millennial_dandy's reviews
342 reviews

Considering that 'The Magnificent Amerbsons' won the Pulitzer prize back in 1919 it's no surprise that it's a poignant (and pointed) portrait of American life and culture, in this case from the end of the nineteenth into the beginning of the twentieth century. Specifically, this novel chronicles the decay and evolution of an unnamed town in the Midwest as a means of exploring a dramatic shift in the American zeitgeist, for which author Booth Tarkington uses the fall of the carriage and the rise of the automobile as the central symbol.

This was a rather lofty ambition on Mr. Tarkington's part, and so to reign it all in, the plot itself is wrapped around three generations of one family: the titular Ambersons.

The Ambersons are by no means 'old money'--we're told on page one that the family patriarch, Major Amberson, was the first to make real money, and then established them as the proverbial 'Joneses' of the town, hosting the most lavish, exclusive parties, building the biggest estate, having roads named after them--all the staple aristorcratic moves.

The townsfolk seem to like the Ambersons well enough, and indeed neither the major or his two adult children are terribly haughty or look down on their neighbors.

Enter the third generation and our main POV character: George Amberson.

George is both a spoiled and a rotten child and loathed by everyone but his mother, who dotes on him unconditionally (to her eventual detriment). He lords it over his friends and anyone else unlucky enough to cross him that he is an Amberson, whatever their fortune, and they are and always will be 'riffraff', whatever their fortune.

This attitude follows him into young adulthood, and he remains convinced that his family's status is connected to some essentialist quality that makes them inherently and inalienably aristocrats even when the family no longer holds any social power or are even rich.

Not a particularly American viewpoint, right? No 'land of opportunity,' 'build yourself up by your bootstraps' 'meritocracy uber alles' red blooded American would be able to tolerate the notion of an American 'aristocrat' without a mighty scoff. Fortunes and status have to be earned, not bequeathed.
Putting a rather fine point on it, a newspaper runs an article titled 'Gilded Youth of the Fin de siècle' that states this sentiment plainly:

In all the orgy of wastefulness and luxury with which the nineteenth century reaches its close, the gilded youth has been surely the worst symptom. With his airs of young milord [...] his recklessness of money showered upon him by indulgent mothers or doting grandfathers. [...] He is blase if you please. (p.75)

Ouch.

None of this gets to young George. What does he care what some 'riffraff' newspaper says? He's got more important things to do like prepare for a career, surely. Well...

"Don't you think being things is rather better than doing things? [...]" [...] When Lucy rather shyly pressed him for his friend's probable definition of the 'things' it seemed so beautiful and superior to be, George raised his eyebrows slightly, meaning that she should have understood without explanation, but he did explain: "Oh, family and all that--being a gentleman I suppose." Lucy gave the horizon a long look, but offered no comment. (p.119)

Who is Lucy? one might ask. Lucy is the daughter of an up-and-coming automobile engineer. Middle class. Industrious. Doers, and very much not 'be-ers.' She and her father, in other words, represent what America is becoming, and none too slowly despite George's confidence that things like 'motor cars' are as vulgar a fad as the townhouses beginning to encroach on his family's formerly isolated estate.

"The things we think are so solid--they're like smoke," George's mother observes, "and time is like the sky that the smoke disappears into. You know how a wreath of smoke goes up from a chimney, and seems all thick and black and busy against the sky, as if it were going to do such important things and last forever, and you see it getting thinner and thinner--and then, in such a little while, it isn't there at all." (p.85)

What neither she nor George realize is that in this metaphor, they are the smoke.

Indeed, as more and more people are drawn to the town, initially to get in on the development of cars, and the town grows up around them, the Ambersons, who decided not to put their eggs in that basket, get completely cleaned out. One by one they start to lose pieces of their estate. There are no more parties, no more carriages, no more need for them. Unwilling to change with the times, and with only one earner (the grandfather) supporting an entire family, the 'magnificent Ambersons' officially fall on hard times, going from 'leisure class' to 'unemployed' practically overnight while Lucy and her father rise to the top of the new upper class.

There are some other particularities, but that's rather the long and the short of it. A sort of reverse rags to riches tale for modern Americans to read and have a sensible chuckle over.

But Tarkington doesn't go all in on this message. If that were the case, the Amberson estate would have crumbled to the ground (which it does) only to be replaced by shiny skyscrapers, the old cobblestone streets replaced with sleek concrete.

That's not what happens, though.

In an aside typical for novels of the time, Tarkington goes out of his way to say this of the 'new America':

A new spirit of citizenship had already sharply defined itself. [...] They had one supreme theory: that the perfect beauty and happiness of cities and of human life was to be brought about by more factories [...] As the town grew, it grew dirty with an incredible completeness. [...] They boasted of their libraries, of their monuments and statues; and poured soot on them. [...] In truth, the city came to be like the body of a great dirty man [...] Such a god they had indeed made in their own image [...] They did not know they were his helplessly obedient slaves, nor could they ever hope to realize their serfdom (as the first step toward becoming free men) until they should make they strange and hard discovery that matter should serve men's spirit." (pgs. 209-211)

Ouch.

And Tarkington doesn't leave it here; no, no. He goes on to add that this new American devotion to industriousness means that no one person, much less a family, will ever again be in the spotlight for any more time than they're useful, producing something, anything new, pushing forward.

"You're refreshingly out of the smoke here," George's father comments to Lucy.
"Yes, for a while," Lucy laughed. "Until it comes and we have to move out farther."
"No, you'll stay here," he assured her. "It will be somebody else who'll move out farther." (p.215)

Well that's all rather cynical and dreary, isn't it? Are the only two choices 'gilded' and 'factory-hungry'?

While Tarkington doesn't seem to take a strong stance on whether those two choices are a binary, I rather think the novel implies that it's a spectrum, and that the polar ends of that spectrum are each toxic, albeit in different ways. The middle ground, then, ought logically be the place we all as Americans should want to see our culture end up. Even the end of the novel, though not definitive, sees the Capulets and the Montagues make nice.

Tarkington makes a strong case against the concept of inherited wealth that easily slides into scornful decadence, but also cautions against trading one toxic form of gluttony (for idleness) for another (for productivity).

Have we, in the century between the publication of 'The Magnificent Ambersons' and now found the balance? Or are we all still worshipping the 'great dirty man'? The emergance of 'grind culture' and aversion to doing things for fun rather than profit would seem to suggest not.

Well my ole buddy, Booth, maybe next century. Maybe by 2119 we'll learn that 'matter should serve man's spirit.'

This is one of those texts that I think most curators of queer fiction would agree is pretty darn important both in terms of being a central paratext and an artifact of queer history. Scores of literary queer works reference The Symposium, usually by name. It's a sort of shorthand in a lot of historical literary fiction to represent gay men try to find each other (looking at you E.M. Forster), it's used as a source for entire plots of novels (a certain recent retelling of a certain Greek epic comes to mind), and mentioned in passing in others to let the reader know that some gay stuff is going to go down at some point.

The Symposium has been a critical text for queer men trying to understand themselves, searching for representation, for validation of their feelings and experiences for a very long time.

It's a lot of weight to put on the shoulders of such a slim little stack of pages.

So how does it stand up? And what even is it beyond a citation for Achilles/Patroclus shippers?

The Symposium is, loosely, about a group of (mostly) sober guys having a night in with the boys and talking about love. That's it. That's the whole plot.

We learn a bit about each of our characters, though the only one that really matters is the man of the hour, Socrates.

Each guest at this shindig takes a turn praising Love, each focussing on a different aspect thereof. Many of these speeches, especially the early ones, explore sexuality in so unbothered a manner I'm wholly unsurprised that much of The Symposium was redacted at universities until relatively recently if Forster is to be believed.

Not that it's particularly graphic (though one guest does go off on a tangent about how Achilles was canonically a bottom, actually, and people need to get that right). But one entire speech is about how humans are naturally either straight or gay (bisexuality is also alluded to in many of the speeches), though that isn't the language used. This message is instead relayed via a myth about Zeus splitting humans in half to teach them humility, and that love is trying to find that other half of ourselves again.

Men who are a section of that double nature which was once called Androgynous are lovers of women [...] The women who are a section of the woman do not care for men, but have female attachments. But they who are a section of the male follow the male. (p.32)

Each speech is quite dense (this is still a philosophy text after all) but quite readable (at least in this Library of Liberal Arts edition), so this isn't something you'd pick up and read straight through.

Though the speeches compliment each other, they are quite distinct, so there's really something here for everyone, as Love is interpreted in as many ways as there are speeches. I suspect everyone who does eventually read them all will have their favorite, though reading them all (with the boys, perhaps?) would also be a great springboard for discussion.

As far as philosophy texts go, this one is one of the most approachable because it is set up as a narrative, and so each idea feels tied to something concrete (a character) rather than just dangling out in space under some intimidating bolded heading. There is enough light interaction between the characters between speeches to break everything up nicely, and we round off with a saucy little biography of Socrates himself, delivered by our resident flower-crown wearing overgrown twink Alcibiades (an interesting historical figure in his own right, and the basis of a character in the fabulous Manhua One Thousand and One Nights).

I'll probably have to read the speeches again (and again) to have any concrete feeling about them, but they're lovely to read, especially in a genre that can often feel so dry and/or dour.

So go: join Socrates and Alcibiades around the table for an evening philosophizing about Love, and rejoice at the fact that we, queer people, have always been here, loving and laughing and wearing flower crowns.

"Sometimes I think people were meant to be strangers" ~Channing Way, I
Apparently, Rod McKuen was one of those artists who at the time of his success had the misfortune of being mainstream, because we all know how anything mainstream is spoken of. Though if the reviews here, over 50 years on, mean anything, he's remembered more fondly now.

I had never heard of this fellow, so I read the collection without the baggage of knowing what anyone else thought of his work at the time he was popular; just found this at a thrift store and liked the cut of its jib.

Many of the poems in this collection appear to have been written when the poet was in his mid 20s to early 30s, and is largely about the ennui that coming out of your 20s brings with it. Especially when reflecting on love and how all-consuming it feels during that period, and how devastating it is to lose it.

