Books Back From the Weekend

Over the weekend I started one book but ended up reading another. I then returned to the original book, got bored, started a third; and then frustrated with the stack of books sitting accusingly next to my bed, I, then, decided to return the majority of the books I had out. Some good, some bad, some I have no idea - I never cracked them, and may return to them later.

The book I finished was The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares. Though only 103 pages, this little book was very intense and a little bit difficult. The story of an unnamed narrator who is on the run from the law, Morel is the diary of the narrator's time on an island to which he's escaped although he's been warned the island houses a deadly disease that causes your hair to fall out, your toenails and fingernails to fall off and your skin to turn read before killing you. On the island is an abandoned museum, a chapel, a swimming pool and a mill. One day out of the blue, our "hero" discovers that there are suddenly people on the island, people that cannot hear nor see him. He decides that he must be dead, but in the process of observing these "intruders" he begins to fall in love with one, a woman named Faustine, who everyday goes down to the western shore to watch the setting sun. Morel is also one of the "intruders" and is also in love with Faustine. His invention is a machine housed on the island that has recorded a week in the life of the group of "intruders" and plays it as a viewable, touchable, smellable image again and again, hence achieving a sort of immortality for those recorded.

I want to tell you more about the ending but I don't want to ruin it. I know how people like surprises, though typically you can lay out the whole plot of a novel for me and I will still enjoy reading it. I'm much more an enjoyer of the journey and not the end. Some of the novel was frustrating: it is a diary and sometimes the diarist is really rather stupid, and sometimes vague, he is afterall trying to figure out what is happening himself and remains vague should he a) escape the island or b) the authorities trace him to the island.

The book I originally started last week for a review this week was Firmin - the story of a rat who through the daily consumption of pages from books learns to read. I found the book boring and pretentious and got to the third chapter before I was tired of my head-nodding and put it down. I felt like I was reading the autobiography of a few of my realtime friends who read as though they simply want to name-drop. "Oh, I read so and so." Or "I read this and that." (Right now the Twilight series seems to be the books of status to read, as though readers wear a button on their lapels proclaiming, "I read Twilight. Ask me how.") This to me is pretention, especially when you take into account the vapid stupidity of some of the books currently being read (e.g. the Twilight series, anything on the New York Times Bestseller list, etc. etc.) Reading is not about dropping names like your a friend of everyone walking down a red carpet, and it isn't about decorating your walls with leather volumes you'll never open: it's about opening your imagination and your soul to the world, even if you can't leave your home.

The third book I started but didn't finish was Harvey Fierstein's Safe Sex. A trio of one act plays, these were written in 1986 at the height(?) of the AIDS crisis and all are about the necessity, or the fear of, or the disillusionment caused by not simply HIV/AIDS but the constraints that safe sex seemed to (and do) put on physical intimacy - how physical intimacy became equated with risk-taking. It is difficult to be intimate when the person you are with may be carrying around the means of your own destruction.

The first play is called "Manny and Jake" and is about two guys trying to hook up.

Manny: A moment of silence for what can't be done. Another for what can't be undone. A moment of silence for letting go of dreams. And one for stifled lives. For loss. For want. And a toast to those who can change. Who have changed. Who want to change and not forget

Needless to say, I put this book soon after the above quote. Though I want to pick it up again sometime.

Other books I'm bringing back:

If you haven't read Einstein's Dreams before, do so. I've read it 3 times already, and pick it up on occasion to read again. It is a collection of vignettes that show the many different worlds that potentially exist according to Einstein's theories of time and relativity. In one such world time is a flock of birds. In another time runs backwards, and so on and so forth.

I first read about Marie Corelli in Chinua Achebe's book A Man of the People. The main character Odili mentions her and her book The Sorrows of Satan twice. Ardath is the only book we have by Corelli here at the library, and is actually a collection of short stories. I've ordered The Sorrows of Satan through interlibrary loan.

Corelli lived and wrote in the 1890s and was more popular than all her contemporaries combined: meaning Arthur Conan Doyle and H.G. Wells. She fell out of popularity and was always a critical failure - for being too sentimental and dramatic. She was probably the Nora Roberts of her time. The Sorrows of Satan is a Faustian story in which Satan tries to win the soul of another character. Achebe's book is similar: Odili refuses to sell his soul to Nanga.

I also love the cover. I've checked out a few collections of poetry by A.R. Ammons and Mary Oliver that have this same type of black and white nature photography. I don't know if the photographer is the same, or if they're from the same publisher.

Other books that I don't know much about and will probably return: