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.

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.

The Winter of Our Discontent by John Steinbeck

The author is out of his element

Ethan Hawley, the protagonist and sometimes narrator of The Winter of Our Discontent, lives with his wife and two kids in New Baytown, a small town on Long Island, New York. Although Ethan is the descendant of glorious whalers, pilgrims, and pirates who founded New Baytown centuries ago, he has since descended from the distinguished heights of his ancestors. Due to the failure of some family business ventures, Ethan finds himself working as a clerk in a grocery store owned by an Italian immigrant and struggling to make ends meet for his family. With such a lowly position comes a fair amount of shame, and everyone in town seems to want Ethan to pick himself up by his bootstraps, aim for higher prospects, and live up to the aristocratic status of his ancestry.

Published in 1961, The Winter of Our Discontent is John Steinbeck’s last novel (not counting a book of King Arthur legends that was published after his death). This book is a bit of an oddball entry in Steinbeck’s oeuvre, for a number of reasons. Like many late-career artists, it seems that Steinbeck wanted to try something different in order to break out of his pigeonholes, but, also like many late-career artists, this effort is nowhere near as good as most of his earlier works.

Steinbeck is one of the great novelists, if not THE greatest, of Western America. Almost all of his stories take place in California or Mexico, and usually contain some notable level of appreciation for the natural landscape of those regions. The Winter of Our Discontent, however, is set on the Northeastern Atlantic Coast. Although technically not New England, the characters in this novel have a sort of stereotypical New England attitude of Anglo-Saxon arrogance. The characters take pride in the fact that their ancestors came over on the Mayflower, and they fret over whether they are upholding their blue-blooded Puritan pioneer heritage. I find it hard to believe that everyone in the Northeast brags about how long their family lineage has resided in the U.S., but this novel gives you the idea that that’s a constant preoccupation, at least for the whitest of the whites, who look down on more recent immigrants, such as the Italian businessman in this story.

Another irritating aspect of the book is that the dialogue is loaded with 1950s slang, which makes for slow and awkward reading. This problem is heightened by the fact that Ethan fancies himself a comedian, so his speech and interior narrative often resemble the rapid-fire string of extemporary non-sequiturs from an old Robin Williams stand-up routine. The plot of the book hints at film noir and dips its toe into crime fiction, but never goes far enough in either of those directions. Nobody really does much of anything until about 240 pages into the book. Prior to that, it’s all get-acquainted time. Then, when things finally start moving, albeit slowly, we’re led to believe that certain potentially exciting actions are going to take place. For the most part, however, they don’t. The purpose of this novel is to exhibit Ethan and his fellow townspeople as examples of moral decline, a fall from the greatness of America’s forefathers to the looser morals of the mid-20th century. In this fall, however, the fall is not great enough—barely a stumble.

TFor most of his career, Steinbeck wrote in a predominantly naturalistic form of realism. Compared to earlier California writers like Jack London and Frank Norris, Steinbeck was more of a proto-modernist, but still he generally opted for good old-fashioned naturalistic storytelling and social realism over narrative ambiguity and existentialist angst. Albert Camus he ain’t. Here in 1961, however, every novelist wanted to prove himself a cracker-jack psychoanalyst, and Steinbeck is likewise guilty of that conceit, so the bulk of this novel takes place inside Ethan’s head and beats his neuroses like a dead horse. The Winter of Our Discontent has little in common with the rest of Steinbeck’s literature, so even if you’re a fan of the author, don’t feel like you’re missing much if you skip this one.

Browsings: A Year of Reading, Collecting, and Living with Books by Michael Dirda

Ephemeral woolgathering loosely related to books

Michael Dirda is a literary critic who has published several books, but he’s mostly known as a book reviewer for various periodicals, most notably The Washington Post Book World. From February 2012 to February 2013, Dirda wrote a weekly column, entitled Browsings, for the website of The American Scholar magazine. The book Browsings, published in 2015, collects the 52 posts Dirda wrote for that blog over the course of those twelve months.

What sets Dirda apart from most book reviewers these days is his love for old books by dead guys. He’s not one of those critics who thinks that literature was invented in 1950. Dirda is particularly interested in books published from 1860 to 1930, what he calls “The Great Age of Storytelling.” He often celebrates forgotten fiction in the genres of science fiction, horror, and mystery. Dirda is a professed Anglophile who doesn’t seem to have any interest in literature that’s not of British or American origin. Dirda is also a book collector and asserts that books aren’t really books unless they’re printed on paper, which is where he and I differ. I think the content is more important than the packaging, but Dirda admits he’ll buy three editions of the same book just because he likes the different bindings.

The Browsings columns were not intended to be book reviews in the standard sense, but rather more personal reflections from a book lover. The only stipulation set for the column was that the articles be somehow book-related, but in the writings collected here, Dirda often wanders outside even those wide parameters. The reason I would read a book about books is to learn about unfamiliar books that I might be interested in reading. Given Dirda’s profession as a book reviewer and literary critic, that’s not an unreasonable expectation, but Browsings really doesn’t yield much enlightenment of that sort. Instead, Dirda wanders farther afield to deliver articles about penmanship, paper stock, and grading papers (Dirda teaches college courses). In one column, he rants about a bad experience he had visiting Rocky Mountain National Park. In another, he complains about the poor service he gets from his local electricity provider. Who wants to read about that, and why would The American Scholar publish it? A typical chapter in this book, however, proceeds thusly: Dirda travels to a literary conference of some kind. While there, he visits three or four used bookstores, and here is a list of what he bought. Then you get a rapid fire stream of obscure author names and book titles, with almost no information on what those books are about or why Dirda likes them. The fact that Dirda likes them is supposed to be enough to satisfy you.

As the author of the Old Books by Dead Guys blog, I see Dirda as me taken to extremes. We both write about old books in the hopes of inspiring readers to give them a try. In my case, it’s a casual hobby. Dirda, however, eats, breathes, and sleeps this stuff 24/7, and somehow manages to make a living off of doing it. He even won a Pulitzer Prize for his lit-crit, but there’s nothing in these columns that would merit such accolades. For me, reading Browsings was a kind of warning cry of what I might become if I take this book habit too seriously: an annoying know-it-all who comes across as pretentious even when writing about so-called “lowbrow” popular literature that’s supposed to be fun. Maybe Dirda writes great reviews for The Washington Post or The New York Review of Books, but I found little of value to be gleaned from his Browsings.

Dynamo by Eugene O’Neill

Failed attempt at profundity

I’m gradually working my way through the complete works of Eugene O’Neill, great American playwright and winner of the 1936 Nobel Prize in Literature. O’Neill also won four Pulitzer Prizes for Drama, but this lesser-known play was definitely not one of his award winners. Dynamo premiered on the stage in 1929, with future movie star Claudette Colbert in one of the lead roles. The production ran for 50 performances, but that was considered a failure compared to O’Neill’s more successful efforts. After the stage debut, O’Neill made significant revisions to the text—including adding some new scenes and deleting a few characters—before publishing Dynamo in book form.

As the curtain rises, the set consists of a pair of two-story houses on the stage. Living rooms are on the bottom floors, bedrooms above. In some scenes, the front-facing wall of a house is removed; revealing the occupants within; in others, the walls remain, and the rooms are concealed. Characters frequently lean out of windows and converse with other individuals outside. In the house on the right lives the Light family: the Reverend Hutchins Light, his wife Amelia, and their son Reuben. In the house on the left lives the Fifes: Ramsay Fife, his wife May, and daughter Ada. Hutchins Light is a sanctimonious Christian, and Ramsay Fife is a confrontational atheist. The two fathers, therefore, have a natural and intense antipathy for one another. Ramsay Fife works at the local power plant, but Mr. and Mrs. Light look down on the Fife family as if they were trash.

Unfortunately, and not surprisingly, the two young adults, Reuben and Ada, are in love with each other. Mother and father Light in no way want their son involved with Ada. Fife, on the other hand, seems to view the relationship as a satisfying prank—his daughter dating Reuben is a great way of sticking it to that pompous self-righteous Reverend Light. The play is primarily concerned with Reuben’s growth into manhood. As he pursues his relationship with Ada, and witnesses some hypocritical behavior by the adults, Reuben’s ideas on love, sex, and religion change over the course of the play.

A debate between Atheism and Christianity would seem like a good premise for O’Neill, the master of dramatic realism, but here in Dynamo he takes it in such a weird direction, the play often feels like a comedy. Electricity is a theme that runs throughout the play, in the imagery of lightning, the power plant and its dynamo, and as a symbol for materialistic atheism. One character sees electricity—or in a larger sense, atomic forces—as the higher power in the universe. That’s not too far off from what many materialists, determinists, monists, or pantheists believe. When said character starts worshipping electricity as a god, however, O’Neill has taken that idea too far into silly territory.

We generally remember O’Neill for his classic plays about dysfunctional families, alcoholics, or sailors, but he occasionally wrote plays that were more experimental in nature. While some of those forays into more avant garde fare are interesting, this is one of O’Neill’s failed experiments. Dynamo might have had something worthwhile to say about the place of faith in the modern world, but O’Neill paints his symbolism with too broad a brush.

The Friendly Road: New Adventures in Contentment by David Grayson

Ho-hum escapades of a hobo hobbyist

The Friendly Road, a book by David Grayson, was published in 1912. David Grayson was a pseudonym used by Ray Stannard Baker, an American journalist and writer of nonfiction in the muckraking style of social justice exposé. Under the pen name of Grayson, he published several lighter and fluffier books. The first was Adventures in Contentment (1907), about life on a farm. The Friendly Road is the second Grayson book, hence its subtitle New Adventures in Contentment. The Friendly Road is written as if it were a first-person nonfiction memoir, but then again, David Grayson isn’t a real person, and many of the happenings in the book seem contrived and not very realistic. This is more of a work of semiautobiographical fiction, and it falls somewhere between a novel and a collection of short stories.

Grayson owns a farm, whereabouts unknown. All the names of cities and towns in the book are fictional, so you never know where the story is taking place, just somewhere in America. (Baker lived in Amherst, Massachusetts.) Grayson decides he wants to take a break from his farm and strike out on the road to dabble in the life of a tramp. He carries very few possessions and soon spends all of the money in his pockets. Over the course of his journey, he lives off of the kindness of strangers. In a typical chapter, he encounters someone along the road. He sees them working and decides to pitch in and help, uninvited. He asks for no compensation, but there’s always hope that he’ll be offered a meal and a place to sleep for a night or two. There’s no real purpose to Grayson’s journey other than wanderlust and the possibility of making new friends. Grayson wants to make friends with everyone and thinks everyone wants to make friends with him.

