Bill Murray Reads Huck Finn

As the video explains, the section being read was not in the novel originally, but was added in some a critical edition in the 1990s.  If you're wondering why you've never heard of this, it's probably because it aired on CSPAN-2 in 1996.  Murray's reading ends about 14 minutes into the video.  It is followed with a panel discussion including William Styron (The Confessions of Nat Turner, Sophie's Choice), and authors Shelby Foote, Roy Blount, and Twain biographer Justin Kaplan.

The Spanish Earth

Fans of Hemingway (or anyone who's seen Hemingway and Gellhorn) will know that Hemingway, along with Gellhorn and Dos Passos, went to Spain to report on the Spanish Civil War, in which the newly established Republic (the monarchy had recently abdicated control of the nation) was under siege by the general Franco, a fascist (I use this word in the technical, not hyperbolic, sense).  Franco received aid from Mussolini-led Italy and the Third Reich.  Hemingway and Dos Passos, with financial support from others (including authors Dorothy Parker and Lillian Hellman), went to Spain to film a documentary that would bring the plight of the Spanish Republic to the American people.  That film is The Spanish Earth.

If the sound seems strange, it's because they had no sound recording equipment with them in Spain.  All sounds were added in post-production.   Another point of interest: Ernest Hemingway himself reads the voice-over narration.  Orson Welles was originally hired to do it, but he and Hemingway had some issues:   

Paris Review Interviews

Paris Review has spent decades interviewing the greatest writers from across the world.  From the 1950s, when they interviewed Graham Greene, T.S. Eliot, James Thurber, Hemingway, Capote, Faulkner, E.M. Forster, Dorothy Parker, Ralph Ellison and others, to the current decade where they interview Ray Bradbury, Bret Easton Ellis, Jeffrey Eugenides, R. Crumb, David Mitchell, and Ursula K. LeGuin.   

And guess what?  They're all available to read online, in their entirety, for free.

1958: Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak

The Author:

Boris Pasternak (1890-1960) was born into a wealthy assimilated Jewish family in Moscow.  His father was a painter and art professor and his mother was a pianist.  Leo Tolstoy was a close friend of the Pasternak family and his family became part of the Tolstoyan movement.*   Pasternak went to college to study music in Moscow, but in 1910 began taking studies in philosophy at the University of Marburg, in Germany.

Pasternak returned to Russia at the outbreak of World War One. In 1914, he also published his first collection of poetry, Twin in the Clouds.  Pasternak remained in Russia through the October Revolution and the Russian Civil War.  In 1922, as the Civil War ended and the USSR was formed, Pasternak published his collection of poems titled, My Sister, Life, which earned him massive acclaim.  In 1922, Pasternak married Evgeniia Lourie with whom he had a son.  They divorced in 1931. He married Zinaida Neigauz in 1934.

Over the decades following the Civil War, the Soviet Union began to institute stricter censorship and harsher punishments.  In 1934, one of his friends and colleagues, Osip Mandelstam, was abducted by the secret police.  More of his friends were taken in the Great Purge of 1937.  Pasternak believed he and his wife would be taken also, after he refused to sign a statement supporting the death penalty for those swept up in the purge, a statement which was signed by most of the Union of Soviet Writers.  

In 1946, Pasternak began his affair with Olga Ivinskaya, a single mother working for the literary magazine, Novy Mir.  By all accounts, Ivinskaya was Pasternak's muse and their relationship was incredibly important to both of them.  In 1949, Ivinskaya was arrested by the KGB and sent to the gulags for five years.    

In 1956, Pasternak finished Doctor Zhivago, but no Russian printing house was willing to publish it.  An Italian publishing agent in Russia managed to arrange an Italian translation which he brought back with him to Italy, where it was published in 1957.  The book was banned in the USSR, and a smear campaign against Doctor Zhivago and Boris Pasternak was launched by the Soviet press.  In 1958, the Nobel Committee awarded Pasternak the Nobel Prize for Literature, which he declined, fearing harsh reprisal from the Soviet government.  This inspired the Pulitzer Prize winning editorial cartoon by Bill Mauldin:

"I won the Nobel Prize for literature. What was your crime?"

Pasternak remained in Russia.  He announced plans to write a trilogy of plays, but died of lung cancer before the first was completed.

The Book:   

Length: 563 pages

Subject/Genre: Post-Revolutionary Russia/Historical fiction

What can I say about Doctor Zhivago that hasn't been said before?  The old paperback I picked up boasts on its cover that it's "One of the great novels of the century."  Which, along with some books on this list (e.g. The Grapes of Wrath, All Quiet on the Western Front), makes it a bit difficult for me to review.  But I'll try.  

If you're not familiar with the story, it follows Yurii Zhivago, the titular doctor.  Beginning around the Revolution of 1905, then skipping around up to the October Revolution in 1917, we see Zhivago's growth into adulthood as well as a parallel focus on Lara Guishar.  Zhivago is orphaned at a young age and sent to live with the Gromekos, a wealthy couple whose daughter, Antonina (aka Tonia), Yurii eventually marries.  Lara is the daughter of a widowed French émigré.  Her mother owns a dress shop which is abandoned in the revolution.  As a teenager, Lara has an ongoing affair with her mother's beau.  All in all, there are about half a dozen characters who show up frequently throughout the novel, fighting with or against each other as circumstances determine.      

One of the great things about this book, and one part of what makes the story so compelling, is the perpetual grey area the characters inhabit.  The novel is extremely political, as one would expect from the subject matter.  But Pasternak manages to capture the complexity of the situation, politically and morally.  When a violently oppressive system is overthrown, and a massive power struggle consumes a large nation, when dozens of competing factions vie for political and military supremacy, morality becomes obfuscated.  Zhivago is a rich Moscow intellectual, who supported the overthrow of the Tsar and had great hopes for a socialist state, yet the very fact that he is a rich intellectual from the capital makes him an enemy to many of the people he ideologically supports.      

But beyond the politics, there is a beautiful story about a man trying to survive a troubling and dangerous era.  I don't want to give away too much of the story, but suffice it to say that Pasternak succeeds in creating a character as multi-faceted and complex as his times.  

I want to include a particularly fantastic passage here, which has nothing to do with the review, except that I wanted to share it.  It's a bit long, so feel free to skip it if you want.  Yurii Zhivago, speaking of death:

"'You want to know my opinion as a scientist? Perhaps some other time? No? Right now? Well, as you wish.  But it's difficult like that, all of a sudden.' And there and then he delivered a whole impromptu lecture, astonished that he could do it.

"Resurrection.  In the crude from in which it is preached to console the weak, it is alien to me.  I have always understood Christ's words about the living and the dead in a different sense.  Where could you find room for the hordes of people accumulated over thousands of years? The universe isn't big enough for them; God, the good, and meaningful purpose would be crowded out.  They'd be crushed by these throngs of greedy merely for the animal life.      

"But all the time, life, one, immense, identical throughout its innumerable combinations abd transformations, fills the universe and is continually reborn.  You are anxious whether you will rise from the dead or not, but you rose from the dead when you were born and you didn't notice it.    

"Will you feel pain? Do the tissues feel their disintegration? In other words, what will happen to your consciousness?  But what is consciousness?  Let's see.  A conscious attempt to fall asleep is sure to produce insomnia, to try to be conscious of one's own digestion is a sure way to upset the stomach.  Consciousness is a poison when we apply it to ourselves.  Consciousness is a light directed outward, it lights up the way ahead of us so that we don't stumble.  It's like the headlights on a locomotive--turn them inward and you'd have a crash.    

"So what will happen to your consciousness?  Your consciousness, yours, not anyone else's.  Well, what are you?  There's the point.  Let's try to find out.  What is it about you that you have always known as yourself?  What are you conscious of in yourself?  Your kidneys? Your liver? Your blood vessels?   No.  However far back you go in your memory, it is always in some external, active manifestation of yourself that you come across your identity--in the work of your hands, in your family, in other people.  And now listen carefully.  You in others--this is your soul.  This is what you are.  This is what your consciousness has breathed and lived on and enjoyed throughout your life--your soul, your immortality, your life in others.  And what now? You have always been in others and you will always remain in others.  And what does it matter to you if later on that is called your memory?  This will be you--the you that enters the future and becomes a part of it."

Doctor Zhivago has a famous film adaptation.  The 1965 film version directed by David Lean and starring Omar Sharif (Lawrence of Arabia) was a giant financial success, remaining the eighth highest grossing film ever, after adjusting for inflation.

While this is certainly an excellent novel, I'm not sure I'd recommend it to everybody.  If you're looking for a light read, or have no interest in the politics and ideology of Revolutionary-era Russia, you probably won't enjoy it.  It's a very dense book (which is pretty characteristic of Russian lit) and requires at least a bit of knowledge of that time period (e.g., if you don't know the difference between the Reds, Greens, and Whites, you may end up confused), but this is nothing ten minutes on wikipedia can't help you out with.  

The Bestsellers of 1958:

1. Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak

2. Anatomy of a Murder by Robert Traver

3. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

4. Around the World with Auntie Mame by Partick Dennis

5. From the Terrace by John O'Hara

6. Eloise at Christmastime by Kay Thompson

7. Ice Palace by Edna Ferber

8. The Winthrop Woman by Anya Seton

9. The Enemy Camp by Jerome Weidman

10. Victorine by Frances Parkinson Keyes

Also published in 1958:

Chinua Achebe - Things Fall Apart

Truman Capote - Breakfast at Tiffany's

Ian Fleming - Dr. No

Jack Kerouac - The Dharma Bums

Sources:

Pasternak, Boris. Doctor Zhivago. 1958. Trans. Max Hayward, Manya Harari, and Bernard 

          Guerney. New York: Ballantine Books, 1981. Print.

1951: From Here To Eternity by James Jones

The Author:

          James Jones (1921-1977) was born in Robinson, Illinois. Although the discovery of oil on family property briefly brought the Joneses wealth, when Jones graduated High School in 1939, the money had run out.  With no money to pay for college, Jones joined the U.S. Army Air Corps.  His poor eyesight prevented him from becoming a pilot, so in 1940 he transferred to the infantry and was sent to Schofield Barracks in Honolulu. Over the following year, both of Jones’ parents died, and the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. In December 1942, Jones was sent out to fight in Guadalcanal. 

            Wounded physically and emotionally, Jones was shipped home in 1943. He decided to stay in the army on limited duty, but was sent to a combat outfit preparing to ship out for battle.  Jones went AWOL and headed back to Robinson.  Here, he met his mentor and future lover, Lowney Handy and her husband Harry.  Jones went AWOL several times over the following year, and was eventually given a medical discharge.  He then went to live at the Handy Writers’ Colony. 

In 1951, he published From Here to Eternity, which focused on the military life in Hawaii.  In 1957 he married Gloria Patricia Mosolino.  They moved back to the Writers’ Colony, but left after a violent altercation between Lowney and Gloria. The Joneses moved to Paris. Although he published many novels over the decades following From Here to Eternity, the first to receive the critical and public reception that FHtE received was 1962’s The Thin Red Line, about his experiences in Guadalcanal.  This was the second book of his “War Trilogy.”  He returned to the U.S. to teach at the Florida International Institute in 1974.  He died of congestive heart failure in 1977.  The last book of his war trilogy, Whistle, was published posthumously in 1978.

The Book:

First Edition Cover

From Here To Eternity follows the life of Robert E. Lee Prewitt, a soldier from a small southern town stationed in Hawaii before the U.S. entered World War II.  Prewitt had blinded another soldier during a boxing match before the events in the novel begin gave up boxing so as not to hurt any one else.  Upon transferring back to G company, known for its boxing, Prewitt’s refusal to fight puts him at odds with his superiors.  There are other major storylines, like Sgt. Warden’s affair with Cpt. Holmes’ wife, Karen. 

The novel deals honestly and directly with morally ambiguous situations, and with topics like sex and honor.  Which is a bit of a relief and surprise, seeing as the previous bestseller was about a morally upright priest and the book after this is biblical historical fiction about a morally upright metallurgist.  Of course, this frankness, the sex scenes, the frequent cussing, would itself help sales for the novel.  Controversy is good for sales. 

That’s not to say that the novel isn’t good.  It is, very much so.  In fact, From Here To Eternity is one of the six novels on the list to also appear on Modern Library’s List of 100 Best Novels (the other five: The Grapes of Wrath, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Portnoy’s Complaint, Main Street, and Ragtime).  From Here To Eternity was a critical and commercial success. 

Of course, the 1953 film adaptation starring Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr, is about as famous (and well-received) as the novel.  Even if you’ve never heard of the movie (several people I’ve spoken to recently haven’t), you’re definitely familiar with this famous scene:

If you don’t recognize it here, you might recognize it from The Seven Year Itch, Airplane!, The Nutty Professor, or Shrek 2, as well as countless other films and TV shows that parodied this scene.

The novel’s a little slow in the beginning, and it’s not a war novel so much as it is an army novel. If you like books that deal with complex relationships, both romantic and professional, and with complex group dynamics, this is a must-read.

Also Published in 1951:

Isaac Asimov - Foundation

Ray Bradbury - The Illustrated Man

Howard Fast - Spartacus

J. D. Salinger - The Catcher in the Rye

Herman Wouk - The Caine Mutiny

Sources: 

Jones, James. From Here To Eternity. New York: Scribner's. 1951. Print.

Dictionary of American Biography. New York: Scribner's. Supplement 10 (1976-

           80). Print.

Back to the Future Theory

What!?  Two movie posts in one week!  Yes, well, so be it.  This is a fan theory of mine that not only explains things like what the flux capacitor does, but answers some continuity 'problems' in the films and introduces (and solves) a couple more.  It is inexcusably complicated.  

Note: 1. Whenever someone travels backwards through time, they create a new timeline.  Timelines will be named in the order they are created (e.g., when Marty first travels through time and arrives in 1955, he creates Timeline B.  Everyone indigenous to that timeline will be surnamed B, e.g., Doc B.)    2. Each timeline will be identical to the one that preceded it, with the exception of events altered as a result of the time travelers whose arrival created the new timeline.  

Part 1:

It’s been pointed out many times before that the Marty that gets sent back at the end of BttF Part 1 is not the same Marty we know and love.  This Marty was born in Timeline B, had cool parents, etc.  The popular fan theory about this is that Doc Brown made Marty B disappear.  The implications are more complex than that.  If Marty B did not go back to 1955, then why don’t we have the same paradox that we’d have had if Marty had never been born?  This led me to understand the flux capacitor.  When Marty A goes back in time and creates Timeline B, the flux capacitor stops working.  When Marty prevents his parents from meeting, he starts to disappear.  This is because Timeline A and Timeline B are still causally connected.  The flux capacitor allows multiple Timelines to exist, without being causally connected, therefore preventing paradoxes.  Part 1 is the easiest to deal with.  Marty skips to the future of Timeline B.  Then Doc B tells him to get in the Delorean, right now!  

Part 2:       

In 2015, Marty’s girlfriend Jennifer sees future Marty.  This is impossible.  Marty A disappeared in 1985 and skipped straight to 2015.  So who has been living Marty A’s life for the last 30 years?  Marty B.  Doc B isn’t cold-hearted enough to make the guy disappear forever, he just sent him a bit ahead, which is why he needed to get Marty out of the way as soon as possible (NOTE: In regards to the Rolls Royce accident that we see at the end of Part 3 and is mentioned in this sequence, it’s plausible that the accident would have occurred to Marty B, considering the chronology of the final scenes in Part 3.  This poses no problem to the theory.)    While there, Biff B steals the Delorean and travels back to 1985, creating Timeline C.  One of the big questions people have is “Why didn’t Biff travel to the future of the timeline he just created, i.e. Timeline C?”  Not only is the flux capacitor is keeping the timelines separate, 2015 B can’t collapse the same way 1985 A did because there are non-indigenous entities in 2015 B, namely, Marty A.  So, Old Biff B gets back to 2015 B, and Marty A and Doc B go to 1985, only to discover that it’s 1985 C, (their arrival changing it to Timeline D).  Marty A and Doc B go back to 1955 (creating Timeline E).  In 1955 E, we see another instance of Marty A and the events from Part 1 play out as they already had (justifying point 2 of my intro notes).  So, all seems well, then Doc B gets sent back to 1885 (creating Timeline F).  Marty A then gets a letter from Doc B, saying he’s in 1885.  Marty then finds indigenous Doc Brown (i.e., Doc E).  You may ask, how did Doc B send a letter from Timeline F to timeline E?  The flux capacitor is no longer working! Timeline E and F are still causally linked!

Part 3:   

Doc E helps Marty A go back in time, creating Timeline G.  Wild West stuff happens.  The photos change because Timelines F and G are still causally linked.  The good guys win and Marty goes to 1985 G.  He goes to pick up his girlfriend (leaving the indigenous Marty w/o a car and no idea where his girlfriend is) and almost gets into an accident with a Rolls Royce. She takes the fax from 2015 B out of her pocket and sees it disappear.  This is significant.  Marty A and Doc B left Jennifer B (and the letter) on her porch in Timeline D.  How’d she get here?  My conclusion is that, without the flux capacitor, entities existing outside their native timeline will phase into new timelines, so long as the new timeline does not preclude the person from existing. Since there is no longer a flux capacitor, the letter is causally connected to Timeline F (i.e. the one after Marty retrieved the Sports Almanac and events could be assumed to be otherwise similar to Timeline B). Then time traveling trains, roll credits, and, assumably, Marty A and his doppleganger.

1939: The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

The Author:

            John Steinbeck, Jr. (1902-1968) was born in Salinas, California, a then-rural area in Northern California, to John Ernst Steinbeck Sr., Treasurer for Monterey County, and Olive Hamilton, a former schoolteacher.  He lived in Salinas until he attended Stanford in 1920, but left in 1925 without receiving a degree.  He then moved to New York to start his writing career, but returned to California in 1928.  He published his first novel, Cup of Gold, in 1929, and married Carol Henning in 1930.  He published a few more works before his first popular success in 1935, Tortilla Flat.  In 1936, he published In Dubious Battle, a labor novel that presaged his next two major works, Of Mice and Men (1937) and The Grapes of Wrath (1939). 

            The social and political fallout from The Grapes of Wrath was as enormous as the public demand for the novel.  The book was widely banned, and in some cases publicly burned.  His marriage fell apart in 1941, and he remarried a year later to Gwyndolyn Conger, with whom he had two sons, Thomas Steinbeck and John Steinbeck IV (the latter of which was a war correspondent in Vietnam who, partnered with Sean Flynn, son of silent film star Errol Flynn, were among the first to bring the My Lai Massacre to the American public’s attention).

            Steinbeck served as a war correspondent in World War Two, and continued writing and publishing both fiction and non-fiction.  In 1948, he and Gwyndolyn divorced.  He married Elaine Scott in 1950.  In 1952, he published East of Eden, often considered his last great novel.  In 1962, Steinbeck was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.  In 1967, he visited the warfront in Vietnam as a journalist.  He passed away in 1968 of congestive heart failure. 

The Book:     

1st edition cover

            It’s The Grapes of Wrath.  What can I say about this book that hasn’t been said and said better than I could possibly say it?  For those of you that have forgotten or haven’t read it (a oversight which I recommend be immediately corrected), The Grapes of Wrath follows the Joad family,  a family of farmer’s from Oklahoma, displaced by the economic crash of the Great Depression coupled with the agricultural devastation of the Dust Bowl.  Having lost everything, they head to California where work is rumored to abound.  Subject to unexpected kindness and cruelty, the Joads attempt to create a new life for themselves, as do the hundreds of thousands of other displaced workers and farmers who have sought refuge in California.  While I think a lot of us roll our eyes at the phrase “testament to the human spirit,” I am nothing but sincere when I say that The Grapes of Wrath is a testament to the human spirit and one of the truly great novels of the twentieth century. 

