Strange News from Another Star by Hermann Hesse

Modern-day fables for grown-ups

Hermann Hesse (1877–1962), winner of the 1946 Nobel Prize in Literature, was born in the Black Forest of Germany. He eventually emigrated to Switzerland and became a Swiss citizen. Hesse is best known for novels like Siddhartha, Steppenwolf, and The Glass Bead Game, but he also published two volumes of short stories. His collection entitled Strange News from Another Star was published in 1919. The eight stories contained within were written from 1913 to 1918. Despite the book’s title, there’s no science fiction here. These tales do, however, exhibit a touch of fantasy like one would find in fairy tales or an episode of The Twilight Zone.

The stories here read like Aesop’s Fables if they were written for adults of the modern world. Hesse’s writing could be characterized as neo-romantic, meaning it is heavily influenced by, but slightly more realistic than, the old-school German Romantics like Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and company. In these stories, Hesse never aims for a realistic portrait of what life was like in a specific region of Germany. Instead, he strives to express universal truths about human nature. Hesse’s fiction tends to take place in vaguely unspecified quasi-medieval settings that could be anywhere in Europe. Often his characters don’t even have names, they’re simply “the young man,” “the girl,” or “the old man.” Hesse frequently presents a utopian vision of a simpler life, one where intellectual pursuits and an appreciation of nature take precedence over the more realistically pressing concerns of earning a living. Within these idyllic surroundings, however, the characters act out dramas in which peace and contentment are disturbed by the darker forces of human nature and modern life, thus forcing the protagonist to embark on some sort of soul-searching quest.

In the title story, “Strange News from Another Star,” a citizen of one of such Hessian utopia makes a journey to our real world of post–World War I devastation, contrasting the paradise of peace that might have been with the death and destruction of modern Europe. Although the word “star” is used, there is no space travel involved. “Star” could easily be rephrased as “another country” or “another [metaphorical] world.” Hesse was a writer who was always searching and experimenting, and as a result, his experiments don’t always pay off. In “Hard Passage” and “A Dream Sequence,” for example, the stories start out well enough but then veer off into too much surrealism that obscures the moral of the story. “A Dream Sequence” is just that, a dream scene that feels as if it were lifted out of some novel and presented out of context.

The strongest entries in the collection appear at the end of the volume. In “Fuldam,” residents of the titular town gather for their annual fair, where a mysterious stranger appears who has the power to grant everyone one wish. In “Iris,” a young boy spends his time daydreaming, studying flowers, and observing the natural cycles of the seasons. When he grows into a man, he loses his childish spirit and grows dissatisfied with life. These two stories, and most others in this volume, successfully combine elements of romanticism, fantasy, and realism. If this book had been published a half century later in Latin America, the style might have been dubbed “magic realism.”

Hesse’s other collection of short stories, entitled Stories of Five Decades, was published after his death in 1972. It is a career retrospective of sorts, containing 23 stories from over the course of his long career. That volume is every bit as good as Strange News from Another Star. Though Hesse is best known for his novels, he was a quite masterful practitioner of the short story, as evidenced in both of his fine short fiction collections.

Stories in this collection

Augustus

The Poet

Flute Dream

Strange News from Another Star

Hard Passage

A Dream Sequence

Fuldam

Iris

Lessons in Pictorial Composition by Louis Wolchonok

Forgotten gem of a how-to art book

If you habitually haunt used bookstores, then you are no doubt familiar with the publications of Dover Books. This is doubly true if you are to any degree an artist. Dover publishes cheap, no-frills reprints of a wide variety of old books, from the greatest classics in world literature to wordless books full of clip art. The Dover catalog includes many obscure and forgotten old books, one of which is Louis Wolchonok’s 1961 book Lessons in Pictorial Composition. As an art school graduate and occasional would-be artist, I find most how-to books on art to be pretty useless. Not so with this book from Wolchonok, however. Although it’s an odd duck in the genre, this book actually has some really useful content for painters and draughtsmen.

Wolchonok (1898–1973) was a professional artist in New York City and taught at City College of New York. There is hardly any information on him to be found online except auction records of his works. He doesn’t even have a Wikipedia entry. Both the Metropolitan Museum in New York and the National Gallery of Art have works by Wolchonok in their collections. To my knowledge, he published three books on art, the others being Design for Artists and Craftsmen and The Art of Three Dimensional Design.

