I Married Adventure by Osa Johnson

Kansas couple explores the world

Martin Johnson was a young man from Independence, Kansas, when Jack London hired him as a crew member on his yacht, the Snark, as detailed in Martin’s book Through the South Seas with Jack London (1913). London became ill and had to return to the U.S., but Johnson continued his journey and actually made it all the way around the world. After returning to Kansas, he married Osa Leighty from the equally small town of Chanute. Rather than settle down with his new bride, Martin was determined to continue his life of adventure. He invited Osa to share in his exotic exploits, and she was game for the challenge. The couple traveled the world and achieved fame for their wildlife photography, documentary filmmaking, and travel books. After Martin’s death, Osa published her autobiography I Married Adventure. It was the bestselling nonfiction book of 1940.

I Married Adventure recounts the couple’s youth and courtship in Kansas and details their subsequent adventures in the Solomon Islands, Borneo, and four trips to Africa, where they lived for a few years. Martin, the photography expert, bought the camera equipment and developed all the film. Osa was not just a passive passenger, however. She served as Martin’s right-hand woman. In addition to appearing on camera, Osa shot photos and film, shot dinner when necessary, drove a truck, managed staff, and entertained visiting dignitaries to camp like George Eastman of the Kodak company and the Duke and Duchess of York.

I admire Martin and Osa for their adventurous spirits, and I envy their travels. As a Kansan for most of my life, I also enjoyed the small-town-couple-make-it-big aspect of the story. The era in which the Johnsons traveled, however, wasn’t known for its ecological or ethnographical consciousness. The Johnsons hire 250 native porters to carry their supplies through hundreds of miles of wilderness, knowing full well that some of those porters are probably going to die along the way. If the porters aren’t moving fast enough, Martin whips them. When they reach their destination, they level swaths of forest to build a small, semi-permanent town, complete with decorative curtains and other frivolous amenities that some poor laborer had to schlep to the site. Osa brags about scattering invasive American flower seeds all over Africa. The couple have no qualms about shooting with guns the animals that they are shooting with cameras. Many anecdotes explain how the Johnsons would get as close as they could to the animals they were filming—lions, rhinos, water buffalo—until the animal would charge one spouse, and then the other would shoot the animal dead. Although the Johnsons occasionally traveled with zoologists from the American Museum of Natural History, Martin and Osa were photographers not scientists, not even amateur scientists. As a result, from this account by Osa you don’t really learn a whole lot about the animals or indigenous people that they encountered.

Although Osa clearly loved Martin, you don’t get much of a sense of his personality from this book, in which he comes across as something of a cipher. You almost get the impression that Osa really didn’t know him very well. That’s not a comment on their marriage, but rather a comment on her writing. This, however, was my grandparents’ generation, when people were more private and dignified when discussing their relationships. If spouses ever disagreed on anything, you wouldn’t hear it from Osa or my grandmother.

I don’t know about the rest of the world, but the Johnsons are still fondly remembered in their home state of Kansas. The Martin and Osa Johnson Safari Museum in Chanute is devoted to their lives, travels, and works. Reading this entertaining biography definitely makes we want to check it out.

The Time Stream by John Taine

Not really about time travel

Eric Temple Bell (1883–1960) was a Scottish-American mathematician who taught at the University of Washington and Caltech. He wrote science fiction novels under the pen name of John Taine. His novel The Time Stream was first serialized in 1931 issues of the pulp magazine Wonder Stories before being published in book form in 1946. I like vintage science fiction and had read a couple good comments recommending Taine. Of his work, I chose to read The Time Stream strictly for its title, because I like stories about time travel. I soon found out, however, that this novel isn’t so much about time travel.

The story opens in 1906. Eight men and one woman from varying backgrounds and walks of life become acquainted with each other in San Francisco. During one of their social gatherings, they discover that they have the ability to “enter the time stream” and ride it into the past, or maybe even into the future. At first, they’re not sure. How did they get this incredible power? Well, it turns out they’re not San Franciscans at all. They are actually the governing council of an ancient civilization named Eos, which exists on another planet with five man-made suns. These Eosians use the time stream to travel back and forth between two worlds. When they are on Earth, they often forget their existence on Eos, and vice versa (although they tend to remember when it’s convenient for the story). They seem to have bodies in both worlds. When they are occupying one, the other lies dormant in a deathlike suspended animation.

Eos is more technologically advanced than 20th-century Earth. The Eosians have unlocked the secrets of nature to learn amazing techniques for manipulating matter and energy. They have also developed a society based entirely on rational thought, allowing for no violence or love. Their rationalism extends to a prescribed breeding program for all inhabitants. The woman of the group, Cheryl, decides to defy this eugenics program by marrying a man for love. Some of the time travelers, however, have seen a future in which this love-mating causes an apocalyptic event leading to the destruction of Eos. The male council members try to persuade her from making this catastrophic choice.

It is often very difficult to tell what is going on in The Time Stream. Am I reading about the future or the past? Are we on Eos now, or Earth? Who remembers what from when? Even the eight time-traveling colleagues are difficult to tell apart. The problem is that Taine tells the story as if he’s written the novel for an audience of Eosians and just assumes that readers from Earth will know what’s going on in this strange world he’s created in his head. Although Taine/Bell himself may be a rational man of mathematics with likely some knowledge of how the universe works, he goes off into flights of fancy more fitting to the fantasy and horror fiction of William Hope Hodgson or Robert W. Chambers. If the laws of physics and logic as we know them operate in Eos, they’re barely recognizable. The most frustrating aspect of the book is that time travel is totally unnecessary to the story, as are all the Earth scenes. The plot is entirely about Eos and a coup and rebellion that takes place there. Why not just tell us that story and leave San Francisco out of it? Also, if the message of the book involves contrasting love with rationalism, for most of the novel Taine really seems to be writing in favor of eugenics.

Reading The Time Stream gives one the impression that the sci-fi pulps were so desperate for content that they would print just about anything. If John Taine has an esteemed reputation in science fiction history, it is certainly not due to this book, which is just a hot mess.

Being There by Jerzy Kosinski

The sagacity of a blank slate

Jerzy Kosinski was born and educated in Poland. As a young man he fled the communist regime in his native country and emigrated to America, where he became a successful novelist. He enjoyed great commercial success and critical acclaim in the late ‘60s and 1970s. He was even somewhat of a minor celebrity, making multiple appearances on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show and acting in a few feature films, most notably Warren Beatty’s Reds. Kosinski’s name is not so well-known nowadays, but many will recognize the title of his 1971 novel Being There because of the popular film adaptation starring Peter Sellers.