I can sympathize with Grayson’s wanderlust, and I generally enjoy reading books about this unfettered, wandering lifestyle. What I don’t like about The Friendly Road, however, is how Grayson constantly reminds the reader that he’s bestowing sage wisdom upon you. He’s extremely satisfied with his own sense of humor and flaunts a know-it-all confidence in his discovery of the secret meaning of life. His revelations, however, are not particularly surprising. What is the key to a happy life? No responsibilities. Duh. Nice (non)work if you can get it, but Grayson’s rosy pictures of pointless wanderlust don’t really stand up to his own moral sermonizing. If everyone lived their life this way, would the world be a better place? Nope. It’s important to note that when Grayson leaves home and strikes out on the road, he leaves behind a woman whom you assume is his wife. She, or someone else, is left responsible for the farm from which he’s fled.

The Friendly Road improves a little in its second half when Grayson encounters a socialist and gets involved in a labor struggle. Baker slips into muckraking mode for a while, and you at least get some sense of historical events that were going on at the time. Still, his insight into the class struggle is a lot shallower and tamer than contemporaries like Jack London or Upton Sinclair. Grayson is neither for nor against socialism. He won’t commit to either side. He just wants everyone to get along.

There are many better books on hobos, tramps, and drifters. In fiction, there are classics like Knut Hamsun’s Wanderer trilogy (1906–1912), B. Traven’s The Cotton-Pickers (1926), John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men (1937), Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957), and William Kennedy’s Ironweed (1983), just for starters. In nonfiction, Jack London’s The Road (1907) and John Krakauer’s Into the Wild (1996) are both excellent. With so many other superior choices, why bother with Grayson’s tepid chicken soup for the soul?

The Moon Pool by A. Merritt

Hackneyed lost-world lunacy

Abraham Merritt (1884–1943), who often published under the abbreviated name of A. Merritt, was an American writer of science fiction and fantasy fiction. For many years, he was also an editor for The American Weekly, a syndicated newspaper supplement. His sci-fi novel The Moon Pool was originally published as two short stories in the fiction magazine All-Story Weekly. Merritt then combined these stories into a novel, which was published in book form in 1919.

A brief forward to the novel explains that an anthropologist named Dr. Throckmartin has disappeared, along with his wife and two assistants, while on a research expedition. Suspicion has fallen on Dr. Walter T. Goodwin, a botanist, who saw Throckmartin shortly before he went missing. The narrative of this novel is Goodwin’s written account of what really happened. This report has been edited by A. Merritt and published by the fictional International Association of Science.

Throckmartin and Goodwin, former acquaintances, are both conducting research on different islands in the South Pacific. They meet each other on a passenger steamer traveling amongst the islands, headed for Melbourne, Australia. Throckmartin had been doing research at the archaeological site of Nan-Matal, the ruins of an ancient Micronesian civilization on the island of Ponape (Wikipedia spells the actual sites “Nan Madol” and “Pohnpei”). Throckmartin tells Goodwin a harrowing story of how his wife and the other members of his party vanished on the islands. He is traveling to Australia to gather more supplies and men for a return expedition. Not long after telling this story, Throckmartin himself vanishes from the boat on which the two scientists are traveling. Goodwin resolves to venture to the Nan-Matal to investigate the disappearances and rescue the Throckmartin party. In this effort, he is accompanied by a couple of new acquaintances, men with their own reasons for embarking on such an adventure. When they make it to the archaeological site, they discover a portal that leads to a lost civilization underground.

The Moon Pool is a horror novel for those who think colored lights are spooky. Over and over again, we get images of colored lights—“pulsing” (14 times), “throbbing” (17 times), “coruscating” (15 times)—in every color of the rainbow. Another oft-repeated motif is the characters experiencing simultaneous feelings of “ecstasy and terror”—many, many times and in many variations. The best portions of The Moon Pool are when Merritt offers scientific explanations of the mystic phenomena depicted—speculative hypotheses drawing from physics, chemistry, anthropology, etc.—but there is so little of that. The vast bulk of this book is just the familiar cult-in-a-cave clichés that one finds in any Tarzan or Mummy movie. The females of this lost race are conveniently gorgeous, scantily-clad humanoid beauties, while the males are brutal, ugly ogre types. They engage in bizarre rituals in which sacrifices are made to a vengeful god.

The Moon Pool might be a baby step above most pulp fiction of this era. There’s an actual sci-fi story going on here; it’s more than just boobs and bullets, though there’s some of that too. This premise and plot, however, only merit perhaps a novella, while Merritt tries to turn this into an extended epic. The result is a boring, drawn-out mess. There are so many overly protracted descriptions of architecture: yet another chamber with another pool or fountain, yet another light show or a curtain of colored mist. Who cares? Despite a couple of relatively exciting action scenes, the story is dominated by mystic mumbo jumbo and predictable romance. Merritt wrote a sequel to The Moon Pool, The Metal Monster, in which at least one of the characters returns, but I’m not likely to tune in for that encore performance.

