Mefisto

John Banville

Don't die, Father Plomer said. Not a good idea.

The common flea, or pulex irritans, which is the name we scientists call him, can survive alive a long time without food. He likes a spicy drop of good red blood, of man or maiden, it's all one to him. He doesn't bite, you know, for fun. In fact, he doesn't bite, but, rather, pricks, sucks up a ruby drop, and off he kicks. His cousin, xenopsylla cheopis, or rat flea, is a different type, for this lad does not ata ll like human gore, indeed, it makes him puke, which is a bore for such a lively fellow. But when his host, the black rat, rattus rattus, gives up the ghost, he has no choice but to go after us. The poor chap's little proventriculus gets all bunged up with swarming bacilli, whose name is pasteurella pestis, need I say any more? Now, dying for a feed, he subjugates his loathing to his need, and finds a human target double quick. Blood is aspirated into the proventriculus. Now sated, our Jumping Jack relaxes, but, oh dear, some of that blood comes up again, I fear now rife with bacilli, and goes straight down the puncture hole. The victim, with a frown, scratches the spot, while pasteurella pestis heads pell-mell for the region of the testes. A week elapses, then the buboes swell, there's fever, stupor, and, of course, a smell as if the poor wretch were already dead. Next wifey gets it, baby too, then Fred the postman, yes, and Fred, the postman's son, then in a twinkling half the town is gone. It flies like black smoke, felling frail and fit, soon continents are in teh grip of it. And all teh doing of his majesty, our lord of misrule, Harry Hotspur Flea! So now, remember, when you feel a bite, it really is an honour, not a slight. The king is dead, long live the prince, and --and there's the knave! My trick, I think. And hand.

A riven thing, incomplete. Something had sheared away, when I pulled through. I was neither this nor that, half here, half somewhere else. Miscarried. Each day when I woke I had to remake myself, build myself out of bits and scraps, of memories, sensations, guesses. I knew how Lazarus must have felt standing in the blinding light of noontide in his foul cerecloths, with a headache, confused suspicious, still vividly remembering the other place, unsure that it was not better there than here.

Help me.

Subtle and not at the same time, Banville's version of the Faust cycle might or might not be.
I do not know what to take away from this book. I do not know what is there in the book. Banville treads the line between outrageous, allegorical fantasy and common, if sodden and dirty, reality.
When I think about this book and try and imagine its appearance, it is much the same as before I read it. There are few pictures. A mottled face with cream scars folded like plastic wrap. A pale woman dying of a drug addiction. A lively fellow. Heaps of metal refuse and the junkyard of an industrial giant. I cannot see any clear pictures of the flow of the story. Generally when you read a book, you look back and can see the thing there in your mind, almost as if you went to the dramatized version of it. Yet here, there is so very little.
It's not as though it is a boring read. Banville writes well and the story pulls you through itself, only it doesn't lend itself to one seeing anything. But I know there is much to see in this book. It might be one of those books that needs to be read several times to picture it--unfortunately I did not enjoy it enough to want to read it again.
If you want a strange read that will give you plenty of rich soil to sprout your thoughts in, this wouldn't be a bad choice. Be prepared for creepiness made all the more powerful because Banville does catch certain aspects of life perfectly. They will resonate with you and sometimes their terrifying twins will come along for the ride.

Doctor Faustus

Thomas Mann

"Know, then," said he, at the table, "ye good and godly folk" (he said 'god and goodly'), "with your modest sins and resting in Goodes godness, for I have suppressed it so long in me but will no longer hide it, that already since my twenty-first year I am wedded to Satan and with due knowing of peril out of well-considered courage, pride, and presumption because I would win glory in this world, I made with him a bond and vow, so that all which during the term of four-and-twenty years I brought forth, and which mankind justly regarded with mistrust, is only with his help come to pass and is the divel's work, infused by the angel of death. For I well thought that he that will eat the kernel must crack the nut, and one must today take the divel to favour, because to great enterprise and devises one can use and have none other save him."

"It is beautiful. It has beauty. Very good, oh, very good, one may say so!"

He reddened, and I looked at him large-eyed. It turned out that he was religious.

A genuine inspiration, immediate, absolute, unquestioned, ravishing, where there is no choice, no tinkering, no possible improvement; where all is as a sacred mandate, a visitation received by the possessed one with faltering and stumbling step, with shudders of awe form head to foot, with tears of joy blinding his eyes: no, that is not possible with God, who leaves the understanding too much to do. It comes but from the divel, the true master and giver and of such rapture.

The belief that we were forced into war, that sacred necessity called us to take our weapons--those well-polished weapons whose readiness and excellence always induced a secret temptation to test them. Then there was the fear of being overrun from all sides, from which fate only our enormous strength protected us, our power of carrying the war straightway into other lands. Attack and defense were the same, in our case: together they made up the feeling of a providence, a calling, a great hour, a sacred necessity. The peoples beyond our borders might consider us disturbers of the peace if they chose, enemies of life and not to be borne with but we had the means to knock the world on the head until it changed its mind and came not only to admire but to love us.

Renounce, it means. What otherwise? Do you think that jealousy dwells in the height and not also in the depths? To us you are, fine, well-create creature, promised and espoused. Thou maist not love.

A transatlantic general has forced the population of Weimar to file past the crematories of the neighbouring concentration-camp. he declared that these citizens--who had gone in apparent righteousness about their daily concerns and sought to know nothing, although the wind brought to their noses the stench of burning human flesh--he declared that they too were guilty of the abominations on which he forced them now to turn their eyes. Was that unjust? Let them look, I look with them. In spirit I let myself be shouldered in their dazed or shuddering ranks. Germany had become a thick-walled underground torture-chamber, converted into one by a profligate dictatorship vowed to nihilism from its beginnings on. Now the torture chamber has been broken open, open lies our shame before the eyes of the world.

Curses, curses on the corrupters of an originally decent species of human being, law-abiding, only too docile, only all too willingly living on theory, who thus went to school to Evil!

"Is that you, good soul?" he said as I went to him and laid my hand on his shoulder. "What are you doing here? This is no place for you. Cross yourself, like this, forehead to shoulders, the way you learned as a child. That will keep you safe."

Please think about the above quotes as telling one story. It was not until I finished Mann's Faustus that I realized the horrible reality behind it. I do not think I have fully understood this reality, but the elements are marshaling themselves in my mind.
Mann does a brilliant job of aligning the traditional Faust cycle with the less talked about decline of Germany during the beginning of the 20th century. As Mann's main character sells himself to evil for the glory and beauty and triumph of his art, so we hear Mann's narrator describing a national transaction with the devil: Germany is falling about around his ears because it sold its soul to the devil for a different price.
Mann published Doctor Faustus not long after World War II ended, although it is mostly set before that war. Perhaps it is all the more eerie because Mann is German and writing in German and was, before exile to America, a German national hero.
The narrative structure of Doctor Faustus will no doubt irritate you. Mann takes his time getting everywhere, and his narrator does a bit too much bewailing and complaining and saying "Woe is me!" If you can manage to put up with this sort of thing, you will find it all makes sense by the end. In fact, you might wonder he didn't cry a little louder.
Any story about man selling his soul to Satan should hopefully have its alien elements for us...hopefully. But Mann's Faustus is disturbing because he does not emphasize the metaphysical side of it, indeed he goes out of his way to make sure we always have an out--maybe the novel's troubled hero, Adrian, is simply out of his mind. In this way, Faustus becomes something that is much less like a glitzy 16th century play and something more like our lives. By the end of Mann's Faustus you will feel the story is no where near as foreign to you as it should be. This will revolt you...hopefully. Listen, if you do read it, especially to those passages that deal with Germany's national pride and vision--as spoken of by a man who was almost duped by it, Nazi Germany sounds no where near as foreign to us as it should.

This is no place for you. Cross yourself, like this, forehead to shoulders, the way you learned as a child. That will keep you safe.

Blood Meridian

Cormac McCarthy

So what is the way of raising a child?
At a young age, said the judge, they should be put in a pit with wild dogs. They should be set to puzzle out from their proper clues the one of three doors that does not harbor wild lions. They should be made to run naked in the desert until...
Hold now, said Tobin. The question was put in all earnestness.
And the answer, said the judge. If God meant to interfere in the degeneracy of mankind would he not have done so by now?

When Glanton and his chiefs swung back through the village people were running out under the horses' hooves and the horses were plunging and some of the men were moving on foot among the huts with torches and dragging the victims out, slathered and dripping with blood, hacking at the dying and decapitating those who knelt for mercy. There were in the camp a number of Mexican slaves and these ran forth calling out in spanish and were brained or shot and one of the Delawares emerged from the smoke with a naked infant dangling in each hand and squatted at a ring of midden stones and swung them by the heels each in turn and bashed their heads against the stones so that the brains burst forth through the fontanel in a bloody spew and humans on fire came shrieking forth like berserkers and the riders hacked them down with their enormous knives and a young woman ran up and embraced the bloodied forefeet of Glanton's warhorse.

Blood Meridian is the most violent book I have ever read.
The above quotation is not the worst, but merely an example of the norm. McCarthy is has beautiful prose and so I guess with much power comes the ability to much evil as well as much good. McCarthy can write awesomely disturbing prose as well as astoundingly beautiful.
I do not think, however, that McCarthy's bloodlust is a reason to avoid Blood Meridian. Sometimes we need to look reality in the face. More disturbing than the bashing infants heads on stones is the likelihood that this is how it happened. Blood Meridian is based on actual events, although it is anything but a true to life story. A man named Samuel Chamberlain was actually a raider in a group known as the Glanton gang which was not innocent of such atrocities as McCarthy attributes to him. But then again, few of us are.
Humanity, in its insulated and cultured security--at least as we know it here in this wonderful place called the United States of America--this humanity has closed its eyes to the reality that it is standing on. I am envisioning a willful child with eyes that look anywhere but on the the pile of skulls it stands upon. We marvel at the great distance we can see, but we never dare to ask how we came by our convenient stool.
This is not some rant on empire or America or the first world. I'm am just wondering about the reality of things.
It is no coincidence either that the devil figures heavily in McCarthy's work. I am tempted to describe Blood Meridian as yet another Faustus story. But it is only a Faustus story in so much as every time we see Satan in literature is. Satan brokers with a currency of lies a market of power and pain. This was true in Genesis, is true in Goethe's Faust, in Marlowe's, in Paradise Lost, in Perelandra, in Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus, in every story of the Devil.
Steel your stomach if you are going to read Blood Meridian and bring your memories of every book you've ever read for the chances are that McCarthy will allude to them all. You should probably study Latin and Spanish as well, if you really would like to grasp everything going on in the novel, and an understanding of German would not be unhelpful. The Classics feature prominently.
Always remember
Et In Arcadia Ego.

Waiting for the Barbarians

J. M. Coetzee

"What if your prisoner is telling the truth," I ask, "yet finds he is not believed? IS that not a terrible position? Imagine: to be prepared to yield, to yield, to have nothing more to yield, to be broken, yet to be pressed to yield more! And what a responsibility for the interrogator! How do you ever know when a man has told you the truth?"

On every face around me, even those that are smiling, I see the same expression: not hatred, not bloodlust, but a curiosity so intense that their bodies are drained by it and only their eyes live, organs of a new and ravening appetite.

Don't read this if you wish to come away with an uplifted heart and a joyful countenance. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians is a troubling read.
It's troubling because innocent people are tortured; it is troubling because the people you thought were good stand by and do nothing; it is troubling because there is no reason for the violence evil men perpetrate on others; it is troubling because it doesn't reveal too many redemptive qualities in humanity; it is troubling because it incriminates you and me.
Coetzee points out the ease with which we will close our ears, eyes, and minds to the evil we know to be going on all around us. His Magistrate is contemptible and repulsive because he takes so long to stand up, but if you have the courage to look yourself in the face once you've finished you have to acknowledge that you aren't much better. While I was reading, I was outraged that the Magistrate would stand by as injustice is flagrant before his nose--there is a particular scene where he notices a baby among some prisoners: "The baby cries and coughs, cries and coughs till I flee for the refuge to the farthest corner of my apartment...But I do nothing. Then one day I notice that the baby has stopped crying"...............................--how can a man stand by when a child is being killed and do nothing? The answer, terrifyingly enough, is quite easily. A more troubling question is: how can such a man call himself good?
But the Magistrate in Waiting for the Barbarians does act, much to his own peril. In a horrifying scene of public violence he confronts the public over their choice for evil. It may take the Magistrate most of the novel, but he does recognize that he cannot continue to ignore the injustice. And now the most troubling part of the story: it was so easy to criticize this cowardly old official, I didn't even need to ask where I was far more guilty than he.
The grand punch-line of the novel, or at least it's most blatant line, comes about late at night as the Magistrate confronts the fleeing torturer and says, "The crime that is latent in us we must inflict on ourselves, not on others." While this may feel like an easy sentence to understand, I would caution you to read Waiting for the Barbarians before you rest content with your interpretation of it. If you refuse this, think at least about these words with which Coetzee ends the novel:

I think: "There has been something staring me in the face, and still I do not see it."

The Invention of Love

Tom Stoppard

A genuine love of learning is one of the two delinquencies which cause blindness and lead a young man to ruin.

If you cannot write Latin and Greek verse how can you hope to be of any use in the world?

Virtue is what women have to lose, the rest is vice.

