I’ve always meant to read Man Meets Dog by Konrad Lorenz, a famous book on the subject, but it still awaits on my shelf.
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My binge reading of Stephen Leacock (early 20th-century humorist) ended with Winsome Winnie and Other New Nonsense Novels (1920), an intolerably tedious attempt to cash in on his first success (Nonsense Novels). I gave up on it early. My favorites of the preceding seven volumes were the fiction works, Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912) and Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich (1914). Two observations: (1) In the time between these volumes Leacock’s humor style switched from satire (exaggeration) to incongruity (e.g., ‘She told the secret only to her intimates, all 300 of them’ [paraphrased]); (2) These volumes seem like progenitors of Sherwood Anderson’s justly famous Winesburg, Ohio (1919) in their use of a mosaic narrative of related short stories centered on inhabitants of a small town. I don’t know whether academics have ever noted this before, but it would be worthy of a professional paper. It is also possible that Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology (1915) may have been an additional source of inspiration. And then there are Stephen Crane’s great Whillomville stories (1890s), which do the same thing, although less cohesively if memory serves.
Coincidentally, the book I just finished, Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s Noon: 22nd Century, does the same thing! This is another outstanding book from these wonderful writers, consisting of 20 stories following a small group of “spacers,” from age 12 to old age, as they explore the solar system and other star systems. The characters appear in various combinations and interact with supporting characters who also return occasionally. The 19th story is an elegiac masterpiece with two surprise endings (the first I guessed, but the second one floored me).
What’s next? The Autobiography of Michel de Montaigne, edited by Marvin Lowenthal. It is actually a compilation of Montaigne’s autobiographical writings (travelogues, letters, etc.) lying outside his great essays. I may reread the latter after this, as I feel in the mood for crystalline prose (yes, even in translation, because his thought process is so clear and concise, and his insights so sharp).
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Funny the things that stay with you after many years. When I think of Leacock I immediately recall his description of a man frantically trying to get somewhere in a rowboat but discarding one of the oars because " two would have hampered him." I also remember a supposedly suicidal man who struggles to find a tasteful way to go about it.
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McTeague by Frank Norris is among the more noteworthy achievements in the wave of naturalist fiction that appeared on the American literary scene around the turn of the twentieth century. It’s a tale of relentless anxiety, mostly the economic kind. I don’t know of any novel that more successfully conveys that feeling, the suffocating weight of it. And it’s fascinating how that anxiety can become self-sustaining, no longer even connected to circumstance.
McTeague, a San Francisco dentist of dubious credentials, makes a small but solid living in a working class neighbourhood. He’s a man of stunted imagination and modest expectations, seemingly harmless to himself and others. But his life gets turned inside out by forces he can only dimly understand. The first of these comes in the form of a female patient with whom he becomes infatuated enough to propose marriage even as she’s seated in his dentist’s chair still recovering from anaesthesia. It’s the first of many apparently impulsive moves that in hindsight seem sadly inevitable.
There are some excellent scenes in the novel’s first half as Norris builds an atmosphere of hypertension. My favourite one is McTeague’s appearance at a theater box office, where he becomes flustered and finally enraged when he’s unable to communicate his seating requirements clearly to the ticket taker. This is the novel’s prevailing mood. Even a pair of neighbourhood dogs get into the act, snarling and straining to have at each other only to fall into confusion when the opportunity finally comes.
The plot turns on a large sum of money that comes fortuitously to McTeague’s new bride. When he loses his dentistry license, Trina nevertheless keeps them in squalid conditions, unable to resist indulging her penchant for frugality, and at one point literally wallowing in a pile of coinage for the sheer physical pleasure of it. The hapless McTeague is pulled along by undercurrents of jealousy and resentment that eventually separate him from his marriage, from friends, from society, and finally taking him into Death Valley of all places. There the story has its stark and memorable climax.
The novel does have it’s faults. Norris will occasionally labour a point to death, and this could try your patience somewhat. And his portrayal of Zerkow the Jewish junk collector is thoroughly stereotypical. In fairness, Zerkow is hardly the only miser in the story, but his behaviour is practically Gollum-like in its reaction to all things shiny and precious.
This was my second reading of McTeague, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s not my last.
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Last night I was reading Arimaa: Strategy and Tactics, which is about, uh, the strategy and tactics of the twenty-year-old abstract board game Arimaa.
It’s written by a former world-class youth chess player, who took up Arimaa in the mid-2000s.
