I'll go to hell, then

On one hand, I scored way better (over 20%) than usual for this sort of thing, but I'll be damned if I ever get so bored as to read Tom-not-Thomas Wolfe, or, god forbid, Ayn friggin' Rand. (And for that matter, you're On Notice, Updike.)

I too am impressed with the scope of the banning (if I am reading that list right? Surely Atlas Shrugged isn't on the hundred best, but if we're including banned books that just miss the century cut, then where the hell is Huck Finn?). I don't know if it counts that at least half of these were assigned reading at one point or another.

1. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
2. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
3. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
4. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
5. The Color Purple by Alice Walker
6. Ulysses by James Joyce
7. Beloved by Toni Morrison
8. The Lord of the Flies by William Golding
9. 1984 by George Orwell
10. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
11. Lolita by Vladmir Nabokov
12. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
13. Charlotte's Web by E. B. White
14. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
15. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
16. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
17. Animal Farm by George Orwell
18. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
19. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
20. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
21. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
22. Winnie-the-Pooh by A. A. Milne
23. Their Eyes are Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
24. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
25. Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
26. Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
27. Native Son by Richard Wright
28. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
29. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
30. For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
31. On the Road by Jack Kerouac
32. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
33. The Call of the Wild by Jack London
34. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
35. Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
36. Go Tell it on the Mountain by James Baldwin
37. The World According to Garp by John Irving
38. All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren
39. A Room with a View by E. M. Forster
40. The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien
41. Schindler's List by Thomas Keneally
42. The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
43. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
44. Finnegans Wake by James Joyce
45. The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
46. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
47. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum
48. Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence
49. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
50. The Awakening by Kate Chopin
51. My Antonia by Willa Cather
52. Howards End by E. M. Forster
53. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
54. Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger
55. The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
56. Jazz by Toni Morrison
57. Sophie's Choice by William Styron
58. Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
59. A Passage to India by E. M. Forster
60. Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton
61. A Good Man Is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor
62. Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
63. Orlando by Virginia Woolf
64. Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence
65. Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe
66. Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
67. A Separate Peace by John Knowles
68. Light in August by William Faulkner
69. The Wings of the Dove by Henry James
70. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
71. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
72. A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
73. Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
74. Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
75. Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
76. Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe
77. In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway
78. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein
79. The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
80. The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer
81. Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
82. White Noise by Don DeLillo
83. O Pioneers! by Willa Cather
84. Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
85. The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells
86. Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad
87. The Bostonians by Henry James
88. An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
89. Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather
90. The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
91. This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald
92. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
93. The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles
94. Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis
95. Kim by Rudyard Kipling
96. The Beautiful and the Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald
97. Rabbit, Run by John Updike
98. Where Angels Fear to Tread by E. M. Forster
99. Main Street by Sinclair Lewis
100. Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie

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Review: Cannery Row, by John Steinbeck

Cannery Row was picked up on a recommendation from a year or two ago (See? I do follow through on those things once in a while), a comment on an old post of a fictional bash attended by us online types. An elaborate Goodbye Cruel World sort of thing, and, well, many of us have been there. The novel, I was told, was similar in spirit. It had a party, for one thing, and caught a similar theme. It was a good observation.

The story takes place in Monterey, CA in the early 1940s, during the peak of the fishing industry there, based, at least loosely, on real characters inhabiting an actual nook of its skid row. The novel focuses on the off hours, in dawn and in twilight, where transience is a palpable sensation, but which also reflects in the light a burnished, etched-in-stone quality, like a frozen memory, or a sepia-toned photograph, or, to dig into Steinbeck's preferred metaphor, as the earnest scurrying of the diverse marine animals that flourish for a few hours in tide pools between the ocean's inevitable scouring. I don't know if Steinbeck realized the sardine industry was as ephemeral as its population (possibly he did--he wrote this after a stint as an amateur marine biologist), but that fits in well enough. The industry that holds all these people in place isn't much confronted, nor is the war, but you can almost infer the brutal patterns of society from these large omissions. These inscrutable but measurable forces may have selected the population of this private ecosystem, but the novel concerns itself with what they do when confined to the same pool.

The storytelling is one of those wandering mosaics, a series of interconnected vignettes that focus on one or two characters at a time, letting them cross, and interact a moment before diverging off into another sequence, with another's point of view. I don't know if this is the best version of this technique I've come across--U.S.A., for a recent example, might come out ahead in overall points scored--but Steinbeck tours us through the lives of some colorful men and women, and finds in there some universal life truths, humor, misery, joy and passion, in an admirable economy of words. There's depth in there, or at least angles of light that imply depth. (I found the handful of authorial segues and introductions to be lovely enough to rob them of their running comparisons.) If, for example, his painter Henri lacks the genius to grasp the philosophical implications in art that he imagines he's after, then his existence itself comes together as a fine tableau to describe a certain balance between connection and the individual burden of holding against a hostile world and the inevitable unknown.

That sounds like the Steinbeck I remember, except rather than doubling as a painful object lesson, Henri is treated with a tender humor. I feel I must have read a dozen of his novels when I was young (it was closer to three). He gets assigned to students because the writing isn't difficult and the themes are impossible to miss, but Cannery Row, while taking the familiar ideas, feels like a different creature altogether. The humor is part of it, and there is gentle affection all around, but Steinbeck also makes a point to hold back on the judgment and observe the community. The soul-crushing hopelessness that was the finale of those other novels is only a prelude here, and the difference is huge. The life which follows, tough but dear, is allowed to be savored. Melancholy and joyfulness...where did I read that?

