The Artist, the Philosopher and the Warrior (#71b)

The Artist, the Philosopher and the Warrior by Paul Strathern


What I said when I got it:

I've been really interested by the concept of this one since it first arrived: basically, Leonardo da Vinci, Niccolo Machiavelli and Cesare Borgia all knew each other, and at a certain point they all travelled together. This non-fiction book examines that moment in time and what it meant to each man's career. Now it's out in a paperback, there's really no excuse to put off having a look.

What I say now:

I was reading this at basically exactly the same time as the enclave in the Vatican was choosing the new pope (yes, that's how far behind I am with my book reviews), and the timing was perfect. Reading about how Cesare's power-hungry father Rodrigo shamelessly bought the papacy and used its power in a grab for real estate made the rituals and solemnity of the modern Vatican seem absolutely ridiculous. I can't imagine anybody learning about the sordid history of middle ages Catholicism and remaining devout (sorry, Dad).

That aside, this was a fascinating peek into an era of history which is hugely important (in so many ways, Renaissance Italy shaped the history and culture of Europe, and thus had effects still being felt today), yet about which I knew very little. The book rotates chapters, focusing in turn on da Vinci, the brilliant artist and engineer who designed increasingly elaborate instruments of war; and Machiavelli, the young diplomat who would become the most radical political thinker of his age; and Borgia, tyrant and murderer, rampaging through Italy trying to claim a Kingdom with the sword.

Luckily for Strathern, Machiavelli kept meticulous journals, and his notebooks lay out exactly how the men met, and how they reacted to each other. Borgia loaned da Vinci from his Florentine masters to aid him militarily; Machiavelli was sent by the same men to divert Borgia's attentions away from defenceless Florence; the two Florentines (da Vinci nearing the end of his career, Machiavelli at the beginning of his) met in Borgia's train and struck up a brief friendship.

Strathern charts their time together during Borgia's campaign, and how their meeting affected each of their subsequent careers, in particular the effect that the charismatic (yet psychotic) Borgia had on the other two. Da Vinci, horrified by the realities of war, stopped designing weapons. Machiavelli, inspired by Borgia's ruthlessness, applied that ruthlessness to the world of politics, writing his famous tract The Prince using Borgia as an inspiration. Strathern's writing is clear and succinct, and doesn't have the grinding density of some non-fiction.

But despite Strathern's best efforts, it's da Vinci who makes problems for his book, remaining stubbornly a mystery: the man himself didn't keep any journals of his own, and the scraps of thought left in his notebooks are more likely to be shopping lists or reminders of chores than anything else. Whenever he and Machiavelli are apart, Strathern is left in the field of conjecture, prefacing a lot of his statements with phrases like 'da Vinci must have felt ...' or 'da Vinci surely saw ...' or 'da Vinci certainly would have been aware of ...' It lends those portions of the book an insubstantial air, which is unfortunate. That's a pretty small quibble, though, in a thoroughly researched and extremely readable history.

Cheers, JC.

My Year of Regrets

Sorry about the silence on here recently. I don't have any other excuse other than to say that it's December, and I work in retail. If you've gone into a shop of any kind in the last two weeks, you'll know what I'm talking about.

On a happier note, that whole 'Death of the Book' thing that people have been going on about doesn't seem to actually be a thing that's happening. At all. At least, not if the store I work in is any sort of a guide. (Shameless plug: Avenue Bookstore in Albert Park, Melbourne. Come see us sometime.) You can't really give an e-book as a gift, can you? Even if it's only because of Christmas, the ink-and-paper kind of book will still be around for a long, long time.

Anyway, it's December, and I'm fucking exhausted (see picture). Hence, no blogs recently.

Starting today, though, you'll be getting a positive avalanche of year-end round-up type posts. Rather than the usual 'I liked/didn't like X, Y and Z,' I thought I'd begin with something slightly different.

