Odyssey by Homer

Odysseus encounters many obstacles on his way back to Ithaca

Odysseus, King of Ithaca, wily hero of the Trojan war, sets out for home with twelve ships laden with booty. Ten years later he washes up naked on a beach, resorting to burrowing into a pile of olive leaves for warmth. In the interim, he has experienced many adventures, seen many wondrous things and even bedded two goddesses. However, the kingdom of Ithaca lies neglected and his wealth is being depleted by the 108 suitors come to court his presumed widow Penelope. Penelope, still in love with Odysseus, and needing to preserve the kingdom for their son Telemachus, has delayed and delayed her choice of a husband, but can delay no more. Odysseus, disguised as an old beggar, finally arrives, and with the help of the goddess Athena, wreaks a terrible revenge.

The Odyssey seemed far more “narratively constructed” than the Iliad. In every scene, the hero has an unstoppable motivation – I want to go home. The use of secrets (and secret scars) combine to support gripping scenes of high emotional intensity. What Odysseus longs for is what we all long for: home. Perhaps this was the original video game: surprises and monsters, capped with an orgiastic mass murder. The meeting of Penelope and the disguised Odysseus is masterfully told.

Women play an important role here, starting with Athena. They want to protect the hero yet they also want to contain and maybe even imprison him. Women are both a source of emotional longing, and what is harder for the modern person to understand, a source of currency or wealth and property. I’m not sure if I completely understood that. Everyone deeply respects Penelope, yet Penelope must be married.

Both kings and swineherds provide hospitality, even though Odysseus is not that nice. He certainly lies a lot.

The Brink by Austin Bunn

Stories about people at a turning point

In the world of “The Brink,” diverse characters across history discover themselves embroiled in spectacular predicaments. From nuclear war to the sex lives of the disfigured to a conquistador’s ship at the edge of the world to a group of cultists preparing for their imminent exit on the Hale Bopp Comet, the main characters wrestle with a profoundly changed world. In every story, the prose was pyrotechnic and perfectly calibrated.

I have mixed feelings about this collection. The stories reminded me of Karen Russell’s: technically proficient, and yet, with a coldness at their core. My preference is for something hot. These stories were glib, about possibly tired subjects: The children of divorce. The video game world. Some of them I really enjoyed: The End of the Age is Upon Us: written in a sprightly compound sentences, about one of the residents in San Diego’s Hale Bopp cult. I also loved Ledge, about the explorers in their ship encountering the monstrous end of the world. The display of writerly“chops” was amazing. Also I was totally into “Griefer,” about the end of a virtual world. He breathed life into it.

Square Wave by Mark de Silva

An overeducated security guard searches for a sociopath compelled to beat up prostitutes

Stories alternate then start to merge: The ubiquity and manufacture of porn; the weaponizing of rain clouds, ostensibly under the guise of conquering drought; the terroristic destruction of municipal landmarks; the origin of modern music; the messy European conquest of Ceylon. The desultoriness of an uncertain relationship. Over many pages of dialogue, characters discuss their situations.  The night watchman's search for the sociopath leads him to encounter many other phenomena.

After a rough start, not helped by forced prose that at times lacked clarity, I started to get into the erudite rhythms of this longish novel. The historical fiction sections were the best, about the colonists trying to get home and the wily Emperor trying to preserve his kingdom. There the varied characters felt truly three dimensional. In the rest of the book the characters toted explanatory billboards on their backs, even though, for the most part, these billboards were pleasantly interesting. Sometimes a unsettling whiff of misogyny rose from the pages, and I’m not sure if the stories ever truly climaxed or combined. Nevertheless, the book held my interest.

Abide With Me by Elizabeth Strout

A pastor confronts the sins of the world

Tyler Caskey, newly ordained Congregational minister, a local Mainer, is assigned to the small town of West Annett. At first Tyler is happy with his vocation, his lovely young wife and newborn daughter. But inexplicable tragedy strikes, and it takes time and healing before Tyler can lead his flock again. As he struggles with his weaknesses, his inefficacy, he muses often on the life and writings of Dietrich Bonheoffer, a minister executed by the Nazis, though the Nazis were unable to quench his eloquent witness. As the pettiness of his congregation's concerns, the gossiping ladies, the Christmas and Easter attendees, erode his patience, he finds a kindred spirit in his housekeeper, uneducated eccentric Connie Hatch. Tyler endures his sorrow and learns more about actual human nature, finding it increasingly difficult but necessary to love the deeply flawed residents of West Arnett.

I hated Olive Kitteridge, but I admired this deceptively simple story, which opens like a fairy tale or folklore. At opportune moments, the stakes were raised and surprises unveiled. All Tyler wants is to live his life as a devout Christian and teach his flock to live as Christians, but over and over he is confronted with surprisingly serious Ten Commandment level sins. At first he doesn’t know how to respond. The fully developed slightly comical characters of West Arnett are, most of them, ornery.  This novel also succeeds as the portrait of a town, a town with some resemblance to Peyton Place. The careful delicate prose was deployed effectively. As the novel proceeds, the story gets dark – even Tyler is guilty of serious things. The happy ending feels a little tacked on. I definitely will go back and reread Olive Kitteridge.

