The Sea, The Sea

By Iris Murdoch

528 pages

Published in 1978 by Penguin Classics

After a successful but sometimes scandalous career as a playwright and director, Charles Arrowby retires from the hubbub of London to what he expects will be some years of tranquil solitude. His plan is to write a memoir about a love affair he had with his mentor, and to enjoy an occasional tryst with an actress he has been having sex with, off and on, for many years.

His plans are altered by the appearance of a middle-aged woman whom he has not seen since his adolescence. She was his first lover, and he remembers her as beautiful and slender. She’s now stout and very ordinary looking, but the spark is still there and he sets about trying to seduce her.

The first hundred pages of the book give the reader hope that the rest of the book will be a pleasant story of rekindled love. I’m just now getting further along than that and can tell that it’s going to be a very different kind of story. Other characters – mostly former lovers – are coming and going, and most of them don’t have good feelings towards Arrowby.

A great deal of the action is interior (his impressions in the memoir) and show him to be a somewhat selfish and superficial individual, despite whatever accomplishments he has had in theater.

This is a very modern novel in the sense that the protagonist is a somewhat ordinary man with many ordinary vanities and vices that leave him, like Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman, unable to carve out any real meaning from his life.

Murdoch’s language is rich, and her dialog and descriptions are filled with allusions to myth and magic. Arrowby’s confrontation with love and forgiveness makes this one of Murdoch’s most moving and powerful novels.

From Dwight Garner, The New York Times: “Profound and delicious for many reasons… a multilayered working out of [Murdoch’s] feelings about the intensity of romantic experience.” 

From Sophia Martelli, The Guardian: “Murdoch’s subtly, blackly humorous digs at human vanity and self-delusion periodically build into waves of hilarity, and Arrowby is a brilliant creation: a deeply textured, intriguing yet unreliable narrator, and one of the finest character studies of the 20th century.”

From Time: “The author renders her immorality play with painstaking attention to atmosphere: the changing hues of the waves, the slippery amber rocks, the strangely damp house are all made palpable. The old scandals are shrewdly reexamined, and Murdoch’s style is as saline as the sea below.”

Piranesi

By Susanna Clarke

272 pages

Published September 15, 2020 by Bloomsbury Publishing

I was surprised by how much I liked Piranesi, considering that it is a genre book, fantasy fiction, which I rarely read and even more rarely enjoy. But this one worked. On several levels.

First and most importantly, it has a very simple plot that is based on a simple question: What is Piranesi, the protagonist, doing in this strange place and why? The author, Susanna Clarke, dishes out hints, but sparsely. And there is no great moment of anagnorisis. Not even a denouement, so to speak. And yet, it’s a page turner.

Its themes are expressed as existential and ontological questions that are not so much posed as suggested. And the answers, if you can call them answers, are ambiguous.

But neither the thinness of plot nor the vagueness of thought diminished my enjoyment of the book. I’m trying to figure out why that is.

One reason is the language. The diction is poetic without ornamentation – a kind of restrained prose that makes the many visual descriptions of the castle and its labyrinth come to life. There is a pleasure in reading them that equals what you might get from a James Cameron movie or a Hieronymus Bosch painting.

Several of our book club members had “trouble getting into the first few chapters.” I didn’t experience that – but with the book’s emphasis on prose and imagery, I can understand why they might have. But everyone that persevered (all but one) rated it one of our best books of the year.

From New York Magazine: “Piranesi Will Wreck You: The novel establishes Susanna Clarke as one of our greatest living writers.”

From BookPage: “Almost impossible to put down… lavishly descriptive, charming, heartbreaking, and imbued with a magic that will be familiar to Clarke’s devoted readers, Piranesi will satisfy lovers of Jonathan Strange and win her many new fans.”

From Time Magazine: “Nobody writes about magic the way Clarke does…. She writes about magic as if she’s actually worked it.”

Essays of E.B. White

384 pages

Published 1977 by Harper Perennial/Modern Classics

It was the third book in a small stack of old books that sat on the corner of my writing desk. I have three writing surfaces: This desk here at the beach house. A small, round table under a gazebo overlooking the Pacific Ocean in our home in Nicaragua. And a bar top at my Cigar Club in Delray Beach.

Each has a similar stack of books on it – books pulled from the shelves in the past several weeks, spurred by something I’d read or heard, waiting till I had time to read them.

This book, Essays of E.B. White, seemed the perfect elixir for the stress I was feeling. I knew White as the co-author of the classic Elements of Style, which I’ve read at least a dozen times, and I knew he wrote essays for The New Yorker, back in its glory days. I had no idea he was also the author of Charlotte’s Webb and Stuart Little.

Since my time was limited, I read only a half-dozen of the essays, but they were all Malted-Milk-Balls fun to read.

I think my favorite essay (so far) is “Death of a Pig,” White’s account of his efforts to save a sick pig that he’d bought and raised to be butchered. Here’s an excerpt:

“The scheme of buying a spring pig in blossomtime, feeding it through the summer and fall, and butchering it when the solid cold weather arrives, is a familiar scheme to me and follows an antique pattern. It is a tragedy enacted on most farms with perfect fidelity to the original script. The murder, being premeditated, is in the first degree but is quick and skillful, and smoked bacon and ham provide a ceremonial ending whose fitness is seldom questioned.”

And here’s an excerpt from “The World of Tomorrow,” on the 1939 New York World’s Fair:

“The truth is my ethmoid sinuses broke down on the eve of Fair Day, and this meant I had to visit the Fair carrying a box of Kleenex concealed in a copy of the Herald Tribune. When you can’t breathe through your nose, Tomorrow seems strangely like the day before yesterday.”

And here’s one from “Some Remarks on Humor” (written as part of a preface to A Subtreasury of American Humor):

 “Analysts have had their go at humor, and I have read some of this interpretive literature, but without being greatly instructed. Humor can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind.”

Interesting Fact: Before his death in 1985, E.B. White suffered from Alzheimer’s disease, and his son, Joel, would read his books back to him.  Since he couldn’t remember writing some of them, he would sometimes criticize the writing, saying it wasn’t good enough. If he liked what he heard, he’d ask Joel who wrote the book. Upon hearing that he was the author, he’d reply with, “Well, not bad.”

From The Washington Post: “Some of the finest examples of contemporary, genuinely American prose. White’s style incorporates eloquence without affection, profundity without pomposity, and wit without frivolity or hostility. Like his predecessors Thoreau and Twain, White’s creative, humane, and graceful perceptions are an education for the sensibilities.”

From San Francisco Examiner: “The abiding spirit of these essays is humane, compassionate, traditionalistic. No matter what his subject, White always keeps his eye on the long view and the larger perspective. There are times when I feel his work is as much a national resource as the Liberty Bell, a call to the best and noblest in us.”

Blow-Up: And Other Stories

By Julio Cortázar

288 Pages

Published 1985 by Pantheon Books

Interesting Fact: In addition to his stories, poetry, and novels, Cortázar published a graphic novel in 1975 titled Fantomas vs. The Multinational Vampires.

From Saturday Review: “Cortázar displays throughout his stories the ability to elevate them above the condition of those gimmicky tales which depend for effect solely on a twist ending. His genius here lies in the knack for constructing striking, artistically ‘right’ subordinate circumstances out of which his fantastic and metaphysical whimsies appear normally to spring.”

From Time Magazine: “[Cortázar] is a unique storyteller. He can induce the kind of chilling unease that strikes like a sound in the night.”

The Maltese Falcon

By Dashiell Hammett

224 pages

Published 1929 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

I read this as a book club selection about a dozen years ago and returned to it this weekend because it is so damned good in the most important ways a book can be good.

The plot – The story line is engaging, suspenseful, emotionally compelling, and fast-paced.

The characterization – The characters are fully imagined, sharply defined, but also full of contrasting nuances.

The theme – The idea that insinuates itself throughout The Maltese Falcon is profound: It’s about deception and self-deception. Every important character and every relationship has elements of falseness. This theme is nicely represented by the various motifs of the story: cosmetics, costume changes, and the Maltese Falcon itself, which is a fake.

The prose – The writing is superb. Taut, clean, and yet beautifully descriptive. Three quick examples:

* “Her eyes were cobalt-blue prayers.”

* “Beginning day had reduced night to a thin smokiness when Spade sat up.”

* “His eyes burned yellowy.”

Interesting Fact: Dashiell Hammett is largely credited with the image of the hard-boiled, noir detective we’re familiar with, as well as bringing literary – and professional – credentials to the detective genre. Under his first name, Samuel – a name that he would ultimately use for his most famous character – he worked with the Pinkerton Detective Agency from 1915 to 1922. The Maltese Falcon is the only full-length Sam Spade novel, but Spade also appears in four lesser-known short stories.

 From The Times Literary Supplement (London): “The Maltese Falcon is not only probably the best detective story we have ever read, it is an exceedingly well written novel.”

From The New York Times: “Hammett’s prose [is] clean and entirely unique. His characters [are] as sharply and economically defined as any in American fiction.”

