A Handful of Dust

As much as I enjoyed Vile Bodies, I enjoyedhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust even more. Ever since I tore through the works of Agatha Christie as a kid, I've been fascinated by the British upper class of the first half of the 20th century.

A Handful of Dust tells the tale of Tony and Brenda Last. Tony is landed gentry who struggles mightily to keep up with his eroding estate, Hetton Abbey. Brenda is a young thing who is struggling herself with rural boredom and the raising of the couple's son, John. Add to the mix John Beaver, an avid social climber who has no particular purpose in life other than sponging off of his well-to-do friends.

After young John Last is killed in a riding accident, Brenda becomes more and more distant from Tony and establishes herself in a London apartment where she enjoys the whirl of the London social season and an affair with Beaver. This leads eventually to a planned divorce, but as Tony finds the stipulations untenable, he decides to embark on a Brazilian safari instead with unexpected and unforgettable results.

Waugh specialized in scathing attacks on this class of people, and this novel is a perfect example of the form. At times laugh out loud funny, it is an entertaining reminder that even with all the trappings of our material lives and our often banal personal triumphs and pitfalls, in the end we are all the same.

The Handmaid's Tale

This is the second novel from Margaret Atwood that I've read and she is quickly becoming one of my favorites. The Blind Assassin was a great book I read earlier this year and I finally got around to following it up with The Handmaid's Tale. And while this novel lacks the plot complexity of the former, the writing is still first class and the story engrossing.

Set in the relatively near future, The Handmaid's Tale is a first person account of the dystopian society the United States has become after the assassination of the President and Congress by a fundamentalist religious group. Subtext informs the reader that fertility has become a major issue and so society has become very strictly ordered, with women not only being stripped of all rights, but becoming subjugates to the will of the ruling order of men. One strata of this new class system is the 'handmaid', women who are still fertile and are given as concubines to influential men ('commanders'). The wives of these commanders naturally resent the handmaids, but are a full part of the ceremony that takes place with the goal of procreation. Our narrator, Offred, slowly unfolds not only the lot she has been reduced to, but also gives a general history of how things came to be this way. A postscript sheds further light, but many Offred's ultimate fate remains somewhat of a mystery.

The novel raises a number of questions that could provide the grist for many meaningful conversations. One could argue that this is a feminist novel while another might argue that Atwood was trying to show a possible extreme reaction to feminism. I have no doubt that this book is a staple in Women's Studies and Women's Literature courses all over the world. I enjoyed this novel very much for its suspense, original plot, and for the way it made me think.

Another issue this book raised with me is the question of what constitutes science fiction. I noted in an earlier post that Atwood does not think of her novels as science fiction, and I think I understand that position with this book. While it is set in the future, does that automatically make a book fall within the 'science fiction' genre?

This novel was made into a film in the mid 90s starring the late Natasha Richardson.

In a Glass Darkly

If you are a fan of Edgar Allen Poe, you will probably enjoy this collection of five short stories and novellas by Sheridan Le Fanu. Tied together by the idea that each of these 'case histories' come from the files of a deceased doctor who specialized in the paranormal, each is capable of giving the reader the creeps.

'Green Tea', 'The Familiar', and 'Mr. Justice Harbottle' all revolve around the idea of paranormal visitation: the main characters are visited by something or someone that others can't necessarily see. And while I enjoyed each of these stories, it was the last two that make me recommend this for fans of horror and the occult.

'The Room in the Dragon Volant' is the longest of the stories and plays out more as a mystery story with supernatural overtones. It would have made the basis for a great Sherlock Holmes story and is truly suspenseful and eerie. While most readers will pick out that a double cross is in store for the narrator, it is hard to tell where it will come from.

'Carmilla' is a frightening tale of vampires that might pre-date Dracula. Le Fanu does an excellent job with description and pacing. Some of the descriptive writing ranks up there with Hawthorne from the same general time period.

The full text of these stories can be found here.