Like a lot of poetry, his style sometimes worked for me, sometimes didn't. The straightforward simplicity of it was described by one GR reviewer as being the precursor to 'Instagram poetry' -- itself looked upon with derision by many for its hallmark straightforwardness that not everyone would even consider to be 'true' poetry.

Ariel Bissett did an interesting deep dive into Instagram poetry in which she explores how far from 'ruining' poetry, the accessibility of it that leads to its wider appeal actually makes it more relevant.

McKuen's poetry, at least in this collection, definitely fits into that conversation of 'what is poetry'? though it would be hard, I reckon, to deny the poetic lens he viewed the world with given some of the choice lines he came up with. He also had a crazy amount of success crossing his poetry over into music and he not only got to work with artists like Johnny Cash, Johnny Mathis, Frank Sinatra, and Barbra Streisand, but in 1968 he won a Grammy for 'Best Spoken Word' album. And all that in addition to his work writing music for film. Across his career, he estimated he wrote a total of over 2,000 songs and 70 books, selling over 1 million copies in 1968 alone. So whatever else anyone might think, he was certainly industrious.

He was also an LGBT rights activist, starting in the 1950s and culminating in more prominent activism in the 70s once he had a bigger platform. In particular, he famously protested against Anita Bryant, then Florida Citrus spokesperson and face of the 'Save the Children' campaign, a movement that leaves an impact even today. At the time she was quoted as saying: "Homosexuals cannot reproduce—so they must recruit, and to freshen their ranks, they must recruit the youth of America." In response, he released the protest song 'Don't Drink the Orange Juice'.

Despite this, and a long history of doing charity concerts during the AIDS crisis, McKuen never seems to have identified with any label himself, saying in a 2004 interview with the Associated Press :

I am sexual by nature and I continue to fall in love with people and with any luck human beings of both sexes will now and again be drawn to me. I can’t imagine choosing one sex over the other, that’s just too limiting. I can’t even honestly say I have a preference. I’m attracted to different people for different reasons.

I do identify with the Gay Rights struggle, to me that battle is about nothing more or less than human rights. I marched in the 50’s and 60’s to protest the treatment of Blacks in this country and I’m proud of the fact that I broke the color barrier in South Africa by being the first artist to successfully demand integrated seating at my concerts. I am a die-hard feminist and will continue to speak out for women’s rights as long as they are threatened. These, of course, are all social issues and have nothing to do with my sex life (although admittedly I’ve met some pretty hot people of both sexes on the picket line.)

Given such an extraordinary career, maybe one would expect his actual work to be extraordinary too. I wouldn't go that far, but then, nothing suggests that he meant it to be, seemingly more concerned with capturing something ubiquitous of the human experience and human emotion. And he must have, because I'm a 20-something reading his poetry in 2023 and I can see myself in some of it.

I used to be afraid to look completely real
the sun was just my friend sometimes
when brown from sea and sky made things all right -
always afraid to be anything but young
and envying beauty
even on the face of strangers

Is this what growing up means
the reality of lighting over public mirrors?
Or is my confidence in love so great
that I worry not
to let you see me at my worst? ~Camera

2.5 rounded down to 2

I listened to this memoir as an audiobook, and that was definitely the way to go. As an experiment, I cracked open a physical copy to see how it read in print, and everything immidiately fell apart.

Author Jennette McCurdy was obviously very angry when she wrote this. The kind of angry that comes from the years of repression she documents in 'I'm Glad My Mom Died.'

Memoirs are so tricky because their success hinges on the life of the writer having been interesting, or at least tackled through a nuanced lens of some kind. Otherwise, they're...cringe. Celebrity auto-biographies especially.

I've always had the sense, perhaps unfair, that pop celebrities writing memoirs, especially when they're still in the middle of their careers feels at best like a cringy lack of self-awareness and at worst gimmicky.

For me, 'I'm Glad My Mom Died' feels like the former, which always fills me with a deep sense of secondhand embarrassment. Not because there was anything objectively bad about her story, but because I don't think it was as edgy or illuminating as she thought it was. Or maybe she didn't and just wanted to use this as a stunt to prove she finally had control of the narrative of her life. A non-fiction 'I, Claudius' for the twenty-first century celebrity if you will.

But either way, this shouldn't have been a book. This should have been a blog. Or a podcast.

This is where the audiobook did a lot of heavy lifting.

If you're going to trauma-dump on millions of strangers, doing it directly into their ear in your own voice in the already very bite-sized vignettes is how you want to do it.

Had this been fiction, I would have picked on it for doing that 'sensationalism but with so much gritty realism thrown on top you dare not question its sincerity' thing that's so in right now. But because it's non-fiction, I want to pick on it for feeling like that.

Obviously, some of the work is on the reader to recognize that these vignettes are "memories of memories" (written by Alan Hollinghurst when he tackled this very issue in 'The Stranger's Child'), but there seems to be rather little self-awareness of this fact by McCurdy herself.

She says in the very last 'chapter' that she reviles the knee-jerk social expectation to respect the dead. I can only extrapolate that she then decided to fully reverse in the other direction.

