Why read The Old Man and the Sea

Ah, Papa Hemingway. I just love your sparse sentences. Sometimes, I try out your writing style. Just the subject, followed by a short predicate. It reads like crap though. Like the sentences in this paragraph. Such a total waste of virtual real estate. So I bow down before you, Papa Hemingway. You make it seem so easy.

My first Ernest Hemingway read was A Farewell to Arms. That book made me an instant fan. I reread a few pages of it last month, as the book club's theme for May was all about Ernest Hemingway: his works and a bio. Then I realized that some of the lines spoken by the main characters are just so insufferable. I gag, but in a good way.

Here's a rather simpler way to show this to you, dear reader. Man asks, "Do you love me?" Woman responds, "No." Man asks again, "Do you love me?" Woman responds again, "No." Man asks for the third time, "Do you love me?" Woman finally admits, "Yes." To which the man says, "I like your hair." Argh!

The book club's swag during the discussion
I wonder if Papa H would approve of all these.
Somehow, I imagine him thinking, "Great. More stuff I don't need."

But I'm not here to talk about A Farewell to Arms. I love that book too much to talk badly about it. What I want to discuss is a much shorter work of Hemingway, which is The Old Man and the Sea. I'm not too sure how to categorize it—is it a novel, a short story (that's gone too long), or a novella? Let's just call this a novella. I love that I suddenly became all gung-ho and just decided that for you, dear reader.

Anyway, The Old Man and the Sea is the perfect book to read if you haven't read any of Hemingway's works. It's short, which will make you instantly decide if you like his writing style or not. It's also what I would like to call a gateway novel. It connects Hemingway's older works with his later fictions. It won the Pulitzer Prize, and I think it just might be the work that tipped the Nobel committee to award him the Nobel Prize for literature.

Wasn't Papa Hemingway a hottie? I get palpitations looking at this.
He served as an ambulance driver during  World War I.
Well, he can take me to the hospital anytime. 

I am partial to Hemingway's earlier works though. The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms are just brilliant. His later novels were hits and misses. The novel that preceded The Old Man and the Sea was very much lambasted by critics; it prompted Hemingway to write something that he said will be his best work. I don't think The Old Man and the Sea is his best though. But a lot of people from the book club liked it, which is good enough for me.

I don't think the novella is about man versus nature; it's more of a man-versus-himself kind of thing. The old man and the marlin that he has caught and held on for a few days are like mirror images. Only a great man can catch a formidable inhabitant of the sea. And having caught the marlin, the old man proved that he still had it in him. He still got his mojo. He rocks.

What I didn't get in the novella are all those religious references pertaining to the old man. He was supposed to represent Christ. He got wounds on his hands which some people compared to, ummmm, the stigmata. And when he finally went home after having spent several days in the sea holding on to that marlin, he collapsed in his bed in a position similar to Christ being nailed on the cross. Whatever. But the novella did make me crave for sushi. Mmmmm. . . Having fresh sushi—now that's a religious experience.

Oh, and this is the first official book club discussion that I attended this year. There's just been too much work. And I had to keep R. company, as the past few months were a very difficult period for him. Well, it definitely felt good to be back, and what better time than a discussion on one of my favorite authors.

R. (right) and I (left), after the book club discussion
Yes, we both wear reading glasses now.
No, we are not hipsters.

We also got the chance to read any biographical work on Ernest Hemingway. I didn't finish mine though. But thank goodness for Wikipedia, yes? From what I read of Papa Hemingway's life, he certainly did lead a very interesting one. War veteran at 19, married 4 strong women, lived in 4 continents, struggled with depression, took his own life. Compared to his, my life seems very much uneventful. But looking at what happened to Hemingway during his twilight years, I realized that uneventful is good.

I opted to read A. E. Hotchner's classic memoir of the time
he spent with Ernest Hemingway. It's a heartbreaking read.

K is for Kipling

I have a certain feeling of ambivalence after reading Rudyard Kipling's Kim, my 11th writer in my dead guy challenge. After turning over the last page, I thought that it was merely a coming-of-age novel. But then I checked out the novel's summary online, and boy oh boy was I surprised. How could I have missed all those details! To say that I felt stupid would be an understatement.

