Animorphs #1: The Invasion, K.A. Applegate

I love children's books. They move so quickly! In just the first few chapters, an alien crashes to earth and gives our protagonists the ability to morph into any animal they touch so they can fight the evil Yeerks (basically slug bodysnatchers, but not cool ones like Skip from Starstruck). Backstories get told to us directly, by the narrator. These kids are making plans and executing plans left and right, finding the Yeerk pool and confronting their leader, Visser Three, before the end of this book. Love that. Its fun when characters get things done. Its also fun when they turn into lizards and have to literally control their lizard brain impulses.

I think i probably missed these as a kid because by the time I was old enough to be ready for the violence and death in these books I was being encouraged by teachers to read more advanced work. K.A. Applegate's prose is very functional, without frills or subtlety, which took some getting used to since I read this right after The Vegetarian. But The Invasion was such a propulsive start, I look forward to reading Animorphs #2 next time I need something short and fast. My library has the entire series on Libby! I can get them whenever I want for free!

Comedy & Society: Eight Plays by Molière (tr. Morris Bishop)

Of course I've heard of Molière. He is perhaps the most famous French writer, poet, visionary, plus actor, to have ever lived. Like all fake intellectuals, I'd heard of him. But i hadn't actually read or seen any of his plays until now.
 
This edition, from the Modern University classics collection, has eight plays, which I will summarize individually: 
1. The Precious Damsels
2. The School for Wives
3. Critique of the School for Wives
4. the Versailles impromptu 
5. Tartuffe
6. The Misanthrope 
7. The Physician in Spite of Himself 
8. The Would-be Gentleman

Molières favorite genre was satire, and one of his favorite targets was the affectation of the aristocratic class. I think the translator who assembled this collection did so with a specific eye towards this theme. All of these plays are about absurd snobbishness: how when people think too much of themselves, their principles, their achievements - they make themselves ridiculous. In several of the plays there is an obvious author self insert, who preaches the value of moderation and discernment.
 
The Precious Damsels (alternately translated as The Affected Damsels) is about a pair of young women who are entirely besotted with the fashion for "wit" at the time - flattering "impromptu" verses, a dandyish obsession with fashion, and an appearance of intellectualism. They spurn two suitors who are too plain and working class for their ambitions. The men then devise a trick: to have their servants pose as gentlemen to trick the ladies into flirting with simple servants. It's not a very compelling setup, to be honest. Bishop (the translator) explains in his introductory note that Moliere's lowbrow farces were often a target of the "precious," who sought distinction and refinement. Les Preciuses ridicules was a kind of counterattack. A lot of Moliere's work is, in some way, in conversation with his critics. Authors had to fight on the stage, before they could fight on Twitter. But as Bishop (the translator) concludes, our society still has its moments where it values "preciosity" - the compulsion toward novelty at all costs - over substance and true insight.
 

The School for Wives was probably my favorite in the bunch, and one of the few comedies that has aged well. It's about a man, Arnolphe, who has spent his whole life mocking the way all the other men around him are being cuckholded, and so is terrified of being cucked himself, because of the mockery he would have to endure. To avoid the inevitable perfiedies of Woman, Arnolphe adopts a young girl from the countryside and has her raised in ignorance in a convent. So she will be too innocent to betray him, you see. A perfect plan. Despite what voice-of-reason character Chrysalde may say, about how "the fool is often false without intention." Hilarity ensues when, predictably, the girl in question falls in love with a strapping young man who happens to see her, and feels no love for the controlling, bloviating man twice her age who thinks he can mold her into his ideal bride. There is a classic fifth-act happy ending, of course, where it turns out the girl is actually the long lost daughter of a wealthy house, and her father has recently returned to France to see her married to his business partner's son, who is, by happy chance, the strapping young man who she is in love with. All is for the best. 
 
Apparently this play caused the 17th century equivalent of a press firestorm: critics thought it was cruel to women, calling them all unfaithful, as it did. They thought the scene where Arnolphe alludes to the wifely duties he expects from his young bride to be were debased smut. And of course they thought the play should have some more action (an impractical consideration at the time - the play was limited to actors delivering monologues because the stage it was performed on was tiny, and surrounded by audience.) Moliere did the best possible thing in response: a 1660s equivalent of a massive subtweet thread. He wrote a play called The Critique of the School for Wives. In it, he gives each of these critics a voice, and creates a self-insert character to defend his play from the criticism. Its gloriously messy. 
 
