Books

I just received a copy of Dreamsbane of Tamalor, a short fantasy book by Bradley James Simpson. My motives for reading it are quite simply that he is one of my “friends” on Goodreads and I am trying to use that site to help me broaden my exposure to writing, writers and other readers. I have to admit, despite occasional frustrations with Goodreads, I am quite hooked. At any rate, it has put me in contact with a wide variety of interesting people (the basic purpose of Social Networking sites) and the fact that an Amazon box arrived on my porch with Bradley’s book proves, I am indeed broadening my horizons (and supporting new writers). I’ll post my thoughts on Dreamsbane of Tamalor sometime soon.

I just finished reading a wonderful little book called Summer in Baden-Baden by Leonid Tsypkin. The book is a dreamy, modern tale of the life of Fyodor Dostoevsky intermingled in the life of one of his admirers, a 20th Century Soviet doctor. Tsypkin, himself an accomplished doctor and medical researcher, died of a heart attack shortly before this work was first published in the West in 1982.

This book transported me back to my days as an undergraduate student in Russian Languages and Literatures, when my time was dedicated almost entirely to the devouring of Pushkin, Lermontov, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, Solzhenitsyn and others of the like. While Summer in Baden-Baden is very much a modern, Soviet era novel, written in a very modern style, the author so carefully and so clearly portrays the 19th Century people and places, that the novel takes on a rich complexity of the 19th Century told from a 20th Century point of view. A rare gem and a fascinating read.

It has been a long time since a book demanded my attention like The Road by Cormac McCarthy. I started reading it in the late evening and had to force myself to stop reading so as not to finish it in one sitting. I actually woke up before the sun unable to resist the temptation to finish the novel.

I have read most of McCarthy’s other novels, and several of them are what I would call great works of literature. Certainly Blood Meridian, and All the Pretty Horses, and perhaps even The Crossing.

McCarthy is a genius of minimalism. His style has a Faulknerseque sense, but lacks the verbosity and temporal ambiguity. The result is a powerfully descriptive voice. McCarthy has a sense of human brutality which dominates much of his writing, and The Road is certainly no exception. McCarthy is a strident instrument of the moral atrophy in our culture, but his style of writing is not that of a moralist. His minimalist style enhances the descriptive aspect of the narrative and presents the reader with the characters, the environment and the plot, offering the reader no aid in passing judgment. In his earlier works, particularly Blood Meridian, the descriptive power of his storytelling and the heinous acts of the characters and the stark and wicked world they inhabit creates a powerful, though disturbing and indigestible experience for the unsuspecting reader.

The Road is quite different. It is a much more mature novel, much more minimalist. The world of the novel is no less callous than other settings for McCarthy’s novels, but this one is much less formally defined. All we know of the setting is that it is some years after a great burning which wiped out most of humanity and all other living creatures. The characters are a father and son who are following “the road” south in a post-apocalyptic, burned out world. Their encounters with other people show the cruel absence of morality which often defines primal survival. But the characters in this story are very much human. They have simply lost their morality in favor of survival.

I found myself reading this book and thinking about my last post on the shootings in Illinois. My comparison of American rampage-shootings and suicide bombers has been working on me. I cannot stop wondering what makes “going Postal” seem more terrifying to me than political or theological violence. Part of me reads a book like The Road and I start to realize that Cormac McCarthy is describing the very difference. We are in peril of losing ourselves and our ability to distinguish right from wrong. Our (Western, most certainly contemporary American) culture is rife with a patriotic sense of superiority over the rest of civilization, yet we allow our culture to become so defined by the short-term materialism and the seeking of pleasure and retribution in violence that there is no distinction between living a good life and living a prosperous life.

McCarthy’s message is indeed relevant, no matter how difficult it may be to digest.