The Human Stain by Philip Roth

The Human Stain is a novel that reaches broadly into many areas of human nature, as well as into several contemporary social issues. It is set in a small academic community in Massachusetts in 1998 with the Clinton impeachment proceedings as a backdrop. The narrator is Nathan Zuckerman, Philip Roth's alter ego, and he is telling the life story of his friend Coleman Silk, a retired professor of Classical Studies.

During one of his lectures, Silk made an innocuous statement that could be construed as racist, at least by those whose ambitions could be furthered by bringing Silk down. After he is hounded out of college into retirement, Silk finds solace in a relationship with a much younger woman who happens to have been through an abusive marriage to a disturbed Vietnam veteran. His enemies continue to defame Silk by exploiting this relationship. In the meantime, however, Silk is sitting on a bombshell of a secret, one that has defined his life.

Living a lie rather than admitting, even to yourself, who and what you really are is one of several themes that The Human Stain explores. It is about the penchant for naming and classifying things rather than understanding them. It is about recognizing what's important, about living for (or against) the expectations of others, and about the tyranny of hate. The author also firmly asserts his views on such contemporary issues and institutions as childhood education, academic infighting, and political witch hunts. If there is anything negative I would say about this novel, it is that Roth's editorial opinions--as much as I agree with them--are occasionally driven home a bit too vigorously to suit the plot, the moment, and the character who is voicing them.

This is an important novel that is also very engrossing; I definitely recommend it.

Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami

"Everything is metaphor." That statement is repeated several times in the novel, and comes as close as anything to explaining the meaning of this enigmatic but captivating story. Kafka on the Shore, right from the first word in the title, plays upon the literary traditions of East and West, from Greek drama and The Tale of Genji to the Bildungsroman and Magic Realism. Its principal theme is memory as a form of responsibility, with libraries being both a frequent setting and a motif.

The plot is dual-threaded in alternating chapters. Speaking in the first person is Kafka Tamura, a fifteen-year-old boy from Tokyo who runs away from home to avoid fulfilling his father's prophecy that Kafka will murder his father and have sex with both his mother and sister (neither of whom he has seen since he was age four). Kafka is drawn into encounters with people who have mysterious ties to his past and his future.

The alternate plot thread is the story, in third person, of Nakata, a simple-minded elderly man who was rendered unconscious for several weeks as a child by a mysterious accident. The accident left him illiterate and with no memory of anything that came before, but with the ability to speak to cats. Nakata is also subject to a mysterious calling which leads him to set forth alone and vulnerable into a world he doesn't understand. Eventually his fate and Kafka's will become intertwined.

Kafka on the Shore if full of allusions, not just to literary landmarks, but to classical music (Schubert and Beethoven especially) and to popular culture. Almost every item worn or consumed has a brand name attached to it, a comment in itself on how we see our world through the words associated with objects. There is also plenty of sex, many references to blood, and one episode of horrific violence.

I strongly recommend this novel, but to fully grasp its subtleties would call for multiple close readings and familiarity with the literary works it references.

The Arabian Nights, Volume I, translated by Husain Haddawy

There are many editions of The Arabian Nights, some abridged, some modernized, and some bowdlerized, so I did some research before selecting the two-volume Haddawy translation from Everyman's Library. The definitive Arabic edition of these traditional folk tales dates from the 14th century. Many of the more familiar episodes, such as Ali Baba and Sindbad, were added by publishers to later Indian and Egyptian printings. In Volume I, Haddawy gives us only the original authentic Arabian Nights. In Volume II (which I haven't read yet) he provides a translation of those later accretions which have come to be thought of as part of the Arabian Nights.

The framework of The Arabian Nights is familiar to most: King Shahrayar, fearful of being cuckolded, takes only virgin brides to his bed and has them put to death the following morning so they can't be unfaithful to him. When the kingdom runs out of virgins, Shahrayar's vizier must give the king his own daughter, Shahrazad. But she cleverly defeats the king's plan by telling him a story each night, but leaving it incomplete at daybreak so he is forced to let her live one more night to finish her story. To keep her endless story going, Shahrazad tells tales within tales, nesting them several layers deep so there is never an ending. For example, the story for the 156th night begins, "I heard, O happy King, that the tailor told the king of China that the barber told the guests that he said to the caliph:"

The stories themselves are relatively short and simple. Some are animal fables, some are love stories, many are humorous tales of a clever man outwitting his enemies. Most of the stories are realistic, but there are others featuring demons, magicians, and enchanted kingdoms. Some have simple morals, but most are only there for the entertainment. Perhaps their greatest value, aside from fun of reading them, is the broad and colorful picture of the Arab world in the Middle Ages. Many of the tales are set in Baghdad, but others take place in cities such as Basra, Damascus and Cairo.

The Reader by Bernhard Schlink

The Reader is a short novel about collective and individual guilt. It is narrated in first person by Michael Berg, who, at the beginning of the novel, is a sickly fifteen-year-old living in an unnamed West German city in the early 1960s. He meets Hannah Schmitz, a single woman in her early thirties, who gently seduces him. Hannah says little about her own past, but Michael discovers over the course of the next few years that she is living with both a secret shame and a secret vulnerability.

I can't say any more about the plot or themes without disclosing more than I should about what's going to happen. The Reader is a poignant and highly readable story that depicts the anguish felt by the post-World War II generation of Germans.

Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs

Naked Lunch is a book about heroin addiction written, the author tells us, while under the drug's influence. It was also, in 1966, one of the last major novels in the U.S. to precipitate a trial under obscenity laws.

There is no plot to Naked Lunch. Each chapter is relatively self-contained, and they can be read in any order. Most of the chapters are visions, hallucinations, delusions, whatever you choose to call them. There are horrifying visions of such things as humans mutating into giant centipedes, just to mention one of the less disgusting images. There are also descriptions of bizarre, impossible sex acts, mostly homosexual and usually of the sort that would lead to death or mutilation if these weren't dream images. In the more coherent passages there are graphic, cautionary descriptions of the ravages of heroin addiction.

In the middle of the book there is a series of more coherent chapters describing in the language of whimsical fantasy the power struggles between factions such as the Factualists, Divisionists, Liquifactors, and Nationalists. While giving the appearance of also being drug-induced visions, these episodes are very recognizable satires of racism, communism, colonialism, and the police state. Burroughs is speaking about both opiates and oppressive government when he says

"You see control can never be a means to any practical end.... It can never be a means to anything but more control.... Like junk..."

(The ellipses are in the original, and "junk" means heroin.)

In the Grove Press edition there are an introduction and appendix by Burroughs, written while not under the influence, providing more information about drug addition, its consequences, and its treatments. Burroughs is clearly warning people away from heroin and other opium derivatives. But, just as clearly, makes a case that marijuana, cocaine, and LSD are not metabolically addictive and (by inference) should be legal.

I like reading extreme and experimental literature, even when I don't understand all of it. Naked Lunch is certainly in that category. There is something in it to offend or upset almost everyone--not once or twice but on every page--so I recommend it only for those who also have a taste for the unusual and can stomach graphic depictions of bodily abuse and behavior.

The Mandarins by Simone de Beauvoir

The Mandarins is a long autobiographical novel about issues in conflict and a woman in love. The principal characters and their real life counterparts are: Anne Dubreuilh (Simone de Beauvoir herself), her husband Robert Dubreuilh (Jean-Paul Sartre), her lover Lewis Brogan (Nelson Algren), and Robert's younger friend Henri Perron (Albert Camus). The novel is structured with chapters in alternating points of view. There are first-person chapters narrated by Anne, and, overlapping them in time, third-person chapters from Henri's perspective.

The story begins in December 1944 in recently-liberated Paris. The French intellectuals who took part in the resistance are celebrating Germany's defeat at the Battle of the Bulge, a defeat which ensured that Paris was safe from being recaptured. The novel ends in the early 1950s, "present day" from the author's perspective. The principal characters have, in the meantime, gone through political struggle, difficult compromise, alienation from one another, disillusionment, and emerged with renewed resolve but subdued expectations.

The principal political issue facing Henri and Robert is how to guide France along an independent socialist path without falling under the domination of Soviet Russia or imperialist America. The two men differ on how closely they can ally themselves with the French Communist party, and eventually they come to a public rift in their life-long friendship (as did Camus and Sartre). They differ in many minor ways as well, and Henri especially finds himself confronted with difficult ethical choices. For example: Should he ignore an uncomfortable truth because exposing it will politically damage his friends? Should he perjure himself and let a guilty man go free to save a woman he loves from shame and exile? Should his newspaper accept funding from a wealthy patron if it means compromising his editorial position?

In the meantime, there is the story of Anne Dubreuilh's love affair with Lewis Brogan. This, and other male/female relationships in the novel, are a vehicle for Beauvoir's feminist views, but only in a subtle and measured sense. There is no diatribe against sexual discrimination or male attitudes, only the sense of frustration at a woman's vulnerability when the love she feels for a man is no longer being returned.

The sense of frustration and futility is what pervades both the political and interpersonal stories in The Mandarins. The intellectuals feel powerless to influence their world just as Anne and other women feel helpless under the weight of their unrequited love. In the end there is only the half-hearted resolve to focus on what is within their power.

The Mandarins is not a difficult novel to read, but its somber mood and lengthy, sometimes dry discussions made it easy for me to set it aside now and then. The intensity does pick up quite a bit in the last third of the book. Having finished it, though, I would say it is a very rewarding experience for many reasons. First, there is the benefit of a visceral understanding of the emotional aspects of existentialism. Second, there is a view of a period of our recent history from a disturbingly different perspective. And lastly there is Beauvoir's insight into one-sided love relationships.

The Sea by John Banville

John Banville's The Sea is a beautiful elegy about lost love and the power of memory. The short novel is set in a seaside resort in present-day Ireland. Max Morden, an art historian, has fled there after the recent death of his wife Anne. He broods over the final months of her terminal illness, but, also over a summer he spent at that same resort at the age of ten--the summer he met the Graces.

The Graces were a family enjoying their summer home, a family from a much higher social class, than Max. Their carefree life immediately immediately captivated Max, whose father had recently abandoned him and his cheerless mother. Invited to share in their outings, Max experienced an awakening of sexual desire, first, oddly, for the mother, Connie, then for Chloe, the daughter his own age. His summer with the Graces and his romance with Chloe has all the beauty, suspense and comedy of a child's first forbidden love.

Back in the present, what force has drawn Max to a place of long submerged memories even as he anguishes over his wife's death? He wrestles with his sense of the meaning of memory, the reality of the past versus its myth, and the emptiness of his future.

"Something precious was dissolving and pouring away between my fingers. Yet how easily, in the end, I let it go. The past, I mean the real past, matters less than we pretend.... [I] felt that I had been travelling for a long time, for years, and had at last arrived at the destination to where, all along, without knowing it, I had been bound, and where I must stay, it being, for now, the only possible place, the only possible refuge, for me."

As noted above, the narrator Max Morden is an art historian, his particular specialty the works of Pierre Bonnard. He sees things with a painterly eye for detail and color, giving us a narrative rich in descriptive beauty as well as in language. The pressure of Max's inner torment builds to a memorable climax, but not one which categorically disposes of every enigma, every question about what compelled Max back to the sea. There is much still to think about after reading The Sea.