The Devil’s Paw by E. Phillips Oppenheim

World War I spy plot with anti-Red sermonizing

E. Phillips Oppenheim (1866–1946) was a very successful author of fiction involving espionage, intrigue, mystery, and crime. From 1887 to 1943, he published over 100 novels. The Great Impersonation (1920) is generally regarded as his best work. Other than that, I couldn’t tell you which of his books are supposed to be good or bad. When I’m in the mood for some Oppenheim, I just pick one at random, based on title. The Devil’s Paw, also published in 1920, is the ninth Oppenheim novel that I’ve read thus far.

Two friends sit before the fire in a hunting cottage near the coast of Norfolk, England. The owner of said cottage is Miles Furley, a parliamentary representative for the Labor Party. Julian Orden is a wealthy aristocrat who lives at his parents’ palatial estate nearby. Mommy and Daddy Orden host a who’s who of aristocrats at their mansion. Among the frequent house guests is the current Prime Minister of England. The year is 1917 or 1918. World War I is underway, and the Americans have joined the fight. Part of Furley’s wartime duties as a coastal landowner is to patrol the shoreline looking for suspicious activity. This evening, however, he injures his leg and asks Orden to cover his shift. While making his rounds on the beach, Orden spies a mysterious figure picking up a canister from the surf, presumably containing a message from a German submarine. Before he can make a move to intercept the spy, however, Orden is struck on the head and knocked unconscious. The next day, he finds evidence that one of his parents’ party guests, a beautiful Russian woman, may be involved in the treasonous act he witnessed on the beach. 

I’ve never been blown away by an Oppenheim novel, but I generally find them moderately entertaining. I wanted to like The Devil’s Paw, but this story kept letting me down. The plot here involves socialists. Rather than proletariats, however, most of the would-be radicals depicted here are wealthy, paternalistic socialists. Oppenheim isn’t really interested in people who work for a living. He thinks that aristocrats are the only people worth writing about, and the only people capable of running the world. Here he pays lip service to the cause of socialism and labor, but one never really gets the feeling that his heart is in it. Orden, the hero of the novel, was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and just happens to dabble in labor politics. The villain is the guy who wears shabby clothes and doesn’t like opera. The result is a jingoistic propaganda piece in which socialism is portrayed as a scam and pacifism is portrayed as evil.

Although this book was published between the two World Wars, Oppenheim’s fiction is still very much stuck in the Victorian Era of the 1880s or ‘90s. One annoying convention from that age is the idea that women can commit no evil. In Oppenheim’s world, the most heinous crime a man can commit is treason, but if the perpetrator is a beautiful, upper-class female, the gentlemanly thing to do is look the other way. (Of course, if she’s of the servant class, she could be shot or hanged for espionage, no problem.) Oppenheim also tries hard to create some sexual tension between his male and female leads, but that’s awfully hard to do when his characters and intended audience are stuck in an idealized gentility wherein you can’t even kiss someone without being willing to back it up with a wedding ring.

If you know anything about history, you know how the spy plot is going to turn out. Oppenheim can’t change the outcome of the Great War. Thus, the only possible thrills would have to come from having the characters threatened with peril. There’s surprisingly little danger in this thriller, however. It mostly reads like a series of political debates, the outcome of which is a foregone conclusion, given Oppenheim’s monarchical bent. Oppenheim should’ve stuck to writing novels about the rich and powerful and left the socialists out of it. He’s clearly out of his element here.

50 Literature Ideas You Really Need to Know by John Sutherland

The “Need” remains largely unsatisfied

John Sutherland is a British literary critic who writes books on books for both academic and general audiences. His book 50 Literature Ideas You Really Need to Know, published in 2010, is an attempt to explain concepts and themes of intellectual lit-crit to a popular audience of book lovers with above-average intelligence. I review a lot of books (about 1600 since I started this blog in 2012), and although I tend to avoid heavy lit-crit analysis and speak to nonacademic readers, I figure it couldn’t hurt to learn a little bit more about the concepts of literary criticism and the terminology employed. So, when this book popped up as a Kindle Daily Deal, I snatched it up at a reduced price. Though there is certainly information here that would be of interest to any bibliophile, overall I found 50 Literature Ideas a disappointing learning experience.

As one might expect, the contents of the book consists of 50 literary terms or ideas, about five pages on each. Sutherland really doesn’t do a very good job of explaining these terms and concepts to the reader. For each idea, he’ll tell you that Frank Kermode said this about it, and T.S. Eliot said that about it. Then he’ll give you a few examples from Shakespeare, Dickens, and Virginia Woolf. All of these opinions and examples usually contradict one another, and none of them really elucidate the topic at hand. Sutherland doesn’t really seem interested in truly educating readers about these 50 Ideas. Instead, he seems to want to conduct book-club salon-type discussions that showcase his erudition.