The Iliad by Homer translated by Alexander Pope

The overpowering wrath of Achilles is no match for all too human Hector and his beloved city

Agamemnon, chief of the Greek armies assembled to defeat the walled city of Troy, grievously insults Achilles, his best warrior, by appropriating his war prize, the beautiful slave Briseis. Achilles then decides he’s had enough of the whole glory and honor thing, and removes himself and his fearful Myrmidons from the fight. Without Achilles, the Greeks in battle are overmatched by the newly emboldened Trojans. Meanwhile, Hector, crown prince of Troy, must rally his people and comfort his wife, all the while staving off the destruction of his culture just because his pretty boy younger brother abducted a Greek wife. After that introduction, there are lots and lots of killing: arrows through jaws, heads lopped off, javelins through hearts, steaming entrails falling to the mud. Lots. Once kind Patroclus, Achilles’ best friend, is killed by Hector, Achilles goes on a rampage that concludes with the death of Hector and the ignominious drawn out degradation of his body. King Priam goes to Achilles’ tent in the dead of night and humbly asks for Hector back and the book ends with Hector’s royal funeral.

The Iliad is one of the foundational classics of Western Civilization. The characters are completely recognizable, fully three dimensional – responsible Hector, inhuman Achilles, sneaky Ulysses, regretful Helen, arrogant Agamemnon, gentle Patroclus.  The list of characters includes the Olympian gods, who aren’t above fighting dirty. Like Dante, the poet uses humble metaphors to strike an emotional chord. Scene after scene concerns a parent’s protective love for their child. The stakes are huge, especially for the Trojans – their culture will be destroyed if they lose.

The gods hardly ever appear as themselves, but take a human form. For them, this all encompassing war is entertainment, but for the humans, it’s life or death. I loved the beautiful description of Achilles’ shield - forged by a god; it depicts the sun and the moon, the ideal Greek life in peace and Greek life in war. It took me a while to get used to the depiction of women here– fully human, fully respected by their family members, however, once captured, the women become currency. That is why Andromache, Hector’s wife, fears having to draw water as a slave. The whole idea of consent is a modern one, apparently. And it does seem that Briseis, after her entire family was killed, had made her peace with being Achilles’ concubine. She weeps for Patroclus, who was nice to her.

I am not that eager to return to the poem – the endless hacking and the decapitations and the soldiers slipping on the gore caused by the human sacrifices started to get to be too much, started to bore me. A huge chunk of this falls in the Song of Roland and Aeneid prior to television teenage boy entertainment. Most of these pages were exactly like a video game. Or like a Red Sox/Yankees game.

A Girl is a Half-formed Thing by Eimear McBride

A sensitive girl loves her disabled brother

A girl, brought up fatherless in an overanxious religious Irish home, reaches maturity, alternately dismayed and protective of her brain-damaged older brother. As a thirteen year old girl, she loses her virginity to an uncle by marriage. Eventually the bright girl leaves home to attend college in England. On a trip back to Ireland, she re-encounters the uncle. Their sexual attraction ignites and he secretly starts to visit her in London. Meanwhile, the girl tries to numb her pain through excessive drinking and masochistic sex in the bushes with random local lads. Once the brother’s brain cancer re-appears, the girl must decide what she is going to do.

This was a unique book – a big part of the experience was the stream-of-consciousness prose style, headlong and rushed, a unique language driven experience. The novel adapted the structure of Portrait of the Artist as well as the The Sound and the Fury, that is, a plotted story told, at first, through the voice of a child. The unusual prose, stuffed with cursing and prayers, did not bother me – I felt I understood what was going on; especially what was going on with her emotionally. However, I wouldn’t call this a beach read. The book was also a social window into an Ireland growing richer, up from the sheep farm and the fifteen kids, towards with the college educated and the fancy cars.

The novel rests on the older brother’s disability.  Nobody in the family talks about it; the schoolchildren cruelly taunt him.  His fate he cannot escape, while she wastes no time getting out of town. What makes this book work is the love between the sister and the brother; otherwise, the story would collapse into a steaming pile of victimization. At times, it was a chore to read the girl’s humorless take on life and the book ends with a monumental masochistic, perhaps not motivated, Liebestod.

Canada by Richard Ford

 A couple's foolish decision affects the lives of their children

The story of a mismatched pair’s brief career as bank robbers is narrated by their son, fifteen year old Dell Parsons, who lives in Great Falls, Montana with his parents and twin sister Berner.  Dell is shy, still physically a boy, loving school and longing for a well ordered life.   He has begun to study chess and beekeeping, imagining participating in those clubs as a freshman, eager to embark upon his new mature life.  However, his parents’s almost immediate arrest after their ill conceived scheme sends his and Berner’s life spinning off into other, more dangerous, directions.

I loved this recursive novel – the story is tentatively painted, then repainted, using foreshadowing and suspense.  Right from the beginning Dell tell us what the story will be about.  The novel is a meditation on chance, how a stupid decision can derail your life and the lives of those you love.  Many chapters end with:  And I never saw him, her, it again.  The novel was much longer than average, but the storytelling gripped me.  The surprises are effectively doled out, especially the surprise of the mother’s fate.  Themes reoccur – the bees, the bell on the Lutheran Church, Niagara Falls.  The casual cruelties of the townspeople are shocking, as well as the life changing kindness of a stranger.

The book is split into two halves, recreating the same situation – an older man, unable to recognize the boy’s innocence, trying to draw Dell into a crime.  The sorrow of losing the parents and their replacement by other much more imperfect parents.  I was trying to figure out why I loved this so much, and I think ultimately it was the characters – they were fully three dimensional and memorable, at least a dozen of them.  And they all are just trying to do the best they can.