Stoppard is a brilliant constructor of dialog. In my first encounter with Stoppard--his wild Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead--I was overawed. I read The Invention of Love because the title sounded intriguing. While it was everything I did not expect when it comes to plot and content, it was more than I could have hoped for in dialog. If I could write conversations like this...
It takes a very alert mind to follow Stoppard as his characters weave together multiple conversations and sometimes even use the same words to continue two separate conversations. Stoppard is more willing than other modern writers to indulge heavily in allusion and I have this feeling that I caught about ten percent of the actual content in his play. makes allusions to everything from the first Roman love poet to the various Greek and Latin scholars of note (or lack) to his own plays (Even Rosencrantz and Guildenstern make a comeback).
The Invention of Love is about the aesthetic movements in early twentieth century England--think Oscar Wilde. It is about Greek poets and Latin scholars, students and the legacy words are to the dead. It is about homosexuality. As a subplot to the play, Stoppard follows Wilde's trail for indecency and the subsequent shattering of his career.
Finally it is the simultaneous enactment of the life of A. E. Housman, a famous English poet and Latin scholar. Stoppard gives us Housman at various times of life, usually conversing with himself at other times of life (or simply being on stage with earlier and later-self).
I don't think I'd ever bother going to see this play, but it made for an interesting and engaging read. I still love Stoppard's dexterity with conversation--incredible.

The Irresistible Revolution

Shane Claiborne

And that's when things get messy. When people begin moving beyond charity and toward justice and solidarity with the poor and oppressed, as Jesus did, they get in trouble. Once we are actually friends with folks in struggle, we start to ask why people are poor, which is never as popular as giving to charity. One of my friends has a shirt marked with the words of late Catholic bishop Dom Helder Camara: "When I fed the hungry, they called me a saint. When I asked why people are hungry, they called me a communist." Charity wins awards and applause, but joining the poor gets you killed. People do not get crucified for charity. People are crucified for living out a love that disrupts the social order, that calls forth a new world. People are not crucified for helping poor people. People are crucified for joining them.

While The Irresistible Revolution is a book of many grandiose statements and not the best writing, the reality behind it overcomes these failings. Claiborne tells of a Christian life lived with a genuine focus on Christ. I would hesitate to call anything he describes in his book (and there are many exciting stories) incredible. Claiborne's call is to a reality check. The Christianity he describes is not a Christianity that is strange or wild as defined by Christianity--it is what it is.
Claiborne manages to find a good balance between criticism of the modern Church and hopeful directions toward renewal in the Church.
There are three phrases that should give you the first whiff of the truth Claiborne is speaking in this book:
1. The Christian life will take everything you have.
2. Want to be a Christian? It will RUIN you for life.
3. If they come for the innocent and poor and do not come over our bodies then a curse be on our religion.
(The second is actually the Jesuit Volunteer Corps's unofficial motto but gets at the same thing).

Incompleteness

Rebecca Goldstein

One can (assuming the consistency of classical mathematics) even give examples of propositions (and indeed of such a type as Goldbach and Fermat) which are really contextually true but unprovable in the formal system of classical mathematics.

"The more I think about language, the more it amazes me that people ever understand each other."

Kurt Godel is the greatest logician since Aristotle. He starved himself to death and is largely forgotten. The only things less understood than the man are his theories. I read this book because I had heard of Godel in various other books. I got my hands on a copy of the proofs for his two incompleteness theorems but couldn't understand them and so turned to a biography in the hopes that it would explain the theorems in slightly less technical language. This Goldstein does, even if she sacrifices some of the mathematical beauty and precision in order to do so.
Perhaps the most wonderful aspect of reading about Godel is the sense of awe you will come away with. There is an eerie mystical haze that hangs about the man--such incredible discoveries, discoveries which have implications on some of the deepest levels of human life--and yet both the man and his discoveries are little known and less discussed.
I have heard Godel compared to Descartes--what Descartes did to geometry with coordinates, Godel does to mathematical logic with Godel numbering. I did not appreciate the importance of this seemingly arbitrary semantic distinction of his--I still do not, but I have an inkling from Goldstein's book of the depth and power that it contains.
Reading about Godel is essential if you believe in logic. If you have heard of such characters as Wittgenstein and Russel and Frege, if you have come across people who would use logic as the perfect and COMPLETE system with which to explain the world, Godel is a necessity. It will change the way you view logic, change the way you view metaphysics--it will shake your certainty in the usefulness of logic as well as relativism. It is ironic, as long as you don't think about it, that a man would almost prove objective truth by proving the incompleteness and therefore incapacity of logic to explain and understand reality. Bring your brain to this one though, it will prove a challenging read. Oh, and that first quote at the top of the page here, that is the phrase that Godel used to tell the world he had proven logic inadequate.