This whole 'reading the stuff I already own' project is hard on two levels: one, there's a bunch of stuff I own that I figured I'd never read, ever (*cough* Proust *cough* Homer *cough* shitloads of others as well *cough*) and ploughing through them all will, at times, be a massive chore. But second, and by my reckoning even harder, is the fact that there are heaps of awesome-looking books being released all the time. And, working in a bookstore, I'm aware of every single bloody one of them. And they're always sitting there, right in the corners of my eyes, taunting me. So this first 2011 summation is not about books I've read, it's about books that have come out that I've really wanted to read, and haven't. These are my 'Regrets of the Year.'

The Tragedy of Arthur by Arthur Phillips.

Arthur Phillips is the main character of his own novel, and the first part of the book details his youth, travelling the country with his itinerant, conman father and Shakespeare-obsessed sister. When his father, in jail for life, bequeaths the adult Arthur Phillips a complete 'lost' Shakespeare play called, funnily enough, The Tragedy of Arthur, he has no idea if it's genuine, or if it's his dad's last great sting. Sharing a similar structure to Nabokov's Pale Fire, the main text of the novel is the fictional Arthur Phillips' introduction to the also-fictional Shakespeare play, which is then reproduced in its full five-act glory at the end of the book.

Having the balls to write an entire play in Shakespearian language is one thing, pulling it off to such an extent that critics are raving is quite another. And, now that somebody's thought of it, who doesn't want to read a Shakespeare-type play dealing with Arthurian legend? A number of my colleagues have been going mental about this Tragedy of Arthur, and I really want to join in.

The Submission by Amy Waldman.

After the destruction of the World Trade Center, a competition is held for architects to design the memorial. To ensure the contest's fairness, it's conducted 'blind' --- nobody knows who designed which entry. The jury, which includes survivors and relatives of victims, finally come to a decision, open the envelope containing the winner's name ... and discover that they've chosen a design by an American Muslim. Cue political and emotional fallout.

There hasn't been an enormous amount of serious fiction dealing with the events of 9/11, and what there has been (Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer and Falling Man by Don DeLillo are the two that immediately come to mind), I haven't read. This rather simple concept strikes me as an elegant way of tackling the issues that arose in the aftermath of the attacks. In particular, it raises the question of 'Where Islam stands in relation to the West?' in a more nuanced way than is usual, and it explores the notion that an inclusive multi-culturalism is necessary for the success of pluralist democracies, and more necessary now than ever.

How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu.

Trying to summarise this insanely-confusing-sounding book without having actually read it is probably the ultimate in foolish attempts at summation. Here goes anyway: our main character, Charles Yu, is a time-travel repairman who lives in his time machine so that time doesn't have to actually move forward. His dad invented time travel, then went missing. While trying to find the one day in the future where he and his father get to meet, Charles winds up stuck in a loop where he's both reading and writing a book called 'How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe.' After that, I've no idea what the hell happens.

That's as much as I've been able to piece together from blurbs, reviews, and talking to a regular at the store who's read it and loved it. With this and Tragedy of Arthur (and Crash), I obviously have a thing for meta-fiction in which the author uses himself as the main character. I do love sci-fi, but a lot of what's coming out these days seems stuck in a bit of a rut, and this one caught my eye because it felt new and different and, bravest of all, fun.

The Toaster Project by Thomas Thwaites.

The only non-fiction on this list, The Toaster Project details Thwaites' attempt to build a toaster from scratch. That sounds reasonably simple, doesn't it? But what if I tell you that the simplest electric toaster he can find has 407 distinct parts? And that when he says 'from scratch,' he really means it? As in, he begins by visiting mines in Wales and digging metals out of the ground. There ain't no 'heading to the hardware store' here, he learns to smelt (I'm not even sure what smelting is), and he makes his own plastic ... pretty badly, if the picture on the cover is anything to go by.

Post industrial revolution, the vast majority of us are so disconnected from the fruits of our labour that the concept of making something with our bare hands is ridiculous. Right now I'm typing on a keyboard, looking at a monitor, and posting on the internet, but I have no clue how any of those things work, or what processes are needed to call them into existence. Thwaites' quest might be a little silly (what good quest isn't?), but I suspect that what this book has to say about the products we use so unthinkingly, and where they come from, might just be fascinating. 