            Steinbeck managed not just to capture the specific plights and hopes and culture of the time and people he writes about, but he uses these details to connect to a deeper, timeless truth about the human condition and American identity.  The characters are incredibly realistic, the story is absorbing and meaningful, the prose is colloquial and poetic.  This book is a portrait of the time in which Steinbeck wrote it, and is a protest book as much as anything else: a protest against the denigration of the poor, the hypocrisy of the powerful, the denial of the desire for basic human dignity.   The response was to either embrace the book, as many Americans did, or burn it.

            There was an immense negative response from forces in agribusiness, as well as many California localities who resented the way the state and its businesses were depicted.  The above is a publicity photo of farm worker Clell Pruett flanked by two members of the Associated Farmers, an organization of large landowners, as Pruett is about to burn the book.  Understandably, the forces of industry were unhappy with the book, and photos like the one above were used as part of a not-unsuccessful attempt to convince the public that the novel was insulting to the migrant workers. 

            The fact that The Grapes of Wrath is widely taught in high schools and recognized as one of the definitive “Great American Novels” shows who won in the arena of public opinion.  Zanuck and Ford almost immediately made the now classic film version starring Henry Fonda:

Although it lost the Best Picture Oscar to Hitchcock’s film version of du Maurier’s Rebecca, there’s no question that this remains one of the greatest films, period.

            The Grapes of Wrath has a major thematic similarity to many of the other books on this list so far: a glorification of rural and small town life.  Wang Lung’s farm in The Good Earth, Tara in Gone with the Wind, the farm community in So Big.  Even the novels for which this isn’t the primary focus tend to address a prevailing attitude of reverence towards small towns.  Perhaps because this was a dying way of life.  As industrialization loomed, as small farmers became obsolete, as we entered the age where cars replaced horses, and manufacturing replaced farm work, people needed a connection to a world that was rapidly being replaced, who, like the Joads, had to leave their way of life behind and start again in a new world.  

Also published in 1939:  
Raymond Chandler - The Big Sleep
Ernest Hemingway - The Snows of Kilimanjaro
James Joyce - Finnegans Wake
Nathaniel West - The Day of the Locust

1936-1937: Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell

The Author:
           Margaret Mitchell (1900-1949) was born to a wealthy family in Atlanta, Georgia.  The only daughter of an attorney and a suffragist in the Deep South, Mitchell’s upbringing was an unusual one.  For instance, after an accident when Mitchell was three, her mother had her start wearing boy’s clothes and she took up the nickname “Jimmy.”  This lasted until she was fourteen. 

            She attended Washington Seminary in Atlanta, an exclusive girl’s school, from 1914 to 1918.  After graduating, she became engaged to army lieutenant Clifford Henry, who was killed in action later that year.  In January 1919, her mother died of the flu. 

            In 1922 she married Berrien Upshaw.  The marriage lasted only two years and was by no account a happy one. Upshaw ran out less than a year into the marriage, providing further impetus for Mitchell to pursue her own career, in this case, journalism.  She began writing for The Atlanta Journal at the end of 1922.  In 1924, she divorced Upshaw and married John Marsh.

            In 1926, while recovering from an injured ankle, Mitchell began writing Gone with the Wind.  The novel was published in 1936 and became one of the best selling novels in American history. 

            Mitchell was hit by a car in 1949 and died in the hospital five days later.

First Edition Cover

The Book:
           Gone with the Wind is known for being a long book.  At over 1,000 pages, I can’t argue with that.  Yet despite its length, Gone with the Wind managed to keep up a good pace throughout.  This was in no small part due to how surprisingly compelling the protagonist, Scarlett O’Hara, was.  While I’ve always heard Gone with the Wind described as a romance novel, I’m inclined to agree with those who claim it is a bildungsroman.*  Part of the reason the story is so compelling is the focus on Scarlett’s personal development and adaptation to (and fights against) the changing norms of the South during and after the Civil War. 

            Even today, this is a delicate subject, and Mitchell’s rendering of the South of that time is worthy of comment.  The novel is at times in love with the antebellum South, painting northern Georgia as a near utopia; at other times, it shows the South as being blinded by its own arrogance and dedication to tradition.  Scarlett is a product of both the good and bad: she had a privileged upbringing and was spoiled by it; she had embraced the period’s ideals of womanhood and became trapped by it; she had the fierce pride of her neighbors and was destroyed by it. 

            Scarlett is a complex figure.  Though she tries to escape the social and cultural bonds that society has pressed on her, she can’t help but be a product of that same society.  Published in the decade following the flapper-era and as men started to go back to work as a result of jobs created by the New Deal (while women were also employed, the majority of jobs for which they could apply were given to unmarried women and widows).

