Lory
See my full review at The Emerald City Book Review. Of course I've heard of Oliver Sacks, author of many books with intriguing titles (The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, An Anthropologist on Mars, Seeing Voices, etc.). But in spite of hearing that Sacks was a terrific writer about fascinating topics out of his practice as a neurologist, I managed to avoid actually reading these works for many years.
Until, while questing for something short and inspiring to read this summer, his little book Gratitude – barely even a book, just a compilation of four brief essays that originally appeared in the New York Times – caught my eye. I polished it off in an hour, was captured by the intelligent and compassionate mind that spoke there, and looked for more.
Awakenings, his second published book, was one I had heard about; I had vague impressions from when the Hollywood movie came out, with Robin Williams and Robert De Niro. I haven't seen that either, but the premise of patients coming out of a decades-long pathological “sleep” sounded interesting. So I checked it out and dove in.
The edition I read in e-book form is the latest of many incarnations. A preface explains some of the transformations the book has gone through: adding footnotes, removing them, putting them back in again; going back to the original stories after further developments; weaving in further developments in neurology, science, and medicine, including chaos theory; adding notes on the stage and film incarnations of the story; and more.
It's an unwieldy mass of material, and exactly the kind of book I prefer to read in print versus the electronic version. With all the footnotes, cross-referencing, and a glossary of medical terms, it would have made it much easier to flip back and forth, and to maintain awareness of the place of the parts within the whole. If it hadn't been such a fascinating story at the core, I probably would have gotten frustrated and given up. Probably I will buy a print copy, because I want to go through it again and take it in more thoroughly.
“When is she going to get to that actual story?” you are probably asking. Yes, like Sacks, I am making you wade through a lot of prefatory and explanatory material – probably because that's how I experienced the book. Pushing all this aside, at the core are twenty case studies of individuals who went through a bizarre, little-remembered epidemic of “sleepy sickness” that erupted worldwide along with the more famous influenza epidemic in the early twentieth century. This viral disease fatally disrupted their brain activity, pushing them into states of torpor and/or of manic inability to sleep; many died, or were left permanently disabled. While some seemingly recovered, later they began to display symptoms of Parkinsonian syndrome, particularly disruptions in movement and speech.
As they became less and less able to function, often needing round-the-clock nursing care to survive, these people were placed in institutions for “hopeless” cases. To one of these institutions near New York City Oliver Sacks came as a young doctor in the 1960s, and there his work with these post-encephalitic Parkinsonian patients changed his life.
In a stroke of fate, Dr. Sacks was present at the moment when a “wonder drug” was discovered that roused these patients out of their decades-long fixation and immobility. L-DOPA, which works to elevate dopamine levels in the brain, at first seemed to promise total, almost instant recovery. People leaped out of their wheelchairs and sang and danced with joy.
But then so-called “side effects” set in, as the medical establishment likes to call unwanted or adverse drug results that are fully as much a part of the treatment as the results they are aiming for. Pulled between extremes of manic and torpid behavior, the patients felt themselves to be walking an ever-narrowing path that became a tightrope over an abyss. Different titrations and schedules were tried, and sometimes a precarious balance was reached that allowed some individuals to have a higher-functioning life for their remaining years.
When that didn't work out, though, the results were often terrible and tragic to behold. Patients who had to be taken off the drug were left in a state far worse than they had been in before. Frequently they lost the will to live, or went mad, descending into a hellish hallucinatory state. Some were quietly euthanized, mercy killings that also meant the doctors need no longer observe the results of their tampering. One has to wonder to what extent the risk of doing such damage is warranted by the desirable results that sometimes, unpredictably, come about.
Great moral questions indeed are raised by this story. For me, frequently it resembled a horror story, a Frankenstein-tale of men enchanted by the Godlike powers they can achieve through the intellect, without the deeper knowledge of what will result from their experiments. Is it right to tinker with human subjects like this? What truly is the nature of consciousness, of life and death? In our quest for a better life on earth, what harm do we do through unawareness and egotism? Is it enough to have good intentions, or should we also be striving for higher knowledge, for the wisdom that sees the whole and not just isolated, disconnected parts?
For Dr. Sacks, there are no easy answers, but as he portrays his own struggle and his own “awakening” we gain a sense of how one morally striving person has engaged with these questions. He speaks against the tendency of modern medicine towards a mechanistic view of the human being, and movingly describes his own human encounters with his patients, encounters that inspired in him an awareness of the person who lives beyond statistics, beyond symptoms, beyond paralysis and speechlessness. He is filled with wonder when he observes the strange experiences his patients are subjected to, and humbled by what they need to call up in order to face their existence day after day.
Such an attitude is one we can all strive to emulate, even if we are not physicians. We will all do harm at times, often out of the best intentions, but let us not obscure the real, living human being with our fixed, mechanistic thoughts. The call to awaken to this power and this responsibility was for me the real message of the book.
I'll certainly be reading more by Oliver Sacks; there is so much to learn from these kinds of stories, pushing us beyond our “normal,” safe ways of experiencing the world. Have you read anything by him? What is your favorite?
Reviews and more on my blog: Entering the Enchanted Castle
More capers with Uncle Fred. In this case, the impostures multiply and ramify and are combined with the continuing pig-stealing gag at Blandings (which is actually more of a subplot here) for sustained comic mayhem. Though this comes chronologically before Uncle Dynamite I read it second, and I found it less enjoyable for some reason – maybe too much of the same too soon, or maybe UD really was better, I'm not sure.
A very brief novel, more of a novella, about two lonely young people who find it hard to figure out how to love each other, while guarding and fostering the light within themselves. I'm not entirely convinced by the voice purporting to be of a 17 year old boy, but as usual Le Guin provides some lovely quotable passages and a thoughtful, richly human story.
See my full review at The Emerald City Book Review. Translator/editor Jack Zipes has gathered many different sorts of tales, originally published between 1904 and 1918: early Gothic-style romances like “The Dwarf,” pieces that mimic traditional folklore like “The Three Linden Trees,” several surreal dream narratives, anti-war satires like “If the War Continues,” and symbolic quest stories like “Iris.” Few are retellings or variants of traditional tales, but they share the heightened, concentrated language and rich array of symbols that come to us from our fairy-tale heritage. As well as drawing on the past, they point toward the future: several of them struck me as reminiscent of science-fiction themes and ideas, and I wondered if Hesse had some influence on authors in that nascent genre.
There are wonderful flights of the imagination here: A poet whose poems have no words and cannot be written down; a mysterious stranger who comes to a city and grants everyone one wish, with surprising results; an isolated forest dweller who quests toward the mysterious world “outside.” Most of the stories were written under the shadow of the Great War, and in manifold ways they cry out for human beings to fight the forces of oppression and mechanization by cultivating the living forces within. Some are more polished, others more like sketches or preliminary drafts for larger works, but all offer a fascinating window into the soul of an artist striving to articulate his deepest feelings and thoughts in a turbulent time.
As part of her full and amazing life, Angelou spent some time living in Africa, looking for her roots and a sense of home there. This proved elusive, but her experiences are, as always, told in a marvelously colorful and humanly embracing way.
Books that are highly stylized, enamored of their own language, are hit or miss with me. Sometimes they just feel false and contrived. (E.g. The Night Circus.) Sometimes, though, the linguistic acrobatics work for me and bring me into a unique world that only exists through this combination of sounds and verbal color. Another time, I might not be in the mood and the whole performance might fall flat.
A Stranger in Olondria worked for me, this time. I just floated along with the rapturous prose and didn't worry overmuch about details like a coherent plot or believable characters. I'm not sure what will be left to me of it after a few weeks or months have passed, but in the time of reading it was a unique experience.
I reread this after enjoying Laurie's review – whose first-time read as an adult made me want to revisit one of my childhood favorites. I still love it, although the classism of the story, as with all of Burnett's books, is grating for modern readers. However, its ultimate message for me is about the wealth to be found in inner development. Sara is a rich girl because she gives generously to others, and a princess because she is master of her own soul. She is not constrained by outer circumstances, but knows how to transform them through her inner attitude and activity. Thus she is free, even when treated like a slave. The images of this 20th century fairy tale are simple and appealing for children, but still ring true to me today.
I had a wish to reread this after the first stage in Narniathon, to understand better the spiritual process behind Lewis's writing. I found it frustratingly evasive in many ways, even as it was unusually articulate in others. Although Lewis tries his best to describe his elusive experience of “Joy” and how he was led from atheism to theism to Christianity, I was left uncertain as to what he really experiences and believes in the fullness of his soul. I suspect at the point of this writing, there was much he was unable to admit to himself, let alone to an audience. There is no wonder at Lewis being an emotionally wounded man, considering the many traumas he went through in his early years; like most of us, he covered these up and endured them as best he could, but that left him with some strange disjunctions in his inner life. It's only now that a fuller understanding of trauma is being unfolded and that new healing methods are being discovered. But even if he was unable to benefit from these, he was a seeker of healing in his own way. I still feel gratitude to him for all that he shared.
An additional note on the e-book edition I read: the proofreading was terrible and there were many mistakes left in from the scanning process (e.g. “Fie” for “He,” extraneous apostrophes, etc.) This is a disgrace for an edition of the work of a man who was meticulous with words. E-book publishers must be more careful about these errors.
Here's a book I've heard about for so long, but never read — the perfect pick for a Classics Club Spin, as well as a chance to take part in Brona's Australian Reading Month event, and to represent another country in my Reading Around the World project. But even without all these side benefits, the story had enough to offer in itself, and I'm glad I finally delved into it.
It was a bit different than I had expected — various blurbs and summaries I've read present the narrator, Sybylla, as bravely attempting to choose a writing career over marriage, not an easy thing for a young woman in the early twentieth century. (I suspect these blurbs may be influenced by the movie version by Jane Campion, but I haven't seen it, so I can't be sure.) In fact, the book ends with Sybylla in despair after rejecting a good offer of marriage from a man she likes, but does not love, thus apparently dooming herself to a life of peasant drudgery. Far from resolving to become a writer, she expresses contempt for her own talent and dismisses her efforts so far.
Though throughout the story there are frequent references to Sybylla's longing for an artistic life, given her time and circumstances, a “career” is never a serious option for her. The title is sufficiently ironic, without the “(?)” she wanted to add (till her publishers nixed that idea).
Sybylla was described by some readers as “a frustrating heroine,” and I could see why. Certainly she is a very frustrated young woman. Though she escapes from her poor, trodden-down family to live with her wealthier grandmother, she doesn't want to admit that this can only be a brief respite, given to her as an opportunity to make a decent match. Her longings for other things, for music, for creativity, have no outlet in the Australian bush, and only make her unhappy when she's not dreamily ignoring her actual prospects.
In this state she drifts into an engagement with a decent young man who is probably enticed by her difference from other girls, but with whom marriage would never work — a fact that she finally, painfully, has to face and to communicate with him. She is then punished for her discontent by her own mother, sent to drudge for a family even grubbier and lacking in culture than her own. She only escapes when disgust makes her physically ill.
What a bitter, woeful tale, you may think! Yes, in a way, but Sybylla's voice (a thin disguise for Franklin's own, one can't help but assume) often speaks with keen irony, a sharp bush-honed sense of humor, and a knack for observation that helped pull me through. Published when the author was barely out of her teens, the novel is rough-edged and sometimes self-indulgent. With a bit more distance, a more mature perspective, the raw emotion and painful teenage confusion of the novel might have been mitigated. But some of its power might also have been lost.
Frequently the book made me think of a darker, Australian version of Anne of Green Gables. There was the girl heroine with a taste for music and a talent for writing, brought from a life of toil to a more genteel home; there was the conflict-ridden romance; all amidst a dramatic natural setting on the edges of European immigrant civilization. But Anne never loses her home at Green Gables, and she doesn't torture Gilbert with her own confusion in quite such an extreme way, either. Anne goes to college, but also finds true love; Sybylla goes back to the cows on the home dairy farm and gives up on marriage. Their fates, in the end, diverge utterly, with Franklin's account the more realistic, if less reassuring.
Reassuringly cozy it may not be, but My Brilliant Career is a book with a unique and memorable persona, an author-heroine I will not easily forget. Against Sybylla's pessimistic predictions, her creator, at least, did indeed become a writer, leaving her mark upon the world of literature — maybe not the “brilliant career” of a teenager's dreams, but a real and impressive story of one woman's struggle to make her voice heard.