She reveals in a paint by numbers sort of way how toxic the lives of child actors can be. How they're so easily taken advantage of by everyone in the industry, including their own parents. She speaks candidly about how this system ruined her childhood and a large swathe of her young adulthood. She writes about the pressure of being in the spotlight and getting your image ripped apart on the huge scale that is the press and social media.

But, and not to be presumptuous, but don't we all kind of know that already? I always thought this was an open secret, one that is 'let out of the bag' by at least one or two former child celebrities every generation.

Was Jennette McCurdy's mother manipulative and abusive? By Jenette's account, absolutely. But she wrote with such an utter lack of nuance that it left me wondering what the take away was supposed to be. Why was I reading this? Why should you?

Why indeed.

It just has that feel about it that documentaries and reality TV have had about them for the last few years where there's this 'gotcha' about catching the audience rubber-necking the events they themselves brought to our attention.

So... I guess...consider me got?

I do wish her all the best though, and I hope that getting all of this off her chest helped her and that she's doing better now.

"Sometimes I feel like a caretaker of a museum--a huge, empty museum where no one ever comes and I'm watching over it for no one but myself."

I'm not the first and won't be the last to compare 'Norwegian Wood' to 'The Catcher in the Rye.' But it bears repeating because while I loathe 'The Catcher in the Rye', I really enjoyed 'Norwegian Wood'. And this despite my issues with both novels being strikingly similar.

So what's the deal?

These are both (anti) coming of age novels that revolve around relatively privileged, 'not like the other boys' protagonists who never really seem to gain any insight into themselves even as they point their little magnifying glasses at the world around them. And just as many consider liking 'The Catcher in the Rye' to be a red flag, I wouldn't be surprised if many people felt the same way about this novel. But what I think 'Norwegian Wood' has that 'The Catcher in the Rye' just missed out on is self-awareness. Unlike 'The Catcher in the Rye' which defiantly tells the reader: 'take from me what you will', we get a little bit of a nudge from Murakami in 'Norwegian Wood.'

In his fantastic review of the novel, Booktuber 'TheBookChemist' discusses how about two-thirds of the way through the story, protagonist Toru Watanabe briefly has to endure being put under the microscope himself by an unambiguously 'bad guy', and his close friend, Nagasawa.

Nagasawa is this too-clever, too-handsome, destined for success, girls falling all over themselves for a chance to bask in his presence kind of guy. He admits this openly, admits that nothing means much to him other than climbing the traditional social ladder to be able to have a comfortable, hedonistic life doing whatever he wants. He treats his girlfriend, who by all accounts is a perfectly lovely person who has never done him any wrong, incredibly badly, neglects to think of her really as a human being rather than just another box to tick ('Perfect girlfriend/wife --tick!), and is utterly unapologetic about it.

In a pivotal scene where Nagasawa invites Watanabe to join him and his girlfriend for dinner, Nagasawa casually mentions that he and Watanabe are the same kind of person. "Neither of us is interested, essentially, in anything but ourselves [...] That's why we can think about things in a way that's totally divorced from anybody else. That's what I like about him. The only difference is that he hasn't realized this about himself, and so he hesitates and feels hurt." (p.208)

All of this is spot-on and completely representative of the Watanabe we've come to know over the course of the novel. When Nagasawa says this, a sort of spell over the reader is broken. The distance Watanabe has kept us at from his own story suddenly makes sense, his dreamy, hyper-sexualized, fantastical recollections of his interactions with the three main women in his life suddenly make sense, his lack of introspection makes sense if we see Watanabe as being just like his friend.

It's not an especially subtle reveal, and it comes at kind of a strange place in the narrative, making the ninety remaining pages that come after it feel like a deflated balloon. It would have been so much stronger, thematically, to close the novel with this scene, I think, and with a little restructuring it could have found its way there. And having that scene at the end also would have been a nice bookend to middle-aged Watanabe's opening remarks about memory in chapter one, and how it's "a funny thing" (p.4) that warps and changes as we get farther away from it in time.

It would have been this nice one-two punch: not only is memory flawed, but our self-perception even as things are happening is flawed.

That, more than the manic pixie dream girls and questionably constructed sex scenes was what bugged me about 'Norwegian Wood' as a love story -- it could have been so great, all the pieces were there, but for some reason, one of them was out of order. And to be fair, despite this issue, it is a brilliant take on the traditional love story. Watanabe is not a nice guy, who thinks he's a nice guy, and gets those feelings validated often enough (at least in his own recollections) that he never realizes he was as much of a jerk as his overtly jerky friend all along.

And I think that describes a lot of guys, frankly. Or at least, a certain type of guy. And what's interesting yet problematic about this novel is that the exact Watanabe type: bookish, 'sensitive', 'hopelessly romantic', 'nice guys' would read this and get to the part where Nagasawa compares himself to Watanabe and agree with Watanabe's (incorrect) evaluation that they aren't in fact the same at all. And then go on their merry way, innocently wondering why it is that so many women think it's a red flag that they like this book.

And that's such a shame, because there's no one better to learn a lesson from this book than those exact guys, who this novel is so clearly aimed at.