The Versailles Impromptu felt fascinatingly modern to me. He wrote and performed it after being commanded to perform for the King on a week's notice. In it, the theater troupe struggles to rehearse for a short-notice performance for the King. Actors bemoan that they cannot remember their lines, they are interrupted by courtiers who want to watch, and Moliere (in the play) gets distracted on a tangent about another farce he's working on, to mock the style of other acting companies. It doesn't really have a plot, or an arc. Moliere uses it as a platform to proselytize what he thinks theater should be, and to highlight the difficulties of putting on a performance. I could easily imagine it being performed in a black box theater, or being a low-budget indie film. 
 
Tartuffe is another play that caused significant controversy. Apparently the King liked it, but banned its performance at the behest of the Church, who accused Moliere of irreligion. It's about a con man (the titular Tartuffe) who poses as deeply holy, to get in with a wealthy man (Orgon), get the rights to all his property, and bone his beautiful wife. All of Orgon's family and friends see that Tartuffe is a con man, but Orgon stubbornly refuses to listen to them until he sees Tartuffe trying to seduce his wife with his own eyes, at which point he flies into a rage. Unfortunately, he has already signed legal documents transferring all of his property to Tartuffe. His family are being turned out of their home in the streets when Royal Guard ex-machina appears, and explains that the King in his Royal Wisdom knows Tartuffe is a con man, and has rendered the legal transfer of property void, and has Tartuffe arrested. I have to admit, I didn't like this one as much. I think it probably could be hilarious if performed, but on the page it dragged a little bit, and I found Orgon's credulity and temper to be more off-putting than funny. But it is funny in a metafictional sense: the Church thought this play was blasphemous, though Tartuffe is not even a priest, and in the text of the play, is clearly just adopting the guise of a religious man to get stuff. Oh how far we haven't come. 
 
The Misanthrope is interesting because in it we see a critique even of an excess of sincerity, almost an about face from The Precious Damsels. The Misanthrope is about a man, Alceste, who hates the pretenses of people at court. He hates, for example, the way people will ask for honest critique of their poetry and then get mad at him for saying he thinks it's bad poetry. Alceste, however, is a bit of a hypocrite: he is in love with one of the court beauties (Célimène) who is known to be a bit fickle and two-faced, entertaining the courtship of several young men without choosing between them, and indeed making fun of other people behind their backs. Alceste gets into a bit of drama with the man whose poetry he pronounced dreadful, and has to flee the court. However, when he asks Célimène to accompany him into exile from the court, she expresses the mildest possible protest before beginning to agree to the idea ("What, leave society before I'm old, and go and bury myself in your solitude?... I'm only twenty; solitude terrifies me. I fear that I am just not strong enough to take on so high a purpose. But-"). This enrages Alceste, who sees it as evidence of her inconsitency and lack of conviction. He turns around and proposes to Eliante, who has been standing around next to Alceste's friend, Philinte, for the whole play, and is like "I should have asked you" and Eliante (rightly) says "I'm no one's backup plan, I've been standing here the whole time waiting for Philinte to ask me to marry him" and then Philinte and Eliante get married, and Alceste grumpily shuffles off out the the country to live out his days in principled solitude. 

Bishop called The Misanthrope Moliere's Hamlet, a work of sufficient ambiguity that different performers and audiences could sympathize with characters on different sides. I think of this collection, it definitely has the most nuanced characters, though as Bishop also points out, the original audience would have seen Alceste as a comically hyperbolic figure, and laughed at him.

The Physician in Spite of Himself is the worst one to read. It's a very slapsticky play, most of the punchlines are someone getting beaten up. I can imagine the right tone and performers could make it very funny, but of all these plays, this one you can skip.
 
The Would-Be Gentleman (Le Bourgois gentlehomme) is about a wealthy middle-class man who has aspirations of entering the gentry. Moliere's audience would have found this to be an absurd aspiration, and so the protagonist is a credulous buffoon. You can't buy class. No matter how many dancing classes and music classes and fencing classes and fine sets of clothes he buys, he cannot acquire good taste (especially not with the constant flattery of the people he's paying to be around him). There is truth to this kind of figure, of course, but I think the core joke has aged badly: the very idea of a commoner becoming a gentleman, that any commoner could even consider themself worthy of being an equal to the impoverished Count who is constantly asking him for money, is not something that is funny or sensible to a modern audience. I did like the wife character in this play a lot though. She criticises her husband for thinking the aristocrats are worth immitating. She points out that the Count is insolvent, that the fashions look ridiculous, and that if her daughter were to marry the Count, she might not be permitted to know her grandchildren. I like her.

And that's it. I might look up some filmed versions of my favorites and update this post, but it's already taken me way too long to write up, and I'm behind on the post I'm writing for my next book, The Vegetarian by Han Kang. 

Fredrick Pohl and Jeff VanderMeer meet in a bar in Florida

Two books for the price of one! Well not really. Two mostly unrelated books that ended up being posted together because I can't meet writing deadlines.