Vile Bodies

I am a fan of British humor. To me, the Brits have mastered the nifty trick of mixing the absurd with the very, very dry. Peter Sellers, Monty Python, and Ricky Gervais all come to mind. Evelyn Waugh, best known for his novel Brideshead Revisited, has also tapped into this reservoir of English comedy in his second novel, Vile Bodies.

Set in the years after the first World War, Vile Bodies centers on the character of Adam, a down on his luck writer who undergoes a series of reversals of fortune. He is in love with Nina, but alternately does and doesn't have the money to marry her. And while their up and down love affair is the focus, the novel is really a sharp lampoon of the 'jet set' of the day and their follies and foibles. Characters such as Mrs. Melrose Ape, the evangelist, Mr. Outrage, the Prime Minister, and the Drunken Major are on hand to act as a canvas for Waugh's broad swipes at British pre-war culture. All of the latest fads and fancies are on hand: zeppelins, motor races, parties, film making, and more parties. The juxtaposition between the old who are still trying to embrace Victorian morals, and the young, who are portrayed as vapid, yet resourceful, is one of the things that makes this novel stand out.

A particularly thoughtful point for me was the ending, which finds Britain at war in Europe, and the various fates of our characters seem fitting for the action that has preceded. Great stuff. The book was adapted into a film by Stephen Fry.

The Last of Mr. Norris

This Christopher Isherwood novel was picked randomly off the list. I was intrigued when I found it on Amazon as they had one used copy in fair condition for $5 and two first editions for over $900! You can probably guess which I bought. I found out later that it can be found fairly readily as part of a two book collection called The Berlin Stories.

The cover of the version I have shows a man sitting on a couch with lots of young people around him engaged in some heavy petting. The blurbs on the cover promise lots of smut, orgies, and S&M, 1930s style. It turns out the book is very tame in regards to titillation. It is actually a pretty light spy/double cross/crime novel set in Berlin in the early 1930s. And while the title character does enjoy a little light bondage, most of the perversions promised on the cover are only hinted at in the text. Our narrator, Bradshaw, an English teacher in Berlin, meets Arthur Norris on a train to Berlin. They become fast friends and Bradshaw becomes intrigued by the effete, shady Norris. Slowly he becomes entangled in some of Norris' scams revolving around the nascent Communist party in Berlin and the rise of the Nazis. More interesting than the novel itself is the fact that this book and his subsequent Berlin stories were the basis for the famous musical and film Cabaret.

As a political thriller, it is fairly second-rate, although it is interesting to read a contemporary account of Berlin in between the wars from the English perspective, especially when the reader knows full well what will happen in a very short time. While this novel wasn't terrible, I'm not really sure how it merited making the list.

Senor Vivo and the Coca Lord

Louis de Bernieres might be best know for Captain Corelli's Violin, a novel that was turned into a film starring Nicolas Cage. I haven't read that book, but it's a sure thing I will after having read Senor Vivo and the Coca Lord. This novel epitomizes the style of magical realism that is often associated with Latin and South American writers. The only catch is that although this book is set in South America, de Bernieres is actually British. One can assume that a teaching stint in Colombia led him to set his first three novels in that location.

Dionisio Vivo is a philosophy professor at a University in an unnamed South American country. He has begun to gain renown for the letters he sends to the local paper decrying the coca trade and its grim byproducts in his country. The local coca lord takes umbrage and makes several attempts on Dionisio's life. Through a series of mishaps, some extremely comical, Dionisio not only survives the attempts but earns a reputation as a godlike figure who is unstoppable. The coca lord lives in mortal fear of him, which only causes him to redouble his efforts to kill Vivo. Throughout all of this, Dionisio is courting a beautiful young woman, Anica, who is the daughter of a shady arms dealer who has kept the coca lord well stocked with weapons throughout his reign of terror. Anica is ultimately faced with a very difficult decision, which has tragic consequences for all involved.

