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.

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.

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.

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

The Madman of Bergerac by Georges Simenon

A jolly, bedridden Maigret

The Madman of Bergerac is the 16th book in Georges Simenon’s series of Inspector Maigret detective novels. It was first published in 1932 as Le Fou de Bergerac. Traveling by train to visit his friend Leduc, who lives in the Dordogne region of southwestern France, Maigret spends the night in a sleeping car. He has trouble sleeping, partially due to the man in the berth above him, who won’t stop fidgeting and intermittently sobs. The stranger descends from his compartment, and Maigret sees him jump from the moving train. Without really knowing why—driven by a detective’s instinct I suppose—Maigret jumps off the train in pursuit. When the mystery man discovers he’s being followed, he fires a shot at Maigret, wounding him in the shoulder.

Maigret wakes up in a hospital in Bergerac, a small city in the Dordogne. He is soon moved to a hotel on the town square, where he receives outpatient medical treatment, as well as the loving care of Madame Maigret. Maigret spends the rest of the novel in bed, but still manages to conduct an investigation into the man who shot him. In addition, a serial killer is afoot in Bergerac. Two women were strangled to death and stabbed post mortem in the heart by some kind of needle-like instrument. From his bed, Maigret meets and questions various citizens of Bergerac. Despite being confined to his hotel room, he is able to form a picture of the town and uncover some of the hidden secrets of its citizens.

Although Sherlock Holmes or C. Auguste Dupin sometimes solved crimes without ever leaving their chairs, an immobile Maigret is an oddity in the series. His bedridden convalescence leads to a lot of second-hand action. Important events take place “offstage,” and Maigret and the reader only find out about them through indirect accounts. Also unusual is how uncharacteristically jolly Maigret is throughout this book. He seems to be having the time of his life solving crimes from his bed. He enjoys tormenting the suspects and making them squirm. The phrase “madman of Bergerac” is coined to refer to the killer, but some of the mystified Bergeraciens sometimes wonder if Maigret himself might have a screw or two loose.

I got hooked on this novel from the get-go, and it held my rapt attention for the first several chapters. I found the ending a little disappointing, however. In pursuing the case, Maigret is more interested in the private lives of his adversaries rather than the fact that people have been murdered, which is treated almost as an afterthought. As usual, Simenon has developed a compelling back story for his characters, a family drama drawn with psychological authenticity. It seems to me, however, that I’ve seen elements of this conclusion in other Maigret novels (Repetition between books, of course, would depend on the order in which you read them, which in my case has been kind of random). Also, the ending seems to materialize out of thin air. Simenon doesn’t leave a lot of bread comes for the reader to follow. There doesn’t seem to be much cause and effect between investigative work and final revelations. The bed-bound Maigret just seems somewhat omniscient.

Though The Madman of Bergerac is not the best Maigret, any Maigret is good Maigret. Compared to the consistent quality of the Maigret books, this one falls a little short, but it’s still better than the vast majority of detective fiction out there.

The Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk

A long haul through 18th-century Polish Jewish history

The Books of Jacob is a novel by Polish author Olga Tokarczuk, winner of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature. This is a historical novel of deliberately epic proportions (about 1,000 pages), based on real lives and events. The novel opens in the 1750s. The story jumps back and forth quite a bit between Poland (the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth), Turkey (the Ottoman Empire), and Germany (the Habsburg Monarchy). At that time, all of those political units were larger in land area and shared common borders with each other.

Jacob Frank (1726–1791) is Polish-born but seems to have been raised as a Turk within the Ottoman Empire. He is discovered by a group of Polish Jews, including some of his relatives, who think he is a new messiah for the Jewish people—a mantle that Jacob is ready and willing to adopt. His sect of followers—known as Sabbatians, anti-Talmudists, or Frankists—breaks from the orthodox beliefs of Judaism. They practice mysterious rites, some of them sexual, that just about everyone else finds sacrilegious. Jacob has heretical ideas of a holy trinity that includes himself. For their unorthodox views, the Frankists are violently persecuted by orthodox Jews and driven from town to town, country to country. To ensure their own safety, they court the protection of the Catholic Church, essentially striking a deal that they will all convert to Christianity (a big baptism bonanza for the Catholics) in exchange for the ability to settle and live peacefully. This provides a bit of a respite from their troubles, but not an end. (It’s a complicated history, and my summary is unavoidably an oversimplification for brevity’s sake.)