Discussed herein: Digits and Dastards by Fredrick Pohl, and Hummingbird Salamander by Jeff VanderMeer 

I enjoyed these short stories by Fredrick Pohl a lot, but didn't have much to say about them, so I didnt give this book its own entry when I finished. I just like this era of pulpy spacefaring sci-fi short stories. I just like these stories about weird little aliens and spaceships. It is kind of dated, in that Star Trek: ToS way, but if you're willing to roll with that, these are fun and I have some weird unexamined nostalgia for this era of science fiction.

 It did make for an interesting contrast sliding into Hummingbird Salamander. 

Hummingbird Salamander was much harder for me to get into. It's kind of a thriller adventure where the narrator follows a trail of clues left by an eco-terrorist, Silvina, about endangered species poaching.

[I usually have a hard time getting in to thrillers and mysteries, but I think its good for me to keep trying one or two every year. ]

 

I have to be honest, this book just made me feel like Jeff VanderMeer has a profoundly different relationship to nature and conservation than I do.

I consider myself a conservationist, but for me, even from childhood, it's always been about ecosystems, not about species. To save the manatees you need to save the whole watershed. Perhaps that seems like making a specific problem bigger and more complicated, but to me it makes everything simpler and more manageable: reduce runoff, protect the banks of the river with a riparian barrier, increase our wastewater processing and stormwater capacity. Saving the river saves the seagrasses and saves the manatees. Most conservation marketing, however, uses a pretty or adorable "ambassador species" to get humans to care. The manatees are how you get people to care about the seagrass. I think this was supposed to be the approach in Hummingbird Salamander.

 

"Jane Smith" is left a taxidermied hummingbird by a mysterious woman named Silvina. Jane becomes obsessed with trying to understand Silvina, and slowly uncovers some facts about her life: Silvina was a wealthy heiress. A disability forced her out of human society and she connected with nature. She became more and more radicalized until ahe started bombing people and selling exotic furs on the black market to fund her terrorism. She was probably killed by her father when she became an embarrassment to the family.

 

I kind of can't shake the feeling that maybe Silvina was the POV in early drafts, because this is, for most of the book, her story. Perhaps the author felt she would be more relatable through the lens of a white middle class protagonist. However, Jane is a brick wall. Jane is so closed off the only thing she seems to care about is this hummingbird. I didnt feel she drew me in, and only finished it because I am trying to catch up with a page goal for this year.

 

My gut feels like there is some sort of smart-person culture critic connection to draw between these two works: the pulpiest of pulp sci-fi and the current hero of literary speculative fiction. Something about thrillers and drunken neo-noir private eyes on houseboats while the world burns, something about billionaires who bankrupt themselves and forfeit their humanity to further the cause of space exploration? Dreams turning to nightmares? Idealism vs conservatism? I can't quite articulate it.  

Digits and Dastards has a lot of stories about weird aliens and humans having their bodies and consciousness morphed into other forms. Sterile environments, being cut off from the rest of humanity. I would definitely recommend it, if that wasn't clear from the comparison to Star Trek. 

 

I think by comparison, Hummingbird Salamander felt somehow solipsistic, all about one random middle class woman's personal obsession with this random eco-terrorist. And truly, I didn't care. For a story that tries so hard to have a climate angle, it spends all its time on human bullshit. Who cares. Who cares about Vilcapampa Enterprises or Jack or any of this bullshit? How is any of it helping anything?

Last year I read a book called "Is A River Alive" by Robert MacFarlane, and while it was more emotional than I prefer I liked that it focused on the ecosystem - the river- as a living thing, and not just the newts or mushrooms. Pohl's heros hurled themselves against the stars for the sake of a collective dream. Jane Smith hurls herself against the uncaring world to feel like she matters. That's my read on her character at least. She doesn't try to improve the world, she's entirely focused on making herself feel satisfied. I wish I hadn't finished this book. The way it ends makes me kind of hate her, actually.

 

 

 

Finding George Orwell In Burma, by Emma Larkin

"Truth is true only within a certain period of time. What was truth once may no longer be truth after many months or years."

This book is so good. It was originally published in 2004, and my copy has a new epilogue from 2011, and a lot has changed since that. But it's still worth reading as a vividly paranoid and empathetic look at the culture of information control in Burma/Myanmar that lasted through so much of the country's recent history. 

I am afflicted with a profound ignorance of global events typical of US-ians. I went into this book knowing very little about the country, besides the fact that it used to be a British colony, and the recent high profile reporting on the genocide of the Rohingya. 