The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides.

The other four books on this little list are by authors I've never read before. This one's a bit different. Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex is one of the great books of this shiny new millenium, a beautiful novel that links the life story of a transgendered person with the history of the twentieth century, and uses the juxtaposition to shine new light on both. It's really stunning, and if you haven't read it, you damn well should.

So as soon as I heard that Eugenides had a new book coming, The Marriage Plot jumped to the top of my 'read that when I get a chance' pile. Everybody at the store was just as excited as me. We badgered the publisher's rep to get us advance copies. We chose it as the monthly read for our in-store bookclub. We were pumped.

Then it arrived, and people started reading it, and word trickled back to me. 'It's ... okay,' was the verdict. 'But it's no Middlesex.' And then I started reading the reviews. If I had to sum up the literary world's reaction to The Marriage Plot in one word, it would be 'disappointing.' My regret with this one is more to do with timing: I should have struck when the iron was hot, reading it when my expectation was peaking. Now it's no longer at the head of the queue of must-reads, and it'll probably be years, rather than months, before I bother. To feel this letdown by a book I haven't even read yet is probably stupid, but there it is.

So those are my top five regrets from 2011. When I get around to reading them, who knows whether I'll like them or not ... but until then I can still convince myself that they're five instant classics of indescribable beauty. (Not like Proust or Homer. That shit will never last ...)

Anybody got any recommendations for more good 2011 reads? Taunt me by sharing them in the comments. Please describe what's great about them in excruciating detail. I love it.

Cheers, JC.


currently reading: Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner
books to go: 94

Marie Antoinette (#100)

Marie Antoinette by Antonia Fraser

What I said then:

Chunky bio of the doomed French princess.

What I say now:

I've had this sucker on my shelf since before the Sofia Coppola/Kirsten Dunst movie came out all the way back in 2006. Maybe if I'd liked the movie more it wouldn't have waited so long to get an airing, but regardless: after watching Cadel kick arse in Le Tour I decided to pull out a book on French history as a teeny tribute to him (seriously, they ride bikes up mountains ... it's pretty incredible if you stop to think about it).

What did I know about Marie Antoinette before I read this book? Well, the same two things I figure everybody knows about her: she said "Let them eat cake," and she ended up being guillotined during the revolution. Other than that, she was a complete blank to me ... which I guess constitutes its own implied criticism of the afore-mentioned movie (this is all I remember: jarring musical choices; converse shoes; and thinking that Jason Schwartzman should never act in period films because he's got one of those voices that can't be anything but modern). Of those two glimmers of knowledge, the first turns out to be utter fabrication (apparently the same 'cake' anecdote was being said about an unpopular Spanish queen more than a century before Marie Antoinette's time) and the second didn't happen at all the way I'd assumed.

Marie Antoinette initially led a sheltered, carefree life as the youngest daughter of the Austrian Empress. In the high-stakes game of alliance-by-marriage that the European royal families were playing, she was --- as the thirteenth child --- too junior to ever have been considered particularly noteworthy and so she was utterly neglected, particularly with regards to her education. But then several of her older sisters passed away and the task of marrying France's Dauphin (the heir to the French throne) fell to her. Belatedly they began to teach her to read and write before, at the age of fourteen, she was sent away from her family to a foreign country to be its princess, and ultimately its queen.

Rather than reading and writing, what she really needed (and never got) was an education in how the French court at Versailles actually worked. It was completely different from the Austrian system that she'd grown up in, and Fraser seems to posit that the majority of Marie Antoinette's problems stem from the utter inability of Versailles to understand her, and of her to understand Versailles. Nicknamed 'The Austrian Woman,' she was never able to overcome her outsider status.

One of the major issues was her (relatively) staunch Christian morality: having no acknowledged lovers --- the way everybody else did --- left the press of the time free to imagine her guilty of the most bizarre and unlikely couplings, rumours they spewed out with such venom for so long that she ended up despised. It's a sad irony to think that she was ultimately condemned by all the world as a despicable harlot for the precise reason that she wasn't one.