Over 700 sketches by Wolchonok illustrate his Lessons in Pictorial Composition. Almost all of these are entirely black and white, using only line-art hatching effects for shading. Only a few of the illustrations use halftone grays. Although Wolchonok does discuss color towards the end, the book contains no color illustrations. The 700 sketches in this book exhibit a wide variety of styles, from non-objective abstractions similar to something Wassily Kandinsky, Robert Delaunay, or Werner Drewes might produce, to realistic landscapes and figures reminiscent of Ben Shahn, early Stuart Davis, or Reginald Marsh. Are they all beautiful? No, but they are all very well thought-out. Each one of these little drawings, most smaller than a credit card, could serve as the basis for a completed painting. I’ve seen some of Wolchonok’s paintings online, and I don’t like them much. These sketches, however, though dated to an earlier modernist period, are quite impressive. It would be difficult for any artist to fill a sketchbook with such a high quantity and wide variety of potentially productive thumbnails. Any artist who can learn from Wolchonok’s workmanlike example would no doubt experience a notable increase in inspiration and productivity.

When I went to art school decades ago, we were required to take many drawing and painting classes, of course. We were also required to take “design” classes, in which we worked through visual exercises to learn about concepts like line, shape, color, form, tension, balance, etc. Lessons in Pictorial Composition would be a fine textbook for such a course. Wolchonok’s Lessons only applies to good ol’ fashioned two-dimensional art—drawings, paintings, prints—not to today’s artworld landscape of found-object sculpture, conceptual art, and other high-falutin gallery fare. Theoretically, however, Wolchonok’s lessons could apply to digital art, which is also 2D.

A lot of how-to art books try to idiot-proof the creative process by telling you where to put your brush and what color to choose. The best books in the genre, and there are few, actually help you to think like an artist. Wolchonok’s writing in this book will not excite you, but he does competently get his points across. The images do most of the talking. Much like Edgar Payne’s Composition of Outdoor Painting, Lessons in Pictorial Composition largely succeeds as a visual reference of examples that artists can learn from, emulate, and build upon.

Memories of My Melancholy Whores by Gabriel García Márquez

Dirty old man finds inappropriate love

Memories of My Melancholy Whores is a novella by Colombian author and Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez (1927–2014). It was published in Spanish in 2004, and an English translation was released the following year. This is a very short work that really belongs in a collection of short stories rather than a stand-alone book. This novella is not set in the fictional village of Macondo where many of García Márquez’s other works take place, like his famous novel One Hundred Years of Solitude and his other three novellas. Instead, Memories of My Melancholy Whores takes place in an urban setting. The city is unspecified, but based on the names of streets, parks, newspapers, etc., it’s a safe bet to say the story is set in Colombia. 

The novella is narrated by an elderly man who I believe is unnamed. Some refer to him as “the scholar.” He appears to be a writer and perhaps a former academic of some sort. He writes a weekly column for his city’s newspaper. This man has never married. He states that in his entire life he has never been in love and has only slept with prostitutes—around 500 different prostitutes by his count. On his 90th birthday, this man decides that he wants to celebrate the landmark event by deflowering a young virgin, so he calls up his favorite madam, who agrees to procure the virgin for him. When he shows up at the whorehouse, he is led into a room where he finds a naked 14-year-old girl lying asleep. Rather than claim the service he paid for, the old man decides to simply watch the girl sleep. The way this is presented, García Márquez seems to want us to find this charming, but the old man also fondles the girl while she sleeps, which is not charming. Even though the two do not speak, the man falls in love with the girl, or so the author would have us believe. The scholar returns to the bordello for repeat rendezvous with this girl, who remains a sleeping beauty during their encounters.

Obviously, there’s some problematic subject matter here. Even García Márquez, one of the most highly acclaimed authors of the last 75 years, did not get a free pass on this creepy sex fantasy. The work was met with some critical and public backlash upon its publication. This is not really an erotic tale, and the sexuality is more implied than graphic. García Márquez uses the whore scenario to comment on old age, lost youth, masculinity, and mortality. The story is told with an attempt at humor that includes dirty-grandpa jokes about the old man’s sexual prowess. Prostitution, even child prostitution, is romanticized in this book as if it were some kind of cultural touchstone. Love between old men and young women has been a common theme in literature since ancient times. The way García Márquez tells this story has a feeling of mythology or fable about it, like when Zeus used to come down from Olympus and deflower virgins. It’s not quite the clueless pedophilia one finds in a lot of Victorian novels, but it’s pedophilia nonetheless, and García Márquez should have known better. An esteemed author might have gotten away with this in 2004, but two decades later it’s unlikely a man could publish a story like this without it inspiring some well-deserved outrage.

Regardless of its controversial subject matter, Memories of My Melancholy Whores just isn’t that great of a read. It’s not only offensive but also feels inconsequential. It just left me wondering what’s the point?

Hombre by Elmore Leonard

A riveting classic Western

Elmore Leonard is famous for his crime novels, many of which have been adapted into popular films in recent decades, but back in the 1960s and early ‘70s Leonard was known for his Westerns. Leonard’s fifth novel Hombre, published in 1961, is likely his best-known Western, due largely to the 1967 film adaptation starring Paul Newman, one of the best American-made Western movies of the 1960s—a decade that was full of great Westerns. The film Hombre changes some of the characters’ names and relationships, but the overall story is very faithful to the novel. Just as the movie is one of the all-time classics in the genre of Western film, Leonard’s novel is an outstanding work that holds a similar position in the Western genre of literature. Hombre the novel is riveting from start to finish.

For various reasons too complicated to explain here, a half dozen folks are riding in a stagecoach headed South towards Bisbee, Arizona. Among them is John Russell, whom some call by the nickname of Hombre. Russell is three-quarters White, one-quarter Mexican. As a child, he was abducted by Apaches and lived with them for several years, becoming accustomed to their way of life. As a young man, he reentered White society, but many of the townspeople still consider him an “Indian,” which, among most Whites in those days, was not a compliment.

When the passengers in the stagecoach find out about Russell’s Apache background, they decide they don’t want him riding in their presence anymore, so he is asked to sit outside with the driver. When the stagecoach encounters trouble, however (as stagecoaches often do in Western stories), and lives are in danger, to whom do they turn to save their bacon and guide them to safety? Russell, of course; he being the most capable man in the party. Russell hasn’t forgotten, however, the insult and ill treatment from his fellow passengers, and it’s unclear how much he’s willing to help them. As for the trouble encountered by the stagecoach, that’s better left unspoiled. The danger is multiplied, however, by the fact that this party is in the middle of the Arizona desert, and water is scarce.

Hombre is a revisionist Western, in that it takes a nontraditional approach to heroism and a more honest look at the status of Native Americans and Mexicans in American society than you’re likely to find in an old John Wayne movie of the 1940s or ‘50s. Although there is still a touch of Wild West romanticism to this story, for the most part Leonard’s novel is very realistic. There are no white-hatted saints among this cast of characters, and no one performs any heroic feats of gunplay that are outside the realm of reason. Unlike many Westerns of the 1960s, Leonard chooses not to ramp up the violence. In fact, the objective of the characters in this book seems to be to fire as few shots as possible and make them count. The plot is a cat-and-mouse game between Russell and his adversaries. Everyone’s actions and reactions are realistic and ring true to the natures of the individual characters. My eyes were glued to the page as I couldn’t wait to see what would happen next. As is often the case in Leonard’s books, the dialogue is pitch-perfect—clever and sharp without being ostentatiously so, and with a slight touch of humor that doesn’t belie the peril of the situation.

I’m not a habitual reader of Westerns, but I love Leonard’s work in this genre. Hombre is one of the best Westerns I’ve ever read, up there with Charles Portis’s True Grit. Leonard’s novels Valdez is Coming and Last Stand at Saber River are also top-notch entries in this genre.

The Later Life by Louis Couperus

Midlife crises in The Hague

The Later Life is a novel by Dutch author Louis Couperus (1863–1923). It is the second book in a four-novel quartet called Small Souls or The Books of Small Souls. (The first novel in the series is also titled Small Souls). The Later Life was originally published in the Netherlands in 1902, which is the time period in which the novel is set. It was first published in English in 1915.

Small Souls introduced us to the extensive Van Lowe family of The Hague, and the family drama continues in The Later Life. This second novel begins about two months after the end of Small Souls. In that previous book, Constance van der Welcke (née van Lowe) had a confrontation and a falling out with the rest of the Van Lowe family. After fleeing to Paris to be alone for several weeks, she returns to her husband and son in The Hague. Soon, the Van der Welckes patch up relations with Constance’s relatives and resume attendance at the family dinner parties.

