Dawn's Reading Blog

Faulkner just amazes me. Even when I don’t have the least idea what he’s saying. Actually, despite a warning that Light in August could be a difficult read, it was one of his more straightforward books and I think I got all of it. There are two plots – the main one of Joe Christmas’s life and death – and the plot that surrounds it of a woman left to bear her child out of wedlock searching for its father. First you get a few chapters of the woman, then tons of chapters about Christmas, and finally the woman comes back. What I don’t get, I guess, is the significance of that – how the two even relate to each other besides taking place in the same town.

But Faulkner could break every rule, write a book without a plot at all, do whatever he pleases, and I’d still be soaking it up. Because his language is so evocative. Because there are so many “yes” moments when reading his work where you know that it couldn’t have been put any better. There’s a reason why there’s a lot of Faulkner on the 100 Best list. This is the last of three of them, but I’ll read his other works as well.

Under the Volcano is the best depiction of an end-stage alcoholic you’ll ever read, but supposedly there’s more to it than that. It’s supposed to be more universal, and the drunkard (the Consul) is supposed to have impressed me with what a great man he is (if only he weren’t so drunk, I suppose).

For my part, the book had too many British schoolboy and classical mythology references–I got almost none of them–and too many sentences in foreign languages: Spanish, French, even German. Thank God I can read a decent amount of Spanish since that was the most heavily used. Although he does translate the most critical passages (obliquely), you’d feel left out.

Strange how he refers to his characters so formally, even when he’s in their heads. The Consul thought he’d have another drink. Monsieur Laurelle remembered his childhood. Odd.

Very poetic and lyrical in places. Good stream of consciousness, excellently realistic relationships. It’s just that it lost me a lot of the time. The essayist at the end of my edition says he’s read it like thirty times. You’d have to.

I was also disappointed in the ending which seemed too deus ex machina for me. I’m always wanting the ending to come from the story. This one was appropriately tragic but not specifically tragic.

We’re told right at the beginning of Native Son that Bigger, a young black man, is bound for trouble, that who he is and the world he lives in make it inevitable. He ends up hurting the only white people who were ever nice to him because he can’t reconcile their niceness with his reality. Although the initial crime is accidental, hurting someone makes him feel powerful and meaningful for the first time in his life and once he gets over the initial shock, he isn’t sorry.

The first two sections of the book, where we watch him unwittingly commit a crime against a white woman and then seek to escape its repercussions, are lively and powerful. In the third section, he’s been caught and the pace slows way down as we can only watch Bigger contemplate, not do. Bigger is a little over-self-aware throughout the story (he knows too much about what makes him tick) but he becomes even more so during the third section, which also gets preachy as his lawyer lectures to him and to us about the “colored problem” and our inability to solve it. There’s a lot of really good stuff in there but it would be better if it were illustrated rather than spelled out.

This was a 100 Best book I was able to get behind. Very gripping and worth a read. Also interesting in that I seem to have read a lot about the communist/anarchist era recently and this was another take on it.

The Way of All Flesh is another example of a 100 Best book that has me scratching my head. It was an interesting story, reasonably well presented. The main characters were engaging. It took a long time to get to the main character as it started with his grandfather, but once it got there it marched along. I just don’t know what was so special about it.

Ernest is an average, put-upon kid until his Aunt takes an interest in him. Then he inherits some money, although he doesn’t know it, and goes through various trials and tribulations, including landing himself in jail, before taking possession of his inheritance and going on to lead a boring but nice life. The moral of the story seems to be that you’re bound to be stupid when you’re young but that some people grow out of it and don’t give them money until they do. Really, it was just sort of a gossipy family tale, something like what Jane Austen might write except that the solution was money, not marriage.

This reminded me frequently of how much I hated the Studs Lonigan trilogy. Like Studs, USA was far too long and the characters seemed far too uninvolved with their own lives. Unlike in Studs Lonigan, there were different main characters and they weren’t all hateful.

USA was broken into many chapters of four different types:

Narrative chapters focusing on a specific character who would appear again (though how soon and how often seemed random).

Chapters about a real person that summarized, in somewhat poetical form, that person’s life.

Camera Eye – a first person, punctuationless, disjointed narrative that often couldn’t be followed and that didn’t continue from one segment to the next.

Newsreel – fragments of news reports from the time period jumbled together and incomplete.

Needless to say, it was hard to follow in spots.