This is my favorite book I have read in quite some time. The story is excellent, but it is the writing that leaves me wanting more. De Bernieres' prose takes the reader through the ecstasy of new love to the depths that lead a major character to attempt suicide. Meanwhile, the whimsical and sometimes magical world he creates is populated with memorable characters such as Ramon, the policeman who protects Dionisio, Lazaro, the tragic leper, and the motley band of women (Las Locas) who create a camp on the edge of town with the sole purpose of bearing Dionisio's children. The novel grows darker in the final third, and the magical elements step fully to the forefront. A very brief epilogue points out the tragedy of coca trade in South America and brings home how difficult the situation is. Laugh out loud funny and startlingly poignant, this one gets a very high recommendation from me.

The Brothers Karamazov

I hadn't been in the mood to tackle a long classic for quite some time, but early in August I decided to read Dostoevsky's last novel, The Brothers Karamazov. I've actually owned it for some time, but it has sat on the shelf as I waited for an opportune time to read it. I'm generally a very fast reader, and the book isn't that long (700 some pages), but it took me the better part of a month to get through it. That's not to say I didn't enjoy it however....

The book explores the lives of four brothers and their somewhat repulsive father, Fyodor Pavlovitch. Dmitri, the oldest, is a sensual being who is betrothed to one woman but in love with another. Unfortunately, his father is also smitten with this woman and is actively hoping to steal her away. Ivan is the intellectual, a deep thinker, and remote emotionally. Alexy is a spiritual young man who holds in highest esteem not his own father, but his spiritual father, a monk at the local monastery. Finally there is the servant and cook Smerdyakov, who is probably Fyodor's bastard. While the main plot of the novel centers around the murder of Fyodor Pavlovitch and the investigation into which son killed him, Dostoevsky's epic aims much higher than being a basic crime novel.

Dostoevsky was shooting for nothing less than a dissection of the modern (at the time) Russian man and his uneasy place at the intersection of politics, law, and religion. His use of psychology predates Freud and anticipates many of the Austrian's basic tenets in regards to the relationship between fathers and sons. There are long discourses on duty, responsibility, honor, religion, justice and everything in between interwoven into the main action. And while this causes the book to drag in places, there is no denying Dostoevsky's grand ambition. He clearly meant The Brothers Karamazov to be his crowing glory, and while I didn't enjoy it as much as Crime and Punishment, his reach did not exceed his grasp.

Miss Lonelyhearts/The Day of the Locust

Nathanael West produced only four novels during his short life. The best of the two are Miss Lonelyhearts (really a novella at 58 pages) and The Day of the Locust. I bought them packaged together in one book and read them back to back.

Miss Lonelyhearts is widely regarded as one of the finest works of the twentieth century. Set in early 1930s New York City, Miss Lonelyhearts is a man who writes an agony column for a daily newspaper. The hopelessness and hard luck that crosses his desk every day has begun to wear on him in significant ways. As he drifts through life in an alcohol haze, he vainly tries to find meaning in life, mostly through an attempt to embrace Christianity. His hard case boss Shrike and would be fiancee Betty offer contrasting views for him to latch on to. I had a mild hangover when I read this story, and the descriptions of drunkenness were tough to handle. The action is somewhat surreal, and as a look at the role of Christianity in an increasingly detached world, Miss Lonelyhearts works very well.

I enjoyed The Day of the Locust more of the two, however. What Miss Lonelyhearts did for (or to) New York, The Day of the Locust does in spades for Hollywood. West had moved to Hollywood to work on screenplays shortly before his death, and apparently he had a rich experience in a short time if this book is any indication. This novel captures the desperation, shallowness, and depravity of early Hollywood in all its glory. Tod Hackett is a young set designer with artistic ambitions who is hopelessly smitten by Faye, a wannabe actress. The story revolves around Tod and his fellow suitors (Earle, the cowboy, and Homer, the midwestern transplant) and their relative success in obtaining the unobtainable. In many ways Faye represents Hollywood in all its fatuousness: beautiful to look at, entertaining to be a part of, but ultimately hollow. The scene of mob violence at the end is truly evocative, and the book stands as an indictment as well as a strange celebration of the insanity of the place and era.

If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

Sometimes experimental fiction works for me, sometimes it doesn't. I loved Jealousy but disliked Cigarettes. If on a Winter's Night a Traveler falls squarely in between.

