Books I Like

Primitive People, Francine Prose: I like Francine Prose. I like her short stories and her essays and her writing in general. This book, though, doesn't seem to quite know what it is. Is it an essay about upper-class Americans and the vapidity of their inner lives, or is it a comedy of manners, or a tragedy, or the story of a Haitian immigrant who takes a job as au pair to the moody children of a separated old-money blueblood couple? Is it a book about love, or money, or the uncertainty of the future, or all or none of that? I don't know, really. Some of it is brilliant--especially the last 50 pages--but some of it seems too self-conscious. Prose never fails to let you know when she's making a deep observation about human nature, and there's a great deal of telling going on, which borders on lecturing. And while the cover copy declares this a comedy, there are frequent and repeated images of blood, death, violence and evisceration. Riddle me that bit. Undecided as to meaning or success of form, but recommended nonetheless.

Hamlet Had An Uncle, James Branch Cabell: If you don't know who Cabell was, you should find something of his and read it. Witty, urbane, mocking of his subjects yet still revealing secrets of the human heart, Cabell wrote sort of old-school prosy fiction about feudal Europe that was once banned as obscene due to some double entendres in possibly questionable taste. Hamlet Had An Uncle is Cabell's fairly straightforward retelling of the ur-Hamlet found in Saxo Grammaticus' "Danish History" of 1300 AD. If you want to see what Shakespeare's story looked like before the bard rewrote Kyd's story lifted from Bellefloret's revisions of the first part of Saxo's retelling, then you should pick this book up. While it eventually suffers from the same weakness of a lot of ancient tales (that of being a long series of episodes connected by a central character but not a story arc), and I found myself saying, Oh, do get on with it, once or twice, it's true to both the original Danish folktale and to Cabell's witty sensibilities.

A Preface to Paradise Lost, C.S. Lewis: This slim volume is taken from a series of lectures Lewis gave at Bangor in about 1940, and begins with a discussion of epic poetry via Homer's Iliad and the ancient story of Beowulf, shows how Virgil adapted the epic form to suit the needs of a morally-guided literature with the Aeneid, and how John Milton subsequently took Virgil's form and adapted it for Paradise Lost. Lewis then goes on to discuss Milton's great poem from a variety of angles, from formal/poetic to religious/doctrinal, to give future readers of that epic a possible understanding of what it might be about, and--more importantly, I think, from Lewis' perspective--to prevent misinterpretations of Milton that continue along the lines of Blake, Shelly, Byron, Baudelaire et alias. It's a solid, well-written and entertaining discussion of the poem, certainly worth reading if you've read (or plan to read) Paradise Lost. I'd recommend reading this after reading the poem, actually. The only place where Lewis stumbles is when he begins to discuss "modern" writing, and delivers an ill-thought-out and narrowminded broadside at Joyce's Ulysses.

Paradise Lost, John Milton: Yes, it's an epic poem in blank verse and yes, it's long and yes, it's very Judeo-Christian, but it is also definitely quite deserving of the "classic" label it's received. Milton's Satan is one of the most compelling characters in English literature, and this book opened the door for the Romantic poetry of Blake, Shelly, Byron, Baudelaire et al, and set the groundwork for a great deal of modern philosophy (Nietzsche, anyone?). Also, it's just plain old really good reading, once you find the rhythm. Like Shakespeare and a great many other masters of the English language, Milton has given us phrases that now have lives beyond Paradise Lost, like "darkness visible" or "Better to reign in hell, than serve in heav'n."

The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov: A classic of 20th-century Russian literature, impossible to print during the author's lifetime because of the book's satirical comments about Stalinist rule, The Master and Margarita tells the tale of a visit made to Moscow by the Devil and his retinue, to see if mankind has changed since his last visit to Earth. There is also a book-within-a-book, the tale of Pontius Pilate's meeting with and condemnation to death of Jesus, and after a while it becomes unclear which story is the framing story and which the carrier of the author's theme. Funny, thoughtful, scary and unforgettable. There is also a large black cat who isn't as good a pistol shot as he might like.

The Uncommon Reader, Alan Bennett: This novella is utterly charming but not in any way harmless. Elizabeth II, Queen of England, sort of stumbles upon reading as a pasttime in her later years, and a new world of ideas and possibilities opens up before her, with important consequences to herself and the realm. Witty, scathing at times and enjoyable from beginning to end.