(As a side note, however horrifying the standard of the press is these days --- and if you're not horrified then you haven't been paying attention --- they've got nothing on the libellistes of Marie Antoinette's day. Essentially, she became the star of a cascade of pornographic pamphlets that linked her, in the most imaginative and energetic terms possible, to anyone and everyone she ever came in contact with. There are still a few levels lower that Murdoch and his cronies can sink.)

Of more importance to Marie Antoinette herself, however, was the lack of a sex life between she and her husband, Louis XVI. The whole point of princesses (and especially queens) was to have lots of male babies to keep the whole shebang running into subsequent generations. Louis XVI seems to have been a shy, awkward kind of a guy, and his ambivalence wasn't helped by the fact that Versailles was considered a public domain. If he wanted to visit his wife's bed (they didn't share quarters), he'd invariably have to pass an entire commentary team in the hallways. Because Louis was French and the King, and Marie Antoinette was Austrian and only the Queen, the blame for their childlessness fell to her. She wasn't tempting enough, or she wasn't fertile enough, or she wasn't doing it right. Even after she had given birth to her own young Dauphin, fulfilling her primary duty as a royal woman, accusations about the child's true parentage haunted her.

All this takes place against a backdrop of breathtaking financial irresponsibility. Fraser makes clear that the ship of the French state was going to be wrecked regardless: too much was spent on too little, for too long. Marie Antoinette's extravagancies on furniture, clothes and makeup sound incredible, but when Fraser ranks them alongside the expenditures of other nobles, it's clear that the entire aristocracy was equally at fault. I'd have liked some more information on the brewing revolution --- Fraser all but ignores it until the washerwomen of Paris are beating on the door --- but that's a minor quibble.

Once the Revolution did come, I'd always presumed that an angry mob had stormed the palace, seized Marie Antoinette and dispensed summary justice then and there. It was actually a much more complicated, much more drawn out process which, in its own way, was probably even more horrible than being torn apart by a crowd would have been. Over the course of more than two years imprisonment, she was slowly separated from everyone and everything that she valued: her friends, her husband, and lastly her children. She was given a trial, but it was a sham, the outcome pre-determined by political expediency. The cold cruelty of her accusers was breathtaking.

On the whole, probably a bit too much of the book was taken up in describing pre-Revolution Versailles politics (all the Comtesses and Princesses and Duchesses started to blend into each other after a while) that turn out to be utterly inconsequential, but it's a good read, and I'd recommend it to anyone interested in the period. Now I just need a Napoleon biography to follow on from this one (he's just entering the picture when Marie Antoinette gets the chop), anybody know a good one?

Cheers, JC.


about to read: The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
books to go: 99 (Ooh, I got a little thrill of pleasure typing that. I'm down into double digits!)

Gomorrah (#107)

Gomorrah by Roberto Saviano

What I said then:

An expose of the Camorra, rivals to the Mafia as Italy’s most dangerous network of murderers and thieves.

What I say now:

Gomorrah was absolutely dreadful, to the point that it was painful to read. For the first time since I began this challenge I was tempted to chuck a book in the bin and cross it off the list that way. Not even Jane Eyre got my goat to this extent.

Saviano is a native of Naples, a city which has been effectively taken over by the Camorra (the local equivalent of the Sicilian Mafia) at every single level of its bureaucracy. And when he's writing about the Camorra, about things that they are doing or things that they have done, then the book is fascinating. Unfortunately, most of the book is not about the Camorra, but about Roberto Saviano's reaction to living in a Camorra-infested city. Saviano obviously believes himself part-poet, part-prophet, part-philosopher, and the majority of the book is taken up with self-important, pseudo-psychological blather about the meaning of what's being described. It's completely insufferable.

