The Compulsion of Lists

Read the other Bulgakov book published by Hesperus, The Fatal Eggs. This one was even worse than A Dog's Heart. Once again, the plot centers in Moscow after the Revolution with a "aristo" scientist trying to cope with the stupidity of the committee members. This experiment entails a "red ray" that the scientist directs on to frogs which causes them to mature and reproduce quickly and expotentially. All this is occurring during one of the first USSR agricultural crisis -- some poultry disease. The good comrades decide to usurp the scientist's red ray and use it on imported eggs to jump start the industry. Unfortunately, the eggs sent to the committee are not chickens, but an assortment of reptiles with the sci-fi predictable mutations and loss of lives.

Well that's about it, my summary without engagement of any kind with the author, his bland style, dated crusade, et cetera, et cetera.

At least the next book to review, One Thousand and One Ghosts by Dumas is a goodie.

But the Other Parts are Bolshevik

Even Hesperus has some "eh" books. Finished one such a couple of days ago, namely Heart of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov. It is a novella set close to a decade after the Russian Revolution at a time when the newly minted Communists were all for singing at dawn and breaking up the larger apartments into more equitable "cubbies." The main character is a well-to-do doctor/mad scientist (oh I forgot to mention, this falls in the satiric sci-fi genre) who takes home a mongrel from the streets, fattens him up and transplants the pituitary gland and gonads of a common criminal. (N0, this isn't heading into the successful realms of The Charlatan.)

Neither is it as memorable as Frankenstein because the manifest political message. Which is, I decipher, the Russian classes were either 1) oblivious to the masses but overlaying a "culture" on the country or 2) so downtrodden as to become near-dogs themselves ... scrounging for food or attacking. Being written in the mid 1920's, the medicinal/psychiatric side effects lack the more frightening parodies that could be expressed post-DNA and more organ transplant operations. The story ends with the doctor restoring the doggie-ness to the "patient," implying the author's belief in the comfortable, if imperfect known world.

In the Beginning, Was the Word

Wow, two in one day. My drive to get books back pre-Woods Hole continues. Another Hesperus amuse bouche finished. This time, The Diary of Adam and Eve, by Mark Twain, as unknown as the Hawaiian diaries and equally enjoyable. Even though this one can be read in the length of a TV comedy hour.

Of all people to write the forward, Hesperus chose John Updike. Okay. There is a marked different world view when it comes to the battle of the sexes. Updike points out how shallow and undeveloped Twain's vapid female counterpoints are to his male leads. Okay granted. But in this book, given the time and contemporary buzz of Darwin and emerging psychoanalysis, Eve is portrayed charmingly. She is not the she-devils of Zola. She is stereotypical, but only in a post-feminist decade. She does have some glaring gaps: her only attempt to cook is to throw one of her cherished apples into the fire, fire that she, not "man" discovered. Twain portrays her is consumed by curiosity, a scientist who experiments, but not to the expense of her awe of beauty, and the recognition of worth being defined by something other than usefulness.

Twain's take on the acclimation of one sex to the quirks of the other's is a wondrous filling in of the blanks in Genesis. How did they come to adjust to each other? How did the acclimate to gender based traits? The device of using a dairy to interpret the same events first by Adam, with his world view and then by Eve, is a perfect way to explain away how to this day a man and a woman regard the same thing as polarly different and holding innately different relevance. It is especially clever how they explain the appearance of Cain, and Eve's "crazy" protective stance to something that Adam thinks could be a fish or a kangaroo or a bear without a tail. Even with their consumption with discovering the cause of all things, and documenting a quasi-theorem for all things around them, Adam simplistically believes that Eve found Cain in the forest and goes looking for more of this unknown species; he is jealous of her good luck in finding another one, Abel, after he has searched so far and wide.

I loved Eve's appreciation of beauty, beauty that is so much more valued because it is mysterious. Being someone enamoured of the Moon, her perception on day two of her life: ..."The moon got loose last night, and slid down and fell out of the scheme - a very great loss. It breaks my heart to think of it. There isn't another thing among the ornaments and decorations that is comparable to it for beauty and finish. It should have been fastened better. If only we can get it back again. But of course there is no telling where it went to. And besides, whoever gets it will hide it. I believe I can be honest in all other matters, but I already begin to realise that the core and centre of my nature is love of the beautiful, a passion for the beautiful ... For I do love moons, they are so pretty and so romantic. I wish we had five or six. I would never go to bed. I should never get tired lying on the moss-bank and looking up at them." Would there be moon glow disturbing my bedchamber this evening.

If one can overlook Updike's imposition of his own more "modern" interpretation of the stance between the sexes and his similar compulsion to belittle religion and project that firmly onto Twain, he does put a publishing reality on the collection. Much like Dickens did with A House to Let, these six stories were reworked over time, given the interest of a paying publisher. That adds to the humor of Eden being Niagara Falls, there being no buffalo in Buffalo and the overall barrenness of Tonawanda. (We New Yorkers are often to ignorant or oblivious to Twain's time in Buffalo -- I ate in this green house when I was visiting the county motor vehicle office out thataway in the 70s -- but at least the final snippet rehashes the absurdity of countermanding the theory of evolution by erecting a statue to Adam in Elmira, commercially assuring a place in history to an otherwise inaccessible, but quaint town. Today, it can claim the fame of Tommy Hilfiger.)