Kim, the main character, is a boy of Irish descent living in India during the British empire in the 19th century. He's a ruffian, a jester, a street rat in Lahore. Then he befriends Teshoon Lama, a former abbot whose dream is to free himself from the Wheel of Things. Teshoon Lama is on a quest to find the River of the Arrow, and he and Kim find themselves in many adventures in their quest.

As the novel progresses, we witness how Kim grows from the unruly orphaned boy that he is to a chela (servant) of the lama, a student in an English school in Lucknow, a government appointee, a surveyor (a spy of sorts), and a key player in the battle between the British empire and the Russians. And this last role is where I have a problem with. I felt that Kim was never really offered a choice in his role as a spy. Everything was laid out for him to become one.

What I did like were the amusing parts where Kim and lama travel to many exotic locations in India. Also, I found their encounters with several characters (e.g., a prostitute, a sick child, a sorceress) charming. This is where Kipling's novel shines. As for the grand plot involving espionage, everything was like a blur. I would have preferred more details, more texture, on these parts of the novel.

Kim is still an entertaining read. Although one major aspect of my ambivalence toward is whether the novel can be enjoyed by children or not. I do see Kim in many bookstores under the children's section, and there's a Puffin edition of it. But the novel's political themes may be too overwhelming for young readers. I guess if the readers are guided to focus on the characters' adventures, then I guess it could very well work as a children's book.

Read this book if:

1. You like your adventure stories set in exotic locations.
2. You've always been curious about the actions of the British empire.
3. You'll read anything by Nobel Prize-winning authors.

Horror-ish

And I've finally read my first Lessing! Yes, it's taken me this long to read one of her novels. I was originally gunning for The Golden Notebook, but when I looked at how thick it is, I died. Twice. The Fifth Child, running no longer than 150 pages, was perfect.

What a beautifully creepy novel The Fifth Child is. The story is pretty much straightforward. A young couple, Harriet and David, decide to move to a house of hotel proportions and have one child after another. Harriet and David have never been financially stable and have relied on David's well-to-do father for support. Things seem to go well with the family until the fifth child, Ben, was born.

All right, maybe the problem didn't start at Ben's birth but during the time Harriet was still carrying him in her womb. Ben was a difficult baby. Harriet often had to take sedatives just to keep Ben quiet inside her. Ben does appear to be an unusually strong baby. When Ben was born, nothing could have prepared the family of the sight of Ben. Besides being unusually strong for his age, Ben seems to resemble a Neanderthal, a monster in his parents and siblings' eyes.

If the other 4 siblings grew up with the attention (if not the love) of their parents, Ben didn't. Everyone seems to be afraid of him. Who wouldn't? When a cat and a dog die from strangulation, everyone thinks that it was Ben. And this thinking seems to be rightly so. Ben appears to act based on very primal instincts: eating ravenously, hurting people who view him with revulsion, and basically not communicating with any of his family. Eventually, the family decide to put Ben to an institution, even though Harriet has always been dead set against it.

Harriet does get Ben back after making an unscheduled visit and discovering that he has been drugged, fitted in a straightjacket, and covered in his own excrement the whole time he was at the institution. Harriet really tries to love Ben as much as she does her other children. But Ben's monstrous appearance and his wild disposition prevent her from doing so. She had to resort to having the teenaged gardener, whom Ben seems to like, watch over her son. It becomes inevitable that Ben becomes part of the gang of teenagers who terrorize parts of England.

Lessing shows us how one child can tear a family apart. The rest of Ben's siblings all leave for boarding school, as if wanting to put as much distance between themselves and their youngest. Harriet and David's marriage is never the same when they had Ben. Their house, which seemed to be their one prized possession, is eventually sold. And Ben only considers his friends as his true family.

I loved The Fifth Child. It's a horror novel that works on so many levels. On one level we see the family dynamic when one aberrant person joins the group. On another level we read about the horrors that Ben was capable of when he was growing up. And yet on another level we imagine the terror that could still happen, terrors brought about by Ben and his loutish friends. It's also a heartbreaking novel of loss, frustration, and what could have been. Somehow, I felt bad for the couple. I can't  help but imagine how everything would've turned out for them if Ben hadn't been born.