Italo Calvino's late 1970s novel is a considered a stone classic by most, but I had a very difficult time engaging with it. It was interesting and I admire his adherence to the conceit of the novel, but that wasn't enough to make me truly enjoy it. It's like a museum exhibit of interesting rocks- kind of nice to look at, but in all honesty, I could care less.

The novel is framed by the relationship between The Reader and the Other Reader and their attempts to finish a novel. Each time they become engaged with a story, a publishing error or some other problem thwarts them and they end up starting another story. And just as that story becomes special...... you get the picture. The ten novels the readers begin are all included here, all in different styles and genres. By the way, YOU are the reader and are addressed as such throughout. It's a bravura performance, but one that ultimately didn't work for me.

Sometimes, I just don't want to work this hard at reading a book.

The Hound of the Baskervilles

Sherlock Holmes is probably the most famous sleuth in history. While I prefer Hercule Poirot, Nero Wolfe and Perry Mason, Holmes is the template that they are all drawn from. With his skills of inductive reasoning, devoted sidekick, and his character tics, Holmes is the gold standard for whodunnit detectives.

The main issue with 'early' mysteries is that the puzzles are not terribly puzzling. None of the Poe or Arthur Conan Doyle stories can match the complexity and cleverness of Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, or P.D. James, but they are very entertaining nonetheless. In The Hound of the Baskervilles particularly, Doyle is able to set a mood that is gothic and terrifying by letting his plot straddle the border of mystery and supernatural. Had Hawthorne written mysteries, this would be what they would be like.

The plot is fairly well-known. Wealthy family is haunted by a curse in which a hound from hell roams the misty moor that adjoins the family property. Now, Sir Charles Baskerville, a wealthy philanthropist, has been found dead, apparently frightened to death and surrounded by large paw prints. The new lord of the manor is moving over from Canada and Holmes takes it upon himself to unravel the mystery and protect the new Baskerville heir. The action is written in the first person by Watson, who shows his own bravery and cleverness a few times. A very fun read for a rainy weekend.

Disgrace

I had previously read J. M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello which I found to be dry and dull- basically a treatise on animal rights and the writing process, both of which are interesting topics, but not when handled in the 'novelesque' form used in that book. Disgrace was much better.

Coetzee, a South African and Nobel prize winner, writes here about David Lurie, a divorced professor whose affair with a student goes spectacularly wrong and who finds himself unemployed and at very loose ends. He decides on an extended stay with his daughter Lucy who lives alone on a relatively remote farm plot which she shares with Petrus, a black man with his own ambitions. Lurie has just begun to re-establish a relationship with Lucy and to understand her choice of lifestyles when the two are brutally attacked by a trio of young men. The heart of the novel lies in the various responses to this event by the main characters.

I really liked this novel because Coetzee is masterful at making the emotional barriers and distance between the father and daughter palpable. It is also an engaging meditation on the complexities of racial interaction in South Africa, post apartheid. The style is descriptive but economical, and Coetzee isn't afraid to feature a protagonist who is, on many levels, unlikable. Compelling.

Siddhartha

On a recent trip to Shakespeare and Co. Bookseller in New York, I picked up several Dover Thrift Editions which averaged about $1.50 each. One of these was Herman Hesse's Siddhartha.

Siddhartha tells the tale of the title character, a young Indian who lived in the time of Buddha. Siddhartha decides to leave his family to become a wandering ascetic and monk. Siddhartha is on a quest for enlightenment, but has a natural skepticism of teachers and teachings. He believes in discovery by the self. He meets a lovely courtesan who teaches him about material possessions and sensual pleasures. After many years, Siddhartha sees the pointlessness of his existence and returns to wandering, not knowing that he has impregnated the courtesan, Kamala.

Siddhartha meets a ferryman who inspires him to 'listen to the river' and Siddhartha begins yet another voyage of self-discovery, which is changed when confronted with his son after Kamala's death.

What saved this book from being too inward looking to bear is Hesse's very lyrical writing style. It reads like an ancient fable, but was actually first published in the 1920s. I'm glad I read this book when I was in my 40s. The themes of searching, of life as a cycle, and of the relationships between fathers and sons is something I feel I can truly appreciate at this time of life. For a book that I didn't enter into reading with any particular gusto, this was excellent.

