Ravelstein by Saul Bellow
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"Often the dying become extremely severe. We will still be here when they're gone and it's not easy for them to forgive us."

Finally I have begun to fill a huge gap in my Great American Literature education: I have just read my first novel by Saul Bellow - Ravelstein (2000). What a great read it has been! True, the first 20 or so pages are highly intimidating: the author assumes the reader's erudition and complete focus, and the text almost overwhelms with hyper-intellectualism. But having survived the beginning pages many readers should get accustomed to the challenges of the prose, like I did. However, I need to offer a warning: this novel may be better understood by older people, and by 'older' I mean people for whom death is no longer an abstract concept but a conspicuous event on the horizon.

The narrator, known as Chick, a seventy-something writer, is obviously an alter ego of Mr. Bellow himself (the author was in fact 85 when the novel was published). Professor Ravelstein, for whom Chick is the closest friend, is "a major figure in the highest intellectual circles," an internationally renowned professor of philosophy, and the author of a best-selling book that expounds his conservative views about the decline of American culture. The book made millions for Prof. Ravelstein and now he can afford flying to Paris to buy Lanvin jackets and custom-made silk shirts. He also happens to be gay and suffers from AIDS complications. He wants Chick to write his memoirs.

In his writings Professor Ravelstein captures "modernity in its full complexity" and the human costs of modernity. He criticizes the mass-market aspect of cultural modernity and juxtaposes it with culture of the olden days, writing about people who read "Stendhal's novels or Thomas Hardy's poems", instead of sucking garbage flowing from TV, Facebook or Twitter. He recommends interest in Plato and Thucidides rather than current celebrities:

"I like to say when I am asked about Finnegan[s Wake], that I am saving him for the nursing home. Better to enter eternity with Anna Livia Plurabelle than with the Simpsons jittering on the TV screen."

Particularly sharp is Ravelstein's critique of the modern education system and the fact that the "liberal education had shrunk to the vanishing point." The universities are excellent in sciences and engineering but a failure at liberal arts. At this point I realized that Mr. Bellow's Ravelstein is modeled on the real-life philosopher and classicist, Allan Bloom. And indeed I have found out that the author and Dr. Bloom were friends and colleagues at the University of Chicago. The life story of Ravelstein and that of Dr. Bloom are in fact parallel. Yet let us remember: this is a novel, not any kind of Dr. Bloom's biography. By it being beautifully written fiction I find the novel much more realistic than any non-fiction biography could be.

Scattered throughout the novel are wonderful morsels of truth about human life and especially death. We the geezers will appreciate the mention of one of the main problems of aging - "speeding up of time." We the geezers may also be able to understand the sentence I quoted in the epigraph above. It's a hard truth to swallow and very painful. Ravelstein is a great novel. My "to read" shelves will now gather other Bellow's works.

Four and three quarter stars.

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The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B by J.P. Donleavy
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"'Yes sir, I know that my redeemer liveth. I know it.'"

One of the most unforgettable books I have read in my life! J.P. Donleavy's The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B (1968) combines breathtaking prose, lyricism, and biting humor with sobering reflections on the human condition. It also has the potential to offend many readers on many levels. Descriptions of pre-adolescent sexuality, numerous risqué scenes, and taboo topics make the novel perfect fuel for barbecues in fundamentalist communities. There have been documented cases of Slaughterhouse-Five burnings in this Land of Freedom of ours; Mr. Donleavy's work is a way more deserving book-burning material but - fortunately - not many people have heard about this wonderful novel.

In the grim days of Internet-generated uniformity of opinions, intimidation by political correctness, "safe zones" on campuses and the like, I found this novel a refreshing deviation from the safe-to-read-for-everybody, lukewarm, agreeable pap that dominates the so-called culture these days. We need more rather than less of controversial art to prevent the inbreeding of popular ideas - ideas that most everybody likes.

The novel recounts the first twenty-something years of Balthazar B's life beginning with his early childhood in Paris when he was raised by nannies in a very rich family. His father had died in the boy's early years and the mother was mainly focused on preserving the vestiges of youth. The boy attends exclusive public schools in England and the famous Trinity College in Dublin, and faces the tribulations of the early adulthood. Ostensibly the author focuses on the romantic and sexual aspects of Balthazar B's life: a boy's coming-of-age usual stuff - masturbation, school pranks, pubic lice, first love - but a discerning reader will notice that underneath the titillating facade of the novel the author tackles more important life issues.

The novel is exceptionally rich in humor in its entire range: subtle and understated funny phrases, sentences, and passages are intermixed with laugh-out-loud fragments. From the childhood memory of the Enema Anglaise, through the utterly hilarious scenes of public school housemaster excoriating smuttiness ("concerning things between the legs") and combating boys' masturbation, the live demonstration of dangers of pubic lice for medical students at the Sorbonne, to one of the funniest scenes I have ever read - the neighborhood vigilantes interrupting a carnal coupling:

"'Sir, gurgling and groaning and some cries have been heard out in the garden.'"

Yet underneath all this ribald humor there is so much understanding of human foibles, so much compassion that there is no doubt whatsoever about the author's intentions.

The portrayal of Balthazar B is subtle, nuanced, and realistic. A child, a boy, and a young man in search of love. "While others are cunning and deceitful," Balthazar "remains always [...] kind." B's best friend is Beefy, also an unforgettable, vivid character, always in search of "pleasurings." For reasons of public decency I can quote only one of the many beatitudes coined by Beefy:

"Remember, blessed are they who are willing victims of the whip for they will scream to high heaven."

It may seem that the novel is light-hearted and fun all around. Absolutely not! It is full of lyricism, melancholy, and even sadness. Miss Fitzdare thread is bittersweet and makes an old man want to cry. And I have left the best thing for last: the extraordinarily accomplished prose. When I read books I mostly care about the beauty of the prose and the author's mastery of the literary craft. This is what makes me round my rating up to the rare maximum, reserved only for masterpieces.

Four and a half stars.



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The Aunt's Story by Patrick White
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"But on a morning the colour of zinc old Mrs Goodman died."

Patrick White's novel The Eye of the Storm which I read over 40 years ago is one of the books I love the most, one that touched me in the strongest way possible and made me realize that great literature is the apex of all arts, encompassing both beauty and truth. Of course I need to re-read it, but the 600-page volume intimidates me. So instead I decided for now to read shorter works by Mr. White, the Nobel Prize winner for literature in 1973. And I am ecstatic that I chose The Aunt's Story (1948), one of the earliest books by Mr. White. I am completely in awe of the magnificent prose and so very happy to assign the rare highest rating.

The novel, divided into three parts, relates the story of one woman's dissolution of identity and her descent into madness. We meet Theodora Goodman as a fiftyish spinster, an aunt to her sister's children. The first part recounts Theodora's childhood and youth. The story is so beautifully told that I was unable to put the book away. Theodora is a disappointment to her mother, the "old Mrs. Goodman" because she was an odd, sallow, and ugly child, and has not fulfilled the mother's hopes. Theo's pretty sister, Fanny, leads a comfortable and utterly conventional life. Theo takes care of Fanny's children and also of her aging mother. As she is socially awkward and unattractive, men are not interested in her; only one man courts her but he probably needs her only as yet another item on the long list of his material possessions. The closest she gets to love is when she has an epiphany of sorts during a concert of a Greek cellist - a sublimation of her needs to be close to another person.

The dreamlike, phantasmagoric second part of the novel takes place in Hôtel du Midí somewhere in Europe where Theo goes after her mother's death. She meets a number of strange and interesting characters in the Jardin Exotique at the hotel. Or does she? The hallucinatory atmosphere of unreality is so overwhelming that the reader will be right to ask whether all these people exist only within Theo's mind. Of course she herself may not know whether they are real. The boundary between her consciousness and the so-called real world has disappeared. The third part takes place somewhere in the United States, where Theodora is in the final stage of her journey into madness. Unable to adapt to any conventional norms of society she disposes of the last components of her external identity.

While the story is powerful and deeply affecting, it is the phenomenal prose that made a tremendous impression on me. Virtually on every page the reader will find a delicious nugget of truth packaged in a wrapping of stunningly original prose. In my long years I have never read a book so rich in fresh and vivid metaphors and metonyms. The following is one of the most extraordinary paragraphs of prose that I have ever read:

"All through the middle of America there was a trumpeting of corn. Its full, yellow, tremendous notes pressed close to the swelling sky. There were whole acres of time in which the yellow corn blared as if for judgement. It had taken up and swallowed all other themes, whether belting iron, or subtler, insinuating steel, or the frail human reed. Inside the movement of corn the train complained. The train complained of the frustration of distance, that resists, that resists. Distance trumpeted with corn."

(After the five-star rating I include three other fragments of Patrick White's breathtaking prose.) The novel is exactly 70 years old yet it does not feel dated at all. It could have been written last year. It reads completely fresh despite references to Hitler's annexations of countries in the 1930s or to Lenin and Kerensky from the times of the Soviet Revolution of 1917.

A magnificent novel!

Five stars.

"In Paris the metal hats just failed to tinkle. The great soprano in Dresden sang up her soul for love into a wooden cup. In England the beige women, stalking through the rain with long feet and dogs, had the monstrous eye of sewing machines."

"But Theodora did not reject the word. It flowed, violet and black, and momentarily oyster-bellied through the evening landscape, fingering the faces of the houses. Soon the sea would merge with the houses, and the almost empty asphalt promenade, and the dissolving lavender hills behind the town. So that there was no break in the continuity of being."

"She walked out through the passages, through the sleep of other people. She was thin as grey light, as if she had just died."

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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.

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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).

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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.

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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.


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