Clock Without Hands by Carson McCullers (1961)

The past, that's not even past, battles the future in a small Southern town at the dawn of integration.

Book Review: Clock Without Hands was Carson McCullers' last novel, written during long, debilitating illnesses, published six years before her death. The story has her powerful writing, intriguing characters, and is set at the beginning of the civil rights movement. It has all the elements to succeed, but doesn't quite pull together to be as brilliant as it should be (and as I expected). Still a good read, enjoyable, quick, revelatory, yet for me it felt distant, with little sense of immediacy, distracted. The climactic incident is rushed and buried. There are four main characters but the depiction of each has a flaw: one somewhat unbelievable; another nearly too watery to care about; one challenging and meaningful, but repetitive; and the most complex, contradictory, and interesting character is almost a caricature, but that's a judgment call. Seems that McCullers began with a central character, the Judge, an all too human "typical" Southerner, but written as an individual, with qualities that belie the stereotype so that he becomes an actual person. A devout narcissist who believes he must fit the role he was raised to, in the only way he knows how to live, the set of beliefs and actions that he must wear, even as his mind is going. Two of the other characters are less fully drawn, but still help create the four elements that comprise the story. The Judge's grandson, whose past was kept from him and so has no direction in life until he learns the new South can include the Atticus Finch he's determined to become. A young black man who feels the pain of injustice, but in his core really wants to become a man of culture, taste, learning -- one who cannot be disparaged by any white man. Frustrated at a life without possibility, he takes a step that he hoped would never come. And the most meaningful character, a dying man who's never acted freely, who sees a life never lived (a life of easy bigotry), who never became a person, and faced with his death he sees the loss of his soul: "He was a man watching a clock without hands." A man before a chasm, staring at death, for the first time finds the courage to take a stand, who finally becomes a human being despite the cost. The remainder of his life matches the length of the story. For all the characters time is the catalyst that drives Clock Without Hands. McCullers obviously had great aspirations for the novel, addressing not only her usual concerns of loneliness, isolation, and confused sexuality, but the new political and social movement of the Fifties, the role of race in the South. There is a great novel lurking within. McCullers again creates a community of souls as in her other books, but here they do not balance and complement. The four are disjointed and the characters fail to mesh as they should, being built at different levels of complexity, meaning, and credibility. Clock Without Hands is well worth reading (everything by McCullers is), but doesn't match her best. Though a good reader will easily see how it could have.  [3½★]

Reflections in a Golden Eye by Carson McCullers (1941)

On a Southern army base in the peacetime of the 1930's, all that is wrong with two couples becomes tragedy.

Book Review: Reflections in a Golden Eye is one of Carson McCullers' lesser known works, but here she puts the "Gothic" in Southern Gothic with a vengeance. The tension builds from the first page. As with The Secret History we know there will be a murder -- involving six people and a horse. I liked the horse. The six characters interact, two married couples, an enlisted man, a servant. All misfits, saturated in feelings of isolation, alienation, obsession. All outsiders, all become grotesques, stunted by an impersonal world that refuses space for them, as outlined in McCullers' famous "square peg, round peg" conversation between two officers. As such they descend to instinct, to the animal, to primitive violence, silences, to the most basic needs. Predators and prey. Deformed reflections of humanity. The characters intertwine, overlap, hate and love and lust for each other, all living somewhere along the sexual spectrum. One, an officer forced to stay intensely closeted, denied his identity and impulses, lashes out sadistically at the world, at men and horses and kittens: "He stood in a somewhat curious relation to the three fundaments of existence -- life itself, sex, and death." Another a man indoctrinated, brainwashed since childhood to fear women, to reject their diseased, repugnant bodies. Mentally disfigured, he's almost more animal than man. As our involvement with the six continues, the tension and mystery grow, we feel the tragedy of being human, we all want to fit somewhere, we all seek something we can't hold. The tension builds until the reader knows something has to give, but is unsure what or where: there are many fissures in this volcano. Reflections in a Golden Eye is a daring book for 1940, addressing sadism, voyeurism, masochism, sexual neglect, repressed sexuality, gay and straight. Unlike her other books, here McCullers is detached from her characters; she does not love them. After reading, I realized I'd barely scratched the surface in understanding these characters, and needed to go back and read it again to more fully comprehend their roots and motivations. Reflections in a Golden Eye now seems even better than when I finished it a month ago.  [4★]

Fables for Our Time and Famous Poems Illustrated by James Thurber (1940)

A collection of fables updated for the modern age.

Book Review: Fables for Our Time is Aesop brought into the 20th Century and made humorously dark or darkly humorous. A satirical menagerie poking fun in an acidic (but funny) commentary on society. James Thurber presents a form of humor rarely seen today, but sadly still relevant. As with our friend Aesop, the morals tell the story: "It is not so easy to fool little girls nowadays as it used to be"; "If you live as humans do, it will be the end of you"; "It is better to ask some of the questions than to know all the answers"; "You can fool too many of the people too much of the time"; "Run, don't walk, to the nearest desert island." All quite obviously true, but the fun is in seeing how Thurber gets there. While some of the fables provide a sharp insight to every day life, others address more serious issues such as the paranoia of communities, as may be focused on refugees, Jews, Reds, or Muslims. In "The Very Proper Gander" a rumor sparked the crowd to gather sticks and stones till they "set upon him and drove him out of the country." The people are oh-so-afraid of those oh-so-dangerous ganders! Even darker are the lessons of "The Birds and the Foxes" and "The Rabbits Who Caused All the Trouble." Fables for Our Time also includes a section, as noted above, of "Famous Poems Illustrated." These are story-poems by writers such as Longfellow, Scott, Tennyson, Housman, and Whittier, all of whose work I assume were safely in the public domain. This section is interesting as an introduction to popular verses of yesteryear, but may be of more interest to fans of Thurber's drawings, as he provides an illustration for most every stanza of the poems. Otherwise, I think the poems were included as a way to fill up a too-slender book. Fables for Our Time isn't indispensable and may be difficult to find, but it's a pleasant enough book representing a lost art form and a sharp eye into human nature. Some fables are dated in a Steve Harvey/battling Bickersons kind of way, but spot on in their evaluation of people.  [3½★]

At the Existentialist Cafe by Sarah Bakewell (2016)

A wide ranging exploration of the lives and ideas of the existentialist philosophers.

Nonfiction Review: At the Existentialist Cafe is subtitled "Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails," which gives a clue that this is not your grandma's existentialist handbook. Sarah Bakewell tells the story of and explains existentialist philosophy through the lives of its proponents, which makes for a human, engaging, and accessible story. Full credit to her for bringing life to such a rarefied subject, and for bringing such a rarefied subject to the general reading public. Although this has become the most successful pop philosophy book since Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), within there is the makings of a serious and informative textbook. Bakewell is a master of disguise: she can teach and entertain in the same sentence. For the serious reader, At the Existentialist Cafe provides a highly useful Cast of Characters, detailed and extensive supplementary chapter Notes, a  thorough Select Bibliography, and a well-organized Index. Her short but incisive discussion of Simone de Beauvoir's groundbreaking The Second Sex (1949) is a high point of the book. Bakewell notes that The Second Sex "can be considered the single most influential work ever to come out of the existentialist movement." Worth noting is that The Second Sex relates practically to everyday life, as did the Epicureans and the Stoics, than does the philosophy for philosophy's sake that fills these pages.

Today it's possible to live in a superficially religious country (where one does not have to believe, but cannot too openly disavow the customs of belief), caught somewhere between the less religious countries of Europe and the truly devout countries of the world. It's surprising how shocking and controversial, even unnerving, existential philosophies once were, and how little they move the needle now. Much of what Bakewell relates, seismic at the time, is taken for granted today. Many people now seem to live existential lives, although most probably would not identify as existentialists. "Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom," wrote Kierkegaard, and today anxiety is a natural and constant element of our lives. As such, the philosophy is less interesting, less necessary, to many modern readers except historically, as it is simply how many live, like fish in water. Bakewell notes: "Existentialist ideas and attitudes have embedded themselves so deeply into modern culture that we hardly think of them as existentialist at all."

As is common with many biographers these days, Bakewell gives herself time in the spotlight along with her subjects, but unlike most biographers at least she does it with taste and restraint. Interesting to me is that Bakewell has a philosophy degree, but she is primarily a biographer, yet explains philosophy better than any book I've ever read by an academic in the field. Perhaps we need biographers to be the new teachers, combining lives with knowledge. For the average reader interested in existentialism, this is the perfect book for painless pedagogy.  [5★]

Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke (1929)

Ten letters from the great German poet to a young correspondent seeking poetic enlightenment.

