Book Review: "The Sky, The Stars, The Wilderness" by Rick Bass

The Sky, the Stars, the Wilderness (1997)
Rick Bass (1958-)

190 pages

In three beautiful, often haunting novellas Rick Bass transports us into the lives of people intimately connected to the natural world. For his characters in these stories nature seems close and deep and bristling with energy that draws their focus, and often their lives, away from the encroaching modern world. They may find nature cruel and hard, or mystical and awe-inspiring --- or even all of these in turns --- but they relish their place in its seemingly limitless mystery.

The Myth of Bears tells the story of a hunter and his wife who have left the desert south-west for the snowy, stark wilderness of Alaska, where they live in a small cabin far from the nearest town, and hunt and trap animals, selling the pelts. Fearing her husband’s increasingly erratic behavior, the woman has bolted through a window in their cabin and disappeared into the winter night. But her continued love for him keeps her from leaving completely, and she sets up a simple camp in the woods from which she watches over him, daily hovering on the edge of his apprehension, balancing her fear of his ability to track her with her continued love for him. For his part, the hunter can sense her presence, and desperately wants her back with him, and so she becomes one additional prey that he tracks as he goes about his work. Thus, the two play a high-stakes version of hide-and-seek, with Nature becoming a third party in the game, as it both helps her to conceal her whereabouts and provides him clues to her presence.

In the second novella, Where the Sea Used to Be, a man has gone into business for himself, leasing property on which he drills for oil, competing against former colleagues who work for the oil leasing firm he had left some years before. He discovers that he has a special knack for knowing where oil is buried, far beneath the surface: every lease he drills produces oil, and he finds the right spot to drill even on properties that had come up dry for his former employer. Understanding that oil is found where ancient shallow inland seas had once existed before being buried under thousands of feet of earth, as he flies over the countryside in his small plane he finds himself able to read the millions of years of history of the land and pinpoint the deposits of oil. For his nature-blind rivals he has a shamanistic connection to the natural world that they cannot fathom.

The final novella takes up the last half of the book, and shares its title. Bass has a lead-in quote as preface to each of the three stories, and though he chooses fittingly in each case, the preface quote for the third story stopped me in my tracks: a wonderful, visceral homage by the writer John Graves to the desire to know what our natural surroundings were like before mankind re-shaped them to fit its needs. Graves achieves a pitch-perfect mix of poignant regret and pragmatic realism, and I read and enjoyed it several times (it is reproduced here) before continuing on to the novella it introduces.

Bass’ narrator in the third novella tells the story of her love for the land of her ancestors, a 10,000 acre homestead where central Texas gives way to the west Texas desert. Her mother having died young, she has grown up with her younger brother, father, grandfather and a Mexican farmhand who has settled in as part of the family. As a young girl, she and her brother explore the land around her family’s home, and she paints for us an intimate and vivid portrait of the river, the hills, the plants and the animals that come to have a deep hold on her. As she brings the story to the present, and the modern world begins to intrude on her beloved land --- even 10,000 acres cannot provide isolation from the forces of economic expansion --- the reader aches with her for the impact on the natural beauty she cherishes. Bass’ writing style and language make the feel and smells and sounds of the land come alive for the reader, allowing us to revel in it as the narrator herself does. A more beautiful and moving appreciation of the natural world and its ability to enlighten the soul would be hard to find

Together the three stories introduce us to people who live close the land, who strive to understand what the land can tell them, and who remain engaged in and enthralled by the mysterious beauty and variety of the natural world; a perfect book of stories to read on a hiking trip at your favorite park or during breaks from working in the garden out back.

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Read quotes from Rick Bass' writings here.

My review of another collection of short stories from Rick Bass, For a Little While, is here.

Used as a story preface in The Sky, The Stars, The Wilderness, find a beautiful quote from John Graves reproduced here here.

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Other reviews / information:
Michael Gorra, in The New York Times

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Other of my book reviews: FICTION and NON-FICTION

The Ideology of Austerity

In an article in the 28 November 2011 issue of The Nation magazine (Night Thoughts of a Baffled Humanist) Marilynne Robinson examines the drive in the United States (and elsewhere) to address the current economic crisis through austerity programs that focus on rolling back many of the public institutions that have come to play such important roles in our lives, and that came about as our society developed a greater sense of community and recognition of the common good.

Though I highly recommend following the link above to read the complete article, I have include below some selected passages from it.  (The bold emphasis and text in brackets are mine.)

 Over the years we seem to have become habituated, even addicted, to the notion of radical threat, threat of the kind that can make virtually anything seem expendable if it does not serve an immediate, desperate purpose of self-defense --- as defined by people often in too high a state of alarm to make sound judgments about what real safety would be or how it might be achieved, and who feel that their duty to the rest of us is to be very certain we share their alarm.  ...  In this climate of generalized fear civil liberties have come under pressure, and those who try to defend them are seen as indifferent to threats to freedom.  The world is indeed dangerous, an for this reason the turning of our society, and of Western society, against itself is flatly contrary to any rational strategy of self-defense.  But this is highly consistent with a new dominance of ideological thinking, and very highly consistent with the current passion for austerity, which gains from it status as both practical necessity and moral ideal.

...

At best there are two major problems with ideology.  The first is that it does not represent or conform to or even address reality.  It is a straight-edge ruler in a fractal universe.  The second is that it inspires in its believers the notion that the fault lies with miscreant fact, which should therefore be conformed to the requirements of theory by all means necessary.  To the ideologue this would amount to putting the world right, ridding it of ambiguity and those tedious and endless moral and ethical questions that dog us through life, and that those around us so rarely answer to our satisfaction.  Anger and self-righteousness combined with cynicism about the world as he or she sees it are the marks of the ideologue.  There is always an element of nostalgia, too, because the ideologue is confident that he or she is moved by a special loyalty to a natural order, or to a good and normative past, that others defy or betray.

...

...in America, an abstraction called capitalism has truly begun to function as an ideology.  The word is not included in the 1882 edition of Webster's Dictionary, and in the latest Oxford English Dictionary "capitalism" is simply "a system which favours the existence of capitalists," as systems like the self-declared social democracies of Western Europe have always done.  In contemporary America it has taken on the definition and the character that Marx ... gave it.  This despite the fact that Marx did not consider the united State of his time essentially capitalist.  This despite the fact that the United States as a society is structured around any number of institutions that are not, under this definition, capitalist.   Suddenly anything public is "socialist," therefore a deviancy, inevitably second-rate and a corruption of, so to speak, the public virtue.  If I could find any gleam of intelligence or reflection in all this, or any sign of successful education, I would be happy to admire it, so passionate are my loyalties.

...

This brings me ... to the subject of competition, great ally of austerity. ... In need of the focus {of competition} that comes with having an alien and threatening government to contend with, an appreciable number of Americans choose to consider their government alien and threatening, and, for good measure, socialist.  Again, this kind of thinking is eminently compatible with austerity, as the redistributive activities of government are exactly what they choose to be austere about.  Other alternatives include returning tax rates for the very wealthy to historically typical levels and cutting subsidies to oil companies.  Or there could be a candid admission that the responsibilities of the government involve it in great expense.  None of these options ignite populist zeal.  This is reserved for attacks --- call them "austerities" --- directed toward public schools, Social Security, national healthcare, the laws that protect air and water quality.

"to have known the land when it was whole and sprawling and rich and fresh"

Rick Bass, in his book of novellas The Sky, The Stars, and The Wilderness (which I will review in a later blog), prefaces the same-titled third of the stories with the following wonderful citation:

"Of all these passers-through, the species that means most to me, even more than geese and cranes, is the upland plover, the drab plump grassland bird that used to remind my gentle hunting uncle of the way things once had been, as it still reminds me.  It flies from the far northern prairies to the pampas of Argentina and then back again in spring, a miracle of navigation and a tremendous journey for six or eight ounces of flesh and feathers and entrails and hollow bones, fueled with bug meat.  I see them sometimes in our pastures, standing still or dashing after prey in the grass, but mainly I know their presence through the mournful yet eager quavering whistles they cast down from the night sky in passing, and it always makes me think what the whistling must have been like when the American plains were virgin and their plover came through in millions.

To grow up among tradition-minded people leads one often into backward yearnings and regrets, unprofitable feelings of which I was granted my share in youth --- not having been born in time to get killed fighting Yankees, for one, or not having ridden up the cattle trails.  But the only such regret that has strongly endured is not to have known the land when it was whole and sprawling and rich and fresh, and the plover that whet one's edge every spring and every fall.  In recent decades it has become customary --- and right, I guess, and easy enough with hindsight --- to damn the ancestral frame of mind that ravaged the world so fully and so soon.  What I myself see to damn mainly, though, is just not having seen it.  Without any virtuous hindsight, I would likely have helped in the ravaging as did even most of those who loved it best.  But God, to have viewed it entire, the soul and guts of what we had and gone forever now, except in books and such poignant remnants as small swift birds that journey to and from the distant Argentine and call at night in the sky."

--- John Graves, Self-Portrait with Birds

Book Review: 'The Sun Over Breda' by Arturo Perez-Reverte

The Sun Over Breda: The Adventures of Captain Alatriste (1998)
Arturo Pérez-Reverte (1951-)

273 pages

In the fog, rain and mud of Flanders, far from their homes in Spain, soldiers of King Philip IV fight to retain control of the land for their country and for the “true religion,” against “heretical” and “Calvinist” rebels. The Spanish soldiers, often going without pay for many months at a time, fight on wearing disintegrating clothing and eating scraps of food, taking what they can from the occasional sacking of a larger city, or from what little the Dutch of the countryside still have left after many years of war. But then, as Arturo Pérez-Reverte makes clear throughout his novel The Sun Over Breda, these Spanish soldiers fight not so much for riches as for honor --- their own and their country’s.

The novel is one of a series written by Pérez-Reverte chronicling the adventures of the fictional Captain Diego Alatriste. Alatriste fights in the Spanish army during the tumultuous years of the early 17th century, as Spain, after over a century as the strongest, wealthiest and most influential country on earth, was beginning to slowly lose its grip on power. Though still strong, its army suffered the effects of too many widely dispersed commitments; though still wealthy, the country watched its riches disappear at an alarming rate to support those commitments; and though still wielding significant influence, it saw England and France begin to gain the upper hand in conflicts throughout Europe and the New World.

Captain Alatriste’s young, teenage aide Iñigo Balboa narrates the story, presenting it to the reader from some future point, as he looks back and tries to explain the events leading up to the surrender of the Flemish city of Breda to the Spanish in 1624 after a long siege, and the lives of the soldiers with whom he had shared the experience. Captain Alatriste, ever at the center of the Iñigo’s recounting, stands as an icon of the brave soldiers who fought for their homeland, and yet in many ways were homeless and on their own. A skillful fighter whose heroic engagement for the Spanish on far-flung battlefields carries much weight with his squad, Alatriste’s title of ‘Captain’ is actually honorary, not official, bestowed upon him by the men of his squad and even acknowledged by his immediate superiors. Thoughtful and taciturn, Alatriste is hard but fair, the epitome of the honor-bound soldier who follows orders without complaint, but understands too when he must stand with him men and his principles against an injustice.

The novel opens with the bloody sacking by the Spanish of a smaller city near Breda, and continues through a sequence of clashes up to the end of the siege of Breda itself. Pérez-Reverte, however, does not simply present to the reader an action-adventure story of hard-fought battles. Though plenty of swordplay and fighting occurs along the way, The Sun Over Breda stands out as true historical fiction, as the author goes into detail about the difficult conditions in which the soldiers (as well as the Dutch of the war-torn countryside) live, how the years of war have worn them down, and how and why they continue to carry on in the face of nearly unending hardship. Not just a novel of soldiers fighting bravely for their cause, Pérez-Reverte allows us to feel the cold, wet, stitched-together clothing the soldiers continuously patch together, the taste of the dried out bread and then soup they survive on as they wait to fight, and the chaos of hand to hand combat along foggy dikes and in dark caves barely wide enough to pass through.

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Other reviews / information:
To my mind, Viggo Mortensen plays an excellent Captain Alatriste in a film version of the series, Alatriste.

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Book Review: 'The Witch of Hebron' by James Howard Kunstler

The Witch of Hebron: A World Made By Hand Novel (2010)
James Howard Kunstler (1948-)

334 pages

In this sequel to his novel World Made By Hand, James Howard Kunstler continues his vision of a post-apocalyptic America, as seen through the lives of the residents of the small, fictional town of Union Grove in upstate New York. The novel opens in mid-October, just a month or so after the events in the first concluded. (My review of World Made By Hand outlines the causes of the downfall, and its effects on America in general and Union Grove in particular, so I won’t repeat that here.)

An unfortunate accident in the first few pages of the story leads to a willful act by the son of the town’s doctor that drives the rest of the novel’s plot, and carries the action out of Union Grove and into the surrounding countryside as well as nearby hamlets and towns. The tenuous relationship between the original citizens of Union Grove and their new neighbors of the New Faith order continues its fitful development as events lead the two sides to work together, though at times with ulterior motives. The supernatural events that arise near the end of the first novel (somewhat surprisingly, as discussed in the earlier review) are expanded on in this one, as is intimated by the title.

Unlike the startling freshness of the first book, however, in which the dramatic effects of the all too realistic slide of American economy and society into a state of chaos maintain a firm grip on the reader’s attention, this sequel is a coming of age story in a by now familiar environment. Though the action does lead to glimpses of what life has come to in other nearby communities, this serves mostly as a reminder of how fortunate the citizens of Union Grove have it.

And, the story seems mostly focused on character development in preparation for future stories in the series. For example, very near the end of the novel, when the drama of the story has resolved itself, one of the main characters meets another, and “the man he had known pretty well for more than a decade took on a fiendish glow in the flickering candlelight” --- the foreshadowing here is about as subtle as a hammer.

The result is that, although an entertaining read, the story moves somewhat slowly towards its conclusion.

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Other reviews / information:
A strong negative review at Casaubon's Book.

A more positive review by Lance Foster in the NY Journal of Books.

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Other of my book reviews: FICTION and NON-FICTION

Book Review: 'World Made By Hand' by James Howard Kunstler

World Made by Hand (2008)
James Howard Kunstler (1948-)

317 pages

Terrorists have exploded nuclear bombs in Washington DC and Los Angeles, severely disrupting both the government and transportation of goods, and quickly leaving the US economy in taters as confusion and security concerns paralyze the country in fear. A war in the Middle East shuts off a significant amount of the oil supply, destroying what is left of both the US and world economies. Appliances and other electronic equipment sit gathering dust as the electricity has sputtered out, cars and trucks that have not been melted down for metal gather rust in the weeds for lack of gasoline and communication even between neighboring communities has become rare in James Howard Kunstler’s vision of the near future.

All this has occurred several years in the past as World Made by Hand opens. The novel follows the lives of the citizens of a small town in upstate New York, as they come to grips with the new world in which they live. They hear of the violence that has swept through the bigger cities and more populated areas, though their relative isolation from the rest of the country saves them from much of its worst effects; they have less luck when the flu and other diseases spread quickly through the population leaving many dead, as medication now in short supply or out completely.

The residents who have survived find themselves returning to the lifestyles of their ancestors. They learn how to make use of what grows naturally or can be raised in and around their community; how to make the clothing and furniture they used to buy and the now vacant and crumbling stores on the outskirts of town; and how to entertain themselves in a world without the electrical distractions of the past. In Kunstler’s telling, many of the people of this small community, once the turmoil of the transition has been overcome, gradually embrace the new, slower world they have inherited. They may occasionally long for particular aspects of their past, eating a favorite food from a far-away place or throwing clothes in a washing machine, but in general they find that the peace and serenity of their new lives more than makes up for the additional hard work of the highly localized and completely de-electrified new world.

But their isolation is not complete of course, as the townspeople discover when a religious group called the New Faith arrives from Virginia seeking a quieter and safer corner of the country. Taking advantage of the lack of any functioning government in the community, the group buys some buildings and land, and settles in. Although the new settlers bring additional talents and capabilities into the town, their tendency to remain separate from the community, their religious fervor and their distinct manners and habits lead to an on-going, low level tension between the them and the original townspeople.

The New Faith order as a kind of foil for the townspeople. While the New Faith members are tightly organized in their work and their goals, the townspeople have settled into a kind of apolitical and secular stagnation --- they help one another for the common good, but they remain focused primarily on their own lives, no one taking the initiative to create order or structure in the town as a whole. The arrival of the New Faith group forges a sense among the townspeople that they need to pull together to at least meet this new ‘other’ from a stronger position, and thus new leaders to begin this work.

Kunstler builds the plot slowly, introducing the townspeople and their changed world, and then slowly adding in elements that serve both to build tension for the reader, and to shake the characters out of their settled existence. From the sequence of disasters that pre-date the events of the story, to the description of the new life the people build for themselves and the challenges they face, the author keeps the novel grounded in a realism that actually adds an unsettling quality for the reader, as it becomes easy to imagine oneself in the new world he has created. The one false note for me then, comes very near the end, when the author introduces a bit of the supernatural into the story; it seems to come out of nowhere, and feels out of place. (Having now later read Kunstler’s follow-up novel, The Witch of Hebron: A World Made by Hand Novel, it becomes clear that the introduction of the supernatural in World Made by Hand serves as a set-up for a storyline that will apparently be followed in a series of sequels to this opening novel.)

In World Made by Hand James Howard Kunstler presents a startling vision of an all too easy to imagine future. Unlike other apocalyptic stories, the apocalypse here comes from events that could be ripped from today’s headlines --- no world-wide nuclear war, or asteroid slamming into the Earth, just a relatively isolated series of events that jam the gears of our extremely complex modern society.

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Book Review: 'A Philosophical Investigation' by Philip Kerr

A Philosophical Investigation (1992)
Philip Kerr (1956-)

 330 pages


Written in 1992, A Philosophical Investigation is a detective novel set mainly in London of the near future. Philip Kerr imagines a world in 2013 in which the financial separation between the poor and the rich has continued to increase even as the two groups live more tightly packed into the city. Parts of London built in hopes of rejuvenating its downtown have deteriorated into areas dangerous even for the police to enter, and deteriorating economic and cultural conditions have led to a rapid increase in crime --- in particular an epidemic of serial killers. Governments have turned to ever more drastic measures to provide security, with budgetary pressures both constraining and guiding the approaches taken. A possible future not difficult for a reader to identify with.

In the world of the novel, scientists in the recent past have discovered a part of the brain (the ‘ventral medial nucleus’, or VPN) which when removed reduces the self-control of aggression in males. Further research has shown that some people are born without this critical, regulating part of the brain, and that men born without it are more likely to become criminals. And, through a not-unrealistic sequence of events, the government and eventually corporate and insurance programs have led to a large group of men in the United Kingdom being tested for its presence, with promises that the results are anonymous.

The novel turns on the crimes of a killer who has managed to compromise the anonymity of the program, and is killing off those men who have been found to be VPN-negative. Assigned to the case is a tough, no-nonsense detective, Isadora ‘Jake’ Jacowicz, who works in a department of Scotland Yard responsible for investigating serial killers; in addition to her day-to-day detective work, Jake writes and presents lectures on patterns in serial killer behavior at conferences on criminal behavior.

The chapters of the novel alternate between the voices of Jake and the serial killer as they play an increasingly personal game of cat and mouse. As the case proceeds, each begins to recognize in the other a formidable adversary, for whom they develop both a fear and a grudging respect.

Philip Kerr’s placement of the novel in 2013 put it 20 years into the future when he wrote it. Reading it in 2011, with 2013 just on our doorstep, gives an interesting twist to his original setting. The general drift in his world to increasing extremes between rich and poor, and government struggles to provide security, are recognizable aspects of our present world, even if some of the details he imagines (video-phones still have not become commonplace) have not materialized.

More challenging for the reader is the ‘Philosophical’ aspect of A Philosophical Investigation; for reasons that become clear as the novel progresses, the names of famous philosophers of the past become relevant to the story, as do in some cases their theories and writings. Not having a strong background in these philosophers’ histories leaves one struggling at times to see the connections characters are drawing. One is left with the desire to go back and learn more about the philosophers mentioned, and then re-read the book to catch what might have been missed on the first reading.

Even without that background, however, the novel captures the reader’s attention in the way a good detective story should. The tension mounts rapidly as the two protagonists become more and more tightly bound together in what becomes a personal battle between them. Different from so many detective stories though, the novel does not present an easy contrast of good and evil. The reader is drawn into the conflicted complexities of Jake’s feeling about the killer, for whom she develops a kind of understanding, one that does not forgive the killings being perpetrated, but that has some sympathy for the mental struggles that have led to them.

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