The Book Thief

October 12, 2010
Essay
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This is a story narrated by an overworked angel of death, during World War II. It is the story of a good German family – foster parents and a foster child – who hides a Jew in their basement. The father is kind hearted, and ironically, it may have been a thoughtless kind act that compelled Max, the Jew the family was hiding, to run. The father, Hans, had watched Jews being marched through the town of Molching. He was compelled to hand a piece of bread to a prisoner. He and the prisoner were flogged, and thereafter he awaited his punishment.

This small example from the novel highlights the theme: while we lack control over world events and even our own circumstances, it is worthwhile to do the best we can. There are no answers as to why we should, not even from the angel of death. He’s simply a worker, like the air raid clean up crew; he takes souls as they depart from their bodies. He talks about his master: not God, but the abstract death. Just the events that cause human bodies to expire. There is little comfort in an afterlife: it isn’t mentioned at all. The carrier of souls here doesn’t choose between good and bad souls. There is no judgment (well it comes out at one point – he pities the Germans who hide in bomb shelters less than the prisoners being exterminated in death camps), but he doesn’t talk about a destination for the souls. No mention of heaven or hell. He simply takes. So why should we do good, then, without the fear of explicit eternal punishment or reward?

I think Zusak’s answer is the following. Liesel is the book thief of the title. She stole her first book on the way to her foster parents. Her brother dies on the way, and when the grave diggers came to bury him, a grave digger’s manul fell out. That was her first. She later rescued books from book burnings. And finally, the mayor’s wife took pity on her and left a window open – so Liesel can sneak into the library and “steal” her books. Liesel learns to read. The pay off comes when Max, the Jew hiding in her basement, pens a story about Hitler and Liesel. The story is heartbreaking because it describes the hate sown by Hitler, and the only remedy isn’t to use words to vanquish evil, but to provide a path out of evil. And only two people follow the path.

Zusak doesn’t bother with an easy parable, but he clearly wishes to inspire people to do good. This book provides a path, through a forest of evil. The reasons to be good? One is, because you’ll never know what the true consequences are. For example, Liesel’s neighbors took a stand. The parents refused the SS to draft their son. The father, Alex, was punished by being drafted. But the son, Rudy, didn’t have to die at the front. Instead, later, a stray bombing by the Allies destroyed the street Liesel and Rudy lived on. Including Alex’s family. Actual, dramatic irony. But here’s another example: Liesel survived that same bombing, because she was in the basement, writing her life’s story. She had been inspired by the gifts of those around her (the mayor’s wife for giving her a blank book, Max for writing her story, her foster parents’ kindness.)

Rudy, Liesel’s friend in the novel, because he was bullied and loved Liesel, wanted to show his worth. He became an excellent runner and excelled at school. He became, in fact, the perfect Aryan boy. All because he wanted to impress Liesel. Would it have been worth it to be ignored instead? Why not achieve? Liesel did appreciate Rudy; both of them did make right choices. Rudy, for example, was also inspired by Hans’s example of handing bread to a Jewish prisoner. He roped Liesel into tossing bread to Jewish prisoners as they were marched through time. They were chased, but this time, they escaped punishment. Still later, because Max had left Liesel’s house to avoid being a burden to her family, he was caught and  eventually was marched through town. Liesel then took strength from the fact that her father had stood his ground; she called out to Max, gave him what little comfort she could by acknowledging his wonderful gift to her, and was whipped. Rudy, in his own kindness, kept Liesel from being hurt any worse.

No easy answers here. Making the right choices does not guarantee a happy outcome. The important point seems to be that the soul is enriched by positive choices, in the present. Liesel found a father and came to acknowledge that her foster mother is also a good person.  A bit crusty, but good-souled. She gained a friend in the mayor’s wife and in Rudy. She learned the meaning of courage, of making a stand. She learned to read. She gained a friend in Max. These moments enrich the soul and makes one happy in the present. This too is another reason to do good; it is another way of feeling good.