Nonfiction Review: Letters to a Young Poet contains much valuable advice, which most young people will ignore and never become poets worth reading, but a few will listen and learn and so make the most of whatever talent they possess. These letter were written when Rilke was in his late 20s and early 30s, just coming into his own as a poet. He disowned most of his poetry written before then. His greatest strengths here are his sincerity and his belief in solitary self-reliance ("Nobody can counsel and help you, nobody."). The letters were written as he received letters from his young correspondent, as thoughts struck Rilke, as he had time to ponder, not as some carefully planned, ordered, and organized program of poetry instruction. The letters are all the more valuable for that. Self-help books cannot make a good poet of someone who is not, but they can save a good poet significant time in developing that talent. Rilke doesn't concern himself with ephemera: the pointless mechanics of words, lines, and structure. Rather he works to help his young friend discover if he has the soul of a poet, if he has the inner strength, spirit, passion, and feeling to be a poet. For Rilke that is the sole importance, that is all of it. He advises the searching poet to be alone, to look deep within, and to determine whether the nascent poet must write. His advice is to seek depth, not irony; ignore criticism; to listen only to the inner voice; to be human, not male (Rilke's correspondent was a young man). Rilke emphasizes the importance of solitude, the strength gained through loneliness, the value of re-living child-like moments. He teaches that learning to love one another is a lengthy process ("do not write love-poems"). The great poet reveals a surprisingly insightful view of women and values the truth of nature above all. Rilke believed that the poet can change the world into spirit, into something meaningfully communicated through depths of feeling and memory: "How much he was at one with all these things!" Letters to a Young Poet is a treasure trove of lessons for the seeking writer; it may not appeal to all readers. Such a short book should simply be read on principle, to gather anything at all that speaks to anyone wanting to write. My edition was translated in somewhat archaic language ("thither irony never descends"; "to a sojourn in the Eternal City Rilke was himself nothing loath"). It's worthwhile to look for some more modern translations to see if some of the denser and more opaque language should be blamed on Rilke or the humble translator. For someone in their late-teens or early twenties, with serious aspirations to poetry, Letters to a Young Poet can only be a benefit.  [4★]

Three Stories and Ten Poems by Ernest Hemingway (1923)

Ernest Hemingway's first book, published in an edition of 300 copies.

Book Review: Three Stories and Ten Poems was published in 1923 by a small, modernist Parisian press for expat writers, Contact Editions, whose owner took a chance on the then-unknown future Nobel Prize laureate. Just as it says in the title, this slim volume contains three stories:

"Up in Michigan" - The story that (according to Hemingway) Gertrude Stein felt was good but unpublishable (inaccrochable was her word), and so a waste of time to write. In the story a young woman receives an unbearably brutal, illusion-destroying introduction to the world and the essential nature of men at the hands of man with whom she's infatuated, despite her essential decency and innocence. It was not included in Hemingway's first story collection, In Our Time (1925), as the publisher was afraid of the obscenity laws. It wasn't published again until 1938 in the collection The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories.

"Out of Season" - Some consider this the "story that marks the true beginning of his mature style."
Here, a weak man, a fish out of water, allows himself to be manipulated and exploited by an illiterate drunk. Recognized as the first example of Hemingway's "iceberg theory," that what is not in the story can be understood through context. To that end he excised the original ending. The story was later included in his first story collection, In Our Time.

"My Old Man" - This one was selected for the 1923 edition of The Best Short Stories (later The Best American Short Stories, which is still published) series. A boy makes the painful discovery that his father is simply a man, with a life of his own marked by the imperfections, flaws, and weaknesses that are humanity. The piece was included in the collection, In Our Time.

One of the elements that we don't realize about these stories is how revolutionary their style was at the time. The simple, stripped down writing was still uncommon, and so was quite striking to readers even apart from all other aspects. Hemingway left out extraneous words, and even extraneous plot, believing excised portions could be discerned through the rest of the story. For modern readers, familiar with contempoary approaches, however, the writing style can seem and sound too simple, too "see Jane run."