The Great Gatsby

I first read The Great Gatsby when I was 11 or 12. I remember seeing it on my teacher's desk and asking her if I could borrow it, probably trying to be precocious. I read it, but it may as well have been the Rosetta Stone. A young kid from eastern Washington had no conception of the New York locale (an essential part of the novel) or of the historical context it stood in. So of course, I hated the book and made sure that I kept that opinion for the next 30 years.

Embarking on the List, I knew there would be a few books that I'd need to reread in order to 'count' them, and this was one of them. I'm glad I gave it a second appraisal.

The novel is set in 1920s New York and Long Island and concerns the experiences of Nick Carroway, our narrator, over the course of a year he spends attempting to become a bonds trader. Nick's second cousin Daisy and her husband Tom live just across the bay from him and he strikes up a romance with their house guest, a female professional golfer. Nick's next door neighbor is the enigmatic Jay Gatsby, a man with a taste for incredibly opulent and frequent parties and a mysterious past. Over the course of the novel, his love for Daisy is revealed and his obsession with winning her from her two-timing husband leads to tragic consequences.

As most people know, The Great Gatsby concerns the American dream, or, more accurately, the artifice of the American dream. It can definitely stake a claim as the Great American Novel. The character of Gatsby is both the realization of the American dream and the representation of its hollow and tenuous promise. The same can be argued for Daisy and Tom who have succeeded, but have done so through very little effort on their own parts. Gatsby is self made, but not in a way that will ever be respected by the likes of Tom, or, to a lesser extent, Nick.

I was interested to learn in my research that F. Scott Fitzgerald was considered somewhat of a failure during his life. After a huge success with his first novel, Gatsby sold only 25,000 copies while Fitzgerald lived, and he wasn't appreciated fully until after his death when his work was reappraised and began to become a standard piece of high school and college curriculum. Fitzgerald, a member of the 'Lost Generation', died very young as a result of his alcoholism. His wife Zelda died in a fire in Asheville, NC just a few years later.

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Another classic children's tale I never bothered to read as a child. In fact, although I must have seen the classic Disney animation at some point in my life, I have no recollection of it. I was on the Alice ride at Disneyland when it broke down one time, but that's another story.

Much of my knowledge of Lewis Carroll comes from John Lennon's admiration of him and the inspiration it gave him in his writing and music. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this for the clever use of language and the whimsy of the story. However, nothing much really happens in the story. There isn't a plot arc to speak of as much as a series of indelible character sketches: the White Rabbit, the Doremouse, the Mock Turtle, the Queen of Hearts, the Cheshire Cat, the Mad Hatter, the Gryphon, etc. have all become part of western popular consciousness.

Carroll's personal life has been a matter of speculation, with dueling academics debating whether or not he was a pedophile and wondering why there are missing pages from his otherwise well-maintained diaries. Carroll (a pseudonym for Charles Dodgson) was also a brilliant mathematician and led by all accounts an interesting life.

I plan to read Through the Looking Glass soon for the further adventures of Alice.

The Bell Jar

I honestly had no idea what to expect of The Bell Jar. I knew who Sylvia Plath was and how she died, but I know of her as a poet and was actually unaware that she had published any novels. In all honesty, I thought The Bell Jar would be a collection of poetry. Instead, it is a novel that seems to be from the Holden Caulfield school of narrators who have disengaged from life after seeing the pointlessness of the whole thing.

Esther Greenwood is a young woman who has regularly achieved academic excellence and at the beginning of the novel is on a month long internship for a New York based magazine. In the first half of the novel, Esther relates her adventures in New York, some comic, some sad. She feels separate from other people, but not in a way that is particularly different than what most people go through from time to time. However, once she returns home to find that she did not get accepted into a writing program as she had anticipated, things take a terrible turn and she attempts suicide. The second half of the novel is a harrowing first person description of a nervous breakdown in action. While the novel ends on a hopeful note, the subsequent tragedy of Plath's life leaves the reader feeling that the hopefulness will be short lived.

