Marcus

I just didn't get this book. Some of that, I'm sure, comes from the fact that I read it in Spanish, and while I like to tell myself that I speak excellent Spanish, reality would probably wound my ego, so I'm going to ignore that and focus on the book itself.

The plot–it moves so fast you feel like you're a dog with your head out the window of a car on a Utah freeway, the only ones where you can go 80 legally. You're driving through the state and trying to take in everything you see but it's just moving by so fast and your tongue, which you normally never have any problem keeping nice and wet, is somehow drying out in the wind and your eyes are flipping back and forth, grasping things that shine or glitter but not fast enough, you can just never quite get a good look at anything. What I mean by that, in case the metaphor missed, is that Every Sentence moves the plot forward and it is utterly exhausting.

The characters are flat and weird. They never change, are never motivated by anything other than their widely varying versions of human nature which they are born and die with and never evolve.

A lot of the time it is hard to discern the magic from the realism. Neither are very convincing, making the magic less magical and the realism less real. I've read that the 100 Years was influenced by Faulkner and I believe that, but wow, the worst parts of Faulkner. It feels like it's all the confusion and it tries to capture all the types and symbolism but it lacks the beauty and the depth. Just when you are getting used to a character or, for that matter, a generation of characters, suddenly so much time has gone by that you're now dealing with a whole new group of people, a new war, new relationships and the only things that give the book any continuity at all are Macondo and Ursula and the family names which repeat and add to the confusion.

If you want magical realism, and I know this is blasphemous, especially for someone who minored in Spanish, I'd say read Salman Rushdie or, if you really want Spanish, Borges or Carlos Fuentes. They represent the genre better. Maybe my opinion will change after I revisit Cien Años in English sometime in the future, but for now I really don't have much of a desire to do that at least not for the next 100 years or so. Oh yes I did.

Long before the the Civil War started, Lysander Spooner was a strong abolitionist and was extremely active in supporting efforts to free the slaves. Despite this, when war broke out, he strongly opposed it. Spooner contended that the Civil War was less about freeing the slaves than it was about maintaining the union. For him, keeping the South in the union meant violently forcing a large group of people (the Southerners) to be subjected by a government to which they no longer consented.

No Treason was written in 1867, shortly after the Civil War. It is in that context that Spooner uses such strong language when he refers to the government as “robbers and murders” (he uses the phrase, or some variation on it, 38 times in the pamphlet). From his perspective, the government of the United States had just killed hundreds of thousands of men who were defending their right to be governed by consent. The result of this bloodshed was that while the slaves were freed, the surviving Southerners were no longer free to withdraw from the bonds of a government that no longer acted as their agent. Again, Spooner was anti-slavery and at times even advocated using violence to end slavery, but he felt the motivation for the war was not freeing the slaves, but the preservation of the union (and consequential suppression of the South) and that the principal reason for conserving the union was greed.

Not content to simply denounce the government's use of violence to force the Southerners to stay in the United States, Spooner also attacks the authority of the constitution. How can a document that nobody has signed or voted for maintain authority over anyone? He argues that a social contract like the Constitution, one that is not explicitly agreed to like every other contract which must be signed, cannot be binding. One way to think of it is to ask yourself–if you were born into a country with an extremely repressive constitution would you accept its authority to oppress you solely by virtue of your being born into the geographical area over which the constitution claimed to exert authority? Essentially that is what happens with the US constitution, only because it is not considered repressive by most, its authority is generally accepted on these nebulous grounds.

Spooner addresses the position that the constitution (and government) is authoritative because the votes of the majority support it by questioning how elections held by secret ballot can pretend to have any power over a person's life and property. He poses it as a group of men (at this time only men could vote) that gather, and by secret ballot vote to rob and plunder (through taxation and the threat of violence for resisting taxation) their fellow man for their own benefit.

Spooner's logic is complex and deals with many of the nuances of voting for a document and agents (congressmen etc.) to exercise the authority of the document. No Treason is tough reading, not because the it is hard to follow, but because for most people, myself included, the content is jarring, hard to refute, and goes against a lifetime of beliefs. Whether or not he is right is a decision that the reader will have to make, but either way, his arguments should not be ignored. They are just as relevant today as they were more than 140 years ago when he made them.

The book is okay, not particularly memorable I thought, especially when held up to the Neal Stephenson standard. The chatty AI was silly and kind of killed any serious aspect of the story for me.

The real winner here was Rob Reid's After On podcast. He's a great host and his guests are very good as well.

