My Struggle, Book Two: A Man in Love by Karl Ove Knausgaard

Real life, ad nauseam

About fifteen years ago, Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard made a big splash in the literary world with his six-volume work My Struggle (Min kamp). Is it an autobiography or a series of novels? Only Knausgaard and his family know for sure, but it’s written as ostensibly an autobiography, so I will consider it as such. My Struggle has received much critical acclaim, but when I read Book One, I wasn’t terribly enamored with it. These volumes, however, often come up as inexpensive Kindle daily deals, so I impulsively bought Book Two and eventually felt compelled to read it.

Book Two, first published in 2009, does not pick up where Book One left off. Book One was mostly about Knausgaard’s teenage years in Norway. In his mid-twenties, he married a woman named Tonje, but we don’t really learn much about her. That period of his life isn’t covered in either of these first couple volumes. As Book Two opens, Knausgaard and Tonje have separated, and he makes a spur-of-the-moment relocation to Stockholm. In Sweden he reconnects with a prior acquaintance, Linda, and they fall in love. Despite the fact that she’s bristling with red flags, Knausgaard quickly decides to make babies with her. From that point on, the book is mostly, “Heaven knows I’m miserable now.”

Book Two is much like Book One in that Knausgaard spends many pages describing scenes from his life in minute detail. The first tenth of Book Two is occupied by a lengthy depiction of a children’s birthday party that Knausgaard and Linda attend with their two kids. This extended vignette is a skillful piece of realistic prose, but so what? I’ve already been to this party dozens of times with my own children. Hundreds of years from now, some historian studying the social customs of 21st-century Nordic parents could use this book as a reference, but to me, spending so much time reliving the author’s experience felt pointless. Knausgaard’s writing is at its best when he delivers brief essay passages with his philosophical thoughts on life, death, love, and marriage, but unfortunately such interludes are only a few pages out of each hundred otherwise devoted to the mundane details of everyday life. Much of the book is spent discussing Knausgaard himself and analyzing his character, which he obviously finds fascinating. Such is the subject of a very long evening Knausgaard spends in conversation with a friend over a few beers that amounts to an egomaniacal My Dinner with Andre.

Most of the narrative takes place in Sweden, but Knausgaard doesn’t really like Sweden. Based on his descriptions and comments, Norway seems a lot like the Wisconsin I grew up in—very alcoholic and a little rednecky, but charmingly unpretentious and laid-back. Knausgaard’s take on Sweden, on the other hand, is very pretentious, uptight, and cumbersomely woke. I feel like I have a lot in common with Knausgaard: none of his good qualities, like his creative passion for writing; just the bad ones, like his misanthropy, low self-esteem, degrees of cynicism, nihilism, and narcissism, and a longing for solitude. It’s his ability to write with authentic psychological realism that allows me to identify with him, but am I supposed to take some kind of pleasure or satisfaction from that? While reading this book, I didn’t. Book Two is an exploration of, or perhaps more accurately a wallowing in, everything that sucks about marriage and parenthood. Even worse, it just comes across like Knausgaard is blaming everything on his wife (I don’t know if Knausgaard and Linda were ever legally married, but they’re at least common-law spouses). This volume reads like it was written as a deposition to support his claim in a custody battle, except Knausgaard doesn’t want custody; he just wants to be left alone.

I thought My Struggle was worth a second look, but Book Two was even more frustrating and disappointing than Book One. Knausgaard is very good at the descriptive diary stuff, but after about a thousand pages, I feel like I wasted a lot of time on one guy’s obsession with his own not-so-extraordinary life. I don’t know if Knausgaard ever got the freedom from his wife and kids that he so desperately craves in Book Two, but from now on, I for one will leave him alone.

A Drama in Muslin by George Moore

Realistic critique of the Victorian marriage market

The Irish author George Moore (1852–1933) was an open admirer of the writings of French novelist Emile Zola. Influenced by Zola’s school of Naturalism, Moore argued for more realism in Irish and British literature, and he practiced what he preached. His novel A Drama in Muslin was published in 1886. In later editions, Moore changed the title to simply Muslin. A type of cotton fabric, muslin is meant to symbolize the white dresses traditionally worn by young women at balls and parties as they “come out” into society. When actually describing women’s garments in the novel, however, Moore more frequently references silk and satin.

The Bartons are a well-to-do family of Galway. Mr. Barton is an absent-minded painter preoccupied by his own little artistic dream world, presumably living off of inherited wealth. His wife, Mrs. Barton, as they say, wears the pants in the family. The Bartons have two daughters. The eldest, Alice, is a very intelligent young woman, somewhat plain in appearance, who exhibits characteristics of what we today might call a feminist or at least an independent woman. Her younger sister Olive is a beautiful young girly-girl who embraces the traditional doll-like Victorian gender role of the feminine sex. Like all aristocratic young women of their time, the two young ladies’ primary goal in life is to find a suitable husband. Fortunately or not, Ireland had an established and regimented system for accomplishing this. For part of each winter, the girls and their mothers would relocate to Dublin where they would take part in a series of dances, dinners, and parties in which the prospective would associate with eligible prospective grooms. This was known as the “castle season” because some lucky ladies would be invited to balls at Dublin Castle. When the Barton women venture to Dublin for their coming out, the beautiful Olive is hailed as the belle of the season, with a possible royal title in her married future, while Alice is less enthusiastic about the whole process.

Meanwhile, back home in Galway, the Bartons and their set of land-owning aristocrats are having trouble with the Land League. The tenant farmers of Ireland have essentially unionized in an attempt to combat exorbitant rents charged by abusive landlords. Much mention is made of Griffith’s Valuation. This was a survey of land appraisal values in Ireland, in this case serving a purpose similar to today’s Blue Book of automotive values. The tenants demand to pay only the rent appropriate to Griffith’s Valuation, while of course the landlords want more. This class struggle has become violent, leading to murders and destruction of property.