But that's not really this book's fault, so I can't fault it or Murakami for simply being another in a long line of books and movies to be misunderstood by its intended audience and warped (in their ignorance) into something much uglier than it was meant to be: a validation of bad behavior.

However, outside of that, and in terms of its value as a piece of art, it's gorgeous. I came away from this completely understanding why so many people love Murakami's writing, and agreeing wholeheartedly with them.

Much like 'Catcher in the Rye' before it, this is an attempt (I think more successful) to capture the ennui of being a young adult and coming to terms with not only that impermanence, but the impermanence of the people that come into our lives, and how incredibly hard that is to reconcile, and indeed how some people don't or can't, and get stuck.

There's a lot of grief in this novel, and that grief over lost youth and the ghosts of the people of our past lingers. Murakami ties that exploration of loss to literal death quite often, but we see it in other, more subtle moments as well: a roommate that suddenly isn't there anymore, a friend you see for the last time, the high school sweetheart you ghosted after graduation. And Murakami allows us to feel the weight of those losses too.

One of the most poignant episodes involves Watanabe's roommate in the dorms, Storm Trooper, a guy who is the source of much ridicule by Watanabe himself; Watanabe openly makes fun of Storm Trooper's quirks to other students living in the dorm, and to each of the other people he meets, and is fairly cold to the guy in person as well, even though he admits that it's because of his roommate that he becomes more organized and cleanly.

In a rare moment of introspection, middle-aged Watanabe looks back on his roommate with a degree of empathy his twenty-year-old self was incapable of: "My stories of Storm Trooper made Naoko laugh [...] though I was not exactly proud of myself for using him this way. [...] Making maps was the one small dream of his one small life. Who had the right to make fun of him for that?" (p.28)

Storm Trooper shows up many times, long after his unexplained exit from the story, and Watanabe's obvious soft spot for him despite how awful he was to him, was one of the throughlines that made Watanabe feel like a real person. That type of loss: no longer having the ability to apologize for something and grant that other person and yourself closure is, unfortunately, one of the painful realizations that so often comes with maturity.

It serves as a subtle but powerful lesson to any young reader: don't take for granted that you'll always have the chance for your thoughtlessness or cruelty or neglect to be forgiven.

And in that spirit of closure, I feel that with 'Norwegian Wood' under my belt I can finally let go of how much I dislike 'The Catcher in the Rye'. Finally, I have a worthy counter-offer to anyone, but especially young men, who are still trying to figure out what it means to be good, and who feel detached and lonely in a way no other person has ever felt detached and lonely before. However, though 'Norwegian Wood' definitely has the capacity to incite that rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass, it doesn't offer an alternative road map, and I fear that if such a young man read this, saw himself in it, and was ashamed, he would be left standing on nothing.

There are arguably not enough books written for men by men that explore toxic masculinity of this type, however, such explorations on their own are not enough -- there needs to be somewhere to go from there that isn't the 'black-pilled' so-called 'manosphere' or the intellectual in-aesthetic-only wasteland of Jordan Peterson.

Popular books exploring a healthier form of masculinity like 'The Song of Achilles' are great places to start, but, and it feels a bit funny to even type it out, the world might actually need more nuanced representations of actually 'good guys' written by men, for men. Because we've gotten really good in leftist spaces at noticing and, rightly, pointing out bad behavior and toxic traits, but there's a real vacuum when it comes to producing representations of solutions, especially in literary fiction not written by and for queer BIPOC folks or white women.

So, go forth, lads: the final frontier awaits!

2.5

This poetry collection was, overall, not my cup of tea. I liked the idea that poetry was, for the author, a form of diary, and that many of the poems responded to events she witnessed during her lifetime. But the actual quality of the poetry itself felt rather lacking. Much better suited to religious greeting cards than quiet contemplation.

This is a more personal quibble, but for the most part I don't care for 'rhymey-dimey' poetry--particularly if it has no variation.

The volume itself is a lovely little object published by The First Church of Christ, Scientist--a church founded by the author herself in the late 19th century.

Indeed, the life of the author is, to my mind, vastly more interesting than her poetry. She lived from the early 1820s until 1910, and so by just the circumstances of her birth lived through interesting times including the Civil War (referenced several times throughout the collection).

Her personal life as it related to religion and medicine and their intersection made for quite the Wikipedia read, and involved seances, accusations of plagarism, and a lawsuit dubbed 'The Second Salem Witch Trial' -- just to drop a few tantalizing details. Furthermore, one of the many publications she had a hand in, The Christian Science Monitor, has won multiple Pulitzer prizes.

Our primary concern is to secure the salvation of the immortal souls of men who live as we once did. Our secondary purpose is to remove from the general world those who are ravening beasts and a scourge to God's children. Whenever we achieve the first, the second will necessarily follow. If we fail in the first" -- he gestured toward the dead man -- "we will be deeply grieved, as we are now, but shall not be deterred from accomplishing the second." (p.314)

This is a book that is far more interesting to talk about than to read.

In 'The Retreat', author Jerrold Mundis explores the deadly sin of 'wrath' and its interconnectedness with punitive justice. He invites us to ponder: is retribution more about punishing the wrongdoer, or satisfying the desire of the victim to cause the wrongdoer pain? Overarchingly, 'The Retreat' follows along what some might consider the slippery slope of institutionalizing 'an eye for an eye.'

To bring this rather lofty philosophical question down to earth, Mundis presents the reader with the Order of St. Hector, the fictional patron saint of violent men. The philosophy of the order is outlined in the quote above. To achieve these aims, once in a while, the brothers of the order (who now live at an isolated monastery in upstate New York after being expelled from Europe) seek out an unspecified number of violent men from across the country and trick them into attending a two-week retreat at the monastery.

Over the first few days, each penitent is paired with one of the brothers, and all seems to be as one would expect: sleeping on an uncomfortable bed, rising early, eating little, and listening to oodles of Bible passages. But then...things take a turn into 'Hostel' or 'Martyrs' territory, and the penitents endure over a week of extreme physical and psychological torture at the hands of the brothers of St. Hector.

The goal? Ostensibly to punish them for and cleanse them of the violence they've inflicted on others in order to save their immortal souls and remove them as threats to wider society. At the end of the retreat, one of three things will happen: one, if the brothers believe that you are truly repentant, you get to divine a fitting penance for your sins and then join the order and devote the rest of your life to the cause and to God. Two, if the brothers don't determine that you're a changed man, you have to either agree to execution by lethal injection or agree to be lobotomized and then join the order in a second-class capacity. But no matter what, once inside, no one gets to leave.

Now, here's where it gets interesting.

The penitents at the retreat are bad guys. Like, really bad. The worst. They've committed every one of the most heinous and disgusting and depraved crimes you can imagine (or that Mundis has imagined for you).

Given that, do they deserve what happens to them at St. Hector's?

If you believe in punitive, retributive justice, you would be forced to say yes. And then read about it for over 250 pages. In graphic detail.

And honestly, as someone who doesn't believe in that type of justice, I reckon that might be something those on the other side of the aisle should have to confront, and then meditate on.

But they aren't the only ones that would come away from this book with something to think about.

On the other hand, this set-up raises questions about rehabilitation. Maybe you don't believe in punishing people; you want to help them become better. But then what do you do with people who can't or won't be helped? Is imprisonment and confinement the answer? Certainly, I don't love the idea of lobotomizing people (how would we ever even reliably come up with a fool-proof way to sift out those who can be helped from those who can't?), but then what do you do with such people? Is it the most humane option to offer them confinement or death?

Mundis repeatedly reminds us of the importance of free will and bodily autonomy (well, after the whole two weeks of torture thing) when it comes to the ultimate fate of each penitent. Do choices like those have a place in restorative justice and rehabilitation in our real world?

Certainly, there have been cases of convicted serial killers who either request or accept the death penalty as punishment for their crimes.

There's a lot to chew on on both sides of the argument here.

Another recurring plot point is the mindset of the brothers as they inflict torture on the penitents. The abbot pulls each brother aside at various points to check in with them, asking each if they are inflicting torture because they truly believe it will save the soul of the penitent or because they enjoy seeing the penitent in pain. If the answer is the former, the abbot nods and returns them to their work, but if it's the latter, he commands that brother repent in some painful way. And that's the real throughline in behind the plot; this push and pull between sincere belief that what they are doing is justified and good, and their own secret bloodlust to do these things regardless because, well, these men deserve it.

As I say: it's all very interesting to think about and discuss and ponder as a hypothetical, but do you need to read a 392 page novel to be able to do that?

Maybe there is such a novel that would be worth the hassle, but I'm not convinced it's this one.

This is a horror novel that's trying to do a lot all at once while also going off on this discussion of crime and punishment and redemption and such. It could have been done, it really just needed a solid trim and restructure.

First off, because of the premise, there are necessarily a lot of characters involved in 'The Retreat.' We have all the brothers of the order and its abbot and then we have all the penitents. The first problem, was that Mundis got carried away.

He tries to introduce us to like twenty characters, but only fleshes out about a third of them so that the others float along as names on a page, not people you care about or can even remember. And on top of that, he doubles and even triples up on his architypes multiple times. We get about three 'thug' lads who are all described the exact same way: big and muscular but stupid. And then there are randomly two South American lads, one of whom is a diplomat, but I swear the name attached with that character gets switched twice. And then there's one guy who uses an alias, but is referred to in the third person narration by his real name.

Then there are all the brothers. Did they all need names and little backstories that ultimately all came down to the same thing: before being brothers, they too were all ~bad guys~.

The characters are, for the most part, a mess, in other words. And that, more than anything, really, really was a problem.

The true elephant in the room, though, is the graphic descriptions of violence and torture and bodily fluids and other gore. Is a lot of it purposeful? Debatably. Is some of it gratuitous? Debatably. You're really either going to be ok reading something like that or you're not; there's not much middle ground here, and it's definitely a taste thing.

Overall, though attempts were made on the part of the author to present an interesting and thought-provoking hypothetical, and in spite of some nice prose, the structure and pacing dragged the overall reading experience down.