            Scarlett has a number of men in her life, most famously Rhett Butler, who flaunts his disdain for tradition and propriety.  It’s this very quality of his that causes Scarlett to both admire and hate him.  Their relationship is far from ideal for either of them and is marred by tragedy and conflict.  The realistic flaws in the characters are a large part of what makes this novel so compelling.  The focus on one of the defining periods of (then recent) American history certainly helped sales.

            Historical novels were also experiencing a peak in popularity (Edmonds’ Drums Along the Mohawk was in the top five bestsellers of the year in 1936 and 1937).  A trend that would  continue, including the bestseller of 1938, The Yearling, which takes place in the Florida backwoods in the 19^th century.  Whereas other bestselling historical novels of the time have been largely forgotten (e.g. Anthony Adverse), Gone with the Wind is still popular almost 80 years after publication.  The 1939 film version starring Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable is in no small part responsible.

A classic, Gone with the Wind is ranked 6^th on the American Film Institute’s top 100 films list, and was in the first group of films preserved by the National Film Registry. 

            But while the film version has helped the novel remain popular, the novel’s own strength is largely responsible as well.  It’s a long book, but if you have the time and patience, it’s certainly worth a read.

*For those non-English Majors: a bildungsroman is basically a coming-of-age story where the focus is on the protagonist’s personal growth.  In Gone with the Wind, there is no over-arching objective (e.g. defeat the bad guy, win the love interest’s heart) beyond Scarlett’s development as a person.  Some notable examples are Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye or Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

Also Published in 1936 & 1937:

James M. Cain - Double Indemnity
John Dos Passos - The Big Money
William Faulkner - Absalom, Absalom!
George Orwell - Keep the Aspidistra Flying
Isak Dinesen - Out of Africa
Zora Neale Hurston - Their Eyes Were Watching God
John Steinbeck - Of Mice and Men
J.R.R. Tolkien - The Hobbit
Virginia Woolf - The Years

            

Thoughts on the Slaughterhouse-Five Film Adaptation

            Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five is one of my favorite books.  A testament to the futility of man’s will in the midst of war, of the lack of volition and agency that envelops mankind when put in an incomprehensible situation, all told in a voice that yoyos between heartbreakingly sincere and sarcastically hilarious.  Published in 1969, Slaughterhouse-Five is a modern classic, ranked 18^th on Modern Library’s list of the 100 best twentieth century novels.  In 1972, the world received a film adaptation directed by George Roy Hill (The Sting, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid) and starring the then unknown (and now obscure) Michael Sacks as Billy Pilgrim.

            The first thing that popped into my mind upon hearing of the adaptation is, “How do you film this book?”  The second question is, “Should it even be attempted?”  There have, of course, been films that are as good as, or better than, their literary source material (e.g. The Wizard of Oz, Jaws, The Godfather, The Shining, The Shawshank Redemption, Forrest Gump, etc.), but very rarely are the books these are based on masterpieces (notable exceptions being Apocalypse Now, based on Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and A Clockwork Orange, based on the novel of the same name by Anthony Burgess). 

            I don’t subscribe to the belief that a film version can retroactively ruin a book, nor do I believe that a film version will result in less people reading a book (quite the opposite, in fact).  My point of view is: Make the best film you can.

            The fact is, Slaughterhouse-five was a good movie.  I wouldn’t say it’s a masterpiece, but then again, most films aren’t.  The basic story and premise is the same as in the book, though the famous first chapter is, understandably, dropped.  The Tralfamadorians don’t appear onscreen, because they are only visible in the fourth dimension (an explanation coherent with the book’s take on the Tralfamdorians).  There were many such little changes that really didn’t affect the quality one way or another (e.g., instead of being lost with two scouts and Roland Weary, he’s lost with Weary and Paul Lazzaro).  There were two places where the movie improved on the book.

The Tralfamadorian Zoo

          One thing the film improved on was Billy’s relationship with poor old Edgar Derby.  I’d say their friendship is better realized in the film than the book.  The second is Billy’s obsession with Montana Wildhack.  In the book, we learn that Billy found a blue film with her in it, but that’s seemingly the limit of his non-Tralfamadorian relationship to her.  In the film version, it’s a little closer to obsession and just tinged with creepiness.    

            I rarely ever find major fault with a small change in a movie adaptation.  The only cases where I do is when it completely recontextualizes or leads to a limited reinterpretation of much of the story and/or its characters.  In the case of Slaughterhouse-five, this change comes when the plane carrying Billy, his father-in-law, and a bunch of other optometrists is about to take off.  In the film version, Billy tries to stop the plane from leaving by warning everyone that it’s going to crash.  They don’t listen to him, and it does. 

            While the events in the rest of the story may not be altered, the interpretation of them must be.  Because Billy Pilgrim tried to use his knowledge of the future, we know something that is true in the film but (in my opinion) not true in the book: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.

            Perhaps I should elaborate.  I think the best supported interpretation of the novel is that Billy Pilgrim has not actually come unstuck in time.  From the first page of chapter two (i.e. the first page of the story, chapter one being used to introduce the rest of the novel):  

            Billy Pilgrim has gone to sleep a widower and awakened on his wedding day.  He has
            walked through a door in 1955 and come out another one in 1941.  He has gone back
            through that door to find himself in 1963.  He has seen his birth and death many times, he
            says, and pays random visits to all the events in between.  

            He says.

If an author devotes an entire paragraph on the first page of the story to just two words, you better believe those two words are important.  The fact is, the narrator after chapter one is not the same narrator.  This is an alternate Vonnegut (Alternegutt?) who served with the fictional Billy Pilgrim and is simply telling us what Pilgrim has been claiming.  This is not third person omniscient, nor even first person omniscient.  This is first person limited. 

            It’s worth noting that Billy didn’t start talking about the Tralfamadorians until after the plane crash that resulted in his coma.

            Every time something science-fictiony happens, the narrator describes it in terms of how similar it is to a Kilgore Trout novel.  While Billy was recuperating from a nervous breakdown, he became a fan of Kilgore Trout.  So, what you have is a man who has been through hell, had seen his only friend in the war executed, and later had a nervous breakdown, during the recovery from the lattermost of these misfortunes, becomes a fan of a science-fiction writer and starts to go through events similar to the man’s novels.
 

            My point is that there’s ample evidence to support a PTSD interpretation, as opposed to a time traveling.  In the film version, we have to accept the time traveling, because Billy proved that he did have future knowledge and was therefore not just having a flashback. 

            But overall, I enjoyed the movie.  It had its flaws, but so does everything else. It seemed that the filmmaker had a lot of respect for the source material, without letting himself be shackled by it, which is great.  If you like the book, I’d recommend the film.

1929: All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque

Who?
            Erich Paul Remark (1898 – 1970) is better known by the pseudonym Erich Maria Remarque (Maria being his mother’s maiden name).  The son of a poor bookbinder, Erich was born in Osnabrück, Germany.  He was attending school to become a teacher when, in 1916, he was called to fight in World War One.  At the Battle of Flanders, in July 1917, Remarque was wounded by British grenades and taken to a field hospital in Duisberg.  After returning from the war, Remarque worked as a school teacher then an ad-writer.  In 1920, he published his first novel, Die Trambaude (The Dream Room) under his own name.  He later stated in an interview that “I published an early work, a novel, whose title I will not name, even under torture.  For this reason Remark became Remarque.”  From 1927-8, Remarque’s second novel, Station am Horizont (Station at the Horizon) was serialized under his real name. Im Westen nichts Neues (All Quiet on the Western Front) was published serially from November to December 1928, and published in book form in January 1929.  It was an overnight success.  It was also one of the books included in the first Nazi book burnings.  Remarque fled to Switzerland in 1933, at an indefinite point remarrying his ex-wife so she wouldn’t be forcibly repatriated.  He later moved to the United States, becoming an American citizen in 1947.  In 1957, Remarque divorced his wife, and married again a year later.  Remarque passed away in Switzerland in 1970.

So what's this book about?

“We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces” (87-8).

            All Quiet on the Western Front tells Paul Bäumer’s experience of World War One.  From the front lines to his hometown, from the hospital back to the front, All Quiet is the story of one man trying to make sense of a world gone to pieces, where the difference between life and death is luck.  It is the story of how war destroys youth. 

            The passages describing the war are awe-inspiring.  Frequently horrific, they somehow retain a strange semblance of beauty and romanticism.  “There is no escape anywhere.  By the light of the shells I try to get a view of the fields.  They are a surging sea, daggers of flame from the explosions leap up like fountains” (66).  While the cover of my copy declares that this is “the greatest war novel of all time,” it is also one of the great anti-war novels.  The war is beautiful in the same way a hurricane or erupting volcano is beautiful.

Why was it so popular?

            There were two other World War One novels on this list, H.G. Wells’s Mr. Britling Sees It Through and Vicente Blasco Ibáñez’s The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.  Both were published in 1916 and therefeore don’t cover the end of the war, and only the latter has extensive battle sequences.  Wells’s novel takes a hoepful view of the war, suggesting that people may (or at least could) create a better society out of the wreckage.  Ibáñez doesn’t suggest that war can ever be defeated, but views World War One as a necessary fight against German militarism.  Remarque better reflects the postwar perspective: the war was a tragic waste of human life.

This one sounds a familiar...

            Besides A Farewell to Arms, All Quiet on the Western Front is the only major World War One novel still read and talked about.  It has also aged spectacularly well, and in many ways is as relevant today as it was when it was written:

            “Almost all of us are simple folk.  And in France, too, the majority of men are labourers,
             workmen, or poor clerks.  Now just why would a French blacksmith or a French
             shoemaker want to attack us?  No, it is merely the rulers.  I had never seen a Frenchman
             before I came here, and it will be just the same with the majority of Frenchmen as
             regards us.  They weren’t asked about it any more than we were.”

            “Then what exactly is the war for?” asks Tjaden.