While the inclusion of this social issue is in keeping with the naturalist ethos, the material on the Land League is really just background context in this novel. The main issue under consideration here is the commodification of young women in the marriage market. Moore’s coverage of the social maneuverings involved includes a fair amount of satirical humor. Mrs. Barton is depicted as a calculated schemer trying to pimp her daughters out to the highest bidder. There are, however, more serious aspects to Moore’s consideration of women’s roles. One of the young women is an atheist, another is a lesbian, and another undergoes an unwed pregnancy. While Emile Zola’s novels were more overtly scandalous, Moore does push the envelope of Victorian literature into a realm of realism that was no doubt controversial for its time. Unlike most of his British contemporaries, Moore writes women well. Alice is a commendably well-drawn and intelligent modern woman, but even Olive and her more traditionally feminine cronies come across as quite realistic in this novel. With A Drama in Muslin, Moore manages to deliver a story in which drama and suspense are generated by the question of who will marry whom, while also calling into question and satirizing the restrictively sexist emphasis that Irish society placed upon that very question.

Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez

Latin American Balzac

Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez (1927–2014), winner of the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature, is probably the biggest name in Latin American literature. Intellectuals might argue for Jorge Luis Borges, and general readers might cite Isabel Allende, but people in both camps have probably read a García Márquez novel. His 1961 novel One Hundred Years of Solitude is his best-known work, but Love in the Time of Cholera, published in 1985, is a close second. Both books have sold tens of millions of copies and have been translated into at least 30 languages.

Love in the Time of Cholera is set in an unnamed Colombian town on the coast of the Caribbean Sea. The story takes place from about the 1880s to the 1930s. Dr. Juvenal Urbino, an aged physician, is one of the town’s most distinguished citizens. He and his beautiful wife, Fermina Daza, lead a wealthy and cultured life. A cholera epidemic has recently raged through the region, killing thousands, and still lingers on in some villages. As a medical man, Dr. Urbino is ever on the watch for this deadly disease, but his own untimely demise comes about as the result of an unfortunate accident. At his funeral, an eminent crowd of mourners gathers in the Urbino mansion to offer their convalescences to his wife. One attendee, however, uses this inappropriate moment to declare his undying love to the widow Urbino before her husband’s body is even in the ground.

This lovestruck man, by the name of Florentino Ariza, did not just pop up out of the blue, however. It turns out that he and Fermina Daza have a history that goes back almost a half century. The story then flashes back to their first meeting in their teen years and follows their relationship through the intervening decades. Dr. Urbino obviously has an important part to play in that story as well, and the three form one of the most memorable and moving love triangles in all of literature.

I had mixed feelings towards One Hundred Years of Solitude, but I was immediately captivated by Love in the Time of Cholera. In One Hundred Years, the story revolves around this confusingly byzantine family tree that the reader has to decipher. Love in the Time of Cholera, on the other hand, focuses on three, maybe four people. García Márquez describes these characters in intimate and intricate detail that brings them vividly to life. Along the way, you get some glimpses of life in Colombia during this period in history. The Latin American atmosphere is palpable, but this is still a universal story of love and longing. García Márquez’s prose (judging by the English translation) is rich and artful. Every sentence is full of meaning, and few words are wasted. It’s really a joy to read. The one reservation I have about this novel is some pervy sexual content. One character’s relationship with a much-younger girl would not fly in today’s cancel culture.

Love in the Time of Cholera doesn’t seem to be set in the same fictional universe as One Hundred Years of Solitude. García Márquez is noted as a writer in the style of “magic realism,” but this book is decidedly less magic in character than One Hundred Years. No supernatural events occur in Love in the Time of Cholera, and I prefer it that way. The story is at times quirky and fanciful, and the characters lead exaggerated, larger-than-life lives, but everything that occurs is within the realm of reality. If this novel is considered magic realism, then Balzac invented magic realism, because this is basically a Balzac novel set in Colombia. I wish García Márquez had been as prolific as Balzac because I would gladly read many more novels like this.

In Indian Mexico by Frederick Starr

Pushy American studies the Natives

I’ve traveled around Mexico quite a bit and developed an avid interest in that country’s history, art, and natural beauty. I don’t get down there much anymore, but I do frequently read books on Mexico. Unfortunately, there isn’t a whole lot of Mexican literature available in English translation, not old books by dead guys anyway. There are, however, plenty of old travel narratives by Europeans and Americans who visited that country, beginning with the early reports of Spanish colonists and continuing up through the Mexican Revolution. In Indian Mexico, by Frederick Starr, is one such travel memoir. Starr was an anthropologist and ethnologist with the American Museum of Natural History. He made five or six trips to Mexico between 1896 and 1901 to gather data on the Indigenous inhabitants of the country. He published his findings in several scientific volumes aimed at an audience of scholars. In Indian Mexico, published in 1908, is the so-called popular narrative of his travels aimed at the general reading public.

The goal of Starr’s expeditions was to take measurements, photographs, and plaster casts of Natives of the “pure blood Indians” in different parts of the country in order to compile an ethnographic physiological profile of the various tribes or nations in Mexico. He travelled all over the country with a small team that included an interpreter, a photographer, a plaster worker, and usually one or two Indian laborers as assistants. Starr’s studies brought him to many small and remote villages, although all of the Indians were familiar with Whites and assimilated into the Spanish colonial culture to varying degrees. In hindsight, the ethnographic techniques of Starr’s party seem rather amateurish, but their documentation was well-intentioned and at least served as a forerunner for later, more extensive research. Many pictures taken by Starr’s photographer are included in the book. The quality of printed photographs wasn’t so great in 1908, so it’s hard to make out much detail, but you get a basic feel for the scenery, the dress of the native inhabitants, and their religious festivals.

In a typical chapter, Starr and his crew arrive in a predominantly Indian town. His first comment is that everyone is drunk. Armed with letters of introduction from provincial governors and other “jefes,” Starr expects the locals to treat him like a visiting dignitary, and he becomes petulant when they don’t. He then sets about measuring and photographing the inhabitants. If anyone decides they don’t want to be measured, Starr threatens to tattle to the governor and have them imprisoned. Eventually, Starr always gets his way, as he smugly relates. Almost every chapter has one of these chest-thumping episodes. Starr clearly wants the reader to think he’s a cool tough guy, but it just comes across as pathetic. Aren’t these people’s lives hard enough without him ordering them around like some Great White Lord? The whole book is a self-aggrandizing manual on how to coerce poor Indians into doing what you want.