Being There is the story of Chance, a humble gardener who has led a very unique existence. Orphaned as a young boy, he was taken in by a wealthy lawyer referred to only as the Old Man. Chance has lived his whole life in the Old Man’s Manhattan mansion, working as his gardener. He receives no pay but is provided with food, shelter, and clothing. Though he’s probably in his thirties or forties at the time this novel takes place, Chance has never been outside the walls of the Old Man’s property. Everything he knows about the outside world he has learned through television. The garden and his television are all he needs to be content. Chance was never formally adopted by the Old Man, and there is in fact no record whatsoever of his existence. When the Old Man dies, therefore, the estate lawyers evict him from the premises, and Chance is forced to make his own way in the world. 

This is a comedic novel, the running joke being that no one Chance encounters in the outside world seems to recognize his childlike intelligence and lack of almost any life experiences. He falls in with wealthy and powerful people who misinterpret his every simple utterance about gardening as sage wisdom. Thus, with very little effort or intention on his part, Chance rises to great heights of political power, commercial success, and media celebrity.

Being There is a very short novel that barely qualifies as a novella. The edition I read was 142 pages, but I’ve never seen a trade paperback with so many blank pages and so much white space. The story is based on a very simple premise, and it sometimes reads like the same joke being told over and over again. Nevertheless, it is very cleverly done. Kosinski satirizes American political and media culture, and some scenes really do inspire laughter. Kosinski has said that he based the character of Chance on a real person, a guru of transcendental meditation. Polish critics, however, accused Kosinski of plagiarizing a previous Polish novel. I’m sure Being There was probably very unique and innovative at the time it was published. Over the past half century, however, we’ve seen many variations of this theme in film and television­—the childlike blank slate who is perceived as a savant. There are touches of Chance in Forrest Gump, Rain Man, and Woody Allen’s Zelig, for example, as well as many other comedic protagonists who suffer from amnesia or stereotypes of autism. I wouldn’t say those later productions necessarily copied Being There, but one’s accumulated familiarity with such plot lines renders Kosinski’s novel somewhat predictable.

Despite such predictability, overall I enjoyed Being There. It’s a quick and fun read. I doubt it is Kosinski’s most profound work of literature, but there are certainly depths of insightful social commentary beneath the simple storyline. After reading this, I definitely would like to check out more of Kosinski’s novels.

Drums & Demons: The Tragic Journey of Jim Gordon by Joel Selvin

Legendary talent, infamous crime

Joel Selvin is one of the best writers working today in the rock-and-roll history genre. I thoroughly enjoyed his book on Sly and the Family Stone. When I found out about Drums & Demons, Selvin’s 2024 biography of rock drummer Jim Gordon, I was excited by what seemed to me like the perfect pairing of an excellent biographer with a fascinating subject, both of whose work I admire. With Drums & Demons, Selvin does not disappoint.

Jim Gordon was one of the greatest drummers of the late 1960s and ‘70s. Most classic rock fans will probably recognize his name from the rosters of the bands Derek and the Dominos and Traffic, but Gordon was also a highly sought-after session man who played drums and percussion on thousands of recordings, many of them rock and pop classics including the Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations,” Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain,” Eric Clapton’s “After Midnight,” John Lennon’s “Power to the People,” Steely Dan’s “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number,” and Kermit the Frog’s “Rainbow Connection.” Rolling Stone put Gordon at number 59 of their 2016 list of the 100 Greatest Drummers of All Time, and, quite frankly, he deserved better. In this book, however, Selvin maybe expends too much effort in persuading the reader that Gordon was the G.O.A.T. of drummers, and after a while the hyperbolic praise grows somewhat tiresome.

Unfortunately, Gordon is not only famous but also infamous. After lifelong troubles with schizophrenia, which went undiagnosed, Gordon became psychotic and murdered his mother in 1983. He spent the remaining 40 years of his life in a prison for the criminally insane, where he died at the age of 77. Drums & Demons is a gripping biography that comprehensively covers both the soaring heights of Gordon’s music career and the crashing depths of his mental health struggles and substance abuse. This isn’t a tabloid account that revels in the horror story of the crime and the misery of its victims. Selvin writes with compassion, a genuine care and admiration for Gordon, and a sensitivity towards mental health issues that is commendable.

As a fan of classic rock, including Gordon’s music, and someone who delights in the minutiae of rock-and-roll trivia, I enjoyed the career retrospective portion of the book immensely. I find the stories of these great rock session musicians really fascinating. I similarly enjoyed Julian Dawson’s biography of the legendary rock pianist Nicky Hopkins. It’s just really interesting to read about all the illustrious artists these session men played with and learn about all the classic recordings to which they contributed their stellar talents. Who knew that Gordon’s best friend in high school was Mike Post, the composer of many classic television theme songs like The Rockford Files (on which Gordon played drums) and Magnum, P.I.? Selvin includes much fascinating detail on Gordon and the musicians with which he worked, including the Everly Brothers, Clapton, George Harrison, Glenn Campbell, Harry Nilsson, Joan Baez, Frank Zappa, and more. Whether in the studio or on tour, Selvin provides an inside look at the music industry that makes you feel like a part of the band.

The latter half of the book, which chronicles Gordon’s downward slide into insanity, is riveting. You can’t help but be moved by this terrible tragedy. Selvin compiled much of this account from interviews with those who knew Gordon, and you can feel both the love and the fear they felt towards this troubled artist. Selvin clearly did prodigious research in the making of this biography, and he writes with an authoritative knowledge and a personal pathos that make this a memorable book well worth reading for any fan of classic rock music.

The Dancer at the Gai-Moulin by Georges Simenon

Guest-starring Maigret

Published in 1931, La Danseuse du Gai-Moulin is the tenth novel in George Simenon’s series of Inspector Maigret mystery novels. In English the novel has appeared as Maigret at the “Gai-Moulin” or The Dancer at the Gai-Moulin. The title references the name of a nightclub in Liège, Belgium, the city of Simenon’s birth, where this novel takes place. Even though Maigret works for the Paris police, his investigations sometimes lead him farther afield, jurisdiction be damned.

