***Last Night at the Lobster by Stewart O'Nan

Digital audiobook, 2007
Narrated by Jonathan Davis

****City of Thieves by David Benioff

2008, Digital Audiobook
Author David Benioff, born David Friedman, an American Novelist
Narrated by  Ron Perlman

The siege of Leningrad during WWII told through the eyes of a young man who comes of age during this time. Sad, as always, the story unfolds using a thought provoking perspective that will make your heart ache for the protagonist and everyone he encounters.

*****The Melancholy of Resistance by László Krasznahorkai

This author is truly amazing - an awesome piece of literature!

Structure

• No paragraphs
• *Dense writing where one thought flows naturally to the next negating the need for many sentences.
• Sentences can be as long as a page or more.
• The writing was so dense, I could not stop in the middle of a chapter; the chapter often being one long paragraph.

Themes

• Dissonance in music and political life. If in the political, will naturally effect the personal
• Mr. Eszter's dissonant piano tuning typifies this theme.
• Destruction necessitates creativity, creativity necessitates destruction
• social chaos - anarchy 
• abject indifference
• dark humor mixed with the absurd
• bourgeois as evil
• atheism 
• lust for power 
• schemers vs. dreamers (Mrs. Eszter vs. Mr Eszter and Valuska)
• loyalty, as seen through Mr. Eszter and Valuska, or
• lack of commitment enabling one to slide in any direction as long as it is personally advantageous, no matter if contradictory or not
• God failed at creation and his plans for man and earth and is an indifferent power.

Symbols

• occurrences in the town that portend something dark and evil, causing anxiety among towns people
• an unusually long and protracted freeze w/o snow
• unexpected circus - one with a singular exhibit - that of a the huge stuffed dead whale
• a huge tree that has suddenly been uprooted w/o previous signs of decay
• the noise it made when rising and falling from the ground was inordinately loud, shocking everyone