Read this book if:

1. You'll read anything that's won the Nobel.
2. You like your horror "literary."
3. You're the black sheep of the family.

A great book raises many questions

It's easy to get lost in Albert Camus's short novel The Stranger. At just a little over 100 pages, one can easily finish it in one sitting. That's what I did actually, this morning when I couldn't go to work.

The Stranger is the kind of book that, as soon as you close it, several profound questions pop up in your head. First, the title. Why title it as The Stranger, when it clearly is about Meursault, a man thrown into the spotlight when he commits an unexplicable act of murder.

Meursault, whom I'll label as our novel's hero for lack of a better term, shoots an Arab one sunny day on a beach midpoint in the novel. When he's asked by the judge for his reason, he just said it's because of the sun. WTF?

The Stranger is a kind of novel that lets you dig deeper, forcing you to "read between the lines" if you will. Perhaps it's Meursault's enigmatic nature that makes the reader feel that he doesn't understand the novel's protagonist at all.

Yes, it's a bit of a challenge deciphering Meursault's reasons for his actions. In the first part of the novel, the reader is informed that his mother has died in a home for the elderly. Why does Meursault refuse to see his mother in a casket? Has he reached a point of being unfeeling toward his parent? The novel doesn't clearly state his rationale. And this is one of the reasons the book will make for a good discussion.

Also, why does Meursault refuse to show any deeper feelings toward the woman he's seeing. He appears to enjoy his company. When he's asked if he loves her or if he wants to marry her, he tells her no. But later on, he thinks that he probably doesn't have any real objection to him being wed to her.

In the last few pages of The Stranger, Meursault is sentenced to be beheaded. Naturally, a priest goes to him during his last remaining hours. And what does our Meursault do? Why he laughs in the face of the priest and throws him out! He feels that everything doesn't matter at this point.

The Stranger is a kind of novel that requires introspection. Reading the final page doesn't complete the reading experience. It forces you to question, to think, to rationalize. And that I think is a hallmark of a great book by a truly gifted writer.

Read this book if:

1. You like your novels short but pithy.
2. You're into philosophical novels.
3. You'll read anything by someone who has won the Nobel Prize.

Poverty, politics, poultry

If you've read at least one novel by Gabriel García Márquez, then you might be in for a surprise if you read No One Writes to the Colonel and Other Stories. If you're expecting magical realism (e.g., people suddenly ascending into heaven as if it's the most natural thing), then the stories in this collection might disappoint. For in this collection, García Márquez chooses the path of a realist. Compared with his other works, you can probably refer to this short story collection as GGM lite.

I, however, wasn't a bit disappointed when I finished No One Writes to the Colonel and Other Stories on this fine Sunday morning. I'm one day late though, as the book club discussed this collection yesterday afternoon. And because I didn't even finish the novella No One Writes to the Colonel, I just decided to keep my mouth shut yesterday.

The thing about the novella is that García Márquez drives you smack in the middle of things. You feel the inescapable poverty of the town, the sickening reek of bureaucracy, the uncomfortable humidity of the town, the futile hopefulness of the characters. You know that nothing's going to come out a situation wherein a retired colonel pins his hopes on a rooster. It's the rooster that's supposed to bring in the money, much needed after so many years of not receiving a pension from the government. The colonel and his wife is so poor that she has been reduced to boiling stones in the kitchen, in the hopes of deceiving their neighbors that they have something to eat.

The novella isn't a pleasant read. The story just gets bleaker at every page. But you plod on, because García Márquez's writing is beautiful. Unlike his novels, here the sentences are terse, the dialogue natural, and the sense of place given in detail. And like most shorter works of fiction, the ending makes you ponder. Is there still hope for the colonel and his wife? I believe not.

During the discussion, Marie, the moderator, mentioned something about the iceberg model of short stories. In an iceberg, the part that is visible on the ocean surface is just a very small fraction of the actual size of the iceberg. I fully agree. Short story writers are masters of the tease. They offer you just mere spoonfuls instead of the whole dish. They leave it up to you on how you interpret the story and, ultimately, on how you appreciate it. They make you question. And such is the pleasure of reading short stories.