I found the book difficult because I find Arimaa a difficult game, and also because I neglected to buy the more introductory primer Beginning Arimaa. I did enjoy the fluffier anecdotal parts of the book, but I can’t recommend its technical content as entirely suitable for a beginner
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When I was in college, I saw Erich von Stroheim’s Greed (1924), his epic masterpiece based on McTeague Although it was cut by the studio from 8 hours to 2.5, it still has good narrative continuity and is very powerful. The next Saturday, I walked over to my favorite used bookstore, about a mile from campus, and found and bought a paperback copy of McTeague. Alas, I still haven’t read it. I’m looking at it right now. I think I will read it next, after I finish my rereading of Montaigne’s essays. Thanks for your interesting comments.
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Hi bugchat, sounds interesting. Does it also contain strategic principles that could be useful for playing go?
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I’d have to reread it from that angle and see.
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I reread your post and appreciate it even more now that I have read McTeague. A thousand thanks, as it is likely I would never had gotten around to reading this outstanding novel if you had not recommended it so highly. I read it as a periodic break from the Montaigne essays, but right from the start I found it very compelling. So many descriptive scenes are superlative but not at all dense or slow, as one might expect from an 1899 novel. I especially liked the scenes of San Francisco street life, the circumlocutions used to describe McTeague’s desire (suggestive but observing the proprieties of the time), the gold mining, and the Death Valley climax (Norris mentions the heat searing right through McTeague’s boots, which is true; I hiked in White Sands in 125 degrees, and the heat is barely tolerable through the soles and not at all if one tries to sit down—so you can never truly rest!).
As you observe, he does occasionally belabor a point (the details of McTeague’s flight in the second-to-last chapter are tedious), and the Jewish stereotyping is offensive (but typical of the era). Nevertheless, this is the best mainstream novel I have read in many years, and now I am going to hunt for and read more of Norris’s work.
I was startled by his use of what I thought was a modern phrase, “out of sight,” meaning excellent, extraordinary, incomparable. This was greatly in vogue among youths in the late-1960s, and I always assumed it derived from the space-age (rockets that went out of sight). It is absent from all of my slang and phrase dictionaries (except the unhelpful Chapman), including Mencken and the monumental Dictionary of Regional American English. But I finally found it in the New Shorter Oxford, albeit without any examples. Its origin lies in the early 19th century, but I have never seen it before in that period.
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I’m pleased that you enjoyed that novel so much, and that I played a part in steering you toward it. As I said before, I won’t be surprised to find myself rereading it. There are so many scenes that just stay with you. There’s the future father-in-law seemingly on the edge of a nervous breakdown, petrified that the slightest mishap will shatter the bourgeois respectability of the family picnic. There’s the ill-fated canary stranded in the desert. (You just knew, didn’t you, that that poor bird would come to a bad end.) And how about that uproarious laughter at the music and comedy revue, the apparent desperation behind it? I found it all quite riveting and certainly memorable.
Like you I had attributed the expression “out of sight” to the hippy crowd and so was very surprised by its use here. Now I’m wondering about groovy and Daddy-O!
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Off the top of my head, I would say Daddy-O dates to the Beatnik era (i.e., slightly older than the hippies). I think Dick Shawn used it in It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963), and I believe “Maynard G, Krebs” used it in the late 50s TV series, The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, which I saw as a kid in reruns. I could say more, but this is off-topic.
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Recently read Suetonius’s How to be a bad emperor. An ancient guide to truly terrible leaders, as selected, translated and introduced by Josiah Osgood.
Some of those Roman emperors were truly degenerate creatures living in truly decadent and sick society.
Suetonius was what you would now label as a royalty watcher.
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Yes, Suetonius’ Lives of the Twelve Caesars is a fascinating book! It was turned into a Classics Illustrated comic book back in the late 50s or early 60s. A surprising choice, considering how salacious it is. It was also the basis for much of Robert Graves’s I, Claudius, which was made into an outstanding 12-part television series—probably the best classical costume drama ever done. My daughter loved it when I showed it to her, and we had several in-depth discussions of Roman history as a result.
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Probably?
Well, I have a tendency to hyperbole when talking about books and movies I love, so I was being careful there. But I will happily remove the modifier, because you are right, I can’t really think of anything better.
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been there, done that 
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A biography of a famous Dutch writer.
Surprisingly there is an English wiki page on Nescio.
An English translation of most of Nescio’s stories was published in 2012 under the title Amsterdam Stories.
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I’m just about to finish The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin. Intriguing novel about utopianism.
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I’ve been meaning to read that since the year it came out.
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Three months after this book, her (sort of) prequel “The Day Before the Revolution” was published, I haven’t read it yet but thought you might want to know.
Le Guin is one of my (many) heroines and saints, BTW, so many awesome books that strongly influenced me when I first read them back in the 1970s.
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