Since this book is aimed for a general audience rather than the literary intelligentsia, however, Sutherland has to dumb down his discourse, which only serves to make the conversation more vague and ill-defined. He defines “bricolage,” for example, as “using what’s at hand,” a meaning so vague that it could encompass pretty much all literary writing. What author doesn’t use what’s “at hand?” Same with “imagery.” All words create pictures. Duh. How does that help us understand literature? Sutherland tells us the history of “deconstruction,” but never really explains what it means. In regards to “metafiction,” Sutherland suggests that “all fiction is metafictional to some degree.” If the concept is that vague, what’s the point of talking about it? Sutherland would do his readers a favor by practicing more “solidity of specification” (Idea #29, which, after reading this book, I’m sure I’ve misunderstood). Sutherland does fare better with the last ten or so terms, which are more issue-based than conceptual, like “plagiarism,” “obscenity,” and “libel,” for example.

In the examples that Sutherland selects to illustrate these ideas, he makes it clear that he thinks the only literature worth writing about is English literature. Very rarely does he reference a work from outside of Britain. (The much-cited T.S. Eliot and Henry James were born in America, but opted for life in London.) The same was true of the other book I’ve read by Sutherland, Curiosities of Literature (2011). That book was basically an assemblage of literary trivia, but it didn’t claim to be anything more than that. 50 Literature Ideas, however, does claim to be more, but it’s still just a hodgepodge of trivial facts and quotes about books and authors. 50 Literature Ideas is part of a series from the publisher Greenfinch, a subdivision of Hachette UK. There are over 30 books in the “50 Ideas” line—in physics, architecture, psychology, and politics, for example. I would hope that other books in that series are more enlightening than this one. However, I suspect that a big part of the problem is the format of these books, which confines the author to delivering lessons that are required to be brief and shallow.

Lazarus Laughed by Eugene O’Neill

Strange multi-masked biblical tragedy

Lazarus Laughed is a full-length drama by American playwright Eugene O’Neill, winner of the 1936 Nobel Prize in Literature. O’Neill wrote the play in 1925. It was published in book form in 1927 and first performed on stage at the Pasadena Community Playhouse in 1928.

Set in ancient times, Lazarus Laughed is based on the biblical story of Jesus Christ raising Lazarus from the dead. Or rather, it’s O’Neill’s speculation on what might have happened after that miracle took place. Christ does not appear in the play. He has already departed Lazarus’s house before the curtain opens, though he is discussed and debated in absentia. Here in O’Neill’s take on things, the resurrected Lazarus ascends to the height of a messiah to rival Christ himself. Lazarus defies Christian and Jewish teachings by leading a cult whose members deny the existence of death and live for laughter and pleasure. 

The drama begins in Lazarus’s hometown of Bethany, in present-day Palestine. Subsequent scenes take place in Athens and Rome, where Lazarus meets Emperor Tiberius and his successor Caligula. Stylistically, this drama is heavily influenced by Greek tragedy. O’Neill tries to evoke the experience of an ancient theatrical production. A chorus (actually more than one) chants narration and commentary throughout the play, and almost all of the actors are masked. Soon after completing Lazarus Laughed, O’Neill used such stylistic elements to again emulate Greek tragedy in The Great God Brown, a play set in modern times.

Lazarus Laughed has only been staged a few times over the past century, probably because O’Neill really didn’t make it easy to produce this drama. In some scenes, his stage directions call for as many as 150 actors on stage at once. Other than Lazarus and his wife, just about everyone else is wearing masks. One scene asks for 49 different male masks and 49 different female masks, and the actors change masks in each scene. O’Neill calls for masks varying in size, emotional expression, age, and ethnicity, and specifies multiple combinations of those characteristics, thus probably at least 500 detailed and well-crafted masks are required to pull this off the way he wanted it. I would imagine the few theatres and schools who actually staged this play likely cut corners in mask manufacturing because O’Neill’s specifications would be cost prohibitive and near impossible to follow to the letter.

Other than simply telling a story about Lazarus and Tiberius, what is the point of all this? I don’t know what literary critics might say about it, but for me personally, I get a message similar to that taught by the ancient Greek and Roman Stoics, that fear of death prevents us from truly living our lives. Lazarus’s repeated assertions in this play that there is no death can be taken two ways: 1) that eternal life in Heaven means there is no death, or 2) that death simply brings a nothingness that is neither to be felt nor feared, so enjoy yourself and live your life on Earth to the fullest. Based on the behavior of Lazarus’s followers in this play, and on how O’Neill lived his life, I’m guessing he meant the latter. There has to be a better way to get that across, however, than having Lazarus and his crowd of followers laughing and yelling, “There is no death!” many times over. If staged with all the grandeur that O’Neill intended, Lazarus Laughed might have been a sight to see, but on the page it mostly comes across as a bit silly.

The Metropolis by Upton Sinclair

Lifestyles of the rich and stupid

The Metropolis, a novel by Upton Sinclair, was published in 1908, just a couple years after his controversial breakthrough book The Jungle. The two novels are written in a similar muckraking, pro-socialist style, but The Jungle is much more eye-opening, compelling, and insightful than this tepid successor. By comparison, The Metropolis feels shallow and poorly thought-out.

