. How he ultimately does so is one of the most charming, emotional, and wryly funny passages in the book.

Next up: Having finished book eleven of A Dance to the Music of Time while I procrastinated on this writeup, I’ve just started Halldór Laxness’ Independent People. Laxness was an Icelandic novelist who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1955, but 120 pages in, I’m not impressed.

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