Friday, October 23, 2015

Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner


It’s a series of great vignettes, written well, with wonderful and thorough research.  It documents some of the taming of the American West, which is a gaping hole in American literature.  All we have previously had is shoot-em-up Westerns.  Filling this gap is why it merited a Pulitzer Prize.
There are two thin plot-lines:
(1)  Two mismatched people, sacrificing their lives to the other’s desire for no good reason.  It reminds one of O’Henry’s, “The Gift of the Magi”, without the moral ending; a tragic ending in Stegner’s tale.
(2) The other tale, not nearly so interesting, is the ramblings of an old, lonely man.  He is trying to accommodate rationalizing his self-sorry state with family history, and the world that has passed him by.
It’s a good documentary, but no one has picked up the ideas for a dramatic movie, TV show, or documentary in over forty years now.  It’s a tragic family story, with no redemption.
 
Some of the best scene-scripting of any movie never made was captured in this book:
(a)  Susan’s descent into the New Almaden mine
(b) Susan’s ascent over Mosquito Pass getting to Leadville
(c)  The dreams of Lyman Ward
 
The early scenes of San Jose, Grass Valley and San Francisco are treasures for those of us who have grown up around the Bay Area.  Stegner’s descriptions of the sights, sounds, smells and people in those days 60-70 years before I came to California are inspirational to me.  I am also reminded that 60-70 years ago was when I did come to California.
 

Saturday, October 17, 2015

The Dinner by Herman Koch




Well, this starts out being a “Walter Mitty” romp[1] around the dinner table, possibly in the fantasies of Paul Lohman. That’s the first third of the book, and the reader buys into this take.

It’s in second third of the book that we suspect that this might be a comedy of errors[2] , although we note that things have gone to the noir side of story-telling, and we hope that the author resolves some of the nagging questions sooner rather than later, and with a positive, life-embracing twist.

Unfortunately, we move into the final third of the novel, assuming the worst case.  They (this broad family clan) are all mad, psychotic sociopaths, out to whimsically murder anyone and everyone without a care in the world.

In the end, most readers will feel glad that their last family dinner party wound up with only a drunk spouse and a petulant teen; and will be glad to avoid seeing family for another year.



[1] From Wikipedia: “in James Thurber's short story "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty", first published in The New Yorker on March 18, 1939.  Mitty is a meek, mild man with a vivid fantasy life: in a few dozen paragraphs he imagines himself a wartime pilot, an emergency-room surgeon, and a devil-may-care killer. The character's name has come into more general use to refer to an ineffectual dreamer and appears in several dictionaries.”
[2] From Wikipedia: A comedy of errors is a narrative work (often a play) that is light and often humorous or satirical in tone, in which the action usually features a series of comic instances of mistaken identity, and which typically culminates in a happy resolution of the thematic conflict.  A slight variation of the "comedy of errors" discipline is farcical theatre, which revolves around humor caused by the foolish mistakes of unintelligent characters and the chaos that derives from it. Examples of farces include British sitcom Fawlty Towers and Men Behaving Badly, as well as films like Monty Python's Life of Brian and Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator.
 



[1] From Wikipedia: “in James Thurber's short story "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty", first published in The New Yorker on March 18, 1939.  Mitty is a meek, mild man with a vivid fantasy life: in a few dozen paragraphs he imagines himself a wartime pilot, an emergency-room surgeon, and a devil-may-care killer. The character's name has come into more general use to refer to an ineffectual dreamer and appears in several dictionaries.”
[2] From Wikipedia: A comedy of errors is a narrative work (often a play) that is light and often humorous or satirical in tone, in which the action usually features a series of comic instances of mistaken identity, and which typically culminates in a happy resolution of the thematic conflict.  A slight variation of the "comedy of errors" discipline is farcical theatre, which revolves around humor caused by the foolish mistakes of unintelligent characters and the chaos that derives from it. Examples of farces include British sitcom Fawlty Towers and Men Behaving Badly, as well as films like Monty Python's Life of Brian and Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator.