Another Useless Doorstop

Can't do it: read Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, I mean. I started it two nights ago and made a final effort at it this morning but it's.....well, I don't like to label....too blokey for my liking. The research seems admirably detailed (although he could be writing absolute mathematical bollocks for all I know) and I can cope with sketchily drawn (tautology?) characters and fast moving plot switching. But do you know what? It's like reading something written by someone with attention-deficit/Asperger's...or for them...syndrome: I'm not sure which. So with no little annoyance, I shall consign it to the 'help-yourself-anyone' shelf along with various other ill-advised purchases. I know what I'm going to get in replacement: Scarlett Thomas's Popco and AlexanderMcCall Smith's The Unbearable Lightness of Scones - pure undemanding beach pabulum, but with pretty coherent narrative strings. As far as I can tell. Thus far.

Finished...in more ways than one

Woke up early and finished off Force of Circumstance - more because I wanted to put it out of its misery than through any desire for completion. The ending is so bleak and downbeat that I really must read something light and fluffy to counteract the sour and gloomy atmosphere that is lingering around me this morning (Alexander McCall Smith is good for that...The Unbearable Lightness of Scones maybe?). Reading between the lines, I'm guessing that she had some sort of mid-life crisis (hackneyed concept though it is) that caused her to lose her enthusiasm for life, her insatiable desire for travel and experience, even for her writing, which latterly became a chore done with grim determination. She sensed the life draining out of her, hated the withering of her body, dreaded the separations inevitably wrought by death.
Well, we all do, love! But her reaction was to 'batten down the hatches', withdraw from society (save for a few intimates) and things that previously gave pleasure, and settle into a grimly monastic existence guaranteed to make her old age seem even longer and less enjoyable than it might otherwise have been. She lived a very selfish life, did exactly what she pleased when she pleased, and in the end this self-sufficiency allowed her to pull her lonely cloak around herself with very little opposition. At the end of this book she laments that all her experiences, reading and knowledge 'made no honey....provide no-one with any nourishment' and bitterly regrets that her annihilation will terminate her repository of memories:


'If it had at least enriched the earth; if it had given birth to....what? A hill? A rocket? But no. Nothing will have taken place, I can still see the hedge of hazel trees flurried by the wind and the promises with which I fed my beating heart while I stood gazing at the gold-mine at my feet: a whole life to live. The promises have all been kept. And yet, turning an incredulous gaze towards that young and credulous girl, I realize with stupor how much I was gypped.' (Force of Circumstance 'Epilogue')


Perhaps this is one of the best arguments against voluntary childlessness that I have ever read (although she never once even mentioned that she might have considered children, having had a horror of restriction and duty. Imagine a little Sartre/de Beauvoir!). The legacy of such emotional independence can turn out to be a terrible loneliness at an age when we are least capable of sustaining it.
I've still got All Said and Done (the fourth volume of her autobiography) to re-read. As I remember, this consists of a series of essays on important themes in her life - far more measured and reflective than Force of Circumstance's anguished threnody. I think, however, that I have had enough of Mme de Beauvoir for the time being. Maybe in the autumn I will turn to her again.

Thar She blows!!!!

Simone de Beauvoir is officially depressing me now. Whatever happened to the intellectually curious and sociable young woman of her younger books? The attitude that prevails in the last quarter of Force of Circumstance is that of a jaded appetite for life and a constant bewailing of the descent into the tomb. And she's only in her fifties.....not significantly older than myself. I guess she must have burned herself out. I am forcing myself to complete it, but am finding her gloomy introspection having a negative effect on me and can't wait to get it over and done with. I might have to go and reread some of her earlier stuff, when she was at the Sorbonne and started to knock around with J-PS in the Flore cafe to jolly myself up! Having said all that, her reflections on life often hit the mark: perhaps that's why I'm finding it such hard going - she's relating the unpalatable truth about ageing and loss of vitality. I sha'n't lend it to my mother, who dwells quite a lot on the implications of loss, old age and death.
It occurred to me that I am woefully under-read when it comes to classic novels, so in a futile and belated attempt to remedy this shortcoming I've bought Herman Melville's Moby Dick. Shallowly enough, I was prompted to do this by the recent rescreening of an episode of my favourite cartoon series Futurama, The Day the Earth Stood Stupid, where the earth is invaded by giant disembodied brains which attempt to wipe out all thought processes in the universe. It's too complicated to relate in detail, but a battle ensues where the plots of classic novels are employed to trap, in turn, the Chief Giant Brain and the unfortunate Fry and Leela. The Chief Giant Brain utilises the plot of Moby Dick, crowing triumphantly 'You shall remain trapped forever in this dense symbolist tome!' They don't, because Captain Ahab (who identifies the chief GB as 'the great grey thinky whale') and Queeqeg and (don't ask) Tom Sawyer help them to escape into the plot of Pride and Prejudice (again, don't ask!). Soon after, in desperation Fry writes his own appallingly spelt novel whose lack of logic causes the Chief GB to have a mental breakdown and 'leave earth for no good raisin'. Hilarious stuff.
Anyway, I invested in a 'Wordsworth Classic' version whose merits I have sung before (cheap, and with an excellent introduction and notes). Complementary to this, I also picked up Leviathan, or The Whale by Philip Hoare which is shortlisted for the 2009 BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction. This should add vital background.