Allan Montague is a lawyer born and raised in Mississippi. Despite his Southern upbringing, his father fought in the Civil War on the side of the Union. After Dad’s death, Allan moves to New York City, along with his mother and cousin Alice. Allan hopes that, through his deceased father’s connections, he can find some profitable work in the big city. Allan’s younger brother Oliver already resides in New York. He lives the life of a wealthy man, but it is unclear what exactly he does for a living. Oliver is active in high society, and he introduces Allan, Alice, and Mom into his high-dollar social circles. The Montagues attend a series of lengthy and lavish parties in which no frivolous expense is spared. The hosts of these parties expend enormous amounts of money in an attempt to outdo one another. It’s unclear why exactly these millionaires would welcome the Montagues into their circle, since the family from Mississippi are merely upper middle class. Nevertheless, Allan Montague is the reasonable man through whose eyes we view the outrageously extravagant lifestyles of these kings and queens of New York society. 

The bulk of this book is just Sinclair rattling off examples of insane things the rich spend their money on, and how much those luxuries cost. This goes on for chapter after chapter. For example, a woman had a million-dollar coat that was made from the feathers of rare Hawaiian birds. Is this really the problem that’s plaguing American society? Not until Chapter 11, when Allan is hired as a lawyer to work on a lawsuit, does some semblance of a story actually begin. That plot thread, however, barely goes anywhere. If Theodore Dreiser wrote this novel, he would concentrate on the business, legal, and financial aspects of the story, perhaps to the point of inducing boredom. Sinclair, on the other hand, rushes through the legal case rather sketchily because he just wants to rant about the rich. He succeeds in getting his point across that the wealthy waste a lot of their money on stupid and useless stuff. There is a brief passage on the idiocy of fashion that’s rather well-said, but then Sinclair just resumes his catalog of expensive oddities: “There was a woman who had her teeth filled with diamonds; and another who was driving a pair of zebras,” and so on and so on.

Sinclair never acknowledges the fact that all this expenditure of wealth might trickle down to the artisans who make these luxuries, the merchants who sell them, and the servants who clean and maintain them. He will try to shock you with the fact that a rich old woman employs 32 servants, but that’s 32 people who have jobs. (I’m a liberal, and I’m making these arguments. That’s how annoying this novel is.) Sinclair’s typical modus operandi would be to contrast his exaggerated rich people with some exaggerated poor people­—i.e. look at what the wealthy are doing while these workers starve—but in this book he never gets around to the poor people, other than a few brief comments the aristocrats make about labor strikes. Sinclair is too busy reciting all these Ripley’s Believe-It-or-Not examples of extreme wealth and waste.

In general, I like Sinclair’s work (The Jungle is a masterpiece, in my opinion), but at times he can get carried away with his exaggerated black-and-white socioeconomic rhetoric to the point of campiness. Such is the case with The Metropolis, and it’s not even fun.

Memories of My Melancholy Whores by Gabriel García Márquez

Dirty old man finds inappropriate love

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

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

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

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

To a God Unknown by John Steinbeck

Young writer tries too hard

I have read quite a few of John Steinbeck’s novels and thought I had heard of all of them until I recently stumbled upon To a God Unknown. Published in 1933 when Steinbeck was in his early thirties, this was his second novel, after Cup of Gold. I was intrigued by To a God Unknown for the simple fact that any mention of it had somehow eluded me for fifty-plus years of my life. After having read the book, however, I can say with some certainty that the reason you’ve probably never heard of this novel is because it isn’t very good.

The time period of the novel is not specified, but it feels like the late 19th century. (I don’t recall any motorized vehicles.) Joseph Wayne is the third of four sons in a Vermont farming family. In bygone days of a century or more ago, the eldest son typically inherited the family farm after the father’s death, so Joseph decides to build his own future by striking out on his own and heading West to California. He finds some beautiful untouched land and establishes a homestead there. From Steinbeck’s descriptions of the surrounding countryside, it sounds like this would be located in what is now Monterrey County near the city of Soledad. 

Soon after Joseph establishes himself in California, his father dies back home. Hard times befall the Wayne family in Vermont, so Joseph’s three brothers and their families move out to California to join him. They build houses in close proximity to one another and work the surrounding land. The eldest brother, Thomas, is a rugged and likable common-sense farmer. The second brother, Burton, moonlights as a Protestant preacher and bears the judgmental attitude that comes with Christian fundamentalism. The youngest brother Benjy is the black sheep of the family, a heavy drinker and ladies’ man with a knack for inciting trouble. Joseph is the serious and moody member of the family. Being the pioneer in this California venture, he assumes the role of family patriarch.

The problem with To a God Unknown is that Steinbeck goes out of his way to load the story with religious imagery every chance he gets, often in a very heavy-handed and obtrusive manner. Joseph develops a love for the land that amounts to a form of pagan worship. He believes a certain tree on his land, for example, bears his father’s reincarnated soul. Burton, the Protestant preacher, naturally has a problem with this. Meanwhile, the family is surrounded by Mexican workers who are devout Catholics, though not without a few of their own pagan traditions. All of these religious cultures mix and clash. I like what I think is the book’s message: that we could learn a thing or two from the ancient pagans about how to respect and care for the land. I didn’t much care for, however, the way that message was delivered. In his early-career eagerness, Steinbeck seems hell-bent on convincing you that this family farming story is an epic of biblical proportions, to the point where he departs too much from realism. Contrast this with Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, an authentic realist novel about family farmers that rises to the level of an epic, but manages to do so in a seemingly effortless manner.

