Category Archives: Fiction

Strange Pilgrims – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

“He sat on a wooden bench under the yellow leaves in the deserted park, contemplating the dusty swans with both his hands resting on the silver handle of his cane, and thinking about death.”

Strange Pilgrims is a lightning tour of Europe, from wind-swept towns in Portugal and Spain to snow-clad Geneva and Paris. The central theme is of Latin Americans adrift in Europe, and many of the stories also involve death, either directly or as a motif. The focus is on what it is to be in a strange land, perhaps reflecting some of Marquez’s time as a virtual exile from Columbia. Might be valuable reading for UKIP or the Fronte Nationale, if they were looking to understand immigrants a bit better.

The name, somewhat obscurely, comes from the fact that it has taken Marquez years to write the stories (originally drafted in the 70s, they were published in 92): they have been pilgrims from the wastebasket to his desk and back multiple times, before finally emerging in their final – or at least current – form.

As is usual with Marquez, his stories are visually stimulating, creating whole pictures in your mind leavened with moments of humour. Several stories also feature magic realism, for which he is best known. Some are terrifying (one in particular, “I only came to use the phone”), and others are touching or inspiring. The line above opens the first of the 12 stories, a particularly good one about a former president trapped in Geneva by medical problems he cannot afford to have treated, nothing left but his dignity. In another, a newly-married couple travels to Europe only to find themselves trapped apart by a language and custom they do not understand, to a tragic end. All are worthwhile, and all bear Marquez’s classic stamp of humour mixed with stunning imagery and emotion.

Dangling Man – Saul Bellow

“Trouble, like physical pain, makes us actively aware that we are living, and when there is little in the life we lead to hold and draw and stir us, we seek and cherish it, preferring embarrassment or pain to indifference.”

Saul Bellow is a Canadian-born Pulizter Prize and Nobel Prize for Literature winner. In the words of the Nobel Committee, his writing possesses a “subtle analysis of our culture, of entertaining adventure, drastic and tragic episodes in quick succession interspersed with philosophic conversation, all developed by a commentator with a witty tongue and penetrating insight into the outer and inner complications that drive us to act, or prevent us from acting.” Dangling Man was his first book.

Dangling Man is a study of a man who cannot find his place in the world, who finds freedom a burden from which he cannot escape. He finds himself growing violent, angry, anything to escape the isolation and monotony of days he cannot seem to fill: he joins the army in order to achieve some blessed regimentation, to eliminate the need for individuality and reflection.

The book is hardly a cheerful one: I would go so far as to call it depressing, painting a picture of the human spirit I do not relish. It’s beautifully written, but as happens with some novels, more interesting after you’ve read it than enjoyable as you do. In a modern world that places an enormous weight on freedom, the idea that freedom might be undesirable presents a dilemma not easily solved. Bellow doesn’t answer the question, but then he doesn’t try to: he paints a vivid portrait of a man trapped in the four walls of his room, not because he cannot leave, but because he doesn’t why he should.

Murder at the Margin – Marshall Jevons

“She and her husband may simply have interdependent utility functions, like so many married couples. That’s what economists mean by ‘love’.”

One of the challenges of teaching – and learning – economics is that it asks students to think in three different ways: mathematically, in graphs, and in economic intuition. Students who are good at one may struggle with the others, or may learn well when a concept is presented in one format but not when the other two are used, but all three are important. As a result, economists like to dabble in different ways of presenting the three, trying to appeal to different types of students.

Murder at the Margin is a murder mystery written by two economics professors. The small, balding, Harvard economist Henry Spearman is on holiday when a murder is committed at his resort, and he is forced to use economic principles and careful observation to solve it. In the words of Alfred Marshall, economics is ‘the study of man in the ordinary business of life.’

I picked it up thinking it might be a useful resource for teaching economic intuition, having had it suggested by a friend. It is not exactly Pulitzer prize quality. It is, however, used frequently in teaching economics, and does a good job explaining economic concepts in clear, effective language. Speaking as an economist myself, it’s also quite funny: it’s from the 70s, so examples and prices are quite dated, and it is both intentionally and unintentionally amusing.

If you’re a student of economics, especially a high school student, I think it has some teaching value. I think most students would benefit more from something like Tim Harford’s Undercover Economist, but for students for whom that is too advanced, or for whom fiction might be more appropriate than non-fiction, it makes a good effort.

The Seagull – Anton Chekhov

I’m going to be away for the next two weeks, and so won’t be blogging: take it as a chance to work on that stack of books you’ve got lying around!

“You can’t have too many English Seagulls: at the intersection of all of them, the Russian one will be forever elusive.” – Tom Stoppard

The best known Russian works tend to be long, philosophical novels, in which characters represent whole philosophies. War and Peace, Brothers K, Crime and Punishment, and many others are all justly famous. As a result, though, other works, including Chekhov’s The Seagull, are often under-known.

The Seagull focuses on the romantic entanglements of four characters, each of whom also has an artistic and dramatic history: a middlebrow author, an actress past her prime, a rising star of an actress, and an abstract playwright. Conversations revolve around the nature of theatre and artistic expression, with perspectives sometimes in striking contrast to the nature of the play itself. Dialogue is also rich in subtext, with characters frequently skirting around what they mean or discussing one thing while meaning another.

Most broadly, Chekhov aims to capture various approaches to being an artist, and even more to being an artist in love. No one character is right or wrong, but each struggles in their own fashion: the Seagull borrows heavily from Hamlet, even quoting lines from it directly, and elements of the Shakespearean tragic flaw are present in the Seagull as well.

It’s a quick read, as plays often are: I haven’t seen it performed, but I suspect it’s a play worth reading before you see it, simply due to the complexity of the dialogue. Well worth a read.

“A work of art should invariably embody some lofty idea. Only that which is seriously meant can ever be beautiful.”

“Wine and tobacco destroy the individuality. After a cigar or a glass of vodka you are no longer Peter Sorin, but Peter Sorin plus somebody else. Your ego breaks in two: you begin to think of yourself in the third person.”

“He used to laugh at my dreams, so that little by little I became down-hearted and ceased to believe in it too.”

“It is not the honour and glory of which I have dreamt that is important, it is the strength to endure. One must know how to bear one’s cross, and one must have faith.”

The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde

“Human life – that appeared to him the one thing worth investigating. Compared to it there was nothing else of any value.”

“The commonest thing is delightful if one only hides it. When I leave town now I never tell my people where I am going.”

As a third steam age science fiction, we turn to The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Dorian Gray is a young man with everything going for him; he is young, handsome, charismatic, in the flower of manhood. He is also convinced that beauty and pleasure are the highest goods, that “the true nature of the senses had never been understood, and that they had remained savage and animal merely because the world had sought to starve them into submission or to kill them by pain, instead of aiming at making them elements of a new spirituality.”

As is pointed out early in the novel, however, all that will fade with time: as he ages he will lose his beauty, and with it his social prestige and his status. So Dorian makes a Faustian bargain: his portrait will age and wither while he remains fresh and young, unblemished by a life of sordid activities.

The book is in some ways a classic tale of a deal with the devil, in which the protagonist goes from bad to worse. It is different, however, in the way that many of Wilde’s tales are different: it is not always obvious what Wilde himself believes. Unlike in Faust, where we can generally assume that Goethe is anti-devil though sympathetic to Faust, Wilde sounds at times actively supportive of Dorian’s ideas, giving the tale a very different slant.

At root, the story itself is perhaps not the most compelling: it can feel long where it should have been short. It is saved though by Wilde’s ability to turn a phrase: it is full of memorable quotes and lines, many of which persist today in comments like the world knowing ‘the price of everything and the value of nothing’ or that ‘it is the feet of clay that make the gold of the image precious.’

“All sins, as theologians weary not of reminding us, are sins of disobedience. When that high spirit, that morning star of evil, fell from heaven, it was as a rebel that he fell.”

“There was romance in every place. But Venice, like Oxford, had kept the background for romance, and, to the true romantic, background was everything, or almost everything.”

Around the World in 80 Days – Jules Verne

“What had he brought back from this long and weary journey? Nothing, say you? Perhaps so; nothing but a charming woman, who, strange as it may appear, made him the happiest of men! Truly, would you not for less than that make the tour around the world?”

Now, despite suggesting in my last post that I was doing steam age science fiction, it must be admitted that Around the World in 80 Days isn’t actually science fiction: the whole point was that it was a journey that was at least theoretically possible at the time. If anything, it is a study of the British Empire at the time, with memorable comments on all the colonies and areas they pass through as well as on British attitudes about each. My favourite, I think, occurs when they are about to be attacked by bandits while on the train across America, where the comment is made that ‘it may be taken for granted that, rash as the Americans usually are, when they are prudent there is a good reason for it.’

Science fiction is often portrayed as boys’ novels, targeted to those who don’t read real fiction. This, I think, is unfair. Science fiction often neglects the sort of character development found in Dickens, true. But in return it allows for a clear focus on a single aspect of society, distilled by its removal from impurities and complicating elements that pervade our own societies. As a result, it often has profound things to say about the world we live in, as well as the worlds we might aspire to see happen, whether that’s about the future of robotics and by extension lesser beings in Asimov, or the nature of globalization in Verne. They can also inspire, as 80 Days does, by evoking a passion for adventure and a desire to see new things.

The classic picture of Phineas Fogg in a balloon is, unfortunately, false: they don’t use a balloon at all in the story. Often ignored is also the fact that he finds love on the adventure: rather than being a celebration of the modern world and consumption, in the end, Fogg is left with the classic reward of all such tales: true love, and happiness ever after.

PS – Interesting fact for West Wing (and Nellie Bly) fans: Nellie Bly did the trip herself as a homage for her newspaper, meeting up with Verne in Amiens after 72 days. Michael Palin of Monty Python fame refused to use aircraft, and managed it in 79 days and 7 hours, slightly longer than Fogg.

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde – Robert Louis Stevenson

As the summer ends, I thought I’d brush up on some steam-age science fiction: Jekyll and Hyde, Around the World in 80 Days, and Picture of Dorian Gray. First up: man and beast!

“It was thus rather the exacting nature of my aspirations than any particular degradation of my faults, that made me what I was, and, with even a deeper trench than in the majority of men, severed in me those provinces of good and ill which divide and compound man’s dual nature.”

Jekyll and Hyde is of course well known to most of us, even if that’s from watching the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. The original text though has some interesting differences. Modern characterization tend to show Hyde as large and brutal, almost an ogre of a man: he has served as inspiration for Batman’s Two-Face and the Hulk. In the original, though, he is significantly smaller than Jekyll, representing the fact that Jekyll’s life had been mostly good, not evil. Instead of intimidating size, all who see him report that he gives ‘an impression of deformity without any nameable malformation.’

Perhaps more profoundly, the original text focuses on the psychology of a clash between good and evil within a person. In many ways, it is the story of the fall: a man’s descent into evil, as he gradually loses control of his darker side until his only escape is suicide. Jekyll himself notes though that there are many sides to a man, and good and evil represents only two: indeed, Hyde may be evil, but Jekyll is by no means good, suggesting a duality may be overly simplistic.

The need to bite back comments or restrain ourselves from impulsive action is hardly a stranger to any of us, I suspect. Though satisfying in the short run, such decisions are rarely desirable in the long. For Jekyll, though, the problem is more acute: Hyde himself has no such restraints, but a single lapse for Jekyll in succumbing to the transformation leads to many transgressions. Though less obvious for the rest of us, we often face a similar problem: once we have succumbed once, we develop an attachment to the behaviour, and may never be free of it. Abstention, to paraphrase Samuel Johnson, may be superior to moderation.

Grimm’s Fairy Tales

“’Never mind, cut it off. When you are queen you will not care about toes; you will not want to go on foot.’ So the silly girl cut her big toe off, and squeezed the shoe on, and went to the king’s son.”

“L’histoire nous apprend ce que sont les humains / La fable ce qu’ils doivent être.” – Voltaire (History teaches us what humans are / stories tell us what they should be.

Grimm’s Fairy Tales have come a long way from their original form, standardized and gentled by Disney and other authors. In the Western tradition, though, they represent a seminal work in fairy tales, matched perhaps only in influence by One Thousand and One Nights. They can definitely be violent, often sexual, and always rude.

They also, however, serve to focus on themes, not individuals: on ideas, not specific settings. Characters are called ‘The Woodsman’ or ‘The Brother’, not given names, in order to ensure it is as widely applicable as possible. They also serve to teach fairly basic lessons about morality, including:

1) Over-cleverness and arrogance are not rewarded.

2) Always be polite.

3) Keep your promises.

4) Share what you have.

5) People get what they deserve – out of their own mouths they are condemned.

Stories don’t get much credit these days, nor does fiction, but Voltaire, I think, has a point.

Dead Souls – Nikolai Gogol

“But wise is the man who disdains no character, but with searching glance explores him to the root and cause of all.”

“Countless as the sands of sea are human passions, and not all of them are alike, and all of them, base and noble alike, are at first obedient to man and only later on become his terrible masters.”

In Gogol’s satirical look at Russian society, Dead Souls refers both to serfs who have died but not yet been recognized as dead by the Census, and the natures of his characters, all of them flawed or caricatures in some way. Gogol’s goal was to capture the flaws and faults of the Russian character, and then in Book 2 provide some insight into solutions. Unfortunately, Gogol was unhappy with Book 2 and burnt it shortly before he died, leaving Book 1 to end mid-sentence: what that says about the Russian character I leave to the reader.

Dead Souls is about a rather untraditional con artist, one attempting to buy dead serfs. In Czarist Russia, the count of serfs under each landowner was established by the census, and if one died between one census and the next, then the landowner has left with a deed of ownership and not much else. Chichikov, our hero, strikes on the idea to buy these dead souls for a pittance and mortgage them for a vast amount of money, then leave with it. Unlike today, when we are lucky enough to have a modern middle class with enough money to be worth stealing from, that meant going to the large rural landowners in search of ones with dead souls to sell. Fortunately, people with dead souls are in abundant supply in Gogol’s epic. Chichikov’s odyssey, and the parallel is intentional, involves repeated, cyclical stops in small town Russia, where he encounters, and indeed personifies, the Russian concept of poshlost: a moral and spiritual vulgarity.

Comedy is a tremendously difficult thing to translate well: jokes rely so much on context and subtle meaning that they almost always fall flat in translation. This translation, the Robert Maguire, very much suffers for it, and I’m not sure if another translation could do better: lacking the background Gogol expected of his readers, much of the satire is lost on me. Still, the book has strengths, and if not replete with laugh out loud moments, there remain some great insights into human nature, always a Russian virtue. I wouldn’t take it over a Dostoyevsky or Solzhenitsyn, but if you like the Russian authors (and I very much do!), he provides a nice change from the better known ones.

Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray

“All is Vanity” – Ecclesiastes

“Ah! Vanitas Vanitatum! Which of us is happy in this world? Which of us has his desire? Or, having it, is satisfied?” – Vanity Fair

In 1899, Veblen published his The Theory of the Leisure Class, arguing that most of society’s activities were focused purely on establishing status. We engage in conspicuous consumption, we train ourselves in skills with no remunerative reward, we even pursue conspicuous leisure, all to prove we have the money and status such activities require. It’s not clear much has changed, unfortunately.

Fifty years before, Thackeray wrote on a similar subject. He satirized early 19^th century Britain, with its class-obsessed, materialist fixations and flaws. His novel, subtitled A Novel without a Hero, has only flawed characters, with a devil’s assortment of opportunists, snobs, fools, hypocrites, adulterers, psychopaths, and more. No character is wholly flawed, however: many are explained to be products of their poverty or straightened circumstances, or also have redeeming virtues. From a mild beginning, it descends into a bleak view of human nature from which there is no escape or possibility of reform.

The glory of the book, however, is in Thackeray’s narration. One of the best known omniscient narrators, he is at times scornful, biting, and incisive, and always clever. He even insults his readers, suggesting that anyone interested in such Vanity Fairs must be lazy or sarcastic. Though grim, however, his insights are brilliant, and maintain their potency today, particularly in a world of increasing inequality and consumption.

“Be humble, my brother, in your prosperity! Be gentle with those who are less lucky, if not more deserving. Think, what right have you to be scornful, whose virtue is a deficiency of temptation, whose success may be a chance, whose rank may be an ancestor’s accident, whose prosperity is very likely a satire.”

“Some cynical Frenchman has said that there are two parties to a love-transaction: the one who loves and the other who condescends to be so treated.”

“The world is a looking glass, and gives back to every man the reflection of his own face. Frown at it, and it will in turn look sourly upon you; laugh at it and with it, and it is a jolly kind companion; and so let all young persons take their choice.”