I just finished my third reading of C. S. Lewis’s An Experiment in Criticism. I read it first in 1993, then in 2003, then today. It may seem strange to return so often to a book of literary criticism—but for me it is a way to keep me grounded, to remind myself why I read. For example:
Those of us who have been true readers all our life seldom realize the enormous extension of our being that we owe to authors. We realize it best when we talk with an unliterary friend. He may be full of goodness and good sense, but he inhabits a tiny word. In it, we should be suffocated. My own eyes are not enough for me, I will see through the eyes of others.
I have wanted to read something by Cormac McCarthy for a long time – since my friend Geoff recommended All the Pretty Horses to me not long after it was published. I’m not sure why I delayed. But recently my friend Lynne wrote on my Facbook wall to tell me to read it. She said something about it’s being “devastating.” So I took the trouble to order the book and read it.
“Devastating” is a good word. In thise story the world is devastated – there has been some sort of disaster and almost everything has been burned up. Everything is gray, covered with ash. And many of the few people left live like animals. The main characters are a father and his young son who was born on the day the earth was devastated. They wander through the blackened world trying to survive by scrounging for old cans of food, drinkable water, scraps of anything that can be used to help them survive. (more…)
On this day in 1713 Laurence Sterne was born in Ireland. Sometime after his birth (!) he wrote The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. The book was a favorite of Arthur Greeves, the lifelong friend of C. S. Lewis. Greeves encouraged Lewis to read it, but Lewis gave up after ten pages or so. But Arthur kept at him, until finally Lewis read it – to his delight. Lewis described the book quite fittingly as a madman chasing his hat on a windy day.
Tristram Shandy reminds me of Seinfeld : the narrative at times seems to run down disconnected paths, yet those paths later join in marvelous and unpredictable ways. But perhaps what I like most about the book is the juxtaposition of the elegant eighteenth-century English style with eighteenth-century English bawdy. I’ve read the story of Phutatorius and the hot chestnut to many guests, and it has never failed to amaze and tickle them.
As I was trying to endure Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist to the very end, I began having the odd sensation that the religion of his world came straight out of Star Wars. And then I ran across this scene that made me laugh outloud:
All things are one, the boy thought. And then, as if the desert wanted to demonstrate that the alchemist was right, two horsemen appeared from behind the travelers.
“You can’t go any farther,” one of them said. “You’re in the area where the tribes are at war.”
“I’m not going very far,” the alchemist answered, looking straight into the eyes of the horsemen. They were silent for a moment, and then agreed that the boy and the alchemist could move along.
Do you recognize it? The alchemist is Obi-Wan Kenobi. He’s talking to some suspicious storm troopers, and shooing them away with his “These aren’t the droids you’re looking for.” (more…)
I confess that I have for a long time had a weakness for (some) of Woody Allen’s work. Perhaps because of the strangeness of my own sense of humor, I have enjoyed his early fiction (Without Feathers, Getting Even, and Side Effects), so I was delighted to find (in a bookstore in Trnava, Slovakia, of all places) a copy of his latest book, Mere Anarchy. I didn’t begin reading at the beginning, because the title of a story late in the book caught my eye: “Thus Ate Zarathustra,” the story of the discovery of the long-lost diet book of Friedrich Nietzsche.
The powerful will always lunch on rich foods, while the weak peck away at wheat germ and tofu, convinced that their suffering will earn them a reward in an afterlife where grilled lambchops are all the rage.
If you don’t find that funny, or have no interest in reading excerpts from the Dostoevsky-esque novelization of a Three Stooges short, then you will not likely enjoy this book. But I confess I did.
Calmly and for no apparent reason the dark-haired man took the nose of the bald man in his right hand and slowly twisted it in a long, counterclockwise circle. A horrible grinding sound broke the silence of the Great Plains. “We suffer,” the dark-haired man said. “O woe to the random violence of human existence.”
After describing a pathetic old dog with a wounded leg that it drags across the floor, Graham Greene contrasts the mongrel with the main character of his story:
Unlike him [the whiskey priest], he retained a kind of hope. Hope is an instinct only the reasoning human mind can kill.
When I read those words they had that ring of truth that carries with it a twinge of pain….
Graham Greene
The Power and the Glory