The Strange Library

The Strange Library, Haruki Murakami

Written as a children’s novella, the English translation of this book by Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore and Wind Up Bird Chronicle are probably his most well-known in the United States) isn’t exactly a graphic novel, but it’s not not a graphic novel, either. The book opens as if opening a package, with a flap on the bottom and a flap on the top, making it difficult but not impossible to read while commuting to work on public transportation. The entire, short, book is written in an overly large and stylized typeface, and throughout there are large illustrations that serve more as comics panels—and have the look and feel of them—than as pictures in a book.

The story itself is of a young boy who is returning books to the library just before closing time and decides to ask for some additional books on Ottoman tax collecting, a topic that had just popped into his mind. He is invited to go down to a room he has never seen before, room 107, where a old man says he can help him but only if he stays in the “reading room”, which happens to be a small cell at the end of a labyrinth guarded by a man who is covered in sheepskin (as in, looks like a bipedal sheep with a human face) and learns that he will have one month to learn everything and his brains will be eaten. The way that he arrives in this situation could likely be a case study in a book teaching people to trust their instincts and the dangers of social conditioning, or, conversely, by pick up artists, as we learn several times that the narrator wishes to go home and knows his mother will be concerned, but is unable to refuse any ridiculous requests and disappoint the old man or see him be mad at him.

As with most Murakami books, reading this story is akin to having a disturbing dream. Nothing in the book makes objective sense, and nothing is as it should be, and yet somehow it makes sense in the telling and it just seems proper that there is an invisible, beautiful girl and the sheep man is frying donuts.

This was a remarkably short book and quick read, and such a strange story, but deeply a Murakami adventure. The illustrations and oddness of the book itself added to the experience of the story. I feel as if there was much I was missing, as if it was an allegory I couldn’t fully see or full of allusions to other myths and stories, but it was also a fascinating tale in and of itself. Finishing any Murakami book always leaves the reader wondering what exactly they just read, but it’s not an unenjoyable feeling.

Peter Pan

Peter Pan, J.M. Barrie

For many of us, as we grow and have kids and revisit our favorite childhood shows and books, we have the uncomfortable experience of realizing that many of our cherished memories are somewhere between slightly and hella problematic. Sometimes they just did not age at all, and we can toss them out with only mild regret, but sometimes there are pieces that one wants to share, and what is one to do?

Peter Pan has always been a bit, well, wrong. The boys get to be kids forever, but they’re desperate for a mother. Wendy’s dream is to go cook and clean for grown up boys. Literally everything with the Indians. In the movie, I remember at some point even in childhood thinking there were parts that weren’t great, but it was also recognizable as a pretend island. The island with “Indians” and pirates is meant to be the way a boy in the early 1900s would imagine it, and so there is an element of innocence to it. (I recognize there might be some self-justification in this.) In the book, however, everything is turned up a few hundred notches, which I had forgotten. The book is very clear that the only wish of Wendy, and any young girl, is, indeed to take care of boys. The book talks with all the enlightenment of a white British gentleman in 1902 of the attitudes of different races that one might find in Neverland.

And yet, there is much to enjoy in Peter Pan. There’s a reason it has endured, has been turned into dozens and dozens of plays and musicals and spinoffs. It’s a story of imagination and eternal childhood, heroics and loyalty and bravery, and all sorts of fun. Who doesn’t want to be a part of that? And it introduces us to absurdity and silliness and the new laws of a child’s imagination early on. I know at least one person who thinks the book is written in such a ridiculous way that no one could understand it, but of course it’s only hard to understand if you’re trying make grown up sense of everything. If you are going to enter into a new world, they might be a bit absurd, but surely not more than everything else in life.