Starr does, on the other hand, provide decent descriptions of the scenery he encountered in his travels. He explains the different handicrafts, folk arts, and agricultural productions of each Indian group he visits, and also describes in detail the typical garments worn in each village. The first half of the book is mostly the gripes of a bitchy traveler, as mentioned above, but the second half of the book is an improvement and provides more information on local customs and culture. This isn’t one of the best Mexican travel narratives I’ve read, but I still did experience some vicarious wanderlust from Starr’s tour through old pre-Revolution Mexico. For alternatives, I would suggest Alexander von Humboldt’s Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain (1811), the brief Travels to Oaxaca by Nicolas-Joseph Thiéry de Menonville (1812), and The Ancient Cities of the New World by Désiré Charnay (1887).

One thing about Starr that I admire is that he edited and published an anthology of 19th-century Mexican literature entitled Readings from Modern Mexican Authors (1904). English-language readers get hardly any opportunities to learn about Mexico’s pre-Revolution writers, and Starr’s anthology may be the best and perhaps the only on-ramp to that subject. 

The Inner House by Walter Besant

A love letter to class inequality

The English author Walter Besant (1836–1901), though generally not known as a pioneer in the science fiction genre, did publish two novels set in dystopian futures. The Inner House, published in 1888, is one; the other being The Revolt of Man (1882). The Inner House opens with a German scientist calling a press conference in London. He announces that he has discovered a process to stop aging. This means immortality for mankind, at least as far as natural causes are concerned. Those undergoing this process will be frozen at their present age and able to survive for centuries, excepting any fatal accidents.

Flash forward to hundreds of years later. Most of the same characters are still alive. Society (the whole Earth or just England? it’s unclear) is now ruled by a socialist regime governed by an authoritarian intellectual elite, the Holy College. All individualism has been stamped out, all problems have been solved, and a tremendous apathy has settled over mankind. Humans have little interest in doing anything except eating, working, and sleeping. The past has been forgotten, until one young woman starts researching the 19th century. This sparks a small rebellion of disgruntled citizens who want what the past had to offer: individuality, capitalism, and love.

Besant’s intention with The Inner House seems to be a heavy-handed critique of socialism. In that regard, it reads like a precursor to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, but without the sense of humor. It’s never convincingly explained how the discovery of immortality would lead to such a bizarre and extreme system of socialism, nor does the apathy and inactivity of the citizens ever seem logical. If they have so much time on their hands, and so little work to do, why wouldn’t they spend that time learning and amusing themselves, or striving for achievements in the arts and sciences? Instead, Besant depicts a very unintentionally cartoony caricature of a socialist society.

These rebels who idolize the past—what do they miss the most? For the women, it’s fancy clothes and shiny jewels. And hey, remember when men used to go off to war and kill each other? That was really cool! The men, of course, miss beautiful women in fancy clothes. What both genders long for more than anything, however, is the beloved British system of inequality. What I hate most about English literature is its relentless reinforcement of an oppressive class system in which one person is born with better “blood” than another. No nation buys into the trickle-down effect of the divine right of kings more than England. Wealthy people are born good and noble. Poor people are born evil. Hard work and education won't save you. Born a servant, always a servant. All Victorian literature endorses this genetic feudalism to some extent, but few authors or novels are as blatant about it as Besant and The Inner House. All of the rebels who so idolize the past are former “gentlefolk” who would no doubt prefer the way things used to be. One of the rebels defiantly scolds the Holy College with “You have made us all equal who were born unequal,” as if that were such a bad thing. (It’s not the “unequal” to which I object, but rather the “born.”) The villain of the novel is a former servant born in poverty, so naturally wicked. The hero is a former gentleman, so naturally virtuous.

Maybe The Inner House was the first novel to show a dystopian future in which individuality was prohibited. Since then, however, there’s been plenty more, and all of them better: Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1921), Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), Ayn Rand’s Anthem (1938), and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), to name but a few. Therefore, there’s no reason to read The Inner House. I read it so you don’t have to.

The Copernicus of Antiquity: Aristarchus of Samos by Sir Thomas Heath

Very brief and awfully arcane

In his popular book and television series of 1980, Cosmos, astronomer and author Carl Sagan includes a chapter/episode on Aristarchus of Samos, an ancient Greek scientist. In the 3rd century BC, Aristarchus conceived the heliocentric model of our solar system, meaning the Earth and other planets revolve around the sun. We know this because Archimedes informs us of Aristarchus’s accomplishment in one of his scientific publications written about a century later. Aristarchus was not able to convince many of his contemporaries, however, and, like much of ancient Greek scholarship, his work was forgotten for centuries, only to be rediscovered in the Renaissance. In 1543, the Polish astronomer Nicolas Copernicus established and mathematically proved the heliocentric model in his publication On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres, and the rest, as they say, is history. In Sagan’s summary of Aristarchus’s career, his heliocentric theory was only one of the ancient Greek’s precocious discoveries. In many ways he was a scientist way ahead of his time.

A desire to learn more about this interesting character led me to The Copernicus of Antiquity, published in 1920, a brief biography of Aristarchus of Samos by Sir Thomas Heath. This book is only about 60 pages long, and the biography is further shortened by the fact that only the second half of the book is actually about Aristarchus. The first half of the book is a brief recap of earlier Greek astronomers and their discoveries, including such ancient cosmographers as Thales, Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, and roughly a dozen others.

The Copernicus of Antiquity was published in a series of books entitled Pioneers of Progress: Men of Science, published by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge in London. It was likely adapted from an earlier, more extensive book by Heath from 1913. I would assume the Men of Science series was intended for a general non-academic reading audience, but this book certainly isn’t written that way. A great deal of prior knowledge is assumed on the part of the reader. Heath writes as if he expects his audience to have read much ancient scientific literature in the original Greek. He also expects the reader to have memorized all of the mathematical operations in The Elements, Euclid’s classic book on geometry. Granted, many college students of 1920 would have studied Greek, but most were neither professional classicists nor mathematicians. While it’s a well-known fact these days that the Earth is 93 million miles from the Sun, few, if asked, could conjure up the angle at which the Sun subtends the zodiac circle, but Heath writes as if this and many similar astronomical measurements were common knowledge. The book is full of complex mathematical computations that will be over the head of curious casual readers.

