Book Review: "Jakob der Lügner" ("Jakob the Liar") by Jurek Becker

Jakob der Lügner (1969)
(Jakob the Liar)

Jurek Becker (1937)

283 pages

In a community caught in a monstrous situation, hope can be a final barricade against despair. Someone seen as a source of hope in the midst of such desperation takes on a status and importance that can feel overwhelming. How does one carry such a burden, live up to such a responsibility?

Jakob, a Polish-Jew living inside a walled off ghetto in a town in German-occupied Poland during World War II, faces this dilemma in Jurek Becker’s novel Jakob the Liar. Jakob works at a railroad yard loading and unloading cargo, and also owns a small restaurant. As the story opens, he is walking home close to curfew time, when a German street-guard accuses him of being out after curfew and orders him to report to the nearby German police station. Though he is eventually allowed to go home, he happens to overhear a radio report while in the police station that indicates that Russian troops have advanced to within 400-500 kilometers of his town. At the railroad yard the following morning, in a moment of crisis as he tries to stop a friend from taking a life-threatening risk, he tells the friend the news about the Russian advance, information that carries tremendous importance for the suffering Jews of the ghetto --- that hope is on the horizon. His friend doesn’t believe him, however, unable to imagine how Jakob could know such a thing. Desperate to convince his friend by substantiating his information, Jakob blurts out that he has a hidden radio, though he actually has no such thing and even the hint of owning one could cost him his life if the Germans hear of it.

Before he can take it back, the news of the secret ratio spreads through the ghetto like wildfire, and Jakob suddenly finds himself the center of attention, the focus of everyone’s hopes. A steady stream of people begin approaching him for the latest news, and, without an actual radio, he is forced to invent Russian progress each night, to tell lies. Jakob at first tries to find ways to extricate himself from the situation he’s inadvertently created, but his friends and neighbors in the ghetto, so desperate for any hopeful news, and unaware of the reality, end up blocking his every attempt. Finally even Jakob himself realizes, as he notices the positive effect his daily updates have on his fellow Jews, that he won’t be able to bring himself to stop the charade.

In telling the story, Becker convincingly recreates the environment of life in the ghetto. Not surprisingly, the tense and always dangerous interactions between the Jews of the ghetto and the German overseers play an important role. When, for example, two German SS officers come into the ghetto looking for a particular Jew, Becker’s description highlights the fear and, on both sides, the hatred that accompanies them; the many different ways that the Jews in the ghetto react are as varied as the people involved. More central to Becker’s telling are the complex relationships between the Jews themselves, as they try to survive the daily dangers of their situation. Even the presence of the radio becomes a point of strenuous division in the population of the ghetto.

The basic story of the novel is simple, and as Becker sets it up in the first couple of dozen pages it is hard to imagine how it will fill out the rest of the pages of the book. But the key to the novel is not the story of the non-existent radio, or the lies that Jakob must invent because of it; what shines through in Becker’s writing is the psychological complexity of life in the ghetto, and the variety of personalities and attitudes that make up the population. He skillfully mixes moments of humor and mundane events in the lives of the residents, with periods of fear and despair they feel at the apparent hopelessness of their situation.

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Book Review: "The Catcher in the Rye" by J. D. Salinger

The Catcher in the Rye (1951)  

J. D. Salinger (1919-2010)

214 pages

Having seen the trailer for the new documentary about J. D. Salinger’s life several times in the last couple of weeks, I decided it was time to fill-in a hole in my reading list: I’d never read The Catcher in the Rye. I hadn’t been avoiding it all these years exactly, but it has remained one of those well-known novels that “everyone” seems have read except me. One concrete reason that may have contributed to this is that many years ago I read his book Nine Stories --- it was on my parent’s bookshelf and I had recognized the author’s famous name, and I remember being under-whelmed at the time. I no longer recall why, but I simply didn’t find the stories particularly engaging. So, I suppose I’ve just never been all that motivated to seek out The Catcher in the Rye.

I’ve rectified that now, having just finished an old edition of the book my wife has. And, at the risk of typing out a kind of blasphemy, I didn’t find it very engaging either, at least not to the extent I expected from what I’ve heard about it, especially recently again, from the famous authors and actors who comment positively on it in the trailer for the documentary.