And so I want to share this and read it with my kids. There will be many such decisions, how do I think through them one by one? What rules can I make for what I share with my kids? And for all if these books, I can find a justification. I can also fall back on the old standby that anyone excusing hazing or injustice or bad behavior can pull out. I read and watched and listened to all these things and I turned out just fine. Old bugs bunny cartoons didn’t turn me racist. And while I think justifying that things ended up okay in the end can’t justify present pain or injustice, when it comes to what I’m afraid might influence them, that’s different. Because again, I have concrete evidence that it’s not the primary influence. I grew up in a home where my parents were very open to talk about the messages we received from shows and from society, and where counter messages of equality and justice were hammered home. It was more than enough for all of us kids to know how to recognize and counter the negative messages and racist and gendered assumptions on our own.

I do not think that I can avoid all of the stereotypes, either in past shows or even current ones. Indeed, I have realized this year that 3^rd grade is apparently the year where no matter how hard you try your kid will confidently announce which toys are girl toys and which toys or boy toys, and ask you if *really* there isn’t any such thing as boy color and girl colors. But I also know that, for all the wrongness we see today, it is a more egalitarian world than even the one I grew up in thirty years ago, and my children have also absorbed that. And so my decision making, I have decided, is how prevalent the messages are throughout the books, and how essential it is to the text. Can I answer the questions (and my middle child will ask why after every sentence) and salvage the story? Is the racism or sexism or cultural weirdness integral to the story? Or is it incidental, and we can talk about how things have changed and then move on? And sadly, for Peter Pan, I can’t. I think it could be written again without it; I think I can just barely find a way to gloss over it all in the movie, where the kids will be much more focused on the fights with Captain Hook; but this book, the one that we have, has all of our stereotypes and negativity of the early century throughout and are, in fact the entire basis of the story. Perhaps when they’re older we’ll pull it down, but for now it will sit, a pretty book on my shelf, challenging me to consider our history, and what to do with all of our history. A good challenge for the new year.

Florida

Florida, Lauren Groff

Florida is a strange place. Most people are aware of that, although primarily through vague stereotypes. Florida Man has his own twitter profile, Carl Hiassen has made a career out of the absurdity that is Florida, and a bunch of the country threatens to write us off after every election. And yes, the political and human strangeness is part of it, but Florida is much more than that, and I love it so.

For one thing, for all its development, Florida is still wild. In the city where I grew up, alligators were in all the drainage ditches along the road and would occasionally end up in someone’s pool. Any golf course has a few resident gators in their water traps. Snakes can be found in the most manicured resort. I have come home to my college apartment to find a half-foot across huntsman spider on the door. And then there is the weather. Summer in Florida becomes a joke, but to those who haven’t been there it is difficult to describe just how different Florida feels than anywhere else in the country. The heat, humidity, the sound of cicadas, fill everything in your consciousness. There is a downpour every afternoon harder than the ones that result in severe storm warnings in my current mid-Atlantic home. The sky is different, and bigger, than anywhere I’ve ever seen. And sitting through a tropical storm or hurricane is an experience in itself.

It is this Florida, the one I feel in my bones and that makes me sigh and know I’m home, that is a character throughout Laura Goff’s collection of short stories. It is also a tale of searching and anxiety, of torn apart relationships and where there is anything to hold on to. Much of it is about solitude, following on character on their lonely journey, or dwelling with someone who is alone even in the midst of many others. The stories include a doctoral student consciously becoming a homeless drifter, a woman on her nightly walks and meditations, visits from ghosts during a hurricane, and taking family on the road to search for more.

Solitude is its own character in the story, and introspection. As is anxiety. Touched on more than once is mothers thinking of the fact of climate change, the ugliness of a world that it will leave for their children. Florida is one of the few places where the realities of global warming can’t be ignored, where even the reddest of Republicans know they need to act or they’ll be under water, and this anxiety resonated with me. I’ve spent many days and nights thinking about the world my kids will see, and wondering if they’ll even remember the coral reefs the way I do, or miss all the birds that will have gone extinct by the time they are grown. And this anxiety is just one piece of the constant, low level fear that all moms walk around with and that seeps through the pages in this book.

