→ February 11, 2023
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Stick to baseball, 2/11/23.

My top 100 prospects and team reports have been running for the last 12 days, finishing up today with the AL West team reports/top 20s. You can see the index of everything I’ve written here, which includes direct links to the reports for every team, the top 100, the farm system rankings, my chats on that site, and more.

My latest review for Paste actually went up last week, and even I missed it in all the hubbub. I reviewed the board game It’s a Wonderful Kingdom, the two-person variant of the popular game It’s a Wonderful World, but I have to say I think the original is a better game, even for two people. It’s a bit like 7 Wonders meets Century Spice Road, but with a little more to it than that might imply. You can buy It’s a Wonderful World here on amazon if you’re intrigued.

My free email newsletter has been almost-weekly this year, and I’ll send out the next iteration this weekend. I skipped my podcast this week because I was writing so much. I think it’ll be back next week. Maybe. Life is full of uncertainties.

And now, the links…

  • The Toronto Star looks at the fall of Jamie Salé into conspiracy theory and denialism. The 2002 Olympic gold medalist, previously best known as one of the two skaters originally cheated out of the gold by corrupt judges, has become a COVID and vaccine denialist – and, of course, now she’s trying to profit off these false views.
  • Intelligencer looks at the increasing “junkification” of Amazon, where legitimate products are getting harder to find as the company tries to muscle its way into more spaces. My outsider’s take: this is what happens when a company needs unbridled growth to prop up a stock price (or a billionaire owner’s wealth).
  • The BBC profiles the French author Colette, calling her “the most beloved French writer of all time,” although in the English-speaking world she’s probably best known for writing the novel Gigi that became a hit musical and film.
  • Is disdain for the less educated the “last acceptable prejudice,” as Michael Sandel writes in the New York Times? He also argues that it’s a problem for the Democrats, and a perception they need to shed.
  • Iowa Republicans introduced a bill that would expand child labor in the state, including jobs previously deemed too dangerous for kids like those in mining, logging, and animal slaughterhouses.
  • We’re seeing fewer big scientific breakthroughs, with the pace dropping steadily for over three-quarters of a century. Part of it is that breakthroughs are harder to come by as the low-hanging fruit is long picked, and part is that nations don’t invest in basic science research without promise of immediate financial returns the way they used to.
  • This blog post arguing that Dominion killed replayability in board games makes a great point – the need to constantly buy expansions to is a great business model for a very small number of games/publishers but not sustainable for the industry as a whole.
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→ October 24, 2022
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The Anomaly.

Hervé Le Tellier won the Prix Goncourt, the French equivalent to the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, in 2020 for his psychological thriller The Anomaly, which was subsequently translated into over three dozen languages and became a worldwide bestseller, an uncommon outcome for a literary prize in a language other than English. It’s an impressive combination of a page-turning plot with a fascinating thought experiment in speculative fiction, crafted in expert fashion so that the twist comes late enough in the novel that you’re already engaged with its diverse characters.

The Anomaly opens with a series of what appear to be unconnected short stories about various people around Europe and the United States, all of whom happened to be on the same Air France flight Paris to New York that encountered severe turbulence on its way into JFK. Each of those stories ends with police approaching those individuals, for an unknown reason, and given how different each of these characters and their lives are, it’s especially foreboding. Anything else would just be a spoiler.

Le Tellier tries to accomplish two very different goals in The Anomaly, and succeeds on both counts. The story picks up the pace and intensity as it goes along; he wisely starts out the novel with a section on a contract killer, which sets a specific tone that doesn’t last but immediately grabs the reader’s interest. You’re already on edge before you even get to the second character, so despite the fact that this isn’t a novel about a hit man, that opening sets up the possibility that anything might happen. By the time you find out what’s actually going on, you’re already flying through the book (pun intended), and that’s when Le Tellier really messes with your head.

There’s a real philosophical question at the heart of The Anomaly, centering on identity and the nature of self, along with more modest questions of personal rights and ownership in a modern capitalist society. Once we find out why the police are gathering everyone who was on that flight, we’re thrown into the existential crisis that’s about to face the passengers, turning what seemed like a potboiler murder or spy mystery into a work that explores deeper and unanswerable questions through the actions and reactions of its characters. It’s a hard line to travel, but Le Tellier manages to do so because he’s set up a collection of characters who would naturally respond differently to the massive shock they receive.

Le Tellier has a solid sense of humor as well, working in a couple of misfit scientists who were first called in by the feds in the wake of 9/11 to come up with a packet of recommendations for the response to all manner of improbable events, only to have them befuddled by this impossible event and responding in kind – by making it up as they go along. There’s a slew of pop culture and other contemporary references, which might not age that well but do give the novel an added sense of realism that balances out the unreality of the latter half.

