Category Archives: Books and literature

Book review: Hungry for the World: A Memoir

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Hungry for the World: A Memoir by Kim Barnes. New York: Anchor Books. 2001. 256 pages.

It takes a certain amount of ego to write a memoir, especially if your life hasn’t been influential or extraordinary. Kim Barnes may have been counting on her life appearing to be the latter when she wrote Hungry for the World, which focuses on her serial relationships with men — from the father of childhood to the lovers of youth to the husband of maturity, circling back to her father, now a grandfather. Throughout, she obsesses over the girl she was and the woman she must be. Her journey is set in Idaho and the Pacific Northwest, in a wilderness penetrated by wanton hunters, felled by loggers, and drowned and despoiled by industry, and in cities and towns filled with more drugs and vice than jobs.

Barnes is a woman in man’s world, even more so after her parents convert to the Pentecostal faith. As he turns further inward, her father seeks self-denial and self-punishment by moving his family from the forest they love into town, where, when he isn’t driving his truck route, he’s sitting around in front of the TV, smoking and apparently contemplating his relationship with God. The more Barnes struggles to understand her father, the more distant he seems. He’s less parent than mythical figure. He’s wise in the woods, taciturn, unrevealing, and unforgiving in town. Barnes is torn between her natural desire to live like a man — free, unencumbered, and in control — and her duty to follow in the path of women like her mother — subservient to God and man. But she is “hungry for the world,” although “world” here goes no farther than the localized experiences of school, work, lovers, alcohol, drugs, and the demands of David, the older man who craves her “trust” while demonstrating with every action his unworthiness of it.

Barnes seems to think her youth was exceptionally tawdry, but there’s nothing here that would surprise or shock anyone who came of age in the 1960s or 70s, not even her relationship with David, the controlling, damaged Vietnam veteran whose thrills depend on his ability to subdue and obliterate Barnes’s personality, preferences, and will — not unlike her father and his church with its patriarchal beliefs.

Many women may find the author’s story and its resolution inspiring, or, as a cover blurb gushes, “refreshing . . . a moving story of human regeneration.” For me, the telling of her story is so self-consciously literary that there’s nothing moving about it. For all the flowery musings and metaphors, Barnes conveys few emotions, only a stated sense of shame about the past and a sense of wonder, albeit detached, about the present.

Kim Barnes is a talented writer, and Hungry for the World abounds with passages whose wording transcends the ugliness of the not-so-extraordinary subject matter and limited, self-aware, and self-important perspective. The problem is that Hungry for the World is more a self-conscious literary exercise than a genuine, heartfelt attempt at memoir. All the pretty phrasings and all the reflective section endings don’t lend this memoir the emotional power and substance it might have had if Barnes had been able to let go of the one thing she, like the men in her life, seems hungry for — control.

8 July 2012
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Bookman’s Alley in Evanston, Illinois

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A couple of weeks ago J. saw an article about Bookman’s Alley, a used bookstore that’s been a fixture in downtown Evanston for more than 30 years. Neither of us had heard of it before, but it sounded charming. The owner, an elderly man, has been persuaded by his family to close the store due to his health issues, although so far he’s not shown signs of being in a hurry. I couldn’t go last week thanks to a bad foot, so we went Sunday, April 1, before he changed his mind and we missed out.

Bookman's Alley
Bookman’s Alley

First, the “Alley” part of the name is not a cute conceit — while Barnes & Noble overlooks a busy shopping district, Bookman’s Alley is nestled in the middle of a nearby Alley, with only an unpretentious wooden sign at the head of the alley to direct the lost and ignorant.

Bookman's Alley
Bookman’s Alley

The building itself is low profile — three quarters of a square with a courtyard for parking open on the alley side. Inside and out, it’s seen better days, but to me it represents a respite from the unrelenting suburban consistency and blandness of big box stores like Barnes & Noble. It has character. It’s unique.

Like most bookstores, Bookman’s Alley is organized by subject, with worn seating scattered throughout many of the cozy, compartmentalized sections. i even found a tiny room in the back partitioned from the rest and stocked with oversized books.

Displayed among the books and hanging from above was a variety of bric-a-brac, ranging from a stuffed toy frog and other creatures to this beautiful printing press. Just checking out the décor would take hours. Asthmatics: You can’t escape the unmistakeable scent of used books.

Bookman's Alley press
Press

Lately when visiting used bookstores I’ve been drawn to the poetry sections. I need more books like a hoarder needs newspapers. At Bookman’s Alley, I picked up The Collected Poems 1929–1936 of C. Day Lewis and Seventeenth Century Lyrics from the Original Texts chosen (no comma) edited and arranged by Norman Ault.  You won’t find these treasures at Barnes & Noble, or possibly anywhere else, at least not together. I wouldn’t have known they existed. The trick now is to find the time and opportunity to enjoy them.

Choosing vintage postcards at Bookman's Alley
Choosing vintage postcards at Bookman’s Alley

While I was waiting to check out, a young couple introduced themselves to the proprietor, who admitted he didn’t recall them. The man finally asked if he remembered their parents, whom he named. The old man lit up with recognition. Yes, of course he knew them. It sounded like this young couple had been united in matrimony at Bookman’s Alley a few years before — what a marvelous idea!

After leaving the books and the lovers, we ate at Blind Faith Café followed by a trip to Cold Stone Creamery for cake dough ice cream. Not a bad way to spend or end a Sunday or a weekend.

Book review: The Rapture of Canaan

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The Rapture of Canaan by Sheri Reynolds. Highly recommended.

In The Rapture of Canaan, Sheri Reynolds creates two memorable characters, each of whom in turn creates God in his/her own image.

The first is Grandpa Herman Langston. After surviving a war that his companions didn’t and then losing his infant son, Herman founds his own “brand” of Christianity, The Church of Fire and Brimstone and God’s Almighty Baptizing Wind. Herman’s church is based on sin, suffering, and punishment — punishing everyone around for his sin of survival. When his granddaughter falls asleep and forgets to say prayers, she is put to bed with cockle burrs and sandspurs. When a member of the congregation imbibes, he must spend a night in his own grave. When the same man fornicates with a girl outside the church (a “backslidden Holiness” named Corinthian), he is starved and imprisoned in a cellar for 40 days — mostly to hide the severity of the punishment Herman has inflicted upon him.

Herman reserves the worst punishment of all for his own wife, who as a child lied to try to hide her mother’s murder of her father. Periodically, Herman trots out Leila’s decades-old transgression as much to punish her as to educate the flock. Recognising that the past is the past, and wise enough to know that God has forgiven her, Leila loves the man, or what he once was, and his strength too much to protest. His needs outweigh hers.

For Herman, religion is control. He decides what is acceptable and what is not; for example, the women must never cut their hair. He decides who and what is punished, and how. He decides what happens to any fines collected. In Herman’s world, the sinner gives up all control to God — the God in Herman’s image.

Lest the reader think that Herman is free from temptation and sin, the other memorable character, granddaughter Ninah Huff, carefully notes all the monetary punishments that are imposed on the members of the community but that never seem to be returned for its common good.

If Herman’s God is a vengeful, controlling one, Ninah’s God is loving and understanding. Ninah and her cousin by marriage, James, are at a dangerous times in their lives, when adolescents discover how powerless punishment can be against the power of passion and love. Unfortunately, James is torn by Herman’s God and by the Jesus he claims speaks through Ninah when they make love.

Ninah, however, continues the questioning they had begun about what it means to love God and one another, and what it means to be a Christian in a world where good people like her Hindu friend from school are non-believers. Is it about seeing a miracle messiah in Ninah and James’ baby Canaan, born with the skin of his hands bonding them in seemingly endless prayer? Or is it about seeing God as love, the love that drives Ninah to brutally cut Canaan’s hands apart so that he can be free to be a sinful and real human being?

Through her affection for James, Ninah discovers the love of God in her own heart. Her God is, by definition, beyond control. James and Ninah can’t and don’t control their natural feelings and urges. Ninah begins to understand the perpetual school truant, Corinthian, whose lack of control is expressed in an exuberant, “Whee, Jesus!”

Eventually, Herman starts to lose control over the community. Some of the congregation, his own family, stop attending services. Ninah starts twisting Pammy’s hair into forbidden French braids. Ninah cuts off her own hair and is followed by several of the women, young and old. When a stroke incapacitates him physically and mentally, Herman’s grip on the community is finally lost, enabling Ninah to take the final step of setting Canaan’s hands free.

Blood is the recurring theme of The Rapture of Canaan — the blood Leila’s mother shed when she killed her husband and the symbolic blood red Leila colours her paper dolls; the blood of menstruation that Ninah hides from everyone, even Leila (Nanna); the blood of James’ first deer kill that baptizes both him and Ninah; the blood of the mare that hemorrhages to death while giving birth; the blood that Canaan must sacrifice as Ninah transforms him from messiah to ordinary baby, conceived and born in the sin of love.

As Nanna recounts stories and Ninah weaves stories into rugs made from “rags and lies, rope and hair, fabric and love,” Reynolds captures the poetry of prose. “I weave in lies, and I weave in love, and in the end, it’s hard to know if one keeps me warmer than the other,” Ninah begins. She sees The Church of Fire and Brimstone and God’s Almighty Baptizing Wind’s community “like an island. Like an island sinking from the weight of fearful hearts.” Ninah says of James, “He brushed my back off each time, and his hands felt like a remedy to all the badness I’d ever known.” She spends her pregnancy making baby clothes. When she sees Canaan’s joined hands in church, she thinks for a moment, “I might have sewn him together by accident when I was making all those baby clothes.”

Poetic, thought provoking, and compelling, The Rapture of Canaan should make you question your own beliefs and where they originated — in the fear of man or in the love of God.

16 April 2005
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: Portnoy’s Complaint

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Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth. Recommended.

Combination lengthy kvetch and documentation of a fictional psychiatric disorder, Portnoy’s Complaint addresses the narrator’s life as a first-generation American Jew and an oversexed male. As both, Alexander Portnoy is unable to reconcile his desire for the American dream with his desire for compliant shikses.

Portnoy is at war with his parents, his Jewish heritage, goy society, women, and, of course, himself. He claims to despise his parents’ flair for the dramatic, yet his entire monologue is an exercise in self-centered comic hyperbole. As an atheist, he has no use for the Jewish faith, but he aspires to the camaraderie and sense of community experienced by the neighborhood Jewish men who play baseball on Sundays. The goyish middle class around him fascinates him with what he perceives to be the perfection of life that goes on behind their curtains and repels him with their religion and its imagery.

Portnoy refers to his girlfriends by nicknames such as The Monkey and The Pilgrim, which focus on what they represent to him rather than on who they are. When they are problematic, as The Monkey often is, they become individuals with greater mental issues than his own. When they are nearly perfect — upper middle-class shikses with centuries-long pedigrees, like The Pilgrim — they fail to satisfy Portnoy’s cravings for all that is not the sexual equivalent of white bread. He finally encounters a Jewish woman — in Israel — but he is not up to the challenge on any level. Mostly, Portnoy claims to want one thing while actively seeking its opposite. He is not so different from anyone else.

Part of Portnoy’s bemusement lies in how the world actually works. While he, a model student and citizen, lives a secret life that would indeed cause the headlines he fears if it were made public, he learns that two of his former schoolmates, unfettered by the type of parental attention that he finds so suffocating and free to pursue the degenerate lifestyle he desires, end up, not behind bars, but behind the curtained windows of American middle-class success, enjoying all that comes with it — including marriage. Portnoy is disturbed to discover that there is no guaranteed cause and effect. Anyone can achieve the American dream if they wish. His failure is another opportunity to blame his parents.

According to Roth, Portnoy has “strongly-felt ethical and altruistic impulses,” but there is not much in Portnoy’s character that is either ethical or altruistic. While his father sells life insurance to New Jersey’s poor blacks and his mother furtively disinfects the dishes and silverware used by the black housekeeper, Portnoy is on his way to becoming the assistant commissioner of human opportunity for New York City. In this position, he shows little genuine compassion or empathy for the poor minorities who seek his support. He has no more interest in the people he represents, other than as symbols of his liberal socialism, than he has in Rosh Hashanah or the other defining aspects of Jewish heritage and experience. His only interest in his lover’s threats of suicide are in the potential headlines — the possibility that his real persona will be exposed.

In a symbolic way, Portnoy resembles a man from his childhood whom he despised for his pretentious piety — Rabbi Warshaw, he of the “Pall Mall breath.” With his position as protector of the minority underclass and his apparent social liberalism, Portnoy is pious, or at least self-righteous, on the outside, but perhaps inside he, like the rabbi and his foul breath, is not so sweet or idealistic as he appears.

Despite the 289 pages of uninterrupted monologue, the reader never really knows Portnoy. The pages and pages of hyperbole make him an unreliable narrator. Because it is a monologue, he chooses what he tells — and doesn’t tell — the mysteriously silent and patient psychiatrist. The reader cannot know how much of this fiction is “true” within its context and how much is Portnoy putting into practice the flair for drama that so exasperates him in his parents — his father, whose bowels never move, and his mother, who believes that she nearly died from once tasting a prohibited delicacy and who can never let anyone forget it. Portnoy’s Complaint reads like a long, drawn-out wet dream; a long, drawn-out comic monologue; or an odd combination of both. I can envision an abbreviated version of this novel as a one-man stage show.

While not for the prudish or the conventional (Portnoy seems to say out loud the types of things most people prefer to repress, even to themselves), Portnoy’s Complaint is a funny, evocative, tactless look at the American experience. You do not have to be Jewish to appreciate Portnoy or his trials, trivial as they are. I suspect most male readers will recognize Alexander Portnoy in themselves, together with his confused and confusing desires for middle-class respectability and his need to push the bounds of sexual expression — although I cannot imagine that very many would admit it.

30 March 2006
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: Neurotica: Jewish Writers on Sex

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Neurotica: Jewish Writers on Sex edited by Melvin Jules Bukiet. Recommended.

“Witness the people of the book, in bed.” Thus editor Melvin Jules Bukiet invites the reader into the intimacies of Neurotica: Jewish Writers on Sex. In this collection, everyone from Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, and Isaac Bashevis Singer to Woody Allen and Erica Jong gets into the act of exploring sex in its many varieties — heterosexual, homosexual, incestuous, paid, humorous, poignant, intellectual, sadistic, masochistic, costumed — always from a distinctive, wry Jewish perspective. Note, though, that you don’t have to be interested in erotica to appreciateNeurotica — just in good stories.

The anthology begins with a memorable story by Woody Allen, “The Whores of Mensa,” an over-the-top private eye tale that cleverly and humorously reveals what many of us know but some have yet to discover — that sex is less a function of the nether regions and more one of the mind. This theme is continued and expanded in “The Courtship” from The Mind-Body Problem” by Rebecca Goldstein, in which the narrator says, “And I remember too the intensity of my pleasure, which wasn’t at all physical . . . my head sang the triumphant thought: I am making love to this man . . . to Noam Himmel, the genius.” Unfortunately, “The Courtship” is marred somewhat by this ending and the tone throughout, which makes it resemble less of a literary work and more of the author’s personal fantasy, or what is known in fan fiction as a “Mary Sue” story.

Philip Roth adds imagination to the mix in an excerpt from The Counterlife in which a dentist suggest to his new assistant that they play dentist and assistant. She says, “Why is it so exciting when all we’re pretending to be is what we are?” When his physical deficiencies win over his imagination, he plummets to the world that is, not what could be, which he cannot long survive.

No matter the theme, any anthology focused on Jewish writers is bound to include references to Germans, World War II, and the Holocaust. In “Jews Have No Business Being Enamored of Germans,” Binnie Kirshenbaum’s narrator confronts the Jewish self-hatred that could make a Jewish man with a “short and convenient view of history” prefer and seek out Germans and “Aryan intellectualism.” Even the narrator’s parents have succumbed to postmodern sense of tolerance or denial. “‘Oh, none of that concerned us,’ my mother waved off the Holocaust and a world war.”

Michael Lowenthal takes a psychologically richer approach in “Infinity of Angles,” in which a Jewish homosexual connects with a German, only to find his would-be lover identifies too closely with the persecuted and demands an unusual punishment.

While there’s some humour in Neurotica, there is also mental illness. The two are combined in “Elvis, Axl, and Me” by Janice Eidus, who proves that Elvis isn’t dead; he lives in The Bronx disguised as a Hasidic Jew. Mental illness appears again in “The Quality of Being a Ruby” by Cheryl Pearl Sucher, a thoroughly modern tale of a bipolar girl experiencing anxiety neurosis who picks up lovers, drops lithium, experiments with cocaine, and resists the advice of her protective father. “For Ruby, the distillation of the illness was ‘Rubessence,’ the perfect calm of inspired originality, the longed-for union of the desired and the real.”

One of the best stories is “Taibele and Her Demon” by Isaac Bashevis Singer, who brings a fairy-tale simplicity to this complex tale of deception and love. As with any collection, there are several stories I didn’t like, such as “Romancing the Yohrzeit Light” by Thane Rosenbaum, who tries too self-consciously to combine the sacred, the profane, and the silly. My favourite story was by Nathan Englander, titled “Peep Show.” The troubled protagonist asks, “What is a boy raised in a world of absolutes to do when he is faced with contradictions?” The answer is, “You question. That’s what you do,” according to the nude rabbi his imagination has conjured. Despite the humorous and ludicrous situations in which the protagonist finds himself at the peep show, the tone of the story is strangely eerie in its reference to peep show nostalgia — a little like the tone of Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes.

Although a few stories are set in places such as France, Germany, Italy, and Israel, most take place in the United States and are by Jewish-American authors. All are from the 20th century, which is disappointing since surely erotica by Jewish writers has been around at least as long as erotica by writers from other traditions. I would like to have seen more representation from other countries and time periods.

The location and time period, however, give Neurotica a couple of themes meant to appeal to a broad audience, including assimilation and secularization. In many of these stories, the faith, traditions, and rituals of Judaism are a mystery to the characters, primarily the younger ones. Noam Himmel, the genius, is an atheist ignorant of his cultural past. At one point, his seducer says, “You have heard of the Talmud?” He says later, “Sometimes, especially on insomniac nights, I start worrying that there may be a God, and worse, that he may be Jewish.” In “Romancing the Yohrzeit Light,” Adam doesn’t “really care to go” to that part of the world, and he allows his Swedish lover to extinguish his mother’s yohrzeit light. Like Adam, many of the characters actively seek goyim as lovers. Some of the older people speak Yiddish, but the young people do not. Yet, while religious, cultural, and even social bonds may seem to be disintegrating with assimilation after World War II,Neurotica shows that there is still a literary voice that has not been silenced and that remains uniquely Jewish.

5 September 2005
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: The Reinvention of Work: A New Vision of Livelihood for Our Time

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The Reinvention of Work: A New Vision of Livelihood for Our Time by Matthew Fox. Highly recommended.

In The Reinvention of Work, Matthew Fox brings together the work of Eastern and Western mystics, ancient, medieval, and modern, to propose a new paradigm for how we work and what we do. Citing Meister Eckhart, Thomas Aquinas, Hildegard von Bingen, the Bhagavad Gita, Tao Te Ching, Studs Terkel, Patch Adams, and progressive economists, Fox explores the concept of work and how it can be healthier physically, emotionally, and intellectually, but primarily socially, environmentally, and spiritually.

Fox believes that the Enlightenment and the industrial age have left us with a machine-centered, anthropocentric world that focuses on outer work and rewards at the cost of inner work and spirituality, and destroys rather than creates. Real wealth results from preserving the health of the planet, not in the artificiality of money or possessions. The result has been a world often at war, where the gaps between affluent and poor continue to spread, where the environmental health of non-industrialised nations is sacrificed for the comforts of the industrialised, and where the work that is available and that most people have serves machines and leaves the worker stressed, addicted to work, ill, angry and even violent, and unfulfilled intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually.

Fox cites mystics like Eckhart and Aquinas to show that they understood what is important and that they prophetically understood the traps that man is prone to fall into. He also recounts the stories of people who reinvent themselves through work, who are willing to sacrifice position and possessions to find an avocation that matters, like the man who gives up a high-paying position to become a fireman and who is ecstatic about the meaning it brings to his life.

Fox carefully sets up all that is wrong with our modern concept of work and, indeed, life, since so much of who we are, how we feel, and how we live is tied up in what we do for a living, or what we mistakenly call “work.” His proposed solutions are centered around creation spirituality, which is a “creation-centered mysticism that is also prophetic and socially transformative.” While creation spirituality is not very clearly defined here — Fox has written several other books about it and refers to them — it appears to center around the idea that creation comes from within and that we create our world, which is part of a greater, interdependent cosmos that continues to undergo creation. For Fox, “enlightenment” might mean recognising and embracing creation spirituality and our responsibility and role in the ongoing creation of the cosmos — a recognition that begins with inner work and extends outer work, and that redefines wealth and poverty. Fox is quick to point out that this is neither communism nor socialism, both of which suffer from the same destructive values as capitalism.

There are many elements involved in creation spirituality, which embraces many aspects of life that have been neglected, distorted, or abused, from education, health care, art, psychology, and sexuality to something he believes is critical yet missing or misused — ritual. In creation spirituality and the reinvention of work, properly conceived and performed ritual is meaningful, bringing people together, bringing out emotions, and acknowledging what has been done in the name of war, destruction, and hate. Ritual can also be playful and energising, for example, circle dances. Whatever the focus, ritual brings us together to share our common joys and sorrows. Ritual heals.

Mysticism appeals to me, and Fox’s assessments of what’s wrong and what could be done to change our course make sense and are supported by the quotes he provides from a broad array of sources, including psychologists, economists, writers, and artists. The consequences of not changing are clear, but it is equally clear that those consequences have not penetrated to either the masses or their leaders. (Even the rising price of gasoline in 2005 has not inspired any more than cautious apprehension.) We are like smokers who are able to quit our habit only when terminal lung cancer has been diagnosed.

To get billions of conditioned consumers (and their consumers-in-training children) to give up their increasingly complex lifestyles, comforts, and amusements in the interest of a healthier, more just world for all and for better personal mental and physical health requires a utopian change that most people will not embrace. As with the Woolgers in their book, The Goddess Within, Fox tries to find a movement in the mid-1990s that has not materialised yet. Generally, people do not choose to change; they are forced to. Perhaps someday, when the gaps have widened too far, and society and our home can no longer support our appetites (and the corresponding waste), we may be ready to listen to Fox and his adherents, at which point they will need to provide practical answers. Who will “make ritual”? Who will produce the necessities and how? Who will distribute them? How will they be paid, or what will replace a monetary/barter economy? What if there is imbalance between what people want to do and what needs to be done? In practical, everyday terms, what does the reinvention of work look like? And do I want to live long enough to experience the disasters that are likely to be required to bring it about?

Eckhart, Aquinas, von Bingen, the Bhagavad Gita, Tao Te Ching — all wise beyond their times. And beyond ours as well.

21 August 2005
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: Memoir from Antproof Case: A Novel

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Memoir from Antproof Case: A Novel by Mark Helprin. Recommended.

