Reading by Example

My parents taught me to love reading. I'm sure they did it consciously too, or would have if it had been necessary, but I think they mostly "taught" me by just being themselves. I have vivid memories of lying in bed awake long past my bedtime (I enjoyed this time and entertained myself by making up stories), or waking up in the middle of the night, and looking out the half open door of my room into the living room to see my mother, with her knees drawn up in front of her on the corner of the couch, absorbed in a book in a pool of lamplight, a slight frown on her face, combing her fingers through her hair. She was the type to stay up late with a book, and also suffered from insomnia and could often be found to have gotten up from bed to resume her spot on the couch at any hour of the night. If it was still evening, there might be the sound of the dishwasher, NPR, or classical music in the background; later she would be perched on her spot on the couch in a pool of silence and darkness in our very silent, dark house, which was located miles from any other in the Blue Ridge Mountains. I found the sight of her there extremely comforting. I slept in a high loft bed right up under the high ceiling of my bedroom (except in the summer, when it was too hot up there; then I slept in a regular bed); at a certain point my book collection grew so large that my father completely walled the loft in with bookshelves. This was delightful, but I remember telling my father it was imperative that I still be able to look down from the loft on the side where I could see out the door of my room. He built a small window into the back of the bookshelf which formed the headboard of the loftbed, which gave me a perfect view of my mother's spot on the end of the couch. While it was generally useful to be able to see into the living room from my bed, I think it was this sight of my mother reading in the night which made me insist on the window.

Nevil Shute, Christmas 2008 - New Years 2009

When I was teenager, thanks to my father's recommendation, I listened to In the Wet, by Nevil Shute, as an audiobook. I think it must have been the 1988 Recorded Books edition read by Norman Dietz (as that is the edition still available from the Jefferson Madison Regional Library system of my hometown!). Recently, also at my father's recommendation, I listened to Trustee from the Toolroom by Nevil Shute, also the Recorded Books version read by Frank Muller.

More on audiobooks in general later. For now, I want to talk about Nevil Shute.

I loved Trustee from the Toolroom so much that I wanted to immediately get my hands on more of his books. I discovered that although he was a bestselling author in the 40s and 50s, all of his books except On the Beach are out of print in the United States. (He was British and lived for much of his adult life in Australia; many or all of his books are still in print in the U.K.) To my extreme good fortune, for Christmas, my father gave me a stack of old hardbacks of Shute novels: An Old Captivity, Ordeal, Pastoral, The Chequer Board, A Town Like Alice, Requiem for A Wren, and Beyond the Black Stump. I think I started reading Beyond the Black Stump on Christmas Day. When I finished it I had to immediately pick up the next Shute book from the stack, and for the next couple of weeks sped through all of them except for Ordeal, which I am currently listening to as a Recorded Books audiobook, read by Ian Stuart. I will attempt to give a paragraph to each book in the order that I read it. (I won't review Ordeal yet since I'm still in the middle of it.)

In the Wet, originally published in 1953. I will preface this by saying it's been at least 10 years, maybe 15, since I listened to it; the following is by no means a complete plot summary. There are two plot lines: a drunken bum is dying in the Australian outback during the rainy season ("the wet"). He has some sort of link, or memory, of an alternate/future reality in which Australia plays a more central role in the world and the U.K. A young pilot receives some sort of politically important secret job and falls in love with a secretary who turns out to be beautiful and tan in a bathing suit and also good at sailing. (This latter theme, of a serious, buttoned-up woman in a functionary position turning out to be hot and a good sailor, and thus worthy of the main character's love, is central to Shute's ouevre.) That's pretty much all I remember; I can't wait to reread it.