Interestingly, we see Nazis in the context of their every day life; we do not see gross acts of violence and depravity. Instead, there are always a segment of the population who are true believers. They try a little harder to please the Fuehrer. They snap their salutes a little straighter, their “Heil Hitlers” a little louder. It is easy for them to be so brave, marching starved prisoners behind the front. The one soldier we do see has returned from Stalingrad, bearing bad news to his mother. His brother had died in Russia. The solider eventually could not bear the guilt of survival and hangs himself. So the disgust with the war is translated into a desire to escape, not to live. That is the opposite reaction of the citizenry, so happy to condemn Hans and Liesel for showing compassion to fellow humans.

I am not sure when I would let my boys read this novel. It has harsh lessons, but the novel remains gentle. It teaches about death and consequences. It shows a way to live, to focus on positive experiences. I suppose they ought to read it when they are tweeners (Liesel’s and Rudy’s age), but with lots of parental input, helping them tie in the scenes in the book with the theme.

Again, this is simply a story of kids and adults doing the right things and suffering for it and yet continuing on the quiet path of courage. The punishment lasts a moment and is painful, but the reader knows the punishment is wrong and unjust. The novel is about the moments in between, and although it isn’t always a happy time, at least the characters can live with themselves, if not their neighbors.

Update: I reformatted the text so that the text was separated into paragraphs. Not sure why it didn’t do that to begin with.

Charlie Stross

October 11, 2010
Thoughts
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He’s one of my favorite science fiction authors. He also writes on his own blog, and it’s fascinating. Not only does he blog about IT, current events and gadgets (here and here), occasionally he’ll write about the business of publishing and the creative process. He’ll also toss out bits of research he’s been doing and packages them into really interesting thought experiments. Currently, he’s writing a series on “Books I Will Not Write”. I would like to bring attention to two of these:

The Crimson Permanent Assurance in Space and Floating in the Sea of Time. The setup for these ideas are soooooo interesting. I wish he would write them.

The neatest thing is that, Stross is never a one-trick pony. He has ideas – like pirates who essentially turn into a hedge fund managers cum Blackwater/Brinks security force for hire types – which make sense, even beyond the trappings of the gee-whiz technology he presents. While he has big ideas, he builds from the bottom up. He doesn’t start of with a perfect society (a la Star Trek). He thinks about humans first, how they are a bunch of selfish little shits, how there’s going to be new technologies, and how the assholes will find  ways to exploit lesser assholes with new technologies. A very human story, and so generally, his hard sci-fi is recognizable under the trappings of the genre. His characters have regular motives and feelings, even if they are teleporting across universes or uploading their minds into supercomputers.

And his rejected ideas are so thought-provoking! I hope somebody picks up on these ideas, although I would much prefer Stross to write these books.

 

 

Links round-up

October 10, 2010
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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/anis-shivani/american-reviewers-mcewan-solar_b_746830.html

 

Sam Harris writes  a thoughtful essay regarding how religion and science may deal with culture. It is an article that distills the theme of his new book, The Moral Landscape. He doesn’t make the usual argument that science and religion need to provide explanations for why we have morality. instead, he focuses on the outcomes of action, which will have a direct impact as to the viability of a single person, or a multitude of individuals. We can certain assess fear and anxiety, nutritional nourishment, shelter, the level of violence encountered by individuals, how much one works, and so on. We do, in general, have some idea of the circumstances under which the most individuals can maximize their positive outcomes (probably with some basic level of food and shelter with a  minimum of physical strife.) This is truly a subtle, but a significant, difference in explaining the commonalities of “morality” based on either religious or  biological first principles.

Anis Shivani has a few thoughts about critical reception of Ian McEwan’s new novel, Solar.

David Rothman, author and e-book advocate, writes about Philip Roth’s new novel, Nemesis.

Finally, Roger Ebert brought some attention to Krishna Shenoi’s appreciation about Superman and Christopher Reeve.

