All reviews copyright 1984-2011 Evelyn C. Leeper.
CLASSICS REVISITED
by Kenneth Rexroth:
MORE CLASSICS REVISITED
by Kenneth Rexroth:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 12/14/2007]
I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that Michael Ondaajte's LOST CLASSICS made sound very appealing CLASSICS REVISITED by Kenneth Rexroth (ISBN-13 978-0-8112-0988-5, ISBN-10 0-8112-0988-1) and MORE CLASSICS REVISITED by Kenneth Rexroth (ISBN-13 978-0-8112-1083-6, ISBN-10 0-8112-1083-9). And surprisingly for lost classics, they were in my local library. Apparently they are collections of essays about classics written by Rexroth for the SATURDAY REVIEW and other magazines, and so are not intended to form a "Lifetime Reading Plan" or any other consistent whole. Some are interesting, some are not. Some recommend which translation to read, some do not. (For some, one gets the impression that there is only one translation to choose from--or perhaps none. Where does find translations of Tu Fu these days? [Mark suggested Chinese restaurant menus, but I pointed out that was "tofu", not "tu fu".])
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DIAMOND DOGS, TURQUOISE DAYS by Alastair Reynolds:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 11/25/2005]
The first story in DIAMOND DOGS, TURQUOISE DAYS by Alastair Reynolds (ISBN 0-441-01238-8) was recommended to us as having a mathematical content. "Diamond Dogs" is a novella in which a team of explorers tries to conquer/solve the Blood Spire, a structure in which one must solve a mathematical puzzle to go from one room to the next. (A wrong guess results in punishment.) As one progresses, the puzzles become harder, the time limits shorter, the doors smaller, and the punishments more severe. The premise seems to be taken from the movie CUBE, the math (after the first couple of puzzles) is purposely vague (because it is supposed to be comprehensible only if one has special conditioning), and there seem to be any number of rabbits pulled out of hats to solve problems. I know Alastair Reynolds is popular, but from this novella I do not understand why.
To order Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days from amazon.com, click here.
"Troika" by Alastair Reynolds:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 07/08/2011]
"Troika" by Alastair Reynolds (published in the anthology GODLIKE MACHINES) is about an alien artifact that appears in a comet-like orbit around our sun. Three attempts are made to investigate, but it is so alien that even trying to study it causes unexpected problems. Reynolds has his characters all part of the Russian space program because in the future they are the main presence in space. There are echoes of Clarke's Rama in this, but while in some sense it goes beyond Rama, it is also less satisfying.
WAGNER, THE WEHR-WOLF by G. W. M. Reynolds (Dover, 1975 (originally published 1846), ISBN 0-486-220005-2):
[From MT VOID, 1988]
Like VARNEY THE VAMPIRE (which I reviewed last year [1987]), this is not your normal horror novel. It's old (almost 150 years) and it's deceptively long (though it's only 150 pages, they are 8-1/2" by 11" with very small print, or about 120,000 words). Unlike VARNEY THE VAMPIRE, however, people are sure who wrote it. E. F. Bleiler, in his introduction, describes Reynolds as being involved in one "cause" after another, including the temperance movement, the early women's liberation movement, and various political causes. Much of his philosophy comes through in this novel, particularly his campaign against the anti-Semitism of his time.
WAGNER, THE WEHR-WOLF is much more readable than VARNEY THE VAMPIRE. It doesn't have the padding that VARNEY has. There are two reasons for this. The first is that it is shorter and hence less in need of padding. The second is that Reynolds apparently used every plot thread that occurred to him while he was writing the novel (which, like so many of that time, appeared as a series of installments in magazines). So a plot includes helpless maidens being thrown into brutal convents, shipwrecks on desert islands, the Faust legend, the Rosicrucians, the imperial Turkish court, the Inquisition, and a lot lot more I can't remember. You see, Wagner falls in love with Nisida, the deaf-mute daughter of the Count of Riverola, who dies leaving his estate to his son Francisco, whom he hates, unless Nisida recovers before her thirty-sixth birthday. Francisco loves Flora, Nisida's maid, who was orphaned early in life, as was her brother Alessandro, who got a position in the foreign service and was sent to Turkey, where he became an apostate and rose to become the Grand Vizier. Meanwhile, Nisida has Flora thrown into the Carmelite convent to keep her away from Francisco, and there Flora meets the Countess of Arestino, who had pawned her husband's jewels with the Jewish pawnbroker Issachar ben Solomon to get money for her lover, Manuel d'Orsini, to pay his gambling debts. But The Count of Arestino discovered this and had her thrown into the convent, while Manuel and the bandit Stephano go to Issachar's house, where they fight a duel, so that when the police come they find blood on Issachar's floor and accuse him of sacrificing Christian children children and hand him over to the Inquisition. Meanwhile, Wagner has been thrown into prison and is about to be executed and Nisida has been captured by Stephano, who was carrying her off when their ship was ship-wrecked on a desert island. Just before the execution, Wagner turns into a wolf, scares everyone, and escapes. Then he hears that Nisida has been carried off and then ship-wrecked, so he goes searching for her, runs into a storm, and gets ship-wrecked on--you guessed it--the same island. Of course, this is because the Devil has diverted his ship so that he could tempt him as he did Faust (from whom Wagner got his lycanthropy), but Wagner resists so an angel appears who sends him to the Rosicrucians. You got that? Anyway, Nisida is rescued by the Grand Vizier, who is really Alessandro, and returns to Florence, as does Wagner in a boat conveniently abandoned by the Turks. Meanwhile, at least three of the main characters are in the hands of the Inquisition, Nisida is still plotting against Flora, the Turkish army is at the gates of the city, and things are generally heating up.
Never let it be said that the plot lags. The writing is florid, but not overly so. Many, but not all, of characters are one-dimensional--but then with this many characters, that's hard to avoid. Those who prefer clean-cut "Campbellian" prose will not find this their cup of tea, but for students of the Gothic horror novel, it's a must-read.
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THE ORIENTAL CASEBOOK OF SHERLOCK HOLMES by Theodore Riccardi:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 01/21/2005]
Of the Sherlockian Canon, all are told by Watson except for three stories. "The Adventure of the Blanched Soldier" and "The Adventure of the Lion's Mane" are told with Holmes as the first- person narrator, and "His Last Bow" is told by an anonymous third-person narrator. All three seem awkward because of this; the reader desperately wishes for the "comfort" of the Watsonian narration. Theodore Riccardi's THE ORIENTAL CASEBOOK OF SHERLOCK HOLMES (ISBN 1-4000-6065-6) is a collection of stories set during the Great Hiatus (the three-year period when Holmes was presumed dead, but was actually traveling in the East). So Watson was not present during any of these cases. But Riccardi mostly avoids the problem of Holmes recounting the story as a first-person narrative by having Watson write most of the stories after Holmes tells it to him. It sounds clumsy when one describes it that way, but it is not in execution. The book is weakest when he falls back on first-person Holmesian narrative. There are also more coincidences than I'm entirely comfortable with, and given how many people seem to know that Holmes is still alive, it's amazing that word did not get back to Watson.
To order The Oriental Casebook of Sherlock Holmes from amazon.com, click here.
UNTANGLING MY CHOPSTICKS by Victoria Abbott Riccardi:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 12/10/2004]
Victoria Abbott Riccardi's UNTANGLING MY CHOPSTICKS (ISBN 0-7679- 0852-X) is the story of the author's year in Japan learning "tea kaiseki", a very specialized cuisine style served as part of the tea ceremony. Riccardi explains the history and meaning of the tea ceremony, the various foods, the utensils and methods, and just about everything else connected with the tea ceremony, as well as a fair swath of Japanese culture as well. Recipes are included. My only complaint is that it may go into more depth about tea kaiseki than you really want to know.
To order Untangling My Chopsticks from amazon.com, click here.
CHRIST THE LORD: OUT OF EGYPT by Anne Rice:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 09/05/2008]
The original discussion group read CHRIST THE LORD: OUT OF EGYPT by Anne Rice (ISBN-13 978-0-345-492739, ISBN-10 0-345-49273-0), and that also seemed to have a logic problem. It is the story of Jesus, told from his point of view. This volume covers his childhood, and is written as though by a boy of ten (or so). However, as someone pointed out, it was obviously written much later, when he was older, so it should not have the "voice" of a ten-year-old. But my complaint is deeper. The premise of the book is that the tenets of Christianity are correct. This means, as I understand that Jesus is basically God. And God is omniscient. So why doesn't the young Jesus *know* he is the Messiah, and what is in store for him? (I'm sure that the answer that Jesus started as fully and solely human and became divine only later is some sort of heresy--possibly adoptionism.)
(In one of the more interesting typos I've seen, this meeting was listed on the library's web page schedule as discussing CHRIS THE LORD: OUT OF EGYPT.)
To order Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt from amazon.com, click here.
THE END OF THE ALPHABET by C. S. Richardson:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 06/20/2008]
THE END OF THE ALPHABET by C. S. Richardson (ISBN-13 978-0-385-52255-7, ISBN-10 0-385-52255-X) was recommended to me somewhere. The premise is that Ambrose Zephyr has been told that he has a month to live, and hence decides that he and his wife Zappora Ashkenazi should travel to cities he has always wanted to visit, working his way through the alphabet, one city per letter. Unfortunately, not much comes of this other than that which would have happened with the alphabetical conceit. There is the occasional bon mot (e.g., "He was cinematically familiar with a few biblical stories."). This is also another example of a book that has done away with quotation marks as perhaps being an unnecessary expense of ink.
To order The End of the Alphabet from amazon.com, click here.
CLARA'S GRAND TOUR by Glynis Ridley:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 10/21/2005]
CLARA'S GRAND TOUR by Glynis Ridley (ISBN 0-87113-883-2) is about Clara's travels through Europe in the 1740s and 1750s. Travel then was hard in general, but for Clara it was even harder. Clara, you see, was a three-ton rhinoceros. Brought from India by Douwemount Van der Meer, Clara became a media celebrity, the first live rhinoceros exhibited in Europe since Roman times. The discussion of the logistics of moving this creature is likely to appeal to engineers, and the effect that the existence of this fabled creature (believed by some to be the "behemoth" of the Bible) had on the populace. My major complaint about the book would be that Ridley describes a lot of paintings, drawings, sculptures, and other works portraying Clara, yet includes only seven in the small section of illustrations. And Ridley repeats the claim that CLARISSA is the longest novel in the English language. At a million words, it was the longest for centuries (although I know VARNEY THE VAMPIRE, at about 900,000 words, is close, and there may well be other "penny dreadful" novels that are longer) but I would claim that Robert Jordan's "Wheel of Fire" is a single, serialized book that is considerably longer. (Ridley mentions CLARISSA because the fourth edition was revised to include a reference to the rhinoceros, which is almost definitely a reaction to Clara's tour.)
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GENOME by Matt Ridley:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 12/31/2010]
Our science book discussion group chose GENOME by Matt Ridley (ISBN 978-0-060-89408-5) for last month. In it, Ridley looks at each of the human body's chromosomes, chooses one gene from it, and talks about it as a way of talking about bigger topics such as species, immortality, etc. While the various topics are well-chosen, and the approach original, the writing is awkward. For example, Ridley describes something as "rather like one of those irritating magazine articles interrupted by forty-eight advertisements" when he really means "rather like one of those magazine articles interrupted by forty-eight irritating advertisements".
Ridley claims that intelligence is going up three points per decade; is that true or are the tests just getting easier (like the New York school tests)?
Ridley also writes, "It would be absurd to argue that only Germans can understand the concept of taking pleasure at another's misfortune; and that the rest of us, not having a word for Schadenfreude, find the concept entirely foreign." There are two problems with this sentence. One, since we can perfectly clearly define Schadenfreude, we cannot say we "have no word for it"; that would be like saying that since we have no single word for "ripe banana", we "have no word for it." Obviously there are a lot of concepts that require adjectives attached to nouns, or other combinations, and no linguist would claim those concepts were therefore alien because there was no one word. But, two, we do have a word for it: Schadenfreude.
(And regarding proof-reading, why is she "Harris, Judith Rich" in the index, but referred to as "Rich Harris" in the text?)
To order Genome from amazon.com, click here.
ENGLISH GOTHIC: A CENTURY OF HORROR CINEMA
by Jonathan Rigby (Reynolds & Hearn, 2000, 272pp, L17.95)
NIGHTWALKERS: GOTHIC HORROR MOVIES: THE MODERN ERA
by Bruce Lanier Wright (Taylor, 1995, 171pp, $17.95)
BRIGHT DARKNESS: THE LOST ART OF THE SUPERNATURAL FILM
by Jeremy Dyson (Cassell, 1997, 282pp, price unknown):
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 06/06/2003]
Last year I read Jonathan Rigby's ENGLISH GOTHIC: A CENTURY OF HORROR CINEMA (Reynolds & Hearn, 2000, 272pp, L17.95). Then a couple of weeks ago, I read NIGHTWALKERS: GOTHIC HORROR MOVIES: THE MODERN ERA by Bruce Lanier Wright (Taylor, 1995, 171pp, $17.95). And when Mark saw me enjoying that, he said I should also read Jeremy Dyson's BRIGHT DARKNESS: THE LOST ART OF THE SUPERNATURAL FILM (Cassell, 1997, 282pp, price unknown).
The first point worth noting is that only one of these are British, which is surprising when one considers that when one talks about "Gothic horror films" or "supernatural horror films," often the studio name that first comes to mind is Hammer Films. Ironically, Dyson doesn't cover the Hammer era at all, but instead concentrates on the Universal/RKO era of the 1930s and 1940s. Wright, on the other hand, focuses on the Hammer period from 1957 to 1976 but covers American and Continental horror films as well as British, while Rigby takes an approach orthogonal to both and covers a century's worth of films, all English.
All three have one thing in common--they concentrate on the "horror film" rather than the "terror film." Their goal is not to write about slasher films, or stalker films, or psycho films, but about "supernatural" horror--horror that is based on something beyond the world we know. (Wright makes the distinction at the end between Gothic and Grand Guignol styles, saying the latter emphasizes our physical existence in this world, while the former postulates a structure of good and evil in which we move.)
On to specifics. Rigby's ENGLISH GOTHIC is a very thorough coverage of its topics, with particular value for the pre-Hammer era which tends to be ignored or skimmed over in works of this kind. Rigby does not cover every film in detail, but at least references and puts in context the films for which he doesn't give detailed plot synopses and analyses.
Wright's NIGHTWALKERS is much less thorough, even for the period it covers, though he spends a bit more time on the films he does cover in depth. And Dyson covers even fewer films, but each again in yet more depth, with entire chapters devoted to "King Kong" and "Cat People", for example.
The real problem with all of these, of course, is that after you have finished reading about a film, you'll want to pull out the DVD (or videotape) and watch it again. After reading about what Wright called "the Cornish horrors" ("The Reptile" and "Plague of the Zombies"), for example, I suggested to Mark that this would make a good Sunday afternoon double feature. Luckily, he agreed, and since it just happened to be Sunday afternoon, that was one problem solved. :-)
All three books are somewhat difficult to find in stores, though on-line booksellers have made it relatively easy on-line. If you are going to get only one of the three, ENGLISH GOTHIC is probably the best choice. BRIGHT DARKNESS is the most academic, with NIGHTWALKERS being the most "pop culture" of the three, though hardly a fluff coffee table book.
To order English Gothic from amazon.com, click here.
To order Nightwalkers from amazon.com, click here.
To order Bright Darkness from amazon.com, click here.