For those who have not read it and are not familiar with the story, Salinger wrote the novel in the voice of Holden Caulfield, a boy in his late teens from a well-to-do family in New York City. Written as a kind of testimonial, Holden recollects as he says in the opening paragraph, “the madman stuff that happened to me around last Christmas.” On the verge of being kicked out of his third prep school because of poor academic performance, and with Christmas break just days away, Holden abruptly leaves the school and takes the train to New York City. He has no firm plans, except that he does not want to arrive at home before his parents receive the letter informing them of his dismissal. He describes his many experiences and encounters over the few days he tries to avoid going home, as he bounces haphazardly around the city. It becomes clear from his telling of these days (and nights) that his failures in school are not due to a lack of intellectual ability so much as to the same alienation and aimlessness that drives his chaotic wandering through the city.

Salinger’s writing captures Holden’s voice brilliantly, and through Holden’s telling of his adventures in the city, and his recollections of earlier events, his confusion with the world and uncertainty over his place in it become clear. I suppose the struggle I had as I read the story may reveal more about me than the novel itself: I have trouble reading (or watching movies for that matter) about someone who is self-destructing at every turn due to fundamental misunderstandings of themselves and others. In his recent novel, The Sound of Things Falling, Juan Gabriel Vásquez writes: “Experience, or what we call experience, is not the inventory of our pains, but rather sympathy we learn to feel for the pain of others.” Holden sometimes recognizes “the pain of others”, but he seems incapable of learning sympathy for it, of finding empathy for those he meets. For him, everyone is classified in some simple categories, mostly negative, and even most of those who he first states that he likes quickly come in for complaint.

Maybe this was the point for Salinger in writing this novel; if it was, he succeeded brilliantly, but for me it made for an extremely frustrating read.

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Book Review: "The Sound of Things Falling" by Juan Gabriel Vásquez

The Sound of Things Falling (2013)   

Juan Gabriel Vásquez (1973)

Translated by Anne McLean

270 pages

Adulthood brings with it the pernicious illusion of control, and perhaps even depends on it. … Disillusion comes sooner or later, but it always comes, it doesn’t miss an appointment, it never has.

For Antonio Yammara, a young professor of law teaching at a university in Bogotá, Columbia, and the main character in Juan Gabriel Vásquez’s The Sound of Things Falling, his “disillusion” comes suddenly and harshly. In its aftermath, his feeling of control over his life and his future are irrevocably shattered, and he struggles to make sense of how his “biography has been molded by distant events, by other people’s wills.”

The novel opens in present day Bogotá, with news reports of a hippopotamus that has been shot dead after its escape from the abandoned zoo of former drug kingpin Pablo Escobar, a major figure in the drug trade that brought uncertainty and violence to Columbia. Watching the media coverage, Yammara is reminded of a mysterious acquaintance, Ricardo Laverde, he met some fifteen years earlier in a pool hall near the university. Though he knew Laverde for only a few weeks, it becomes a fateful meeting that alters Yammara’s life.

Over the course of the novel Yammara tells us the story of his struggle to make sense of what happened to him, and how his desperate search for answers led him to trace the path, through time and space, that brought Laverde into his life. From the late 1990’s, the story goes back to events in the 1960’s and early 70’s, when the drug trade in Columbia drifted gradually from a low level and uncoordinated activity of relative innocents to a highly centralized business of famous drug lords and cartels, with the War on Drugs organized in response against it. Yammara eventually comes to understand how apparently minor and inconsequential choices in someone else’s life led to an impact on his own that he had little hope of foreseeing.

Vásquez has written The Sound of Things Falling as a kind of mystery novel, though the questions here do not concern who done it?, but rather how did this happen?. We discover with Yammara, slowly, piece by tiny piece, the history that explains the dramatic moment that changed his life. The deliberate pace of the story reinforces Vásquez’s theme that there are “long processes that end up running into our life … [but that] tend to be hidden” from us, unseen and unexpected. When these slowly developing “processes” eventually run into our lives, they can catch us unaware, sending us spinning off into an unexpected future and, like Yammara, we have only imperfect memories and incomplete information available to help us understand what has happened to us. Finally we are left with the realization of the tenuous and uncertain path of our life, however much control over it we may like to believe we have.

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Book Review: "Before Time Could Change Them: The Complete Poems of Constantine P. Cavafy

Before Time Could Change Them:
The Complete Poems of Constantine P. Cavafy (2001)
Translated by Theoharis C. Theoharis

354 pages

We are told that we shouldn’t judge a book by its cover; but the beautiful cover and striking title of this book --- Before Time Could Change Them --- immediately stood out to me as I browsed slowly through the bookstore. Although I had never heard of the poet Constantine Cavafy, and haven’t read a lot of poetry, the title struck a chord, speaking in one short phrase to both human frailty and desire. Paging through the book and stopping to read several of the poems in this collection of Cavafy’s work, his mix of personal reflections on life and references to classical European antiquity drew me in.