             Kat shrugs his shoulders.  “There must be some people to whom the war is useful.”

            “Well, I’m not one of them,” grins Tjaden.

            “Not you, nor anybody else here.”

            “Who are they then?” persists Tjade. “It isn’t any use to the Kaiser either.  He has
             everything he can want already.”

            “I’m not so sure about that,” contradicts Kat, “he has not had a war up till now” (205-6).

            In 1930, a film version was released, winning the Academy Award for best picture and best directing.

Should I read it?

            Yes.  It’s a classic for a reason, and that reason is quality.


Also published in 1929:

William Faulkner - The Sound and the Fury
Mahtma Gandhi - The Story of My Experiments with Truth
Ernest Hemingway - A Farewell to Arms
Virginia Woolf - A Room of One's Own

Sources:

Barker, Christine and Last, R. W. Erich Maria Remarque. London: Oswald Wolff, 1979. Print
Remarque, Erich. All Quiet on the Western Front. 1929. New York: Ballantine, 1982. Print. 
          Trans. Wheen, A. W.

1928: The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder

Who?

            Thornton Wilder (1897-1975) was born in Madison, Wisconsin but grew up in California, first in Ojai then, after spending a couple years in China, Berkeley.  He received a B.A. from Yale in 1920 and a Master’s degree in French from Princeton in 1926, at which time he began a lifelong career as a teacher and a writer, publishing his first novel, The Cabala in 1926.  He published his second and most famous novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey the following year, earning him the first of three Pulitzer Prizes (the other two were for his plays Our Town (1938) and The Skin of Our Teeth (1942)). 

            Wilder served as an information officer in World War Two, rising to the rank of lieutenant colonel in the air force.  He never married.  Although he kept his personal life to himself, it is now known that Wilder was gay and carried out an affair with Samuel Steward (a writer and professor who later became the official tattoo artist for the Hell’s Angels).  Wilder continued writing into his old age, publishing his last novel, Theophilus North, in 1973, two years before his died peacefully in his sleep in 1975.

So what's this book about?

            The first section of The Bridge of San Luis Rey starts with the collapse of a rope bridge in eighteenth century Peru, a disaster causing five people to fall to their death.  The accident is witnessed by a monk who is determined to figure out what led these people to be on the bridge in an attempt to try to understand god’s plan.  The second, third, and fourth sections show the interconnected and distinct lives of the five victims and their respective roles in the city of Lima.  The final section recounts the consequences of the monk’s research.

       “The result of all this diligence was an enormous book, which as we shall see later, was
        publicly burned on a beautiful Spring morning in  the great square.  But there was a secret
        copy and after a great many years and without much notice it found  its way to the library of
        the University of San Marco.  There it lies between two great wooden covers collecting dust
        in a cupboard.  It deals with on after another of the victims of the accident, cataloguing
        thousands of little facts and anecdotes and testimonies, and concluding with a dignified
        passage describing why God had settled upon that person and upon that day for His
        demonstration of wisdom.  Yet for all his diligence Brother Juniper never knew the central
        passion of Doña María’s life; nor of Uncle Pio’s, not even of Esteban’s.  And I, who claim to
        know so much more, isn’t it possible that even I have missed the spring within the spring?”
        (9).

            The prose itself is wonderful, and the story is structured beautifully.  Everything ties together in a way that is cathartic but leaves you with the unanswerable questions: Fate or Chance?  Does order exist or do we input order in retrospect?  This novel is both philosophically and aesthetically beautiful.

Why was it so popular?

            Questions like the ones posed in The Bridge of San Luis Rey are eternal, but it’s easy to see how, in the socially tumultuous period following the largest war the world had ever seen, people would be looking for answers more fervently. 

            Intense critical acclaim drove the novel into the spotlight.  I cannot help but speculate that the undaunting length of the novel (my copy is only 123 pages) worked to its advantage. 

This one sounds familiar...

            The Bridge of San Luis Rey is the first novel on my list that has remained popular to this day.  It’s frequently assigned as required reading in schools and Wilder’s play, Our Town, is still performed regulalry by professional, amateur, and school theater groups.

            Since its publication, The Bridge of San Luis Rey has appeared on TIME Magazine’s list of the 100 best novels since 1923 and placed as number 37 on Modern Library’s 100 best novels of the 20thcentury.  It’s also had three film adaptation, in 1929, 1944, and a poorly received 2004 version, starring Kathy Bates, Harvey Keitel, and Robert DeNiro.

The story of five actors connected by a box office disaster.

Should I read it?

            Yes.  As I said earlier, the novel is both aesthetically and philosophically beautiful.  The story and characters are layered and the prose is strong.  Read this book.

Also published in 1927:  

Bertolt Brecht - The Threepenny Opera
Aldous Huxley - Point Counter Point
D. H. Lawrence - Lady Chatterley's Lover
Erich Maria Remarque - All Quiet on the Western Front

Sources:

Wilder, Thornton. The Bridge of San Luis Rey. 1927. New York: Harper Perennial, 1998. Print.