But please do read the plot summary and share that much with anyone you can have a good discussion with, because there's a lot in 'The Retreat' to talk about. Perhaps even reflect on. Somewhere quiet and peaceful. A monastery, perhaps…

The Taming of the Shrew -- 1.5
A comedy should, first and foremost, be funny, and sadly, The Taming of the Shrew failed in this most basic regard.

It's been said that to really get under the hood of comedy, you have to first consider what the premise of the joke is; what are you being asked to find funny? In the 'Jeeves' series by Wodehouse, for instance, you have a bumbling, aristocratic boss and his incredibly competent and clever butler. The underlying absurdity to this set-up is that, in theory, an aristocrat is such because he there is some intrinsic, inherited quality that makes him a cut above those who, because of something intrinsic and inherited, serve him. By having a foolish and inept aristocrat and a clever and capable servant, the joke is that there is nothing intrinsic and inherited that place the aristocrat and servant in their respective social positions. The joke is that the qualities associated with each class are not innate.

Therefore, this joke is funny to the person who agrees with that premise, and not funny to the person who does not.

This was my problem with 'The Taming of the Shrew' -- I just didn't think the joke was funny, the joke here being: 'imagine: a woman pushing around a bunch of impotent men until a 'real' man comes by and pushes her around to the point that she is 'tamed' and completely subservient to him to the degree that the hitherto 'good' women seem shrewish by comparison.'

To find this funny, you have to agree with the premise that men should not be pushed around by women, that they are not 'real' men if they are, and that the correct and only role of a woman is to obey and worship the men in her life, especially her husband.

I don't agree with that premise, so this didn't read as comedy to me.

Now, not finding something funny is not the same as finding something offensive, though too often these days, the two tend to be conflated, especially by those engaging in bad faith.

Take slapstick humor a la The Three Stooges, for instance. A lot of people like the slapstick in The Three Stooges, but a lot of people don't find it funny, and some people might say it's offensive.

The person who finds it funny maybe enjoys the absurdity, the unreality of it, or may feel schadenfreude. The person who doesn't find it funny may not find that premise of absurdity and unreality enough to feel schadenfreude rather than empathy. And the person who finds it offensive may not only think it's unfunny for those reasons, but moreover, promoting or normalizing bullying or violence. But not everyone who doesn't find The Three Stooges funny will find it offensive.

To me, 'The Taming of the Shrew' is not only unfunny, it is offensive. I not only don't find the premise funny, I find the follow-through vile. Many of my notes in the margins were 'ew' and 'yuck' when it came to situations that were probably designed to be funny.

In the introduction, the writer makes a point to say that this particular play hasn't done well since Shakespeare's time, even long before the 'era of political correctness' some might claim we now live in, writing: "Only in greatly altered forms did it enjoy stage success through much of the 17th, 18th, and early 19th centuries [...] probably a response to the play's uncanny ability to make audiences of any era uncomfortable." (p.9)

Indeed.

I'll rather let the source material speak for itself here.

1. Petruchio: I am he am born to tame you, Kate, and bring you from a wild Kate to a Kate conformable as other household Kates. (p.59)

2. Petruchio: 'Tis a world to see how tame, when men and women are alone, a meacock wretch can make the curstest shrew. (p.60)

3. Petruchio: Another way I have to man my haggard, to make her come and know her keeper's call [...] She ate no meat today, nor none shall eat. Last night she slept not, nor tonight she shall not. [...] I'll rail and brawl; and with the clamor keep her still awake. This is a way to kill a wife with kindness, and thus I'll curb her mad and headstrong humor. (p.84)

And then, for the rest of the play, we get to read about how, after not letting her eat or sleep, she indeed becomes his obedient little wifey, which is proven to the audience through a series of scenes depicting the degree to which he's browbeaten her.

In one such scene, they're heading out to return to her father's house for a visit, and he states that it's nighttime even though it's not, she contradicts him, saying it's daytime, and he threatens to not continue on to her father's house and drive them home unless she agrees to say it's nighttime because he says so.

Petruchio: I say it is the moon.
Katharina: I know it is the moon.
Petruchio: Nay, then you lie. It is the blessed sun.
Katharina: Then, God be blest, it is the blessed sun. But sun it is not when you say it is not. [...] What you will have it named, even that it is, and so it shall be so for Katharine. (p.102)

We get this exact 'joke' again one page later. They finally arrive at her father's house, and after a while, she tells Petruchio she wants to go to her sister's wedding feast. He tells her they can only go after she kisses him. She hesitates, saying that kissing in public is embarrassing for her, and he shrugs and says:
"Why, then let's home again."
"Nay, I will give thee a kiss [She kisses him] Now pray thee, love, stay.
"Is not this well? Come, my sweet Kate. Better late than never. (p.110)

The piece de resistance comes at the end when he proposes a wager with the other newlyweds over which of their wives is most obedient. The other two men’s wives don't come out from the house when they 'bid' and 'entreat', but Kate comes out dragging the other two when Petruchio 'commands' her to come. But that's not good enough of a show, so he adds:

"I will win my wager better yet, and show more sign of her obedience. [...] Katherine, that cap of yours becomes you not. Off with that bauble. Throw it underfoot. [She obeys]. (p.116)

One of the other wives balks at this type of humiliation of a wife, but the other two husbands both express that they wish their wives were as obedient.

