As I Lay Dying: Redux

by William Faulkner

(New York: Vintage Books, 1964)

Paperback, 250 Pages, Fiction

ISBN: 9780394702544, US$1.95

ABCD Rating: BACKLIST

“My mother is a fish.” (79)

From the Cover: Faulkner’s harrowing account of a family’s struggle to get their mother properly buried is a tour de force of literary invention. With the coffin in the wagon they trek across the Mississippi countryside, where they encounter the catastrophes of flood and fire, as well as the chaos of their own feelings. Each of the family members attempts to restore some order in his life, and it is in Faulkner’s imagining of the thoughts and feelings of these inarticulate people that the novel gains its variety of moods—from black humor to deepest pathos. Written in six weeks while Faulkner was working in a power plant, As I Lay Dying is a testimony to the genius of one of the world’s greatest writers.

My Original Review: 10/29/2006 – 07:30:00 PM

My Reux Review: This is the second time around for reading As I Lay Dying in my college career. When I first read Faulkner’s landmark novel, I was struck by the complexity of his writing. This time around, I was struck by how absolutely hilarious this novel is. Not necessarily in a HA-HA laugh out loud way, but rather in a black, ironic humor fashion. The Bundren Family is one of the most inept I have ever come across in literature.

It is just horrific and compellingly tragic how bad they are at most of what they do: one breaks his leg, so the family pours cement on it to set the leg; the youngest doesn’t comprehend that his mother is dead and so he bores holes with an auger into her coffin, drilling into her face; the daughter is trying to get to town to have an abortion, for which her “boyfriend” gave her $10; Anse—the father—is a toothless hunchback; one of them tries to burn own the barn where they are storing their mother’s coffin for the night so that they don’t have to haul her to her hometown; there is a strange erotic undercurrent in the relationship between brother and sister Darl and Dewey Dell; the local doctor is so fat and old he can’t walk up the hill to the Bundren farm that he has to be hauled up with ropes; they wait nearly eight days before getting their poor dead mother and wife to her hometown to be buried, and then have to borrow a pair of shovels to do it … I could go on and on.

I know it doesn’t sound particularly funny when I lay it out like that, but trust me, the bleak, dark humor in As I Lay Dying is thick across the whole of the book.

However, that’s not all there is to As I Lay Dying. It is also strikingly similar to Don DeLillo’s novel Libra which explores the question of just how much is knowable about any one event. In DeLillo it is the Kennedy assassination, in As I Lay Dying it is the purpose behind hauling Addie Bundren’s body to be buried with her people in Jefferson. Each of the family members (including Addie) have their own reasons for going to Jefferson, but it is all dependent on what they reveal and—even more importantly—what they don’t reveal. There is belief that novels should help to make sense of things. What happens, then, when so much of life is unknowable or hard to understand? Does the novelist have a duty to try and make sense of the nonsensical? Faulkner certainly didn’t think so, as evidenced in As I Lay Dying.

This seems to be what Faulkner has done. Was his intention to present the most articulate version possible of people’s inarticulate psyche/psychological realities? If this were the case, did he come close? I would say so. As I Lay Dying is as articulately inarticulate as anything I have read, and he marvelously manages to create the sense that everyone of these narrators are suspect and not telling the Reader everything, or that they don’t even know everything, even though they pretend they might.

I can’t help but be in awe of As I Lay Dying and what Faulkner accomplishes. If you haven’t read it yet, I highly recommend that you find yourself a copy and sit down to one of the strangest, blackly funniest and complex novels out there.

East of Eden

by John Steinbeck

(New York: Penguin Books, 1986)

Paperback, 778 Pages, Fiction

ISBN: 9780140049978, US$7.95

ABCD Rating: ACQUIRE

A searing novel about the oldest and most terrible of conflicts: brother against brother.

From the Cover: Adam Trask came to California from the East to farm and raise his family on the new, rich land. But the birth of his twins, Cal and Aron, brings his wife to the brink of madness, and Adam is left to raise his boys to manhood. One boy thrives, nurtured by the love of all around him; the other grows up in loneliness, enveloped in a mysterious darkness. As Steinbeck interweaves the stories of the Trasks and their neighbors, the prosperous, open-hearted Hamiltons, he portrays men and women determined to conquer not only the land but the forces of love and hate, trust and suspicion within their hearts.

My Review: Someone once said Hemingway influenced the way people write, but that Steinbeck influenced what people write about. This is obviously true with The Grapes of Wrath, and … to a certain extent … with East of Eden. Despite all my prior misgivings about Steinbeck as an author, and about East of Eden as a novel, I found myself really getting into this novel and, by the end, really enjoying it.

From what I understand, Steinbeck set out to do with East of Eden was threefold: (1) tell his family history, (2) retell the Biblical story of Cain and Abel, and (3) to tell the story of the human family. To say the least, this is ambitious at the very best, and would probably be foolish in the hands of most authors. In my reading of East of Eden, I think that Steinbeck has accomplished these three goals. What is most interesting, though, is that Steinbeck takes all of the Reader’s expectations about how they think that the story of Cain and Abel plays out and stands it all on its head. He certainly sets the Reader up to expect certain actions from specific characters with his use of “C” and “A” names: Charles and Adam and Cal and Aron in particular, but there’s also the character of Cathy, whom we’ll get to in a minute.

