At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O'Brien
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"Having placed in my mouth sufficient bread for three minutes' chewing, I withdrew my powers of sensual perception and retired into the privacy of my mind, my eyes and face assuming a vacant and preoccupied expression."

So begins Flan O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds (1939), an outrageously unusual book, breathtakingly different and daring. I am sure there are Master's and Ph.D. theses dedicated to the novel and googling the title yields numerous hits with serious literary analyses of the work. The Guardian lists it among the 100 greatest novels written in English. Time magazine placed it on its list of 100 best English-language fiction books since 1923. Being totally unskilled in the craft of literary analysis, I will just say that it is probably one of the three most unusual books I have read in my almost 60-year reading career, a remarkable and completely unforgettable novel.

I had not known Flan O'Brien - a pseudonym of Brian O'Nolan - until I read his The Third Policeman , a phenomenally hilarious, unconditionally five-star book. At Swim, not that funny but deeper, is an extremely ambitious exercise in the literary art. Many critics consider Flan O'Brien to be an early representative of post-modernism in literature, although others classify him as a modernist, along with, say, James Joyce.

At Swim is clearly intertextual and metafictional - two of the main characteristics of literary post-modernism. It contains three separate beginnings and three endings (antepenultimate, penultimate, and the ultimate one). The narrator - a student of University College in Dublin - is writing a novel in which a certain Dermot Trellis writes a novel which borrows characters and motifs from ancient Irish folk tales and legends. One of the characters in this novel is Trellis' son, who writes about his father at the suggestion of other characters from the novel. Since Trellis' literary powers disappear while he is asleep, the characters in his novel conspire against him: they use his periods of rest to have a good time. In fact, they arrange to simulate the actions that Trellis wants them to perform in his story rather than actually carry them out. We have four "levels" of authorship: Flan O'Brien creates the narrator who creates Trellis who creates characters among which we have his son who writes about Trellis. So who really writes the story?

The novel - a set of loosely connected stories and vignettes might be a better term - is written in a wide variety of styles. It contains an abundance of pomes (i.e., poems), staves, and verses. and it includes figures of speech followed by their identification, for instance

"[I expressed] my whole-hearted concurrence by a figure of speech.
Name of figure of speech: Litotes (or Meiosis).

There are passages of utter hilarity: for instance (note the ſpelling):

Horſe, with a round fundament, why does he emit a ſquare Excrement? Happineſs, what is it? Lady diſturbed in her Bed, your thoughts of it? Light, is it a Body?

Perhaps my most favorite passage of the book begins with "There is nothing so important as the legs in determining the kangaroolity of a woman" and goes through ascertaining that a deceitful kangaroo can shave the hair of her legs, assuming she is a woman, and then - by the way of the mathematical concept of geometric progression - proceeds through truth, which is an odd number, to the fugal and contrapuntal character of Bach's work

And what about a breathtaking passage that seamlessly (and intertextually) combines quotes from John Milton, "What neat repast shall feast us light and choice of Attic taste" with "What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?" by Keats. And the unforgettable monologue by Finn MacCool about the sweetest of all music - the music of nature, a passage that incorporates calls of various birds of the Irish landscape.

While I suspect not every reader will be amused by At Swim I am in awe of the sheer audacity of the author's undertaking, and I am rounding the rating up to - yay! - five stars.

Four and a half stars.

View all my reviews

The Natural History of Nonsense by Bergen Evans
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"Irrationality must come close to being the largest single vested interest in the world. [...] In fact, everyone in our society not directly engaged in the production and distribution of necessities, transportation, artistic creation, elementary teaching or the maintenance of public order, to some extent, and more or less consciously, preys upon ignorance and delusion."

Finally I have had the opportunity to re-read the book that like no other - with the possible exception of some works by Stanislaw Lem - influenced my thinking during the teen years and helped shape my worldview. I first read Bergen Evans' The Natural History of Nonsense (1946) when my mother gave it to me as a Christmas gift in 1963 or 1964: it shook me and since then I have always tried to follow the lessons of skepticism with respect to a great number of popularly held beliefs.