The other stories in this collection are just as good as the novella. In fact, my favorite in this book isn't the novella itself but an 8-page short story entitled "Tuesday Siesta." My mind can't stop thinking of all the various scenarios that can transpire after the last scene. What happens when folk learn that the mother of the thief whom they've killed has come to their town to visit his son's grave? Such delicious possibilities.

It's quite fascinating how Gabriel García Márquez has assembled a treasure of stories in this collection. I don't read a lot of short stories, but each small gem in No One Writes to the Colonel and Other Stories is enough to urge me to read some more.

Read this book if:

1. You'll read anything by Nobel laureates.
2. You love Latin American fiction.
3. You like your fiction bite sized.

Good for the soul

Effing hell, poetry! Poems are not really my cup of tea. More often than not, I can barely get what the poet is saying. But I would have to agree that some poems are beautiful, and that they evoke in the reader feelings that are a hard to describe.

But I'm determined that my taste should not just be dominated by fiction, specifically novels. So when I saw Selected and Last Poems 1931-2004 by Czeslaw Milosz in Fully Booked 2 weeks ago, I thought that it would add variety to my reading habit. Besides, Milosz was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1980. Just reading 1 collection by this poet is a bragging right in itself.

Here's a book by a Nobel laureate, who was part of the Polish resistance during World War II, defected to France in the 1950s, and then became a professor of poetry in the US in the 1960s onwards. Surely his vast experience would add a rich texture and a profound depth to his poems, yes? Hmmmm.... Quite daunting. This would need a plate of cookies; one cookie for every poem that I finish.

Oy! The subject matter tackled in the different poems are so broad: religion, politics, personal stuff, weird and random stuff, and some other stuff that I can barely comprehend. The poems' lengths have a huge range as well, with some as short as 2 or 3 lines and some as long as 20 pages.

There are some poems that resonate after reading them. Some of my favorites are "A Song on the End of the World," "Sentences," and "After Paradise." I've provided excerpts below.

A Song on the End of the World
On the day the world ends
A bee circles a clover,
A fisherman mends a glimmering net
Happy porpoises jump in the sea,
By the rainspout young sparrows are playing
And the snake is gold-skinned, as it always should be.
[excerpt, page 33]

Sentences
What constitutes the training of the hand?
I shall tell what constitutes the training of the hand.
One suspects something is wrong with transcribing signs
But the hand transcribes only the signs it has learned.
Then it is sent to the school of blots and scrawls
Till it forgets what is graceful. For even the sign of a butterfly
Is a well with coiled poisonous smoke inside.
[excerpt, page 80]

After Paradise
Don't run anymore. Quiet. How softly it rains
On the roofs of the city. How perfect
All things are. Now, for the two of you
Waking up in a royal bed  by a garret window.
For a man and a woman. For one plant divided
Into masculine and feminine which longed for each other.
[excerpt, page 179]

The poems collected here were written from as early in the 1930s and up to the early 2000s, when Milosz was already bedridden. Was Milosz a romantic? I think so, for there are some poems of his that deal with love. Was he pragmatic? Maybe.

Milosz's work, for its sheer brilliance, scope, and number, can be quite overwhelming, especially for one whose exposure to poetry is quite limited. But the 200 or so poems collected in Selected and Last Poems 1931-2004 are certainly enough to make you love this poet.

Read this book if:

1. You love poetry.
2. You'll read anything by a Nobel laureate.
3. You want variety in your reading habit.

This little book deserves a big place in your shelf

We've all seen this book by Nobel laureate Herman Hesse. But how many of us have picked it up and bothered to read it? Dear reader, you should. If read with an open mind, Siddhartha can truly be a very meaningful reading experience.

Now I'm not one to pick up a self-help or inspirational book. (I read Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist this year and found it totally unbelievable. I still don't know what the fuss is all about The Little Prince despite having read it twice.) But I figured I might as well read Siddhartha, since I've been seeing this little pocket-sized edition in bookstores for the longest time ever.

Siddhartha is still basically a novel though, one that concerns an Indian, named Siddhartha, who lived during Buddha's time. He goes through the usual experiences when one seeks spiritual enlightenment. He leaves his father and mother to join the mystics in the forest. He listens to Buddha preach. He joins the secular world and becomes a rich man and a lover of a courtesan. Finally, he becomes a boatman, shuttling people back and forth across the river.