See my full review at The Emerald City Book Review. Translation between languages is an enterprise that has variously been seen as impossible, unreliable, unnecessary, or not cost-effective enough. In our English-dominated culture, it's something of an endangered species. Princeton professor David Bellos, on the other hand, believes that far from being a sort of awkward linguistic appendage we might better do without, translation is central to how we think and experience the world as human beings. And after reading Is That a Fish in Your Ear? you'll most likely agree.
Don't worry about the topic being too dry or erudite. Bellos is clearly no literary snob (his title is a quotation from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, after all) and the book's 32 short chapters are witty, playful, and endlessly thought-provoking. Did you know that in Russian there is no word for “blue”? (If you're going to translate that word, you first have to decide whether it's dark or light blue.) Did you realize that the work of simultaneous interpreters at the UN is as stressful as that of air traffic controllers? Have you wondered how the Bible can be translated into languages that have no way to express the concept of a person's thoughts being different from his outer actions? Do you understand how Google Translate actually works, or why legalese really is a separate language?
All of these fascinating questions and many others are explored, with the overarching aim of illuminating what translation does. Even if you were never to read or listen to a word of a translation from another language, this would be relevant to you, because translation is part of what makes us human.
Far from deploring the different ways we have of expressing ourselves and finding them a source of confusion, Bellos encourages us to celebrate them, and to embrace the activity of bridging them through translation. As Bellos argues, “The diversity of language is a treasure and a resource for thinking new thoughts.” So, I would say, is this book. It's certainly one I'll treasure and return to, as a deeply enjoyable and stimulating read.
I read Dorothy Dunnett! I'd seen her books highly recommended so I wanted to check them out. I did not get on with the Macbeth one, but I tried again with the Lymond Chronicles. The start was rocky again (Lymond seemed a horrible character to begin with, and I was confused by the history and military strategy) but after a while I finally got into it. The plot remained confusing to me, but I became more engaged with the characters, and it was lovely to see Richard and Lymond finally coming to an understanding. I will try the next in the series and maybe it will be more comprehensible now that I have some orientation.
I didn't feel that the foreign quotations were a huge impediment to understanding, although it would be nice to have a reference with the translations. The outrageously florid style could have been irritating, but somehow it worked and gave a great flair to what otherwise could have been quite a dull and dreary passage of history. Maybe that's why these books are so beloved.
Reviews and more on my blog: Entering the Enchanted Castle
I'm glad I finally read this after many years of circling around it. I'm also glad I had also read/watched some other resources on the Nag Hammadi texts and Gnosticism, because Pagels emphasizes the opposition of Orthodox/Gnostic views, and it's actually more nuanced than that. But there is no question that the rediscovery of Gnosticism and the re-emergence of Gnostic texts is a transformational event of our time. I would like to go back to the book and consider again all the ideas it brings up. I think that I am a Gnostic and after centuries of burial and suppression, there is a lot in me that wants to come out and needs rediscovery too!
One thing that stuck with me was a point she made at the end, that Gnosticism did not become a larger movement, and went underground, because such a solitary path oriented on individual discovery could never have survived on the scale that the orthodox church, with its community orientation and outward mechanisms of transmission, did. That seems to me true. However, that outer “carrying” mechanism seems to me to have be in danger of falling into emptiness and oppressiveness, and needs to be re-enlivened by the spirit of true knowledge, personal experience of the divine. This was not possible before, because not enough human beings were ready for it. But the time is now! We have evolved further, and now, we can potentially take up the call of Gnosticism. I hope we will, and that we will not reject and oppose the other side but bring about a marriage of these seemingly opposite impulses. Each side suffered from their separation.
Reread sparked off by the 1976 Club blog event - this is one of my favorites from DWJ's early period, a quietly brilliant little tale about prejudice and the sacrifice needed to produce true change. It seems to me ever more timely, as our walls get ever thicker and our refusal to see or listen to one another stronger.
I read this in December 2021 for the zillionth time to join in Calmgrove's Narniathon (one book per month, in publication order). Thoughts to be posted on my blog shortly.