The author himself calls the book "a study in the paleontology of delusion." His goal is to systematically debunk a wide range of common prejudices and beliefs and to be an advocate of skepticism, which he aptly defines as "the life spirit of science." Yes, the book is heavily dated, but before I discuss some of the prejudices and misconceptions exposed by the author, let me first point out how relevant the author's theses became with the ubiquity of Internet.

Mr. Evans recounts a hoax perpetrated by H.L. Mencken in 1917 when he had published an article about the 75th anniversary of "the first bathtub installed in America." In his article he wrote about the initial resistance of the society to the invention, condemnation as "a menace to health and morals," and the slow acceptance of the invention. Mencken's story was so catchy that it was retold and reprinted thousands of times, and referred to as fact by public authorities. Even when in 1926 Mr. Mencken confessed that the story was a hoax, not many people believed him. Even the second confession did not help. People repeated the story for years and years (it was used as late as 2008). One hundred years later the Internet gives us thousands of fake stories, nonsense, and pure garbage every day. And we do believe these stories. I personally know a Ph.D. in sciences who believes that the contrails of planes are really chemtrails sprayed by "gubmint." I know serious and intelligent people who believe that vaccinations cause autism. The power of nonsense has not changed over 100 years.

The only weakness of the book is that the selection of commonly believed nonsense is quite dated. Hopefully fewer people now believe that lightning never strikes twice in the same place, that lemmings march to their deaths, that there exist "piscatory downpours" (raining fish), that animals know when their death is near, that dogs can find way back home from thousand of miles away, that elephants have phenomenal memory, that children can be raised by animals, that weather conditions during conception influences a person's future, that the so-called "death rattle" commonly accompanies human expiration, that hair can turn white instantaneously, and many others.

While all these examples of nonsense may sound mild and inoffensive, Mr. Evans talks a lot about serious issues: prejudices about race, how physical characteristics presumably determine the intellectual ones, etc. He lampoons the 1940s racial stereotypes of blacks, Jews, Asians, and others. Now we know more about these prejudices, but in 1940s this writing must have been quite courageous.

Not only is the book a loud cry for rationality, it is also frequently hilarious. Some stunning examples: the author quotes a traveler to Java who writes that infants there throw away their cigarettes when they are ready to suck mother's breasts. My absolute favorite is the 1920 research article by Prof. Adolf Gerson who traces the development of human menstrual cycle to the lunar cycle and the fact that early men hunted for their females on moonlit nights. Also, I am not sure if the author used the following example on purpose or just did not notice the atrocious pun it creates: he writes about the hairy Ainus people of Japan who value hirsuteness in their women. I apologize for being offensive if I did not catch the joke.

So yes, it is quite a dated book but since the advent of Internet seems to have strengthened the global embrace of irrationality and confirmed the human propensity for nonsense it remains a vey strongly recommended text.

Four and a half stars, which I round up. I am happy about my first five-star rating in half a year (55 books ago).

View all my reviews

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"She was only the faint violet whiff and dead leaf echo of the nymphet I had rolled myself upon with such cries in the past; an echo on the brink of a russet ravine, with a far wood under a white sky, and brown leaves choking the brook, and one last cricket in the crisp weeds..."

I read Lolita for the first time in high school and now, after my current re-read, it seems to me that I had then read a completely different book. It should not be a surprise: there is no way that awkward teenager of 1960s and this cynical geezer of 2017 are the same person. While the teenager was fascinated with the taboo topic and oh-so-adult plot, the geezer could not care less about the taboos and the story but is awed by the magnificent prose. So these two different people agree that - for different reasons - this is indeed an extraordinary work, and its inclusion in various lists of best English-language novels and the most celebrated books in the history of literature is justified.

In his Lectures on Literature (according to Martin Amis' The War Against Cliché) Nabokov tries to teach people how to read, tries to make the readers "share not the emotions of the people in the book but the emotions of its author." In my own uneducated way I have been following this advice, caring less about what the authors are writing about and more about how they write. In simpler words, when reading a serious book I focus on the prose. And from the lush and lovely alliterations of the first paragraph to the ending invocation, Lolita is an amazing, jaw-dropping celebration of English language. One can find a dazzling language jewel on each of the three hundred or so pages and spend hours deciphering the elaborate structures of word plays, allusions and puns. I have been amazed by the unparalleled virtuosity of style, the constant changes in literary conventions and narrative structures and strategies.