I was a young but ardent whale conservationist in the seventies, for many years sporting the ubiquitous 'Save the Whale' badge on a succession of shoulder bags (it didn't get any less theoretical than that, I'm afraid), and I was quite transfixed by a recent visit to the whale exhibition at the Natural History Museum in London. So I shall enjoy a voyage of the imagination onto the high seas: and doesn't it have one of the most thrilling opening lines of any novel? I don't know quite why, but 'Call me Ishmael...' sends a thrill of anticipation and excitement down my spine.....

Cryptono...no...no!

Still extremely dubious about Cryptonomicon. I read the prologue this morning and felt even more sceptical. I probably need a back up.

A Writer's Life

I am plodding on with Force of Circumstance and find that it is improving. Actually, to tell the truth, I am skipping the overtly political bits and concentrating on the author's reflection on her motivations, relationships, writing and travels. For a forceful and intellectual woman, she seems unduly troubled by the ageing process. Her relationship with the writer Nelson Algren having petered out (both too pig-headed to compromise), she mournfully resigned herself to a celibate decline. She had not even reached fifty, for crying out loud! An unexpected affair with the journo Claude Lanzmann restored her confidence and joie-de-vivre, particularly as he was 17 years her junior. She writes much more engagingly when living life to the full and it is not difficult to detect the grey cloud of depression that shrouds her when she feels lonely and disconnected. Misery chokes articulacy.

She describes the writing process extremely accurately, and it is heartening to know that even such a towering intellect as hers struggled to put pen to paper:

'When I feel ready [after much reading and reflection], I write three or four hundred pages straight off. This is arduous work: it requires intense concentration, and the rubbish that accumulates appalls me. At the end of a month or two, I am so sickened that I can't continue. I begin again from scratch. despite all the material I have at my disposal the paper is blank once more, and I hesitate before taking the plunge. Usually I begin badly, out of impatience; I want to say everything at once; my narrative is lumpy, chaotic and lifeless. Gradually I become resigned to taking my time. then comes the moment when I find the distance, the tone and the rhythm I feel are right; then I really get underway. With the help of my rough draft, I sketch the broad outlines of a chapter. I begin again at page one, read it through and rewrite it sentence by sentence; then I correct each sentence so that it will fit into the page as a whole, then each page so that it has aplace in the whole chapter; later on, each chapter, each page, each sentence is revised in relation to the work as a whole. Painters, Baudelaire says, progress from first sketch to finished work by painting the complete picture at each stage; that is what I try to do.'

Force of Circumstance: Part I, ch.5 'Interlude'

Inspiring stuff indeed.

Like Father(s)? Like Sun!

Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson: that's my holiday book, but I have to admit I'm feeling a bit dubious about it......seems to tick the right boxes, but I am uncomfortably aware that so did the Illuminatus! trilogy.....I did try to read some of Stephenson's Baroque trilogy once upon a time but faltered quite quickly. I'll give this one a go.

Two biblioblogger recommendations are winging their (used) way to me:

1) New Testament Studies by C H Dodd, as recommended by Mark Goodacre as essential reading for anyone who is 'seriously interested' in Pauline eschatology (me! I am!) and

2) John J. O'Keefe & R.R. Reno's 'Sanctified Vision: An Introduction to Early Christian Interpretation of the Bible' [recommended in 'Son of the Fathers' blog, by - if I'm not mistaken - Josh Mc Manaway (sp?)] dealing with patristic hermeneutics, very pertinent to my area of study.

I don't think I'll be taking them away on holiday with me: I'm far too shallow and flakey. No pics of me boning up on my PhD stuff on the beach....or maybe.....?

HT Mark Goodacre's NT Blog , Son of the Fathers