Whether this novel ultimately works for you will probably come down to your willingness to suspend disbelief for the thought experiment in the latter half. I had no issue with this because it’s so well crafted, even before we get to the reveal, and because the novel does not wallow in the details or make the event itself the center of the story. This is a humanist story – although there’s a brief detour into a meeting of religious leaders that is wryly funny – that has characters at its heart, with Le Tellier writing believable reactions for each of them and representing a broad range of emotions in the process. I found it incredibly compelling from start to finish, even as the author leaves some questions unresolved.

Next up: I’m reading this year’s Hugo winner, Arkady Martine’s A Desolation Called Peace.

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→ August 21, 2019
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The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being is the second of Milan Kundera’s books I’ve read, along with The Book Of Laughter and Forgetting, and … I don’t get it. I admit this of my own free will: I don’t understand why his books are revered, but revered they are, with literature professor Daniel Burt including Unbearable Lightness on his revised list of the 125 greatest novels ever written at #112.

I do understand the core theme of this book, at least, since it is spelled out in the title and Kundera makes frequent references to it in the text. In direct contrast to Nietzsche’s idea that anything we experience just once might as well not be experienced at all, Kundera subscribes to the believe that we live just once, and that everything that we do and undergo is thus unique. He describes life in terms of contrasts, and how you can view life as having weight or, in the case of the title and most of his characters, as being unbearably light. It is as if he’s saying life is so nasty, brutish, and short that we might as well try to enjoy it in spite of ourselves.

His characters do seem to get after it, at least; Tomás, the main character, is a philandering asshole who refuses to keep it in his pants even when he belatedly realizes that his bed-hopping is making him miserable and that he actually loves his paramour Tereza, for whom he flees the communists of Czechoslovakia and, almost inexplicably, then follows her back into the authoritarian state even though he knows he will lose his livelihood and possibly his freedom for doing so. One common criticism of horror movies is that the plots require the characters to do dumb things so that the bad stuff can happen. Kundera makes Tomás do a dumb thing – really, who defects from a police state and then un-defects? – so he can move the story along too. He does have a bizarre philosophy to rationalize his womanizing, but I found it unconvincing.

Tomás is a man of principle at work, despite his utter lack of scruples when it comes to women or his one son, custody of whom he gives up to the boy’s mother so that he doesn’t see his own child for about twenty years. When Tomás is asked to renounce an essay he’d written for a newspaper about the meaning of Oedipus Rex because the Communist puppets in charge of Czechoslovakia after the Prague Spring find it subversive, he declines, even though he knows it will cost him his job as a surgeon, eventually leading him to increasingly menial jobs and out of the city entirely. It’s the contrast Kundera outlines in the first part of the book, although I found it hard to reconcile the two sides of Tomás’ character, since the area where he acts amorally involves causing pain to many other people.

These two are connected with another couple, Sabina and Franz, via, what else, Tomás’ affair with Sabina. Sabina is an artist who loathes kitsch, a term that Kundera takes from its normal denotation of tackiness in art to some broader connotation across multiple disciplines, including philosophy, that nearly put me to sleep. Franz is the least defined of the four major characters – the dog, Karenin, might have more depth – and I never quite understood why he ended up in a protest march in Cambodia alongside publicity-seeking American celebrities.

I hated this book – not so much while I read it, but when it was done and I realized how little I’d gotten out of it. Perhaps it’s a function of my lack of any philosophy education whatsoever – I probably got more from Monty Python than I did anywhere in school – but I didn’t take anything away from the book other than Kundera’s extreme materialist attitude towards life; his characters are inscrutable and unlikeable and they do and say things that feel unrealistic. I know a few of you mentioned absolutely loving this book, but it did nothing for me whatsoever.

Next up: I’ll be reading Wolf Hall for a while longer.

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→ January 25, 2019
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The Plague.

Reading Albert Camus’ The Plague, which appeared on the Guardian‘s list of the top 100 novels ever written, was itself a bit intimidating, because it’s the rare novel where I could go into it already knowing there would be layers of meaning beyond the text itself, presenting me with the challenge of reading for plot while also considering how much time to spend deciphering the metaphors and allusions throughout the book. Fortunately, it’s a better read than Camus’ The Stranger, a hallmark of existentialist literature that stands at an imperturbable remove from its protagonist, although I won’t pretend I truly understood everything Camus was trying to express in this text.

Set in Oran, in what is now Algeria but at the time was still a French colony, The Plague follows an outbreak of bubonic plague in the city through about a half-dozen characters, primarily Dr. Rieux, who becomes the leader of the efforts to treat and slow the progress of the epidemic despite a lack of medicines and unhelpful authorities. Bubonic plague, the best-known disease caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, had no effective treatment at the time that Camus wrote the novel, so characters who fall ill expect and are expected to die, making the response from Dr. Rieux and the other central characters more about management and quarantine rather than cure.

