Books

One of my favorite pastimes is reading. Here are some classics and some recently published books that I found thoroughly enjoyable.

Gormenghast It's been quite a while since I last added a book to this list. Gormenghast, however, is not a book I can leave out. I knew nothing about this book or its author until I first caught a glimpse of the BBC miniseries of the same title on the Space channel. Much to my fortune, they played all four episodes one night, which I was able to tape and then watch at my convenience. I was not disappointed. So impressed was I in fact, that I felt compelled to acquire the book also; I did not regret doing so!

Gormenghast is one of the most wonderful stories I ever read. It really defies description. Indeed, the best Quentin Crisp, author of one of the introductions, managed was an analogy about a homeowner who, after having seen that the path in one neighbor's garden goes lengthwise, while the path in the other neighbor's garden is circular, decides to build a diagonal path in his own garden. "Originality," observes Crisp, "is only to be praised when not prefaced by the look to right and left."

Peake certainly created something truly original. The BBC miniseries focused on the first two parts of the trilogy, the story of young Titus Groan and Steerpike. My favorite, however, is the third volume. How can it not be, with a character like Muzzlehatch, who leashes his ugly, noisy, temperamental car to a mulberry tree?

Alas, Mervyn Peake is no longer: disease took him from us when he was only in his fifties. Even more a pity because Gormenghast was never meant to be a trilogy: Peake had many, many other stories in mind, for which possible characters and events were listed among his notes. What those books would have been.
barney.jpg (8809 bytes) Barney's Version is the latest book of the eminent Canadian writer, Mordecai Richler. It was also an eye-opener for this immigrant, a book that made me realize that there is literature in Canada!

Barney Panofsky is not a nice guy. He's an arrogant cigar-smoking drunk, a wife abuser, a fraud. His philosophy is simple: "life is absurd and nobody ever truly understands anybody else." He feels compelled to write his memoirs when his lifelong enemy threatens to publish his. From it we learn about his three marriages, his youth in Paris and his later life in his birthplace, Montreal, and his version of the events that led to the death of his best friend, Boogie.

This book reminds me in many ways of the long-lost literary world of Hungary as it existed before World War II and the onset of Communism. I picked up this book for one simple reason: I saw an interview with Richler on CBC TV, and concluded that he's one hell of an opinionated bastard... fortunately, his opinions seem to coincide with mine!
[Metropolitan] I bought Metropolitan by Walter Jon Williams because of an excellent review in Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, and I did not regret it. The author calls his book a fantasy, so his wishes should be respected; but this fantasy is written in the best traditions of hard-core science fiction. Yes, there is magic on this Earth of some unimaginably distant future; but this magic has its source in plasm, a substance that is extracted, metered, bought and sold, smuggled and stolen. Nor does the presence of magic exclude high-technology. Can you conjure up images in your mind of plasm-based commercials in the sky advertising news that you can read in coin-operated terminals of the Wire? Can you picture a four-engine cargo plane used to reflect plasm from a secret source to a place of armed rebellion assisted by skilled mages? Then you can perhaps understand why I fell in love with this book.

By the way, this book now has a sequel, City on Fire, just as good as the original.
[Paris in the Twentieth Century] Another recent read was Paris in the Twentieth Century by Jules Verne. Written in the 1860's, it describes the unhappy life of a scholarly young man in the Paris of 100 years hence. It is a city of horseless carriages with hydrogen-powered internal combustion engines, steering wheels, and accelerator pedals running silently on asphalt-covered roads; of a mass transportation system called the Metro; a city taken over by business and Americanisms; a city of theater plays that are manufactured to order in a giant dream factory; a city of giant banks with huge computing machinery, electrical alarm systems and fax machines; a city of huge concerts of electrically amplified popular music in electrically lit stadiums; and also a city of little compassion and even less culture, where an artist starves to death in winter while bookstore clerks no longer know names like Balzac or Victor Hugo. Of course this is not the only work of Verne in which he gives an astonishingly accurate depiction of the future; but none are comparable to this one. The manuscript was rejected by his publisher, as being unrealistic in its pessimism ...

One Hundred Years Solitude (Cien años de soledad) by Gabriel Garcia Marquez is one of the 20th century's classics. Called a milestone of Latin-American literature, the Colombian author's book describes the mystical, magical history of the Búendia family and the remote town of Macondo. A must read for anyone who values the written word.

Another must read is Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita. The Russian author's whimsical story is set in the Moscow of the 1920's, a period of relative prosperity during the few years of Lenin's NEP (New Economic Policy), just before Stalin's reign of terror. In this city of overcrowded flats, street vendors of warm soda, screeching streetcars, and the dreaded Authors' House arrives Satan himself, about to hold his annual ball. The mischief and havoc wreaked by his two sidekicks is hilarious. But their story is interwoven with the tragic life of the Master and his rejected manuscript, which also comes to life describing the last days of Christ in a somewhat unconventional way. Bulgakov's book remained unpublished until the 1960's; when it finally saw the light of day, it became an instant literary sensation.