Quotes & Notes

• not a moral tale but a statement
• author uses the surreal to portray reality.
• p. 3-4    essence of book: "everything was subject to the prevailing conditions: all normal expectations went by the board and one's daily habits were disrupted by a sense of ever-spreading all-consuming chaos which rendered the future unpredictable, the past unrecallable and ordinary life so haphazard that people simply assumed that whatever could be imagined might come to pass, that if there were only one door in a building it would no longer open, that wheat would grow head downwards into the earth not out of it, and that, since one could only note the symptoms of disintegration, the reasons for it remaining unfathomable and inconceivable, there was nothing anyone could do except to get a tenacious grip on anything that was still tangible..."..."for it was as if some vital yet undetectable modification had taken place in the eternally stable composition of the air, in the very remoteness of that hitherto faultless mechanism or unnamed principle - which, it is often remarked, makes the world go round and of which the most imposing evidence is the sheer phenomenon of the world's existence - which had suddenly lost some of its power, and it was because of this that the troubling knowledge of the probability of danger was in fact less unbearable than the common sense of foreboding that soon anything at all might happen..."
• p. 6    humor: "...that noise 'so calculated to offend all one's finer feelings', but in her opinion, 'perfectly common  among common people' of munching and crunching..." (Mrs. Plauf on eating loudly, relegated only to commoners)
• p. 36    humor:  Mrs. Eszter of Mrs. Plauf and her flat: "...the cosy comfiness, the stolid air of inactivity, the treacly prettiness of this 'filthy little viper's nest'..." .
• p. 78-79    of Valuska:  "...he confronted the slow tide of human affairs with a sad incomprehension, dispassionately and without any sense of personal involvement, for the greater part of his consciousness, the part entirely given over to wonder, had left no room for more mundane matters, and had ever since then trapped him in a bubble of time, in one eternal, impenetrable and transparent moment. He walked, he trudged, he flitted blindly and tirelessly with the incurable beauty of  his personal cosmos in his soul..."
•  pp 95-96    Valuska: ..."Everyone was talking about 'the unstoppable stampede into chaos', the 'unpredictability of daily life' and 'the approaching catastrophe' without a clear notion of the full weight of these frightening words, since this epidemic of fear was not born of some genuine, daily increasing certainty of disaster but of an infection of the imagination whose susceptibility to its own terrors might eventually lead to an actual catastrophe..."
• of Mr Eszter: 
• p. 96... " the darkness occasioned by the 'apparently inoperable cataracts' of his soul."
• p. 99-100..."nothing would disturb his in his real mission, which he referred to as his 'strategic withdrawal in the face of the pathetic stupidity of so-called human progress'.
•  p. 102    "...the fatal early frost that had descended on a dry autumn with its terrifying loss of precipitation could mean only one thing, sure as the toxin, the undeniable fact that nature herself had laid down her tools and finished her regular task, that the once-brotherly bond between heaven and earth was well and truly broken, and that the last act had assuredly begun wherein we were orbiting along among the scattered detritus of our laws and 'would soon be left staring, as fate had decreed, idiotically, uncomprehendingly, watching and shivering as the light steadily withdrew from us'."
• Mr. Eszter: 
• p. 104 "the harmless truth...we are simply the miserable subjects of some insignificant failure, alone in this simply marvelous creation; that the whole of human history is no more than the histrionics of a stupid, bloody, miserable outcast in an obscure corner of a vast stage, a kind of tortured confession of error, a slow acknowledgement of the painful fact that this creation was not necessarily a brilliant success."
• p. 108 "...he never passed up the chance to draw a sharp distinction between 'the enchantment of illusion and the misery of its fruitless pursuit' -  such a dizzying journey, all he could count on would be 'the unique quality of his own immobility'."
• p. 109-110  "..he wanted to "wipe from his memory... 'the whole breeding ground of dark stupidity' was to be annihilated in one fell swoop and for ever. Of course, the person he most devoutly wished to remain ignorant of was Mrs. Eszter, his wife, that dangerous prehistoric beast from whom he, 'by the grace of God', had separated years ago, who reminded him of nothing so much as one of those merciless medieval mercenaries, with whom he had tied that infernal comedy of a marriage thanks to an unforgivable moment of youthful carelessness, and who, in her uniquely spectacle of disillusionment' the society of the town, in his view, somehow succeeded in representing."
• p. 117    "The world consisted merely of  'an indifferent power which offered disappointment at every turn' ... struggle, that was all there was to the world if we but realized it...Faith, is not a matter of believing something, but believing that somehow things could be different; in the same way, music was not the articulation of some better part of ourselves, or a reference to some notion of a better world, but a disguising of the world, but no, not merely a disguising but a complete, twisted denial of such facts......a cure that did not work, a barbiturate that functioned as an opiate."
•  p. 121   humor: "an evening over supper together" = Mrs. Eszter's warning to Mr. Eszter that, if you do not do as I say, I will move back in (we will be eating supper together again).
• p. 127  "...the exclusively human capacity for mind numbing levels of neglect and indifference was, beyond a doubt, truly limitless. The amount of it!"
• p. 128  The author's concept of things is completely different than Orhan Pamuk's in, "The Museum of Innocence":  "Apple cores, bits of old boots, watch-straps, overcoat, buttons, rusted keys, everything, that man may leave his mark by, ..a museum of pointless existence...houses, trees, lampposts...could this be a form of the last judgement...no apocalypse, but mankind swallowed without fuss or ceremony by its own rubbish. Not an altogether surprising end."
• p. 181   "The nail in the plank is stationary while the position of the hammer is variable."
• p. 191-2  Mr. Eszter, waiting and hoping Valuska returns home safely during a night of violence, has an epiphany: "  "...he suddenly realized that he had been escaping all his life, that life had been a constant escape, escape from meaninglessness into music, from music to guilt, from guilt and self-punishment into pure ratiocination, and finally escape from that too, that it was retreat after retreat, as if his guardian angel had, in his own peculiar fashion, been steering him to the antithesis of retreat, to an almost simple-minded acceptance of things as they were, at which point he understood that there was nothing to be understood, that if there was reason in the world it far transcended his own, and that therefore it was enough to notice and observe that which he actually possessed...he seemed to hear anew -sounds-; could taste the air outside and smell the dust within;...and he knew that all these, the tastes, scents, colors, sounds - the beneficial sweetness- they had not passed away, because they existed and would continue to exist."
• The last paragraph of this book (pp. 310-314) is actually a description of our bodies deteriorating after death. It is, at once horrific and beautiful; that is our body as nature decomposing back into earth.
• "Everything was there, it is simply that there was no clerk capable of making an inventory of all the constituents; but the realm that existed once -once and once only-had disappeared for ever, ground into infinitesimal pieces by the endless momentum of chaos within which crystals of order survived, the chaos that consisted of an indifferent and unstoppable traffic between things. It ground the empire into carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen....and unstitched them till they were dispersed and had ceased to exist, because they had been consumed by the force of some incomprehensibly distant edict..."
• So what is the author saying here? That there is order within chaos and that there is some order, or possibly even meaning, to our lives; that life is controlled by something we cannot comprehend...God? I do not feel he would go so far as to say that, God.
• Unlike Yukio Mishima's, "Temple of Dawn", there is no reincarnation.