Three Stories and Ten Poems also includes the titular poems, in which Hemingway tried to push the limits, to make them revolutionary, or at least conspicuous in a sort of bluntly realistic style. I find it interesting that like Bukowski, Hemingway's early start was as a poet as much as a writer of fiction, seemingly incompatible with his stereotypical image as a macho man's man. The poems are worth discussing. Six of the ten poems were originally published in the important Chicago modernist magazine Poetry (which in 1915 first published the then impenetrable "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," and is still publishing today) in January 1923. Gertrude Stein noted that she liked the poems more than his contemporaneous fiction. Despite these commendations, Hemingway's poetry is not the basis of the reputation that led to the Nobel Prize. The poems have an always-traditionally-masculine edge, mostly straightforward without too much embellishment, using words rarely used in English-language poetry at the time (gonorrhea, whore, stomach-pump), just as "Up in Michigan" addressed a subject more directly than was usually done. Published in 1923, some of these are war poems, reminiscent (though not as well done) of the British poets of the First World War. The ten poems with my simple notes are:

"Mitraigliatrice" - There's some confusion about how to spell the title of this poem -- apparently wrong in the book but correct when it was published in Poetry. Here Hemingway compares his Corona typewriter (sent to him for his birthday by his wife, Hadley) to a machine gun. Wishful thinking, perhaps. The metaphor no doubt became more common after the invention of the electric typewriter.

"Oklahoma" - Open to interpretation: I see it as author is writing about one thing, but thinking of another to make the last line hit hard. Yes, I mean metaphor.

"Oily Weather" - The triumph of man over nature. Which you'd think Hemingway would've understood is a mirage.

"Roosevelt" - Meaning Teddy, since FDR was a ways off back then. Here Hemingway mocks the self-mythologizing, macho manly-man President. Which is a little ironic, perhaps projecting, since no one was more aware of his own image than the author.

"Captives" - Not a brilliant poem perhaps, but accurate and honest in its emotion.

"Champs D'Honneur" - My guess is that this ("Fields of Honor" in English) is Hemingway's reply after reading Wilfred Owen's "Dulce et Decorum Est." Owen was a great war poet.

"Riparto D'Assalto" - A war poem, good enough, mixing thoughts of soft, warm prostitutes with the misery of the war zone. Hemingway watching "shock" or "storm" troops between battles.

"Montparnasse" - A cynical comment about the ex-pat, Bohemian life on the Left Bank of Paris. Hemingway was one of those people who felt he could expound on the lives of others, not realizing how little we know about the desperation contained in the lives of others.

"Along with Youth" - A coming of age poem, as with the Nick Adams' stories or "My Old Man." Given the subject, not terrible.

"Chapter Heading" - I enjoyed this one, a good poem. Reminded me of Edna St. Vincent Millay; that's a compliment. It was selected for Best Poems of 1923 and was Hemingway's first publication in a book in the U.S.

If Hemingway's poetry speaks to you, you should seek out Complete Poems, edited by Nicholas Gerogiannis, published by University of Nebraska Press (Bison Books). It's too obvious to say, but true, that Three Stories and Ten Poems is interesting more for its historical value and as an insight into Hemingway's growth as a writer, than valuable for the lasting quality of the work. Regardless, the collection is worth the price of admission.  [3★]

In Evil Hour by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1962)

The circle of violence begins anew for the residents of a Colombian river town when an anonymous agitator begins posting local rumors about rich property owners.

Book Review: In Evil Hour (La mala hora) is the first novel published by Gabriel García Márquez. This short book has the same "telling a tale" tone as his later works, making it both familiar and charming. It's a kind of cozy, oral history that might be told in a cafe or a barbershop, with just enough added irreverence to make it human and believable, as if relating a story that may've been long known in the region. It reminded me a little of Chronicle of a Death Foretold. At this point in his career, García Márquez was still writing realistically, without the magical elements of his later work. Although much more focused and simpler in scope, In Evil Hour is clearly a stepping stone on the way to the achievement that would be One Hundred Years of Solitude. Colonel Aureliano Buendía makes a brief appearance, as does mention of Macondo, and other notes from the melody of that literary masterpiece. The undertone of In Evil Hour, though, is violence as it afflicted rural Colombia. Political violence that became an unstoppable force, destroying communities, despite all best intentions: "Abandoning us to God's mercy is another way of beating us up." A time when threats become more powerful than their execution. Most of the characters, even those with families, are lonely, isolated, and see themselves coming to some solitary end. As with his most famous novel, here in the midst of the tropical heat, noontime dust, and slow decay, is the same existential dread.  [3½★]