What is the world's story about?

At first i was not too sure about this book. I disliked so many of the characters in the beginning. I didn't know what Steinbeck was trying to get across. However, I always wanted to find out more. And in the end I loved the story. I love Lee. Caleb is one of the most interesting characters I have ever met in a novel. This is definitely a book I wish I had been able to read in school and discuss with a class along the way. All this symbolism and these various themes- I am sure I missed half of it. I kind of want to go read the Old Testament now to piece a few more things together (I've never read it! gasp). There is a quote on page 324 (of my version) and I feel that most of the time I was reading this book like Samuel, whereas it needed to be read the way Tom would read it.

"And the books that came into the house, some of them secretly- well, Samuel rode lightly on top of a book and he balanced happily among ideas the way a man rides white rapids in a canoe. But Tom got into a book, crawled and groveled between the covers, tunneled like a mole among the thoughts, and came up with the book all over his face and hands."

I want to send this book to my little brother, who struggles, well, with a lot of things, but maybe it would help him see he has a choice to find the good in himself, the good in others.

From Chapter 34:
"A child may ask, "What is the world's story about?" And a grown man or woman may wonder, "What way will the world go? How does it all end, and while we're at it, what's the story all about?"

I believe that there is one story in the world, and only one, that has frightened and inspired us, so that we live in a Pearl White serial of continuing thought and wonder. Humans are caught- in their lives, in their thoughts, in the hungers and ambitions, in their rice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity- in a net of good and evil. I think this is the only story we have and that it occurs on all levels of feeling and intelligence. Virtue and vice were warp and woof of our first consciousness, and they will be the fabric of our last, and this despite any changes we may impose on field and river and mountain, on economy and manners. There is no other story. A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean questions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well- or ill?

...We have only one story. All novels, all poetry, are built on the never-ending contest in ourselves of good and evil. And it occurs to me that evil must constantly respawn, while good, while virtue, is immortal. Vice has always a new fresh young face, while virtue is venerable as nothing in the world is."

Caleb was named after a character in this book...

Let's read it! Meet you back here on Feb. 1st!

Netherland.

Tap, tap. Anyone still there??

Guess what? I just finished Netherland.

Except I didn't really read it. I mean, I sort of did, but I guess I kind of skimmed it after a while. So I guess I can't really get credit for reading it.

I read the first 75 pages or so & decided that I didn't love it. Or maybe even like it. I mean, O'Neill is clearly a strong writer. Obviously. But I was having a bad week, & I didn't really have the tolerance / patience to finish something I didn't really love in that very moment, so I skimmed through & grabbed the major plot points, probably missing out on the essential parts of the book in the process.

But I like what Heidi & Lindsey said about it. Especially what Heidi said about Hans feeling like a ghost. Exactly. The whole book just felt so grey & blasé.

I was just frustrated, I guess. Frustrated at how their relationship unraveled, so seemingly apathetically. How does that happen? I never want it to happen to me & my own. It makes my stomach hurt to think about it.

******************

What should we read next? Let's pick up again, yes? My mom is loving The Help right now, but I'm just sort of feeling out of in in terms of books to read. I feel like it's been a bad reading year for me & I want to change that.

Maybe we should look at the original list we did a year ago?

The Elegance of the Hedgehog

I read this book about a month ago! Yikes, I had a lot more to say about it then..., thankfully Kathryn's post provided somewhat of a refresher for me (I made a brief comment on her post below).

Some favorites moments/thoughts/sentences:

(P 161) When the charming Ozu sends a book to Renee she describes it as "a fine edition bound in navy-blue leather of a coarse texture that is very wabi." And then goes on to define wabi as 'an understated form of beauty, a quality of refinement masked by a rustic simplicity.' I just loved the word wabi and what it stood for. Have you ever come across such objects? If you have, you know how perfect the word wabi fits in a way that no English word can. I think?

(p162) Paloma on intelligent people. Maybe this just makes me feel better about myself?