This collection of short stories felt amazingly real, even where the stories seem unreal. The sense of place is so incredibly strong, pulling me through cypress trees and live oaks as Goff spends far more time in the central swampland and forests of the panhandle than the white sand beaches. And the exploration of characters was strong, bringing the reader into their minds and feeling there with them. It was a powerful and moving collection showcasing a different part of Florida, one foreign to those of us who only know Hiassen and Disney and Miami, but one that is very real.

The Hedgehog, The Fox and the Magister’s Pox

The Hedgehog, the Fox and the Magister’s Pox, Stephen Jay Gould

The fact is that Stephen Jay Gould is very, very smart. This isn’t a revelatory statement or anything; the man is a well-known genius. And a multidisciplinary one as well. In addition to his well known brilliance in paleontology and evolutionary theory, he was also incredibly well read, a scholar of the classics and history, and read, at the least, several languages.

Gould was also somewhat unique, in my admittedly limited experience, as a well-known scientist who had great respect for the social sciences, the arts, and even religion. And that is really at the heart of this book, which is based on the old proverb about the hedgehog having only one great trick, and the fox having many. Science is the hedgehog; the humanities are the fox. And in his view it is very important to delve deep into the scientific method, but it only really gets you great insight into science. Humanity also needs to consider a wide range of knowledge, as the fox has. And he gets at the heart of the difference in a remarkably perspective way in the final essay in the book, disagreeing with E. O. Wilson’s Consilience – he points out that it’s not that chemicals or genes could never explain exactly why we might like a piece of art, but that even if they can it misses the entire point as far as art and the humanities are concerned. It is an entirely different way and focus of knowing and that is okay.

I have a great respect and agreement in this point of view. Indeed, it is the way I approach my own great interest in science and my own practice and interest in religion – I don’t see them in conflict, because I don’t in anyway see them as answering the same questions or even attempting to do so. However, this book was not as enjoyable as I’d hoped, largely because of what I mentioned at the beginning of this review. Stephen Jay Gould is very, very smart.

The book is ostensibly written for a lay audience, and I suppose technically it is. He does explain in depth most of his references, and so it was understandable. It’s just that without knowing most of his references, which plum the depths not only of scientific history but ancient and classical scholars, Latin proverbs, and esoteric textbooks by Poe, the book gets to be quite dry and boring. I did not have the point of references I needed to understand all of his references. And then adding in whole essays of his observations on what science and the humanities can learn from each other based on how papers are presented and conferences, with what appeared to be gentle ribbing going on for pages. In much in that section I didn’t understand what he was saying, but it had the cadence of a joke.

All in all, the book just wasn’t written for me, and that’s okay. It’s written for someone who will chuckle sardonically in the potshots at the lack of slides in a presentation at a humanities conference, or someone who understands the references to Renaissance humanists. But if you are not that audience, while the theme is interesting and there are bits and pieces to hold ones attention, it is not the book for you.

The Cloister Walk

The Cloister Walk, Kathleen Norris

The Cloister Walk takes us through a liturgical year in a Benedictine monastery. Benedictine monasteries exist in a way that is both timeless and intimately bound up in time. The Rule of St. Benedict was first written in 516 and has continued to guide the order for the last 1500 years. While a monastery will have internet and cars, in many ways the existence has been the same for over a millennia. And yet they are also proscribed by time. Prayers happen at specific moments throughout the day. Being an order that requires Work, manual labor, they often have farms, gardens, or otherwise manage their land and are therefore tied up in the seasons. And the Church itself has strict ways to measure time, with the liturgical year divided up with Ordinary Time, Holy Days, Advent, Lent, and Pentecost.