In his poems, Cavafy does not focus on the beauty and wonder of nature; here instead we read about the mystery and depth of the human spirit: our hopes and our fears, our desires and our vanities. A deep melancholy courses through many of Cavafy’s poems, which explore unrequited love, lost youth and the tenuousness of success.

The title poem captures well Cavafy’s style well. Reflecting on the departure of a lover to a distant city, he concludes with the devastatingly poignant realization that the pain of parting may also contain a silver lining:

It was circumstances. --- Or perhaps Fortune
came on the scene as artist, separating them now,
before their feeling could vanish, before Time could change them;
the one will seem eternally what he was to the other ---
a twenty four year old; a young, handsome man. 

Other poems look back on the struggle against declining body and mind from deep in the fall and winter of life --- after time has changed them, as it were. The poem Melancholy of Jason Kleander; Poet in Kommagini; 595 A.D. opens

The aging of my body and my features
is a wound from a savage knife.
There’s no enduring it. 

And in another poem, An Old Man sits alone in a café

And he reflects on Temperance, on how it fooled him;
and how he always believed --- what madness! ---
that lying voice which said, “Tomorrow. You have lots of time.”

He remembers passions that he checked; and how much
joy he sacrificed. His brainless wisdom,
each ruined change derides it now. 

The poems drawn from history and legend also focus on the human element of the story, the emotional context of the moment: the vanity of rulers and scholars, and their fears as well. In Nero’s Term, the Roman emperor seeks out prophets to reveal his future:

Nero did not worry when he heard
what the Delphic oracle revealed.
“Seventy-three is an age he should fear.”
He still had time to be happy.
He’s thirty years old. The god
has given him a very ample term
in which to prepare for future dangers.

Now he’ll go back to Rome a little tired,
but tired gloriously from that trip,
on which all the days were pleasure---
at theaters, in gardens, in gymnasiums …
Evenings in Achaia’s cities …
Ah the pleasure of naked bodies above all …

That is Nero’s portion. And in Spain Galba
secretly musters and drills his army,
the old man who’s reached his seventy-third year. 

But not all is lamentation and disquiet in Cavafy’s poems. He also writes of desire and love, such as in Blue Eyes, which opens

These vibrant spheres of light were not made
     for scorn, oh beautiful Circassian girl.
Not wrath’s, but joy’s and passion’s lamps,
     pleasure’s lavish donors,
     promise of sweetness in fleshly delight. 

This wonderful collection of poems includes a Forward by Gore Vidal and an Introduction by the translator, which together present a brief history of Cavafy’s life, and place his work in some historical context and literary style. Many of Cavafy’s poems, as can be seen in several of the selections I’ve included above, are almost prose-like in their structure, making his work very approachable. But the relatively simple structure can be deceiving, because his choice of just the right word and his slight turn of a phrase draw a reader effortlessly into the emotional settings he creates.

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 I’ve included the complete Cavafy poem Waiting for the Barbarians at the end of my review of the J. M. Coetzee book of the same name.

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Book Review: "TransAtlantic" by Colum McCann

TransAtlantic (2013)
Colum McCann (1965)

307 pages

There are passages in Colum McCann’s novel TransAtlantic in which the suffering and loss the characters encounter tear at one’s heart. And yet in other scenes these characters experience wonder and accomplishment that fill one’s heart with hope. Here, condensed into a novel, are the vagaries of life.

Spanning the past one hundred and sixty some years, McCann builds his story around brief but critical times in the lives of several historical figures. These ‘real’ characters, otherwise unrelated, become linked together in his novel through the transformative effect they have on the lives of four fictional characters, one or another of whom they happen to come into brief contact with: four generations of women --- mothers and daughters, one to the next. Through his characters, historical and fictional, McCann explores the vicissitudes of everyday life, whether experienced by the famous or the unknown: from the dreams and passions that motivate us to push beyond what we already know, to the natural and man-made disasters that can threaten to destroy our hope and our will.

The novel focuses on each of the main characters in turn (if not precisely in chronological order), and is built around crossings most of the characters make of the Atlantic Ocean, between North America and Ireland.