 

Imperial Bedrooms

October 7, 2010
Essay, fiction, Goodreads
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Imperial BedroomsImperial Bedrooms by Bret Easton Ellis
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

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Wow. The book is graphic; I am unsure as to the grand purpose behind the book. Ellis doesn’t write a sympathetic character. He writes about broken people who  suffer further humiliation of spirit. They then choose to ignore the outrage or to perpetrate them. Clay, the antihero of Less Than Zero and Imperial Bedrooms, responds by taking as much as he can.
I had supposed Less Than Zero to be about kids who suffer from a shallow culture and a lack of mature guidance. Rather than understanding that maturity is a state of mind, the neglected children in Zero do adult-like things. They drink, they fuck, they drive around, they snort, and they spend.
None of these kids actually had to learn to survive; as if navigating the currents of upper class ennui prepares one for life. No, these children have family money and lack for nothing. None of them will ever need to think about how to earn enough to keep him fed, clothed and sheltered. Instead, they only learn how to manage their coke habit.
If the book is simply about having too much money, too soon, without guidance, then it would have been trivial. What Ellis did was to amplify despondency  by sexing up the story. It mirrors the state of the characters in the book. Just as the outrageous loses shock value over time, so must the kids seek ever more grotesque modes of enjoyment. There really is nowhere else to go but down. In this context, Less Than Zero plays out like a cry for help.
A reasonable adult would simply want them to stop abasing themselves. But what could be done? Take away their money? That will simply cause them to spiral down the drain faster. It will force the children into whoring themselves that much sooner. The regulator against self abuse is a healthy concept of human dignity, which Ellis has taken pains to show doesn’t exist for Clay. While some the characters avoid doing evil, it is out of fear rather than value for another person. One point is that there is so little one can do; we must live with these monsters. We conclude that when one has everything, he has very little to lose.
In the early 80’s, I suppose to read about 13 to 19 year olds experimenting with drugs and homosexuality was a kick to the head. But the book quickly leaves conventional outrage behind. Clay moves from an inability to relate to people to observing acts of evil. We see Clay happen upon a snuff film (but is it? After all, these kids’ parents all seem to work in film. Perhaps it is fake? Somehow, Ellis presents that alternative as a straw man.) Clay walks in on a gang rape. He doesn’t join, but remained indifferent.
It is unclear how much of that was ingrained or learned. And perhaps it doesn’t matter. No parents are seen in the book. And when Clay’s 13 year old sister is talking about the quality of sex and coke, it seems besides the point to ask whether nature or nurture was at fault. The book again emphasizes what little we can do.
In Imperial Bedrooms, we find the characters older, but no deeper, than in Less Than Zero. Clay is a screenwriter. He has left a girl friend behind in New York to come back to LA. He enjoys the physical delights of the casting couch. Clay withdraws into ever more depraved activities. There is really only two ways for the sequel to go: either Clay works towards redeemimg himself or becomes a monster.
Because we see Clay being outmaneuvered in this novel, the despair that was apparent in the first book is transformed into exhibitionism. In Imperial Bedrooms, we are simply seeing predators fighting. But before the end, we see an amoral Clay, from Less Than Zero, transgressing into immorality. I suppose the difference is that Clay either watched others be harmed or harmed himself in the first book but now harms others. We see him use men and women alike, just to exert power over others. As my 5 year old said of his 2 year brother: ‘He wants what he wants. He’s the king of the babies.’
And then the book ends. Clay is simply led away by a more brutal monster, losing his territory to a more ruthless predator.
At some point, one might ask if Ellis is writing satire. I don’t think there is enough of Clay engaging with society or other personalities. We remain within Clay, locked into his limited point of view (animal sees food, takes food, animal sees pleasure, gets pleasure.) There is one toss away line, about how snuff films are now released on the Internet. I don’t think this single point elevates Imperial Bedrooms to an absurdist look at society.
Imperial Bedrooms, like Less Than Zero, is narrated in the first person. But we never know what Clay thinks. We see him act. Ellis’s style tends to reinforce the feeling that this book is like an animal documentary. We infer Clay’s mental state by his responses to his environment. The readers have to anthropomorphize Clay.
Because Ellis offers very little in the providing his thoughts for how to engage against Clay and his ilk, I can see how his book can be perceived as pornography. It lets depravity titillate the reader while not offering any comment. Well, that’s not true; the fact that one needs a second predator to clean house says a lot. That is the nature of the world. Play victim or to play aggressor.
While Less Than Zero had similar elements, the end of that novel was moderate. Clay’s problem was that he couldn’t treat other people as individuals. That meant Clay had a chance to snap out of it, giving the reader a small measure of hope. He could grow up.  In Imperial Bedrooms, the trajectory is aimed downwards. We are only left wondering how steep is Clay’s descent. And there is little we can do to help the characters, or ourselves, if heaven forbid we have something they want.