Camus tracks the actions and emotional responses of those half-dozen characters as the plague appears, waxes, peaks, and wanes, with nearly everyone suffering some sort of loss as the novel progresses. Rieux has sent his wife, ill with some other ailment, out of town to a sanatorium as the novel opens, so she’s away during the plague but he has no contact with her. Rambert, a French journalist who was scheduled to leave Oran but who is trapped by the quarantine, speaks of his desire to return to his wife in Paris, even plotting escapes around the guards, but eventually choosing to stay because he feels some responsibility to help. The plague affects everyone, even those who don’t lose family members to the disease, as it first alters the rhythm of the town’s life – Camus writes of the movie theaters running the same films, then exchanging films with other theaters, just to retain some semblance of normal life – and eventually leads to shortages.

There are some strange omissions in the novel, as the major characters are all French men – the women who appear are all minor characters, and I’m not sure there’s even a single named Arab character in the book. Whether Camus intended this, it is a book of othering – his characters set themselves apart from the Algerians in Oran, but are themselves the others, the minority ruling class in a country that would begin a violent revolution for independence seven years after The Plague‘s publication.

Most critical analyses I’ve seen of The Plague describe it as an allegory for the Nazi occupation of France and the intermittent, nearly futile resistance offered by some French civilians against their occupiers and the collaborators in the Vichy puppet government. Camus’ protagonists know they are likely doomed to fail, and even success will be defined by forces outside of their control. I thought the disease worked better as a metaphor for life itself, especially as defined by Camus’ atheist/existentialist worldview: If life and death are largely random, both in the sense of unpredictable as well as without philosophical meaning, then how should we react? What moral codes dictate our actions? Is there value in finding external meanings, as the priest Paneloux – who argues that the death of a child due to plague must be right, because if it occurred, then it means God willed it, in a sort of ne plus ultra form of the unitary executive theory – does right up to his own death? If not, how do we give meaning to our lives when they are finite and may be cut short without warning?

If that was Camus’ intention, he gives us several possible answers, but none is as powerful as Rieux, who seems to sacrifice the most in the novel, but whose only gain is intangible and fleeting, the boost we get from helping others. In a time today when so many people still celebrate materialism or aspire to its excesses, and where we live as if the probability of a catastrophe like The Plague is almost nil, that message feels as relevant as it might have seventy-two years ago in the Holocaust’s wake.

Next up: Bianca Bosker’s Cork Dork: A Wine-Fueled Adventure Among the Obsessive Sommeliers, Big Bottle Hunters, and Rogue Scientists Who Taught Me to Live for Taste, recommended by a close friend of mine who used to work in a restaurant mentioned in the book.

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→ October 16, 2018
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Missing Person.

French author Patrick Modiano won the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature, and his best-known work, at least outside of France, is his novel Missing Person (originally Rue des Boutiques Obscure, a real street in Rome on which Modiano once lived), which won the 1978 Prix Goncourt, the French equivalent to the Pulitzer or the National Book Award. Modiano’s works tend to be short and tersely written, with sparing prose not too dissimilar to Hemingway’s, and a constant distance maintained between the reader and the text. (This post is primarily about Missing Person, but this summer I also read Suspended Sentences, a collection of three novellas by Modiano, which informs my opinion of his style.)

The protagonist of Missing Person is an amnesiac detective whose boss of ten years is retiring, leaving him to try to solve the case of his own lost identity and history, based on scant clues and the need to talk to people who may not remember him, or want to talk, or even still be among the living. The short novel follows the character around Paris and France, and eventually to the South Pacific island of Bora Bora, as he tries to unroll the years he lost prior to whatever caused his amnesia. He uncovers a possible answer to his identity, although it’s far from certain, and the person he may once have been was himself a frequent changer of identities as he tried to flee from the occupying forces during World War II, eventually slipping across the Pyrennées into Spain.

Even that story, however, is of dubious veracity, and there’s a sense throughout the novel that the protagonist, who also narrates the work, is grasping at any straws he can find, overly eager to get an answer to his search without worrying enough whether it’s accurate. He has a photograph of someone who might have been him, but whenever he shows it to someone who might recognize him in that context, he’s quick to ask, “Don’t you think it looks like me?” — a leading question that elicits half-hearted agreement more than actual answers. Once the narrator has a story on to which he can latch on, he also seems to drop alternate theories, which seems contrary to his new identity as a private detective and apparently a successful one at that.

It’s impossible to read a story like this without also seeing it as a meditation on identity – on our need for a back story, for example, or how on the stories we tell ourselves to provide meaning to our lives, especially when there might be things in our own pasts we’d rather gloss over or forget entirely. It’s unclear whether the protagonist did things during the war of which he might not be proud now, and there’s a trap in his easy adoption of this particular identity: what if he finds he was a collaborator, not a resister, during World War II? Or simply betrayed people who were close to him? The farther he goes down this rabbit hole, trying to convince people to give him the answers he wanted, the greater the risk he exposes himself to a story he might have preferred to forget.