Another thing I liked about the novel was the diversity of its residents, ranging from Mack and the boys, the bums who have, after their fashion, mastered a life of complicated idleness, to Doc, the biologist shacked up in the lab supply business across the street. The rest of the characters radiate in connections to Mack and Doc, and occupy various social strata in between them. What's brilliant about the Cannery Row community is the lack of pretension that Steinbeck places between its members. They all live in their roles in the community hierarchy, but the author locates the common experience they share. Mack spars with the Chinese shopkeeper, and Doc reluctantly takes on his mantle as local wise man, but on the other hand, Lee Chong goes to Mack's parties, and gives in to his schemes even though he knows better, and Doc treats his neighbors with dignity and patience. Each individual is an indispensable cog in the community, and they have everything in common and yet they all have those unreachable places that shelter their own failures. Lonely in a crowd, geniuses and lunatics clinging together, less different than we want to admit, and yeah, point taken.

Review: Mirrors, by Eduardo Galeano

So I was pleased to learn from this book that one name of the form is zuihitsu, based on Sei Shōnagon's The Pillow Book, one of classical Japan's several indelible contributions to literary form. At least it's a word to keep in mind as I attempt to review Steinbeck or Dos Passos doing similar things, even as they may diverge from the contemplative, essay-ish, impression-heavy style that the name more correctly implies. I like it better than writing "mosaic" or "tapestry," and it's nice to lessen the obligation to say things about sums and parts and all that, but of course I will anyway. Mirrors strings together historical tidbits, each several paragraphs long, more or less chronologically, chosen for poignancy, sensitivity, and horror. Given history, it's not like he lacks material. It feels a little bit like some polite children's lesson-book that one only barely remembers, but I'll tell you, picking at the world in three-paragraph chunks is also a lot like reading a blog. It would be a brilliant project in the right hands. Just sayin'.

Subtitling it "stories of almost everyone" is a bit ambitious (the original una historia casi universal appears to convey a slightly different meaning, no? Galeano evidently collaborated closely with the translator, Mark Fried, to ensure the right context), but it is impressive for its comprehensiveness just the same. He takes us through prose-poetry snapshots of lives, starting at the fuzzy dawn of human memory through the bloody birth of our new century, stopping at many corners of civilization along the way. Although I think it takes more excursions eastward than western literature may normally, the focus is still mainly centered on the Americas and Europe, but that's mostly, from Uruguay, what he has been confronted to explain. The language of each individual entry strives for a beautiful simplicity, and I have to admit that I wasn't sure at first that the language quite lived up to the attempted sentiment, but a couple things about that: (1) it's a translation from the Spanish, and (2) it does add up. So it's bigger than the sum of the parts after all; the cumulative effect gets in there quickly, and I surprised myself staying up late pulling through half the book in a night. As for the language, my running hypothesis is that Spanish (heavily Latinate, relatively formal) lends itself well to a certain directness of expression, which may be minimalist or deceptive, but it's pretty hard to make that case with so few data points. It's unfortunate that my language skills are not up to reading it in the original.

Galeano's historical mission is to remind his readers of the causes and the consequences of power. He neglects to address the somber, theatrical regrets that the wielders of power find so ennobling, and shifts his focus to the people who actually bore the cost of it all, on those obvious casualties that history likes to leave unmentioned. Revisionist? More like making a different claim as to What It's All About, which is worthwhile in any honest history, and in literature doesn't even require an explanation. These things happened, and happened more constantly and more universally than big daddy cracker's grand march of progress. The other half of it, the judgment that conquest just isn't so fucking great, becomes hard to refute when you actually start counting the lives, or the quality of lives.

The author's governing philosophy is gently humanist, maybe another Howard Zinn type of anarchist, with a general distrust of power and its justifications, formal or otherwise, perhaps a little optimistic about democracy, appreciative of open-minded scientific inquiry, of art, supportive of common wholesome comforts over the excess grief imposed by the big ideas of powerful men, however noble they may seem. If there's a religious sentiment here, it's more about quiet spirituality--early on, he grants primitive fables a lot of power--than any formal religion, for which he doesn't hesitate to document myriad horrors. If Inkberrow reads this thing, note that Galeano isn't too deluded about it all. He doesn't come out against the Enlightenment, aware that he is sharing many of the values purported at that time, and he extends them as their original proponents failed to. He takes a couple pokes at John Locke's convenient theories of property rights (or of their limits when it came to John Locke), the failures of the French Revolution, the limited sphere of the American founders, etc. What good are values of equality, after all, if after every implementation, the result is still violently unequal for so many people? My favorite quote in this regard was directed against Marxism:

And thus, for what it said and what it did not, the Manifesto confirmed the most profound truth its authors had hit upon: reality is more powerful and astonishing than its interpreters.

The generally equanimous view is one to which I am not unsympathetic, which is no doubt one reason I appreciated the book. In any given one-note vignette, the impression of many of our saints can become monstrous, and of our monsters, unforgotten. But he can sanctify normal people beyond normal too. He doesn't change these perspectives without awareness, and in at least one passage he pens how humans can be all of those things, which is of course true on an individual scale too. I tend to be more forgiving of history's more well-intentioned or half-right actors, who are inevitably flawed products of their times, although Galeano has knocked another chink or two in that apology, pointing to what the wrong half costs. And we can still look critically on the times themselves. Our times too.