After reading and researching, I now understand that The Bell Jar is largely autobiographical. Virtually everything and everyone in the story mirror real events and people in Plath's life. In fact, before she died, Plath insisted the novel not be published in the United States and was only published in the UK under a pseudonym. One feels slightly uncomfortable reading the novel knowing that it is a relatively true account, especially when one knows the rest of the story and the relief that the narrator has survived her ordeal is undercut by the knowledge of her ultimate fate.

Farewell, My Lovely

"I got up on my feet and went over to the bowl in the corner and threw cold water on my face. After a little while I felt a little better, but very little. I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat, and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room."

Farewell, My Lovely is entirely built of this type of prose, lyrical and purple at the same time. I discussed earlier how difficult it is to read a hard boiled detective tale because of the constant satirizing and diminishing returns of the genre. Still, after Dashiell Hammett and Sam Spade, the quintessential L.A. hard case has got to be Raymond Chandler's Phillip Marlowe. When a character is portrayed in film by people like Robert Mitchum and Humphrey Bogart, you know he's tough.

Farewell, My Lovely was the second of Chandler's Marlowe novels. It follows a case of gambling, drugs, and murder in 1930s Los Angeles and environs. Along the way there are dames, psychics, disreputable cops and doctors, and a double cross or two for good measure. Chandler is particularly good at description and Marlowe in his first person narration is the conduit for these descriptions. Marlowe becomes enmeshed in the action by simple coincidence, but is able to play just the right moves in order to crack the case. Chandler hints at Marlowe's alcoholism without dwelling on it and also shows him to have racist tendencies. In fact, some of the racism is shocking to a modern reader, but is somehow different than that of the Tarzan novel. Here, the racist remarks are in keeping with the character, as opposed to being a simple premise that the action is based upon.

As with much of the genre, the mystery itself is no great shakes, but Chandler's writing is evocative and I'll look forward to reading more.

Brighton Rock

Graham Greene is yet another prominent twentieth century novelist that I have been aware of but had not read. Brighton Rock is his 1938 novel about seaside thugs and their struggle for power over Brighton and its horse track.

Pinkie is a seventeen year old whose world stretches no further than the beachfront and horse track in Brighton. He has inherited control of a gang after its leader was killed. Despite his young age, Pinkie's ruthlessness and quick mind make him a natural for succession. The far wealthier Mr. Colleoni has his own ideas on who should handle the action in Brighton, and a struggle for control ensues. Against all this is Pinkie's relationship with Rose, a naive waitress who has information that might link Pinkie and his gang to a murder. Unfortunately for Rose, she has no idea what the information really means and is 'romanced' by Pinkie who has aims at marrying her simply so she cannot be forced to testify against him.

The real interest in this novel for me was the character of Pinkie, who must have been relatively unique for his time. Like Tom Ripley, here we have a central character who is pure evil. Pinkie's abhorrence of carnality and twisted puritanism make him an interesting example of 'Catholicism gone wrong'. He and Rose's actions grow out of a belief that once they have committed mortal sin, all is lost- so what's the point in redemption? This novel is really a meditation on Catholicism and the many ways its adherents can interpret what it all really stands for.

A good novel, but it never particularly engaged me as a story. More interesting was the subtext. Brighton Rock was also made into a film starring Richard Attenborough.

Murder Must Advertise

Growing up, I was a huge fan of Agatha Christie and Rex Stout. I'd mix things up a little with the occasional Ngaio Marsh, Ruth Rendell, or Erle Stanley Gardner mystery, but I never looked into Dorothy L. Sayers until recently. Sayers was a contemporary of Christie's and was one of the first women ever to earn a degree from Oxford. Later in her life she became a noted Christian scholar, but most of her literary fame derives from her detective stories featuring Lord Peter Wimsey. Wimsey was atypical of the sleuths of fiction from the time period. He didn't bask in his eccentricities like Poirot or Nero Wolfe. Instead, he was a wealthy aristocrat with excellent social connections and a real talent for sport.