The first half of the book tells the stories of the historical figures in the novel. In the mid-1840’s Frederick Douglass, then an escaped slave living in Boston, spends time in Ireland speaking on the need to abolish slavery and raising funds for anti-slavery groups in the United States, as well as receiving donations to buy his own freedom. Some seventy-five years later, in 1919, Jack Alcock and Teddy Brown fly a modified World War I bomber --- a cloth-framed biplane --- non-stop from Newfoundland to Ireland, the first such plane flight across the Atlantic. Finally, another eighty years further on, in the late 1990’s, former Senator George Mitchell leads negotiations to end the “Troubles,” the long period of self-inflicted death and destruction in Northern Ireland.

The stories of these famous men become bound together, in McCann’s telling of their histories, by a woman who encounters Douglass during his time in Ireland, and then by the woman’s daughter, grand-daughter and great-granddaughter, who eventually cross paths with Alcock and Brown, and later Mitchell. Though the meetings are tangential to the lives of the historical figures --- unimportant to them really --- for the women these encounters provide a glimpse into possibilities for futures different than they had earlier imagined for themselves.

The second half of the book details the lives of each of these four generations of women. The men of the first half drift for the most part into the background, though never completely disappearing. Instead it is now several of the women who are inspired to make trans-Atlantic crossings and search out their destinies, as had before them the famous men they have met. Each in their own way, these women experience both the marvels and the pains of life, as they travel far from their origins.

In a note at the end of the novel, McCann thanks among others Wendell Berry, who, like McCann, has written movingly of the land and people’s place on it, and also forcefully on injustice and against violence. These themes appear through TransAtlantic: Douglass goes to Ireland arguing for justice for slaves; a century and a half later George Mitchell makes that same trip to try and bring peace to Northern Ireland; one of the primary motivations of Alcock and Brown to make their historic flight was to turn a machine of war, the WWI bomber, into one of peace. The women of the story, in their more private histories, also engage with the injustice and violence of the world, whether it is the struggle to work alongside men, the misery of the U.S. Civil War or the seemingly endless and random death of the Irish “Troubles.”

McCann’s powerful writing envelopes a reader in his characters; he does not so much tell us what they are thinking as form images of their emotional reaction to the world, as they reflect on their past successes and failures, try to make sense of their present struggles, and imagine their potential futures. The images he paints can sometimes amaze with their beauty and precision, but also in other passages break one’s heart when faced with the crushing depth of a character’s pain.

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Book Review: "Shift" by Hugh Howey

Shift (2013)
Hugh Howey (1975)

603 pages

[Note: although I make it a point to not include spoilers in my reviews, this is the second book in a trilogy, and it's not possible to write about it without including some context from the first book, Wool.  So, if you haven't read that first book yet, I suggest you jump back to my review here.]

In Wool (reviewed here), Hugh Howey introduced us to a world of silos, deep underground structures home to thousands of people living beneath a poisonous surface. The story in Wool takes place during a critical couple of weeks in the life of a silo, as the elite of the existing order struggle against a revolution from below. The novel provides some hints at how this strange, future world came about, but we readers only come to know what the characters themselves can ferret out from the well-hidden information they discover, and we are constrained too in our understanding by the characters own biases based on their limited view of the world they grew up in. Shift, the second novel in the series, serves as a prequel to Wool, describing the origin history of this future world.

(If you have not yet read Wool, then you may want to skip the rest of this review until you have; I try to keep any of my reviews from containing significant spoilers, but it is not possible to review Shift without giving away some information that is only revealed well into the telling of Wool. Even my opening paragraph above reveals a subtle piece of information that many of the characters in the story only discover well into the action.)  

Shift tells the founding story of the world of silos. Spanning several centuries, the action begins just thirty-five years or so in our future, concluding at roughly the same point as Wool, though from a new point of view. In Shift, Howey describes all too plausible global dangers and political machinations during the middle of our current century that lead to the construction and operation of the silos. By transforming relatively minor extrapolations of current technology into deadly weapons, evil forces in the world threaten to destroy humanity even as powerful leaders aware of the danger struggle to put in place their solution to it. Once the silos have been built and populated, the remainder of the story takes place over the succeeding centuries, as the law of unintended consequences frustrates the careful planning, and many checks and balances, that the “founders” built into their system.

Whereas Wool reads as an adventure story of revolution and discovery set in a far, if dystopian, future, Shift adds to the mix a nightmarish reality of how the silos come about that feels too probable not to leave a reader scared for the future of our real world.