The novel makes it clear that, for a person to succeed in his or her spiritual journey, it's not the individual experiences that matter, but rather the sum of them. It is through these experiences that we gain an understanding, an appreciation of things.

I don't doubt it if people would see differing messages conveyed by the novel. After reading, I felt that the novel spoke to me about happiness and contentment. I don't need to search far and wide to be happy. The things, the experiences, the people that will make me happy are all in front of me. Maybe the message I'll glean after re-reading Siddhartha might change. We'll see.

Read this book if:

1. You'll read anything by a Nobel laureate.
2. You're fascinated by Indian mysticism.
3. You're not into inspirational books but are willing to give this one a try.

From an absurd idea to the sublime

The book club is set to discuss José Saramago's novel, Blindness, in March. The book club is in for at treat. Blindness is brilliant. Saramago is brilliant. Blindness is a novel unlike anything you've read. Saramago isn't your usual novelist. Yes, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1998. No, he doesn't use quotation marks to set off speech, he doesn't employ short readable paragraphs, and he loves the comma splice. (Just read the excerpt below.) And those, dear reader, are some of the things that make reading Saramago both a challenging and a rewarding experience.

I'll reserve my opinion on Blindness in the coming months. But to start off the year 2011, I've decided to read Seeing, a novel that somewhat serves as a sequel to Blindness. It touches tangentially some of the characters and themes of Blindness.

It's been 4 years since the epidemic of blindness has struck the unnamed nation in the Iberian peninsula. It's local election day, a day characterized by torrential rain that prevents the citizens from voting. At exactly 4 pm, the rains stop and the citizens queue up to vote. The following day, the government calls for another election. The first is declared a failure. Why? 70% of the ballots are blank. In the next election, the results are even dismal. Close to 80% of the ballots are blank.

The nation's government, fearful of this mysterious situation, decides to relocate the capital and leave the city's citizens to fend for themselves. It's a "punishment" of sorts imposed by the government on its citizens who have chosen to exercise their right of putting in a blank ballot.

Here is where a brilliant moment of irony lies in Saramago's narrative. For having not put any name or party on the ballot, the citizens clearly see that none of their options in the elections is favorable to them. Saramago has let the reader now that its citizens know that their officials are corrupt, prone to lay the blame on innocent civilians, and basically incompetent.

...Let's say that you provided the nothing and I contributed the whatsoever and that the nothing and the whatsoever together authorize me to state that the blank vote is as destructive a form of blindness as the first one, Either that or a form of clear-sightedness, said the minister of justice, What, asked the interior minister, who thought he must have misheard, I said that the blank vote could be sign as a sign of clear-sightedness on the part of those who used it, How dare you, in the middle of a cabinet meeting, utter such antidemocratic garbage, you ought to be ashamed of yourself, no one would think you were the minister justice, cried the minister of defense... [page 159]

In Blindness, Saramago focused more on the people, on a society where anarchy reigns in the absence of a government. In Seeing, Saramago does the reverse -- he highlights what the government does to its citizens, specifically, what the government does wrong. And in Seeing, there are a lot of things that the government screws up. First, they incited rebellion by placing bombs, setting them off, and blaming the citizens of the city who they have now called rebels. Second, they declared a state of emergency, imposed stricter laws, and shut off the city from the rest of the nation.

None of these government actions worked. On the other hand, the city's people become a peaceful and cooperative lot, helping one another even after a small group of them get turned away by the government. In this novel, Saramago writes about the goodness inherent in people, a goodness that will allow us to survive with or without the help of an othewise useless group such as the government.

Seeing is a satire. Among other things, it shows that our officials may not have the best intentions at all times. The president in the novel is a weakling, who bows to the prime minister, who's always in a power struggle with the interior minister. These 3 characters are so terribly pathetic, but you know that they do exist in real life. Scary, no?

I'm glad I started this year with a Saramago novel. Seeing isn't as brilliant as Blindness, but it will show the reader that people, deep inside, will do good things.

Read this book if:

1. You'll read anything written by Saramago.
2. You like political satires.
3. You love a challenging read.