The Government Inspector - Nikolai Gogol

Nikolai Gogol (1809-1852)

The Government Inspector is a satirical play first performed in the mid 1830's that dramatized the proclivities of rural Russians and the corrupt bureaucracies of the Russian government and minor officialdom. It was a critique of the Russian government under Tsar Nicholas I, and as such was given a polarizing reception. 

The Play opens with news that an Inspector General will be making an appearance incognito, creating havoc and chaos for the small town assembly. Quickly they begin to try and hide their vices. The Chief of Police is cautiously reproached for taking bribes.   

"There are sins and there are sins. I tell everybody openly that I take bribes, but what kind of bribes? Only wolfhound puppies. That's absolutely another matter!"

They quickly assume that in order for Government Officials to make an appearance, there must be a war brewing with Turkey. As terror grips them, they agree that the best course of action for now will be for the Postmaster to read all outgoing and incoming letters from now on. The Postmaster quickly assures them that he's been doing so for quite some time!

Finally, they discover the official has been living within their midst for the last few weeks, and all hell breaks loose and they frantically try to put things in order. Ducks must be removed from the town square, the sick patients in the hospital must be thinned out and their diseases must be inscribed in Latin above their beds, bribery must be abated for the time being and all drunks must be forced to eat onions and garlic to shroud the scent of vodka on their breath.

"An inspector has come! With a mustache? What sort of mustache?"

Meanwhile, Khlestakov's money has run out and he has been living in abject poverty, begging the kitchen for food each day, while he hides away in his room at a little decrepit inn unable to pay for his room and board. He is forced to subsist on feathery soup and roasts comparable to tree bark. 

The Chief of Police makes his appearance, both under different impressions as to the meaning of the visit. Khlestakov begins to defend his inability to pay his rent, while the Chief of Police defends the butchers, the general productivity of the town and tries to appease him in any way possible.

Khlestakov, quickly realizes their is some misunderstanding and he has been taken for a General of sorts, a role he was born to play. He immediately uses this to his advantage and openly accepts bribes of all sorts as they begin to take him on a tour of the town. 

"From the time I undertook management [at the hospital] - incredible as it may seem to you - all of the patients have been getting well like flies. A patient can hardly enter the hospital before he's cured, not so much by the medications as by the reliability of the management."

Slowly the city officials present themselves and begin to air their grievances, hoping to bribe Khlestakov into making a favorable report. Khlestakov abruptly asks each visitor for a loan of 300 rubles, which each is happy to accommodate except for a few of the poorer officials whom he graciously accepts 75 rubles from.  

As Khlestakov gets ready to depart, fearing his subterfuge may be discovered, he writes a friend of his a letter exposing his fraud and saying it might make good fodder for a story. The Postmaster intercepts the letter and quickly dashes the hopes and dreams of the townspeople who now realize they have been had by an impostor.

Only torture by ingestion of salted herring (a common practice to produce excessive thirst) would be good enough for such a scoundrel.

"You're going to eat salted herring my man!" may be my new favorite threat!

Where I'm Calling From - Raymond Carver

Raymond Carver 1938-1988

Carver's compilation of short stories are told with the detached minimalism of the Dirty Realists, a coterie of writers in the 1970 - 80's that focused on sadness and loss in the everyday lives of ordinary people. Often their characters were lower-middle class or isolated and marginalized, perpetually misunderstood, struggling with the everyday aspects of survival, they embodied Thoreau's ideal of living lives of quiet desperation.

Carver was influenced by James Salter, but unlike Salter who created a world from the everyday moments of a single family, Carver's stories are vignettes into the lives of the American diaspora.

Like his characters, Carver's career was overshadowed by alcoholism, poverty a broken marriage and cancer. His characters often struggle with profound loss and at times are comforted by lonely bakers.

 For a while Carver eked out a living as a janitor, which gave him time during off hours to work on his short stories. He resonates with the down-and-out-blue-collar character, the hardscrabble world of the working poor. While Salter's characters are upper middle class, leisurely sipping their wine and grumbling about lack of identity and the confines of marriage, Carver's characters have no time for wine sipping or a moment to stop and wonder if there could be something else. They are trapped in a world of emptiness and desperation. There are lost dreams and deluded hopes. And yet throughout his short stories are moments of connection. A man traces a cathedral with a blind man. A moment observing and ugly baby play with a peacock fills a couple with happiness and they embark on a new life of their own. A boy catches a fish that only he can appreciate while his family life slowly crumbles around him. A husband searches for meaning in a letter from his wife, slowly tearing apart the writing style and semantics, missing who she is as a person, refusing to listen or acknowledge her accusations as she quietly walks out of the house into a herd of abandoned horses.