This very dark comedy is a vicious satire on the American popular culture, the moronic world of commercials, the travel industry, road trip literature, etc. But then there is the ostensibly main topic of the novel that has offended and disgusted thousands and thousands of readers and I should at least mention the general subject of Humbert Humbert's (HH from now on) "pederosis." Yet unlike that teenager with whom I share the body, now I can only view the subject from the perspective of art, Nabokov's exquisite art of language. When reading I often make little notes to myself and when I read through the scene that happens on the candy-striped davenport, after HH catches the apple that Lo has been eating, I just sat there in amazement, and wrote in big letters on my note paper "I am stunned." Yes, some the most extraordinary pages of English prose I have read in my life.

A perfect novel then? Oh no, definitely not! The "afterword" entitled "On a Book Entitled Lolita", where the author seems to defend the novel, weakens the book's impact. As a work of art - great art! - the novel completely defends itself. Also, the author writes:

"Lolita has no moral in tow. For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss [...]"

Maybe I am obtuse but what then does Nabokov mean when he quotes "an old poet":

"The moral sense in mortals is the duty
We have to pay on mortal sense of beauty."

Of course, Nabokov is right when he says that literature is not in the business of conveying "morals", but then - as I see - he seems to flout his own rule.

I actively dislike the very short fragment that takes place in Beardsley School when HH notices "another girl with a very naked, porcelain-white neck," and the text suddenly escapes the world of metaphors where the rest of the novel safely resides and moves for a moment, along with Dolly's red-knuckled hand, to the physically literal sphere. The movie-style ending also seems incongruous with the rest of the novel: the film adaptations have cheapened the novel enough.

So while it feels unnatural to assign any rating lower than maximum to Lolita, my reverence is muted by reservations.

Four and a half stars.

View all my reviews

Roads to Santiago by Cees Nooteboom
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

" We are in too much of a hurry to remain dead for so long."

Another phenomenal book, non-fiction this time, from my favorite writer. While one cannot expect masterpieces every time from even the greatest authors Cees Nooteboom's Roads to Santiago (1993) reaches the upper regions of my rare five-star rating and deserves extremely slow reading to take full delight of the writing and to wallow in exquisite detail. I made notes about virtually each of the book's 340 pages and my review was originally four times longer - what follows is just a haphazard abridgement.

Mr. Nooteboom describes his travels in Spain - parallel travels as he points out: one in his rented car and another through the past. He is "a pilgrim on the Great Way to Santiago de Compostela"; he retraces the journeys of the faithful on the Camiño de Santiago, also known as St. James's Way, the main Catholic pilgrimage route that dates back well over one thousand years, to the 9th century. The motion through time-space yields a history book - history of Spain, a country with complicated Roman, Visigoth, Arab, Jewish, and Christian roots, yet a uniquely European country. Never in my life have I learned so much about a country from a single book. Mr. Nooteboom writes not just about the famous historical figures, like Ferdinand and Isabella of Aragón and Castille or Philip II, people that most of us have heard about. We meet scores of lesser known personages and - more importantly - the author guides us through the historical processes that were occurring throughout the roughly 1300 years. We are not just reading about Spain - we get immersed in its history and culture.

Travel book, history book, but also a book of remarkable wisdom. On the social scale the author contemplates the nature of history, its relationship with time, and the role of an individual in history, even if - as he points out in a sobering thought - most people believe they have nothing to do with it. In the psychological domain Mr. Nooteboom - who often retraces his steps from his previous trips in Spain - explains, for instance, why people need to relive the experiences from the past: the reason is human "desire to weave a strand of eternity into your own life." Art history is a frequent focus as is, of course, literature: Homer, Cervantes, Nabokov, Borges' universes, and his perplejidad that is life. Incredible!

So many passages took my breath away. The author visits El Burgo de Osma where a copy of the Codex Beato is displayed, also known as Commentary on the Apocalypse: the book contains a map of the world drawn in 1086, "inscribed with Visigothic lettering." In the little village of Santiago de Peñalba he finds a perfectly preserved Mozarabic church dating from 919, with the date carved in stone. How insignificant are the sound and the fury of today when one can touch human-made objects from one thousand years ago! To me the most stunning fragment in the entire book is the study of Las Meninas, a famous painting by Velásquez ("Velásquez paints the truth not as it is but as it appears to be"). How can I ever thank the author for showing me the harmonies, the structures of truth and beauty I have never been aware of?

On the La Mancha plateau Mr. Nooteboom follows the footsteps of Cervantes and his heroes: Don Quixote, Sancho Panza, and Dulcinea. He has "an appointment with those fearsome adversaries, Don Quixote's windmills" on a long range of hills near Consuegra. He visits Dulcinea's home in El Toboso and offers the stunning line:

"To enter a house that once belonged to someone who never existed is no small matter."

Indeed. The author visits Extremadura and we read - in a rare non-European digression - about Pizarro and the ambush in Cajamarca, Peru, where the conquistadors massacred 2,000 unarmed Incas to commence the wholesale obliteration of Inca civilization. It is a disaster when we lose all our data on a hard disk. We mourn prehistoric paintings when they are defaced. Can we imagine the total destruction of a flourishing civilization? The people, their culture, their mythology, their gods. All gone forever.

And the magnificent, spellbinding, spine-tingling last paragraph of the book - a long stunning forceful paragraph that almost manages the impossible: summarize Spain in awe-inspiring prose. I could go on and on with my raves. The best non-fiction book I have ever read? Yes, I believe so.

Five stars.


View all my reviews

A Perfect Vacuum by Stanisław Lem
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"[...] And the only subterfuge the evasive Lem might still avail himself of would be a counterattack: in the assertion that it was not I, the critic, but he himself, the author, who wrote the present review and added it to - and made it part of -'A Perfect Vacuum.'"

Whenever I begin a re-read of a Stanislaw Lem's book I am afraid of disappointment. Lem was by far the most favorite author of my youth, some 35 to 55 years ago, and I have been worrying that in re-reading his works my enthusiasm may diminish for the Polish philosopher and futurologist who is best known for his incomparable science fiction books, such as Solaris. I am happy to report there have been no disappointments so far and A Perfect Vacuum (originally published in 1971) is one of the best books I have recently read, maybe even better than Lem's His Master's Voice which I rated with almost five stars.

A full review would take too much space so let me just offer a few remarks about this impressive work. A Perfect Vacuum is set up as an exercise in metafiction where Lem offers a collection of reviews of non-existent books. In the author's stroke of genius, the collection even includes a review of the book that contains the review - how's that for advanced self-referentiality? On a similar note, in the review of (fictitious) Gigamesh Lem provides delicious satire on literary criticism that indulges in looking for non-existent references: after all, it is true that any reference to anything can be found anywhere if one looks hard enough.

Lem creates the author of Gruppenführer Louis XVI who writes about artificial reality of 17th century French royal court created in Argentina by SS officers who escaped Germany. Any older Polish reader will immediately recognize this as satire on the so-called communist government in Poland that created an artificial reality for the citizens. A contemporary reader, on the other hand, may easily make a connection to the current situation when it seems that about half of all people are unable to distinguish the artificial reality of TV shows from the actual reality. Another fictitious book under review, Rien du tout, ou la conséquence, pushes the meta-literature to the extreme positions: narration is eliminated to the extent that only pure language remains. The piece also contains a hilarious passage about an author who wrote Don Quixote from the scratch and obtained exactly the same text as the one produced by Cervantes.

Now about my three favorite pieces. The review of De Impossibilitate Vitae, a fictitious work halfway between mathematics and total lunacy, is a playful take on probability theory (the subject that I teach, by the way). Lem presents the author's clear and convincing explanation that his existence is a result of chains of events so improbable that it is not at all possible for him to exist. Neither is it for any other person (De Selby's observations presented in The Third Policeman come to mind).

Non Serviam, perhaps the deepest piece in the set, reviews a book about personetics - science and technology that enabled people to create personoids, sentient beings that exist as executing programs, computer models implemented in software. Nevertheless they are completely real to themselves; they build their culture, philosophy and even religion that seeks to embrace the Creator of their Universe. Lem, as the reviewer, emphasizes the monumental moral and ethical dilemmas of those sentient creatures' creators. Alas he takes an easy way out and only glides over the crucial issue of the origin of self-awareness.