The Cain and Abel aspects of this novel, including two lengthy discussions of the story by the characters (especially that between Adam, Lee and Samuel in Chapter 24), are very interesting in that Steinbeck seems to be working out the story and its implications for himself and dwells, in particular, on the Hebrew word Timshel which means “Thou Mayest” as in “thou mayest overcome sin,” meaning that God is leaving it up to mankind to overcome their sins, it is not a given and it is not a command, it is a choice, and choice seems to be what East of Eden is all about: making the choice to either overcome one’s sins, or not.

This is the choice that Charles must make, it is the one that Adam must make, that Cal must make, and that Aron must make. They each are able to, to a greater or lesser degree, some better than others, and in spite of their “A” or “C” names, neither Charles not Cal are strictly Cain just as neither Adam nor Aron are strictly Abel. Steinbeck has done a marvelous job of winding the two characters together and making them much more complex than the Bible makes them out to be. (Of course, the Bible doesn’t have the character development that Steinbeck does, so it’s possible that Cain and Abel are more complex than we know, but I guess it’s a mostly moot point.)

Well, this then brings us to Cathy. Cathy Cathy Cathy. My favorite cover for East of Eden deals with Cathy, and while it is not the one I own, it is one that I am dying to get my hot little hands on. (It can be found HERE, if you are curious. I love it because it takes one part of the story that is barely a page long and spins it way out and makes this a novel all about Cathy, rather than Adam and Aron and Cal. Plus, I just love pulp covers, there’s not a lot better than a pulp fiction cover from the 30s, 40s and 50s.) Anyway, back to what I was saying, in my review for the audiobook edition of Eclipse, I mentioned that the villain in that novel, Victoria, is one of the better bad guys out there, but honestly, she can’t hold a candle to Steinbeck’s Cathy. Cathy is truly an evil and an irredeemable character, I know in my class there were those who defended Cathy (to a certain degree, you can’t defend a character like Cathy 100%), but I see no defense to be made for Cathy and no redemption, even at the end.

The bottom line, though, is that I loved The Grapes of Wrath and hated The Pearl and I was afraid of making East of Eden a tie-breaker when it came to my feelings towards Steinbeck as an author. If there was any doubt in my mind before, it is gone after reading East of Eden, Steinbeck is an amazing author and this is a novel that I would recommend to just about everyone without any reservations whatsoever.

A Bit on the Side

by William Trevor

(New York: Penguin Books, 2004)

Trade Paperback, 245 Pages, Short Fiction Anthology

ISBN: 9780143035916, US$14.00

ABCD Rating: ACQUIRE

From the Cover: William Trevor is truly a Chekhov for our age, and a new collection of stories from him is always a cause for celebration. In these twelve stories, a waiter divulges a shocking life of crime to his ex-wife; a woman repeats the story of her parents’ unstable marriage after a horrible tragedy; a schoolgirl regrets gossiping about the cuckolded man who tutors her; and, in the volume’s title story, a middle-aged accountant offers his reasons for ending a love affair. At the heart of this stunning collection is Trevor’s characteristic tenderness and unflinching eye for both the humanizing and dehumanizing aspects of modern urban and rural life.

This collection includes the following stories: “Sitting with the Dead,” “Traditions,” “Justina’s Priest,” “An Evening Out,” “Graillis’s Legacy,” “Solitude,” “Sacred Statues,” “Rose Wept,” “Big Bucks,” “On the Streets,” “The Dancing-Master’s Music,” and “A Bit on the Side.”

My Reveiw: I have never read a Chekhov story (that I can remember). Russian literature and drama never really was my thing. However, Chekhov did say something that I have always liked, and that I think can be applied to Trevor. He, Chekhov, insisted that the role of an artist was to ask questions, not to answer them. Whether or not Trevor is “truly a Chekhov for our age” (as the back of the book insists) and whether or not he lives up to Chekhov’s literary tradition, he does fulfill Chekhov’s idea that it is better to ask questions than answer them. Trevor does this a lot in all of the stories in this anthology. There are a lot of questions here, and very little (if any) answers.

Since I don’t have Chekhov as a frame of reference, I can’t compare or contrast … but I have been reading a lot of Ernest Hemingway’s short stories lately, and even though he is a contemporary author, Trevor has a lot in common with Hemingway and his style. There are very clipped sentences, some very dry, ironic humor and not a lot of explanation. Also, like Hemingway (and possibly like Chekhov, I don’t know) Trevor takes the expected and traditional forms and turns them on their head.

Most striking is the lead-off story in the collection, “Sitting with the Dead.” It is a traditional Irish wake story and it is a bit of a ghost story, but the outcome is not what you think and neither is the ghost, when it is finally revealed. There are others that are equally as good: “Justina’s Priest” is a bit of a Christ story that has been stood on its head; “An Evening Out” is an odd little vignette in the lives of two lonely strangers who use each other; “On the Streets” is a creepy story that I wish I had written, and the title story, “A Bit on the Side,” is a n oddly moving drama about a man calling it off with his mistress.