Two teenage boys are hanging out at the Gai-Moulin one evening. René Delfosse, 18 years of age, is the wealthy child of a factory owner and somewhat of a juvenile delinquent. Jean Chabot, 16, is a poor boy, generally well-intentioned, who has fallen in with the wrong kind of friend. Both of them are enamored with Adèle, a dancer at the Gai-Moulin. She is friendly towards them, but treats them like pets and doesn’t put out for them. On this particular evening, Adèle can’t spend too much time chatting with the boys because she has to pay attention to a real big spender. This stranger has a Turkish look about him, which results in him being frequently referred to as “the Turk,” whether accurate or not. Unbeknownst to Adèle, Delfosse and Chabot have not come to the Gai-Moulin merely to drink cocktails. Their intention is to rob the place. They hide in the basement until after closing, then enter the bar to empty the till. Before they can do so, however, they find the body of the Turk dead on the bar floor.

By now, you might be asking yourself, “What does all this have to do with Maigret?” The odd thing about this Maigret novel is that Maigret himself doesn’t even appear until halfway through the book. Even then, he largely confines himself to the sidelines while the Liège police do all of the leg work. The absence of the book’s star for much of the novel’s length seems an odd choice on the part of Simenon, but I guess when you write around 500 novels you can afford to experiment. This book kept calling to my mind Arthur Conan Doyle’s book The Valley of Fear, a Sherlock Holmes mystery in which Sherlock Holmes barely plays a supporting role. That Doyle book, in my opinion, was definitely a failed experiment, but this Maigret novel fares a little better with the absentee detective strategy. The final chapter of the novel, in which Maigret does his thing, is really very good as Simenon rolls out one of the more ingeniously intricate crime-solution plot webs in the series.

The notable absence of Maigret for much of the novel, while unexpected, does not ruin the book. I wouldn’t recommend this novel for Maigret newbies, because one learns almost nothing about the main character, but if you’re already a fan of the series then this mystery will not fail to satisfy. It’s not one of the best books in Simenon’s consistently high-quality series, but it’s better than many Maigret cases and far above average when compared to the novels of other 20th-century mystery writers.

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

Nigeria at a crossroads

Nigerian author Chinua Achebe’s 1958 novel Things Fall Apart is likely the most widely read work of Black African literature among English-language readers worldwide (as opposed to white African writers like Algerian Albert Camus or South Africa’s J. M. Coetzee). Achebe wrote the novel in English, and it was published by Heinemann as the first novel in their African Writers Series, a series that would eventually encompass about 300 books. Things Fall Apart takes place in a rural village of the indigenous Igbo people (sometimes spelled Ibo), when Nigeria was a British colony (1914–1960).

Okonkwo lives in the village of Umuofia. Though he came from humble beginnings, through hard work, ambition, and physical strength, he has elevated himself to a position of high status within his clan. He lives with his family of three wives and several children in a mud brick-walled compound of several huts, where they raise crops and some livestock. To settle a conflict with a neighboring village, a boy from another clan is given to Umuofia as a hostage. The leaders of the Umuofia clan charge Okonkwo with the care of this boy, Ikemefuna, whom he raises as if the boy were his own son. In a twist worthy of a Greek tragedy, however, this act ends up setting in motion a chain reaction of karmic retribution that threatens Okonkwo’s downfall.

The second half of the novel deals with the encroachment of British culture into this isolated village. Christian missionaries and government bureaucrats arrive, a few of whom are white, the rest being Nigerians from outside the clan. Achebe describes how Christianity wedges its way into the Igbo people’s lives, garnering some earnest converts, while others cling to the traditional gods and customs. Okonkwo is firmly on the side of the old-schoolers who resist the influence of the whites. As depicted by Achebe, Igbo culture places high importance on a traditional conception of masculinity, and Okonkwo considers any man who deviates from the old ways to be “womanly.” In this clash between tradition and modernity, Achebe lets the reader see both sides of the argument. On the one hand, he clearly shows the iniquity and brutality of British colonialism in Nigeria. On the other hand, he implies that elements of Christianity offer a more compassionate alternative to some of the restrictive superstitions, prejudicial thinking, and more violent aspects of traditional Igbo culture. Achebe’s views on Nigerian independence are clear in this book, but his feelings towards the Christian church are not so clear cut.

In Things Fall Apart, Achebe gives readers a vivid look at traditional indigenous life in Nigeria. This contrasts with his fellow Nigerian author Wole Soyinka, winner of the 1986 Nobel Prize in Literature, who writes mostly about urban intellectuals in Nigeria. Achebe grew up amid both Igbo and Christian traditions and went on to become a university professor and one of his nation’s leading man of letters. For most of the book, Achebe’s writing gives the reader a feeling of being a member of the Umuofia clan. The last few chapters on Christianity and imperialism, however, feel a little more like they were written from the perspective of a university professor looking at Igbo culture from the outside.

One main reason why I read the literature of foreign nations is in hopes of gaining an understanding of the lives, cultures, and perspectives of people from other parts of the world. Things Fall Apart is certainly satisfying in that regard. This isn’t just the Western literary tradition transplanted to an exotic locale. This is a quintessentially African work of literature and a very fine novel by any standard of world literature.  

The Wayward Bus by John Steinbeck

A memorable road trip

John Steinbeck, winner of the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature, is one of America’s all-time literary greats, known for such highly acclaimed novels as The Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice and Men, East of Eden, and Cannery Row. In any list of his major works or ranking of this top ten books, one title you are unlikely to see is his 1947 novel The Wayward Bus. Nevertheless, Steinbeck is one of those writers who is so good that even his minor works shine. The Wayward Bus may be an obscure and forgotten entry in his body of work, but I enjoyed it very much.

In the small crossroads town of Rebel Corners in the Salinas Valley of California, Juan Chicoy, a Mexican-American, and his wife Alice run a service station and diner for travelers. Juan also drives a passenger bus from Rebel Corners to San Juan de la Cruz, a connecting line between two Greyhound routes. As the story opens, Juan’s bus has broken down, and a handful of passengers have been stranded at Rebel Corners. Juan and Alice and their two employees, who all live at the site, have given up their bedrooms to these delayed travelers. As the sun rises, Juan and his young mechanic, Pimples Carson, repair the bus in order to get their fare-paying passengers back on the road. The weather reports are not good, with speculation that the San Ysidro River might flood, which would put everyone in an even more inconvenient or even dangerous situation. The passengers are itching to go, however, and Juan is tired of listening to their complaints, so he decides to risk it and get the journey underway.

What this book does really well is bring to life the gas-food-lodging culture and atmosphere of 1940s travel. Of course, I wouldn’t know what it was like to ride a long-distance bus in the ’40s, but I made my share of Greyhound trips in the ’80s and ’90s. This book vividly brings to mind that atmosphere of wanderlust and fatigue, the collection of characters you meet on such trips, and the seemingly random locations where the bus makes its periodic stops. Before the installment of the interstate highway system, road travel had a more rustic, anything-can-happen feel to it, which this book captures really well. Also, as one would expect from Steinbeck gives the landscape of California much consideration and describes it in vivid, loving detail.

