Category: Books and literature

Discussion of books and other literature

Laughter in the Dark

Milan’s foot in Nick’s living room

Nabokov’s book is a cruel one: a love story without love, and a mystery with the ending announced in the opening lines. It lacks everything that saves Lolita from being a hopelessly ugly story, notably the sense that there is something of value in what transpires, if only for the descriptions it evokes. When the characters in Laughter in the Dark are aware at all, it is generally only for the shallowest of self-serving purposes. The only character with any force of understanding – Paul – is nonetheless unable to effectively protect anyone of importance to him. He just ends up carrying the grief that is beyond the capabilities of everyone else in the book.

As with Nabokov’s other work, allusions to other literature are fairly frequent. While Lolita calls most loudly to Edgar Allen Poe’s poetry, Laughter in the Dark spends a fair bit of time whispering to Anna Karenina, though Margot and Rex acutely lack the depth of character that partially redeem Anna and Vronsky. The German setting creates an alien and alienating feeling quite different from Lolita – the book with which this one must inevitably be compared. The characters all seem better suited to vindictiveness than joy, as demonstrated by everything from the shallowness and hypocrisy of Albinus’ interest in Margot (abandoning his family, but immediately inclined to kill her for straying from him) to the uncalculated malice underlying the triumph of her confidence trick.

Nabokov has a talent for irony and devastating understatement. At several points, I was moved to mark the margin with a hasty exclamation point. The clarity of his work is well displayed in this novel, though his talent mostly evokes an appreciation for how trivial, manipulative, and unredemptive human relations can be at their worst. The straightforwardness of the language is extreme even for Nabokov, who does not generally play games with opaque and experimental prose. Laughter in the Dark is intensely cinematic. Particularly during the last portion – in which Albinus has lost his vision – you can imagine how the shots would be framed, how his willful blindness and the callousness of his tormentors would be displayed on celluloid.

Having read this book, I think I will need to go back and read Lolita and Anna Karenina again – though that was inevitable before I ever picked up this volume.

Comprehensible art

Perhaps my favourite thing about Vladimir Nabokov is how he never sacrifices clarity for the impression of brilliance. So many great modern authors seem to take delight in baffling their readers, whether with torturous sentences, incomprehensible plots, or surrealism. James Joyce is especially guilty, but hardly alone, in his use of such approaches. While such writing can push the boundaries of language, it is likely to try one’s patience as well. As such, it is especially pleasant to see genius expressed in a straightforward form: excellence in a fairly traditional format.

It’s rather like the different kinds of modern art. There may be some profound idea in the mind of the artist who has splattered a crumpled canvas with Burger King condiments, but I have a lot more respect for the one who made the elegant sculpture in wood or marble or bronze.

Best books of 2007

The five best books I read in 2007:

I unreservedly recommend them all. The links go to my reviews.

The sex life of corn

Corn, the key species in modern industrial agriculture, is completely incapable of reproducing itself in nature. The cobs that concentrate the seeds so nicely for us are not conducive to reproduction because, if planted, the corn grows so densely it dies. As such, the continued existence of Zea mays depends upon people continuing to divide the cobs and plant a portion of the seeds.

Corn is apparently a descendant of an earless grass called Teosinte. It is hard to overstate the consequences of a heavily mutated strain of Teosinte finding a species capable of closing a reproductive loop that would otherwise be open, leading to swift extinction.

The actual mechanics of corn reproduction are similarly odd. Male gametes are produced at the top of the plant, inside the flower-like tassel. At a certain time of year, these release the pollen that fertilizes the female gametes located in the cobs. It reaches them through single strands of silk (called styles) that run through the husk. When a grain of pollen comes into contact with one of these threads it divides into two identical cells. One of them tunnels through the strand into the kernel, a six to eight inch distance crossed in several hours. The other fuses with an egg to form an embryo, while the digger grows into the endosperm.

Another curious aspect of corn reproduction is that, because of seed hybridization (not genetic modification), every stalk of corn in a field is a clone of every other stalk. This is because the seeds came from inbred lines: each made to self-pollinate for several generations, eventually yielding batches of genetically identical seeds that farmers buy every year. They do this because the yield from the identical seeds is higher than that from the mixed generation that would follow it by a degree sufficient to justify the cost of buying seeds.

Such hybrid corn pushed yields from twenty bushels an acre – the amount managed by both Native Americans and farmers in the 1920s – to about two hundred bushels an acre. Given the degree to which we are all constructed more from corn than from any other source of materials (most of the meat, milk, and cheese we eat is ultimately made from corn, as are tons of processed foods), these remarkable processes of reproduction and agriculture deserve further study. For my part, I am reading Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma. I am only 10% into it, but it has been quite fascinating so far.

Fiction, non-fiction, and memory

Milan Ilnyckyj in a red coat

I have a new theory about why I do so much better with non-fiction than with fiction. It has to do with the way I read and the relationship between reading and kinds of memory. There has probably been no point in the last decade in which I was reading only one book at a time. At present, I am reading thirteen. It is routine for me to leave a partially completed book for weeks or months, while engaging with something more immediately interesting or urgent.

With non-fiction, every sentence and chapter you read gets integrated into your general schema of knowledge on the topic in question. You can read one chapter on cryptography or ice core sampling or the life of Voltaire and it will henceforth be stored along with related thoughts and memories in a general databank of knowledge. Admittedly, the databank is full of rats that chew their way through ideas long left uncontemplated. The point is that there is a single and relatively well ordered web of knowledge in one’s general library.

Fiction, by contrast, demands the recollection of a lot of specific facts in an organized way. You need to remember the world of that book or story: a world potentially very distinct from the ‘general world’ about which non-fiction knowledge is collected. Remembering characters, world characteristics, relationships, and plot points all calls upon us to treat a fictional universe with a similar kind of importance to the real universe. While this is simple enough when reading a single book at a time, it does not fit very well into a reading pattern based on reading many books in parallel, sometimes abandoning any particular one of them for months at a time.

Love and Hydrogen

Bubble blowing graffiti, Vancouver

The twenty-two stories in Jim Shepard’s Love and Hydrogen cover a lot of ground: from gay love aboard the Hindenburg to Dutch soccer to a first-person narrative written by the Creature from the Black Lagoon. While a common style and repeated themes connect the collection, a great deal of effort is demonstrated in creating a rich scenario for each. I appreciated the degree to which each story felt like an initiation into a new area of knowledge, while also feeling united by a kind of unfathomable emotional edge – intentionally vague and melancholic.

Shepard clearly likes disasters, dysfunctional families, aviation, and monster-style early science fiction. The prevalence of the latter theme makes the book feel older than it is: as though it was written in the age of drive-in movies rather than as a response to it, about five decades later. The whole collection has strong overtones of post-war America, though with violence as a near-constant theme.

The sports stories elicited much the same reaction in me as the sports themselves: soccer interesting, football brutal, and baseball hokey with an American twang. Among the aviation stories, the one describing the experience of German trainee pilots with the infamous Messerschmitt Me 163 “Komet” was perhaps the most compelling. I can see why the vehicle appealed to Shepard; as the first rocket-powered manned fighter, with corrosive fuel and no landing gear, it was an incredibly perilous thing to fly. That particular story resonated nicely with the recently completed Why the Allies Won, both touching upon the theme of Germany pushing technology forward, but often doing so in ways that were not tactically or strategically useful.

Shepard has a talent for simple yet powerful statements. In a story about the first bathysphere, the narrator notes calmly that he “passed the point below which only dead men had sunk.” In a story written from the perspective of John Entwistle, the bass player in The Who, the narrator remarks that: “Rage in the service of self-pity was what we’d always been about. It was what rock had always been about.” Similar elegant tidbits are sprinkled through the volume – counterpointing descriptive passages that sometimes come off as an evocative but elusive tangle of words. I found myself getting particularly lost in some of the dysfunctional family narratives – most of my mind warning that “this isn’t something we want to wander into.”

Having the daring to write the supposed thoughts of contemporary figures is an impressive if somewhat off-putting characteristic. “John Ashcroft: More Important Things than Me” is probably the most elusive story in the collection. It is written as a collection of aphorisms, focusing on Ashcroft’s personal convictions and life experiences. I don’t know to what extent it faithfully reproduces the life or views of the controversial figure, but – as a story – it remains quite opaque in its motivations. In a sense, it is a humanizing text, seemingly contributing to a more balanced understanding of the public figure. At the same time, it leaves the reader suspicious: both the supposed author (Ashcroft himself) and the actual author are presumably trying to forward a political agenda or perpetuate some sort of satire or criticism. As it stands, it remains unclear what either message is meant to be.

Overall, the collection is the kind of literary work where you are constantly thinking “I will understand this better the second time around.” Given the quality of the stories, it is plausible that this will be one of the few books that actually earns a second reading.

Why the Allies Won

Vancouver grafitti, in an alley off Seymour Street

Among the hundreds of books I read at Oxford, Richard Overy’s Why the Allies Won stood out as an especially engaging piece of historical argumentation. It is one of a handful of books I was determined to re-read when I had more time available. Given the fundamental importance of the Second World War in the establishment of the contemporary international system, the question is a rather important one. Overy’s explanation is well-argued, convincing, and consistently interesting.

This complex book has a number of general themes, each of which is based around a necessary but insufficient cause for the victory of Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union over Germany, Italy, and Japan. Overy goes into detail on the Battle of the Atlantic – particularly the importance of American supplies for Britain, the U-boat menace, and the tactics that turned the tide in that theatre. He likewise covers the war on the eastern front: from early German successes to the battles at Stalingrad and Kursk that marked the watershed point of the war. In the Pacific theatre, he does an excellent job of explaining the significance of the Battle of Midway, including the considerable role luck played in the victory. The outcome was largely decided by ten bombs in ten minutes that struck Japanese aircraft carriers while they were refueling their air wings.

An entire chapter is devoted to the cross-channel invasion from Britain into occupied France. Of particular interest is the role played by intelligence, a subject Overy arguably neglects to some extent in other circumstances. The ways in which the Allies kept German defences spread out through misdirection make for especially interesting reading.

Overy also covers more thematic reasons for the Allied victory: mass production, especially in the United States and Soviet Union; technology, especially air power; the surprising unity between the Allies; and the moral contest between the Allied and Axis states. Unlike many historians, he highlights Allied bombing as an effective military strategy. He remains ambiguous about whether the military utility justified the bombing of German and Japanese civilians, but argues relatively persuasively that attacks on oil facilities and other key bits of industrial infrastructure served an important strategic purpose.

Midway is not the only example of good fortune Overy highlights – partially in an attempt to undermine the argument that the war could only have ended the way it did. Adding external fuel tanks to the fighters escorting bombers into German airspace dramatically reduced losses, substantially bolstering the effectiveness of the strategic bombing campaign. Likewise, equipping a few aircraft to close a small ‘Atlantic gap’ helped secure the end of the U-boat threat. Even the devastating trap sprung by the Soviets upon the German supply lines approaching Stalingrad could not have succeeded without the incredible success of a few thousand isolated troops occupying the entire German 6th army.

This book is enthusiastically recommended to anyone with an interest in military history generally or the Second World War in particular. It is also a good general disproof of the idea that the outcome of wars is decided by basic material facts like the relative sizes of economies, or the idea that there aren’t decisive turning points in history where the world is pressed along one path as another is closed off.

Book project: month two

Entering the second month of our reading agreement, neither Emily nor I has finished the first book. Allowances can be made, however, for the fact that December ended with holidays and my visit. I am aiming to finish Love and Hydrogen in the next few days and move on to Nabokov’s Laughter in the Dark soon after. No doubt, she will be through the more hefty A History of Warfare before too long.

Despite my nervousness about assigning a second military-themed book in a row for Emily, I have given her Ender’s Game for January. It is quite a compelling read and it serves our original purpose of sharing books that have meant a lot to us and influenced us somehow. Not only have I read this Orson Scott Card novel dozens of times, but it was a pretty important aspect of the collective knowledge of some of my closest friends in high school.

Prior posts:

First photo in a book

Graffiti in North Vancouver

After asking my permission, a group of authors used one of my photos in their book Adrenaline Junkies and Template Zombies: Understanding Patterns of Project Behavior. The photo in question is of a Soviet automobile in the Occupations Museum in Tallinn. I am not sure of the precise context in which it was used, but they have offered to send me a copy.

I will post a photo of the page including my photo when the book arrives. I am generally happy for people to use my photos with permission and proper attribution. The pleasantness of this experience stands in contrast with the unauthorized publication of one of my photos in The Oxford Student.