With historical novels, there is such a thing as being too faithful to real life. Tokarczuk goes into far more detail than necessary and drags this story out much longer than called for. She has obviously done much research, and perhaps in doing so she felt the need to cram every name, date, and note of correspondence she encountered into this book, when really some abridgment would have been welcome. Much of the plot is meeting after meeting and meal after meal with these characters, who talk about the same things over and over again, or write letters arguing the same points repeatedly. If ever a novel needed one of those cast-of-characters lists, it’s this one. New characters are constantly introduced who don’t seem to serve much purpose in the story. Other than three or four main characters, everyone else is difficult to tell apart. They all have at least two names, a Jewish name and a Christian name, and it’s hard to keep track of just how everyone is related.

I don’t know Tokarczuk’s religious views, but she is clearly fascinated by the history of this unusual religious sect. As a nonbeliever in any of the big-three theisms, however, I really couldn’t see why anyone considered Jacob a messiah in the first place. He has a natural charisma but doesn’t come across as particularly holy, miraculous, or even good. He reminds one of David Koresh. As messiah, he grants himself the right to take his followers’ wives, daughters, and in some cases sons, for his own pleasure. I kept hoping the congregation would wake up and realize Jacob’s a huckster and a rapist and take their revenge on him.

I do have an interest in Polish history and culture. I’ve read quite a bit of Polish literature and history books on Poland. I would have enjoyed a textbook chapter on Jacob Frank, however, more than I enjoyed Tokarczuk’s tedious rendering of this story. If you read a page at random, you’d find the writing quite adept and beautiful, but as a whole, this novel numbs the mind with hundreds of pages in which not much happens. The last 25% of the book, to be fair, is quite a bit more interesting and eventful than the three quarters that preceded it. In the end, however, I couldn’t help thinking I wasted an inordinate amount of time on a book that kept asking me to sympathize with a self-serving Tartuffe and his gullible disciples. I’ve previously read Tokarczuk’s Flights and Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead; both are better than this. 

Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett

Hard-boiled carnage with no one to care about

Red Harvest, published in 1929, is the debut novel by Dashiell Hammett, who would soon after author The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man, which both became classic American films. Hammett is the author most associated with the genre of American noir crime and detective fiction, with the possible exception of Raymond Chandler, who came along a decade later. Red Harvest may very well be the inaugural novel in that genre. France’s leading noir author, Georges Simenon, didn’t start cranking out books until a year later.

Red Harvest is narrated by an unnamed agent of the San Francisco office of the Continental Detective Agency. He is engaged by a client—Donald Wilsson, a newspaper editor—to come out to Personville, a mining town so rough it’s nicknamed Poisonville. It’s a city of 40,000 people, and judging by this novel, most of them are criminals. The exact location of Personville is never specified, but it seems to be roughly in the vicinity of where Utah, Nevada, and Idaho meet. When the operative arrives in Personville, he finds that his client has been murdered, before the two could even meet to discuss why the detective’s services were needed. As he looks into Wilsson’s untimely demise, the detective discovers a network of organized crime and corruption. He decides to clean up this rat’s nest, and he finds another client who will pay him to do it.

This novel is about as hard-boiled as they come, and for that I admire it. Most gangster stories from the pulp fiction era read as watered-down or phony compared to Red Harvest. In this novel, if a killer wants to kill somebody, he’ll actually kill them (or try to); he won’t talk their ear off before shooting at them. There is a refreshing realism to the book’s utter lack of morality or restraint. Criminals act like criminals.