Almost Dead

October 6, 2010
Essay, fiction, Goodreads
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Almost Dead: A NovelAlmost Dead: A Novel by Assaf Gavron
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

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I thought that this book should have switched titles with Super Sad True Love Story.

An Israeli citizen named Eitan Einoch survives three suicide bombings. He becomes a national celebrity as shell shock overwhelms him. For a short while, it seems he find happiness; from the first suicide bombing, a fellow rider with a premonition asks Einoch to deliver a message to his girlfriend. Einoch plays it off. After he disembarks the minibus, the bomber struck. Einoch deals with his survival by trying to deliver the message. He falls in love with the girl.

There is a parallel story, told from Fahmi Sabih’s point of view. We learn that he is a Palestian refugee, lying in a hospital room. He’s in a coma; it doesn’t take much to realize that his story will converge with Einoch’s.

I haven’t had much exposure to fiction from the Middle East, and only from a historical perspective (Orman Pamuk’s My Name is Red.) As a disinterested third party, I feel that Gavron was delicate in portraying the plight and character of Palestinians – including the suicide bombers. One gets a sense of the complexities that any inhabitant must juggle. Loyalty to family, to one’s tribe, to society, and even to oneself – exemplified by the need to seek a better life. Not everyone succumbs to hate. Not everyone can rise to forgive. Some parents wish their sons to join the fight; others wish them to flee and just live.

Gavron brings a  light touch, I think. Nothing is too heavy handed; I thought it was masterful the way he portrayed Einoch’s numbness has he survives attack after attack. I have no idea how I would react, nor do I know how one usually responds, but I can appreciate that some people may not run screaming – at least not right away. Instead, he lets Einoch’s problems develop; rather than dramatic confrontations, Einoch loses efficiency and concentration.

Another device Gavron uses well is coincidence. Not the fact that Einoch suffers several bombings and has his fate intertwined with Fahmi, but the simple interactions with other characters. The encounters do not seem forced; Gavron gives his characters space. Just because two of them appear on the same stage doesn’t mean that it will lead to anything. This light touch helps to create an impression of life, of simply being.

Gavron, I think, brings a bit of sympathy in his portrayal of life and death in Israel. He can’t fault the hard-liners too much, and I think he wishes the best for the citizens who wish to ignore the conflict and just live. But there are too many fingers pointing; every combatant has an easy time claiming vengeance for a previous injustice or violence. It brings to mind George Carlin’s rant on “Peace without honor” – one mustn’t let pride be valued over life. In most cases, pride means to get one’s way. The reciprocal recriminations sound like the argument that it’s turtles all the way down, with no true foundation in sight.

Links round-up [digital]

October 5, 2010
links
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Jaron Lanier wrote an editorial for the NYT about the digital classroom. He points out that education may not be discretized into blocks and efficiently transferred to the students. He fears that reducing knowledge into blocks, and then having students shuffle them around, gives the impression that new knowledge is simply recombining old bits (i.e. Remix Culture). Lanier feels that this is a problem of computer-aided educational tools: designers can limit the  learning by the nature of the “building blocks” the students can use. Further, the binary referendum of multiple choice testing gives an incentive for factory processes rather than hoping kids will absorb and then generalize the concept of “5+7”  to apply it in new contexts (like, “15+ 17”).  Matthew Bernius responds (hat tip: Paul Biba from Tele-read).

Margaret Atwood weighs in on e-books.

Jeffrey Trachtenberg has a piece in the WSJ about the publishing side of e-books, with regards to literary authors (lower prices for e-books – compared to hardcovers lead to smaller profits, coupled with a down-trend in book buying, puts the squeeze on author advances.)