Steinbeck: A Life in Letters

Edited by Elaine Steinbeck and Robert Wallsten

Paperback, 928 pages

Published April 1, 1989 by Penguin Books

John Steinbeck was an important writer and an interesting character. As noted on Amazon, he hated the telephone. So for him, “letter-writing was a preparation for work and a natural way for him to communicate his thoughts on people he liked and hated; on marriage, women, and children; on the condition of the world; and on his progress in learning his craft.”

I’ve been reading this collection of his letters, prompted by a review in “Brainpickings,” and I’m enjoying it. It opens with letters written during his early years in California, and closes with a 1968 note written in Sag Harbor, NY.

Here’s an excerpt from the book (selected by “Brainpickings”) on the topic of human nature:

“Speaking of the happy new year, I wonder if any year ever had less chance of being happy. It’s as though the whole race were indulging in a kind of species introversion – as though we looked inward on our neuroses. And the thing we see isn’t very pretty…. So we go into this happy new year, knowing that our species has learned nothing, can, as a race, learn nothing – that the experience of ten thousand years has made no impression on the instincts of the million years that preceded.”

Another excerpt:

“Not that I have lost any hope. All the goodness and the heroisms will rise up again, then be cut down again and rise up. It isn’t that the evil thing wins – it never will – but that it doesn’t die. I don’t know why we should expect it to. It seems fairly obvious that two sides of a mirror are required before one has a mirror, that two forces are necessary in man before he is man. I asked [the influential microbiologist] Paul de Kruif once if he would like to cure all disease and he said yes. Then I suggested that the man he loved and wanted to cure was a product of all his filth and disease and meanness, his hunger and cruelty. Cure those and you would have not man but an entirely new species you wouldn’t recognize and probably wouldn’t like.”

From The New York Times: “Surely his most interesting, plausibly his most memorable, and… arguably his best book.”

From Los Angeles Herald-Examiner: “The reader will discover as much about the making of a writer and the creative process as he will about Steinbeck. And that’s a lot.”

Neither Here Nor There: Travels in Europe

by Bill Bryson 

Paperback, 254 pages

Published March 28, 1993 by William Morrow Paperbacks (first published 1991)

I was in a shallow, prompted in part by the decision to trash an essay I’d spent half a day on, and I needed something to lift my spirits. I looked up from my laptop and there, on top of one of the stacks of books on my credenza, was the pleasant image you see above: the cover of my old copy of Neither Here Nor There, by Bill Bryson.

I’ve re-read Bryson’s books before. (I read this one for the first time about two years ago.) They were all Heath-bar pleasurable and chock full of interesting facts. Neither Here Nor There, published in 1991, turned out to be considerably lighter on the interesting facts. But it was fully satisfying in giving me the pleasure I was seeking.

It’s both a travelog and also a collection of wry observances. But most of all, it’s a comic novel about a smart and funny and ultimately very charming character named Bill Bryson.

Bryson grew up in the heart of America, and then spent 15 years living in and writing about England before he set off on a partly nostalgic, partly adventurous journey from Hammerfest, Norway to Istanbul, Turkey. In between, we learn in Neither Here Nor There, he got into all sorts of small jams and pickles, half of which were due to the discrepancy between a large and spirited appetite for romanticized adventure and a relentless habit of penny pinching his every commercial encounter.

It’s a very funny book. I was barely three chapters into it and I could feel my mood moving up from a 5.9 to a 7.9, which is almost impossible even with the most precise combination of drugs and alcohol.

One of the particular pleasures of the book, besides the Scrooge-precipitating mishaps, is Bryson’s relationship with a second fictive character, a friend who reappears in flashbacks to earlier adventures in Europe, the pseudonymous Stephen Katz. (Katz reappears prominently and hilariously in several later books.)

As mentioned above, the distinguishing difference between Neither Here Nor There and the earlier Bryson books that I’ve read is that it’s short on facts. It’s also skimpy on the comical conversations that so many of his other works are rich in. To compensate, there is a plenitude of hilariously prejudiced observations about the cultural characteristics of every nationality he encounters.

This last bit was not much commented on when the book was published, but has been widely criticized in recent, more politically correct, years.

For me, that made the experience of Neither Here Nor There even tastier.

From Good Reads: Bryson brings his unique brand of humor to Europe, whether braving the homicidal motorist of Paris, being robbed by gypsies in Florence, attempting not to order tripe and eyeballs in a German restaurant, window-shopping in the sex shops of the Reeperbahn, or disputing his hotel bill in Copenhagen. Bryson takes in the sights, dissects the culture, and illuminates each place and person with his hilariously caustic observations.