The problem with that approach, however, is that there is no one or nothing to really care about in this novel. The hero has no name and very little personality. The only woman in the book is a greedy, sleazy whore. The villains are all nondescript thugs who differ in name only. Hammett constructs this very complex web of intrigue in which all these characters blackmail, double-cross, or rat on each other. It’s all very confusing, and the reader doesn’t care enough to want to figure it all out. Never at any time did I understand why the detective was pursuing all these criminals. He has no reasonable motivation. There’s some money involved, but it’s treated almost as an afterthought. What does he really get out of this, other than the triumph of good over evil, law over corruption, which is totally antithetical to everything that happens in the book?

Red Harvest has never been formally adapted into film. A film noir version might have been more successful than the book, since some charismatic actors might actually convince you to care about these characters. One can easily see Humphrey Bogart or John Garfield in the lead. Red Harvest was likely one of the influences behind Akira Kurosawa’s samurai film Yojimbo, which in turn set the template for many subsequent gangster thrillers, from Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars to Walter Hill’s Last Man Standing. The latter film is the one that most obviously resembles the novel. It takes place in the 1920s in a Western town (but Texas), the Bruce Willis character very much resembles Hammett’s nameless detective, and the plot consists mostly of gratuitous mayhem and violence. Both that film and this novel have a direct-to-video feel about them. If this genre is your jam, however, then by all means read Red Harvest. For better or worse, it’s the Homer’s Odyssey of hard-boiled crime fiction.

Mysteries by Knut Hamsun

Inside the erratic mind of an eccentric outsider

Norwegian author Knut Hamsun’s literary career spanned seven decades, during which time he produced a plethora of novels, plays, stories, poetry, and essays, not all of which have been translated into English. Hamsun, who won the 1920 Nobel Prize in Literature, was an innovative literary pioneer who had a profound influence on modernist literature, not just in Norway but worldwide. His first novel, Hunger, published in 1890, is probably still his most renowned and widely read work. His second novel, Mysteries, published in 1892, is not as well known.

The title Mysteries is as generic as it sounds. It could pertain to anything or nothing going on in the story. Like many of Hamsun’s novels, it is difficult to summarize the plot of Mysteries in a couple of sentences. The plot just kind of meanders from scene to scene, without any overt agenda, much like real life itself. The novel follows Johan Nagel, an eccentric outsider who shows up one day at a small coastal Norwegian town and decides to settle there. Nagel states his profession as agronomist, but although only about thirty years of age, he seems to have inherited a sufficient sum of money so as to be no longer required to work for a living. Upon arriving in the unnamed town in which the novel is set, he takes a room at a main-street hotel and decides to stay indefinitely, as something of a retiree.

Nagel may be a stranger, but he’s no recluse, and he soon becomes involved in the social life of the town. He gets to know some of the citizens, both the fashionable set and some of the lower classes. He attends parties, where he is both a popular attraction and a gauche curiosity. Nagel has a habit of saying whatever’s on his mind, whether it’s socially appropriate or not. He talks a mile a minute and often runs on into extended stories and soliloquies. He will regale a crowd of partygoers, for example, by recounting the details of a dream he has had. This hardly seems realistic among polite society, but his audience listens enrapt while the dream goes on for several pages. Being socially active in his new hometown, it’s not surprising that Nagel would fall in love. His choice of soulmate is a complicated one, however, and their relationship is anything but easy and smooth.

Early in his literary career, Hamsun had an antipathy towards realist and naturalist literature. He is considered the leader of a neo-Romantic resurgence in Norwegian and Western European fiction. Mysteries is realistic in the sense of this is what provincial Norway was like in the 1890s. The story touches on political and social issues of the time, but not so much as to be obtrusive to ignorant outsiders unfamiliar with Norwegian history. The novel is predominantly Romantic, however, because it’s almost entirely concerned with what’s going on inside Nagel’s noggin: his struggle for love and self-actualization. Through the love story that arises, Nagel eventually develops into a modern variation on Goethe’s Young Werther.