Orwell is not the subject as much as his work and his time as an imperial police officer in Burma is a framing device to entice westerners to care about people in such an isolated, controlled country.  The author visits towns where Orwell was stationed, and talks to people who live there about the military regime and what daily life is like. Many of the people she talks to have been imprisoned. Through their stories she draws a direct parallel to the story of 1984 - the constant paranoia that you are being observed and reported on, the looming threat of prison and torture, the whisper network of news, since all publications are heavily censored. "You must look for what's missing, and learn how to find the truth in these absences," one of her subjects explains. "When a subject drops from the news you can be pretty sure there's something going on in that field."

 This book does spend time talking about ethnic tensions between the Burmese military government and the many ethnic minorities that live around the country's periphery, though at the time it was written in 2004 the army had waged a campaign against ethnic nationalist groups so brutally and for so long that many of them had brokered treaties. Racialization is also a tactic used by Big Brother in 1984 - violent conflicts can be spun to legitimize authoritarian power. Orwell wrote that "the object of war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact." I think we've all seen, in recent years, that it need not even be war. Any violence against a defined outgroup will do. In the Rangoon chapter, the author describes being passed a quickly scrawled note by one of her Muslim friends asking her to pass on news about a riot that had recently happened in a small town in northern Burma. A local mob set fire to Muslim houses and shops, including a Muslim school. 250 of the 300 boys at the school were still missing. 

The regime uses communal violence as a technique to deflect attention from other big news events in the country, and riots are usually instigated by fake monks- soldiers who shave their heads and don robes. 

I think what will stick with me the most is the author's inference that Orwell (or Eric Blair, his real name) felt equally trapped and unable to voice dissent with the colonial government. He wrote in his novel Burmese Days, "All other kinds of freedom are permitted. You are free to be a drunkard, an idler, a coward, a backbiter, a fornicator; but you are not free to think for yourself." He also related in The Road to Wigan Pier about how he spent an hour of "safe" conversation with another colonial servant on the train ride to Mandalay before they realized they both hated the imperial government, and were able to speak freely about it to each other. And he was trapped by nothing stronger than social convention. 

 I leave you with this quote from a conversation Larkin had about the recent death of Ne Win, the founder of the military government that controlled Myanmar for fifty years:

I asked Za Za Win what she thought was the significance of Ne Win's death. "Nothing." she said. "Nothing will change because he's dead. His death makes no difference. It changes nothing." She was probably right: I noticed that even after Ne Win's demise people were still uncomfortable about saying his name out loud in tea shops.

 

 

 

The Seance, Isaac Bashevis Singer

 New year new stack o' books, as they say. Or as I say, at least.  

I picked up this slim mass market paperback, printed in 1968, from a used bookstore in Deland, knowing absolutely nothing about the author or the stories but thinking it sounded interesting.  And it was, mostly. 

These stories have a dark sense of humor, and are often about the kind of loneliness one feels when surrounded by people and weighed down by duty.

 A list of the Stories Within:

1.  The Seance

2. The Slaughterer

3. The Dead Fiddler

4. The Lecture

5. Cockadoodledoo

6. The Plagiarist

7. Zeitl and Rickel

8. The Warehouse

9. Henne Fire

10. Getzel the Monkey

11. Yanda

12. The Needle

13. Two Corpses Go Dancing

14. The Parrot

15. The Brooch

16. The Letter Writer 

I dont have particularly strong feelings about these stories, but one thing i want to talk about is how they are permeated with an obstinate social conservatism: there is a uniting sensibility in all the stories that to express individuality, to go against the will of the community, is to be doomed. Seeking joy or even trying to avoid misery is not rewarded. Adherance to social normativity is the only way to peace. not happiness. Happiness is fleeting, often illusory. communal peace is what one should hope for.

Its fucking depressing, is what it is.

A common refrain that characters express after someone experiences misfortune or does something terrible is that "it is fated." Everything that happens was always destined to happen. I felt that this sentiment was meant to be received with a degree of irony, but it was often hard to tell. 

In an attempt to understand if this was meant to be subversive I looked up Isaac Bashevis Singer's Wikipedia page. The section about his work is a bit of a mess, by the way, clearly written by someone with opinions on his influences but not the typical editorial style of Wikipedia. It seems he had a bit of a complicated relationship with his faith, which helped clarify what was going on in stories like The Warehouse, where God is a distant presence even in Heaven. In stories like Henne Fire though, the demons, at least, are close. The Wikipedia article credits this to his inability to reconcile a loving and compassionate god with the crimes against humanity he escaped when he left Poland in 1935. Perhaps this is where the irony creeps in from, when expressing a belief in fate.

I dont think i would recommend this collection. The prose is well written, but the stories have a kind of rambling quality: often several pages will be dedicated to describing a character before the story about whatever misfortune actually starts. Still, it was interesting to read something from a yiddish writer, and to learn a bit about his life.