From Kirkus Reviews: Bryson’s crankiness could have proved amusing – after all, Mark Twain’s did in Innocents Abroad – but the humor here is meanspirited and juvenile.

Economics in One Lesson

by Henry Hazlitt 

The first book on economics I ever read was Das Kapital, by Karl Marx, when I was in high school. I didn’t read it cover to cover. I was using it rather than reading it, using it to confirm the naïve ideas I had about economics back then.

I read Hazlitt 30 years later, after I’d had enough life experience to understand the fundamental flaws of Communism. Economics in One Lesson will be an eye opener for anyone that gets their economic theories from newspapers and magazines. It explains why so many of the most popular views about economic dysfunction are unsound and why social agendas will almost always fail. And it does so in the clearest and most reasonable way.

Economics in One Lesson is the classic of Austrian economics. But it’s more than that. It’s an example of the kind of thinking that is necessary to understand any complex aspect of humanity. When Hazlitt wrote it in 1946, he probably had no idea that it would become so important. As Gary North said recently in a review of it:

“Hazlitt was a great teacher. He became a mentor for me when I was getting started. I was not unique. He helped a lot of young economists.

“His book is great for high school students. I assign it in my course on economics for the Ron Paul Curriculum.

“This book is worth its weight in gold for anyone serious about understanding economics. But now, thanks to the Mises Institute, you can get a free copy here.”

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It’s Halloween! I’m going trick or treating today with my four grandkids. We don’t know if any of their neighbors will be opening doors or setting out candy on their porches, but the kids want to observe the ritual, so we have a Plan B in place in case they don’t. (I’ll be leaving little bags of treats along the way.)

I will also be reading “The Raven,” as I do every Halloween. This is the poem that made Edgar Allan Poe famous. Interesting fact: On the anniversary of Poe’s birthday, every year from 1949 to 2009, a mysterious stranger left three roses and a bottle of cognac at his gravesite… then suddenly stopped. Someone should get back to it!

The Raven

by Edgar Allan Poe

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,

Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore—

While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,

As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.

“’Tis some visitor,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door—

Only this and nothing more.”

Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December;

And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.

Eagerly I wished the morrow;—vainly I had sought to borrow

From my books surcease of sorrow—sorrow for the lost Lenore—

For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore—

Nameless here for evermore.

And the silken, sad, uncertain rustling of each purple curtain

Thrilled me—filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before;

So that now, to still the beating of my heart, I stood repeating

“’Tis some visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door—

Some late visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door;—

This it is and nothing more.”

Presently my soul grew stronger; hesitating then no longer,

“Sir,” said I, “or Madam, truly your forgiveness I implore;

But the fact is I was napping, and so gently you came rapping,

And so faintly you came tapping, tapping at my chamber door,

That I scarce was sure I heard you”—here I opened wide the door;—

Darkness there and nothing more.

Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing,

Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before;

But the silence was unbroken, and the stillness gave no token,

And the only word there spoken was the whispered word, “Lenore?”

This I whispered, and an echo murmured back the word, “Lenore!”—

Merely this and nothing more.

Back into the chamber turning, all my soul within me burning,

Soon again I heard a tapping somewhat louder than before.

“Surely,” said I, “surely that is something at my window lattice;

Let me see, then, what thereat is, and this mystery explore—

Let my heart be still a moment and this mystery explore;—

’Tis the wind and nothing more!”

Open here I flung the shutter, when, with many a flirt and flutter,

In there stepped a stately Raven of the saintly days of yore;

Not the least obeisance made he; not a minute stopped or stayed he;

But, with mien of lord or lady, perched above my chamber door—

Perched upon a bust of Pallas just above my chamber door—

Perched, and sat, and nothing more.

Then this ebony bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling,

By the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore,

“Though thy crest be shorn and shaven, thou,” I said, “art sure no craven,

Ghastly grim and ancient Raven wandering from the Nightly shore—

Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night’s Plutonian shore!”

Quoth the Raven “Nevermore.”

Much I marvelled this ungainly fowl to hear discourse so plainly,

Though its answer little meaning—little relevancy bore;

For we cannot help agreeing that no living human being

Ever yet was blessed with seeing bird above his chamber door—

Bird or beast upon the sculptured bust above his chamber door,

With such name as “Nevermore.”

But the Raven, sitting lonely on the placid bust, spoke only

That one word, as if his soul in that one word he did outpour.

Nothing farther then he uttered—not a feather then he fluttered—

Till I scarcely more than muttered “Other friends have flown before—

On the morrow he will leave me, as my Hopes have flown before.”