***The Burgess Boys by Elizabeth Strout

Digital Audiobook,  2013
Narrated by Cassandra Campbell

***The Orphan Master's Son by Adam Johnson

Audiobook

*****The Garlic Ballads by Mo Yan

• Translated from the Chinese by Howard Goldblatt. 
• Setting 1985, China
• Other Mo Yan books I have read:  Big Breasts and Wide Hips, which is my favorite book of the author's,  to date. 
• In China, Mo Yan is a controversial writer. Other Chinese writer's believe he snuggles too closely with their government, so to speak. I disagree. I believe he schmoozes with the government so he can get away with writing what he does about Chinese life. It is not favorable, but it is real. It is clear he has a love for his homeland. Just because the country has severe problems does not take away from the inherent beauty of its land and people.
• Mo Yan's writing is visually descriptive and beautiful. It possesses a quality and depth that is astounding. His contemporary writing illustrates the causal violence that predominates the third world areas of the country. While the violence is difficult to read and comprehend, it does not take away from the beauty of Mo Yan's narrative.

*****Runaway Horses, by Yukio Mishima

• Runaway Horses is Book 2 of  Yukio Mishima's tetralogy, The Sea of Fertility
• See notes and full description of Book 1, Spring Snow, under 2014 of this blog.
• Setting-Osaka, Japan, 1932
• Yukio Mishima is Kimitake Hiraoka's  pen name
• Mishima was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature three times
• Yukio Mishima spent five years writing his tetralogy,  The Sea of Fertility, a saga of 20th century Japan.  On the day of its completion, January 25, 1970, the author mailed his manuscript to the publisher, headed to Tokyo headquarters of Japan's Eastern Army where he made a speech urging the troops to impose martial law in the Emperor's name, then performed a ritual seppuku (suicide). Mishima was 45 years old.
• Mishima's was raised in a samurai family where mind and body control was taught and respected. In traditional medieval Japan samurai conduct was considered an expression of loyalty to the Emperor. Mishima maintained this lifestyle for the entirety of his own short life. He held on to traditional medieval Japanese ideals long after the Emperor was gone and Japan was modernized. He abhorred the materialism that infiltrated Japan after WWII. These concepts are depicted in both Runaway Horses and Spring Snow. Due to the way the author died, I have little doubt these themes will continue throughout his tetralogy. 
• Mishima was a Kendo master; he ascended to the fifth rank. Isao, Kiyoaki's reincarnate, was also a Kendo master. This relationship is important as it relates to the ideals expressed in the first two books. In Spring Snow, emotional Kiyoaki embarrasses his samurai father with his delicate sensibilities. In Runaway Horses, Kendo influences Isao's samurai mindset which proves critical to his future decisions.

** * * Edge of Eternity by Ken Follett

2014
The CenturyTrilogy,  Part Three
Digital Audiobook

*Life After Life by Kate Atkinson

British author.
First published 2013

She was born, she lived, she died and was born a new.  Repeat. And again. Once more. No, let's do it again. And again. Repeat. Really?

Atkinson's concept is great, yet not fully developed. As a result her book is extremely tedious. Each death and rebirth move the story forward very little. Character development is all but absent. It felt like Atkinson did not know what direction to take so she included all of them with little thought regarding progression.  This could have been a phenomenal story, but it was not.

Repeat.

*****The Bridge of San Luis Rey

Thornton Wilder (1897-1975), American playwright and novelist

·        First published in 1927

·        1928 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Fiction

·        Setting:  Lima Peru, 1714

·        Themes: love and fate

·        The Bridge as symbol:

·        transition: from life into death

·        love: its endurance and the fact that it outlives death.