Murder Must Advertise, published in 1933, is set at the firm of Pym's Publicity. Sayers worked in an advertising firm and her behind-the-scenes knowledge is well evident. In this story, Wimsey goes undercover at Pym's to discover who pushed one of the associates down a spiral staircase and what London's thriving drug trade has to do with Pym's. While not as ingenious a plotter as Christie, Sayers writing is breezy and lighthearted. There is a great deal of humor in the characters and the dialog and contains some broad and affectionate swipes at English class hangups and character.

If you're an English mystery fan, you'll enjoy this book. Next on my list from Sayers is Five Red Herrings, which most mystery enthusiasts claim as her best.

The Collector

The Collector is an engrossing psychological thriller from John Fowles. The plot is simple enough, but the sophistication inherent in some of the themes this novel presents make it an incredible first novel.

Frederick Clegg is a socially awkward young man who collects butterflies and lives with an aunt and cousin after the deaths of his parents. He fantasizes a life with a local girl, Miranda Grey, who is far out of his league. By chance, Frederick wins the pools and no longer need worry about income. He buys a secluded country house, packs the aunt and cousin off to Australia, and puts into play a plan to realize his fantasy of a life with Miranda by kidnapping her off of a London street.

The first half of the novel is written from Frederick's point of view. His even, almost emotionless tone and awkward formality and Victorian sense of virtue make's one forget from time to time that he is a psychopath. He makes much of the fact that he does not violate Miranda sexually, and believes that this makes him a good person.

The second half is told from Miranda's point of view. The incidents are the same, but her explanations (in a hastily scrawled journal) show the motivations behind her interactions with Frederick. She longs, of course, for freedom, but she also analyzes her relationship with the much older artist G.P. and comes to a series of conclusions regarding art, beauty, and those who do and do not understand them.

The theme of imprisonment runs throughout the book. There is Frederick's physical imprisonment of Miranda as well as the fact that he is imprisoned by his set way of thinking. Miranda is imprisoned by her social and artistic elitism; she is a snob in the worst way. She not only disdains those of lower social status, but those 'new people' with their middle class wealth who do not and cannot properly appreciate art and culture the way that she and her high-minded friends can. The story is a journey for her as well as for Frederick, although the results for both are unexpected.

A creepy novel with a provocative ending for the early 1960s. A film version with Terence Stamp was also made.

A Confederacy of Dunces

An all time classic comic novel, A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole is also a New Orleans classic. I read this book before I ever imagined living in New Orleans, and it painted an amazingly vivid picture of a place I became determined to visit someday.

The novel concerns the comic exploits of Ignatius J. Reilly, indelible resident of Uptown New Orleans and sufferer of chronic 'valve' problems. Ignatius still lives with his mother although he is thirty and spends his days writing in his journal about the shortcomings of the rest of humanity. Ignatius is a man out of time; a lover of geometry and theology, a hater of popular culture. He attends movies in order to make fun of them. In other words, he wallows in the very material he finds so offensive. He is agoraphobic, a slob, and has delusions of grandeur.

The book is more of an extended character study of Ignatius and New Orleans than it is a traditional plot arc. We meet the denizens of New Orleans, Myrna (Reilly's sometime girlfriend), the long suffering mother, and a bevy of oddball characters. Having lived in New Orleans for over ten years, I have to say that its depictions are incredibly accurate in all their hilarity. Ignatius' attempts at gainful employment (as a hot dog vendor and in a pants factory amongst others) are hilarious enough to sustain the novel.

One of the amazing things about this novel is the route it took to publication. Toole was a young New Orleanian who committed suicide in 1969. His mother found the smeared carbon copied manuscript amongst his effects and in the later 1970s sought out noted author Walker Percy and badgered him into reading a novel by her dead son. Percy did so reluctantly, but found himself more and more entranced as he read on. Using his connections and influences, the book was finally published in 1980 and won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature the following year.

I have purchased and give this novel away at least a half dozen times. I have not read it for several years but plan to reread it for the 4th or 5th time this summer. Simply brilliant, and a top ten favorite for me.

Ignatius J. Reilly is such a part of New Orleans culture, you can visit his bronze image on Canal Street: