Gravity’s Rainbow, february 23rd, 2017.

It’s been a while.

I have been distracted from Paperback Rider since late november, but today I have a special book to recommend. A book I had heard was difficult, that it was one of those ‘just tell people you’ve read it, but haven’t gotten past page 200.’ The book is another Pynchon (I read V. last summer) and is called Gravity’s Rainbow, and I can tell you it is glorious.

It is rare that you read a book that so thoroughly baffles you, yet is compelling enough to not let go of. No summary of Gravity’s Rainbow would do it justice, since the narrative is so sprawling and far-reaching, that I would never be able to cover it all. In short, the story takes place (mainly) in Europe during the last months of WW2 and the immediate aftermath in the “Zone,” or post-war Germany. Tyrone Slothrop is the closest thing resembling an anchor, we follow his wild adventure through Germany searching for the mysterious V-2 rocket with the serial no. 00000. There is something about Pavlovian conditioning, rocket predicting erections, secret government project and general paranoia.

As he moves on he finds these farms haunted, but amiably. The oakwork creaks in the night, honest and wooden. Unmilked cows low painfully in distant fields, others come in and get drunk on fermented silage, barging around into fences and piles of hay where Slothrop dreams, uttering moos with drunken umlauts on them.

What makes the trip (and at times it really is) enjoyable is the sheer creativity and humour that Pynchon possesses. There is a staggering amount of storylines to sink your teeth into, easily enough to satiate 50 novels, most of which are interesting, funny and absurd. How many novels contain a chapter on scheeming light-bulbs?

There is the black SS division known as the Schwarzkommando, led by Enzian whose half-brother is a Russian intelligence agent, and there is the crazy antics that follow when our hero dons a zoot suit. Then there is the villainous German captain Blicero and his rocket, oh, and there is an octopus that is being trained to fight, and also, famously, an instance of coprophilia, which is the polite term for faecal arousal. The last bit proved too much for judges and disqualified the novel for the Pulitzer price in 1974.

Pynchon is an author of incredible range. The novel is long, my copy is around 900 pages, and it can be difficult to read at times. It seeks to describe the paranoid mind at the cost of narrative cohesiveness. Sometimes it can be a bit dull, but the effort is rewarded with moments of great humour and fantastic eloquence.

Curiously, the reader of Pynchon’s earlier work V. is rewarded in Gravity’s Rainbow with the return of familiar faces, such as Corporal Weissman and Seaman ‘Pig’ Bodine. It adds yet another layer to an already complicated novel. You might need a wiki search for some of this.

Anyone looking for a challenge should read this book. It is an inspired piece of fiction, teeming with creative energy which you will never forget.

 

-PBR

Grey Emminence, November 3rd, 2016

Last entry’s deviation from the Paperback Rider formula might have been an act of desperation. I have read several books that have not lived up to the high bar I have set for this blog, and perhaps Blitzed should not have been a recommendation, but joined that group of rejects. It did, however, make its way to the blog, and so it shall remain, but this weeks biography puts it to shame. Perhaps, for future posts, there should be room for imperfections and books of lesser grade than those of the past. I am currently reading another Thomas Pynchon novel, which I hope to finish and write something about (although it has lost me completely many pages ago).

‘This man,’ he said, ‘penetrates my most secret thougths; he knows things that I have communicated only to a few people of tried discretion; and he goes to Tours and returns, on foot, in the rain, the snow and the ice, in the most frightful weather, without anybody being able to observe him. I swear, the devil must be in this friar’s body.’

After reading Blitzed, a proper old paperback dumped into my mailbox from Amazon, Grey Eminence by Aldous Huxley. It ties strangely into what I have just read, and what I am currently reading, but we will get to that. It is a biography of Francois Leclerc du Tremblay, known to most of his contemporaries as Father Joseph and to history as the titular Grey Eminence. Born of wealthy and well-connected nobles, Francois Leclerc entered the Capuchin order of monks around the year 1600, following an early awakening to the presence of god. He became a mystic, missionary, and politician, and his work caused the suffering of hundreds of thousands of people.

Huxley is mostly interested in the man, the strange dichotomy of deeply devout catholic monk, who meditates on the suffering of Jesus every day, and who sets out to bring about a peaceful kingdom of Heaven on Earth. The extreme skill of his political side, however, helps the likes of Cardinal Richelieu, the Red Eminence, and prolongs the Thirty Years War. Huxley tells us of Father Joseph’s rise to power and describes in detail the story of 17th century European high politics. It is thrilling to read how, as Huxley often reminds us, reality trumps fiction in strangeness and matters of intrigue.

The book was written in 1941, and Huxley states, that to understand what is happening then, in ’41, one must understand what happened in the 17th century. While not providing any thoughts on the state of affairs in the 40ies, Huxley uses the character study of Father Joseph to put it into perspective. What does it do to a man’s ideals, if he fails to ask the most important questions? And the question is: does your basic assumptions of the world withstand scrutiny? In the case of Father Joseph, his fatal flaw was to believe in the providence of France, and to equate French power with divine rule.

Grey Eminence is a well written and interesting study of the road paved with good intentions. For anyone interested in history and religion it is well worth a read.

– PBR

V., August 26th, 2016

Returning from summer hiatus we have as our first book a delirious account of a man’s quest to find the enigmatic V. Is it a place? A woman? No one knows and it is not clear that the reader will ever know.

In front of the wine shop on the Ponte Vecchio sat Signor Mantissa and his accomplice in crime, a seedy-looking Calabrese named Cesare. Both were drinking Broglio wine and feeling unhappy. It had occured to Cesare sometime during the rain that he was a steamboat ⌊…⌋ and was announcing his discovery to those who came within earshot. He would emit short blasts across the mouth of the wine bottle to encourage the illusion. “Toot,” he would go, “toot. Vaporetto, io.”

Thomas Pynchon is an author whom you might know from the recent adaptation of his book Inherent Vice. This weeks book, V., is his first, published 1963 and deals with, well… It’s not a simple question to answer. I have no idea what it is about, yet the words and stories had me spellbound throughout.

It might be about Herbert Stencil, who is searching for V., “a remarkably scattered concept” (pp. 364) found in his father’s notebooks. It might be about Benny Profane the human yoyo, a Bukowsky-esque factotum/bum with a dash of beatnik. There is also the Whole Sick Crew who the aforementioned two move in the periphery of. There is also the alligator hunters in the New York sewers, the dead priest whose congregation of rats still roam there, the sailor with the sharpened teeth, a plot to steal Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, a very detailed description of a nosejob and so much more.

It might be beneficial to just not bother with the overall narrative, and instead focus on immersion into the text. If you at this moment have the impression that V. is a post-modern novel driveling on into endless wordgasms and nonsense writing, disperse of the notion immediatly! While it is a challenging read it is incredibly funny and at times extremely silly. Pynchon names his characters like he was writing a cartoon. There is the British spy Bongo-Schaftsbury, the dentist Eigenvalue and on and on.

V. is the first Pynchon novel I have read that I really liked, having been a little bored with Inherent Vice, but I have lined Gravity’s Rainbow, Mason & Dixon and Vineland up on the shelf, to be read soon. In the meantime I highly recommend a headfirst dive into the strangeness that is his first novel, V..

Amazon <> AbeBooks

Siddhartha, June 30th, 2016

Greetings from the North. I have escaped the noise of Copenhagen to a place of absolute seclusion. I am writing from a house which is required by local law to be hidden from the nearest road. Here, in the vacuum of society, the birds are distinguished only by the pitch of their cry, there being a dislike of human order among the inhabitents.

It is fitting then that one should delve into the works of Herman Hesse, the German author who despite winning the Nobel Prize for litterature in 1946, only became widely translated and read when the counter-culture movement of the 60s created a massive audience for his works of spiritual enlightenment.

Siddartha, our book of the week, is perhaps the most universal of them. Is tells the story of Siddartha, a son of a Brahmin, who feels a great thirst for knowledge and enlightenment and thus he travels from profession to profession in order to attain it. First he seeks the ascetic order of the Samanas where he learns to meditate and disregard external stimuli. He practices escape from the self in order to become one with the universe. He soon becomes restless. He tells his friend Govinda that he believes the temporary respite from the self one gains from meditation is not that different from the one the ox cart driver gets from drink. He parts with the ascetics and his friend and sets out on his own, determined to learn what teachers cannot teach: wisdom.

Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. One can find it, live it, be fortified by, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate or teach it.

Siddartha is a classic bildungsroman and the lessons learned by Siddartha are timeless. The primary revelation of Siddartha, which is the result of his thirst for knowledge, is that he cannot hope to learn the world by listening to his teachers, reading scrolls or meditating. He has to leave his home and his teacher and experience the world through the filter of different layers of society. He becomes an ascetic. He learns of love from a beautiful woman. He becomes wealthy until the nausea drives him mad. To know the world he has to experience the extremes, both despair and sin and holyness and perfection.

Siddartha is a great little book. It reaches into the reader and tickles something essential and the joy of reaching the conclusion of the book and finding oneself a little wiser is an achievement few other works can lay claim to.

 

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Jesus’ Son, June 24th, 2016

<The doctor> peeked into the trauma room and saw the situation: the clerk -that is, me- standing next to the orderly, Georgie, both of us on drugs, looking down at a patient with a knife sticking up out of his face.
“What seems to be the trouble?” he said.

This week Paperback Rider is recommending a small collection of short-stories by Denis Johnson called Jesus’ Son. It is a collection of short and strangely spellbinding tales, all centered around the man Fuckhead, who takes odd jobs, does drugs, drinks, gets into fights. Lives his life one day at a time.

There is a strangeness to the narrative, a logic that resembles that of an old drunkard telling stories to people passing by. The narrative is often fractured, jumping back and forth in time and place, confusing facts or mixing up different stories. Furthermore, there is very little linearity in the stories, first we did this then I did that, but somehow it works. There is a certain sense coherence in the delirium that upholds the narrative structure and keeps the story from falling apart, but don’t look for a grand narrative, this is more like a cluster of social-realist tales of people on the fringe of society.

One of the stories, Emergency, opens with Fuckhead working as a clerk at a Catholic Hospital. The orderly, Georgie, steals whatever pills he can get his hands on, and the two of them slowly descent into separate kinds of madness, fueled by each own’s particular and entirely random cocktail of capsules. There is a fine line between comedy and despair in this story and Denis Johnson dips his toes on both sides throughout.

One advantage of recommending short-stories is that they are much easier to access. To anyone unaware, the New Yorker releases a podcast once a month where authors read short-stories by other authors. It is a great way to spend 30 minutes and Denis Johnson’s stories have been featured a couple of times, including a reading of the story Work from this collection. The thing about Jesus’ Son is that even within individual stories are smaller and disconnected stories, making the collection coherent in its incoherence. For all its inconsistencies and faults of logic, it is a wonder that the text works, but it does and for a summer afternoon it is a perfect read and a great piece of fiction.

 

Amazon <> AbeBooks

Command and Control, June 17th, 2016

Keeping with the theme of death, destruction and chaos and the inherent violence of humanity established last week, this week we will be looking at Command and Control by Eric Schlosser, a perhaps even more chilling read than Blood Meridian. While Cormac McCarthy’s bloody Western is horrifying in its brutality, Schlosser’s book is disturbing because it breaks the illusion that the threat of nuclear weapons is a thing of the past.

Command and Control is a nail biter of a non-fiction piece. It details the history of nuclear weapons and the industry and, importantly, security surrounding them. The premise is, that while, statistically, the chance of a bomb going off by accident may be small, but given enough weapons and enough time it is bound to happen. This risk is further compounded by the fact that the most unstable nuclear powers  are also the ones increasing their arsenal (see Pakistan). TheThis story is not about those powers. It is focused solely on American nuclear weapons and the disturbingly high number of near misses of the past 70 years. It serves as a reminder that even the seemingly most technologically advanced and stable of nuclear powers have only just managed to control the power of the Bomb.

The Mark 6 was a large weapon, about eleven feet long and five feet in diameter, and as Kulka tried to peek above it, he inadvertently grabbed the manual bomb release for support. The Mark 6 suddenly dropped onto the bomb bay doors, and Kulka fell on top of it. A moment later, the eight-thousand-pound bomb broke through the doors.

The broad historical scope of nuclear weapons and politics is interlaced with one account of a near disaster. A routine maintenance job on a missile in Damascus, Arkansas, starts going bad when a bolt is dropped from a platform near the top of the missile. It ricochets off the concrete inner wall of the missile tube and pierces the thin aluminum shell of the missile. Highly toxic and flammable liquid starts spewing from the tiny hole causing havoc in the silo. Schlossers account of the events that follow is one of the most thrilling things you will ever read.

Eric Schlosser had previously written another non-fiction book on American culture, Fast Food Nation, which was a great critical success and was made into a movie in 2006. Prior to that book’s publication Schlosser visited an underground facility in which a Titan II intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) is stored, ready to launch at a moments notice. Many years of research concluded in the publication of Command and Control in 2013 and the impressive bibliography is a clear evidence of the amount of work put into this book.

It is quite a feat to have written a book that gives you information about how long the half-life of certain radioactive isotopes is and never stops being entertaining, all while making you shake your head in disbelief at the madness of humanity. Command and Control will have you telling anecdotes like “that time IBM executives visited NORAD and everyone thought the United States was being attacked by Russia but it turned out it was just the moon.” As far as narrative history goes, this is probably the best I have read. It is like a car crash, or maybe a more fitting analogy is the rising mushroom cloud on the horizon, terrible and unstopable, yet your primal instincts gorgonizes you to the ground while radioactive fire melts your glittering eyeballs. You don’t want to look, but you will.

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Blood Meridian, June 10th, 2016

Today Paperback Rider has been posting continuously for 8 weeks and it is time for a book of considerable magnitude. When I began writing this blog I knew that I would at some point have to recommend Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. It is one of the few books I have read more than once, in fact I just finished reading it for the fourth time, not finding the experience any less thrilling than the first time round.

They ascended through a rocky pass and lightning shaped out the distant shivering mountains and lightning rang the stones about and tufts of blue fire clung to the horses like incandescent elementals that would not be driven off. Soft smelterlights advanced upon the metal of the harness, lights ran blue and liquid on the barrels of the guns. Mad jackhares started and checked in the blue glare and high among those clanging crags jokin roehawks crouched in their feathers or cracked a yellow eye at the thunder underfoot.

Blood Meridian follows the story of the Kid, who at the age of 14 sets out from his home in Tennessee. He roams the land, a ragged figure, drifting in the wind without clear purpose other than perhaps the occasional tumbler of whiskey. He eventually joins a band of scalp hunters travelling the borderlands of Texas, California and Mexico. They are both chasing and being chased by indians and no mercy is shown from either side in each encounter. This Western has no heroes, very few good deeds and no redemptive qualities. It is a modern Western in that it . The story is grim, violent beyond belief and an awe inspiring spectacle of the horrible. The brief flashes of humor are accentuated all the more because of it, as when the Kid and a man called Toadvine are jailed in Chihuahua:

How do you like city life? said Toadvine.
I dont like it worth a damn so far.
I keep waiting for it to take with me but it aint done it.

The villain of the book is perhaps the greatest villain of all of literature. Judge Holden is, all at once, father figure, anti-christ, poet, philosopher and ruthless murderer (among other things) and seems to appear, sometimes out of thin air, whenever violence is looming. He is a large man with not a hair on his pale body, prone to partial or complete nakedness and is always smiling and laughing.  At night by the campfire he deftly records and sketches all kinds of things into a leatherbound ledger. The men of he company he rides in are terrified of him and it. To the question of his intention in sketching the artifacts he answers that it is “to expunge them from the memory of man.” The Judge is a devourer of civilisation and of culture, seeking only the most primal of human instincts and to promote them beyond all others. He is, in a sense, the devil, but what is the devil if not a projection of ourselves?

So why is this a book worth reading? Simply put, it is a masterpiece. The neo-biblical prose, the archaic references, all come together to form a sort of holy testament to modern American civilisation. It is powerful in its language like nothing else, like the voice of God booming in your skull. Reading some passages makes you feel like the text itself could reach up and pull down the heavens on your head.

Blood Meridian is not an easy book to read. It is vile and horrible and more than once have I had the urge to throw it away. Yet I keep coming back to it. For the language, the imagery and the characters. It is a study of our vilest thoughts and the depravity inherent in human culture. It is also perhaps the greatest piece of fiction from the last 30 years.