And if the narrator can’t solve the mystery of his identity and past, then what remains for him? Can he be satisfied living a life without a history, or knowing his real name (or, as it seems, one of his real names)? When the foundation of our self-identification is denied to us, how does that affect our ability to function in a society that is obsessed not just with who we are or where we came from, but with where our parents came from, or whether we come from certain stock or a high enough class? What does the lack of a personal history do to someone’s self-image? Is it better to have a satisfying myth than to have the unvarnished truth – especially if the latter is unflattering or even includes something shameful?

Modiano’s stories seem to lack firm conclusions; that is certainly true of Missing Person, where the Bora Bora lead doesn’t pan out, leaving the narrator with one last clue to try to unravel his personal history, with the novel ending with a brief thought from the narrator on his quixotic mission but no resolution. He might know who he was, but he’s not sure and it appears he might never receive that closure. Modiano asks if half an answer, of uncertain accuracy, would be better than having none at all, and leaves it to the reader to judge.

Next up: I’m halfway through Vernor Vinge’s mammoth Hugo-winning novel A Deepness in the Sky.

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→ September 16, 2016
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HHhH.

My latest boardgame review for Paste covers the 3D building game Saloon Tycoon, and I wrote a piece for Insiders yesterday on some top 100 prospects who had down years. I also held a Klawchat here on Thursday.

Laurent Binet’s historical novel HHhH won the Prix Goncourt du Premier Roman, an award given to the best debut novel in French literature, in 2010, and has since become a bestseller in multiple languages and even spawned a film version due out in 2017. But it’s far from a typical historical novel; while the novel’s core is the story of the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, the “Blond Beast” of Hitler’s regime and a primary architect of the Holocaust, Binet has wrapped that story up in his own metafictional account of the author’s difficulty in writing a novel about the past where the participants are dead.

The Heydrich storyline is fairly simple, and Binet – or, I suppose, the narrator-author within the book – tells it with sufficient detail to inform the reader and keep the plot moving. Heydrich was born into privilege but was dogged by rumors as a youth that he was part Jewish; as a teenager, he joined a volunteer paramilitary unit and an anti-Semitic organization that was a major forerunner of the Nazi Party. He joined the Germany Navy in 1922 and was rapidly promoted through the ranks; he later married a woman who was already an ardent Nazi, but the affair cost him his officer status and he was briefly unemployed. A bit of good fortune put him in front of Heinrich Himmler, who named him head of the newly created intelligence service within the SS, a post that led to another surge up the ranks for Heydrich, culminating in his roles as director of the Gestapo and as Acting Protector of the occupied area now known as Czechia. It was there that Heydrich became the lone high-ranking Nazi official to be assassinated by resistance forces, the result of a courageous and clumsy operation called Anthropoid that resulted in Heydrich’s death, a showdown where the assassins were trapped in a Prague church after a lengthy manhunt, and the Nazi destruction of the towns of Lidice and Ležáky, with over 1300 civilians murdered.

Binet’s approach in HHhH – the title stands for “Himmlers Hirn heißt Heydrich,” which means “Himmler’s brain is called Heydrich” – is to tell the story of the assassination while also telling the story of telling the story. He presents himself through this narrator surrogate as a writer somewhat obsessed with the historical facts, dwelling over the difficulty of recreating events through secondhand materials of questionable veracity, and often presenting a scene complete with dialogue only to tell us in the next section that he made it up.

On the one hand, Binet examines some real questions seldom asked of historical fiction and even non-fiction, not the least of which is how the author could possibly know what was said in the dialogue s/he presents. Eyewitness testimony is unreliable, as are our memories in general, so even asking participants who said what won’t produce accurate answers. On the other hand, it’s distracting as hell to get rolled up in the assassination storyline, only to have Binet’s narrator burst through the door with a “hold up, that’s not really what happened!” tangent that breaks the spell of the narrative. To be fair, that’s more prevalent in the first half of the book; once the story gets cooking, such as the scene when the assassins bumble the actual attempt (which, sorry for the spoiler, killed Heydrich anyway), the interruptions are fewer, and Binet saves some of his final thoughts on the author’s dilemma for the last few pages – a peroration that is as effective as any other passage in conveying his state of mind as an author who became invested in his story and frustrated by his inability to ever get it truly “right.” HHhH thus is more like two nested stories, the outer one of which is about the inner story, with differing styles and levels of interest in both of them, working well together but carrying some of the frustrating hallmarks of all postmodern literature.

Next up: I’m halfway through Clifford Simak’s Hugo winner Way Station.

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→ February 8, 2016
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The Meursault Investigation.

Standard reminder, since I’ve been asked this several times a day lately: The top 100 prospects package starts to roll out on Wednesday, February 10th, with the organizational rankings; the top 100 list itself follows on Thursday, with the org reports (including top tens) posting the following week.

I did not like Camus’ The Stranger, which is widely considered one of the greatest novels ever written – it was #58 on the Novel 100, and appeared on the Bloomsbury “100 must-read classic novels” list too – because it is a book completely devoid of … well, anything. Emotion. Feeling. Heart, at which I suppose Camus would have laughed derisively. Camus rejected the “existentialist” label often applied to him, and devoted much of his writing, fiction and philosophy, to refuting the nihilist philosophies of his contemporaries in the surrealist movement. Yet The Stranger struck me as nothing if not nihilist, a book that argues that there is no meaning in anything, not even in the killing of another man, in this case the nameless Arab (later made famous a second time in a song by the Cure) whom the protagonist kills, leading to his own execution. It’s a story of disaffection turned into total disconnection, a novel that is both atheist and anti-humanist at the same time. If that’s not nihilistic, I’m more than a bit confused (again).

Kamel Daoud’s critically acclaimed 2014 novel The Meursault Investigation is a response to Camus-cum-Meursault, written as a serious of monologues delivered by the narrator to an unseen journalist. The narrator, it turns out, is the younger brother of the nameless Arab, and he is seriously pissed off. Mostly at Camus for killing his brother “twice,” once in the murder, a second time by refusing to deign to give the victim a name, even while creating this enduring novel about the act. The victim’s name was Musa, and his brother, Harun, would like us all to know that – and in so doing, opens up a series of doors on the historical relationship between west and east, white and nonwhite, European and African or Asian, and so on down the line.

Daoud’s angry narrator distills the rage of a race and a religion and a color into the righteous indignation of a younger brother whose life was irreperably altered by the senseless murder of his older brother. Harun’s father had abandoned the family, and with Musa dead – and no body to bury – he and his mother end up moving out of their city home to a village outside of Oran, but not before Harun fulfills his mother’s wish that he kill a Frenchman in symmetrical vengeance for the death of her son. This event splits his life into before and after, and becomes part of the foundation of his own anti-nihilist philosophy, one that simultaneously rejects religion and views God as “a question, not an answer,” one that blames France for screwing up Algeria through colonialism and then blames Algeria for screwing up Algeria once the French have left. And let’s not even start on how much he blames his mother, whose inability to grieve for the dead son whose body was never found (because Camus erased it) has derailed the life of her younger child.

The Stranger struck me as a work of dead prose, what a novel would look like if the author stripped out any sense of emotion, feeling, even senses like wonder or fear. It’s like Gadsby, the novel written without the use of the letter ‘e,’ a neat trick that does nothing to make the novel any better for the reader and probably makes it worse. The Meursault Investigation infuses all of that missing emotion back into the book, as the pages practically glow with the narrator’s rage and weep with his frustrations. It’s alternately funny and infuriating, the extended monologue of a man drunk on emotion rather than alcohol. Daoud is giving Camus a giant middle finger by turning the French author’s novel inside out and revealing to us everything that Camus left out. As someone who simply can not understand the mountains of praise heaped upon the earlier work, I read The Meursault Investigation with great joy, as if I’d finally found a kindred spirit who rejected The Stranger for its nihilistic implications, yet one who providers layer upon layer of complexity that a reader of Camus would likely never have begun to consider.

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→ July 5, 2014
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Les Misérables (book).

My breakdown of the Jeff Samardzija trade is up for Insiders now.

Victor Hugo’s The Wretched (Les Misérables) is by far the longest book I’ve ever read, over 1300 pages and well over half a million words, and if you’re considering tackling it too, I strongly suggest you just watch the musical instead. Cameron Mackintosh changed very little of the novel’s plot for the stage version and omitted nothing of significance; Hugo padded his novel with lengthy expositions on topics from Napoleon’s fall at Waterloo to the structure of the Parisian sewer network, none of which is remotely worth your time.

If you’ve avoided the musical in both its stage and film versions, the plot of the book is quite simple and linear given the tome’s thickness. Jean Valjean was convicted for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his family and ended up spending nineteen years in prison after multiple failed escape attempts. He gains his freedom but finds himself rejected by everyone in society, unable even to find a place to stay, only finding shelter with a bishop possessed of impeccable compassion, a night that leads Valjean to a religious awakening and gives his life new purpose – but also makes him (in modern terms) a parole violator, doomed to a life of fleeing the robotic law-and-order Inspector Javert. Valjean takes on responsibility for Cosette, the orphaned daughter of a fallen seamstress named Fantine, after a handful of coincidences – something that Hugo uses repeatedly to put his small universe of characters into incessant contact with each other. When Cosette reaches her late teens, she falls for the student Marius, who’s tangentially involved with a group of would-be rebels who set up a barricade in the streets during the uprising of 1832, after which everyone dies but Marius, who’s saved by Valjean … and I haven’t even mentioned Thénadier, who hangs around this book like a bad penny.

There aren’t any proper subplots and most of the characters get minimal development other than Valjean, leaving the book somewhere between a character study and a vehicle for Hugo to discuss his views on religion, politics, and French history, as well as the sewers. Valjean’s status as an iconic character of literature may result from his own impossible goodness, his willingness to subvert himself to help others, notably Cosette, but he’s far more interesting for his verbose internal debates over the proper course of action when faced with difficult moral decisions. Fantine’s story is sad and probably well-founded in reality, but it’s a straight-line descent, and Hugo makes them almost comically good – sweet, dainty, ladylike. Javert lacks any sort of nuance, rigid in his adherence to order and authority, devoid not just of compassion but of emotion. Marius is the standard romantic-heroic doofus, and he and Cosette deserve each other if only for their mutual insipidness – each of them has the personality of a root vegetable. Gavroche, the imp who dies helping the insurgents at the barricade, might get more character development than most of the adults, as well as some details that are left out of the musical, such as the fact that he’s Éponine’s younger brother – and that they have three other siblings. Éponine is a very different character in the book, less overtly tragic than in the musical. Her love for Marius isn’t lifelong, but fleeting, and he’s barely aware of her existence, but “On My Own” wouldn’t quite pack the same punch if Mackintosh had left it as a mere crush than unrequited love.

Hugo’s purpose in writing the novel was social criticism, particularly the French systems of economics and justice, which resulted in huge disparities between the wealthy and the poor, while creating (in Hugo’s view) a very high risk of recidivism for released convicts. He paints dismal pictures of the lives of the poor in France and the plight of women born or left outside the narrow upper echelon of society, especially those who, like Fantine, are left as unwed mothers, with no recourse to make the fathers of their children take responsibility. But to craft these polemics, he relies on endless coincidences and forces his characters to make choices or decisions that beggar belief, right down to Valjean’s final, ridiculous choice to remove himself from Cosette’s life after her marriage to Marius without explaining to her why he’s done so – or to Marius why his revelation of his criminal past should be irrelevant. (Marius is such a doofus that he goes along with Valjean’s self-imposed exile anyway.) Heck, even Fantine’s decision to house her child with the Th&ecaute;nardiers, a critical plot point several times over, makes no sense – yet without it, nothing that comes afterwards would hold together. She happens to work in Valjean’s factory, he happens to come upon her as she’s about to be arrested by Javert, and so on. Hugo writes as if there were only a half a dozen people in France and it was perfectly normal for Valjean to bump into Javert or Thénardier while walking down the street – or that all of these nitwits should end up at some point in the same ramshackle tenement.

Had Hugo published Les Misérables as a 300-page romantic/adventure novel, it would have been a much better read but might not have endured as a work of populist fiction. Yet despite a mediocre contemporary reception and the presence of those tedious harangues on social or political subjects, it ended up at #90 on The Novel 100 and made the Bloomsbury 100 too, which I have to assume is as much about the book’s renown as its quality. There’s a decent story in here, but it’s just not a very good book.

Next up: I knocked off the sixth Flavia de Luce novel, The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches, in a day – and feared, incorrectly as it turned out, that it marked the end of the series – and am now halfway through John Scalzi’s Hugo Award winner Redshirts, which is hilarious.

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→ December 29, 2013
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The Count of Monte Cristo.

I’ve been lax in book blogging lately, between year-end lists and a run of longer reads (a few of which were duds) and the mystery/detective novels I don’t review unless it’s by an author I haven’t discussed before. The one loooong read that’s worth a mention here is Alexandre Dumas’ (père, which I won’t mention again because it’s not like anyone remembers anything his son wrote) The Count of Monte Cristo, which surpassed Gone with the Wind as the longest novel I’ve ever read. It’s on the Bloomsbury and Guardian top 100 lists, and while it didn’t have the same chewy center as Dumas’ The Three Musketeers, it was still a fun and surprisingly rapid read.

Edmond Dantes is the Count of the title, although as the story opens he’s just an amiable young sailor, about to marry the girl of his dreams and earn a big promotion on the boat where he works, all of which pisses off his two main rivals in love and at sea. Those two conspire with a third man to ruin Dantes by a letter falsely accusing him of treason, which, thanks to a corrupt prosecutor looking to save his own hide, lands Dantes in a notorious prison, jailed without trial or even knowing the charge, with no hope of release or leniency.

After fourteen years in captivity, Dantes manages an escape (one of the book’s highlights), finds great wealth via his only friend in prison, and resurrects himself as The Count of Monte Cristo. This mysterious saint-like figure has infinite wealth and uses it to spare people in need, many of whom fail to recognize their former friend or rival after his long absence and changed appearance. Now 33, the Count plays the longest con of all, plotting to ruin the lives of the men who tried to ruin his and mostly succeeded. Over the course of maybe 300,000 words, about the length of three typical novels, Dantes lays elaborate traps for the three men most responsible for his plight, but, as you’d expect, runs into a few unforeseen complications that provoke introspection and self-doubt to let Dumas pad the ol’ word count a little further.

A superficial read of The Count of Monte Cristo as the mother of all revenge stories (which, by the way, is based on the true story of a Frenchman who did a lot of what Dantes did, just without all the cash) would still be time well spent. Dumas had the knack for building tension without seeming false, then providing huge, satisfying resolutions that are plausible within the confines of the story. If you accept the premise of Dantes obtaining an endless supply of money, then much of what comes afterwards is surprisingly realistic for a novel of the romantic/traditional period. Dumas paints the three targets as awful people, and you’ll find yourself rooting for him to give them what for. Even when there’s collateral damage, Dantes endeavors to make things right – money allows a vengeful man to be more precise – to keep the reader happy that no women or children will be unduly harmed in the reading of this novel.

Of course, you could also wring enough symbolism out of this book to send the Seine spilling over its banks, staring with Dantes himself coming back from the dead – or a stone crypt of sorts – at age 33, just like Jesus Christ. Dantes even believes himself to be sent by God, or an instrument of God to spread good fortune to those who deserve it and to crush those who would do or have done evil in the past (to him, that is). He’s not Jesus, but he’s Jesus-like, in the literary sense, which I imagine has been fodder for countless term papers and college theses.

Dantes is not perturbed by the thought of being used by a benevolent Deity to bring ill fortune or even death on those who have done others harm until after he’s nearly completed his scorched-earth campaign from Provence to Paris. He even acquires a coterie of servants and acolytes and helps them obtain revenge they were unaware they could achieve, again with little thought to whether these acts were, in themselves, evil, or at least un-Christian. The twisted theology of the Count, coupled with his monomaniacal pursuit of vengeance, might have rendered him more insane than saintly; there is no potential for forgiveness or a commutation of the sentences Dantes plans to deliver. Even though the men who wronged him don’t deserve clemency and continue to act without regard for the well-being of others, Dantes goes way too long – years, at least – before experiencing anything like remorse for his own ruthlessness in smiting his enemies.

I wouldn’t say I’m likely to reread the book, but it might be a more fruitful read to consider it as Dantes’ search for meaning, the development of his own philosophy of life. He enters the prison believing he knows all that matters, and leaves it full of practical knowledge but emotionally void other than his wish for vengeance. Through years of wealth, of making others’ dreams come true, of ruining lives that were probably worth ruining but also ruining a few others in the process, the Count arrives at a very different mental state than the one he held at the start of the book. He never monologues but does offer hints at his newfound philosophical leaning, such as:

“There is neither happiness nor misery in the world; there is only the comparison of one state with another, nothing more.”

There’s some ambiguity in the end of The Count of Monte Cristo, but with hints that Dantes intends to retire from public life, in a somewhat monastic sense, which would provide a clever parallel to his time in prison, where he was deprived of almost everything except for the companionship of the abbe in the next cell. Dumas recognizes that you can’t bring a life full circle because Dantes can’t undo all the damage done. Instead, he gives Dantes satisfaction enough to sail off into the novel’s sunset, unfulfilled emotionally but at least bearing the pride of a twenty-year-old task completed.

* Two wonderful quotes about food from this book, the first describing what we know recognize as umami, the “fifth taste” found in foods high in glutamates:

“Tell me, the first time you tasted oysters, tea, porter, truffles, and sundry other dainties which you now adore, did you like them?”

And the second, a serious line that reads as a joke now, one that could only have been penned by a Frenchman:

“condemned to partake of Italian cookery—that is, the worst in the world.”

* Euphemisms for death abound in every language, and, along with euphemisms for sex, show tremendous creativity. Dumas offers one I hadn’t seen before, with one character asking if anther has “paid the last debt of nature?”

* I mentioned reading a few duds that didn’t merit writeups. Two were from the Bloomsbury list – Herman Hesse’s Narcissus and Goldmund, a fable about two men who choose widely divergent paths in search of enlightenment, and Arnold Bennett’s The Old Wives’ Tale, a romantic (in the traditional sense) novel about two sisters with widely divergent personalities who live separate, different lives but end up in the same place. I also read Anne Tyler’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Breathing Lessons, which is just a bad Richard Russo book. Next up: Sophie’s World: A Novel About the History of Philosophy, a 1991 book by Jostein Gaarder.

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Kipps and Dangerous Liaisons.

Last week’s ESPN content included a look at a few top prospects who were called up and a Klawchat. I also contributed to the new Future Power Rankings by naming a “new #GUY” prospect for each system, ignoring players who were just drafted in June or who were previously on my top 50/100.

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I’d only read one H.G. Wells novel, his sci-fi/social commentary classic The Time Machine, before encountering Kipps The Story of a Simple Soul on the Bloomsbury 100. Another novel of deep social criticism, Kipps represents Wells’ attack on the gulf between haves and have-nots in late 19th century England while simultaneously rejecting socialism as a solution, wrapped in the envelope of a rags-to-riches-to-rags romance that works effectively on its own and as a delivery mechanism for Wells’ polemics.