Like Wool, Shift was originally written as a set of e-books which have been combined here into a single print edition titled The Shift Omnibus. The approach Howey uses is similar in both novels: in each of three sections (originally released as separate e-books), the action is divided into very short chapters which alternate between two frames of reference, the two paths eventually coming together as the action in the section plays out. And, as in the earlier novel, this technique and Howey’s writing style in general give the story an urgency and ‘cliff-hanger’ feeling that make it hard to set the book down.

A quote from my review of Wool applies equally to this prequel: “Whatever you do, don’t read Hugh Howey’s novel Wool --- unless you are prepared to drop everything else you are doing and stiff-arm any interruptions. Once you have entered into his dystopian view of earth’s future, you won’t want to set the book down until you finish.”

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A third novel, Dust, will apparently be appearing soon.

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Book Review: "The Forever War" by Joe Haldeman

The Forever War (1974)  

Joe Haldeman (1943)

266 pages

What are the consequences of a militarized world prone to a policy of ‘shoot first and ask questions later,’ both for the soldiers who most leave home to fight and for the societies they leave behind? In the novel The Forever War, couched in the techniques and devices of science fiction, author Joe Haldeman provides his reflections on this question. Written in 1974, the story opens in 1996, which would seem to date it for a modern reader; however it serves Haldeman’s purpose perfectly: as the Vietnam veteran explains in the Author’s Note to the edition published in 2008, he wanted the story set in a time when military (and to some extent political) leaders would still be products of the Vietnam War. This choice of starting points turns out not to be a distraction, even for a reader in 2013, and is at any rate quickly left behind by the rapid progression of time in the story.

As the novel opens, a group of draftee soldiers struggle though basic training on Earth. Soon enough, however, they ship out for further training on a planet far outside Pluto’s orbit. It turns out that portals in space have been discovered that allow ships to jump instantaneously to distant points in the galaxy. This has led to shiploads of colonists traveling out to earth-like planets around far-away stars; when one such ship ends up destroyed, political and military leaders quickly put the Earth on a war footing. A planet-wide military command is created, and the best and brightest among all nations are drafted into a fighting force to counter an alien race known as the Taurans.

Through the eyes of the main character, William Mandella, we get an intimate view of this war of the future. Though the technology may be new, and the locations exotic, Mandella experiences the personal and organizational confusion of being a foot soldier in a conflict that he feels little direct stake in. The disorder and contradictions arise even before the first battle: though they have trained on a planet that has the near absolute zero temperatures the military leadership expected to encounter in the war, the new soldiers’ first engagement is on a jungle planet, against an enemy that no one can even tell them the shape or look of. That the confusion of the battle scenes and the camaraderie between the fellow soldiers feels so convincing would seem to reflect the experience Haldeman brings to the story from his time fighting in Vietnam.

The novel’s title comes from the time dilation the soldiers experience as they travel at near light-speeds across the galaxy from one battle to the next. The story spans a little over a thousand years of Earth-time, though Mandella ages only about a decade during that period, participating in only a handful of battles. When his first two-year period of military service ends, he heads back to Earth, on which thirty years have past. Once back, however, Mandella and his fellow returnees struggle to re-integrate into a society that has changed dramatically during their absence. He and many of his former colleagues soon end up back in the service, returning to the one home where they feel, if not exactly happy, at least a part of something they understand. As his time in the war continues, Mandella’s degree of separation with society back on Earth only widens, eventually impacting even his military life and relationships, though he himself remains far from Earth.

Haldeman’s style and some of his themes reminded me a bit of the science fiction stories by Robert Sheckley, in Store of the Worlds (reviewed here), particularly Sheckley’s depiction in Morning After of an economic system on a future Earth in which there are not enough jobs for everyone; and his description in If the Red Slayer of the life of a soldier in a future war, in which the wounded are able to be repaired no matter what their injury, and are then sent back into battle. As does Sheckley, Haldeman wraps his story in a science fiction structure, but at its heart this is a tale of the chaos and confusion of war, and its impact on both the soldiers who go off to fight, and the society on the home front built around its demands. As but one small example, Haldeman’s imagined solution to the issue of men and women serving together in the military will certainly surprise many readers.

The Forever War stands as a rousing novel of science fiction, with a fascinating imagination of our future. At the same time it provides social commentary relevant even today, forty years after it was written.

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