Of course, the fault is probably not with Heath but rather with whoever edited the Pioneers of Progress series. They took a full-length scholarly monograph intended for classical philologists and mathematicians and condensed it down to a pamphlet size, but they didn’t adjust the content for a pamphlet audience. I learned much more about Aristarchus from Sagan’s chapter in Cosmos than I did from this book by Heath. With the exception of a few facts here and there, I found it a waste of time. If an overview of ancient Greek astronomy is what you’re looking for, undoubtedly better texts exist than this.

Crashing Suns by Edmond Hamilton

Typical star wars fare

American science fiction writer Edmond Hamilton’s career spanned from the late 1920s through the 1960s. His novella Crashing Suns was published in the August and September 1928 issues of the pulp magazine Weird Tales. This is one of Hamilton’s first handful of published writings. He was a prolific contributor to Weird Tales, making his debut in 1926 and eventually publishing 79 stories and novellas in that magazine.

Crashing Suns takes place about a hundred thousand years in the future. Mankind has colonized all the planets of the solar system. (No mention is made of Martians or other alien races.) The narrator, Jan Tor, is a captain in the Interplanetary Patrol, the law enforcement agency for the solar system. He gets summoned by the Supreme Council, the governing body of the League of Planets, to return to Earth for an emergency meeting. In this council meeting, it is revealed that a nearby star system, that of the red giant Alto, has changed its course and is heading towards our sun. In a few months, Alto will collide with our solar system, wiping out all human life.

Much like Bruce Willis in Armageddon, Jan Tor is tasked with leading a mission to stop this catastrophe. Engineers on Earth have created the first-ever interstellar spaceship, in which Jan Tor will lead a small team to Alto to investigate the cause of the red giant’s wandering trajectory. After literally five minutes of preparation, Jan Tor and his crew load into the new spacecraft and take off for Alto, a voyage that will take a few weeks. What they find when they get there will be no surprise to anyone, but in the interest of avoiding spoilers, I won’t say. For the most part, the story proceeds as expected from that point forward. Crashing Suns is the first in a series of seven stories featuring the Interstellar Patrol, presumably the successor to this story’s Interplanetary Patrol.

I had read a couple of Hamilton’s stories in the past and found them to be quite original and innovative. Crashing Suns, however, is very familiar fare. That’s likely due to the fact that it was so early in Hamilton’s career that he was still finding his way, as was the science fiction genre in general. Much of the sci-fi published in the pulp magazines of the 1920s all reads alike. One can tell from Crashing Suns, however, that Hamilton is a good writer in terms of characterization and suspense, but the general plot is common to many science fiction stories and every sci-fi movie since Star Wars. I will continue to look into Hamilton’s work, since what little I’ve read indicates a promising talent, but next time I’m choosing a story I’ll aim closer to the 1960s than the 1920s.

The German Genius: Europe’s Third Renaissance, the Second Scientific Revolution, and the Twentieth Century by Peter Watson

A quarter millennium of rich intellectual history reassessed

British historian, novelist, and journalist Peter Watson has published over two dozen books over the past 50 years. He is best known for his nonfiction books on intellectual history or the history of ideas. Rather than tell the history of the world through its wars, dynasties, and diplomacy, Watson examines world history through the arts, sciences, literature, and social sciences. In his 2010 book The German Genius, Watson explores the prodigious intellectual achievements of Germanic Europe, a realm that includes not just Germany but other German-speaking lands, including Prussia, Austria, and parts of Switzerland, Poland, the Czech Republic, Denmark, and more. The book covers a time span from 1750 to the present. In the 18th and 19th centuries, Germany (collectively speaking) led the world in a vast assortment of scholarly disciplines: philosophy, physics, biology, medicine, mathematics, chemistry, engineering, literature, history, sociology, psychology, and music to name a few. Germany’s intellectual profile took the ultimate turn for the worst in the 20th century, however, with the Nazi atrocities of World War II and the persecution of academics under that authoritarian regime. Watson examines how this nation stacked with geniuses fell from the zenith to the nadir of intellectualism, and how that fall has affected Germany’s intellectual legacy.

I had previously read Watson’s 2022 book The French Mind, in which he gives a similarly comprehensive, centuries-spanning overview of French thought and culture. I would assume his latest book, The British Imagination, does the same for the UK, but I haven’t yet read it. The German Genius is a better book than The French Mind, which tried too hard to advance a specific thesis and was only partially successful. The German Genius mostly just lets the Germans’ achievements speak for themselves. While The French Mind pushed a very feminist argument, feminists will not be happy at all with The German Genius, where maybe five women are mentioned for every thousand males. In both his French and German studies, Watson makes the convincing case that Britain and the United States could learn a thing or two from the way these cultures view the world.

Of course, the elephant in the room is the Third Reich. Watson doesn’t excuse or deny in any way the evils perpetrated by the Nazis or the horrors of the Holocaust. He calls out many scholars and intellectuals who supported the Nazis. The question Watson grapples with in this book is to what extent should the Nazis’ wrongs negate German achievements before and after the Third Reich. He traces a continuum of intellectual cause and effect from Immanuel Kant to the present day. Romanticism led to inwardness, which led to cultural pessimism. Social Darwinism led to nationalism and antiSemitism. The horrors of the Nazi years are a part of this continuum, not removed from it, but how much of this spectrum of thought should be darkened by that black mark, and where exactly is the line of demarcation? Friedrich Nietzsche’s work had philosophical value, for example, but was co-opted and misconstrued by the Nazis, thus tainting his name. Martin Heidigger, on the other hand, was a willing collaborator with the Nazis. Does that render his philosophy totally invalid?

Watson asserts that, because of animosity generated by the World Wars, many Germans who made important contributions to knowledge and society have undeservedly fallen into obscurity. He even includes an appendix on 35 semi-forgotten Germans we should all know better. Watson also points out the important contributions to American and British science, arts, and culture made by German immigrants who fled the Nazi regime.