The bus and highways and diner pie, however, merely serve as the backdrop for a story that is really about an assortment of human beings momentarily thrown together by their intersecting itineraries. It is the realism of the characters, their thoughts and behaviors, that really makes this a captivating read. The drama is heightened by the fact that in this bygone pre-internet age, an adventurous traveler could change his or her entire life by simply turning a different corner, not looking back, and deciding to be someone else. These are people the reader will recognize from their own lives, and Steinbeck is very insightful about what’s going on in their heads: what men want from women, what women want from men, how men see themselves through their work, how different personalities conflict with and influence one another. When a beautiful blonde woman, traveling alone, walks into the diner, the reactions of the other characters, man and woman alike, are realistic variations of lust, envy, hostility, and bumbling foolishness. A successful business man, traveling with his wife and daughter, brings a touch of the capitalist criticism of Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt. Steinbeck is also to be commended for treating Hispanic characters as real human beings rather than the common stereotypes of the time.

The Wayward Bus isn’t the kind of book that wins prizes or inspires critical plaudits. It’s not about starving farmers fighting for survival; it’s about middle-class Americans with prosaic problems, hopes, and desires that to them (and us) often feel like romantic, monumental crises. Steinbeck does a beautiful job of illustrating the crucial dramas in everyday lives, in a way that is as real as life itself yet as compelling as literature should be.

Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World by Nicholas Ostler

Bites off more than most general readers can chew

Nicholas Ostler is a British scholar with degrees in linguistics, Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit, among others. He is currently the chairman of the Foundation for Ancient Languages. The publisher HarperCollins says Ostler has “a working knowledge of twenty-six languages.” His book Empires of the Word was published in 2005.

In this book, Ostler writes about what he calls “language dynamics,” that is, how languages are born, proliferate, migrate, and die. Why does one language succeed in dominating large portions of the world, through millions of native and secondary speakers, while many others languish and disappear over time? Ostler explains how these rises and falls have played out numerous times over the course of world history due to causes such as military conquest, imperialism, trade relations, economic influence, religious conversion, government bureaucracy, mass media, and perceived status and prestige. Ostler doesn’t provide a unifying thesis as to how languages survive and thrive. Rather, he examines the spread and decline of languages over the course of history and examines each pivotal turning point on a case-by-case basis, often drawing parallels between the trajectories of ancient and modern languages. He focuses much attention on the languages that are most prominent in the world today, and how they got that way.

As for the intended audience, I’m guessing this is a history book written for linguists. Ostler certainly assumes a lot of prior knowledge of history and languages on the part of the reader. I was hoping for something a little more accessible to general readers, like Gaston Dorren’s books Lingo and Babel, which cover many of the same topics as this book but in a much more user-friendly manner. Empires of the Word is such a relentless barrage of detail it is difficult to see the forest for the trees. Ostler’s prose often reads like a text composed entirely of footnotes. Foreign words discussed in the text are often accompanied by a phonetic approximation of pronunciation, yet there is no key provided as to the system of phonetic notation used, so the reader is simply expected to know that. Even if the notation is a standard with which linguists would be familiar, the reliability of the phonetic transcriptions is called into question by typographical issues with font glyphs and diacritics (in the ebook, as discussed below). The only thing that might make me think this book is meant for general readers is Ostler’s repetitive summarizing of his points and conclusions. By the time you get to the end, it feels like you’ve read the same book three times.

Ostler likes to quote from historical texts. He presents these quotes in their original language (often non-Latin alphabets) and then in English translation. It is often interesting to see the comparison between the two writing systems. Early in the book, however, Ostler uses the French phrase “coup de grâce.” In the ebook edition, the “a” accented with a circumflex is replaced by an “s” with an hacek. This is a font error that likely does not occur in the print edition, but this caused me to question the accuracy of the spelling and diacritics of all the foreign words, of which there are many, throughout the ebook. How do I know if what I’m seeing is correct? The “s” with an hacek appears quite frequently, and some words have dollar signs in them. Of course, a font problem is no fault of the author’s, but rather a production issue that is the publisher’s responsibility, so Ostler is not to blame. Near the end of the book, there’s a chapter about the top twenty languages in the world today, in terms of number of speakers. Throughout the chapter, Ostler repeatedly refers to “the list,” yet the list itself is not provided to the reader. My guess is that the list was formatted as a table, and that table was excluded from the ebook. Perhaps that’s also what happened to the pronunciation key. HarperCollins really did not do a very good job of putting this ebook together, resulting in a rather annoying experience for the reader.

Collected Novellas by Gabriel García Márquez

Colombia’s Faulkner

Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez won the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature largely on the strength of his highly esteemed novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. The book Collected Novellas, first published in 1991, brings together three lesser-known works of shorter fiction that complement that bestselling classic.

Leaf Storm, García Márquez’s first book, was published in 1955. He uses the phrase “leaf storm” to signify the influx of foreign interests that turned a small Colombian village into a boom town for the fruit industry. Against this backdrop, the story deals with the death of a citizen who was far from beloved by his fellow townspeople. The narrative is related through the alternating first-person perspectives of a father, daughter, and grandson who knew the deceased. Through a series of chronologically jumbled scenes, García Márquez reveals the back story of the dead man, from his arrival in town to his demise, as well as the private secrets of the family of narrators. Stylistically, this novella bears much resemblance to the writing of William Faulkner in novels like As I Lay Dying. I would have also sworn that Leaf Storm was influenced by Mexican author Juan Rulfo’s novel Pedro Páramo, but the two books were released in the same year, so any cause-and-effect relationship between the two seems unlikely.

The next selection, No One Writes to the Colonel, was first published in 1958. An aged and destitute veteran of a previous civil war (the Thousand Days’ War of 1899–1902) awaits the military pension he was promised. The current regime has placed his village under martial law. Again, death and funerary matters play a prominent role in the story, as the Colonel attends the funeral of a local musician. The final selection, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, published in 1981, is the best-known of the three works in this volume and the most compelling. In the opening pages, an Arab Colombian named Santiago Nasar is murdered. García Márquez then flashes back to reveal the story behind the killing, which he relates in a nonlinear fashion through the perspectives of various witnesses. Perhaps the most shocking aspect of the crime is that everyone in town, except the victim, seems to see the murder coming, and most simply accept it as a foregone conclusion.