Marginalia

September 30, 2010
Essay
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Lev Raphael recently wrote of an advantage possessed by paper books: marginalia can comprise both responses to what was read as well as a diary of sorts. It is a physical manifestation of memory, thought processes, and perhaps emotional state. Specifically, this piece was pitched as a counterpoint to the idea that books are simply containers, delivering the content within, with Stephen King making a recent comment to this effect.

I agree with both points and have this to offer.

I still think these lists of pros and cons of e-books or paper books miss the point. The main competitor to paper books isn’t e-books, but every other form of diversion and entertainment. I would say that shunting customers to some “container” is the least of the publishing industry’s worries. I see the e-book/paper book debate as pointless. A true reader wouldn’t care how he is reading, so long as he is reading.

Also, keep in mind that I love reading. I can’t get enough of it. I prefer to fill all my spare time reading. The most efficient way, at my disposal, is to use a software ebook reader installed on my Motorola Droid phone. Before that, I read on my iPod Touch, my Treo phone, my Palm Tungsten 5, my iPaq, a Handspring Prism (the color screen version) and a monochrome black-on-dark-green screen of the Handspring Visor. A tech geek will realize that there is a clear progression: I’ve listed in reverse order the quality of the screens of the machines. So I suffered through some god-awful visual experience, just because I was so enamored of carrying a huge library of books with me, and of reading these books at every opportunity.

And before I had a machine that can contain my bookshelf, I would pack multiple paper books for trips, long or short. This includes packing 2 or 3 books for a subway ride. I feared finishing a book and  not have another book to start. Sure, it’s neurotic; I read quickly, but not that quickly. I did not always divide my reading time among several books, so I agree it is doubly strange to always pack so many books. On long trips, I have been known to pack 8 books; now, when I fly, I can trim that to two so I can read during take-off and landing. It isn’t realistic for me to pack so many books, as I know I can’t read or finish them all. But I can’t help myself.  In my book bag that I take to lab, at this moment, I have 3 books.

My point is that I distinguish between reading and other activities, as opposed to reading on a machine versus reading on paper. I still head to the library (it’s the beautiful, recently renovated Cambridge Public Library) once every few weeks to load up on even more books. I peruse bookstores for fun; I eagerly await new releases from the bn.com/ebooks and FictionWise sites. I see it as a boon that I can add to my electronic bookshelf without my wife noting the amount of space it takes up in our condo.

Enough credentializing. My only point is to say that I have noticed that although the content is the same, I read differently depending on the technology I use. As Raphael noted, writing notes on the margins is easy to do in a book. Coming from a background in which  my work requires me to read science articles, I have not found a better way to annotate articles than to write all  over the paper. I have tried writing notes in a separate notebook, I have tried writing notes on a sheet of paper and stapling it to the article, I have tried downloading the PDF version of the article and making comments, and I have tried archiving the web version in Evernote and making annotations there.

I have also tried the analogous operations on books. Nothing is more convenient, to me, than to write on the document. Part of it is the immediacy, writing next to the passage is quick. It does get unwieldy, since I don’t underline but insist on writing down as complete thought as possible. Try holding onto a book and a Moleskin, and writing while exposing as much of the text as possible.

I would also point out that, some of us are fortunate enough to have some form of location awareness and tactile memory when reading an actual, physical document. For example, even if I cannot remember the precise text, I can generally remember where I found the words.

Another problem with e-book annotations is that not all e-book readers have a way to export the notes one makes. The readers I use won’t let me do that, and so I find myself suffering through an unwieldy software interface to access my notes, individually. It would be faster to go through notes made in the margins of text. So when I read an e-book, I write fewer, but longer notes. I take the risk of forgetting some points before I write the note; after all, one of my reasons in writing marginalia is to help me remember something in the first place.

What one does with the notes after writing them down is a separate matter. I see marginalia as placeholders until I can collect my thoughts elsewhere. Yes, that elsewhere has been on the computer (until recently, Evernote. Now I just write on this blog.) Despite the convenience of digital manipulations, I still find it easier  to thumb through a book and read a few notes or passages to gather my thoughts on a book. Until the notes-interface improves on my e-book readers, this is yet another advantage for paper books.

I think in dealing with technology, noting advantages and disadvantages is fine, but I don’t think these lists really help one decide on its worth. Given the list of pros and cons I made, I don’t see any one format winning out. That is good, because I think each has different things to offer a reader. I do not see myself ignoring paper books, nor do I envision myself reading off my phone or computer screen all the time. Not only is there a time and place for each, but economic and technological advances can limit or expand our options. There may come a time when I find that multimedia and ads have infected e-books to such an extent that I can no longer read them. Or that we may find that paper book costs increase due to demand for wood. Or that print is only reserved as luxury products. Rather than being wedded to one form of technology (whether it’s Gutenberg’s, or Bezos’s, or Jobs’s), it makes more sense to know that what works for you can change in the future.

A blog about antiquity

September 28, 2010
Essay
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Andreas Kluth is a reporter for The Economist who wrote Hannibal and Me, to be published in 2011. I stumbled on his blog, The Hannibal Blog, through this post (well, the post was featured on the Freshly Pressed page on WordPress.) He is interested in “triumph and disaster in life” and how the great men and women overcome or are overwhelmed by these events.

Kluth sounds like a kindred spirit; he is focusing on people who do great things and in a set of essays on his blog, uses some literary archetypes to explore the theme.  He is focused on this epoch, and he writes about Fabius, Scipio Africanus, and Hannibal, three actors who shaped this era (ca. 200 BCE), in Hannibal and Me.

***

I must get the following story off my chest. During high-school, I chose a “classical” education for myself. In addition to the standard set of classes, I took as electives Latin, (classical) piano, and European history. The only thing that was missing was fencing, and I remedied that during college. I demonstrated an ability in Latin for three years: I scored the highest average, among my peers I translated quickly and correctly, and could decline nouns and conjugate verbs without trouble. One regret was that I did not cultivate this interest further (I do wonder what kind of historian I would have made.)

One problem was that I dropped Latin in my senior year, missing out on the Latin Prize (given to the student who has the highest grade.) I had an extremely good shot; I had the highest grade in my junior year, and the way this was achieved made me certain that I was going to do the same in my senior year. I am only writing this to show that, for this high-school Latin class, I exhibited an aptitude. This is so I can say the following and not sound like sour grapes.

The real point of the story is why I refused to take Latin in my senior year, despite my interest and relative skill: I was disgusted, at an intellectual level, with the travesty of how this class was taught.

For the first two years, the Latin teacher engaged the language as a real entity. She taught vocabulary and had us translate the language – as if it were still alive. On tests, she actually constructed new sentences and had us translate (from Latin to English and English to Latin.) In my third year, the instructor gave up on this. She saw no point in teaching it as a real language. In fact, she kept telling us it was silly to do so; it is a dead language, after all. So she babysat us, basically.

During class, we simply organized into groups and translated the lessons. Mostly, students copied from me. The honest ones asked me for help. There were some other good students who worked alone. We would then correct the translations. Preparing for the test, she would then simply go through our translations, telling us which sentences will be on the test. It was simply a matter of rote memorization. I balked; my challenge to myself was to ignore the test preview and translate everything during the test. It was in this context that I still received the highest marks.

But I just couldn’t take this class for a second year, and so I missed out on translating Cicero and Ovid. This marked the only time that I lost such respect for an instructor that I could not follow through with a course of learning. I don’t regret the prizes and honors; it was only a meaningless high school award. I do regret how this one instructor just beat down my interest in Latin.

Yes, I am fully aware that I could have simply done independent study. My only point here is to highlight the one time I could not overcome an intellectually stultifying atmosphere. I hope I’ve since grown in confidence and can pursue and drive learning and discourse in a manner that interests me. In general, I don’t think teachers teach so much as inspire. That is, they make you care about the subject enough to do the work.  And in the cases where I faced inadequate teachers, I can generally make pursue the subject just because I am interested in the subject. However, this one time, in Latin class, I found the instructor incompetent and I was unable to deal with that. So much so that I couldn’t  make myself care any more about translating a dead language.