"I'm going to say something really banal, but intelligence, in itself, is neither valuable nor interesting. Very intelligent people have devoted their lives to the question of the sex of angels, for example. But many intelligent people have a sort of bug: they think intelligence is an end in itself. They have one idea in mind, to be intelligent, which is really stupid." I don't know... pointless thesis papers came to mind? Not all, but some. I like that whole paragraph.

(p. 188) Paloma on teenagers (this reminded me of the "cool" kids in high school).

"And secondly, a teenage who pretends to be an adult is still a teenager. If you imagine that getting high at a party and sleeping around is going to propel you into a state of full adulthood, that's like thinking that dressing up as an Indian is going to make you an Indian. And thirdly, it's a really weird way of looking at life to want to become an adult by imitating everything that is most catastrophic about adulthood... Lastly, teenagers think they're adults when in fact they're imitating adults who never really made it into adulthood and who are running away from life."

(p. 215) How toilet paper defines are wealth, from Renee (and whole-heartily agreed by me!)

"The toilet paper, too, is a candidate for sainthood. I find this sign of wealth far more convincing than any Maserati or Jaguar. What toilet paper does for people's derrieres contributes considerably more to the abyss between the classes than a good many external signs." So true, so true. And while we're speaking of the toilet, didn't you love the laughter between Renee and Ozu over his music-making toilet flusher? Made me love Ozu even more...

(p. 248) Renee on using intelligence to serve others. The whole passage is great, but...

"The only thing that matters is your intention: are you elevating thought and contributing to the common good, or rather joining the ranks in a field of study whose only purpose is its own perpetuation, and only function the self reproduction of a sterile elite -- for this turns university into sect."

Anyone else besides Kathryn and me read this one?

I kind of want to read it again. Like Kathryn, I started out thinking the book was pretentious and trying too hard. In the end, I loved it.

Netherland: Thoughts on Hans

I was just flipping through Netherland and wanted to share a couple things that I had marked.

I think this is what makes me sympathetic to Hans...

p.82-83 "Perhaps the relevant truth--and it's one whose existence was apparent to my wife, and I'm sure to much of the world, long before it became apparent to me--is that we all find ourselves in temporal currents and that unless you're paying attention you'll discover, often too late, that an undertow of weeks or of years has pulled you deep into trouble."

I loved his description of the DMV on the following page (which is so true!)...

p 85 "Two of the, women in their thirties, screamed with laughter by a photocopying machine, but as soon as they reached their positions at the counter they wore faces of sullen hostility. One could understand why, for assembled before them was a perpetually reinforced enemy, its troops massing relentlessly on the hard pew-like benches. Many of those seated were hunched forward with hands clasped and heads bowed, raising their eyes only to follow the stupendous figures..."

And then there was a line I really loved, but I can't find the paper I wrote it on... Hm. I'll be back.

Netherland

Anybody finished with Netherland yet? I may be the only one but I didn't love it, so I kind of want to do my post on it and move on.

{warning- spoilers}
I thought O'Neill was a fascinating writer. But the main character, Hans, was completely unmotivating and unmotivated. He drove me crazy. I did like hearing about his relationships with people in his life, and stories of his youth, those were my favorite parts of the book. However, then I felt even more annoyed that he so easily let the important things slip out of his life. Even his effort at restoring his family in the end seemed subpar. Chuck was obviously shady and I don't understand how Hans was so naive to it until the end. Was his distractedness and lack of passion a result of 9/11? A result of being a foreigner in Manhattan? Hans seemed like a ghost floating through the city and life and doing what others told him to do (Rachel and Chuck, primarily). I would have thought experiencing something like that would make one cling to and fight for loved ones more dearly.

A few passages I marked. necause they way they described certain moments in relationships was so very real to me:
"And after Mama's cremation I could not rid myself of the notion that she had been placed in the furnace of memory even when alive and, by extension, that one's dealings with others, ostensibly vital, at a certain point become dealings with the dead." (pg 89)

"For my comings and goings were frightening mysteries to my three-year-old son. My arrival, however closely anticipated, startled him; and from our first moment together he would be filled with a dread of my departure, which he could not comprehend of situate in time. He feared that any minute I might be gone; and always the thing he most feared would come to pass." (pg 118)

"But in the taxi home, there's an epilogue of sorts: my wife, mooning out of the window at rainy Regent's Park, says, "God do you remember those sirens?" and still, looking away, she reaches for my hand and squeezes it.
Strange how such a moment grows in value over a marriage's course. We gratefully pocket each of them, these sidewalk pennies, and run with them to the bank as if creditors were banging on the door. Which they are, one comes to realize." (pg 183)

Barbery.

Loved, loved, loved this book.

But I so hated the first 50 pages. I really did. I thought it was pretentious, that it was just trying too hard to be fancy & philosophical & unique.

But then something happened, & I just fell in love. I think the characters suddenly became human for me. I finally deciphered who was who, & how they fit together. And then - I couldn't put it down. I finished it in a few hours. I thought it was such a beautiful story with such a real ending.

One of my favorite snippets, from Paloma -

In any case, this is true at our place. If you want to understand my family, all you have to do is look at the cats. Our two cars are fat windbags who eat designer kibble & have no interesting interaction with human beings. They drag themselves from one sofa to the next & leave their fur everywhere, & no one seems to have grasped that they have no affection for any of us. The only purpose of cats is that they constitute mobile decorative objects, a concept which I find intellectually interesting, but unfortunately our cats have such dropping bellies that this does not apply to them (pg. 51).

I loved Paloma's wit, as unlikely as it is that any 12 year old would be so engaging. But I thought that she was just clever - & we share a distaste for cats.

Another favorite deep thought from Paloma -

If people could climb higher in the social hierarchy in proportion to their incompetence, I guarantee the world would not go round the way it does. But that's not even the problem. What his sentence means isn't that incompetent people have found their place in the sun, but that nothing is harder or more unfair than human reality: humans live in a world where it's words & not deeds that have power, where the ultimate skill is mastery of language. This is a terrible thing because basically we are primates who've been programmed to eat, sleep, reproduce, conquer & make our territory safe, & the ones who are most gifted at that, the most animal types among us, always get screwed by the others, the fine talkers, despite these latter being incapable of defending their own garden or bringing a rabit home for dinner or procreating properly. Humans live in a world where the weak are dominant. This is a terrible insult to our animal nature, a sort of perversion or a deep contradiction (57).

From Renee -

From their box hidden behind the sheets at the back of the wardrobe I have brought out 2 earrings inherited from my mother-in-law, the monstrous Yvette - antique silver, dangling, with 2 pear-shaped garnets. I made 6 attempts before I managed to clip them properly to my earlobes & now must live with teh sensation of having 2 potbellied cats hanging from my distended lobes. 54 years without jewelry do not prepare one for the travails of dressing up. I smeared my lips with 1 layer of "Deep Carmine" lipstick that I had bought 20 years ago for a cousin's wedding. The longevity of such a useless item, when valiant lives are lost every day, will never cease to confound me. I belong to the 8% of the world population who calm their apprehension by drowning it in numbers (301).

I love that after all of this preparation, after all of her anxiety, after not being recognized by the other tenants in the building, that Ozu says, I would recognize you anywhere. I really enjoyed seeing their love story develop, their simple friendship, two people with such sad hearts who are able to find happiness in each other.

The ending. Sigh.

Thinking back on it, this evening, with my heart & my stomach ll like jelly, I have finally concluded, maybe that's what life is about: there's a lot of despair, but also the odd moment of beauty, where time is no longer the same. It's as if those strains of music created a sort of interlude in time, something suspended, an elsewhere that had come to us, an always within never. Yes, that's it, an always within never.

Don't worry Renee, I won't commit suicide & I won't burn a thing. Because from now on, for you, I'll be searching for those moments of always within never. Beauty, in this world (325).

I guess that in the end, I wanted Ozu & Renee to get married & adopt Paloma. That would have just been perfect, right? A happy, incredibly brilliant little family.

It didn't work out that way, but I think that there was redemption. And that makes me feel okay. Bittersweet perhaps, but okay.

I'm going to go read Netherland now.