Watson is really great at writing these sweeping historical syntheses. He summarizes vast quantities of information and explains complex concepts in engaging and accessible prose, all the while pointing out interesting connections and drawing insightful conclusions. I come away from each of his books with a long list of interesting people, ideas, and books to explore further. I enjoy Watson’s books so much, I purposefully read them slowly too make them last longer. I would suggest starting with his worldwide histories Ideas and The Modern Mind before venturing into his regional studies like The German Genius and The French Mind.

The Great Return by Arthur Machen

An underdeveloped quickie by an otherwise great author

Welsh author Arthur Machen (1863–1947) is a respected old-school master of the fantasy and horror genres. His novella The Great Return was published in 1915. Because it is quite short, it probably just barely qualifies as a novella. It is so short, in fact, that it’s difficult to summarize the plot without giving away any secrets or surprises.

The narrator, a Welshman, frequently scans the local newspapers for items about “remarkable occurrences.” This man’s profession is unclear, but he has an avid enough interest in the occult to investigate matters that suggest an inkling of the supernatural. Vague mentions in the papers of unusual goings-on lead him to the coastal village of Llantrisant. Some mysterious lights have been seen out at sea, and some folks have heard the peal of a bell from no apparent source. That’s about all I can tell you. Machen draws on a combination of Christian mysticism and old Welsh pagan folklore for this story. This isn’t really horror because it’s not really scary, but it does fit into the Twilight Zone range of spooky fantasy.

The Great Return, unfortunately, reads more like The Mediocre Return. This is more of an idea for a story than an actual story. One can imagine a Stephen King novel based on this premise, and knowing Stephen King, that novel would be way to long. As Machen presents it here, however, it’s way too short. Not much happens in the first three chapters. Some minor rumblings occur in chapters four and five. Then in chapter six it takes a big leap and goes full-on occult fantasy in the seventh and final chapter. The payoff is too little too late. A big problem with this tale is the way it’s narrated. The story is related by a long-winded narrator who’s full of himself and digresses into subjects you don’t want to hear about rather than focusing on the miraculous supernatural events at hand. His personality is obtrusive. A disembodied third-person narration would have been more successful.

I only recently discovered Machen, and I’ve been singing his praises in this blog over the past year. His novels The Great God Pan, The Terror, The Hill of Dreams, and in particular The Three Impostors are all very good. The Great Return is the first piece of writing by Machen that hasn’t impressed me. It’s not going to stop me, however, from continuing to work my way through his corpus of writings. 

Penguin Island by Anatole France

Satire in the tradition of Voltaire

The French writer Anatole France (1884–1924) won the 1921 Nobel Prize in Literature. His novel Penguin Island, published in 1909, is probably his best-remembered work, at least in the minds of English-language readers. In this comedic and critical novel, France establishes himself as the inheritor of Voltaire’s role as the great satirist of French literature.

Some time in the Middle Ages, a Breton monk named Maël (later Saint Maël) decides it is his mission to sail forth to unknown lands and spread the gospel of Christ to the savages. His boat drifts way off course, and he ends up in the Southern Hemisphere, where he lands on an island full of penguins. At 99 years of age, with failing sight and hearing, Maël thinks the penguins are an Indigenous race of people, so he baptizes them into the Catholic Church. The only witnesses to this sacrament are God and His angels in Heaven, who debate how to rectify Maël’s erroneous baptism of animals. God solves the problem by turning all the penguins into humans, albeit naked uncivilized humans. Maël then tows the Penguins back to Europe, where they establish a new nation in the area of what we know as France.

Spanning centuries in the history of the Penguins, the book is divided into eight related stories taking place in eight different time periods. The early chapters of the book, in which the newly humanized penguins are learning the ways of civilization, are the most funny and entertaining. France seems to be lampooning some of the Edenic noble-savage pipe dreams of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Like Voltaire’s Candide, however, Penguin Island doesn’t aim its mocking barbs at just one target but rather scatters its shots to make different satirical points in every chapter. In this book everything is game for absurdity and worthy of tongue-in-cheek scorn.

After a while, the fact that these people started out as animals becomes irrelevant. The Penguins of Penguinia are simply another nation of humans, often a surrogate for the French. Some targets for spoofing include religion in general and the Catholic Church in particular, capitalism, feudalism, gender roles and sexual inequality, various factions in the modern French political landscape, and even Dante’s Divine Comedy. The most extensive parody is directed at the Dreyfus affair of the 1890s, in which a character named Pyrot is a substitute for Dreyfus and Columban for Emile Zola. To a French reader, the characters and events being satirized in this book would be readily decipherable, but it’s not always easy for an American reader to recognize all the players of every political plot. That doesn’t become too much of an obstacle, however, because enough of the humor and derision is universal to human nature and society, not French-specific.

The early formative years of the Penguins are laugh-out-loud silly at times, but the latter, more modern episodes of their history take the form of more wryly stated indictments of hypocrisy. There is also a science fiction element to the book as the final chapters take place in the future. After all the satire and cynicism, France ends the book on a surprisingly inspirational note of hope. Penguin Island is a work of great insight and much wisdom, but perhaps presented too cleverly for the non-French reader to grasp all in the first read. I think I’ll give it a second look, eventually, because it seems worthy of further scrutiny.   

Mathematical Puzzles by Martin Gardner

An early collection of brain teasing quickies

Martin Gardner was a popular and prolific nonfiction author of the latter half of the twentieth century. Just as Carl Sagan was the great popularizer of science during that time period, Gardner was the great popularizer of mathematics. For over 25 years, he wrote a column in Scientific American magazine entitled Mathematical Games, in which he presented all sorts of mathematical curiosities and puzzles and educated readers on the mathematical laws and theories behind them. These columns were collected into over a dozen books that enlarged his audience well beyond the subscription list of Scientific American.

Mathematical Puzzles, an early collection of Gardner’s mathematical writings, was published in 1961 and later rereleased by Dover Publications in 1986 as Entertaining Mathematical Puzzles. The puzzles in this volume are not taken from Gardner’s column in Scientific American. Some of them previously appeared in a magazine called Science World, for which Gardner also wrote a column entitled On the Light Side from 1957 to 1959. These are not the chapter-length mathematical explorations from Mathematical Games but rather what one typically finds in a collection of brain teasers: items of one to two pages, essentially a word problem followed by an explanation of its solution. Altogether, there are about 60 puzzles in this book. They are arranged into ten categories such as money puzzles, speed puzzles, plane and solid geometry puzzles, and probability puzzles.

Compared to his writings for Scientific American, these little brain teasers are not Gardner’s best work. It’s amazing how many of these puzzles conclude with “Nope. It can’t be solved.” You read the first page, wrack your brain to try to come up with a solution, and then turn the page to find out there’s no viable answer. Where’s the fun in that? If it were one or two puzzles, that would be reasonable, but it seems like nearly half the book is unsolvable. Another frustrating aspect of brain teasers in general is that they are essentially mathematics written with words, and if the author isn’t exactly precise and clear in the wording of the problem, then you end up feeling like you’ve been cheated or you wasted your time. Gardner’s guilty of that as well in a number of these riddles. Such occasions call to mind the questions on your old school math tests that no one in the class got right because the teacher worded them poorly.

Nevertheless, there’s still fun to be had here and math to be learned. Every puzzle has its little twist that forces you to think outside the box of straightforward solutions. As the aforementioned list of categories indicates, there are little lessons on geometry, probability, and arithmetic. These are not easy math puzzles, but you don’t need to know algebra or calculus to figure them out. The most unfamiliar area for most will probably be the little section on topology. Gardner also describes some games of the abstract strategy variety (think checkers or tic tac toe, for example) that can be played with pencil and paper, coins, or other everyday items.

The material here may not be Gardner’s most ingenious writings, but this little book still does its job adequately. The next time I download a volume of Gardner’s mathematical puzzles, however, I’ll make sure it’s one of the 15 volumes from his Scientific American series. 

Reeds and Mud by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez

Compelling Spanish regional naturalism

Reeds and Mud, a novel by Spanish author Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, was originally published in 1902 under the Spanish title of Cañas y barro. Blasco Ibáñez was a realist writer, and sometimes a naturalist (a specific form of realism), and Reeds and Mud qualifies as both. He was born in Valencia, a city on the Mediterranean Coast of Eastern Spain, and most of his fiction takes place within that district. Reeds and Mud is set in the town of Palmar in the Albufera region of Valencia. The Albufera is a large lake or freshwater lagoon, surrounded by marshes and separated from the ocean by a thin strip of land. It is to these marshes that the title of the novel refers, as well as to the homes of the area’s inhabitants. At the time this story takes place, about half of Palmar’s residents are still living in traditional fishermen’s huts of reeds and mud, while the other half resides in more modern wood-frame houses.

For centuries, the primary mode of life in the Albufera has been fishing, with eels being particularly bountiful in these waters. The residents of Palmar also do quite a bit of hunting, though much of it in the form of poaching in a nearby forest where they’re not supposed to venture. At the time of this story, agriculture is starting to gain a foothold in the region. The novel focuses on three generations of one Palmar family. The grandfather, Tío Paloma, is an elderly boatman, fisherman, and hunter who embodies all the traditional customs and lifestyle of the Albufera. His son, Tío Tóni, on the other hand, dreams of being a successful landowner and struggles to coax a profitable crop out of the marshy soil. This contrast in lifestyles­—old ways vs. new, fishing vs. agriculture—causes conflict between father and son. Meanwhile, the grandson, Tonet, is a lazy ne’er-do-well who would prefer to avoid work altogether; neither fishing nor farming for him. His grandfather feels some affinity towards the young man, but his father considers him a disgrace..

In addition to the drama within the family, Tonet is involved in a love triangle that brings further conflict and suspense into the story. There’s more going on in this sunny fishing village than just picturesque rural living. Blasco Ibáñez turns over some stones to reveal the darker side of this community, and the story occasionally ventures into some frightening scenes. Naturalist authors like Emile Zola were often criticized for their vulgar and disturbing subject matter, but Blasco Ibáñez includes one image in this novel that is so graphic and horrifying I would be surprised if this book wasn’t banned by the censors of its day.

The Albufera region has no doubt changed much in the eleven decades since Blasco Ibáñez wrote this novel. What’s great about Reeds and Mud, in addition to its compelling story, is that it functions as a historical document of the people, customs, and natural environment­ of this specific time and place. That’s one of the valuable aspects of the naturalist novel—when done right, it functions as a sort of time-capsule for historic preservation, like a National Geographic article but deeper and more personally engaging. Almost every chapter of Reeds and Mud centers around a traditional public event, like a religious festival or the drawing of lots to assign fishing grounds. Instead of photographs, the reader gets the rich empirical description of reality characteristic of naturalist texts. Blasco Ibáñez was one of Spain’s great realist chroniclers, along with Emilia Pardo Bazán and Benito Peréz Galdos.

Since I discovered Blasco Ibáñez a couple years ago, he has become one of my go-to authors for fiction. I can always count on him for a rewarding read. As good as Reeds and Mud is, I like his novels The Cabin (La Barraca) (1898) and The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1916) even better.   

No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy

McCarthy does Elmore Leonard

Few American authors garnered as much critical acclaim over the last half century as Cormac McCarthy (1933–2023). He published his first novel in 1965, but it wasn’t until about 30 years later that he achieved any commercial success. I rarely quote Wikipedia, but this was too good to pass up: “As of 1991, none of McCarthy’s novels had sold more than 5,000 hardcover copies, and for most of his career, he did not even have an agent.” He hit it big in 1992 with All the Pretty Horses and has since become a household name. Not only the appeal, but the style of his work seemed to get more commercial in his latter years. He started out as the new William Faulkner, but by the time he died, it seems he had discovered an affinity for pulp fiction. McCarthy’s novel No Country for Old Men was published in 1992. The film version, made 15 years later, won the Oscar for Best Picture. This book is a crime novel, similar in style and subject matter to Elmore Leonard’s work, but as he did before with Blood Meridian, McCarthy instills this gritty, violent story with the deep thoughts of highbrow literature.