In addition to Nagel’s extensive and revealing blatherings, Hamsun employs some early use of stream of consciousness narrative. Such interior monologues do not venture into the abstract excesses of later modernist authors but rather quite brilliantly capture the authentic imaginary conversations that we all engage in from time to time. Hamsun’s work reads as if influenced by the psychological studies of Sigmund Freud, but Mysteries actually precedes by a few years almost all of Freud’s published works. Nagel’s dreams and interior monologues show that Hamsun is clearly interested in the power of subconscious thought on human behavior. By exploring both the subconscious and conscious components of Nagel’s mind, Hamsun constructs a character that is much deeper and more multidimensional than the typical literary protagonists of his era.

Hamsun’s writing was years ahead of its time, and his work is still far and above most of today’s literature. He has become one of my go-to authors. I’ve never read a bad book by him, I can always count on him for a thought-provoking read, and I intend to eventually read my way through his complete output of novels. Growth of the Soil is my favorite thus far.   

The Man Who Sold the Moon by Robert A. Heinlein

Surprisingly preoccupied with business matters

The Man Who Sold the Moon is a science-fiction novella by American author Robert A. Heinlein that was published in 1950. It is also the title of a collection of short fiction published that same year, in which that novella is included. It is this latter collection to which this review pertains. In addition to its title selection, the collection entitled The Man Who Sold the Moon also contains five short stories originally published from 1939 to 1940. All six pieces are works in Heinlein’s Future History series, a large assemblage of novels, novellas, and stories that all take place in the same fictional future. The works collected in this volume represent the beginning of that series; that is to say, they are the earliest narratives in the fictional chronology.

The Man Who Sold the Moon (the novella) is an extended prequel to the much shorter story entitled “Requiem.” With the exception of that pair, the stories in this volume are only loosely related to one another. Although all united by the Future History scheme, they feature different characters and are set in different decades. Occasionally a character or his technological achievements may be mentioned in a later story. The half dozen stories in The Man Who Sold the Moon don’t seem to be presented in any logical order—neither in order of publication nor in order of Heinlein’s fictional timeline. This book includes a chart, put together by Heinlein, outlining the chronological order of the series. These being the earliest stories in the timeline, they take place roughly from the present day (the time of publication being late 1930s) to the fictional 1980s.

Heinlein’s first published story, “Life-Line,” is about an inventor who creates a device that can predict the future by “reading” timelines. It has the fanciful and thought-provoking qualities of a good Twilight Zone episode. “Let There Be Light” is about two scientists who pursue a more efficient form of lighting, and it’s about as exciting as that sounds. In “The Roads Must Roll,” America’s highways have been replaced by a cockamamie system of conveyer belts—not Heinlein’s brightest idea. “Blowups Happen” is a speculative story about nuclear power, written before nuclear reactors were a reality.

The centerpiece of this collection, The Man Who Sold the Moon, chronicles the endeavours of D. D. Harriman, a successful businessman, high-dollar huckster, and big-time negotiator who takes it upon himself to spearhead mankind’s first trip to the moon. In order to bring this dream to reality, Harriman must employ some questionable ethics, navigate legal loopholes, and exercise much financial chicanery. The plot is a chronicle of all this wheeling and dealing and not so much about the actual space travel. Harriman has elements of P. T. Barnum, Donald Trump, and Elon Musk, but more likeable and sympathetic than the latter two. “Requiem,” the sequel, catches up with Harriman later in life.

Given Heinlein’s reputation as the greatest science fiction writer of the 20th century, or at least one of the big three (along with Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke), I expected more from this volume. Heinlein’s Future History series is highly acclaimed, but this is still very early in that history. Space travel is just getting started, and we haven’t yet gotten anywhere near the colonization of other worlds. The result is a book full of surprisingly down-to-earth stories that have more to do with prosaic matters of business and industry than with astrophysics or space exploration. I’m surprised that the readers of Astounding Science Fiction magazine would have found fascinating these stories about government regulation and bureaucratic red tape. In just about every story here, Heinlein pushes some kind of libertarian agenda. This is most evident in the title selection, in which space travel and exploration are best left to private interests, preferably unregulated. Governments are merely obstacles in Heinlein’s vision of the future.