Would that I find a couple more Hesperus hours of humor.

Dutiful, but not Insightful Reading

Trying to clear the decks of library books before I head off for a couple days vacation, I finished the third Malcolm Gladwell book, Blink. This one has two diametrically opposed observations. First, that trained people can make accurate decisions in about two seconds because they ignore everything that is irrelevant and zero in on the key element. Hoving from the Met is used as an example of someone, who it appears can intuitively spot a forgery, but who in reality has trained for years (harken back to Gladwell's theory of 10,000 hours to expertise). Just when you want to trust your own gut first impressions, Gladwell flips over to illustrate split second biases of the cops in the Amadou Diallo case and how conductors are prejudiced in whom they place in their orchestras unless auditions are held behind screens. This is not a message of "trust but verify;" rather I can only conclude that Gladwell is more comfortable when that instant discern affects inanimate objects rather than people, especially those one does not know. I really have nothing else to say. Sorry this took longer than two seconds to read. But I think you get my impression.

Vacant House, Empty Book

Another Hesperus 100 pager down: this time A House to Let "by Charles Dickens." Well, not actually. The book is a collection of six short stories, one of which is a horrible poem, with the only thing in common being a thread of speculation as to why a dilapidated house across the street from the narrator is vacant with no chance of being rented. Inside the cover, the table of contents credits only one of the stories as being exclusively written by Dickens, two co-authored with good old Wilkie Collins, one singularly by Collins, and the other two by little known women, Elizabeth Gaskell and Adelaide Anne Procter. The book emerges more as a marketing device for Dickens' magazine, especially to promote the circulation of work by these lesser female writers. The two strongest selections are the story's "book ends" first and last installments which happen to be the two co-authored pieces.

The writing is crisp and witty as it introduces Sophonisba, an old lady with a clever perspective on her long life, an appreciation for her servants and a curiosity about her surroundings. Moving to London for a change of scenery as recommended by her physician, she lets lodgings across the street from the titled "abandoned" building. She charges both her butler, Trottle (a wonderful Dickensian name) and a long suffering, doddering suitor, Jarber, to find out what they can about former owners and the house's history. This challenge becomes the device to introduce "stories" about previous occupants whose eccentricities have absolutely no bearing on the denouement. In fact, it appears that the women's contributions had been previously published independent of this literary collection.

Despite its strong first chapter, the book falters and even the second best last chapter seems contrived and a vehicle for Dickens' more familiar social causes of broken families and lost and abused children. At least I only devouted a couple of hours to reading the book.

Hesperus Published Books as Diversions

The pile of books to read is now quite numerous if not tall and threatening to topple. Simply because, the selections published by Hesperus tend to be slender paperbacks of around 100 pages of either a collection of short stories or a novella. Two I polished off last night are Emile Zola's For a Night of Love and Luigi Pirandello's Loveless Love. (Notice a mini-theme here?)

This small edition contains the title story, a second Nantas, and a really short story called Fasting which theme-wise has nothing to do with fated love but deals with the religious/quasi-sexual ecstasy induced by a zealous Catholic priest as he raves about repentance and denial of the body in his sermons to a largely female audience while himself then visiting each duchess, marquise, and lady for lavish glutinous dinners. A nice little contemplative diatribe against the sham and pretense of ritual over faith.

Putting that filler piece aside, the two other stories are magnificent. I can only paraphrase the foreword to echo Zola's talent as being his depiction of the world in hyper-focus; his layering on of minute details in his characters' lives and appearance. He outlines the male characters so thoroughly before the real action takes place that their responses to stimuli and opportunities are natural and fully understandable. But his females! Ah, what predators. Written in 1876, almost 20 years ahead of Thomas Hardy's Tess, these "love affairs" pulse with longing, frustration, no, emotional abuse. Wow what writing.

Pirandello in contrast, although writing 20 years later, while depicting weaker males, cannot make the females into femme fatales, and according, the stories are blase. The mismatches and thwarted loves could be infused with Shakespearean twists; but Pirandello, maybe given his time approaching the 20th century, has his characters blind to their motives and emotions. A nice couple of stories to read about the frustrations of life but neither a quick, exciting read nor a cast of memorable lovers.

The Author is Not an Outlier

Finished Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell and still have Blink on reserve at the library. This is not the mind of a major scientist, nor the writing of a stellar author. His premise in this book is that superstars are a function of their place, time and benefactors. Oh, you didn't know that? At least I watched a good movie last night, Frida. I have hesitated taking it out, never having seen Salma in anything and being averse to watching anything about Communists in Mexico, but it was good ... visually pleasing (no Love in the Time of Cholera, mind you) and Salma was amazing. And of course it appealed to my attraction to the tango.

Back to Outliers. I appreciate scientists who can write up their theses using references that the common nonscientific reader can relate to. But once the book becomes trying to tease theorems out of single stories, they lose credibility. At least now I understand the Oriental mastery of math ... if you count in formula, I guess you naturally have a leg up. The one theory that harkens back to Tipping Point is the extension of the school day/year. How else can the student rack up the "expertise" requirement of 10,000 hours?

Anyway, I've moved on to short stories by Pirandello.