The Later Life seems quite a bit shorter than Small Souls, and there is less going on in this second outing. Instead of bouncing around the entire Van Lowe family, here the focus remains primarily on the Van der Welckes: Constance, her husband Henri, and son Adriaan. Shortly after returning from Paris, Constance comes to the realization that her husband and her niece Marianne are in love with each other, though so far the interaction between the two has remained innocent. Meanwhile, an old school chum of Henri’s named Brauws returns to The Hague and becomes the frequent dinner guest of the Van der Welckes. Despite his history with Henri, Brauws forms a closer bond with Constance, and she falls in love with him. Much like her husband’s budding romance, there has been no physical affirmation of the relationship, just conversation. Will either of these harmless infatuations develop into full-fledged infidelity?

The title “The Later Life” may seem to imply that the novel is about senior citizens, but the three main players in this love quadrangle only range in age from their late thirties to their early forties (Marianne is about 19 or 20). Constance, Henri, and Brauws, however, all go through some sort of midlife crisis in this book and find themselves contemplating their lost youth. They are all dissatisfied and depressed by their present state of living. They’re lonely, trapped in loveless relationships, and/or depressed by the lack of meaning in their lives. Each wonders if he or she can finally find true happiness in later life, or is it too late to make a fresh start?

The phrase “small souls” is brought up more than a few times in the first two novels of this series. Couperus uses these words to signify the restrictive societal conventions under which these characters have developed and continue to live their lives. While somewhere in the world surely people are truly living lives that matter, the Van Lowes’ lives revolve around petty aristocratic concerns over what is proper or what people might think. “The world is full of mighty problems; and we . . . we are pigmies . . . in the tiny world of our own selves. . . .” says Brauws. Whatever was the equivalent of the Victorian era in the Netherlands, Couperus’s novels don’t so much rebel against it as rather critically acknowledge it as a pervading fact of life. Constance is the only one in her family who even questions the established order of things—whether these dinner parties or social engagements even matter. At 43, she realizes that she’s never really been in love, that she’s never even really lived. In the Small Souls series, which has proven a great read so far, Couperus reveals the existential angst beneath the veneer of upper-class respectability.

Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time by Dava Sobel

My kingdom for a clock!

Long before the days of ubiquitous GPS devices, when sailors first started voyaging to distant parts of the world, it was very difficult to determine just exactly where one was. While latitude could be determined by measuring the height of the midday sun above the horizon, longitude was quite a bit trickier. Without an accurate determination of longitude, ships could not only get lost aimlessly at sea but also wrecked on the shorelines of unforeseen islands and continents. This was such a costly and frustrating problem that in the early 18th century, England, the world’s leading maritime power, established a Board of Longitude to encourage efforts to find a solution to the longitude puzzle. The Board promised a large cash prize to whomever could come up with a reliable and accurate method for determining longitude. The book entitled Longitude by science writer Dava Sobel, published in 1995, recounts the story of the long and arduous quest to solve the longitude problem and claim the prize.

The surest method for finding longitude is to compare the solar time (noon, for example, the point when the sun is highest in the sky) of a known point (usually the port of departure) with that of your present location. Just as modern time zones tell us that New York is roughly an hour ahead of Chicago, the difference in minutes and seconds between point A and point B can be converted to a measurement of degrees indicating how far east or west you’ve traveled. The only way it is possible to measure this, however, is if you have an accurate timepiece that can remain synchronized to the exact solar time of your home port. Up to the early 1700s, this was not possible because there weren’t any clocks that could keep sufficiently accurate time when subjected to shipboard motion and temperature changes. What was needed was something we take for granted these days: a reliable timepiece. An English carpenter and self-taught clockmaker named John Harrison (1693–1776) set about to create such a marine chronometer that could withstand seaborne conditions and allow for accurate and reliable navigation. Harrison would end up devoting decades of his life to the project. 