For whatever reason, Dos Passos focused on fewer characters for longer in each subsequent book of the trilogy. I therefore enjoyed the third part much more than the first.

One thing I can say about all the historical reading I’ve done recently is that, as badly as our liberties may be being infringed upon under the current administration, it’s nothing compared to how things were at the turn of the century. Freedom of speech? Bah. Nothing like. You wanted to speak against the establishment you could expect to be beaten and jailed. And working conditions and life for the poor were miserable and not many people cared. The country has made progress for all that it will never be perfect.

I ended up reading two books on the 100 Best list about the first World War at the same time. It wasn’t intentional. I didn’t know The Naked and the Dead was even on the list. I’d just run across a copy of it at a used book store and recognized the name. And the other book, USA (reviewed separately) is only sometimes about the war. It just so happened I was at the spot where the war was going on at the same time I was reading this book.

I liked this one better. It had too many character so I never did completely figure out whose backstory belonged to whose current drama, but it was engaging from moment to moment and a sort of story arc began to prevail. It starts a little disjointed – so many people and no apparent plot – but the plot eventually shows itself. The characters go on a mission from which several will not return. It gets your attention.

As with many on the 100 Best list, it doesn’t seem head and shoulders above the rest to me but I found myself wrapped up in the characters and the story as it went on.

The bad thing about Kim is that it’s quite incomprehensible in spots. Not being Indian or even English or from that era of time, I couldn’t follow certain concepts without further explanation and the habit Kipling had of defining one word I didn’t know by using another I didn’t know was beyond irritating. But I still liked it.

In contrast to my rant about Little Lord Fauntleroy, this is a children’s book suitable for both children and adults. The hero is a real boy with both good and bad traits. He grows as the book continues, making more of his good traits but never losing completely the bad. He’s both lovable and real.

It’s also fun from a travel and cultural perspective. Kim’s adventures cross India and bring him in contact with all its personalities. Whatever racism it displays (which isn’t much) seems in keeping with the reality of the time. The white man is never admitted as being superior, merely as being in charge. Kim does identify with the British politically, but he’s also British by heritage, so why not?

This is a book that deserves its status as a children’s classic.

At first I found Tobacco Road depressing. Then I started to find it funny. I’m not sure if I was supposed to have that reaction or not. My mother says she saw the play years ago and it was definitely not a comedy but I don’t see how you can stage some of that action and not have people laughing. I mean, sure, these people are leading sad lives and I imagine Caldwell modelled them after real people leading real sad lives, but then he presented them in hysterically funny situations. So, sorry if I wasn’t supposed to laugh but I did.

The Day of the Locust is another 100 Best book, this one more haunting than some of the others. It tells the story of the seamy side of Hollywood in the 30s, following primarily a scene painter’s quest to lay a wanna-be actress but detouring around a variety of other characters. It starts slowly but the characters quickly grab your attention and it ends with a bang as the hero’s predictions of a mob uprising come true. It’s realism at its best – depressing but not pointlessly so.

Appointment in Samarra comes from the 100 Best list. As with a lot of the books on the 100 Best list, I saw value in it but not so much that I understood its placement there. As I’ve said before, I think a lot of the books on that list were ground-breaking at the time, making them important but not necessarily great in the modern context.

Appointment in Samarra starts with the story from which the title is pulled, which is good because I’d never heard it before. It means unavoidable fate, essentially. The story starts slowly as we’re introduced to some side characters. Odd, but some people seem to think the story is really about them. After that, we finally get to the main character who’s about to start on the journey towards his unvoidable fate, although a lot of what happens seems pretty avoidable if he’d only sober up.

Situations that slide inevitably from bad to worse have always been the stuff of nightmares for me. (Literally. I dream about fender benders that end up in riots and so on.) And this book did a pretty good job presenting that nightmarish atmosphere, where the characters feel like events are happening without their control.

What struck me as not so accurate in the book was that this series of events just happened to start and to slide at that moment. The hero drinks too much on a regular basis and has other issues that didn’t suddenly develop that evening. He starts everything out by doing something stupid because it occurs to him to do it and he continues doing stupider things as the book progresses. But why would he do something stupid that particular night if he’s got a lifetime of drinking while remaining socially acceptable behind him?

Still, if you accept that he did this thing on the spur of the moment, then the rest of it flows nicely along from there to a satisfying (not happy, but inevitable) conclusion.