A Christmas Carol

I didn’t read it last Christmas though that may have been a more appropriate time of year to do it. I’ve long felt that I at least ought to (/have?) read this – now I have.

There would be plenty of much worse stories to read to your child. Mind you, when the child is a bit older it might be a good idea to introduce him/her to the Blackadder version…

What I have been reading

i) Dickens. I have completed the book now, well a little while ago, but I never got to tell you people what I thought afterwards. That’s an easy task: Read the damn book! Nuff said.

ii) Catch-22, by Joseph Heller – I have finished that one since my last book update too. It was very good, I thoroughly enjoyed reading it, even the parts I wasn’t supposed to be enjoying.

The book is very funny, but you should not read it (only) for the laughs. The sheer absurdity of almost everything that goes on in the book is a big part of what makes it so wonderful, but that absurdity applied just as well to the real world at that time, which is a point Heller gets across with great force. I’m still very impressed by the way the book changes direction about half way in or so, without ever really breaking the flow of the story: It gradually becomes more serious, more tragic, as Yossarian’s “friends” keep dying all around him, for no good reason, and people all around him keep trying to kill him too, for no good reason. The moronic XOs and COs, people like Major Major Major Major Major, and their various stupid ideas, even more absurd proposals, their own motivations for doing what they are doing – and their complete lack of understanding of their soldiers’ motivational setup – combined with the stupid bureaucratic setting that these people work in, makes for a lot of very funny pages – until you remember that not all of this is made up by Heller, and that some of those people were actually very real. It’s that way about a lot of what happens in the book; it’s funny, but you know deep down that you’re actually not really supposed to be laughing here. Heller seems to all the time be telling us between the lines that if you think the book is messed up, then you’re wrong; it’s not the book that’s messed up, it’s the real world that’s messed up.

iii) Franz Kafka: The Trial, translated by Breon Mitchell. I have completed the novel, even if I have still not yet read the last 20 pages of the “Fragments” section of the book (Kafka died before the novel was ever finished, and he wrote in his will that it was to be destroyed when he died. The Fragments part of the book consists of additions, unfinished chapters ect. that never made it into the novel proper).

It’s not a fun book to read. In a way, it is actually a horrible book to read. But you can’t lay it down. At least I couldn’t. It wasn’t anything like I’d expected, but then again, after having read it, I realized that I actually didn’t really know beforehand what to expect. It’s absurd like Heller, but not much fun to read. Just like Yossarian, Josef K. is caught in a catch-22, before that term had ever been coined. As the novel progressed, I couldn’t stop thinking about how I might have done things differently from Josef K., had I been in his situation; but the more pages you read, the more you realize that whatever you might have said or done differently, very little would have changed. The novel is so well written that the slow but still immensely brutal realization that there is no escape, no hidden loophole somewhere that you (or Josef K.) can find to bring a stop to the nonsensical trial, which incidentally pretty much nobody – including the people who are trying to get you convicted – seem to know anything about, is almost as hard on the reader as it is on Josef K. As you read on, you get to feel K’s despair, and I must say it really got to me. All the way through, you can’t stop looking for loopholes that just aren’t there and never were.

Heller was greatly inspired by Kafka’s authorship, and the impact of two other authors I have read recently, Fyodor Dostojevskij and Charles Dickens, are also easily recognisable in his novel. Catch-22 is, even if it has twice as many pages as the latter, easier to get through than The Trial, even if it is not exactly a walk in the park. If you’re not sure if you can handle Kafka, my advice would be to start out with Heller and then perhaps later move on from there. As Howard Jacobsen puts it in his introduction to Catch-22, Heller’s book is: Kafka popularized rigth enough, Kafka made available to those who would never go near Kafka, but by no means Kafka alleviated.

iv) Bombarder Hovedkvarteret, by Mikkel Plum.

I have in a recent post made it clear that I find the book very promising. I naturally still do.