Kipps himself is Arthur “Artie” Kipps, who has been shipped off by his mother (with his father unknown) to be raised by his Puritanical and simple-minded aunt and uncle. While attending a useless primary school, he falls in love with Ann, the sister of his best friend Sid, only to lose track of her when he begins his apprenticeship as a draper at age 14. The drudgery and limited outlook for working-class children sent into this sort of indentured servitude comes under Wells’ fire, as does the factory system’s wide latitude for employers to cheat their helpless employees. Kipps ends up the recipient of a windfall inheritance, seeking then to raise himself up above his lower-class upbringing, yet also struggling with questions of moral responsibility associated with his newfound wealth, many raised by the minor character Masterman – an ardent socialist dying of tuberculosis. Kipps’ fortune disappears almost as quickly as he obtained it, and it is in his response to this turn of events that his inner character emerges from the facade of the semi-polished and utterly superficial Kipps of the book’s middle section.

Wells wrote Kipps with a satirist’s pen, mocking people with wealth and power at every turn yet never sparing those poor in all but ideas. Masterman’s polemics on capitalism are somewhat undercut by Wells’ decision to make the novel’s one socialist – or its only real philosopher of any sort – terminally ill with a disease known at the time as “consumption.” Kipps’ sudden acquisition of wealth changes the way nearly everyone in his life treats him, turning many supporting characters into comic relief, while also throwing him into many situations he finds embarrassing that are also send-ups of the circumstances that created them, such as a scene in the fine restaurant of the hotel he’s inhabiting, where walking in with the wrong shoes is just the first of his problems. The reader can only feel badly for Kipps, who is a stranger in the strange land of privilege, while scorning the various aristocrats who’d look down on him for his naivete.

The romance plot is the overarching storyline in the book, covering Kipps from childhood till the point when he loses his fortune (in predictable, but yet somewhat amusing fashion), even though it functions as a subplot under the more academic themes relating to Kipps’ career and time as one of the idle rich. Kipps’ childhood romance with Ann lasts until he turns 14 and leaves for a career in fabric, after which he ends up with a crush on the more sophisticated Helen Walsingham, who views him sympathetically but without much interest until his inheritance turns up. The way in which Kipps acquires that money doesn’t fit neatly into either plot line, but also provides one of the book’s most entertaining passages, particularly because the non-drinker Kipps goes on a lengthy bender that leads to an improbable connection to the lost money, while leading into a lengthy fish-out-of-water passage where Kipps flops and flounders his way through upper-class society.

Wells mimics lower-class speech in Kipps’ dialogue, with liaisons like “a nactor” for “an actor” and elisions like “mis’bel” for “miserable,” which can make reading the text a little slower, but he more than makes up for it with direct, modern prose that avoids the sluggishness that I’ve encountered in some of the other Bloomsbury 100 novels, even contemporaries of Kipps. It’s funny, cutting, sweet, and still quite relevant in a time of rising income inequality in capitalist societies yet in a world where socialist economies have failed.

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I also knocked out Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’ 1782 epistolary novel Dangerous Liaisons*, which appears on both the Bloomsbury and Guardian lists, although it took a solid week to get through the tedious prose and absurdly long letters between the main characters. Focusing on a romantic rivalry between the rake the Viscomte de Valmont and his quondam paramour the Marquise de Merteuil, both gleefully free of morals and engaged in multiple intrigues simultaneously. Their rivalry leads Valmont to “seduce” (rape, in modern terms) the 15-year-old ingenue Cécile de Volanges, which in turns sets their mutual downfall in motion.

*Not to be confused with “Dangeresque Liaisons.”

For a work involving sex (most of it of the consensual variety) and betrayal, Dangerous Liaisons is a plodding read, as the entire book comprises letters between the various characters floridly describing what they just did, or what they might do next, or (in Cécile’s case) what they would just like to do. I assume Laclos was moralizing in two ways, over promiscuity/infidelity but also over those who treat others as mere pawns for their own gains or pleasures, as both Valmont and Merteuil treat multiple lovers (or victims) in this way over the course of the novel. Yet Laclos makes the novel so one-sided that it fast becomes boring, in the way that Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward wears out its welcome with sermonizing on how the world should be.

I haven’t seen the Academy Award-nominated adaptation of Dangerous Liaisons (a film adapted from a play adapted from a novel) starring John Malkovich (really?) as the roué Valmont, but I did watch the 1989 adaptation Valmont, with the far more believable Colin Firth in the role of the cad. That version altered the ending far too much to be considered a reasonable adaptation, crafting happy-ish endings for several characters and avoiding the more serious aspects of the novel’s depictions of Valmont and Merteuil (played by Annette Bening, also a solid casting choice).

Next up: Joseph Roth’s The Radetzky March, another selection from the Bloomsbury 100, and a novel that has appeared on at least two lists of the most important novels in the German canon.

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