Light Years - James Salter

James Salter's prose are like the early waking hours where you are caught between reality and the oscillating waves of your dreams, his writing style is sparse and pared down, a precision and mastery of language.

Reading Light Years was like being a fly on the wall, watching as the spider of fate and destiny spins her web, entrapping the protagonists one after another in her silken threads. As they pursue their lives, their dreams, while they search for their identities, slowly the chords are wrapped tighter and tighter, each one falling into the same trap, the promise of love and the hope of being truly understood.

The story of Viri and Nedra is one of a families growth and dissolution. It is filled with the intimacies of everyday life, the relationship with objects, the sounds of movement, the sacred rites of sharing a meal. It is a novel about relationship, like Anna Karenina only from the perspective of Vronsky, a man who spends his life seeking the counterpart of his soul, whose unhappiness is tangible... "He was self-indulgent, a failure. He had not abandoned failure; it was his address, his street, his one comfort. His life was one of intimacy and betrayal. Of himself he wrote: extravagant, false. He was impractical, moody, a deviate. He suffered and loved like a woman; he remembered the weather and the menu in restaurants, hours that were like a broken necklace in a drawer."

Viri watches Ibsen's The Master Builder and see's himself. The portrait of a failed architect begging his mistress not to leave him makes him sick and yet doesn't call forth change. He leaves the theater and continues his pilgrimage of inefficacy and failure, knowing in his bones that "One of the last great realizations of life is that it will not be what you dreamed."

Nedra is married to a man that can give her everything except what she wants, wealth. Although they live in an upper-class world, where she reigns supreme at dinner parties, the men wanting to be near her, the women wanting to share their intimacies, her marriage has become a prison of which she can only dream of escape.  Although Nedra demands change and eventually flees the confines of her cell she never truly grasps what she's looking for. She has no wealth but is ultimately free. 

The Crying of Lot 49 - Thomas Pynchon

Thomas Pynchon (1937-)

I basically had no idea what was going on throughout the entirety of this book...somewhat like the protagonist Oedipa Mass.

Oedipa becomes an executor of the will of a one time lover and finds herself lost within a web of mystery that seems to involve the unearthing of a centuries-old conflict between rival mail distribution outfits. There is a secret symbol that keeps appearing and leading her further into the bowels of the mystery only to finally reveal its never ending depth. Is everyone she's ever met a part of the intrigue? Is it all a practical joke? As she makes her way from one lead to the next she leaves a trail of missing links behind her, while slowly the men she comes in contact with either take their own lives or spontaneously go insane leaving her more and more isolated with no one to turn to and no answers for her endless questions.

This book has been described as a great example of postmodern writing and I picked up on that pretty quickly. There is no real concept of truth, rather its searching for truth or meaning in the rubble of endless interpretation and infinite possibility. The book ends without closure leaving the reader to determine Oedipa's truth for her. Was it all just a practical joke or as the curtain closes do we envision her on the cusp of enlightenment?

Thank god this book was only a 180 pages. Unfortunately there are another 2 Pynchon books left on the canon...so I might need to spread them out to one every 5 years or so. Pynchon is not my favorite author by a long shot, again like Oedipa, I felt like someone was playing a practical joke on me. His writing style is brisk and staccato. No poetry. No terrifically executed sentences. Just incredibly hard to follow mazes of text, with plays within plays and references within references.

The Gormenghast Trilogy - Mervyn Peake

Mervyn Peake (1911-1968)

So after trying to read Clarissa for a million years, I decided for now to throw in the towel and turn to a book that seemed like it might have a plot. Plots these days are a little much to hope for I think.

The Gormenghast trilogy is a set of fantasy novels that revolve around a remote and reclusive earldom filled with bazaar characters and outrageous happenings. The basic plot of the three books is the growth and development of Titus Groan, the 77th Earl and heir to the Gormenghast world. He is not thrilled by the prospect of living out his life day by day through the archaic rituals that have come to define Gormenghast. The rituals proceed life and Titus feels trapped and chained to a world that seems to have nothing to offer beyond endless stone corridors that open into decrepit rooms devoid of life, adventure and meaning. He envies the free and slowly plots his escape...only to realize that for him the only real option is Gormenghast.

