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Willaim Sloane’s novel To Walk the Night is the first of two featured in the NYRB edition The Rim of M Two Tales of Cosmic Horror with an introduction by Stephen King.
It’s a perfect little read for a dark and stormy night.
Mr. Sloane takes his time.
As Mr. King says in his introduction things have to simmer before they can boil. Simmer they do.
To Walk the Night begins with the discovery of a body.
Two life-long friends find the body of an old professor of theirs burned to death inside a locked observatory where he worked nights on his studies in astronomy and mathematics.
But was he dead when they found him or was he just on the verge of death. The burns form a single line, as though a ray had been projected along his back.
The book was written in the ;s, the early days of science fiction when terms like ‘ray’ were still in use.
For a while, the story is a locked room mystery.
The two friends and the local police detective try to find out who the killer is, with no success. Then one of the friends falls in love with the professor’s widow, a beautiful woman, much more beautiful than either of them would expect to marry the professor.
The two friends largely part ways when one marries the professor’s widow just a few months after the murder.
After a time, the local police detective meets with the still unmarried friend to tell him what his investigation has revealed.
A few months before the professors marriage, a young woman disappeared. This woman was an “idiot,” the term used in the ;s. Unable to do anything to take care of herself, she lived with her elderly parents who doted on her until the day she vanished outside a local gas station while her mother was in the restroom.
After he has finished his story the detective shows the unmarried friend a picture of the girl.
She looks exactly like the professor’s widow, exactly.
So much so that both are suspicious that the two are the same woman.
How can this be?
This would all read like pulp fiction were Mr. Sloane not such a capable writer.
His prose is good enough to evoke earlier horror classics like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. That the entire story is told to one of the boy’s fathers long after the events have taken place helps give the novel this feeling.
It all works very well.
I read it in a single sitting, on a slightly windy Saturday night, when I would have been watching Creature Features if Creature Features were still on.
To Walk the Night would have been perfect for it.
In the end, there is a second “murder” and a supernatural explanation that must be accepted as there could be no other cause.
It’s a perfect little horror story gem.
I liked it as much as Stephen King did.
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Long into the night Marco Polo sits in Kublai Kahn’s palace telling him about all the cities he has visited, cities the Kahn will never get the chance to see.
This is the premise for Italo Calvino’s wonderful novella Invisible Cities translated from the Italian by William Weaver.
Each of the short chapters describes one city.
After a few chapters, the dialogue between Marco Polo and Kublia Kahn intterupts for a page or two.
It shouldn’t work so well.
It ought to become tiresome after a while.
It certainly shouldn’t begin to be something of a page-turner.
But it did, it didn’t and it was.
I loved it.
I kind of want to read it again right now though I just finished reading it.
I was reminded of Alan Lightman’s wonderful book Einstein’s Dreams which is just a series of possible ways time might work in other realities.
Turns out Mr. Lightman’s book is inspired by Invisible Cities, at least structurally.
I enjoyed both the descriptions of the cities and the scenes of dialogue in Invisible Cities.
I found the cities to be wonderful, worthy of Kublia Kahn’s stately pleasure dome.
While I was reading an imagined encyclopedia, I found I always wanted more.
Each one struck my fancy one way or another.
The dialogue worked in creating two characters, giving them a life outside of the encyclopedia while managing to comment on the cities described.
There were many bits that I loved, like this one:
The dreamed-of city containe he arrives at Isadora in his old age.
In the square there is the wall where the old me sit and w he is seated in a row with them. Desires are already memories.
There is so much about language in Invisible Cities that I began to wonder if I should read the book as theory.
Is. Mr. Calvino giving us his theory of aesthetics in his descriptions of these imagined cities?
Is he presenting a philosophy? He may very well be doing just that, but the reader need not worry.
There is plenty on the surface to enjoy in Invisible Cities without digging for meaning.
Invisible Cities comes with my highest recommendation.
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Children are evil.
Not evil, but so amoral in their innocence that their actions are sometimes difficult to distinguish from evil.
Richard Hughes examines this supposition in his comic novel A High Wind in Jamaica.
Set at the end of the 19th century, when steam ships were beginning to replace schooners, something that worries the novel’s pirates, A High Wind in Jamaica is the story of a group of children kidnapped by pirates while on their way to homes in England.
Which group will turn out to be closer to the barbaric nature of uncivilized humanity: pirates, or children freed from proper adult supervision?
The Bas-Thornton’s have raised their children on a ruined sugar plantation in Jamaica where Mr. Bas-Thornton has a ‘business of some kind.’
Mrs. Bas-Thornton has not tried to maintain any sense of proper decorum.
Instead her children, three boys and two girls, have been left to themselves, much to their delight.
It was a kind of paradise for English children to come to, whatever it might be for their parents: especially at that time, when no one lived in at all a wild way at home.
Here one had to be a little ahead of the times: or decadent, whichever you like to call it.
The difference between boys and girls , for instance, had to be left to look after itself. Long hair would have made the evening search for grass-ticks and nits interminable: Emily and Rachel had their hair cut short and were allowed to do everything the boys did–to climb trees, swim, and trap animals and birds: they even had two pockets in their frocks.
After an earthquake followed by a hurricane which destroys much of their home, the Bas-Thornton’s decide to send the children back to England for their safety.
Two months later, the Bas-Thornton’s receive a letter from the ship’s captain–their children have all been killed, murdered by pirates who raided the ship shortly after they set sail.
But the truth is that the children willingly went with the pirates who afterwards found no one would take them off their hands.
Over time, the pirates become attached to the children and, for a while, keep them on-board ship enjoying their company.
The children quickly adopt the pirates as surrogate parents, big brothers really.
They are enthralled by the ship’s monkey.
They become attached to both of the pigs kept on board for future use, treating them as foot cushions, thrones, and horses.
The youngest girl, Laura turns everything she finds into a baby doll she can stash in it’s own ‘home’ somewhere on board.
(In the end she’ll try to take them all with her, fighting the cook over a soup ladle baby she can’t bear to be parted from.)
Her brother Edward is overjoyed he gets to be on a pirate ship without even having to run away from home.
It all appears very innocent, but Mr. Hughes is interested in darker aspects of childhood.
Early in the novel one child, John falls to his death while everyone is on shore.
That night the children look at his empty bed wondering what to make of it.
Afterwards, no one mentions John at all.
He is forgotten by the children until their mother asks where he is once they are rescued.
Emily, the captain’s favorite, is devoted to him until
one night when he has too much to drink he looks at her in a way she does not like.
After that, she turns against him, which is understandable, but through her innocence she later exacts a terrible revenge which the captain does not deserve.
A High Wind in Jamaica is a book about children, but it is not a book for children.
Mr. Hughes enjoys the games and frolics of his child characters, but his sympathies lie more with the pirates.
are taken in by the children, the pirates find they are unable to properly civilize the children who find the absence of civilizing parental guidance a ‘kind of paradise.’ When it becomes clear that the children cannot stay on board any longer, the pirates must decide what to do with them.
A true pirate would toss them in the sea, which is suggested, but the captain has become too fond of them to do this. Instead, he will see them safely placed which will lead to his downfall.
I entered into reading A High Wind in Jamaica expecting an adventure novel, which I got.
There is plenty of adventure to be found in Mr. Hughes’s book.
There is also a very adult look at the nature of innocence and the amorality inherit in it.
A High Wind in Jamaica was much more than I expected, and I expect it will be in contention for my list of favorite reads in 2011.
After nearly six years since I first ran this review on my old blog, Ready When You Are, C.B., I remain a big fan.
I loved this book and have tried to push it on several people with no success so far.
I stand by this review, which has me wanting to read it again. The only thing I’d like to add, or to clear up really, is that the pirate captain did nothing more than look at Emily in a way that made her uncomfortable.
Above it sounds like something more may have happened, but it didn’t. He paid a very heavy price by the end.
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Once every so often, a blogger somewhere asks if it’s possible to recognize how good a book is without liking it.
I think we’d all agree that a book can be good even though it does not fit our own personal taste.
At least in theory.
But when the rubber hits the road, or the fingers turn the pages, could you praise what is praiseworthy and write a good review about a book you didn’t like?
The Beauty of Men by Andrew Holleran contains some of the best writing I’ve read in a while.
Mr. Holleran takes the reader into the lives and psyches of his characters with an empathetic touch bringing them
to life with honesty and with understanding.
He neither judges nor asks us to feel sorry for the people he portrays.
His words are straightforward enough to cut to the quick, but writerly enough to be lyrical when lyrical is called for.
The Beauty of Men is about Lark, a 47-year-old single gay man, who has moved to Florida to help care for his mother who became paralyzed after a fall.
At times he has to remind himself, She fell, I didn’t. But it doesn’t matter. She fell on him.
All accidents on a certain scale, he noticed early on, sitting in the waiting rooms of intensive care units, affect not only the person who had the accident, they affect the person’s family as well.
“She’d be better off dead!” his cousin said the evening she visited his mother for the first he wanted to slap her, for saying precisely what they could not allow themselves to think.
“Would you rather have died the night you fell?” he recently asked his mother.
“Oh God, yes!” she said in a loud croak.
So much for the twelve years. They were victims, all of them, of Technology–she’d been on her way out of Life, in a revolving door, and been caught when the door stopped–she’d been stepping into Charon’s boat to cross the river Styx when she was pulled back, one foot in the boat, one foot on the bank.
Death had been devouring her and dropped her to the floor, like a dog distracted by other prey, mangled and crippled and sore.
Ironically, his mother’s injury allowed Lark to escape a world full of death.
The novel is set in the mid-;s when AIDS was ravishing a generation of gay men in New York City where Lark was living.
Now, Lark lives alone, has few friends, but he can blame this on his move to rural Florida.
Had he stayed in New York he would be just as alone for a different reason.
Now, instead of going to clubs and bath houses, he goes to the boat ramp and the one local gay bar two towns over in Gainesville.
There are no happy campers in The Beauty of Men.
Maybe one.
Lark’s friend Eddie who frequents the boat ramp almost daily without any illusions of romance.
Eddie is older than Lark but he has none of
Lark’s maudlin attitude about age.
He knows what he is, has accepted it, and goes through life with neither illusion nor self-pity.
Lark on the other hand is obsessed with age.
He has survived the AIDS epidemic only to find himself too old to be the gay man he wants to be anymore.
The old become invisible, which is true in the straight world, too, but invisibility for older gays in the ;s was compounded by a community that valued both youth and beauty as signs of good health.
Lark he just can’t find anyone who reciprocates.
We are the same age, Lark and me. Knowing something of what he feels did not make me like The Beauty of Men more.
Maybe the ;s is not long enough ago.
If the novel were set in the ;s, I could have felt more for Lark.
But so close to our own time, I lost patience with him early on and never really came around to his side.
I can’t say if the issues the book raises have been resolved or if we’ve just moved on to other things, but it all felt a bit old-hat to me.
So am I recommending the book?
I can say this: It is so well written that I will be reading more of Andrew Holleran’s novels.
I’ve never read his classic Dancer from the Dance which is considered a seminal work in the LGBT Cannon.
When I next see it on the shelf in a used bookstore somewhere, I’ll buy it.
In the end, The Beauty of Men is an excellent work.
One of the nice things about moving all of my old reviews over to this newer blog is that I have an excuse to re-read them all again.
I remembered this book, I see the cover and the title in local bookstores frequently, but I had forgotten all about it. This review brought it all back.
I imagine my opinion would be the same were I to read the book today.
It’s too much of its time, too much a piece of history.
I like to see what the author might write if he told this story today. He’s very good, Mr. Holleran.
And I will admit that I have still not read Dancer From the Dance.
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I never thought it would come to this.
It’s not like I don’t still love Haruki Murakami.
I do. Maybe not like I once did– maybe the honeymoon is finally over, though it lasted many years.
Many, many terrific writers essentially write the same story over and over again.
Some put the same narrator into slightly different situations but basically repeat themselves each time they write something.
Sometimes you have to look a little harder than others to see this, but it’s true more often than not.
So if you read enough of one author, there’s a danger that it will all begin to wear a bit thin.
That’s what’s happened with me and Haruki.
The two stories I read for this round in the competition were “The Mirror” and “A Folklore for My Generation” both translated by Philip Gabriel.
I enjoyed them both.
Both are well written stories.
But I’ve just had enough of Mr. Murakami’s passive narrators, these men (mostly young men) who take life in as it happens to them with a bemused, slightly detached attitude as though it’s all kind of interesting but not really unusual.
Having read so many of them, I’ve come to long for characters who will at least try to take the bull by the horns once in a while.
I think this feeling about Murakami came to a head with Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage which I loved at the time.
But it has this passive narrator, this young man whose friends gang up against him when one of them wrongly accuses him of sexual assault.
It takes him years to finally stand up for himself.
When he finally does, he is so gentle about it, so passive, that his self-defense looks like an act of contrition.
He’s a perfect Murakami character.
The rest of the cast in the stories I read for this round were all very familiar, too.
A slightly wiser, just a bit older friend who serves as a sort-of mentor figure to the narrator and a just-this-side-of-pixie girlfriend or girl friend to round things out.
I found myself longing for something new.
Enter Elizabeth Hardwick and her two stories “Yes and No” and “The Friendly Witness.” Written in the early ;s these are hardly new stories, but they are so full of plot, so full of different characters, the writing so full of language, that they feel kind of new.
Have we reached a point were rejecting a sparse economy of style in favor of language for the sake of language is new? Can we begin to enjoy wordiness again?
Ms. Hardwick may end up writing the same story again and again, I’ll find out eventually, but for now she is new, she is fun, she brings reading back to enjoying language for itself even if it doesn’t really add much to the characters or the story and even if what she is saying could be said in fewer words.
Why settle for five words when fifty will do?
Take this paragraph from “The Friendly Witness”:
It was not long after the gift and Susie’s first letter from school that the evangelicals in town forgot their doctrinal disputes in favor of a common, earthly aim, which was to close Charlie Bowman’s club.
These righteous people, with the first approach of an early winter, seemed to feel a new crusading energy, as though they had to fling off the lethargy of a summer that had been abominably hot and enervating, even in a spiritual way, because their little white frame churches, uncarpeted, brutally lightled by the plainest, latitudinarian, unshaded bulbs, and the drowsy motions of palm leaf fans, aroused an inwardness for which they reproached themselves when the heat disappeared. With a unifying cyclonic energy, they burst in upon the Mayor, several weeks before the accusation of fraud, and startled him considerably, for he was busy with another project very dear to his heart, the reading of Sandburg’s Lincoln. Putting aside his books, he cast a lively friendly eye upon the man and woman who did the talking, the others backing them up for the pews, so to speak, with rapid affirmative nods. “Looky here, it’s a shame!” the woman said, and the Mayor lowered his eyes.
Without any adornment or cosmetic, she was, nevertheless, strikingly garish. The Mayor turned to the milky-faced man, bleached possibly by many repentances, and thought, “Well, he’s found a way to get outside himself!” The man, as if sensing the Mayor’s infinite capacity of diversion, thrust his milky countenance across the desk and said hoarsely, “Are you hearing me right!”
I read three fully drawn characte the Mayor, the woman and the man. Not exactly original characters, we’ve seen them before most of us, but three characters where Murakami and others like him might have included just the Mayor.
The other two are not needed to keep the story going or to make the author’s ultimate point.
But arent’ they fun?
A woman who appears garish even without make-up.
It’s nice just to see the word “garish” used without irony.
And the man in the end who cuts through the Mayor’s nonsense, sees right through him to find the ineffective factotum who really has no idea what is going on.
I loved it.
More please, Ms. Hardwick.
You advance to the next round.
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