AMAZON <> ABEBOOKS

Blood and Plum Blossoms,June 3rd, 2016

Greetings from a city in chaos! Copenhagen is currently cast into the throngs of sun mad youths, red faced and wild eyed behind cheap plastic sunglasses of all colors, dancing through the streets, beer and wine and vodka held aloft in a heathen salute to the sun and later the moon and always the bass. The yearly Distortion Festival is upon us and it is never quiet.

Maybe seek the leisurely comfort of this weeks item. On the menu is the novella Blood and Plum Blossoms by Yu Hua. It is the story of a son of a hero who sets out to avenge his father’s murder. We follow him on the road and in his dealings with people who knew his father. After his death the figure of his father fades in the memory of people, but the legend of his father’s sword, the Plum Blossom Sword, is woven into the myths of the land.

For once its blade had been slathered with the blood of a foe, one gentle wave of the hand would suffice to send the blood flurrying from the blade like red snow, leaving a single stain in the shape of an exquisite plum blossom embossed on the blade for all eternity.

Curiously, as I write this I realise that as with the previous story by a Chinese author on Paperback Rider, this story is about a man trying to lift the legacy of his ancestors and failing to do so. Yu Hua takes the classic formula of the warrior who takes up his father’s sword and hunts down his killers and twists it into an ironic joke. In the beginning of the story we are told that the young boy does not come close to being the kind of man his father was. If one is so inclined one could easily read some Freudian themes into the image of the sword. I will leave that to the reader.

Yu Hua is a Chinese author of exceptional skill. He has written books and novellas and published a book of essays on China a few years ago, titled China in Ten Words, which details his childhood and experience and memories from the Cultural Revolution and is well worth a read. He tells a story of his birth as a writer. He had managed to get in contact  with a local Red Pen, a famous local writer of Communist literature, who he asks to comment on his one-act play. The Red Pen tells him to pay extra attention to the soliloquies of the landlord (a common trope of communist literature and drama of the cultural revolution was the fiendish landlord who’s devilry is exposed by the noble working class) and flesh them out as much as possible, make them as real and full of feeling as possible. The aspiring writer takes the advice to heart and goes home to rewrite his play. A few days later the Red Pen is arrested and branded a Black Pen and paraded in public squares with a sign emblazoned with his sins. A local official had read the unfortunate man’s play and deemed him an opponent to the communist cause because of the eloquence with which he expounded the landlords desire for power and the subterfuge with which he carried out his plot. Since he had written it, it must originate from him was the verdict. Such was the perils of men of letters in China in the 60’s and 70’s.

Anyway, I highly recommend Yu Hua. Blood and Plum Blossoms was published in English translation in a collection called The Past and the Punishment: Eight Stories but I’m sure it can be found elsewhere. His, I believe, latest novel was published in English last year and is called The Seventh Day and is also worth a read, should the meagre scope of the novella not satisfy your appetite.

Yu Hua’s writing is slow and intricate (more so in Chinese but also in English translation). He seems to enjoy telling stories that gradually reveal themselves as if watching a landscape appear out of receding mist. It is a great pleasure to read and his novellas are a great place to start.

The Past and the Punishment, Eight Stories:
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China in Ten Words:
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The Seventh Day:
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Pale Fire, May 27th, 2016

Lines 939-940: Man’s life, etc.

If I correctly understand the sense of this succinct observation, our poet suggests here that human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece.

Greetings from somewhere in Copenhagen where the sun beats the street into slick rivers of tar and people flock to every patch of green clenching the victuals spat out by shawarma chefs and pizza jugglers in an endless stream of meat and bread. Grab a book and find a spot in the shade. This weeks recommendation is from the great Vladimir Nabokov, the Russian who became one of the greatest authors of English fiction. While Lolita is the book everyone knows and many have read, todays book of choice is Pale Fire which is smaller and lighter and not quite the masterpiece that Lolita is but still worth the effort.

Pale Fire is a strange little novel, but perhaps only if one dwells on its strangeness. The story is rather straightforward, a tale of mystery, murder, regicide and revolution, but the structure is strange. It takes the form of a poem and its critical commentary. A foreword introduces us to the context within which the poem was written and the main characters of the story. Next is the poem, the last of John Shade’s distinguished (as we are told) career. A thousand lines detailing his life and the tragedy of the loss of his daughter. The remaining and majority of the novel is the commentary in which a Dr. Kinbote explains the poem and reveals the true(?) meaning of the ambiguous references.

The commentary tells a different story than the poem. Kinbote very forcefully squeezes his own narrative into the poem. A story of his homeland of Zembla, a nation that underwent revolution which caused its monarch to flee. The country probably shares a border with Russia and has sinister connections with the equally sinister country of Denmark, which is repeatedly brought up in connection with the people chasing the noble king, Charles the Beloved. An assassin dressed in a crumpled brown suit from Copenhagen, shady figures meeting in Copenhagen, a cheap Danish newspaper as indicative of sinister character, and so on. It does seem like Copenhagen is a sort of transit hub for all things evil. Anyway, the reader quickly senses that Kinbote’s narrative might not be all that trustworthy, much like the narrator of Nabokov’s masterpiece Lolita. I will let the reader figure out the mystery on their own and just quote Kinbote’s rendition of one of his talks with John Shade:

“Me dear John,” I replied gently and urgently, “do not worry about trifles. Once transmuted by you into poetry, the stuff will be true, and the people will come alive.”

The book has been sitting in my bookshelf for a long time, frightening me with its strangeness and tiring me with its structure, but last week I decided to read it for the first time. I can report that it is worth the effort. It is one of the few books I have read which can be read every which way. Reading the introduction I jumped to the notes referenced in it and having read the poem I read the commentary, going back to check and re-read the poem. This is not necessarily the right way, there is no right way, and my checking and re-reading did lessen in the latter half of the commentary. The whole thing can easily be read straight through without any problems.

One of the fun things about reading Nabokov, though, is the playfulness of his language and the many self-references and wordplay and anagrams. Some are more obvious than others, some the novel is kind enough to point out (Kinbote, botkine, botkin, bodkin).

Pale Fire is a great piece of fiction. It is funny and cleverly written.

 

Get it from Amazon or AbeBooks.

The Sot-Weed Factor, May 20th, 2016

“Faith!” cried Ebenezer joyously. “Only think on’t. A province, an entire people – all unsung! What deeds forgot, what gallant men and women lost to time! ⌊…⌋ Marry, ’tis virgin territory!”

So begins the grand tale of Ebenezer Cooke, the son of American plantation owners, but raised and educated in Great Britain. He sets out in the late 1600’s, headed for his family’s plantation and on a quest for the muse of Maryland and the title of Poet Laureate of Maryland.

Compared to earlier entries on this site, this is of considerably lighter tone, at times bordering on the tasteless. The Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth is a farcical comedy, written in hilarious mock 17th century vernacular and filled with absurd stories about pirates, intellectuals, poets, farmers, explorers, indians, lovable hogs and the list goes on. Here be fart jokes a plenty! It might border on poor taste, but somehow the skill with which it is written and the sincerity of the underlining themes elevates it from the crudeness. Deep down I think we all enjoy the image of a crew of adventurers, who are sailing up the Chesapeake when local food gives the entire crew the trots, causing them to get caught with their pants down, asses hanging over the side railing on both sides of the ship, when Indians attack.

The story begins in England, where Ebenezer has finished his education and struggles with the meaning of life. He finds himself denouncing the pleasures of the flesh in favor of the purity of poetry. There is quite a lot going on in the story. At the center, though, is the dichotomy of pure innocence of Ebenezer and the hedonism of his mentor, Burlingame. Burlingame is an advocate of the pleasures of life and loves all things equally, perhaps with the exception of Ebenezer and his twin sister, who occupy a special place in his heart.

John Barth is a somewhat archetypical post-modern writer and the narrative structure of The Sot-Weed Factor reflects that. It is a long book with several layers of narratives and meta-narratives, and may at times test your stamina. But the reward is worth it. It is the sort of book that you want to continue for a long time. The language and style makes it a treat to read. When I read it a few years ago I thought I might have discovered a literary genius. Having read a handful of John Barth’s other works I can report that it is not the case. The Sot-Weed Factor is, by all accounts, his masterpiece. Funny, well-written and as wide reaching as they come.

Recommended for the reader who doesn’t mind crude jokes and epic adventures.

Amazon /// AbeBooks