Then the bird said “Nevermore.”

Startled at the stillness broken by reply so aptly spoken,

“Doubtless,” said I, “what it utters is its only stock and store

Caught from some unhappy master whom unmerciful Disaster

Followed fast and followed faster till his songs one burden bore—

Till the dirges of his Hope that melancholy burden bore

Of ‘Never—nevermore’.”

But the Raven still beguiling all my fancy into smiling,

Straight I wheeled a cushioned seat in front of bird, and bust and door;

Then, upon the velvet sinking, I betook myself to linking

Fancy unto fancy, thinking what this ominous bird of yore—

What this grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt, and ominous bird of yore

Meant in croaking “Nevermore.”

This I sat engaged in guessing, but no syllable expressing

To the fowl whose fiery eyes now burned into my bosom’s core;

This and more I sat divining, with my head at ease reclining

On the cushion’s velvet lining that the lamp-light gloated o’er,

But whose velvet-violet lining with the lamp-light gloating o’er,

She shall press, ah, nevermore!

Then, methought, the air grew denser, perfumed from an unseen censer

Swung by Seraphim whose foot-falls tinkled on the tufted floor.

“Wretch,” I cried, “thy God hath lent thee—by these angels he hath sent thee

Respite—respite and nepenthe from thy memories of Lenore;

Quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe and forget this lost Lenore!”

Quoth the Raven “Nevermore.”

“Prophet!” said I, “thing of evil!—prophet still, if bird or devil!—

Whether Tempter sent, or whether tempest tossed thee here ashore,

Desolate yet all undaunted, on this desert land enchanted—

On this home by Horror haunted—tell me truly, I implore—

Is there—is there balm in Gilead?—tell me—tell me, I implore!”

Quoth the Raven “Nevermore.”

“Prophet!” said I, “thing of evil!—prophet still, if bird or devil!

By that Heaven that bends above us—by that God we both adore—

Tell this soul with sorrow laden if, within the distant Aidenn,

It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels name Lenore—

Clasp a rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore.”

Quoth the Raven “Nevermore.”

“Be that word our sign of parting, bird or fiend!” I shrieked, upstarting—

“Get thee back into the tempest and the Night’s Plutonian shore!

Leave no black plume as a token of that lie thy soul hath spoken!

Leave my loneliness unbroken!—quit the bust above my door!

Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!”

Quoth the Raven “Nevermore.”

And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting

On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;

And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon’s that is dreaming,

And the lamp-light o’er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor;

And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor

Shall be lifted—nevermore!

Book of the Week

The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks, and Giants of the Ocean, by Susan Casey

I’m sure I would not have ordered this book had I not just finished watching “Octopus Teacher.” (See above.) I was deep in the beautiful mysteries of the oceans and didn’t want to come out of the water.

The Wave, I’d read, was a NYT bestseller. How could that be?

One reason, I discovered, was that Susan Casey is a very good writer. Another is that she writes about very exciting topics – in this case, giant waves. The 70- to 80-foot waves that extreme surfers like Laird Hamilton ride, but also the even bigger rogue waves and tsunamis that exceed 100 feet and can actually break an 800-foot ship in two like snapping a pencil.

The Wave is chock full of exciting stories about disappearing ships, as well as the history of giant waves, the new science behind them, and such fascinating miscellany as how Lloyd’s of London insures against them.

I’m only a third of the way into it, at this point, but I can already feel the excitement of the ride.

Click here to watch a talk that Casey gave about the book at a bookstore in California.

And click here to watch a TED Talk – “ Dispatches from the Dark Heart of the Ocean” – that she gave in Maui.

 About the Author 

Susan Casey, author of the NYT bestseller The Devil’s Teeth: A True Story of Obsession and Survival Among America’s Great White Sharks, is editor-in-chief of O, The Oprah Magazine. She is a National Magazine Award-winning journalist whose work has been featured in the Best American Science and Nature Writing, Best American Sports Writing, and Best American Magazine Writing anthologies. Her work has also appeared in Esquire, Sports Illustrated, Fortune, Outside, and National Geographic. Casey lives in New York City and Maui.

 Reviews of The Wave 

 “Immensely powerful, beautiful, addictive, and, yes, incredibly thrilling…. Like a surfer who is happily hooked, the reader simply won’t be able to get enough of it.” – San Francisco Chronicle 

“[An] adrenaline rush of a book…. As terrifying as it is awe inspiring.” 
– People

“Casey’s descriptions of these monsters are as gripping in their own way as any mountaineering saga from the frozen peaks of Everest or K2.” – The Washington Post Book World 
 

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