Let me give an example of what I mean. After a chapter detailing a war between rival Camorra clans (a chapter that consists almost entirely of a massive list of dead men's names, with no context given ... but that's another complaint), Saviano writes this: "It was as if I had an indefinable odor on me. Like the smell that permeates your clothing when you go to one of those fried-food places. When you leave, the smell gradually becomes less noticeable, blending with the poison of car exhaust, but it's still there. You can take countless showers, soak for hours in heavily perfumed bath salts and oils, but you can't get rid of it. And not because --- like the sweat of a rapist --- it has penetrated your flesh, but because you realise it was already inside you. As if it were emanating from a dormant gland that all of a sudden started secreting, activated more by a sensation of truth than of fear. As if something inside your body were able to tell when you are staring at the truth, perceiving it with all your senses, with no mediation."

A couple of things about this passage (and seriously, there are hundreds just like it scattered throughout the book): the observant among you might have noticed that it's not about anything! The whole passage is a metaphor (it starts "It was as if I had...") with not one, but two similes ("like the smell that permeates your clothing" and "like the sweat of a rapist") contained inside the metaphor! That's just horrendous writing, confusing as hell ... and worse, it's completely devoid of content. What does the Camorra have to do with the above passage? Not a god-damn thing. And that's not even mentioning the bizarrely melodramatic language, which goes past 'so bad it's good' and ends up back at 'dreadful' again. "Like the sweat of a rapist [...] it has penetrated your flesh." Seriously, Roberto? SERIOUSLY?!?!?

The shame of it is, that when Saviano actually has something to say, it's worth listening to. The best moments of the book are the moments of actual reportage, when he's simply telling a tale, rather than commenting on it. There's the enthusiastic Camorrista who uses his connections to travel to Russia for an audience with his hero Mikhael Kalashnikov, designer of the AK-47. Or the teenage kids who drive trucks of toxic waste to illegal dumpsites because ordinary truckers won't go near them, then boast of their bravery. Or the junkie girl who revives her overdosing boyfriend by laying a handkerchief across his face and urinating on it (don't ask me how that worked ... but apparently it did). If Saviano had reported the facts, rather than insisting on intruding on them, he could have written a hell of a book. As is, unfortunately, you have to slog through endless BS to get to the good stuff.

Cheers, JC.


about to read: Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami
books to go: 106

Weeds in the Garden of Words (#119)

Weeds in the Garden of Words by Kate Burridge

What I said then: 

"A collection of essays about the English language, with particular attention to its troublesome elements."

What I say now:

Two non-fiction books in a row! What's happening to me?

Kate Burridge is a broadcaster on ABC radio who has (or possibly had) a show that focuses on language and the way we use it, and this book is a collection of neatened-up transcripts of her show. As such it's very bitsy, spending only a page or two on each topic, before dashing off to the next. Even though she's arranged them in logical order, and re-written them to smooth the transitions between topics, it's still a really odd, disjointed read. I found it was perfect for public transport, though, because it's perfect for reading in bite-sized chunks, and there was never that problem I have with a really engrossing book where I look up and find that I've unwittingly gone to the end of the tramline. No offense, Kew, but I'd never visit you otherwise.

As is always going to be the case with such a bitsy book, some sections were more interesting and enlightening than others. The main thing to take from the book is that English is such a chameleon, and is capable of being used so inventively, that notions of 'correctness' are pretty ridiculous ... so if you want to bitch me out for using the word 'bitsy' or the phrase 'bitch me out', then take a hike. As Burridge points out, if the printing press had been invented a hundred years earlier or a hundred years later, our language would be nigh-on unrecognisable. Of course some things have changed in the centuries since, but there's absolutely no rhyme or reason to what's fluid and what's static. We don't pronounce sue as shoo anymore, so why the hell did sugar stay shoogah? Both of the bolded pronunciations were looked down on back in the day, so why was one successfully repelled from the language, while the other worked its way up to being the accepted standard? Turns out, nobody really knows ... but it's kind of fun to think about. If you're a word geek. Like me.