Though stand-alone works in their own right, these three novellas are set in the same fictional universe as One Hundred Years of Solitude. Leaf Storm and No One Writes to the Colonel both take place in Macondo, the same fictional village in which One Hundred Years is set. Macondo is García Márquez’s equivalent to Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, another fictional setting that unifies multiple related novels. Chronicle of a Death Foretold does not mention Macondo, but, like the other two novellas included here, García Marquez does drop the name of Colonel Aureliano Buendía, a character from One Hundred Years of Solitude who figures prominently in the history of this fictional vision of Colombia, much like Faulkner often refers to the Snopes and Compson families in his Yoknapatawpha novels. I use Faulkner here merely as a stylistic comparison and don’t mean to imply that García Márquez’s writings are in any way derivative of or inferior to those of Faulkner. In fact, I prefer the writings of García Márquez. He uses the same modernist techniques of stream-of-consciousness, nonlinear chronology, and varying narrative perspectives, but unlike Faulkner he doesn’t overly indulge in deliberately obscure wordplay. Chronicle of a Death Foretold impressed me even more than One Hundred Years of Solitude, and the other two novellas in this collection are also very fine works worthy of a Nobel laureate.

Novellas in this collection

Leaf Storm

No One Writes to the Colonel

Chronicle of a Death Foretold

A Naturalist at Large: The Best Essays of Bernd Heinrich

Assorted investigations in natural science

Biologist Bernd Heinrich was born in Germany and emigrated to Maine with his family as a young boy. He is now a professor emeritus at the University of Vermont, but he lives in Maine and has a cabin there where he seems to spend a lot of time. Heinrich first came to my attention for his investigations into the intelligence of ravens, but he is primarily an entomologist who has done extensive research on bees. Heinrich’s father Gerd Heinrich was also an esteemed entomologist.

A Naturalist at Large: The Best Essays of Bernd Heinrich was published in 2018. It is a collection of articles that Heinrich wrote for various periodicals. Almost all of the selections come from the magazine Natural History, where he appears to have had a regular column. Other than that, there are two articles each from Audubon, Outside, and the New York Times, and one from Orion. The majority of these essays are about observations and studies of nature that Heinrich made on his land in Maine. The rest take place in locations around the world where he has conducted research, such as the Canadian Arctic, the Judaean Desert in Israel, and the Okavango Delta in Botswana. In a typical chapter, Heinrich observes a pattern of animal behavior and comes up with an idea of how and why such a behavior would evolve. He then conducts further observations or experiments to test the validity of his hypothesis. Some examples of his inquiries include how bumblebees regulate their body heat, why water beetles gather in clumps, how the structure of tree branches determines their ability to survive ice storms, how tiny Golden-crowned Kinglets survive icy Maine winters, why there is a predominance of red flowers in the Middle East, and why all plant growth seems to twist in a counterclockwise direction.

Despite the title, I find it hard to believe that these are the best essays of Bernd Heinrich. If they titled the book Assorted Odds and Ends by Bernd Heinrich, however, it probably wouldn’t sell very well. This is basically a collection of magazine articles from mainstream periodicals (not scholarly journals), most of which are not feature articles but rather the sort of short articles and columns you find in the front of most science magazines before you get to the meatier fare.

I have a lot of respect for Heinrich’s work as a naturalist, but I was a bit bored by these writings. He makes the science seem moderately interesting but far from fascinating. Heinrich presents a very nuts-and-bolts approach to natural science: I noticed this. I formed a hypothesis. I tested it thusly. I came to these conclusions. Don’t expect the philosophizing of Thoreau in these Maine Woods. I was anticipating something more along the lines of A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold, another naturalist who wrote about the wilderness surrounding his cabin (in Wisconsin rather than Maine), but even Leopold’s essays on wildlife conservation policy read more poetically than Heinrich’s articles. What’s missing is any sense of what it feels like to be present in the wild places that Heinrich is describing. These essays read more like they were written in a laboratory. My guess is that Heinrich’s long-form books are more satisfying than these short essays. His workmanlike prose could benefit from some more room to breathe. I’d like to give his A Year in the Maine Woods a try, to see if there might be a little more Thoreau in him after all.

The Maracot Deep by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

25,000 feet under the sea

The Maracot Deep is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s final novel. It was first published in book form in 1929; he died the following year. The novel was previously published in serial form in the pages of The Saturday Evening Post (1927) and The Strand Magazine (1927-1928). The Maracot Deep is a science fiction novel of undersea exploration. The work will spark obvious comparisons to Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, but it really has more in common with Conan Doyle’s own 1912 novel The Lost World.

Esteemed British oceanographer and marine biologist Dr. Maracot organizes an expedition to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. He takes along two companions: zoologist Cyrus Headley, who serves as the narrator for most of the book, and Bill Scanlan, an American mechanic who serves much the same purpose as Verne’s Ned Land of Twenty Thousand Leagues. The team are lowered to the ocean floor in a vehicle similar to a bathysphere, except that this submersible is box-shaped, like an elevator. They descend five miles down into the deepest trench in the Atlantic, named the Maracot Deep in honor of the professor. The lifeline to their surface vessel is cut, leaving them stranded at the bottom of the trench with impending death a foregone conclusion. They are miraculously saved, however, by a race of undersea dwellers who prove to be the descendants of the centuries-old sunken civilization of Atlantis. 

While Verne was more interested in actual oceanographic science, here Conan Doyle is more interested in fantasy. In order for his crew to have even the slightest chance of surviving, Conan Doyle conveniently dispenses with the intense pressure exerted by great depths of water. He just invents a theory to eliminate that obstacle. One commendable choice, however, is that these Atlanteans are not able to breathe in water like fish. Instead, they have created technology to master their environment, including a breathing apparatus that would put modern scuba gear to shame. At the bottom of the ocean, Maracot and company encounter all manner of sea serpents and lethal beasts that are more mythical than scientifically authentic. Regrettably, the reader only learns the bare basics about Atlantis and its inhabitants because as soon as the three heroes make it to the ancient sunken city, they’ve already started looking for an escape from their hosts.

Even as late as 1927, Conan Doyle is unwilling to allow for a disembodied third-person narration or an interior first-person perspective. Instead, he sticks with the Victorian convention that all stories must be told in the concrete form of a written document, such as a diary, a letter, or a message in a bottle. This makes for some clunky logistics in the telling of this story, such as unnecessary multiple perspectives and a jumbled chronology. The novel proper basically ends with chapter five, but Conan Doyle must have had a seven-issue contract with the Strand, because he tacks on two chapters at the end that really should have been integrated into the main narrative rather than presented as afterthoughts. Conan Doyle’s most egregious sin with this novel, however, is that he can’t find enough sci-fi potential in undersea exploration, so he resorts to throwing in some of his usual supernatural spiritualist mumbo jumbo.

I don’t believe Conan Doyle wrote The Maracot Deep to compete with or capitalize on Verne’s masterpiece. Rather, I think he simply wanted to try his hand at one of the few subgenres of adventure literature—undersea exploration—that he hadn’t yet covered. The Maracot Deep really doesn’t hold a candle to Twenty Thousand Leagues, and it reveals Conan Doyle to be past his prime at this point. There just isn’t enough science in this watered-down science fiction.

Footsteps of Fate by Louis Couperus

Dutch treat

Louis Couperus (1863-1923) was a Dutch novelist and poet who enjoyed some international success in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His novel Footsteps of Fate (Dutch title: Noodlot) was published in 1890. According to literary critic Edmund Gosse, who wrote the introduction to the first English translation of the novel, Couperus was a member of the Dutch Sensitivists school (a term I’ve never seen anywhere else, so maybe Gosse invented it). As far as I can tell from Gosse, this sounds like a literary school that was inspired by French Naturalism but didn’t want to admit that it was inspired by French Naturalism. Judging by Footsteps of Fate, Couperus writes in accord with the same philosophy of fatalism and heredity as the Naturalists, as exemplified by the novels of Emile Zola, but he stops short of the more blatantly coarse, vulgar, and offensive scenes and subject matter in the writings of Zola or even Balzac. The Sensitivists were also admirers of Joris-Karl Huysmans, a Zola protégé of Dutch ancestry.

Frank Westhove is a Dutch expatriate living in London. There are a few brief mentions of his background as an engineer, but at the time the story opens he seems to be living the life of an independently wealthy English gentleman, i.e. not working at all. One cold winter night he is approached by a shabby vagrant who turns out to be an old chum of his, Bertie van Maeren. Bertie had been to America, experienced some career failures and hard times, and was now homeless and almost penniless. He asks Frank for some assistance, and with a generous what-are-friends-for attitude, Frank invites Bertie into his home and promises to support him financially until he can get back on his feet. This turns into an extended roommate situation in which Frank and Bertie live the lives of well-to-do gentleman, financed entirely by Frank, who doesn’t seem to mind one bit. While the two are off on a trip to Norway, they meet some fellow Londoners, Sir Archibald Rhodes and his daughter Eva. The travelers get to know one another, and Frank, not surprisingly, falls in love with Eva. Rather than being happy for his friend, this relationship brings out the worst in Bertie, who fears that a union between Frank and Eva will rob him of his meal ticket and put him back out on the streets. 

One doesn’t learn much about Dutch life or literature from Footsteps of Fate. It reads very much like an English novel of the Victorian Era. It has a gentility about it that one doesn’t often find in the works of Naturalist literature, but nevertheless the fundamental elements of Naturalism are present: the faithfulness to realism and the assertion that much of mankind’s behavior is molded by social and hereditary forces and therefore out of one’s control. Some aspects of the story come across as unrealistic—most notably Frank’s limitless generosity and Eva’s exaggerated frailties—but one must keep in mind that what seems realistic in the 21st century differs from what would have seemed realistic to the Victorian readers of 1890. Bertie, however, rings true as a timeless archetypal example of the mooching houseguest. Footsteps of Fate starts out in a deceptively decorous and sober manner, but to Couperus’s credit, the book snowballs surprisingly into full-on unsparing Naturalism. Couperus fools you into a false sense of comfort and complacency before hitting you with the hard stuff towards the end.

I’m a fan of Naturalist literature in the vein of Zola or Frank Norris. This was my first experience with Couperus, and I enjoyed this book quite a bit. The characters are memorable, the situations believable, and the plot served up its fair share of surprises. I will definitely seek out more of Couperus’s novels in the future.

The Personal Equation by Eugene O‘Neill

The Hairy Ape lite

Eugene O’Neill

After having read several of Eugene O’Neill’s better-known plays, I became a fan of his writing and decided to set about reading his complete works. Doing so has led me to some rather obscure works of his, some unjustly obscure and some deservedly so. The Personal Equation, one such O’Neill rarity, falls somewhere between the two. Written in 1915 as a class project when O’Neill was at Harvard, The Personal Equation didn’t make it to the stage until over a century later, when the Provincetown Players performed the work in 2019. O’Neill himself wished for many of his earlier plays to remain forgotten, because they weren’t up to his later high standards, but The Personal Equation is certainly not the worst of his early efforts (the worst would likely be Welded, with Bread and Butter and Servitude close behind). Nevertheless, when O’Neill won the 1936 Nobel Prize in Literature, it is unlikely that The Personal Equation factored into that decision.

The fact that The Personal Equation is an issue-driven play makes it more interesting than the romances and relationship dramas from O’Neill’s early career. This play deals with labor issues of the World War I era, which if nothing else lends some historical value to the drama. Tom Perkins is a member of the IWE—International Workers of the Earth—a thinly veiled surrogate for the real-life IWW—Industrial Workers of the World (nicknamed the Wobblies). While working clandestinely as a labor organizer and agitator, Tom has a day job working in the offices of the Ocean Steamship Company. He associates with a cell of other IWE activists, including his girlfriend Olga, with whom he cohabitates, a rather daring and progressive arrangement for an unmarried couple in those days. The IWE charges Tom with a dangerous mission to blow up the engines of the Ocean Steamship Company’s ship the SS San Francisco, in hopes that the action will inspire shipworkers to revolt in a general strike. Complicating matters, however, is the fact that Tom’s father, Thomas Perkins Sr., is the second engineer on that very same SS San Francisco and a loyal company man who loves his job, his ship, and his engines. Regardless, to prove his loyalty to the IWE, Tom accepts the sabotage mission.

Early in his adult life, O’Neill worked for several years on merchant marine vessels and joined the Marine Transport Workers Union of the IWW. The platform of the IWW was a mix of socialist, anarchist, and syndicalist principles. In The Personal Equation, O’Neill deliberately distances the fictional IWE from the “Socialists,” presumably meaning the Socialist Party of America. Though O’Neill may have been a member of the IWW, his depiction of the IWE in this play is not entirely positive. One gathers that he believed in the party line of the IWW, but he was disappointed with the management of the organization and its ineffectiveness in living up to its ideals. He also criticizes how the IWW and other leftist radicals abandoned their antiwar stance in the face of World War I jingoism.