Trustee from the Toolroom, originally published in 1960, after Shute's death the same year. My favorite of his books so far, possibly one of my favorite novels of all time. Frank Muller, widely considered to be the greatest audiobooks narrator of all time, does a lovely job narrating. A humble, lower middle class Englishman becomes his young neice's guardian when her parents die while carelessly sailing around the world. He alone knows that all their wealth, in the form of diamonds, was sealed up in their sail boat, so for the first time in his life he must leave his native town and find the crashed boat in the faint hope of recovering the diamonds to give his neice a shot at a good life. He's an amateur creator of tiny, fully functional machines and the main contribtor to a fanzine on the subject; he turns out to have fans in unlikely places who ensure the journey is a success. What a book! It has a completely original plot; vividly drawn characters you would never meet elsewhere (most importantly that of the main character, the brave, humble little engineer), and is both melancholy, uplifting and hillariously funny. It does all the things Shute does best and does them even better. I've never read another books like it.

Beyond the Black Stump, 1956. This is the portrait of a young, beautiful, brave Australian girl who's both emminently sensible but young and sheltered enough to be a naif. She's grown up in the wildest wilds of the outback with her eccentric family (white) and neighbors (mostly Aboriginal). She's well-educated and even refined but at home in the rough frontier lifestyle (think Ma from Little House on the Prairie as a young girl). (Oh man, someone should totally write a novel about Ma - Charlotte Ingalls, I guess her name is. One of the great characters from literature about whom we know far too little. Remember when Laura realizes she's never seen Ma's ears?) A group of American engineers comes along to look for oil, and she falls in love - sort of - with one of them. They want to get engaged but her mother is smart enough to insist she visit the American's family first. So she travels to a 1950s Oregon town, where the people still pride themselves on living on the frontier -- she's too polite to point out she knows what the real frontier is like, but ends up realizing she belongs back on it, with the British outback farmer who's loved her all along. This was not my favorite Shute novel-- it spends a lot of time from the POV of the American boyfriend, and Shute did a better job than he intended of making him unsympathetic, and not enough time with the awesome Outback eccentrics. However it is a fascinating exploration of ideas that were near to Shute's heart - the nature of the outback or the frontier, and his two favorite countries, Australia and America (Australia, of course, was his favorite place in the world, and America doesn't come off very well in this particular book, but he did like the idea of it).

A Town Like Alice, 1950. My second favorite Shute novel, and another favorite of all time. One of the most original books I've ever read; a book only Shute could write, and thank God he did. The story is so surprising, and takes such a perfect but completely unexpected twist that I'm hesitant to write it down. Not that's it's all that likely, dear reader, that you exist, but I'd hate to ruin one of the coolest novels of all time for you. I'll tell you how it begins: World War II comes to the British colony of Malaya, and the Japanese take all the British civil servants prisoner. They don't have a camp for women and children, so a group of them are ruthlessly marched round and round the island, emprisoned but homeless, for years. Apparently this part of the book is based on the true story of what happened to a group of Dutch women in Sumatra. In Shute's version, all the women are the wives of the civil servants, except for the heroine, a young secretary, who emerges as their leader and ensures the survival of those that do manage to survive the horrendous conditions and tropical diseases. This is a story with true horrors -- I'm sure I cried more than once in Starbucks while reading it - but I also cried tears of joy at other parts. It's a bit like a classic holocaust survivor's story with a lot M*A*S*H* an an Australian outback story thrown in, and as Dickens would say, tell me higher praise and I'll use it.

Requiem for a Wren, 1955. All Shute novels I've read have a core of seriousness but usually a lot of humor; this one is purely sad, with only the barest hint of optimism to allow you to have the will to live in this sad world when you're done with it. Instead of crying in Starbucks I cried in Uptowner's (24th St. NW between L and M, down the alley from Trader Joe's, decent sandwiches and buffet but very expensive). An Australian WWII vet and sheep farmer researches the life of a mysterious suicide to find he knew her as a Wren during the war; his heart is broken but finally allowed to heal. This is a delicate book and I'm not sure what Shute was trying to say with it... maybe just to tell the truest story he could about some very particular kinds of sad and broken lives.

The Chequer Board, 1947. An interesting complement to Spike Lee's movie The Miracle at Santa Anna, a story Shute might have told if he were a modern day black film maker. (Spike, if you're out there, I appreciated your movie even though nobody else did.) Being himself instead, this is a much more understated, even funny story, and it's about the reaction of lower class Brits (rather than Italians) to black American soldiers during WWII. In a nutshell, each group finds the other understandably awesome, and also Gen. Eisenhower was a cool dude. The end. Another total original and a pleasure.

Pastoral, 1944. Shute obviously thought this story an adorable defence of romantic love and gender roles in the midst of WWII England. I was not a fan. Essentially the Wren, happy and fulfilled in her newly possible professional role, is persuaded to give it all up to marry a pilot and keep house for him, because unfulfilled love causes him to pilot his plane less well. What a dork. A story in which he loves the Wren enough to leave her alone and allow her to do her job, and allows the unfulfilled love to motivate him to be a truly heroic fighter pilot, then gets tragically shot down by the Nazis, would have been infinitely preferable. Sorry Nevil.

An Old Captivity, 1940. Another Shute original, which is beautifully echoed in what may be the greatest Star Trek: The Next Generation episode of all time, The Inner Light. A Cambridge don hires a bush pilot to fly him to Greenland for archaelogical research, and takes his spoiled daughter along (she is reformed by the dangerous adventure of the journey). The pilot falls into a coma in which he experiences the life of a slave belonging to Leif Erickson; he heads the first exploratory expedition when Leif discovers a new land, and as a reward Leif sets him free to live there with his beloved fellow slave. When the pilot wakes up, he is not only able to validate the don's theory about the Vikings discovering America, but having experienced true love in that other life, is able to find happiness with the don's daughter. Wow.

I Speak of Boredom

To explain the name of the blog: "monstre delicat" is a phrase from Baudelaire's poem Au lecteur, which opens his collection Les Fleurs du Mal ("Flowers of Evil").  To quote from Richard Howard's translation of the last two stanzas:  "But here among... the squalid zoo of vices, one is even uglier and fouler than the rest... this beast would gladly undermine the earth and swallow all creation in a yawn; I speak of Boredom...  Reader, you know this squeamish monster well, -hypocrite reader, - my alias, - my twin!"

(Monstre delicat is here translated "squeamish monster" - the monster being Boredom, or ennui.)  

Perhaps needless to say, Au lecteur is one of my very favorite poems.  

 

Ce Monstre Delicat - an explanation

The purpose of this blog is to document books I have read (or listened to as audiobooks) and movies I have seen.  For a while when I was a teenager, I kept a journal of books I had read, and it proved quite useful: writing a summary of the plot helped me remember a book better, and writing a brief review helped me analyze the book and form a more considered opinion about it. Now as an adult, I will sometimes have a flashback to a scene or idea in a book I read years ago, and wish desperately I could remember the author or title and find it again.  If only I had kept up my brief practice of a book journal!

It would not have occurred to me then to document movies.   I liked watching movies very much, but for reasons beyond my control, I consumed (for lack of a better word) far fewer movies than books, and partly due to their shortness and vividness, and also to their rarity, I found them more memorable than books (thus there was no need to write down plots in case I forgot later).  I also took movies far less seriously; it did not occur to me to analyze or review them.  I was pretty old - 16 or 17, believe it or not- before I truly realized there could be such a thing as a bad movie or a bad play.  (Not because I saw only good ones - rather, I just liked, or believed to be good even if I didn't really like it, almost every one I saw.)  I was much younger- maybe around 8 - when I understood that a book could fall anywhere on a spectrum of abysmal to Great.   In other words, while I liked all movies, I enjoyed them uncritically, and therefore, didn't truly appreciate them - didn't love them.  I could read better than I could view; I could understood a book better than a film; at least on some level I could analyze a book, and I could certainly identify some good and Great ones to love with all my heart.  Why was I a better reader than viewer?  Partly due to practice - in my childhood, at least, it was easy to get my hands on a nearly infinite supply of books and rare to see a movie - and also I was taught from an early age not only to critique and analyze books, but specifically how to do so.  I think I got the message from my parents (and more arguably my culture) that movies are for occasional entertainment, while books are there to sustain life and make it livable.

I would still consider books to be more necessary to life than movies, but I have gained much in my appreciation of movies as an important art form, and worthy, side by side with the books I read, of a little record-keeping and reviewing.