There is a lot here, and all of it is very good. Trevor is an author whose work I’ll be keeping an eye out for in the future.

Eclipse (Audio)

by Stephenie Meyer

read by Ilyana Kadushin

-Twilight Series, Book 3-

(New York: Listening Library, 2007)

MP3 Audiobook, 850.1 MB, 16½ Hours, Young Adult Fiction

ISBN: 9780739356166, US$57.00

ABCD Rating: DITCH

From the Cover: Edward’s soft voice came from behind me. I turned to see him spring lightly up the porch steps, his hair windblown from running. He pulled me into his arms at once, just like he had in the parking lot, and kissed me again. This kiss frightened me. There was too much tension, too strong an edge to the way his lips crushed mine—like he was afraid we had only so much time left to us. As Seattle is ravaged by a string of mysterious killings and a malicious vampire continues her quest for revenge, Bella once again finds herself surrounded by danger. In the midst of it all, she is forced to choose between her love for Edward and her friendship with Jacob – knowing that her decision has the potential to ignite the ageless struggle between vampire and werewolf. With her graduation quickly approaching, Bella has one more decision to make: life or death. But which is which?

My Review: Oh, what can I say about the audio version of Stephenie Meyer’s Eclipse that I haven’t already said about Twilight and New Moon? That after an initial love affair with the novels, I have come to not like the audiobooks at all? Check. That Ilyana Kadushin couldn’t read her way out of a wet, bottomless paper bag? She can’t. That Edward and Bella are in an abusive, co-dependent relationship that is not at all healthy? They are.

When you get right down to it, in spite of what I may have said previously … these novels are not all that good to begin with, and they suffer miserably in their audio format … yet, so far, Eclipse is the best of the three novels (and audiobooks, for all of Kadushin’s ineptitude). What redeems Eclipse where, say, Twilight and New Moon fail is that Meyer expands the scope of her underlying mythology. It is fascinating to hear about the history of the werewolves, the origin stories of Rosalie and Jasper, more of who the Volturi are and what they do, and in all honesty, Victoria is one of the better villains out there today. Oh, she’s not on the scale of a Hannibal Lecter, Jack Torrance, Dracula or Alex from Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange, but, for young adult literature, she’s one of the better bad gals out there.

Unfortunately, though, deeper mythology and a good villain don’t necessarily make up for a delinquency in writing, and the novels in this series are just not that well-written. The story is handled ham-handedly and if I hear one more thing about Edward’s perfect smile or how perfect he was I felt I was going through my iPod out of my car window onto I-5. (Well, maybe I wouldn’t do that … I don’t think Alisa would let me buy a replacement.) Now, I understand that this is how a teenage romance works (I do work with middle schoolers after all) but I find the Romeo-Juliet, Tristan-Iseult thing to be rather annoying. Maybe that’s just me showing my age, and perhaps the problem with me and the entire series … it doesn’t stand up to anything more than a cursory reading, and definitely does not stand up to audiobookness. It is an unforgiving format, in my mind, because all the warts are on display.

Then there is the whole “I’m going to take apart your engine so your car doesn’t start so you can’t see your werewolf friends” that Edward does (and Alice); dominating her life, telling her who she can see … this is the Hero and Claudio, the Paris and Helen of the New Millennium? (Well, maybe Hero and Claudio isn’t the best example but they certainly are a better aspiration than Catherine and Heathcliff.) The whole relationship is very unhealthy to my mind, and I don’t know that this is something that had I a tweenage daughter, I would be comfortable with her reading. I never thought that those words would be coming out of my mouth, ever, but there you go. Parenthood changes you.

Anyway, I’ll get down off my soapbox and stop ranting and just say that while Eclipse is certainly the best of the first three novels, it is by no means a good book. It has its moments, but on the whole, give the book a wide berth … especially in its audio incarnation.

Are You One of the "Cool Kids"?

From PunditKitchen.com

Happy 105th Birthday, Dr. Seuss!

LEGO Model courtesy of Fascinating LEGO® Model of the Day

The 105th birthday of Dr. Seuss took me by surprise. It’s the kind of thing that, as a blogger of books, I should know about, but somehow I completely blanked on it. If I was prepared, I would have written the post in Seussian verse, or regaled you with an article I wrote for my high school paper, The Olympian, as a sophomore eulogizing the Good Doctor shortly after he passed away.

But, it is in a box somewhere in the garage and it’s late (relatively speaking) and I don’t feel like rooting through the garage. So, maybe next year. In the meantime, go get yourself a Dr. Seuss book and a child (preferably one of your own, or otherwise related to you) and curl up in bed and enjoy Green Eggs and Ham, or The Lorax, or If I Ran the Zoo, or Horton Hears a Who!, On Beyond Zebra, The Cat in the Hat, or my personal favorite, McElligot’s Pool.

Happy Birthday Dr. Seuss, thank you for all the memories. We miss you.