The plot rather than linear, swirls around the many characters in almost a Dickinson sort of way, they make their entrances and exits with the plot occasionally surfacing from the shadows of their interactions.

Withdrawn and ruinous it broods in umbra: the immemorial masonry: the towers, the tracks. Is all corroding? No. Through an avenue of spires a zephyr floats; a bird whistles; a freshet bears away from a choked river. Deep in a fist of stone a doll's hand wriggle, ward rebellious on the frozen palm. A shadow shifts its length. A spider stirs....and darkness between the characters.

- Gormenghast 

He only knows that he has left behind him, on the far side of the skyline, something inordinate; something brutal; something tender; something half real; something half dream; his half heart; half of himself....

- Titus Alone

Clarissa - Samuel Richardson

So I'm 200 pages in, with another 1,300 to go and I have a feeling this is going to be just as painful as I imagined. To give myself goals and benchmarks I decided to check in every 200 pages or so and give a brief summary, while I eat copious amounts of chocolate as a reward.

So basically, there's a rumor regarding some foul play and unjust treatment of a suitor circulating about the Harlowe family. Anna Howe decides to get to the bottom of these rumors and so begins the longest correspondence in history. It seems there has been a suitor of Clarissa's older sister, but she rejected him and after a nanosecond during which he caught a glimpse of Clarissa, he decided that actually Clarissa was the better deal after all, much to the chagrin of the older sister. Clarissa thinks this guy, Mr. Lovelace, is a bit of a rake and having much higher matrimonial ambitions for herself, puts him off and except for the original encouragement of the family would have nothing further to do with him. But Mr. Lovelace's continual courtship of Clarissa is too much to bear for the older sister, who drags the older brother into the matter challenging Mr. Lovelace to a duel and forever sullying Mr. Lovelace presence and ambitions toward the Harlowe family. (Side note: Mr. Lovelace is a rake and a no-good womanizer...)

The family somehow instead finds what they deem to be a suitable match for Clarissa, a Mr. Solmes, who is completely and utterly repugnant to Clarissa. She has begged confinement to a nunnery or certain death over any union with Mr. Solmes, who nevertheless doggedly/lethargically pursues her. How can one be both dogged and lethargic? Well despite constant, never-ending refusals he waits in the guest room unperturbed as the linen for Clarissa's trousseau is procured. Yet, the family does all of the intense courtship, which involves imprisonment in her room, seizure of all correspondence and a never ending stream of family disapproval and disavowal unless she concedes to their will. 

Finally after resisting Mr. Lovelace for 200 pages...it seems like he is looking like her best option. If she is still banished to her room 200 pages from now writing letters secretly to her dear friend Miss. Howe...I think I might have a break down. This book could use a little more action and a little less endless discussion. 

Evelina, or the History of a Young Lady - Fanny Burney

Evelina is a young woman, well educated yet sheltered from the ways of the world. She is raised in rural seclusion, the unacknowledged but legitimate daughter of a dissipated English aristocrat. When she is seventeen she is allowed to spend time in London and there quickly finds herself immersed in the world of the English aristocracy, frequenting balls, becoming familiar with lords and visiting all the fashionable establishments. When her poor cousins insist on her spending time with them she is then exposed to a completely different world occupying the same topography but further away from her previous existence than a foreign country. This leads to some humorous moments (it seems there were more prostitutes wandering the Covey gardens then I had previously thought, something Jane Austin never mentions.)

Told through a series of letters, this book was much better than I was anticipating. Evelina seemed like an adorable younger sister that still has a lot of growing up to do, but her faults are from inexperience rather from lack of trying. She is altogether too malleable and could have done with a little more backbone on occasion, but all in all she was a worthy protagonist. I think if anything the moments of "satire" were a little too much. In this sense Evelina was a foil for the satire to take place around her while she went about her business of being a reliable, estimable heroine. The satire, I guess, was most evident in a couple characters never ending desire to make fun of the aristocracy with endless jokes, pranks and melodrama. I could have done with a bit less/none of it...

 After my second book now told through the exchange of letters maybe I'll finally be brave enough to attempt Clarissa (all million, zillion pages of it.)