Quote of the day

{David is 8-9 years old at this point in the story. He is travelling alone, heading for a boarding school in London, and he has just sat down for dinner in a local public house. At this moment, he is just about to start eating:}

‘There’s a half a pint of ale for you. Will you have it now?’ I thanked him and said: ‘Yes’. Upon which he poured it out of a jug into a large tumbler, and held it up against the light, and made it look beautiful.
‘My eye!’ he said. ‘It seems a good deal, don’t it?’
‘It does seem a good deal,’ I answered with a smile. For it was quite delightful to me to find him so pleasant. He was a twinkling-eyed, pimple-faced man, with his hair standing upright all over his head; and as he stood with one arm a-kimbo, holding up the glass to the light with the one hand, he looked quite friendly.
‘There was a gentleman here yesterday’ he said — ‘a stout gentleman, by the name of Topsawyer — perhaps you know him?’
‘No,’ I said, I don’t think –’
‘In breeches and gaiters, broad-brimmed hat, grey coat, speckled choker,’ said the waiter.
‘No,’ I said bashfully, ‘I haven’t the pleasure—’
‘He came in here,’ said the waiter, looking at the light through the tumbler, ‘ordered a glass of this ale–would order it–I told him not—drank it, and fell dead. It was too old for him. It oughtn’t to be drawn; that’s the fact.’
I was very much shocked to hear of this melancholy accident, and said I thought I had better have some water.
‘Why, you see,’ said the waiter, still looking at the light through the tumbler, with one of his eyes shut up, ‘our people don’t like things being ordered and left. It offends ‘em. But I’ll drink it, if you like. I’m used to it, and use is everything. I don’t think it’ll hurt me, if I throw my head back, and take it off quick. Shall I?’
I replied that he would much oblige me by drinking it, if he thought he could do it safely, but by no means otherwise. When he did throw his head back, and take it off quick, I had a horrible fear, I confess, of seing him meet the fate of the lamented Mr. Topsawyer, and fall lifeless on the carpet. But it didn’t hurt him. On the contrary, I thought he seemed the fresher for it.
‘What have we got here?’ he said, putting a fork into my dish. ‘Not chops?’
‘Chops,’ I said.
‘Lord bless my soul!’ he exclaimed, ‘I didn’t know they were chops. Why a chop’s the very thing to take off the bad effects of that beer! Ain’t it lucky?’
So he took a chop by the bone in one hand, and a potato in the other, and ate away with a very good appetite, to my extreme satisfaction. He afterwards took another chop, and another potato; and after that he brought me a pudding, and having set it before me, seemed to ruminate, and to become absent in his mind for some moments.
‘How’s the pie?’ he said, rousing himself.
‘It’s pudding,’ I made answer.
‘Pudding!’ he exclaimed. ‘Why, bless me, so it is! What!’ looking at it nearer. ‘You don’t mean to say it’s a batter-pudding?’
‘Yes, it is indeed.’
‘Why, a batter-pudding,’ he said, taking up a tablespoon, ‘is my favourite pudding! Ain’t that lucky? Come on, little ‘un, and let’s see who’ll get the most.’
The waiter certainly got the most. He entreated more than once to come in and win, but what with his tablespoon to my teaspoon, his dispatch to my dispatch, and his appetite to my appetite, I was left far behind at the first mouthful, and had no chance with him. I never saw any one enjoy a pudding so much, I think; and he laughed, when it was all gone, as if his enjoyment of it lasted still.
Finding him so very friendly and companionable, it was then that I asked for the pen and ink and paper, to write to Peggotty. He not only brought it in immediately, but was good enough to look over me while I wrote the letter. When I had finished it, he asked me where I was going to school.

…

The above is an excerpt from Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield, the complete and unabridged version (837 pages), which I’m currently reading – alongside Sun Tzu of course. This book is a real heartbreaker, this I know with certainty, even if I’ve still only read about a fourth of it. And yes, I do get out – I’ve been sitting outside (reading) between noon and 3 pm both today and yesterday. This is as close to an optimal afternoon as I’ve been for a long while, I think (yeah, I know: some people would probably think this was a bit sad).

I have also finished Said’s Orientalism (in a Danish translation) and Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls (…likewise), as well as Lone Frank’s Det nye Liv since the last time I wrote about books I’ve been reading. I might write a bit about Said later, and maybe a line or two about Lone Frank’s book.