1) The Gallic Wars: The hotel in which we stayed in Selcuk, near Ephesus, had a book swap on the rooftop patio, where I found Julius Caesar tucked amid the yellowing guidebooks to Turkey in every possible language, including Japanese. It was a pretty slim volume, which surprised me; I had had the idea that it was really long.
It was certainly interesting, but I didn't find in it the Art of War-style, universally-applicable insight that I think I was expecting. Mostly I was astounded by the Roman ability to move tens of thousands of soldiers, plus baggage trains, over such vast distances in a relatively short amount of time. The organizational capacity of the Romans never ceases to amaze. Then there were battles in which he reported ten or fifteen thousand of an enemy tribe were slain--they must have been estimating, but how close to the mark? At another point he describes selling an entire city into slavery to a single, unnamed buyer:
"The day after, Caesar, after breaking open the gates, which there was no one then to defend, and sending in our soldiers, sold the whole spoil of that town. The number of 53,000 persons was reported to him by those who had bought them."
Who the hell could afford to buy an entire city's worth of people? How would you use them? What would stop them from just killing you once the Romans were gone? So many questions. Sadly, I ended up leaving this book in another book swap in our hotel in Istanbul so that Sean could take the next one on my list:
2) The Mouse That Roared: This book is awesome! A satire of the Cold War from 1955, it tells the story of a tiny European principality called the Duchy of Grand Fenwick that decides to declare war on the United States so that they can be defeated and start collecting money from the Marshall Plan. They're so poor and medieval that their expeditionary force still wears chain mail! Through a series of coincidences, they manage to invade New York City during a city-wide disaster drill and unwittingly kidnap the scientist who's just created the most destructive atom weapon ever, the Q-bomb, which could easily destroy Earth. All of a sudden all of the superpowers of the Cold War have to bow to this tiny country they've never heard of.
It was a great read, and I'm looking forward to watching the Peter Sellers movie version. I don't think I could imagine a movie version of this that didn't have Peter Sellers in it, really--it reads like it was written for him!
Arthur Conan Doyle clearly had a low opinion of Mormons, judging from the story "A Study in Scarlet." The story was recently banned from a school in the US, I read, because it's considered offensive on religious grounds. I find the Mormon religion kind of ridiculous, I have to admit. Alright, I find religions in general pretty ridiculous in the things they're willing to believe, but c'mon, the "true" religion really just popped up in the US in 1830 via a miraculous visitation and some buried golden plates? And the angel's name was "moron" with an "i" after it? Are you kidding? Worst marketing strategy ever.
Vanity Fair: This is a book I've been intending to read for some time, but never had; finally I spotted a copy at a tag sale in Chesnut Hill (the same place I scored the remaining 5 volumes of Winston Churchill's account of WWII for less than $5, so happy) and thus had no further reason to delay. It's a great read. Thackeray had an incredible ability to sketch characters to the point that they seemed like someone you've met on the street before, especially clever, scheming Becky Sharp, a sociopath if there ever was one. Beautiful, ambitious, and totally without morals, she lies, cheats and steals her way through the book, ruining the lives of others and yet always managing to scrape right through. She's not redeemed at the end, nor does she die in some overly moralistic way--you catch of a glimpse of her when she's older, faded, but every bit as ruthless as before.
According to the foreword, Dickens and Thackeray were frequently compared in their ability to create this world of characters, but Thackery's tone is lighter, tinged with sarcasm, in lieu of what I always perceived as Dickens' never-ending gloom. Some of the best parts of the novel, for me, are when the narrator speaks of his observations of "the Fair":
"Indeed, for my own part, though I have been repeatedly told by persons for whom I have the greatest respect, that Miss Brown is an insignificant chit, and Mrs. White has nothing but her petit minois chiffonne, and Mrs. Black has not a word to say for herself; yet I know that I have had the most delightful conversations with Mrs. Black (of course, my dear Madam, they are inviolable): I see all the men in a cluster round Mrs. White's chair: all the young fellows battling to dance with Miss Brown; and so I am tempted to think that to be despised by her sex is a very great compliment to a woman."
A Sentimental Education: I found this at a used bookstore in Middlebury for 25 cents! Cue my great delight. I loved Madame Bovary, despite the grimness of the ending, and I was intrigued to read that this book is considered by many to be Flaubert's masterwork. I think I prefer the character of Emma Bovary (as did the author, who said "Emma Bovary c'est moi"), but the atmosphere of Frederic Moreau's gay Paris. I don't know who would prefer reading about a dusty provincial town and that infernal man with his lathe if you could read about all-night parties with prostitutes under the gas lamps of the capital, against the background of the 1848 revolution.
The books are similar in that they sketch out lives gone to waste--Emma trapped in her one-horse town, Frederic desperately obsessed with a married woman that he can never have. I'm more inclined to feel sorry for Emma, who was at least constrained by gender roles to a life of inactivity, to Frederic, who has money and education but does nothing with it but moon over a frankly unremarkable female that he met briefly on a riverboat (I found shades of Proust and Charles Swann in this, and I've expressed my feelings on Swann before, blech).
However, Frederic doesn't meet the kind of tragic end that Emma does--he just fades out. In the last scene he and his friend reminisce about their youth, how they were once going to take the world by storm, and what happened? Nothing. In the last lines they remind one another of a youthful, failed attempt to visit a whorehouse that ended with them running away in terror and being the scandal of the countryside--and then they agree that was perhaps the best time they ever had! According to the foreword, this attracted a lot of heat to Flaubert, as people thought he was encouraging bohemian behavior, but in fact it refers to the potentiality of that moment, everything unknown and untasted that lay before them, all the world to explore. Halcyon days, from the perspective of the older, jaded failures they've become.
Innocents Abroad: Mark Twain in Europe. 'Nuff said. So many great quotes, including this (really long) one on the surfeit of Michelangelo:
"In this connection I wish to say one word about Michael Angelo Buonarotti. I used to worship the mighty genius of Michael Angelo--that man who was great in poetry, painting, sculpture, architecture--great in every thing he undertook. But I do not want Michael Angelo for breakfast--for luncheon--for dinner--for tea--for supper--for between meals. I like a change, occasionally. In Genoa, he designed every thing; in Milan he or his pupils designed every thing; he designed the Lake of Como; in Padua, Verona, Venice, Bologna, who did we ever hear of, from guides, but Michael Angelo? In Florence, he painted every thing, designed every thing, nearly, and what he did not design he used to sit on a favorite stone and look at, and they showed us the stone. In Pisa he designed every thing but the old shot-tower, and they would have attributed that to him if it had not been so awfully out of the perpendicular. He designed the piers of Leghorn and the custom house regulations of Civita Vecchia. But, here--here it is frightful. He designed St. Peter's; he designed the Pope; he designed the Pantheon, the uniform of the Pope's soldiers, the Tiber, the Vatican, the Coliseum, the Capitol, the Tarpeian Rock, the Barberini Palace, St. John Lateran, the Campagna, the Appian Way, the Seven Hills, the Baths of Caracalla, the Claudian Aqueduct, the Cloaca Maxima--the eternal bore designed the Eternal City, and unless all men and books do lie, he painted every thing in it! Dan said the other day to the guide, "Enough, enough, enough! Say no more! Lump the whole thing! say that the Creator made Italy from designs by Michael Angelo!" I never felt so fervently thankful, so soothed, so tranquil, so filled with a blessed peace as I did yesterday when I learned that Michelangelo was dead.”
On foreign communication: "In Paris they just simply opened their eyes and stared when we spoke to them in French! We never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language."
My personal favorite: Twain and his friends insisted on calling every one of their guides (Greeks, Frenchmen, Turks) by the same name: Ferguson. They also enjoyed staring dumbly at every statue and image of some figure from ages gone by and then asking their guide, slowly, stupidly "But...is he dead?" Heehee.
No comments:
Post a Comment