In the borderlands of Southern Texas, Llewelyn Moss is out hunting antelope when he spots a group of trucks parked out in the middle of nowhere. Upon closer inspection, he finds the site littered with dead bodies. In an apparent drug deal gone bad, it seems that both sides have massacred each other. As is often the case in such scenes, there’s a briefcase full of money on site. Moss absconds with what he estimates to be 2.4 million dollars. The drug cartel naturally wants its money back, so it sends men after Moss. Among those hunting him down is a mystery man named Anton Chigurh, a cold-blooded assassin who uses an unusual weapon to make his kills, though he’s pretty good with a shotgun as well. One way to get to Moss is through his wife, so she has to go on the run as well. Ed Tom Bell, the local sheriff, considers it is duty to serve and protect the citizens of his county, including Mr. and Mrs. Moss. He sets out investigating the case, hoping to catch up with Moss before the killers find him.

Much of the plot takes place in motel rooms and highway diners on Texas desert roads, where gunfights frequently ensue. There are two aspects of the book that elevate this novel from a genre thriller to a great work of American literature. First is the character of Chigurh, a force of nature when it comes to dealing death, but also a philosopher when it comes to dealing dialogue. Second are the monologues of Ed Tom Bell that are interspersed in italics throughout the primary third-person narrative. These monologues alone could constitute a book worthy of a Pulitzer. Bell contemplates his mortality, old age, marriage, his regrets as a law enforcement officer, a former soldier, and a man, and how the world has changed for the worse on his watch.

Similar to Leonard’s writing, No Country for Old Men is written in curt, choppy prose—sometimes so curt and choppy that it’s a little tough to figure out what’s going on. It reads like an exercise in using as few words as possible. There are no visual or biographical descriptions of the characters, you just have to figure out who they are by what they say. The dialogue is brilliantly written, again calling to mind Leonard, but without so much overt humor. The manner of speech employed by the characters, intelligently rendered in authentically down-home diction, is also reminiscent of Charles Portis’s great Western novel True Grit.

Most literary critics don’t consider No Country for Old Men to be McCarthy at his best because it doesn’t have the Faulknerian profundity of his earlier novels. For that same reason, it may be his most accessible book to an audience of general readers raised on crime films and Westerns. This is definitely not a conventional thriller, but I was riveted to every page. I’ve liked McCarthy’s books in the past, and I like Leonard, so to me this novel was the best of both worlds.

The Green Hills of Earth by Robert A. Heinlein

The mundane aspects of space exploration

American science fiction author Robert A. Heinlein wrote a series of roughly two dozen short stories and novels known as his Future History. These works were all originally published in fiction magazines such as Astounding Science Fiction or The Saturday Evening Post before being gathered into book-length collections. The first collected volume of Heinlein’s Future History fiction, published in 1950, was The Man Who Sold the Moon. The second collection, published in 1951, is The Green Hills of Earth. This latter volume contains ten short stories that were originally published in periodicals from 1941 to 1949. The book’s final selection, “Logic of Empire,” clocking in at 41 pages, is the longest entry in the volume. The rest of the pieces included are truly short stories in the 10- to 20-page range.

Many consider Heinlein to be the greatest science fiction author of the 20th century. Given such high praise, I found The Man Who Sold the Moon rather disappointing. Most of the stories were more about business and logistical matters than science and exploration. What was missing was any daring speculative thinking, deep thoughts, or any sense of wonder. In his desire to make his future realistic, Heinlein focuses on very mundane aspects of space travel and extraterrestrial colonization. For the most part, The Green Hills of Earth continues this prosaic approach. “Gentlemen, Be Seated,” for example, is about pressurized tunnels below the surface of the moon, and what happens when one springs a minor leak. “Delilah and the Space-Rigger” is set at the construction site of a space station, but the story is essentially about a human resources matter.

The first six stories in this volume are mostly about mankind’s base on the moon, the better part of which is built underground. There’s some mining going on. It’s not terribly exciting stuff. With story number seven, however, the book takes a turn for the better. In “—We Also Walk Dogs,” which takes place around the 1990s of Heinlein’s Future History timeline, mankind has established colonies on many planets and moons of the solar system, and some of those new worlds have Indigenous inhabitants—Martians, Venusians, etc. This story is essentially about a glorified interplanetary concierge service, but it provides an intriguing introductory look into Heinlein’s vision of solar system colonization.

The book’s title selection is about an interplanetary hobo-troubadour poet, kind of a Woody Guthrie or Leadbelly of outer space, who writes a famous folk song, “The Green Hills of Earth.” The aforementioned “Logic of Empire,” is the other notable piece in this volume. Two well-to-do Earthlings argue over whether the system of indentured servitude that prevails on Venus qualifies as slavery or not. Then the pair of friends get drunk and accidentally sign themselves to long-term contracts of hard labor on Venus, a jungle planet with amphibious natives. It’s really more of a prison story than a sci-fi story, but sci-fi has often been used to comment on social issues, and here Heinlein uses his dystopian Venus to critique colonialism and the exploitation of developing nations. I found the blunt pessimism of the ending admirably unexpected.

So far I haven’t been overly impressed by Heinlein’s Future History. Personally, I prefer the Terro-Human Future History of H. Beam Piper, which may not be as scientifically realistic as Heinlein’s universe, but it’s a lot more fun to read. Given his high renown, I’m guessing Heinlein has better work in his oeuvre. I suspect that his stand-alone novels, like Stranger in a Strange Land or Starship Troopers, are a whole different kettle of fish, so I’ll probably head in that direction next.