Much of the first half of The Personal Equation is predictable, but the ending is rather cleverly unexpected. The premise of the play sets up some contrived scenes, particularly the father vs. son conflict, but if you think of this as political symbolism and don’t expect too much realism, one can appreciate the care and craft with which O’Neill constructed this drama to convey his intended message. Ultimately, however, The Personal Equation ends up feeling like a watered-down rough sketch for O’Neill’s later, greater, and much more powerful allegory of labor unrest and class struggle, The Hairy Ape. Still, if you are a fan of O’Neill’s work, and The Hairy Ape in particular, then The Personal Equation is a well-drawn rough sketch that’s worth a look.

Rama II by Arthur C. Clarke and Gentry Lee

Nonsensical soap opera in space

Rama II is the sequel to Arthur C. Clarke’s science fiction novel Rendezvous with Rama. While Rendezvous was written solely by Clarke, Rama II was written collaboratively with Gentry Lee, an engineer who headed several unmanned space missions for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, including robotic probes and rovers sent to Mars, Jupiter, and visiting comets. Rama II was published in 1989, 16 years after Rendezvous with Rama. The story of Rama II, however, begins in the year 2200, about 70 years after the events of the previous novel. This second installment, therefore, features all new characters, but frequent mention is made of the Rama mission from the first novel.

Rama and Rama II are the names given to two nearly identical spacecraft that have entered our solar system from parts unknown. Clearly created by an intelligent extraterrestrial civilization (referred to by default as the Ramans), the two craft are enormous cylinders 50 kilometers long and 20 kilometers wide, filled with mysterious machinery, an atmosphere, and even a large body of water. The first Rama was discovered to be uninhabited by intelligent life, though occupied by maintenance robots with biological components, referred to as biots. Earth is better prepared for the second visit in 2200. An international crew of 12 cosmonauts, comprised of scientific and military personnel is sent to intercept Rama II as it passes through our solar system. Whether the Ramans will actually be found present on this second craft is anybody’s guess, but at the very least this team of explorers hopes to capture one of the biots and bring it back to Earth for study.

I read the first Rama book because I was intrigued by the premise. I was unfamiliar with Clarke’s writing and new him by reputation only. I found Rendezvous with Rama, however, to be quite disappointing. When Rama II was offered at a discount price, I decided to give Clarke the benefit of the doubt in hopes that the second installment would prove better than the first, but alas, Rama II is drastically worse than its predecessor. The problem with Rendezvous is that it was far too techy. Clarke spent most of the book exploring the physics of a cylindrical spacecraft, with very room left for consideration of the alien intelligence behind it. You would think that the addition of Gentry Lee, a spacecraft engineer, would result in a “hard” sci-fi book that’s bogged down even further in technobabble, but no, with Rama II, the exact opposite is true. This book reads like a fantasy novel written for children.

All sorts of bizarre happenings occur on this new Rama, with no rhyme or reason to any of it. The cosmonauts end up in all sorts of tunnels with weird creatures popping out of them. Nothing is really learned from any of the random happenings that occur. Meanwhile, the crew members conduct themselves with all the maturity and intelligence of a bunch of teenagers. There are all sorts of melodramatic subplots going on that would better belong in a soap opera or an Agatha Christie novel: love affairs, petty jealousies, a murder mystery, pointless dream sequences with African mysticism, a bunch of useless Shakespeare references. And every character gets his or her own terrible back story. The female lead reminisces about a love affair she once had with . . . the king of England. Totally unnecessary.

Although Clarke may be one of science fiction’s most acclaimed futurists, the technology employed by these astronauts of 2200 isn’t much more advanced than devices we all now use at home every day. I can only assume that Clarke’s Odyssey series (2001, 2010, etc.) is far superior to his Rama books, otherwise why would he be so famous and critically acclaimed? Clarke and Lee’s Rama II, on the other hand, leaves the reader wondering, what the hell were they thinking?

Last Stand at Saber River by Elmore Leonard

Another riveting Western in the classic Leonard style

Nobody writes a Western like Elmore Leonard! Though better known nowadays for his crime novels and their movie and TV adaptations (Get Shorty, Out of Sight, Justified), Leonard started his career as a writer of Westerns and in my opinion is one of the best that ever worked in the genre. Western novels often venture into corny territory, but not so with Leonard’s books. Last Stand at Saber River was originally published in 1956, but it reads like a Western movie of the 1970s that might have starred Clint Eastwood or Lee Marvin. It was not adapted into film, however, until 1997, when it was released as a made-for-TV production starring Tom Selleck.

After years of fighting for the Confederacy on Civil War battlegrounds out East, Rancher Paul Cable returns to his home in Arizona with his wife and three small children. Upon reaching their small community in the Saber River Valley, Cable’s first stop is the local general store. There he finds his old friend the storekeeper has since passed away, to be replaced by a surly one-armed character named Janroe. This mysterious new neighbor informs the Cables that their homestead is presently occupied by the Kidston brothers, former acquaintances from before the war. Undaunted, Cable ventures out to the old homestead to inform the Kidstons that its rightful owners have returned home. The Kidstons, however, refuse to leave, asserting that Cable lost any rights to the land when he went off to fight for the Confederacy. (By this time, Arizona was controlled by the Union.) Though Saber River may be a long way from the Civil War battlefronts, heated animosity still exists between Union and Confederate sympathizers. With no law to aid him in reclaiming and defending his home, Cable takes matters into his own hands, but not without violent resistance.

What is great about Leonard’s Westerns is his no-nonsense realism. While he doesn’t turn his back entirely on the mythic aspects of Wild West lore, the characters in Leonard’s stories act like real people. There are no cut-and-dried saints and sinners here. Everyone has shades of gray in their moral code and believable motivations behind their behavior. The action scenes are riveting because they are logically constructed within the bounds of possibility. Leonard moves his gunslingers around like pieces on a chessboard, allowing the reader to imagine himself caught in the perilous situation described. The victor of these conflicts is not a superhero capable of remarkable feats with a gun but rather the one who manages to logically outsmart his opponent. Because these are not black-and-white, good-versus-evil shootouts, the danger feels real. Leonard avoids typical Western clichés to deliver a plot that is unpredictable and immensely compelling.

When Leonard originally started publishing short stories in Western pulp magazines, his early entries were more in the traditional realm of folkloric cowboy tales, as seen in The Complete Western Stories of Elmore Leonard. His storytelling evolved over time, as did literature and film as a whole, to become darker, grittier, and more daring. Last Stand at Saber River is an example of Leonard’s mature, idiosyncratic style, yet it still falls a little short of the hard-boiled intensity of 1970’s Valdez Is Coming. Nevertheless, if you are looking for a great Western read, it’s a safe bet that any of Leonard’s Western novels from 1953 to 1972 will fill the bill.