  

This novella is more complex than it initially appears. It is not simply about a bridge collapsing and the tragic death of five individuals. It looks at the importance of love in our lives, how it outlives us, and how it effects those left behind. It is not that people are merely saddened by another’s loss, but that mortality provides us with new and expanded perspectives. In other words, we may begin to see things we failed to notice during a person’s lifetime. A relationship once wickedly spurned can awaken to deeply repressed or unacknowledged feelings. It is a continuum of emotions previously undiscovered. Wilder also looks at religious theory as it relates to fate and coincidence in our lives. Are our lives governed by God’s pre-ordained plan (fate), or by accident – random occurrences?  Wilder’s inspiration for this question is found in the Gospel According to Luke, when it states: “Or those eighteen upon whom the tower of Siloam fell and killed them, do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others who dwelt in Jerusalem?” Such is the question man has struggled with since the beginning of time and Wilder considers in this profound novel dealing with humankind.

Quotes from, The Bridge of San Luis

p. 7   Franciscan Brother Juniper:

·        “Either we live by accident and die by accident, or we live by plan and die by plan.”

·        “But this collapse of the bridge of San Luis Rey was a sheer Act of God. It afforded a perfect laboratory. Here at last one could surprise [sic] His intentions in a pure state.”

p. 8 “But to our Franciscan there was no element of doubt in the experiment. He knew the answer. He merely wanted to prove it, historically, mathematically, to his converts, - poor obstinate converts, so slow to believe that their pains were inserted into their lives for their own good. People were always asking for good sound proofs; doubt springs eternal in the human breast…”

p.16  Most readers miss the fact that, “the purport of literature, is the notation of the heart. Style is but the faintly contemptible vessel in which the bitter liquid is recommended to the world.”

p. 17  “She saw that the people of this world moved about in an armor of egotism, drunk with self-gazing, athirst for compliments, hearing little of what was said to them, unmoved by the accidents that befell their closest friends, in dread of all appeals that might interrupt their long communion with their own desires.”

p. 45   “Now he discovered that secret from which one never quite recovers, that even in the most perfect love one person loves less profoundly than the other.”

p. 81   “…he had to repeat over to himself his favorite notions: that the injustice and unhappiness in the world is a constant; that the theory of progress is a delusion; that the poor, never having known happiness, are insensible to misfortune. Like all the rich he could not bring himself to believe that the poor (look at their houses, look at their clothes) could really suffer. Like all the cultivated he believed that only the widely-read could be said to know that they were unhappy.”

p. 99   “Everyone knows that in the world we do nothing but feed our wills.”

p. 107   “But soon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left the earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.”

Thornton Wilder

Quotes from Wilder clearly define his literary intent and his theory of human nature, which are one and the same thing. They are integral to and enhance the reading of “The Bridge”, which is why I have included them here.

The quotes below are copied from sections of Wilder’s lectures, interviews, and letters as are printed in the 1996 First Perennial Classics edition of, The Bridge of San Luis Rey.

p. 121   In a letter to a former student about The Bridge of San Luis, Wilder quotes his literary influence, Chekhov, “The business of literature is not to answer questions, but to state them fairly.’ I claim that human affection contains a strange unanalyzable consolation and that is all.”

p. 124  Wilder developed his characters from his own literary influences, “My weakness is that I am too bookish, I know little of life. I made the characters of The Bridge out of the heroes of books”. For example, the Letters of Mme. De Sevigne influenced the character, Marquesa de Montemayor (Dona Maria).  p. 116  After attending a concert in Paris featuring Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, Wilder said he, “came home and wrote the death of Manuel.”

p. 125   Wilder states that human beings conceal their unhappiness. “In my own case, what I seek everywhere is the mask under which human beings conceal their unhappiness…In social life… in varying degrees. They are solitary, they are consumed with desires which they dare not satisfy; and they wouldn’t be happy if they did satisfy them, because they are too civilized. No, a modern man cannot be happy; he is a conflict, whether he likes it or not.”

p. 125 “Humour is a mask to hide unhappiness, and especially to hide the deep cynicism which life calls forth in all men. We’re trying to bluff God. It is called polish.”

p.129   “Art is confession; art is the secret told. Art itself is a letter written to an ideal mind, to a dreamed-of audience.”

p. 137   “A letter can function as a literary exercise, the profile of a personality, and news of the soul.”

As a side note, and in context to his work, I think it is interesting that Thornton Wilder was friends with Sigmund Freud.