Usually in a book you find a character that you identify with–someone whose motives you understand. I didn't find that character in The Idiot. The unifying trait of all of them is the way their lives are directed by passion. None of them are rational–whether blinded by love, money or vice; whether good or evil, they each act to slowly bring about their own ruin. It's tragic and disconcerting to watch them slowly come unravelled.

Though Prince Myshkin is the “idiot” the book is named for, he is definitely not, at least at the time the story takes place, an idiot. He's innocent and good, but is consistently (and disconcertingly) brazenly honest. It is shocking. When he bares his soul to people who care nothing for him, it's almost too much. The Idiot is a blood on wool contrast of his goodness and the depravity every other character where the end result is the same for everyone.

This story, like most serialized Russian novels, is episodic and probably unnecessarily long. Among the many tangents are, as are so often found in Russian literature, philosophical and religious ponderings, commentary on the stratification of Russian society and descriptions of contemporary historical events. Through it all there is a beautiful, tragic love story where human flaws are shown raw and unpolished. The ending is insane. It's bizarre. Surreal. It's worth reading the whole book for the ending.

I keep telling myself I'm not going to read any more children's books unless I'm reading them to my children. I convince myself that I'll find more enjoyment or more utility reading grown-up books. Lately though, I've found that every time end up reading a book with a child protagonist, I prove myself wrong. Huck Finn is another case in point.

The most poignant part of the book for me was when Huck was struggling with whether or not to turn Jim in. Huck knew that it was his duty to allow Jim to be returned to his master, but Huck had grown to love Jim and didn't want to hurt him. His reasoning was that he'd feel bad not turning Jim in, but then again, he'd feel much worse if he did betray him and turn him in. Faced with a no-win situation, Huck went with his heart and was true to his friend. The payoff when Jim once again shows his gratitude to Huck is powerful and moving.

I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my life, and I knowed I could pray now. But I didn't do it straight off, but laid the paper down and set there thinking–thinking how good it was all this happened so, and how near I come to being lost and going to hell. And went on thinking. And got to thinking over our trip down the river; and I see Jim before me all the time: in the day and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a- floating along, talking and singing and laughing. But somehow I couldn't seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind. I'd see him standing my watch on top of his'n, ‘stead of calling me, so I could go on sleeping; and see him how glad he was when I come back out of the fog; and when I come to him again in the swamp, up there where the feud was; and such-like times; and would always call me honey, and pet me and do everything he could think of for me, and how good he always was; and at last I struck the time I saved him by telling the men we had small-pox aboard, and he was so grateful, and said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the ONLY one he's got now; and then I happened to look around and see that paper.

It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a- trembling, because I'd got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:

“All right, then, I'll GO to hell”–and tore it up.

“My goodness, and she so well only last week! Is she took bad?”

“It ain't no name for it. They set up with her all night, Miss Mary Jane said, and they don't think she'll last many hours.”

“Only think of that, now! What's the matter with her?”

I couldn't think of anything reasonable, right off that way, so I says:

“Mumps.”

“Mumps your granny! They don't set up with people that's got the mumps.”

“They don't, don't they? You better bet they do with THESE mumps. These mumps is different. It's a new kind, Miss Mary Jane said.”

“How's it a new kind?”

“Because it's mixed up with other things.”

“What other things?”

“Well, measles, and whooping-cough, and erysiplas, and consumption, and yaller janders, and brain-fever, and I don't know what all.”

“My land! And they call it the MUMPS?”

“That's what Miss Mary Jane said.”

“Well, what in the nation do they call it the MUMPS for?”

“Why, because it IS the mumps. That's what it starts with.”

“Well, ther' ain't no sense in it. A body might stump his toe, and take pison, and fall down the well, and break his neck, and bust his brains out, and somebody come along and ask what killed him, and some numskull up and say, ‘Why, he stumped his TOE.' Would ther' be any sense in that? NO. And ther' ain't no sense in THIS, nuther. Is it ketching?”

“Is it KETCHING? Why, how you talk. Is a HARROW catching–in the dark? If you don't hitch on to one tooth, you're bound to on another, ain't you? And you can't get away with that tooth without fetching the whole harrow along, can you? Well, these kind of mumps is a kind of a harrow, as you may say–and it ain't no slouch of a harrow, nuther, you come to get it hitched on good.”

“Well, it's awful, I think,” says the hare-lip. “I'll go to Uncle Harvey and–“

“Oh, yes,” I says, “I WOULD. Of COURSE I would. I wouldn't lose no time.”