All of this ostentatious symbolism might be forgivable if you actually cared about any of the characters, but that’s hard to do when they all speak in very stilted, stage-play dialogue that doesn’t resemble real human speech. Joseph and his wife sound more like professors of philosophy than farmers, and Steinbeck belabors words like “sacred” and “holy” in order to hammer home his religious imagery. To a God Unknown is not up to the level of quality one expects from Steinbeck. It reads like the work of a young author trying too hard to prove he’s profound.

The Great God Brown by Eugene O’Neill

Heavy-handed symbolism as O’Neill goes artsy

Eugene O’Neill’s play The Great God Brown was first staged in 1926. O’Neill may have won the Nobel Prize in Literature, but not every one of his works is a masterpiece, or even good. Sandwiched between better-known repertory classics like Desire Under the Elms and Strange Interlude comes this oddity. I have almost worked my way through O’Neill’s complete works, and this is one of the weirdest dramas he ever wrote. It doesn’t read like O’Neill at all but more like something by Samuel Beckett. Beckett, however, would have done it much better. When The Great God Brown debuted, the New York Post called it “a superb failure.”

Mr. Anthony and Mr. Brown are partners in a construction firm. Their teenage sons are best friends who have just graduated from high school. While Brown is the junior partner in the firm, often looked down upon by his partner, his son William shows far more promise than Anthony’s son Dion. William “Billy” Brown is a good student with the potential to become a great architect and take over the leadership of the family business. Dion Anthony, on the other hand, has the temperament of a tortured artist-poet and is a heavy drinker and philanderer. Both young men are in love with the same high school sweetheart, Margaret, but she only has eyes for Dion. While William is jealous, he resigns himself to bachelorhood and focuses on his career. 

Dion is a terribly overdone caricature of the artiste. His speech is just a series of random phrases, many of them biblical, which he spouts in an ostentatiously crazy way. He constantly refers to himself and others he’s speaking to in the third person. To some extent, O’Neill seems to be making fun of the artist stereotype, but at other times he’s clearly buying into it. Although there is definitely occasional humor in The Great God Brown, it also seems clear that O’Neill intended the play to be philosophically profound in much the same way that Dion thinks the relentless stream of non sequiturs that he utters is profound.

One of the odd things about this play is that the characters wear masks. The opening scene takes place at a dance, so at first I thought perhaps it was a masked ball, and the characters were wearing Mardi Gras or domino masks, but that’s not the case. The characters don their masks anytime, 24/7, at their discretion. O’Neill recycles this dramatic convention from ancient Greek tragedies or Japanese Noh theatre. The masks symbolize the difference between one’s true self (mask off) and the personality he or she projects to others (mask on)—what The Who once referred to as an “eminence front.” Confusingly, however, in The Great God Brown these masks function as more than just metaphor. The masks sometimes cause cases of mistaken identity, which means that the characters must literally see the masks just as we do, yet no one in the play seems to find the wearing of masks the least bit odd. The masks also exist as disembodied objects. When someone finds a discarded mask removed from its owner, they react as if they’ve discovered a corpse. This unresolved ambiguity between the reality and metaphor of the masks is just bizarre and clumsy. An avant-garde playwright like Beckett might have pulled it off, but this seems woefully heavy-handed and out of place in what is otherwise a pretty typical O’Neill play about relationships and morals.

The Great God Brown may be a terrible play, but it sure isn’t boring. It’s hard to tell what audiences of 1926 would have thought of this. They might have eaten up this pretentious drivel. For readers of today, however, there is some pleasure in watching this train wreck unfold. One can imagine what it would have been like to spend an evening in the theatre experiencing this strange presentation. It is somewhat kitschily entertaining in the same manner as one of those hacky movies that’s so-bad-it’s-good.

Ms. Marvel Epic Collection, Volume 1: This Woman, This Warrior by Chris Claremont, et al.

Dismal attempt at a feminist superheroine

The superheroine Ms. Marvel made her debut in 1977 in issue #1 of her self-titled magazine. Marvel Comics’ trade paperback Ms. Marvel Epic Collection, Volume 1 collects issues 1 to 14 of Ms. Marvel, as well as Marvel Team-Up issues 61 and 62, and a crossover issue of The Defenders (#57). I grew up reading Marvel Comics, and I think of the 1960s, ‘70s, and to a lesser extent the ‘80s, as the glory days of superhero comics. Sometimes, however, Marvel’s Epic Collections remind me that there were plenty of mediocre and worse comics published during that era. This is one of those volumes.

Marvel had a few female superheroes before Ms. Marvel’s 1977 debut, among them the Invisible Girl (1961), the Wasp (1963), Marvel Girl (1963), Scarlet Witch (1964), Black Widow (1964), and Storm (1975). Those characters are all interesting in their own way, but Ms. Marvel just feels like she was created to satisfy some estrogen quota. By this point, Marvel really seems to have run out of good ideas for superheroes. Carol Danvers was a supporting character in the old Captain Marvel comic starring the male Kree warrior named Mar-Vell. She gets exposed to some alien radiation and is transformed into a sort of Kree/human hybrid, complete with a split personality. This identity crisis becomes cumbersome and is soon dispensed with. Ms. Marvel is super strong (boring) and her suit allows her to fly (also boring). Who knows how strong she is, but she says she’s not bulletproof. As if she weren’t powerful enough, she also has a Kree “seventh sense” that is somewhat similar to Spider-Man’s spider-sense, except that Ms. Marvel can actually see the future. 

