More Books - Anne Frank

I've read several books in the past few weeks, and I've not been keeping this updated.  I'm only going to write about one though, "The Diary of Anne Frank". 

This makes the 3rd time I've read a version of this diary.  This one was subtitled "the Definitive Edition", and I actually bought it in the 1990s.  I probably haven't read it since 1995 or so.

There are 3 accepted versions of the diary, I think - Anne Frank's original version started in 1942 shortly before she and her family went into hiding (version a), the version she began editing in 1944 with an eye toward publication after the war (version b - she continued with the original diary while creating an edited version), and the version edited by her father (Otto Frank) and published in 1947 or 1948. 

The Otto Frank version is the one I read in school in my early teens.  He left a lot of stuff out, partly because of space constraints for the publisher, partly because some of the material was not appropriate for a young audience (though Anne was ages 13-15 when she wrote it), and partly because he was her father and she was his daughter.  You know how that goes.

Otto Frank died in 1980 and he willed all his daughter's manuscripts to a foundation in Switzerland.  Since then they've been studied, verified beyond a doubt, an edition has been published for scholars, and the "definitive" edition has been published for a more general population of readers.  There are a lot of things in this book that were not in the version edited by Otto Frank, the version that I read as a student.

Anne and her family considered themselves German, but they were Jewish and when the Nazis came to power they emigrated to Holland, where they had a comfortable life.  Her father was a manager in a small company involved in some kind of jam or jelly manufacturing - I'm not quite clear on that.   I got the impression that her parents were functional but never quite fluent in Dutch.  Anne and Margot, her older sister, were very fluent in Dutch, and I think Margo was fluent in German as well.  I think Anne was comfortable speaking German, but treated Dutch as her native language.  She was very young when they left Germany.

Their comfortable life lasted until 1940, when the Germans invaded the Netherlands, and began placing restrictions on Jews.  She started her diary in the months after the invasion, and very early on she writes about all the restrictions, great and small, placed on the Jews. 

This was written from her point of view, and Anne was young and was not aware of everything that was going on.  I can assume that her father had made arrangements with some people they worked with to create a hiding place in an annex in his business place (which he was apparently restricted from working in) for his family and another family - 7 people in all.  Things were getting bad, and they picked a date to go into hiding, but a wrench was thrown into their plans - Margot, Anne's older sister, received a "call-up" notice from the SS to report to such and such place at a certain time for a work detail in Germany.  Of course they were going to send her off to a concentration camp and that would be the last anyone would see of Margot.  So the Frank family went into hiding the very next day, a week earlier than originally planned, and they were followed shortly by the van Dann family (their real names were van Pels, but Anne gave them pseudonyms in version b of her diary).  Some months later they were joined by a dentist who Anne gave the name Alfred Dussel (real name Fritz Pfeffer), who was also German but had been living in Holland for many years.  So there were 8 people living in the "Secret Annex".

I have actually seen this "Secret Annex".  I lived in Germany as a teenager (and again in my 20's), and our class took a trip to Amsterdam, and one of the places we visited was the Anne Frank "House".  I remember the building was tall and narrow, very close to a canal and shared walls with neighboring buildings.  I remember walking up narrow steps to the area where they actually hid - most of the building was offices and a warehouse.  Here my memory is hazy - I don't remember many details, except that it was VERY SMALL.  There have been a couple of movies based on the diary, and they all give the illusion that there was much more space than there actually was.  Still, in a way they had it good - a lot of Jews in hiding were living in much worse conditions, and the ones that answered the call up notices were either murdered, or starved or died of disease in concentration camps.

I think of Anne Frank's diary as almost like two diaries in one.  In one, she describes things that happened, and it can be fascinating.  In the other she describes feelings - Anne was a young girl going through puberty during some very rough and unusual living conditions, so her feelings can be a pretty wild ride.

I'm sure it was a hard life, and it just got harder as time went on.  8 people forced to live in very close quarters, no way to get away from one another, very limited privacy, food becoming scarcer and scarcer, living in constant fear, it had to be very very stressful. There were personality conflicts, magnified by the close quarters.   Anne spends a lot of time writing about the conflicts and stress (seems she was at the center of a lot of it) but I bet she only covered a fraction of what went on.  They may have had it good in comparison to some, but they didn't have it easy.  They apparently did their best to keep up routines, including school work, but it must have been very difficult.

There is a thing about secrets - the more people who know, the less secure they are.  There were 8 people who were hidden in a small space for over 2 years, and they could not do it alone.  They had to depend on help from others.  The core was 4 people who worked in the office.  As time went on, more people knew.  One of the office worker's parents was informed and built a bookcase to conceal the entrance to the annex.  It became obvious that other people didn't know for sure but suspected, and they were helpful for the most part. 

Some things they could not be sure about though, and as I read the diary I realized that the longer things went on the harder it was to keep them secret.  The people helping them were forced to deal with "black market" types, and some of those people were less than savory.  Over time, they may have developed suspicions, something they could use to protect themselves in case they were arrested (it takes a lot of food & and illegal ration books to feed 8 people, during war time).  The annex shared a wall with a business next door, none of whom were informed about their neighbors in hiding. It is hard for 8 people to be absolutely quiet.  Something as simple as a cough or sneeze, or an ill timed bump against something might arouse suspicion - especially if repeated over time.  They would sometimes open windows to get some fresh air, and on more than one occasion someone noticed some windows opened when no one was supposed to be there and mentioned it to one of the office workers.

And there were a series of 3 or 4 burglaries over a period of months - and in one burglary in particular, maybe two, it's possible that some of this small group of people in hiding were seen.  It's even much more likely, in fact it's almost certain, that they were heard.  It was their habit, after hours, to make use of the downstairs office space for various things - this was not the most secure thing to do considering their situation, but you can imagine their need to spread out.   Also, after working hours, they weren't particularly quiet - they talked, flushed the toilet, lived their lives as normally as they could.  It's possible, maybe even probable, that burglars were aware of them before they were aware of the burglars.  In the end, this is probably what lead to their capture.  I think it's pretty certain that one of the burglars turned them in - probably in return for some leniency.  These burglaries were terrifying to Anne, and she describes them in detail.

Anne's diary ends on August 1, 1944.  There was nothing special about the entry, nothing different, obviously she had no idea it was going to be her last one.  Although she lived in fear of being found, she was also optimistic that they'd survive till the end of the war.  They were arrested on August 4th, just a little over two years after they went into hiding.  Apparently there was an SS sergeant in full uniform (who's complete name is given in the book), and 3 or 4 Dutch security people in plain clothes (but armed) who arrested the group and searched the annex for money and other valuables.   They ignored Anne's diary.  Later Miep Gies, one of the people who had hid them for 2 years, found it strewn all over the floor.   She considered it private and never read it - she gave it to Anne's father after the war.  Two of the people who hid them were arrested, but one released due to ill health, and another managed to escape.

As a group they had some very bad luck, timing wise.  They had been there for over two years, if they could have lasted a few more months they probably would have survived the war.  As it was they were on the last transport to leave Holland, and initially sent to Auswitz in Poland.   Mr. Van Dann (van Pels) was gassed in October or November 1944, apparently among the last to meet that fate.  The others were transferred from place to place.  Anne's mother died in January 1945, from "hunger and exhaustion".  Mrs van Dann was transferred to several camps, and it is certain she did not survive, but no one knows the date or location she died. I can't remember when Mr. Dussel died.   Margot and Anne were transferred to Bergen-Belsen, and they both died in a Typhoid epidemic that swept through the prison population - Margot in February 1945, and Anne in March 1945.  Peter Van Dann who was a couple years older than Anne, and who Anne became very close to during the years in hiding, died in Mauthausen in Austria on May 5, 1945 - very shortly before the camp was liberated, and very shortly before Germany surrendered.   Of the 8, the only one who survived was Anne's father, Otto Frank.

They came very, very close to surviving, and it's sad that they didn't.  Anne Frank was a very good writer, and I suspect she would have been very well known had she survived.  She was born in 1929, so it's quite possible she'd still be alive today.  But that is a future that never happened, so we're left with the thoughts of a teen aged girl living in extraordinary conditions during a dangerous and horrific time. 

Everyone should read it.  More than once.

A little postscript:  May 29, 2012

Here is an interesting link I found which talks about the museum as it is currently, and gives some background info on the Franks:   http://www.scrapbookpages.com/annefrank/AnneFrank01.html   It's pretty lengthy, and has pictures.  The museum is quite a bit different than it was when I was there.   And it's been so long I've forgotten most details of the place. 

Also the group was apparently arrested by members of the SD, not the SS.  My mistake. 

I'm still surprised at the arbitrariness of some of their fates:  Hermann van Pels (van Dann) injured his finger, asked to be put on a barracks detail, and ended up being gassed with the rest of the members of the barracks he was assigned to.   Otto Frank survived because he was beaten to within an inch of his life, placed in the infirmary, and when the Auswitz was abandoned, they left the infirmary patients behind.  Peter van Pels (Peter van Dann) saw Otto Frank shortly before the evacuation and probably could have hid out in the infirmary, but went along on the "death march" to Mauthausen in January 1945.  He survived the march, but died on May 5, 1945 - either very shortly before the camp was liberated or on the actual day of its liberation. 

Books I've read lately.

I've been remiss lately in fulfilling my compulsion to write something, anything, about what I read.  I've not even been updating the book on the sidebar.  So, I'll have to mend my ways.  So here's some thoughts on books I've read lately.

I read The Devlin Diaries by Christi Phillips.  It is essentially about two mysteries of sorts, which take place 340 years apart or so.  One is set in the reign of King Charles II, and the other in present day Cambridge.  Its a story of professors, historical research, a 17th century serial killer, the modern day death of a much disliked professor and so on.  I liked it. I thought it was very well written (though I did find an editing error - where her 17th century character replied to the modern day professor), and it was a good story.

I also read The Day I Died by Steve Sjoregren, which is a true story about the author's botched surgery and it's aftermath.  The author is a hard working pastor of a large church in Cincinnati, and seems to be a nice guy.  The operation was scheduled gall bladder surgery.  I know what a person with gall bladder problems goes though, I apparently had gall stones etc and I was sicker than I've ever been in my life.  Pain, vomiting, and more vomiting, even when there was nothing to vomit.  My body found something.  So as much as surgery is not a fun thing to do, I can see the necessity of it. 

So anyway, the surgeon made a mistake right off the bat, making an incision at a wrong angle and too deeply.  The incision ended up cutting through a bowel, and cutting an artery.  The author very nearly bled to death and was technically dead, was revived, and at some point later was technically dead and revived again.

Can someone be technically dead?

He spent a long time heavily medicated, in and out of consciousness, and saw things which he interprets religiously. 

Personally, I'm very glad I didnt read this book before I had gall bladder surgery.

So the first part of the book was interesting.  The last half turned into a motivational type book - how to be a better father, husband, friend, etc.  I really do not like motivational books.  Maybe I have no desire to be motivated.

Next I read Against All Odds by Tom Clancy.  It's about what you would expect - military special forces, people being killed on every page (usually their heads explode), world-wide conspiracies which range from Pakistan/Afghanistan to Mexico & a lot of stereotypes.  It was a fast, easy read, good story and I expect it will be a major motion picture some day.  It's very typical of the type of fiction Tom Clancy writes.

Ah, The Russia House by John Le Carre

Years ago I bought a CD by Metallica, because one day I was listening to the radio and I heard a song they covered, "Whiskey in the Jar".  I recognized that song as something of a folk song, probably Irish.  I had another version on another CD by the Pogues.  I didn't feel the radio had done the Metallica version justice, it being radio and all, so I was interested in seeing how it really sounded on a half way decent sound system.  Well I was surprise.  This most metallic of hard rock bands did a very good job, I thought.  There was a depth and richness to their version I did not expect.  It was very well done.

The Russia House is like Metallica's version of Whiskey in the Jar.  It has an extraordinary amount of richness and depth to it.  It is a spy story, with Barley Blair being a reluctant spy, set in the final years of the Soviet Union.   People are doing things that could cause them to end up in a Soviet prison or worse.  Portions of it are quite tense, and especially as it approached the end, I was wondering what was going to happen.  I didn't really expect what actually did happen.

When you get down to it, the book is about people.  Human, very fallible, complex people, some who have goals which are perhaps at odds with what they should be. 

This book had a good story & plenty of suspense, but I don't believe there was physical confrontations.  No one shot anyone, nothing blew up, I don't think anyone even took a swing at anybody.  But people spent a lot of time in various states of fear.  And like the fog of war, no one quite knew the big picture, and there was a lot of disagreement about what had actually happened once it was over.   Nothing was neat and tidy.

It is the anti-Icarus Agenda, and comes off being vastly more believable.

Finished The Icarus Agenda

Sometimes I think I read a book simply because it's long, and I won't have to make a decision on what book to read next for awhile.  Of course I don't have to read a book, as far as that goes, but I've almost always got one going.  For awhile I had an "upstairs" book & a "downstairs" book, but the past few months I've only had the upstairs book, which I generally read in bed.  If they have lots of a pages with small type, like Robert Ludlum's Icarus Agenda, it's going to take me awhile.

I almost always finish the book, even when it requires trudging through.  Like this one.

I suppose this book would be described as a "thriller", no big surprise there.  It is very action oriented, with strong characters doing things most mortals would never dream of.  Strong is not always the same as believable.

Also par for the course is the whole set of assumptions behind the plot.  Its a book about conspiracies.  Not just run of the mill conspiracies, but several unrelated conspiracies by small groups of powerful people to control or influence countries, regions and economies.  And the hero that combats them.  That is essentially what the book is about, for pretty close to 700 pages.

Now where have I come across this plot line before?  Pretty much everywhere.   It's been done to death, and it had been done to death by 1987, when this book was written.

Anyway, I suspended disbelief for awhile and read the book. That's about all I can say about it.

Eventide, Lake Wobegon & Holly Springs

I don't really like to write up the books I've read, but I do because somewhere in the back of my mind I feel like it's a good exercise.  However  when I read them I never think about what I'm going to write about them.  I read them as if I'm never going to think about them again once I'm done.  Usually that's not the case.  Usually I write something about them, then never think of them again.

Each one of these books deserve their own write up, but it's not going to happen this time.  So, I'll mix them all together somehow.

Eventide by Kent Haruf, Lake Wobegon Days by Garrison Keillor, & Home to Holly Springs by Jan Karon all have settings in small towns & the areas just outside of them, though the locations, culture & traditions of these small towns were quite different.  Eventide is set in the Colorado plains, Lake Wobegon Days in Minnesota, & Holly Springs in northern Mississippi. 

Holly Springs is the only one of them that is actually a real location.  Lake Wobegon Days has some very funny parts, but it's much more than a humor book.  If you pick up that book expecting a laugh on every page, you'll be disappointed. Also, it's humor is quite sophisticated.    Eventide was probably the most "realistic" of the three.  They are very different books, all worth a read.

The small towns (and I do mean small) are the common thread for all three books.  They all capture an undercurrent of humanity that you will not see if you just notice the surface of things.  Anybody who has lived in a small town any length of time knows that there is more going on than meets the eye. 

Eventide is very good at capturing both the good and the horrors of a small town rural-ish area. There are people in this town who work hard and are fairly well off though not immune to the tragedies of life.  This books gives you a pretty good description of modern life on a ranch, raising and selling cattle.  And the horrors (my word) are because what the author describes is completely plausible & realistic.  Elderly people just hanging on, people who are just down right mean, alcoholics, abused children & social workers who have to deal with this, the upheaval that can be brought on by what is probably a very treatable & essentially minor mental illness, people who, if they were ever tested, might be considered retarded and are fairly incapable of dealing with the problems of life.  There is an undercurrent of dysfunction in which people still manage to function, at least at a certain level.  I dont want to scare anyone off this book - it's pretty good.  Much better than anything I'll ever write.

Lake Wobegon days creates a fictional town with fictional people from the days of it's founding as "New Albion" by Congregationalists from New England, to the arrival of Germans (who were Catholic) & finally the Norwegians, (who were Lutherans).  The history of the town, and the railroad that came to it accidentally is very detailed, so be prepared for that.  It was the Norwegians who became the majority and changed the town's name to Lake Wobegon, because they liked the sound of it.  The author creates all kinds of characters in all kinds of situations, and it's interesting in a town dominated by the Lutheran church & the Catholic church (Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility), the narrator grows up as a member of the  "Bretherns", a much more fundamentalist protestant sect, and a much smaller group, than the Lutherans.  My favortie part of the book is a chapter long footnote entitled "95 theses 95" which a recent emigre from Lake Wobegon, back for a visit, was going to nail 95 theses to the door of the Lutheran church.  He didn't because he could hear the Luther Leaguers inside and he was afraid someone would see him, and he was also afraid the nail might ruin a really good piece of wood.  So he slipped it under the door of the local newspaper office, where years later it remains on the editor's desk, even though it was never printed.  The editor is waiting for a slow news week, apparently.  The 95 theses were a "dramatic complaint about his upbrining", and details the engraining of a very inhibiting value system.   There is a lot of humor in the book, and it is used very well to capture that dysfunctional undercurrent of humanity that exists in every small town quite nicely.  I don't know if that is what the author was trying to do or not.

Home to Holly Springs is Jan Karon's first book in her "Father Tim" series.  Father Tim is an episcopalian priest and was the main character of her "Mitford" series of books, set in a small town in the mountains of North Carolina.  People believe it's loosely based on the mountain resort town of Blowing Rock, but I don't know.  However in this book Father Tim is returning to Holly Springs, Mississippi his boyhood home, & pretty much confronting his past.  Father Tim came from a fairly well-to-do family, and grew up in a large home outside of town, living in what was almost a World War II era version of plantation society.  The undercurrents that seem to be a common thread of these books come largely through Father Tim's flashbacks to his childhood.  The innocence of childhood and of small town life is illusory much of the time. (Always has been)  Things happen which the child is only semi-aware and which are never completely explained.  Life is both good and safe, dangerous and tenuous.  There are brutal people in the world.  Even when Father Tim is in the present, the undercurrent is there.  Most people he meets are nice enough, but some are living in difficult situations, some are gravely ill.

I've not done any of these books justice.  They're all worth reading.

Valley of Horses

I had read Clan of the Cave Bear & thought it was interesting, so I decided to read Valley of Horses, the next in a series of "Earth's Children" books by Jean Auel.  Being a red blooded American male of the species, I'd never heard of them before - we picked them both up in a box of books at a yard sale down on South Avenue in Valdese.  I'm not sure how many more books there are in the series.

First I need to gripe about the titles.  I naturally want to say Clan of the Cave Bears, which is wrong, and I also have a strong urge to say Valley of THE Horses, which is also wrong.  I bet anything the author did this on purpose, just to screw people up and see who was paying attention.  I can think of no other reason.

I liked Clan of the Cave Bear - it must have been interesting growing up Neanderthal.  The author created a whole culture for them, I'm sure a mixture of accepted scientific belief with imagination used to fill in the holes. 

The story continues with Valley of Horses, with Ayla forced to leave the clan by the extremely jealous, angry, and impulsive Broud, using every bit of skill she has just to survive.  But the book introduces another major character, Jondalar, who is on a "Journey" with his brother to travel to the end of the Mother river - looks like the modern day Danube. (or Donau). 

Slowly but surely it becomes clear that Jondalar is something of an Ice Age John Holmes, but much more handsome, and Valley of the Horses becomes, in addition to everything else it is, something akin to literary pornography geared towards women.

The characters are great, extremely vivid, detailed, very well described, very realistic and it is very easy to identify with them.  Jean Auel is at least as good as someone such as Orson Scott Card ("Ender's Game" etc) when it comes to character development, maybe better.  Most characters in most books can't come close to touching Ayla and Jondalar - it's beautifully written that way.  My fear is I'm going to compare the characters in every book I read after this to the characters in this book, and I'm sure almost all will come up short, they'll seem somehow incomplete.

And it's not just humans - Whinney the horse and Baby the cave lion are also an important part of the story.

But the descriptions of sexual encounters involving Jondalar are overpowering, and I'm not sure that it always advances the story.  Or maybe it does - it is certainly part of his (and Ayla's) being.  But it's like the author gets lost in it, and it goes on and on forever with page after page of throbbing manhood and pulsating wetness and such. But you know how us males are, it could be that my main complaint was that there werent any pictures.  Anyway, when I finished this book my overall impression was "Man, there's a lot of sex in this book".  There's more than enough sex in this book to get a Republican up in arms, or to cause some parent somewhere to demand it be removed from the school libraries.  Assuming it was ever there to begin with.

But the book is so much more.  Its a great story with beautifully written characters, in a beautifully described location just trying to live their lives 30,000 years or so ago.  You're not going to find many books as good as this.

Books I've read lately.

I've been remiss on writing about books I've been reading, so I shall do so now.  Quickly.  I'm not going to go into a lot of details, tho.  Or worry too much about grammatical conventions. Just 'cause.

First I read "Five People You Meet In Heaven".  I can't remember the author.  It was a mystical little book about an elderly amusement park worker who died in a work related accident, while trying to save a small girl from the same fate.  After his death he meets 5 people who's lives he impacted, some of whom he'd never known while he was alive.  Basically his whole life history comes out with these people, and it was interesting.  The author's concept of Heaven though has nothing to do with religion, at least not with Judeo-Christian traditions.  You've seen the same concept a thousand times in movies & TV shows.  Heaven is not a physical place but a state of mind, and it's different for each person.  Not sure that'd past muster with a Baptist preacher.

I also read "The Summons" by John Grisham.  This was a good story, I don't think John Grisham writes bad stories, but there wasn't anything great about it.  In this book an elderly judge is dieing, and he summons he two sons (hence the title) to his Mississippi home, supposedly to settle the estate.  But he dies before they arrive, and the more responsible brother finds boxes filled with cash.  Something over $3,000,000.  His father never earned more than $50,000 a year in his life, so something strange has happened.  The rest of the book deals with the money, and has a semi strange (but only semi) twist.  Not bad reading.

Then I read Ken Follet's "The Man From St. Petersburg", which I thought was very good.   The main characters are Felix, a Russian anarchist, and Lady Charlotte, the daughter of the Earl of Walden, and it is set in the summer of 1914, in the months preceding the start of World War I.  It's kind of a spy story, but not really, and it gives vivid descriptions of British society & customs in the early 20th century.  Prince Alexsey has come to England to negotiate a treaty.  The British negotiator is the Earl, who happens to be the Prince's cousin by marriage.  Felix knows that if the negotiations succeed, Russia will enter the coming war on the side of England and France & he wants to stop that.  Not out of love for Germany, he just doesnt want Russia to go to war.  So the story is about his attempts to assassinate the Prince.  Now there is a history between Felix & the Earl of Walden's wife, the result of which was Lady Charlotte, tho the Earl doesn't know.  And Lady Charlotte is coming of age and is expressing a lot of interest in politics, the suffragette movement and society as a whole, much to her mother's dismay.  Felix and Charlotte meet, and she is drawn into the web.  I liked this book a lot.

And I also read "Precious Victims" by a couple of authors who names I can't remember.  This is a true crime book, and tho it told an almost unbelievable story, I thought it was very poorly written.  There were a ton of people in the book, so that was hard to keep straight, and many times they were referred to in one sentence by their first name and the next by their last name, so that just added to the confusion.   The book tells about a couple in Illinois (not to far from St. Louis I gather), Robert and Paula Sims, who had three children in the 1980s.   Both daughters were found dead, and Paula Sims, who gave unbelievable stories in both cases, was convicted of murdering the 2nd daughter.   That's about all I want to say about it, it was pretty tedious.  And not Kafka tedious, but bad writing tedious.  It looked like it was written in a hurry, and could have used a bit more editing.  And it could have been a lot shorter.

I'm one to talk, I know.

Not sure what I'm going to read next.

Blumfeld, Part II - or - Kafka's Balls.

As I suspected and feared,  the bouncing balls in "Blumfeld, An Elderly Bachelor" were never explained. 

When last I left the story, Blumfeld had trapped the balls in his wardrobe, and was trying to give them to the charwoman's son.  This had to be a convoluted transaction, because Blumfeld was afraid the balls would follow him if he got anywhere near them.  He needed to give the key to his wardrobe to the boy, then the boy would have to get the key to his room from the the charwoman (the boy's mother) then go get the balls, then give both keys back to his mother.  The boy was dense and could not understand what he needed to do or why, but there were two little girls there who grasped the instructions clearly, so Blumfeld reluctantly gave them the key to his wardrobe.  They raced downstairs to the charwoman to get the key to his room, and Blumfeld left for work.  And that is the last the two bouncing balls are mentioned.

Blumfeld holds a supervisory position in a linen factory.  He's in charge of accounts etc for women who do piece work.   He has two assistants (both incompetent in his eyes), and a servant who cleans up around the place.  He had to beg his boss (who doesn't understand the complexities of the work) for assistants, and finally he got some, but now he feels his boss took an extra long time in order to find the dullest, most incompetent people possible.  He had hoped to train them and they they'd take initiative on their own, but that hasn't happened.  Blumfeld is convinced that if he dies or leaves the company, everything will fall apart because no one but him knows the complexities involved. 

I suspect that what has really happened is that the industry has changed, new technologies of sorts have been introduced and the world has passed Blumfeld by & he doesn't realize it.  But you have to infer that, everything in the story is from Blumfeld's point of view.

Now, back to the balls.  If a character in a story I was writing came home one day and found balls bouncing in his room,  bouncing in sync and following him around, with energy levels more or less reflecting his own, with no means of locomotion, I would probably feel compelled to explain how that could be.  But, I'm not Kafka.  Kafka feels no need for an explanation.

I've not read the Cliff Notes on this, so I don't really have a clue.

It is interesting that there are lots of  "pairs" in the story.  The balls, the assistants, the charwoman and her son (both dullards in Blumfeld's eyes), the two little girls (smart but untrustworthy, per Blumfeld).  I don't believe in literary co-incidences, but then what do I know.  Even the fact that Kafka chose the share the information that Blumfeld is a bachelor in the title instead of drawing it out is the story may have significance.  But I can't draw any lines to explain anything.  I can't connect the dots.  I don't even know where the dots are.  I don't know what it all means.   I understood the words, I followed the story, but I'm missing something.

I just know that Blumfeld is a very typical main character for a Kafka story.   And anytime I get through a Kafka story, it's a victory.

Blumfeld, An Elderly Bachelor

I've been reading a fair amount of books lately.  I read "Battle Ready" by Tom Clancy which details the career of Marine General Tony Zinni.  It jogged my memory a bit about being in the Army, and drove home the fact that I really did not have the personality for it. If I were in combat and an enemy who was trying to kill me suddenly withdrew, I personally would not be inclined to chase him down.  My personal reaction would be something on the order of relief at having survived a fire fight, and I'd be happy to let him go.  When someone has the motivation & means to kill you, it's down right dangerous to go chasing after them.  It's just as easy to get yourself killed by troops who are retreating as it is by troops who are charging.  However, that is not really the right attitude to take.  When an enemy is on the ropes you finish him off, otherwise he'll keep coming back, and one day he'll get you.  General Zinni seemed to love every challenge the military threw at him, in fact he sought it out.

I also read "Flashback" by Gary Braver which seem to me to be a pretty standard run of the mill made for TV movie book about corporate greed in the pharmaceutical industry.  It was better than anything I could write, but it was pretty predictable.

And I read "Aftershocks" by Richard S. Wheeler, about the immediate aftermath of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.  That was a historical novel of sorts, and it followed the lives of 5 or 6 people, who for the most part, did not interact with each other so you had several stories going.  I never knew that much about the 1906 earthquake, so this filled in a few holes.   It was pretty good. There's so much I don't know.  Lots of times when I read things it makes me want to learn more. 

These books came from a thrift store, and I find myself temporarily without unread books about. 

So, with a heavy heart, having nothing else to read,  I picked up my copy of the complete stories of Franz Kafka, and chose a story more or less at random.   "Blumfeld, An Elderly Bachelor" is 23 pages long, and as always, before I start a Kafka story I make my peace with the world.  I ask myself if I want to suffer through 23 pages of something that will surely be odd, and maybe never make any sense.  I don't really want to, but the curiosity is overwhelming.  I know at some point I'm probably going to get lost, but each story loses me in a different way.

So Blumfeld, who lives alone, is trudging up the stairs to his apartment, thinking of all the reasons he doesn't want to own a dog. Most of these reasons have to do with cleanliness - shedding hair and such.  When he gets to his apartment, he hears a noise, opens the door to find two balls bouncing in sync.  One reaches it's height as the other hits the floor.  I remember thinking - here it is, the point in the story (a couple of pages in) of Kafkian oddness.  I had no idea that this story involved random bouncing balls.   Balls bouncing for no apparent reason, and with no means of causation.  Perpetual motion bouncing balls.  The balls followed him around, keeping a certain distance away, and seem to have some sort of feelings.  I left the story half way in, I expect to finish it up this evening.   Blumfeld had managed by trickery to trap the balls in his wardrobe, and was trying to give them to the Charwoman's son, who seemed very dense and didn't quite understand.   Now I wonder how the story will end, and what other twists will be coming in it, and if the bouncing balls will be explained.  I seriously doubt it. 

Think kind thoughts.

Geography Song

I ran across this little poem in a book I'm reading. I'd never heard it before. It's funny and light hearted and very out of character with the rest of the book. 


The Geograhy Song

Maine is an island in Asia,
France is a river in Spain.
Coconuts grow on a mountain of snow,
Deserts are covered with rain.
Crocodiles come from Chicago,
Silver is mixed in a mill.
Grass is quite rare,
The equator is square,
And Kansas is south of Brazil.

Reading again

Suddenly I'm doing a lot more reading, pretty much 2 books at a time.  I have a downstairs book and an upstairs book.  I just finished "Feet of Clay" by Terry Pratchett, and I'm fixin' to finish "The Girl Who Played With Fire" by Stieg Larsson.  Both books are part of a series, and both have a mystery & action, but that's pretty much where the similarity ends. 

Terry Pratchett is kind of fantasy/sci-fi, but more fantasy, with lots of insight, social commentary and wickedly funny in spots.  I'm still laughing about Rogers the bulls who had a very large forehead, meaning each eye had a different view, so he thought he was two animals, so he always refered to himself in the plural, hence Rogers the bulls.  That and Wee Mad Arthur, the rat hunter.  And Detrius the troll breaking up a chair because a doctor needed a stool sample.  And all the heraldry puns.  And Fred Colon's attitude toward "detectoring". 

Stieg Larsson is mystery/action (and also deceased).  He also had very good insight into human behavior, and obviously researched a lot of things.  His plots are much more complicated and involved than Pratchett's, and his characters are much more real.  But then his characters are all human, and many of Pratchett's arent, and there is at least one where people aren't quite sure one way or the other.  Larsson's books are page turners, it's hard to put them down.

So pretty soon I'll be starting on Pratchett's "Jingo", and Larsson's "Hornet's Nest", continuing the series of both authors.  I just have to figure out which one will be my upstairs book, and which one will be my downstairs book.

Finished 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. At last.

Lordy, I'm glad that's over.  It was a strange little book, the type where you just have to let stuff go sometimes. 

If you drew two circles and labeled one Kafka & one Marquez, there would be some overlap, but not that much.  For me it was a lot easier to follow than Kafka, but I saw some similarities.   They both mix in reality with unreality, but yet treat the unreality as if it were real.  In Kafka's Metamorphosis, a guy turned into a bug, and people didn't freak out & run away, they tried to talk to him (it).  In Marquez's village of Macondo, the whole town at one time or another experienced a couple of years of insomnia, almost 5 solid years of rain, and various other miraculous things happened to individual people along the way.

I begin to see the book as a series of stories.  My favorite was the one where Jose Arcadio Buendia, the family patriarch, discovered on his own that the world was round, centuries after this had become common knowledge.  I liked the stories surrounding Remedios the Beauty who was so beautiful that one day she just acended into heaven, along with a set of Aramanta's favorite sheets.  I've taken to referring to our dog as "Pickles the Beauty", but I'm afraid she'll get the big head.   I liked the stories of Jose Arcadio Segundo & Areliano Sequndo, who were twins and would fool people by switching identities as children.  They did it so often that Ursula (their great-grandmother) was convinced they had got themselves mixed up.  Aureliano had the personalities of all the Jose Arcadios, and Jose Arcadio had the personality of all the Aureliano's.  They died on the same day, in the end the pall bearers were drunk and got the coffins mixed up so that they were buried in the other's grave.  Which may have been correct after all.   In every generation there was one (usually an Aureliano, the exception was Jose Segundo) who spent a lot of time in an old room trying to figure out manuscripts left behind by a mystic gypsy.  

I started reading this book back in November.   It usually doesnt take me this long to read through a book, and I have no excuses for this one.  I just wasn't into it for some reason.  I have this stupid bit of pride that I'm not going to let any book get the best of me.  So I read the stupid thing, and parts of it were quite good, parts quite funny and parts I just struggled through like trudging through knee deep mud.  Its done.  On to something else.

My .02 on Huckleberry Finn

It's been in the news lately that a new edition of Huckleberry Finn is being published, with the "n-word" expunged, replaced with the word "slave".   A lot of people think this is a good thing, that it doesn't change the story and perhaps because of this change a lot more students will be allowed to read it as part of a high school curriculum.   But a lot of other people feel that it is censorship and by removing that word you remove some of the power and meaning the book.  

To paraphrase Mark Twain, the difference between the right word and the almost-right word is the difference between lightening and a lightening bug.  There is a reason he used that word.

I read Huckleberry Finn the first time when I was 11 years old.  I read it on my own, not part of a school assignment or anything, complete with all 200 + instances of the 'n-word'.   At age 11, I knew well enough that I should not go repeating that word amongst my classmates.  I new it's connotations and history.  Much later I read Huckleberry Finn to my son, the very same book I had read as a child, one chapter at a time when he was quite young - much too young to grasp the finer points.  When I read this to my son, I did exactly what this person who is publishing a revised version is doing - I substituted the word "slave" for the "n-word".  But here is the difference - my son was 5 or 6 years old at the time, an age when kids repeat everything they've heard.  I'm pretty sure he wasn't old enough to understand that he should not go slinging this word around the playground. 

By the time people are old enough to read this on their own, they should be able to distinguish between differences in usage and connotations of words in the mid-19th century and the early 21st century.  They should have a grasp of context. 

The book was published in 1884, and is set some 30-35 years earlier, in the 1850s.  It starts in Missouri, a state where slavery was legal at the time, and ends in the deep south, mainly because Huck and Jim fell asleep and missed their intended destination of Cairo, Illinois. (In reality, Jim probably would not have found much sympathy in Cairo, Illinois, but that's reality, and Huckleberry Finn was fiction). But anyway, along the way there are all kinds of people, descriptions of Mississippi River life, humor, and some astute social commentary.  

Huckleberry Finn may have been the first major novel to make use of dialect, or at least the first American one.  I think I read somewhere that Mark Twain used 7 dialects for his characters, but I'm not sure.  When I read it at age 11, I had no trouble understanding most the language used.  Much of it was very similar to the way my grandparents spoke, and even though I didn't use most of the words or phrases in my everyday speech, they were very familiar to me.   I didn't realize it at the time, but this gave me a bit of an advantage in understanding this book.  Anyway,  Jim, the uneducated slave, spoke differently than Huckleberry who had a little bit of education forced upon him.  Huck spoke slightly differently than Tom Sawyer, who attended school more regularly.  Huck's father was as uneducated as Jim, but spoke differently than either Huck or Jim, because he had a different background.  They all spoke differently than the Widow Douglas, who tortured poor ol' Huck with manners and religion.  And none of them spoke as articulately as Judge Thatcher, who was quite well educated. (An aside:  I always thought Judge Thatcher may have been a bit of a crook.  Can't prove it, but in the "Adventures of Tom Sawyer",  Huck had come into a bunch of money as a result of an encounter with Indian Joe, and in "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn", Judge Thatcher seemed a little too agreeable to manage Huck's 'fortune').

What I'm getting at is that Mark Twain wrote the book with the characters speaking American English as it was spoken in by various strata of society in Missouri in the 1850s.   I am sure the "n-word" was used at that time by people of all races without a second thought.  I don't know that it had the same connotations or meanings then that it has now.   I do know that the connotations and meaning it has now are not good. 
Writing dialect, getting it right and being consistent is difficult.  If you remove this word from the book you weaken part of the author's attempt at authenticity and reality.  It skews the portrait of life in the 1850s.

Does it matter?  Maybe not.  It won't change people's lives one way or another.  Neither will painting a Hitler mustache on the Mona Lisa, but I hope no one does it.  However, I think if you can't handle reality in literature you should stick to sit-coms on TV, where (sarcasm alert) they'd never ever dream of using stereotypes or offensive language.

Still reading 100 years of solitude. Sigh.......

I've been reading this book forever.  I stopped for awhile initially because I was trying to adjust to my very first prescription for bi-focals.  And delayed picking it up again because I wasn't sure I wanted to put myself through what reading this book was going to put me through.

I understand that many actually consider this book to be honest to goodness literature.  I believe it.

I can tell it's an exceptional book.  The characters are great, there's a lot of subtle humor and observations in it, it has some mystical elements, and on more than one occasion it happily ignores the laws of physics. 

I'm at the point where the story is going to be about Jose Arcadio Segundo and Aurielio Segundo, and I just not sure I want to put forth the effort to get to know these characters.  I've made it to my 4th generation of Jose Arcadio's and Aurielio's, surely that's enough. Sufferin' Cats.  And the first Aurielio, the Colonel and their grandfather, had 17 boys by 17 women, and named them all Aurielio.  Why not stick a Rafael or an Enrico in there?  And Ursula (their great-grandmother & the family matriarch) is apparently going to live forever, but that remains to be seen.  But with the Segundos it's a whole new story and I'm just not identifying with anything.  At the moment Aurielo is talking to a ghost and wallpapering the house with 1 peso notes, and has become wealthy because all his livestock procreates at an abnormal rate.  Not quite sure what Jose Arcadio is up to, but I'll find out before long.

I don't know.  Normally a book like this is right up my alley.  Maybe I'm just tired of thinking.  I never really liked books about "families".

So anyway, I've decided to take the plunge and finish this book.  It'll be a happy day when I'm done.

The World is Round

I've spent a long time reading 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and I'm nowhere near done.  I blame this on the new glasses I got a little while ago.  I have to wear these things almost all the time, and by evening, when is which I do most of my reading, I just want to take them off.

So I've taken a bit of an unintentional hiatus from reading this book. 

I have no idea how the book will end, but the first part has been interesting.  It may very well land somewhere on my "Kafka" scale, an informal listing of books that are difficult for me to understand.   But maybe not.  My big fear with my "Kafka" scale is that I won't be smart enough to realize I don't understand.

My favorite part of the book so far is when Jose Arcadio Buendia discovered that the world is round.   Every year or so a group of gypsies passed through the very isolated village of Macondo, and basically put on a show, displaying earthly wonders (like ice) and other delights for a fee.  Sr. Buendia was very impressed by and recieved something of an philosphical education from one of the more mystical of these gypsies.  One year he bought some instruments from this gypsy (sorry, I cannot spell his name from memory) and began studying the sky.  After a year or so he came to the independent conclusion, without the aid of an education, books, knowledge of history, or space travel, that the world was round. 

This is humorous because he pretty much reinvented the wheel, putting in a tremendous amount of effort to learn something that had been part of the overall body of common knowledge for centuries.   Christopher Columbus was acting on the theory when he sailed west with the idea of finding a water route to the east, and I'm sure Columbus wasn't the first to conclude that the world was round. 

But it is also fascinating.  If we didn't have the body of knowledge, if we weren't literate, how many of us would realize or even give the shape of the world a second thought.  When you stand on this planet no matter where you are the ground is below your feet and the sky is above your head - it looks flat (and frankly I've always wondered about that, but only because I know the world is round).  To be uneducated and living in the middle of a large land mass and come to any other conclusion is remarkable.  There was something to Jose Arcadio Buendia.

I'm looking forward to finishing this book at some point.

Finished "Life: A User's Manual" by Georges Perec.

I'm not going to review this book because I'm positive I could not do it justice.  And I'd hate to spoil it for the legions people who read this blog (ha!) who may feel inspired to tackle this book.  But I'll write just a bit about it, and it's possible this may turn into a lengthy post. 

This book is about the current and former occupants of an apartment building in Paris, as well as the building itself, located at 11 Rue Simon-Crubellier.

First, physical characteristics of the actual book I read:  it is paperback, measuring 9 1/4 x 6 x 1 3/8 inches - so it's quite a bit larger than your typical mass market paperback.  It weighs 30 ounces - almost 2 pounds.  The "story" part of the book is 500 pages, divided into 6 parts, 99 chapters & an epilogue.   In addition to these 500 pages, there is a table of contents, a preamble, an outline of the apartment building at 11 Rue Simon-Crubellier with notations of current and former residents, an extensive 58 page index of people, places, and other items in the novel, a chronology starting in 1833 and ending in 1975 (the books 'present time'), and an alphabetical checklist of some of the stories narrated in the novel.

This novel is a challenge to my intellectual abilities, and I'm not just talking about the author's use of big words.  The story is not straight forward, in fact the first time I read it I didn't even realize what the story was until near the end.  And the author assumes a the reader has a very high level of cultural knowledge.  Not only of things like history & literature, but also science, medicine, economics, religion, various world wide cultures - from highly advanced civilizations to tribal organizations past and present, languages, the ancient Greeks & Romans, Mathematics, music and on and on.  It seems endless. 

There are a couple of interesting things about this book, and I shall mention them right now.  Puzzles play a large part in the story, particularly Bartlebooths puzzles created from him by Gaspard Winckler.  All told, Bartlebooth commissioned 500 puzzles.  500 puzzles, 500 pages.  From what I know about Georges Perec, that is probably not a co-incidence.  But why?  And the next, and this is really odd, has to do with the chapters.  There are 99 chapters, so they tend to be short, only a few pages a piece.  They are titled with the chapter numbers & a subtitle, followed by a number to indicate how many times this subject has been covered.  So chapter 41 is written as "Forty-One On The Stairs, 6",  Chapter 42 is "Forty-Two, Foulerot, 2" and so on.  All 99 chapters are written in that format except chapter 51.  For some reason it is written as "The Fifty-First Valene, (Servants' Quarters, 9)".  Why is it written "The Fifty-First" and not "Fifty-One"?  This isn't an accident, but I don't know the reason.

There are lots of stories in this book about the current and previous occupants of the apartment building.  The stories are interesting and exhausting at the same time.  One of the stories is a very detailed examination of a map on Bartlebooth's wall.  It is an antique map of the New World, I believe from the very early 16th century, just after it was discovered by Europeans.  The story includes the historiography and scholarly debate about Amerigo Vespucci's role (or lack of) in lending his name to North and South America.  After several pages of this I was wondering what in the heck this story had to do with anything.  Turns out, this was the only officially commissioned map which had a name other than "America" for the new world, and as such was purchased by Bartlebooth's great Uncle James Sherwood, who collected unicum - objects which are the only ones of their kind.  James Sherwood was the ultimate source of Bartlebooth's great wealth.  Suddenly, the whole map story sort of made sense.

It is very tempting to skip over large sections of some of these stories - when the author decides to list the contents of the various cellars, for example, or when he lists 179 subjects & scenes Valene the artist would like to paint.   But my advise is to not skip a word.   There is a fair amount of humor & satire in this book, but it's not going to knock you over with obviousness. You have to recognize it when you see it, and it pops up when you least expect it. 

The book has a story - rest assured.  It's a very strong story and I could tell it to you, but I aint gonna. If you've never read it before you won't know what it is for a long time, but it is there.  It's neither a happy nor sad story.  It's life, I suppose.  The creation theory or big-bang theory aside, life is life.  The world chugged along happily before anybody who is alive now was born, and will not stop when everyone who is alive now is dead. 

This is one of my favorite books, ever.  It just blows away most other books I've read.  It's not easy to read, but it's worth it.  It's entertaining (I especially liked the story about how the Danglar's (a staid & prominent couple who occupied Bartlebooths apartment before Bartlebooth did) found their kink), and it's thought provoking at the same time.  It's actually kind of mind blowing.  When you think about it.

I bought this copy off eBay for just a few dollars.  You can also get it cheaply on Amazon, or if you're lucky you could find it at a thrift shop for a couple of bucks.   It is well worth the investment of time it will take to read it.

Life, 2nd thoughts

On September 30th, I wrote a bit about a book I was getting ready to read, "Life: A User's Manual" by Georges Perec.  I'm well into the first part of the book, and this conjured up some other thoughts on it.

I had mentioned that the book was written in the 3rd person, told by some unnamed entity who knows everything about all the characters in the book.  I forgot to mention, or perhaps I forgot entirely, there is no dialog in the book.  There's mention of one person talking to another, but so far, and I believe for the entire book, there is never any dialog.

It is as if this narrator is describing a photograph.  Frequently there is no one in a room he describes.  If there are people, he describes them as in mid-action, not as going from point A to point B for example.  It's as if there characters are frozen in an instant, like in a candid photo, and the narrator describes the picture.

A lot of time is spent describing the things in whatever apartment the narrator is in at the moment.  Frequently these are mundane things described in detail.   The narrator also seems to have a very deep level of cultural literacy, and assumes the reader has the same.  Well this particular reader (me) has a fair amount of cultural literacy, but there are lots of references in this book I don't have a clue about.

The main thread, the main story is well underway, developing quite nicely, in fact.  I only know that because I've read the book back in 1989 or so.  If I hadn't I wouldn't even know what the main thread was at this point.  I'm sure, back in 1989, I wasn't even aware what the point of the book was at this point.  So I've lost that element of surprise - I won't have that OMG moment I had 20 years ago because I know what's coming, I know who the main character is & what's going on.   But I'm enjoying it just the same.

This is a beautifully written book.  I assume anyway, it was obviously translated from French into English, so  I guess I really wouldn't know.    It has complexities on several levels.  And besides complexities, it has a preamble, an index, a chronology, and an appendix where it references all the stories the narrator tells. 

I enjoy reading it, though I think I'll be at it awhile.  It is a book you have to want to read.  I don't expect I'll ever understand it completely.

Life

Well I've done it again.  This is the 2nd or 3rd time I've bought this book, and I know I read it all the way through once awhile back.  I plan on reading it again, but I know, once again, I'm in for it.

The basic setting is an apartment building in Paris, and the story jumps around from apartment to apartment, so you can see all the events happening simultaneously.  It is narrated in the 3rd person, by a person who apparently sees all and knows all about the occupants.  There is a lot of minutiae in this book.

In a traditional class bound European society, the residents of the apartment building probably would be considered middle class.  From my point of view, most of them seem very well off financially, but the distinction I guess is that most have some sort of employment. They have to work for their money, except for maybe Bartlebooth, who is apparently a wealthy British ex-pat. 

As the stories unfold and things begin to take shape, you begin to notice that jigsaw puzzles play an important role in the "plot" such as it is.  Not the cheap machine made cardboard ones you can buy in the toy section of department stores, but handmade wooden ones, made by a craftsman, the kind where there is no picture on the box.  The kind made to order.  The kind where several pieces may fit perfectly with several other pieces, but only one is correct.  The kind with traps and tricks, where everything fits perfectly together and you're left with one last piece and it doesn't fit in the only remaining space.

I'm pretty sure I missed stuff the first time I read it.  But I do remember saying OMG as I approached the end.  Only this was in the days before texting and stuff so I said it out loud.

The only other time I've experienced an emotion of pure surprise and shock like that from a book was when I was reading the "World According To Garp" by John Irving, when Garp smashed into the back of a car parked in his garage, while his wife (I think) was engaged in an "act of adultery" in said parked car, resulting in just a little bit of castration to one of the participants.  I was reading this while sitting in a car in a parking lot waiting for the Killeen Texas public library to open, perhaps in a slightly altered state of reality, can't really remember, and I looked up and stared at the bricks, in unbelieving horror.

Well, this book is completely different, but it was the same feeling, except for the horror part.   This time I know what's going to happen, but I want to remind myself of the details. 

It's not Kafka hard, but not really an easy read, at least not for me.

Ford County: Stories

Ford County: Stories, is a book of short stories by John Grisham, and I finished reading it a couple of days ago. 

Some of these stories are 50 or 60 pages long, and to me that's not a short story.  That's a long story.  I'm not sure what the cut off for a short story should be, but after 10 pages, you're pushing it as far as I'm concerned. 

Anyway, these were interesting, & compared to Kafka, very easy stories to read.  Refreshingly easy to read. They were completely linear, and contained no airborne dogs, nobody who turned into a bug, no one who spent their life building a wall.  One of the stories took place over a period of 3 hours or so, others over a period of weeks or months, but they all were linear.  They started out at one point in time, and ended at another point in time, with the end of the stories always later in time than the beginning, and no time was lost anywhere along the way.   Some of the characters were decent people, some maybe not so much, but none of them ever seemed confused about what time it was or how long it was taking for things to occur.  None of them seemed to be out of touch with their surroundings.

The stories had plots that were pretty straight forward.

I wonder how Kafka would have written these stories.  But I'll never know, because a) he didn't, and b) if he had, I probably would not have finished them.

Now I need another book to read.

Oh man, not Kafka again

I ran out of stuff that I wanted to read, so I picked up my copy of Kafka short stories.  I opened it up almost, but not quite, at random to a story called "Investigations of a Dog".  I stared at the title for a long time, with some trepidation.   I checked to see how long it was, just to see what I was in for.  38 pages of small print.   38 pages of challenging reading.  I was tired, I was looking at this while in bed, and I wondered if I really wanted to do this to myself.  Did I want to put myself through this? 

I figured why not.

So I started reading.  By the second page I found myself going back and re-reading portions of the first page, just to double check my understanding, to make sure I hadn't missed something.  It is not light reading.

I don't know what it is with my run-ins with Kafka through the years.  I'm not sure why I've kept that book.  Part of the reason is I take it as a personal challenge, I think.  I will not admit that I cannot get thru, and understand, any piece of literature that is written in English, no matter how difficult.  I don't have this problem with people like Faulkner.  Heck, I don't even have it with Hermann Hesse, I've read both Siddhartha & Steppenwolf and maybe a few other things he's written.   Just Kafka.  Why is that?

Of course I'm reading translations.    I'm not sure if Kafka wrote in German or Czech (I should find that out), but what ever it was, it was the 19th century version of the language.   To do it justice, the translation should reflect that, and it sort of does.  There are long sentences, lots of clauses, lots of passive voice writing, not lending itself to any kind of college Freshman Composition class.   So it's hard to read from that perspective. 

Also, its difficult to read because it's just so weird. You have to discover what is going on, and I find myself going back and re-reading because I either have trouble believing what I'm reading, or I lost the flow of the story somehow.  This story, for example, is being told from the point of view of an apparently alienated, decidedly bohemian dog.  And as the reader, I know nothing more than what the dog knows, nothing more than what the dog sees or experiences with his other senses.   I know what the dog thinks, I know his opinions, and it is not easy to follow.  The dog describes things in a way most humans wouldn't.  Kafka is a very, very good writer.  But at the moment, I have no idea where the story is going.

Everything Kafka has ever written is like that, at least to me.  I've had this book for years.  I guess I'll keep it and force my way thru a story every now and then.

He wrote a story about a man who woke up and found that he was a huge insect - his most famous, probably.  He wrote another about a man sitting at the gates of heaven for years, afraid to ask permission from St. Peter to enter (I think).  That one was a parable, and I'm still shaking my head.  He wrote one about building the Great Wall of China, and after reading that I remember thinking, yep, that's pretty much what it was like being in the Army.

I'll read some more tonight.  But I suspect I'll spend a week at least on those 38 pages.