All of this provides a well measured life, that nonetheless passes in a way that is distant from the outside world. Kathleen Norris, a married woman, raised as a Protestant, has found a comfort in this way of life. She writes insightfully of her year dividing her life between home and residing in the monastery (it is little known outside of the very Catholic world that many orders have a ‘third order’ of lay members, or that they will often welcome long-term residents or retreat goers.) There is a deep spirituality that comes from living in time measured by the seasons and by the daylight, rather than our work days and our clocks. And there is something that pulls at people in the Benedictine law of prayer and humble work, and a day where there hours are counted by prayers, something that has allowed this way of life to exist for 1500 years. It may be far smaller than previously, but it still exists throughout the world, and in many variations of the Benedictine order.

It is difficult to impart to others how something can be so affecting, but Norris tries mightily to explain her pull towards the Benedictines, in large part as she tries to identify for herself how she ended up in this surprising circumstance. Through it she follows the liturgical year, and her own experience of each piece of it. This is a book imbued with the peace and calm often found at a monastery or convent, and seems to flow gently but deeply as she shares her experience and her feelings. There is a deep well of feeling at the bottom, and a pull within the book itself for such calm and identity as well—for there is no doubt that a deep part of the connection with such an order is the fact that it does have a connection with others around the world and going back in time. Norris’s book pulls this out and communicates what makes such a thing special to so many people. Reading it was a retreat in and of itself.

 

Small Gods

Small Gods, Terry Pratchett

To the extent there is a theme in Terry Pratchett’s books it could probably be summed up as this: people should be more or less be left alone to live their lives and make their decisions. It won’t be ideal or utopia; humans will probably muck things up. But we should allowed to muck things up in our own way. It’s not to say that he’s libertarian, this isn’t about anything so pedestrian as specific laws, but that people are ends in and of themselves, not means to someone else’s ends, and it’s wrong to force them into your own story. In Discworld the villains are most likely to be clerics and priests, political leaders, or even fairy godmothers, who want to force everyone else to be part of their destiny or ideology, who only see people as bit players in their own story. The other theme is that stories have a way of trying to lead their own lives, too.

Discworld has touched on the story of Gods before. They’re very much a part of Discworld, and live in their home on the tallest mountain, Cori Celesti. As Pratchett likes to play around with stories and myths from any place that catches his fancy, the Discworld Gods tend to be a mishmash of Greek and Roman and Egyptian and Voodoo and animist and any other thing. (According to Discworld, there are at least 3,000 Gods on Discworld and people are discovering new ones every day.) In Small Gods we learn that the Gods pop up here and there, but their lifeblood is belief. If they can catch one believer they can exist; with more believers they can gain in power; with no believers they blow away into the desert. And belief is tricky, as we find. It doesn’t mean following the rules; it doesn’t necessarily mean believing in the rituals or idols or going to Church/temple/etc and saying you believe. It means Belief.

The formerly powerful god Om inspired a grand civilization of Omnian, one which bears striking similarities to the most restrictive and torture heavy versions of Christianity. And despite the fact that there is a major civilization with pilgrims coming from around the world and monasteries and monks and a Quisition dedicated to making sure there aren’t any other religions around, belief in Om, rather than the Quisition and clerics, is not there. Which means that when Om tries to manifest himself as a bull for one of his periodic visits to Earth, he instead ends up wandering the Disc as a tortoise almost entirely powerless until he finds Brutha, the one actual Believer left in Om.

From there we’re off, with Brutha and his prodigious memory unwillingly taking part in palace intrigue, the head of the Quisition, Vorbis, and a nascent rebellion, facing off, and war with an Athens type stand in. Through this we have those who continue to try to fight for not just themselves but the truth or the glory or a greater story, while at the same time others just try to keep putting one foot in front of the other and doing what they think they should. In Discworld there is no greater act than doing things because it feels like the right thing to do, with the general idea that people will more or less try to do the right thing, with cruelty being what needs elaborate justifications, philosophies or ideologies.

What we learn through this book, our main message, is one that should be no surprise to those who are fans of Good Omens. Simply this, that for all of us, the moral should be:

• This [life] is not a game.
• Here, now, you are alive.

And we can all go and figure it out from there. A good lesson for us all, and I would say a much more fun discourse on belief than all the treatises on clericalism one could find.