Despite a ridiculous costume that flaunts her naked belly and back for all to see, Ms. Marvel isn’t just a slice of cheesecake. In fact, the artists can be commended for actually drawing her like a modern athletic woman who looks like she could be on the Olympic volleyball team. By issue #10, the powers that be had already demurely covered her midriff windows. All of the villains in these Ms. Marvel comics address her as “Woman,” as in “Woman, I will destroy you!” What’s funnier is that even in her own interior monologues, Ms. Marvel refers to herself as “Woman,” as in “Woman, that was a close call!” It couldn’t be any more obvious that this dialogue was written by men.

Chris Claremont, who went on to become one of Marvel’s golden boys with the X-Men, writes almost all the issues in this volume, and he delivers some really atrocious stories here. Gerry Conway created the character, however, and Claremont was just stuck with her. On the bright side, the art here is pretty good. Jim Mooney does his best John Buscema imitation, and John himself and his brother Sal are on hand for a few issues. John Byrne draws the two issues of Marvel Team-Up. It’s apparent that Marvel wanted to get this title off to a good start by putting some of their best 1970s talent at the drawing board, but it doesn’t make up for the abysmal storytelling.

The Brie Larsen version of Captain Marvel that you see in the Marvel Cinematic Universe is quite different from these comics but just as poorly thought-out. In the movies, she’s basically Marvel’s green lantern, and she’s as powerful as Superman. What makes Marvel’s heroes interesting is their weakenesses, the fact that they’re not perfect. The MCU’s Captain Marvel, however, isn’t allowed to have any weaknesses because then she wouldn’t be the epitome of female power. Heaven forbid an intentional feminist icon should have any flaws, so she ends up just being boring and ridiculous, much like Conway and Claremont’s version in these initial issues.

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.

The Trial by Franz Kafka

Too absurd to alarm

Austrian-Czech author Franz Kafka is widely regarded as one of the most important figures in modern European literature. In the early 20th century, he pushed the envelope of what literature could be by applying dark, dystopian, surrealistic, and deliberately absurd imagery to existential themes of modern life. Kafka wrote three novels—The Trial, The Castle, and Amerika—all of which were unfinished at the time of his death but nevertheless were left complete enough to be hailed as masterpieces by literary critics of the last century. The Trial was first published, posthumously, in 1925, but was written about a decade earlier. I had previously read Kafka’s novella The Metamorphosis and found it worthy of high regard. The Trial, on the other hand, left me quite disappointed and even annoyed.

The Trial concerns the legal troubles of Josef K., a chief clerk at a bank. On his 30th birthday, two law enforcement officers show up at his apartment to arrest him. The nature of his offense is never disclosed, neither to K. nor to the reader. The particular agency these officers work for is unknown, and it doesn’t seem that any formal charges are ever made. K. is not taken into custody, but released on his own recognizance, able to live and work much the same as before. It is made clear to him, however, that he is regarded as a criminal and will have to undergo a long, complicated, and labor intensive trial process that will likely dominate his life for years to come and may result in a serious sentence. In the process of preparing for his trial, the workings of which he knows almost nothing, K. consults a number of people for assistance, including lawyers, a businessman, and a painter. 

Much like George Orwell’s 1984 and other 20th-century dystopian novels, The Trial reflects the unfortunate reality of Justice in many authoritarian and non-democratic nations. The fact is, there were, and probably still are, many countries where you could be dragged out of your bed in the middle of the night, for no specified crime, imprisoned, tortured, and/or executed. There are moments in The Trial where Kafka brings that horror vividly to life.

The effect is ruined, however, by the juxtaposition of such political paranoia with humorous and absurdist elements. The legal proceedings described are unrealistically byzantine and bizarre, and the details are often revealed through somewhat silly conversations with characters that I assume were meant to be satirical characters. Every woman K. meets along the way throws herself at him, and he engages in bumbling, fumbling romances with a few of them. The overall effect is something like that of a German expressionist print. On the one hand, the rude, angular depiction of human figures engenders disturbing feelings of anxiety, revulsion, and paranoia. On the other hand, there is also something humorous about the rather cartoony and distorted style of expression. Sometimes that humor is intentional (as in George Grosz) and sometimes not (as in Egon Schiele). In The Trial, it is hard to tell what is intentionally humorous and what is not. For today’s reader, a century after the book’s initial publication, the difficulty is compounded by an ignorance as to what life was really like in Bohemia or Czechoslovakia a hundred years ago. For example, court proceedings in The Trial are held in the attic of a tenement building. Was that a real thing? Or is that just a joke?

Having only read a couple of Kafka’s works, I wouldn’t go so far as to say he’s overrated. I do feel fairly confident, however, in saying that The Trial is overrated. If literary critics want to hail one innovative early-2oth-century Czech author as a godfather of modernism, my pick would be Karel Capek rather than Kafka.