Longitude was a New York Times bestseller and won several prestigious book awards. It is deliberately written for an audience of general readers, perhaps too deliberately at times. This is a very small and short book that one can read in a day or two. It’s written at about a high school vocabulary level. Wherever possible, complex scientific concepts are explained in layman’s terms, and there are no footnotes or endnotes. Longitude is at its best when it’s discussing the biography of Harrison and all of the politics behind the awarding of the coveted prize. It’s not so great, however, at explaining how exactly geographical coordinates are measured or what mechanical advancements made Harrison’s clocks so special. In the interest of simplification, such topics are glossed over in a sentence or two so as not to strain the brains of casual readers. Some simple black and white diagrams might have been helpful, but the book has no illustrations. Perhaps such diagrams would intimidate prospective readers by being too “sciency.” The result of too much popularizing is that the science and mathematics behind this story get inadequate and what feels like half-baked coverage. This is science history that succeeds as history; it’s about scientists but not so much about science.

The story of John Harrison is really fascinating, and this book made me want to learn more. Longitude is much like a National Geographic article (albeit a long one). You know you’re not getting quite the full story because the account has been condensed for reasons of space and accessibility. Nevertheless, you still learn a lot, enough to satisfy most curious general readers and pique the interest of those willing to pursue the subject further.

The Fate of the Corps: What Became of the Lewis and Clark Explorers After the Expedition by Larry E. Morris

The later lives and deaths of America’s intrepid explorers

I’ve read a few books recounting the 1804–1806 expedition of Lewis and Clark and their Corps of Discovery across America to the Pacific Coast and back. Stephen Ambrose’s Undaunted Courage is an excellent summation of the voyage, and the original 1814 published account of the journey, edited by Nicholas Biddle and Paul Allen, certainly yields many interesting details. The most complete account to date would be the 13-volume edition of the Journals of the Lewis & Clark Expedition edited by Gary E. Moulton, which you can either buy for a few hundred dollars or read online for free. Following up on all of these accounts of the expedition, Larry E. Morris’s 2004 book The Fate of the Corps takes a unique and interesting look at the Corps of Discovery by asking what happened to all these guys after the expedition was over?

In addition to Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, and the men they assembled for the journey, the scope of Morris’s study includes Clark’s slave York, as well as Native American guide and interpreter Sacagawea and her French-Canadian husband Toussaint Charbonneau, both of whom joined the expedition in midstream. Morris considers 34 people to be the core of the Corps, and he investigates each of their post–expedition lives. Along the way, many other recognizable historical figures who associated with Corps members are brought into the narrative, including Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, Stephen Austin, Sam Houston, and about a half dozen U.S. Presidents. Lewis and Clark’s team members took up a variety of roles after the Corps split up—fur trappers, farmers, soldiers in the War of 1812 and the Mexican-American War, lawyers, politicians, and more. In learning about the lives of these Corps members, one learns quite a bit about the broader history of 19th-century America, Western expansion, and Native American relations.

While the lives many of these figures led were quite fascinating, their deaths are often equally intriguing and sometimes poignantly tragic. The best-known case is the death of Lewis himself, who exhibited signs of mental illness and committed suicide (or, as some argue, may have been murdered). Clark, on the other hand, lived a longer life in which he held important political positions in the West and also served as the guardian of Sacagawea’s children. Morris examines Clark’s attitude toward Native Americans (somewhat progressive for his day) and his problematic relationship with his slave York (not the least bit progressive).

I recently read Robert M. Utley’s 1997 book A Life Wild and Perilous, a history of “mountain men” that covers similar subject matter and several of the same individuals as Morris’s book. I found Utley’s storytelling very confusing and rather boring. Morris, on the other hand, really brings these characters to life. The biographical scenes are lively, often exciting, and sometimes moving. Morris’s accounts are grounded in fact, but they don’t read as simply a relentless barrage of facts. Morris does jump around quite a bit, chronologically and geographically. There a lot of life threads intertwined here, which can sometimes be disorienting. Unlike Utley, however, Morris assists the reader by providing a useful chronology up front and an appendix that recaps the pertinent details of each member of the Corps. As a result, you come away from this book knowing exactly what happened to these men and woman (except in cases where nobody knows exactly what happened to these men and woman). When there are conflicting views among historians about the ultimate fates of, for example, Lewis and Sacagawea, Morris explains the pros and cons of each side’s arguments.

If you want a history of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, this isn’t it. Read Ambrose or Biddle’s books. If that’s not enough to satisfy your interest, however, and you’d like to follow the ripple effects of that landmark journey through subsequent American history, then Morris’s The Fate of the Corps is a great read that will tell you everything you want to know and more.