Stories in this collection

Delilah and the Space-Rigger

Space Jockey

The Long Watch

Gentlemen, Be Seated

The Black Pits of Luna

It’s Great to Be Back

“—We Also Walk Dogs”

Ordeal in Space

The Green Hills of Earth

Logic of Empire

Figures of the World: The Naturalist Novel and Transnational Form by Christopher Laing Hill

Zola’s effect on American and Japanese literature

If you read this blog religiously (which I’m sure no one does), you’ll know that one brand of fiction that Old Books by Dead Guys really likes is Naturalism. I started this blog by reviewing the complete works of Emile Zola, Frank Norris, and Jack London, all of them naturalist writers. The naturalist movement, spearheaded by Zola, was an offshoot of realism. It’s known for hyper-detailed and brutally objective descriptions of settings and social milieus. Naturalist authors often have an atheistic bent; they emphasize how human lives are influenced and governed by scientific laws of evolution and heredity, physiology, sociology, and psychology. I’m a well-read fan of French and American literary naturalism and have started to branch out into the naturalist literature of other nations. Wanting to learn more about naturalist authors in other parts of the world led me to Christopher Laing Hill’s 2020 book Figures of the World: The Naturalist Novel and Transnational Form. This book, published by Northwestern University Press, is available as an open access publication, meaning you can download a pdf ebook for free (or you can purchase a print copy).

What I was hoping to get out of Hill’s book was an international list of authors and books for further reading, and I certainly got that. Some of those books may have never been translated into English, but if even a quarter of them are, they ought to keep me busy reading for years. Hill focuses primarily on French, American, and Japanese literature because he reads in those languages. The bulk of the book is comparing novels from those nations to show how Zola’s ideas spread from country to country. His detailed examination of works by Zola, London, Norris, Theodore Dreiser, Kosugi Tengai, and Tayama Katai brings up many interesting and thought-provoking points. Like most literary critics, Hill gives away the endings of all the novels he discusses, but I’ve already read all the French and American books, and it’s unlikely I’ll ever read the Japanese. In addition, Hill does mention and briefly discuss many other works from other countries. He gives particularly good overviews of Spanish and Latin American naturalism and East Asian naturalism. Hill says almost nothing about British and German literature, but he does reference plenty of naturalist authors from other European nations such as Denmark, Greece, and Slovenia. 

Having an avid interest in this subject, I naturally liked much of what Hill had to say. As a nonacademic, however, I can’t say I like the way he says it. Hill is a PhD writing for other PhDs, and the text is the jargon-heavy academic prose you’d expect for an audience of specialized professors. It drives me nuts how many words are used to make a point, how many times the points are made over and over again, and the pretentious, obscure vocabulary (ugh, the title). The word “figure” is used over 400 times to mean just about anything and everything. There are chapters on “the body figure” (anatomical imagery), “the Nana figure” (sexually liberated and/or independent women), and “the social figure” (just about any time and place, as far as I can tell). When Hill comments on the work of other Zola scholars, he points out exceptions to any proffered thesis as if to nullify its value. He then seems hesitant to say anything concrete himself for fear that his arguments will be likewise picked apart. Every statement has to be made with heterogenous multiplicity, so that nothing can ever be nailed down as fact, theory, or even an explicit opinion. 

Naturalist literature can be enjoyed and appreciated by nonacademic readers, not just the intelligentsia within academia. As intended by the author, this scholarly monograph only addresses the latter category. For the nonacademic audience, if nothing else, the bibliography and the index suggest myriad opportunities for further reading. With this blog I try to turn a few readers on to some readworthy naturalist literature, and hopefully the knowledge I’ve gleaned from Figures of the World will help me do that.

The Power of a Lie by Johan Bojer

Decent Norwegian realism built on a flawed premise

Johan Bojer (1872–1959) is a Norwegian novelist who achieved some popular and critical success in his native country. Several of his books have been translated into English. His novel The Power of a Lie (Troens magt) was published in 1903.

The story takes place in a rural provincial Norwegian town. I don’t believe the town is ever named, but it’s somewhere in the vicinity of Lake Mjøsa and the city of Lillehammer. Knut Norby is one of the wealthiest landowners in this region. In years prior, had invested in the business venture of a neighbor named Wangen. Norby co-signed a loan to help Wangen establish a brickworks. Desiring to keep this financial dealing a secret from his wife, Norby hasn’t told anyone about his involvement in Wangen’s business. Now that brickworks has failed, gone bankrupt, and the creditors have come a-calling. Norby is liable for about two thousand krone—not an exorbitant sum for a man of his standing.

Since nobody knows that Norby has co-signed as surety on Wangen’s behalf, a rumor gets started that Wangen forged Norby’s signature on the document. Norby does nothing to dispel this rumor, and, as the story of forgery spreads, he becomes hesitant to counteract the ever-growing lie. Hoping to avoid the ire of his wife and some embarrassment in the face of his friends and neighbors, Norby decides to affirm the accusation. Thus accused of forgery, Wangen faces prison time. If the forgery is disproved, however, Norby could also face a prison sentence for bringing a false accusation against an innocent man.

I had previously read Bojer’s novel The Great Hunger and liked it well enough. I was less satisfied, however, with The Power of a Lie. The premise on which the plot is based just seemed unreasonable to me. Once the lie gets started, then the book becomes a good naturalist novel with realistic human behavior and an inside look at Norwegian village life. Establishing the lie in the first place, however, seems to me a hurdle over which the novel stumbles. First of all, Norby himself doesn’t come up with the lie, so that lessens his moral culpability somewhat. Then, the fact that he would reinforce this false rumor feels unrealistic and farfetched. I’m certainly not a paragon of moral virtue, but I wouldn’t send a man to prison just to pacify my wife and avoid a little embarrassment. The hearings, depositions, and trials would be more trouble than it’s worth. This whole crisis seemed avoidable. Norby could have easily come out with the truth early on, and he really wouldn’t have suffered much from it. Instead, the novel needed a plot premise to get the snowball rolling, and here that plot premise feels forced.

The novel does have its moments, however. Potential witnesses face compelling moral dilemmas of whether they should testify of not. There are some interesting revelations of class struggle in the story. Within this isolated country corner, Norby is somewhat of an aristocrat, a feudal lord of sorts who governs over a corps of peasant laborers. He has conservative views on capital and labor, while more liberal views are starting to encroach into his domain. Wangen, on the other hand, is decidedly less well-off, and the destruction of his reputation clearly creates a financial burden on him. His wife, who suffers along side him, is a particularly sympathetic character. The Power of a Lie is a decent but flawed work of Norwegian literature. Bojer’s probably got better novels in him, but I can more consistently count on the works of his countrymen Knut Hamsun and Alexander Kielland.