Despite my tepid review, there is enough here to build a reasonably satisfying foundation for a fictional universe, and I’m sure as Heinlein ventures farther from Earth, his narratives will become more deserving of the adjective “astounding.” I’m intrigued enough to follow this future timeline into the next volume of collected stories.

Stories in this collection

“Let There Be Light”

The Roads Must Roll

The Man Who Sold the Moon

Requiem

Life-Line

Blowups Happen

The Skylark of Space by E. E. Smith and Lee Hawkins Garby

Landmark space opera, corny but creative

The Skylark of Space is a science fiction novel by E. E. Smith (1890–1965). Sometimes credited as Edward E. Smith, or referred to by his nickname “Doc,” Smith was born in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, but soon moved to the Pacific Northwest and eventually worked as a food chemist for a doughnut factory in Michigan before starting his literary career. Though he published over a dozen sci-fi novels, he never did give up his day job. The Skylark of Space was first published in serial form in three 1928 issues of Amazing Stories magazine. The novel inspired one of the most memorable covers ever to grace the front of Amazing Stories, illustrated by Frank R. Paul. Smith usually gets all the credit for The Skylark of Space, but he cowrote the first portion of the novel with Lee Hawkins Garby, who happens to be a woman. Smith penned the rest of the Skylark series himself. The Skylark of Space was first published in book form in 1946.

In his laboratory, the chemist Dick Seaton investigates the properties of a newly discovered and extremely rare element known only as “X.” Unexpectedly, a lab instrument, made of copper, is propelled through the window, flying at high speed on a straight trajectory into the unseen distance. Seaton discovers that X has unlocked the “intra-atomic” energy within the copper, thereby releasing a clean, extremely powerful, and optimally efficient form of energy. Seaton and his friend, the millionaire industrialist Martin Crane, envision this new energy source providing the propulsion necessary for space travel. With the intention of exploring the stars, they begin building a spacecraft dubbed the Skylark. Seaton’s scientific colleague Marc DuQuesne, however, wants to steal the X for himself and will stop at nothing to get his hands on it, even over Seaton and Crane’s dead bodies.

When it appeared in Amazing Stories, this novel had a profound influence on young readers like Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and John W. Campbell Jr., who would go on to become some of the most important names in science fiction. What likely appealed to those future authors were the “hard science fiction” elements of the story, rather than its less successful fantasy and romance aspects. In this novel, Smith, a true scientist himself, deliberately strives to explore various scientific phenomena, and he provides reasonable scientific explanations for the bizarre happenings in the book. Obviously, the Skylark’s copper-fission propulsion method is not a reality, for example, but it’s based on real scientific concepts and is treated with a respectably sound science-fiction logic. The chemical properties of metals and the technological and military applications of various wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum are also explored.

It’s in the human and alien characters where the novel becomes farfetched. The love stories are corny beyond all get-out, and the extraterrestrial beings are like something out of an Edgar Rice Burroughs fantasy. The novel starts out as a down-to-earth Thomas Edison pastiche, but it just gets sillier and sillier as it goes on. It’s comical that Seaton and Crane express absolutely no surprise or wonder at their experience of interstellar travel. They treat their space voyage and contact with an alien race as the most natural and expected occurrences. The irrational behavior of the villains is even sillier. Some elements of the story are merely kitschy with antiquity, like the idea of fur suits keeping one warm in the nearly absolute-zero vacuum of space.

The Skylark of Space reads like a literary bridge between the works of Jules Verne and Robert A. Heinlein. The story of space princes, warring alien races, and starship battles is clichéd space opera, but those same clichés have nevertheless proved successful in many subsequent sci-fi epics from Star Wars to Dune. Sporting cool tech and exciting battle scenes, The Skylark of Space was no doubt considered quite cool by sci-fi fans of 1928. In spite of its hokier aspects, it’s still quite fun to read today.

Westerns by Elmore Leonard (Library of America)

The modern master of the genre

The Library of America is a nonprofit publisher that puts out authoritative hardcover editions of works by American authors, essentially establishing a “canon” of American literature. They began with reliable classic old books by dead guys—Melville, Twain, London, Emerson, and so on—but over time have expanded into collections of more recent authors’ writings, with mixed results. Some of their choices are not exactly canon-worthy, but one American author who certainly does deserve a spot in the LOA pantheon is Elmore Leonard (1925–2013). The Library of America has published four volumes of Leonard’s work. Three are devoted to his crime novels; the fourth and most recent volume, entitled Westerns, was published in 2018.

Leonard is best known for his crime fiction and thrillers, but he originally began his literary career writing Western stories for pulp fiction magazines. His Western fiction, however, is more than just standard Wild West adventure literature. Leonard has consistently demonstrated himself to be one of the all-time masters of the Western genre. This volume from the Library of America includes four near-perfect Western novels: Last Stand at Saber River (1959), Hombre (1961), Valdez Is Coming (1970), and Forty Lashes Less One (1972). One thing notable about these novels is that three out of the four feature Native American, Latino, and Black protagonists that are handled in a realistic and sympathetic manner that unfortunately was not the norm for 1960s and ‘70s Westerns.

The novels are followed by eight of Leonard’s short stories, all of them quite good. Leonard set most of his Western stories in Arizona. They tend to be situational thrillers involving good folks persecuted by hostile Apaches, cattle rustlers, bandits, or corrupt land barons. The best of the short stories presented here is “The Tonto Woman,” which is also the latest selection, from 1982. The rest were originally published in the 1950s. As is usual for the Library of America, this book also provides a chronology of the author’s life and career, which in this case amounts to a detailed, comprehensive biographical sketch of Leonard.

Leonard’s body of work has been the basis for many film adaptations. Hombre (1967), directed by Martin Ritt and starring Paul Newman, and 3:10 to Yuma (1957), directed by Delmer Daves and starring Glenn Ford and Van Heflin, are two excellent Western film classics. The latter was remade fifty years later with Russel Crowe and Christian Bale in the lead roles. Valdez Is Coming was also adapted into a 1971 film starring Burt Lancaster. Last Stand at Saber River became a made for TV production starring Tom Selleck (1997). Director Quentin Tarantino bought the rights to Forty Lashes Less One but hasn’t done anything with it. Leonard’s story “The Captives” was also made into a great movie entitled The Tall T (1957) starring Randolph Scott. “The Tonto Woman” was adapted into a short film (2008) that garnered an Oscar nomination for Best Live Action Short. Not all of these films are masterpieces, but they’re all well worth a watch. I cite them here as evidence of Leonard’s prominent and enduring influence on the genre.

Even readers who don’t typically like Westerns may still enjoy Leonard’s suspenseful plots and clever dialogue. His writings have an appeal that transcends genre boundaries. If you liked Get Shorty or Justified, you might very well like this as well. The only Western book I can think of that’s comparable in literary merit and entertainment value to Leonard’s novels is Charles Portis’s True Grit. If you like Westerns, then you should definitely check out Leonard’s work, and if you’re going to buy a paper hard copy edition, why not get this top-notch volume from the Library of America? They do hardcovers right.

Novels included in this volume
(all previously reviewed at Old Books by Dead Guys)

Last Stand at Saber River 

Hombre 

Forty Lashes Less One 

Valdez Is Coming 

Short stories included in this volume

Trail of the Apache 

The Rustlers 

Three-Ten to Yuma 

Blood Money 

The Captives 

The Nagual 

The Kid 

The Tonto Woman