Under Fire: The Story of a Squad by Henri Barbusse

The war novel to end all war novels

Under Fire is a novel by French author Henri Barbusse, based on his own military experiences in World War I. Barbusse enlisted in the French Army at the age of 41 and served on the Western Front from 1914 to 1916. Under Fire was published in late 1916, while the Great War was still very much in progress. The book was a great success upon its release and received the Prix Goncourt (France’s award for best novel of the year).

Much of the action of Under Fire takes place in the trenches on the front lines of the fighting between France and Germany. The story follows a squadron of foot soldiers, men with working class backgrounds and little education—not career soldiers but common privates plucked from their hometowns and thrust into the hell of war. The book has about a hundred named characters, most of them members of this squadron, but a core group of about a dozen men form the central cast of this drama. The book is narrated by one of the squad’s soldiers who is presumably Barbusse himself. He is never mentioned by name, but it is revealed that he is a writer gathering stories for what might someday be a book.

Under Fire was controversial for its time because of its brutal naturalism. Barbusse’s literary style is similar to that of Emile Zola’s, as seen in the latter’s own classic war novel The Debacle, but taken to extremes worthy of a horrific world war fought with modern technology. Barbusse vividly describes the miserable living conditions in the trenches and the terror of undergoing constant bombardments. The battle scenes are drenched in rain and mired in mud. Barbusse’s prose is littered with gruesome images of injuries, deaths, and corpses littering the land like a macabre sculpture garden. Nothing in this novel qualifies as a glorified or romanticized image of war. Barbusse pushes a very strident anti-war message here. He may have served almost two years in combat, but in his heart he is clearly a pacifist. Barbusse’s experiences of war even converted him to communism after seeing his fellow poilus suffer for the aristocrats and oligarchs who make war for their own benefit.

This is not entirely a novel about combat. Between the battles there is plenty of time for the men of the squad to take their leave in small towns, farms, and even in Paris. Their experiences, however, are far from luxurious as the mud, the rain, hunger, and lice seem to follow them wherever they go. Barbusse depicts the life of a soldier as just as much drudgery as danger, but his uncompromising realism insures that the narrative never becomes boring. Amid all the tragedy one finds moments of humor and the camaraderie of brothers in arms. At times, these men may come across as salt-of-the-earth caricatures, but I find that preferable to the tortured poets that inhabit some highbrow war novels, like John Dos Passos’s Three Soldiers. Barbusse makes you feel for these soldiers, as victims crushed under the wheel of war, but he never resorts to excessive sentimentalism or cloying melodrama.

Under Fire influenced Ernest Hemingway’s writings on World War I, as well as those of Erich Maria Remarque, author of All Quiet on the Western Front, which was published in 1928. I haven’t yet read that latter novel, but if it is, as people say, the greatest novel of World War I, I can only assume that Barbusse’s Under Fire is a close second. As a document of war, it is difficult to imagine a much more vivid and visceral experience then what Barbusse delivers here. If we had no photographs or artifacts of the Great War, Barbusse’s text alone would be sufficient to teach us what that tragic conflict was like. Under Fire is an exceptional novel that deserves a more prominent position in the canon of 20th century world literature.

Hopscotch by Julio Cortázar

Tragically bohemian Latinos in Paris

Argentinian writer Julio Cortázar was born in Belgium during World War I. He grew up in Buenos Aires and emigrated to France in his late thirties. Cortázar is a highly esteemed author in Latin America, where he is considered one of the groundbreaking modernists who spearheaded the Latin American literary “Boom” of the 1960s and ‘70s. His novel Hopscotch (original Spanish title: Rayuela) was published in 1963.

Hopscotch concerns an Argentinian expatriate named Horacio Oliveira who lives in Paris. He is involved with a woman called La Maga (real name Lucia) who is from Uruguay and has an infant son. The two South Americans circulate amongst an international group of friends, self-appointed intellectuals who live a bohemian lifestyle. Calling themselves, “the Club,” they spend their days and nights sipping coffee and maté (a sort of South American tea), listening to jazz records, and arguing about literature and philosophy. Other than one member who calls himself a painter, none of them seem to have jobs, and its unclear how they survive. All of the club members display a condescending attitude toward La Maga, who is not as well-read as the men in the group. She seems to have a genuine love for Horacio, who merely deigns to put up with her.

At first, it’s possible for the reader to become invested in the relationship between Horacio and La Maga, but at the halfway point the novel takes a turn into another direction that just feels silly, pointless, and a colossal waste of time. La Maga, unfortunately, is the only sympathetic character in the book. The rest of this social set is composed of smug, pretentious blowhards. If your circle of friends talked like the way these guys talk, you’d want to punch them all in the face. They take turns trying to prove they’re smarter than each other by out-name-dropping authors, musicians, philosophers and filmmakers that they think are cool. It doesn’t take long to realize that Cortázar himself is the pretentious blowhard who wants you to think his cultural choices are cool. When the writers and thinkers in question aren’t arcane enough to satisfy his snobbery, he even creates a fictional intellectual named Morelli whom he quotes at length to no purpose.

Hopscotch is renowned for its innovative narrative structure. In a brief intro, Cortázar explains that the novel can be read in two ways. First, one can read it as a linear novel from chapters 1 through 56. Alternately, one can follow a maze-like path in which chapters 57 through 155 are haphazardly distributed between the primary narrative chapters. The reader is directed from chapter to chapter in a manner reminiscent of the Choose Your Own Adventure Books, paging back and forth from one passage to the next, or in the case of the ebook, just clicking the links. Being the completist I am, I chose the longer, more circuitous route. Regrettably, chapters 57 through 155 are mostly unnecessary to the narrative (even Cortázar calls them “expendable”) and consist merely of “deep thoughts,” epigraphs, tangential digressions, and failed experiments.

If your definition of great literature is “anything goes,” then you’ll probably think Hopscotch is a cutting-edge masterpiece. I, however, don’t think it deserves that much credit. Many of the writers that Cortázar mentions in Hopscotch, such as Raymond Queneau and Witold Gombrowicz, were far more successful than he at using experimental language and structure to enhance a narrative, create an effect, or actually say something, rather than merely indulging in weird-for-weird’s-sake showiness. Cortázar seems to think that he can just write whatever pops into his head, and you’ll eat it up because he’s a highbrow man of letters. If the book were shorter, it might be easier to give him credit for some cleverly written passages, but Hopscotch is so overdone it feels like an ordeal, like being trapped at one of the Club’s maté parties.