The other thing I can take from this book is an increased annoyance at the complete lack of grammar in my education. I was never taught grammar. At all. What the fuck's up with that? That's a pretty serious gap in the schooling of a wannabe writer. I gleaned the ultra-basics from the few Year 7 Italian lessons I paid attention to --- what a noun is, what a verb is, stuff like that. I might have picked up a bit more, except Mick Arcuri was a fluent Italian speaker and let me copy his answers. But there's a whole lot of stuff that Burridge mentions in an off-hand fashion, assuming knowledge on the part of her readers, that I've never been taught. A friend who was studying teaching a while back mentioned once that grammar was making a (bit of a) comeback in the curriculum ... but because she was my age, she didn't know any of the stuff she was supposed to be teaching! Apparently there's about ten years worth of kids who just missed this stuff completely. So any grammatical errors in my blog are obviously not my fault ... at least I've got a (bit of an) excuse.

Cheers, JC


about to read: The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John Le Carre
books to go: 118

The Corner (#120)

The Corner by David Simon and Ed Burns

What I said then:

"A year in the life of a Baltimore drug corner, as witnessed by the guys who went on to make The Wire."

What I say now: 

Okay, before I even start, let me just say openly that if you haven't seen The Wire then: A) You've missed out on the best TV show ever made, and B) You're probably going to feel a little excluded by most of this review. So go watch it (it's only about sixty hours of television) and meet me in the next paragraph.

Before they were television producers, David Simon was a journalist at the Baltimore Sun, and Ed Burns was, first, a homicide detective, and later a teacher at an inner-city public high school. Simon wrote an earlier non-fiction book called Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets in which he spent a year with the Baltimore PD's homicide unit. The Corner is, in a way, a companion piece to the earlier work. In it, Simon and Burns spend a year on a drug corner (or, as they put it, an open-air drug market) at Monroe and Fayette streets in inner-city Baltimore, sharing the lives of some of the residents.

There's Fat Curt, an aging tout whose hands and feet are swollen due to medical complications of his drug addiction, and Ella Thompson, a woman who channels a very private pain into incessant community work and volunteering. And there's a family: Fran Boyd, a drug fiend and mother of two, her ex-partner Gary McCullough, striving to retain some semblance of dignity as his addiction strips him of everything else, and DeAndre, their teenage son, clumsily becoming a man amid the wreckage of his parents' lives. These are the core cast, but the book reaches its tentacles much deeper than just five people. Friends, brothers and sisters, parents and children, neighbours, fellow fiends (the author's term) - all have their story told, with equal weight given to everybody's struggle.

And that's the best thing about the book: it gives voice to those usually left voiceless and forgotten, reminding us that even people who can fit under a nice easy pejorative label - 'drug addicts' and 'drug dealers' in this case - are still people, deserving of as much time and attention as anybody else. It's pretty uncomfortable reading in a lot of ways (an Australian version might be 'a year in a detention centre' ...), but it's definitely worthwhile. 

The Wire is just about the toughest, grittiest television you'll ever watch. But here's the thing: as I was reading The Corner, I kept thinking 'Wow, they softened The Wire a lot from Baltimore's day-to-day reality.' As bad as The Wire makes parts of Baltimore look, it's kid-stuff compared to the portrait they paint in this book. The show throws its audience a couple of bones that the book can't: the character of Bubbles, for example, or the organised nature of the Barksdale and Stanfield crews, or the fact that those crews aren't made up almost entirely of drug fiends themselves.

But Simon and Burns don't just give us a devastating portrait of that one corner (one corner out of, they guess, between 100 and 120 drug markets in the city of Baltimore at the time, a city of about 700,000 people). They also examine the historical forces that have created the corners, giving a brief history of the post-war American underclass that is horrific in its cold logic. At no point, really, could anybody have done any different. Politicians and police and dealers alike, everybody's hands are neatly tied by circumstance, and they have been for the last fifty or so years. It's a sobering thought, and a sobering book.