Like Winter’s Tale and A Soldier of the Great War, Memoir from Antproof Case is difficult to classify (although Helprin helpfully gives it the subtitle A Novel). It has elements of magical surrealism, but falls short on magic.

In this sprawling fictional memoir, Oscar Progresso (not his real name, as though he were a real person) slowly and circumspectly reveals the cause of his pathological aversion to coffee, but first distracts the reader with red herrings like coffee’s allegedly toxic chemistry, the over-the-top portrayal of addiction to it, and its amphetamine-like effect on its purported victims.

The real cause is tragic but, given the tone of the novel, it’s hard to feel deeply for Oscar, the son of poor parents, graduate of Harvard University (and a Swiss mental institution), globe-trotting partner in an investment banking firm, WWII flying ace, and husband of a billionaire. The details of few of his stories are probable — how he killed two men, his life in the mental institution or even as a pilot during the war, the redundancy of the opulence of his life with Constance (how many kitchens is even a mansion likely to have?) or how she came to leave him. Then there is the drawn-out fall from power as an investment banker, from deciding the future of entire nations to being relegated to a carved wooden school desk in an unlit janitor’s closet and then to pointlessly shifting gold in the vaults with a class of unquestioning troglodyte humans; the culmination of this work is the most improbably event of all.

If there is any doubt about Oscar’s sanity, his reaction to being unable to find a larger antproof case should resolve it.

There are only two areas in which Oscar seems somewhat trustworthy. The first is the underlying story of his aversion to coffee, the story that is slowly and painstakingly revealed, and the other is his love for his wife’s son by another man, the boy he once was for only a short time.

I found myself wanting less of the whimsy and surrealism, imaginative and fascinating as it is, and more of the heart and soul that must inspire some of Oscar’s interjected and concluding thoughts, for example:

“Though the world is constructed to serve glory, success, and strength, one loves one’s parents and one’s children despite their failings and weaknesses — sometimes even more on account of them. In this school, you learn the measure not of power, but of love; not of victory, but of grace; not of triumph, but of forgiveness . . . With it [love, devotion, life as an device for the exercise of faith], your heart, though broken, will be full, and you will stay in the fight unto the very last.”

As with Winter’s Tale and A Soldier of the Great War, the voice is poetic and unique and the characters etched, while the events purposely stretch the credulity of the reader (if not the narrator).Memoir from Antproof Case tries to appeal to both the imagination and the heart, but, like its predecessors, sacrifices the latter for the former. This is unfortunate, because it has the potential to be the most human of the three. Instead of feeling for Oscar Progresso and his losses and lessons, I am left thinking he is a madman and an unreliable narrator who cannot escape the obsession and fantasy he has created and now clings to; my empathy remains uncertain and unclaimed. I cannot even be sure that the one story Oscar tells that rings true really is — the one of his childhood tragedy.

Helprin is close to being a great novelist but there is something cold and intellectual in his approach and style that prevents him from breaking through as, for example, Toni Morrison has. Although he has experienced life, it is rarely clear that he has felt it. Like Oscar and some of his previous characters, Helprin seems more observer than participant, which ultimately detracts from the magic and surrealism. Part of what make something magical is a belief that it could be possible in some way or some world; much of Oscar’s narrative is possible only in a madman’s mind.

Memoir from Antproof Case is worth the read, especially for Helprin fans, but it is more fancy appetizer than satisfying main course.

Aside: My copy of Memoir from Antproof Case is stained with coffee.

7 August 2005
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: A Treasury of Royal Scandals: The Shocking True Stories of History’s Wickedest, Weirdest, Most Wanton Kings, Queens, Tsars, Popes, and Emperors

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A Treasury of Royal Scandals: The Shocking True Stories of History’s Wickedest, Weirdest, Most Wanton Kings, Queens, Tsars, Popes, and Emperors by Michael Farquhar. Recommended.

If you eagerly await each issue of The National Enquirer but wish it were less about Jennifer Lopez and more about Henry VIII, this is the book for you. In it, Michael Farquhar has collected charming tales of Europe’s royal elite at their finest — fornicating, battling, murdering, backstabbing, beheading, inbreeding, mincing, politicking, and going stark raving mad. You’ll read about the touching love of Philip the Fair for Joanna the Mad (who’s called that for a reason, as you’ll see), the familial love of Napoleon for his brothers, and the not-so-familial love of Caligula for his sister.

Farquhar’s gift is not so much for digging up tales of shame, but for the irreverent sarcasm with which he dishes them out. Of King Frederick William of Prussia: “The reply [to his son] was written in the glowing warmth of the third person.” “Peter the Great was what might be best described as a super-tsar.” [Groan.] “If Louis XIV was France’s Sun King, then his brother, Philippe, duc d’Orléans, was its Drag Queen.”

Sarcasm and bad puns aside, let’s get back to the comparison to The National Enquirer. Unless you are truly the type who subscribes to Playboy/Playgirl for the articles, chances are that you readThe National Enquirer for the titillating hints of the scandals, improprieties, infidelities, gifts to the Democratic Party, and other acts calculated to provoke moral outrage that today’s royal icons, celebrities, have virtually trademarked.

If you have any common sense (and how would you? Look at what you’re reading!), of course you realise that little of The National Enquirer is burdened by the weight of the truth, but it is seasoned just right to tempt your sense of gullibility. (For example, a cover lamenting Cher’s “heartbreaking disease” — surely cancer, or at least diabetes? — led to a story about her deadly adult acne problem.)

Farquhar takes much the same approach to his subject. Royal Scandals is replete with “reported that” qualifiers as well as apocryphal stories. Perhaps the most obvious is the one about the assassination of England’s Edward II, or rather the description of the gruesome way in which it was allegedly committed. You’d be hard pressed to find a historian who doesn’t scoff at the anecdote, but you are guaranteed to flinch at it. Farquhar will have you hooked.

While Royal Scandals does not quite qualify as history — don’t cite it in your next paper, kids — it may pique your interest in such characters as Bloody Mary, Mary Queen of Scots, the Virgin Queen Elizabeth, and the hapless Jane Grey (whose mother was, “by some accounts . . . romping with a servant fifteen years her junior” at the time of Jane’s beheading).

When you’ve finished reading Royal Scandals, you’ll realise Hollywood has nothing on history — or the embellishments thereof.

The appendices, showing British, French, and Russian monarchs, and a timeline of events in the western world are useful. An index would have been helpful as well.

2 May 2005
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: Master and Commander

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Master and Commander by Patrick O’Brian. Not recommended.

Master and Commander is the first in a series of Jack Aubrey/Stephen Maturin novels, this one set in the early 1800s. After meeting Dr. Maturin at a concert by annoying him, Aubrey learns he has been promoted to master and commander (with honorary title of captain) of His Majesty’s sloop Sophie. How Aubrey earned this promotion is unclear, as his womanising ways seems to have irritated his commandant and everyone else, although women seem to have played a role in obtaining it.

There are several problems with Master and Commander. The first is O’Brian’s fixation on his knowledge of sailing and sailing terminology. At one point, he spends pages having a crew member explaining the rigging in painstaking — and painful — detail to Dr. Maturin. There is little purpose to this, as most laymen will find it difficult and tedious to follow, and a knowledgeable person will want to skip it altogether. It adds nothing but volume to the book and proof that O’Brian did his research.

O’Brian provides no historical context for the story. England is at war with France and Spain, but even Bonaparte is rarely mentioned. The characters reference naval actions like the battle of the Nile, but these incidents have meaning only to the characters since the reader is never privy to the context or greater strategy.

While Aubrey, Dr. Maturin, James Dillon, and the master are interesting characters, most of the rest of the crew is intentionally faceless. The men in key positions, like the bosun, are rarely referred to by name. Even Marshall is known primarily as “the master,” making the attempt to give him a personality by alluding to him as an apprehensive pederast futile.

There is neither much story nor much action here. It takes the first quarter of the novel for Sophie to leave port for the first time under Aubrey’s command. The novel’s big battle, during which Sophiemiraculously defeats a bigger, better-manned ship, is so hurried and poorly recounted that there is no tension or suspense about how the encounter will play out or end. The victory evokes no sense of exhilaration in the reader, so the ensuing letdown (no promotions, no cruise) loses its emotional impact.

Even the most intriguing aspect of the novel, the relationships between Aubrey and Dillon, Dillon and Dr. Maturin, and Aubrey and Dr. Maturin, are poorly drawn, partially because the point of view is inconsistent. As a clinician and researcher, Dr. Maturin is the relatively objective observer and link between Aubrey and Dillon. He knows Dillon’s secrets (as well as his own) and the thoughtless bias behind Aubrey’s anti-Papist rants, but is reduced to expressing his thoughts and feelings of affection, frustration and disgust mainly to his journal, as though he were documenting an illness.

Master and Commander has tremendous potential, but O’Brian doesn’t have the literary skills or ability to craft a great read. His prose is ordinary at best, and history, drama, suspense, plot, and even characterisation are given short shrift. For more compelling naval adventures set during the same period, read the Horatio Hornblower series, which is much better conceived and written and which is far more evocative.

Note: The colours of the movie tie-in edition cover are pastel blue and yellow — a very odd choice, given the subject matter and target audience.

20 March 2005
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf

Book review: The Goddess Within: A Guide to the Eternal Myths that Shape Women’s Lives

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The Goddess Within: A Guide to the Eternal Myths that Shape Women’s Lives by Jennifer Barker Woolger and Roger J. Woolger. Not recommended.

The Goddess Within is an attempt to explore and explain contemporary psychological issues and social trends through the ancient Greek goddesses Athena, Artemis, Aphrodite, Hera, Persephone, and Demeter. The premise is based on the idea that the whole goddess of more matriarchal times has been divided and wounded, that patriarchal society suffers due to the resulting imbalance, and that we need to restore the balance and the multiple roles and energies of the goddess (and women).

One problem with The Goddess Within is reflected in the subtitle. There are no goddesses that shape women’s lives; rather, humans shaped the goddesses — including their splintering. At times, the authors seem to forget that distinction, especially when they make such statements as: “. . . the two goddesses who are, so to speak, expressing their larger grievance through the two women.” Perhaps it is simply the two women expressing their own grievances, which they have in common with other women.

The most basic problem, however, is the division of everything into the masculine and feminine. Is the earth really female? The moon? Why is the sun male? The authors talk at length about the moon, but never acknowledge that, without the “male” sun, there would be no nurturing of life on earth. Why is intellect a male attribute? Emotion female? Are these the kind of labels that reveal human psychology or repress a deeper exploration? Since each goddess is held to represent certain traits, are they necessary at all? Can six goddesses represent the “feminine” in its entirety? Essentially, psychology can be made to fit into any system desired.

What is more troubling, however, is the authors’ claim that “balance” is missing in our patriarchal world and their insistence that a matriarchy should replace it. The amount of gratuitous male bashing leaves no doubt about how they truly feel about “balance.” For example: “Growing Athena soon learns to curb her frustration at male stupidity and ineptitude, however” and “All men have in them heroes, lovers, fathers, leaders, listeners, protectors of one kind or another and it is never too asking too much to make the long overdue sacrifice of the whining little boy that prevents their emergence.” The message throughout is that everything wrong with the world, from war to pollution, is due to masculine thinking.

The authors also bring a great deal of personal bias to their discussion. They believe that Demeter (motherhood) is undervalued and suggest that mothers be allowed to return to their jobs after being granted five-year leaves — a greater privilege than National Guardsmen have. They don’t point out that someone must fill Demeter’s shoes involuntarily — perhaps even a type who doesn’t want to work extra hours and who would like to experience life, too. (I’ve done my share of working late so mothers can get to day care and events on time — my own admitted bias.) They say that families with children are relegated to fast-food restaurants and blue-collar diners, another phenomenon that doesn’t fit in with my observations.

That leads to another problem — The Goddess Within seems dated. Writing in 1989, the authors discuss “movements” that the average American today has not heard of — suggesting they are not so much movements as the typical handful of people from each generation who deviate from societal norms. There has been no growing return to rural living; if anything, suburbs continue to expand. There is no growing sensitivity toward the “earth goddess” among the masses. What the authors label “patriarchal values” — war, conquest, corporate power, degradation of the earth — are even stronger today. If the question is one of balance of matriarchal and patriarchal values, as the Woolgers define them, the world is as or more out of balance than ever.

The Woolgers, however, do not seem to propose balance, but a return to the matriarchy, where patriarchal Christianity as practiced and rational science (which they tuck in together as odd bedfellows) are subject to the goddess — ignoring the benefits that Christianity and science have given western society and focusing only on the harm they have done. For example, science has brought us nuclear weapons, but it has also contributed cures, treatments, and surgeries for ailments that would have killed millions of us early in life.

Rarely do the Woolgers mention the gods — and then it is primarily as consorts to the goddesses (or, in Zeus’s case, as the ultimate patriarch). If balance of these values should be the goal of the individual and society, why not The Gods and Goddesses Within: A Guide to the Eternal Myths That Shape Men’s and Women’s Lives? In their slavish devotion to the feminine (and feminist), the Woolgers devalue the masculine. To them, “no matter how much a doting father adores and is adored by his daughter, he is still far from a mother’s love of her little girl. He did not bear her in his body; he cannot experience that great mystery.” Is this really true? Does every woman who bears children experience it as a “great mystery”? And what of the great mysteries that men can and do experience? It is this lack of balance and wholeness that undermines the Woolgers’ claims.

Some women (and men) may find the goddess portraits very useful in assessing themselves and the women in their lives (for example, the Hera mother is easily identifiable) as well as their relationships. The goddess portraits and sidebars are also somewhat useful in the study of Greek and Roman mythology. Beyond that, however, The Goddess Within is little more than trendy, empty, male-bashing feminism of the worst kind.

My goddess scores:

Athena (goddess of wisdom)
17
Artemis (goddess of the wilds)
29
Persephone (goddess of the underworld)
23
Aphrodite (goddess of love)
22
Hera (queen of heaven)
9
Demeter (goddess of life)
1

5 February 2005
Copyright © Diane L. Schirf