Finally, in New Cosmogony Lem quotes the Nobel Prize acceptance speech of a physicist and philosopher who is one of the pioneers of a new model of cosmology - Universe as a Game - where the oldest civilizations are the players who apply minimax strategies to construct the "laws of nature." It is also here that Lem, through the fictitious physicist's words, states the audacious yet utterly brilliant thesis that the expanding Universe serves the purpose of keeping the distance between new civilizations and the existing ones, which would cleanly account for the so-called Silentium Universi. Physics of the Universe as a by-product of sociology - it is not possible not to admire the author's (and the author's author's) cheek!

Despite Lem's usual hang-ups about sex, the piece Sexplosion exudes sheer hilarity with its memorable mentions of unchastity belts, sodomobiles, cybordellics, gomorcades (my own translations as I read the book in its original Polish version), and many, many other vehicles of pleasure. Perycalipsis is also a hoot with its spiritual masturbation, that is getting off on promises rather than releases. Phenomenal stuff!

Great book: funny yet deep and thought-provoking. In fact, now I love it more than 45 years ago. Despite my stinginess with top ratings here's the second one in just one week! Maybe I am getting soft in the head faster than I think.

Fours and three quarter stars.


View all my reviews

The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"[...] the savant spent several months trying to discover a satisfactory method of 'diluting' water, holding that it was 'too strong' [...]"

At my age there exists no greater pleasure in life - other than eating chocolate, of course - than finding a book that is so stunning in its arrogant and confident uniqueness that it takes one's breath away with its sheer audacity. And as a matter of fact the pleasure of finding a book that totally defies expectations lasts longer than chocolate, not to mention the fewer calories it packs. I have just found such an epitome of literary surprise in Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman (written in 1940, but not published until 1976). This is also the second funniest book I have devoured in the 60 years of my reading adventures. Only Śledź Otrembus Podgrobelski's Introduction to Imaginescopy, which has not yet been translated from Polish to English - and is most likely untranslatable - might be more hilarious.

In fact the two works do share some similarities: while Śledź's book is a scientific treatise on imaginescopes, devices that consist of a hole enclosed by any substance and used to expand human imagination, Policeman - in addition to the narrative layer - is an exposition of theories of a certain De Selby. Among other findings De Selby demonstrates that there is no such thing as motion (which can easily be proved by looking at any photograph), posits that nights are just concentrations of "dark air" that possibly could be bottled and stored for later use, and that the earth is sausage-shaped. (Here I must disagree: after years of working the math - the subject that I teach on university level - I had shown that the earth is a torus, a donut-shaped object. Alas, because of senility, I have forgotten my clever proof.) Yet De Selby's most comforting discovery is that death does not exist and is just an illusion. Of course, each comfort has its price: De Selby proves that life does not exist either but one has to agree that non-existence is a reasonable price to pay for immortality.

The plot is deliciously and totally demented as well: the nameless narrator (his soul is called Joe, though), orphaned early and raised in a boarding school, gets hold of one of De Selby's books. He acquires an obsession to commentate all works by the author and produce a definitive De Selby Index. Lacking financial means for the research he murders a wealthy man to steal his money. However, the dead man's money is not that easy to find and the narrator attempts to enlist the police to help him find the hidden cash. The policemen, though, are not your usual cops: they are only interested in human-bicycle relationships and in fact function under the assumption that bicycles and people contain interchangeable parts, which eventually allows them to merge into one entity.

This is just the beginning of strange occurrences - I will not take away the reader's pleasure to discover the demented things that happen next. Let me just mention that we have a tactfully depicted sex scene between a man and a female bicycle. We also meet a box-making craftsman who - having perfected his manual skills so much that he builds boxes small enough to be invisible even under a microscope - eventually manages to build a box half as small. Can you imagine that? Half as small! And what about the posse of fourteen one-legged men who tie themselves in pairs?

While not all passages in the novel are equally riveting I can reiterate with full confidence that this is the funniest book in English language that I have ever read. I hypothesize that it might be the funniest book in English ever written, at least until I read the same author's At Swim-Two-Birds.

Four-and-a-half stars and - gasp! - I am rounding my rating up! My first five-star book in almost half a year and 50 books.


View all my reviews