In a recently-written epilogue, the authors recount an incident that occured a few years after the book's release: "A young councilman, sensing an opportunity, held up a copy of The Corner for television cameras at the corner of Monroe and Fayette and declared that, if elected, he would take back the drug corners and make the city safe again. He would fight the drug war they way it needed to be fought. It was pointed out to the ambitious councilman that the book he was holding was, in fact, an argument against drug prohibition, that it depicted an increasingly draconian legal system's inability to mitigate against human frailty and despair, against economic neglect and institutional racism, against a failed education system and the marginalization of America's urban population. The councilman conceded that he had not actually read the book, but that he was nonetheless the man for the job and indeed, he was twice elected mayor of Baltimore. He is now the governor of Maryland." 

Wire fans will recognise more than a hint of Carcetti in there. And so the same old ideas that have never worked get spun out again, and nothing ever changes. I know I've been going on a loving-and-recommending-everything kick recently, but this book is amazing as well. Sorry.

JC


about to read: Weeds in the Garden of Words by Kate Burridge
books to go: 119

The Diary of a Young Girl (#123)

The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank


What I said then:

The classic Holocaust memoir. (side note --- wow, detailed!)

What I say now:

Given the ridiculous restrictions I'm placing on myself, it's going to be pretty rare that I can follow a thread with my reading, letting one book lead me to the next. Usually I'll just be jumping all over the place. So I figured I'd take the chance to do a bit of 'themed' reading while it presented itself, and given how much I loved The Plot Against America I thought it'd be interesting to contrast it with this.

Presumably everybody knows this book. It's one of the most well-known, beloved books of the twentieth century (along with, I dunno, Lord of the Rings and To Kill a Mockingbird and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and American Psycho ... oh, just me?). Anne Frank got given a diary on her thirteenth birthday, the twelfth of June, 1942, in Amsterdam.  Twenty-four days later her family went into hiding in a 'secret annexe,' a suite of rooms hidden at the top of a warehouse. They were joined by another family and a mutual acquaintance, making eight people in all. With the help of about five or six Dutch men and women, they stayed there for more than two years, before being discovered, arrested, sent to concentration camps and, with the exception of Anne's father, killed in the very last months of the war. One of their helpers saved Anne's diary, which she'd been writing in all that time, and it was later published by her father.

As a document of one small drama within the greater unfolding drama of the war, the book is remarkable. In hiding, they listen to Churchill's speeches on the radio and discuss the pending invasion. They have scares when burglars break into the warehouse below them. They worry that the man who delivers potatoes knows they're there, then find out that he himself has been hiding Jews ... and that he's just been arrested. The small heroisms of those in hiding and their helpers deserve recognition, and this diary gives it to them.

Because of the book's  exalted place in our culture, I'd sort of expected Anne herself to be an angelic figure, a perfect girl. In fact, she was nothing of the sort: reading between the lines, she comes off as an ordinary, wilful teen who was occasionally obnoxious and annoying and, being the youngest person in the annexe, got on everybody's nerves. What makes the book really special is the way Anne grows in the two years in hiding, the way she begins to know and understand herself. The diary drastically shifts in tone, in keeping with Anne's changing moods, and the blunt reality of that reminds you that, hey, this was a real girl, and if she was angry when she sat down to write, she wrote angry. If she was dreamy, she wrote dreamy. If she was scared, she wrote scared.

It seems ridiculous to 'review' this book at all, really. It's great, its reputation is justified, and if you can get through the third-last diary entry --- which reads, in part: "It's difficult in times like these: ideals, dreams and cherished hopes rise within us, only to be crushed by grim reality. It's a wonder I haven't abandoned all my ideals, they seem so absurd and impractical. Yet I cling to them because I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart. It's utterly impossible for me build my life on a foundation of chaos, suffering and death. I see the world being slowly transformed into a wilderness, I hear the approaching thunder that, one day, will destroy us too, I feel the suffering of millions. And yet, when I look up at the sky, I somehow feel that everything will change for the better, that this cruelty too will end, that peace and tranquility will return once more." --- if you can get through that without needing to pull out a hanky or a tissue or pretending you've just been chopping onions, then you're more hard-hearted than I.

Cheers, JC.


currently reading: A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz
books to go: 122