Just in case the audience still isn't 'getting' it, we end the play with Petruchio charging Kate to "tell these headstrong women what duty they do owe their lords and husbands." (p.116)

She complies, giving a very long and very sad 'trad-wife' speech about how "thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper, thy head, thy sovereign; one that cares for thee, and for thy maintenance commits his body to painful labor both by sea and land [...] and craves no other tribute at thy hands but love, fair looks, and true obedience -- too little payment for so great a debt [...] I feel ashamed that women are so simple to offer war where they should kneel for peace." (p.117)

'The Taming of the Shrew' is not a comedy; it's a disturbing account of socially accepted and encouraged domestic abuse leading to Stockholm Syndrome. And it's made even sadder by the fact that so little has changed since the turn of the seventeenth century given the popularity of the 'trad wife' hashtag on TikTok, and the spooky similarity between Kate's speech at the end of the play, and the rhetoric of conservative women now.

So, no, I did not find this play funny, and indeed, I found it offensive and disturbing. It deserves its unpopularity, it should only be read for filth, and a few witty lines scattered throughout do not make it worth reading unless being read critically.


Twelfth Night -- 3

I remember reading this comic-book version of Twelfth Night as a kid, and being really obsessed with the story -- more so than any of the other stories in the series (and I'm pretty sure we had them all).

It's one of those fairly formative experiences; in this case my introduction to Shakespeare was also an introduction to the fluidity of gender. I remember thinking how cool it was that Viola could just put on men's clothes and presto-chango-rearrango become Cesario, a man, in the eyes of everyone else in the play (until of course she, ironically, has to 'come out' as a woman at the end). Disney's 'Mulan' was the second of the 'one-two' punches that solidified this fluidity in my mind as a thing..

All this to say that whatever else one might take away from those two stories, to at least one kid, they were a sort of permission to follow in their respective protagonist's footsteps, though that would come much later on. If I may be so trite: representation matters.

I so loved that picture book version of the story that I developed a sort of aversion to reading the original because I was so afraid that it wouldn't live up to what I wanted from it: to be able to relive that 'aha' moment from so long ago.

And, well, I did indeed find that it didn't quite measure up. It happens.

Specifically, I discovered upon reading the original that I don't much care for most everything happening around Viola's story. I didn't find it thematically very complex as other plays of his are, nor did I find the humor altogether that funny. I may be accused of 'hating fun' but I actually didn't care for some of the set-ups for some of the jokes, namely the entire side-plot revolving around the servants humiliating Olivia's butler (?), Malvolio. Sure, he's not terribly 'merry' (which is a key character trait in this play, and if you don't want to have fun, there's something wrong with you), but the amount of time dedicated to making him look foolish just felt meanspirited.

I appreciated that the very pushy way Orsino went about trying to woo Olivia wasn't ultimately rewarded by her, but it was still, again, kind of unpleasant to have to read scene after scene of him feeling entitled to her love despite the fact that she's made it clear she isn't interested in him.

Much of this is more of an emotional response than a scholarly one, but since it can't be said that Shakespeare is underwritten about in academia, I feel like one is allowed to have a feelings > facts-based review of his work.

That all being said, I will always be appreciative of that picture book series -- it definitely caught me at the right moment in time. And I still think 'Cesario' is a great name.

3.5 rounded up to 4
"Our memories have been battered by the disappearances, and even now when it's almost too late, we still don't realize the importance of the things that have been lost." (231)
'The Memory Police' has been compared to some pretty big hitters: 'Fahrenheit 451', '1984.' And while those comparisons are apt even just from the synopsis on the back, they also might set a person up to think they're going to get something they're not.

This is a dystopian, yes, and it is about authoritarianism, yes, but it's less about the systems themselves and more about the effect those systems have on ordinary people. And specifically, it's about the effect those systems have on group and personal identity. About what's left when collective memory is stripped away.

We follow an unnamed protagonist who works as a novelist on an island where one by one things are disappearing from everyone's memories. One day you know what a bird is, can recognize one when you see it, and the next day --boom-- you can see a bird and have no idea what it is or retain any memory of what it might have meant to you.

It's never explained how this process occurs, but what we do know is that it doesn't work on everyone. Some of the islanders don't forget. This is where the Memory Police come in. We never learn much about them other than that they check in to make sure everyone gets rid of all reminders of whatever has most recently disappeared, and also to take away anyone who doesn't lose their memory.

The result of this is that some islanders attempt to hide friends and neighbors who don't lost their memories from the Memory Police in a manner very evocative of the Nazi regime. And like the Nazi regime, as time goes on, the Memory Police continue to crack down on the townsfolk. Famine and a never-ending winter follow.

But this isn't an allegory for Nazi Germany, at least, not exclusively. By being so vague, Ogawa evokes the horror of any type of cultural genocide.

As an American now living in Canada, it brought up most strongly in me the comparison to the systematic cultural genocide of the Indigenous peoples of North America and Hawaii as well as of the slaves brought over from Africa. The comparison being that while the people themselves are still here, they've been largely stripped of their linguistic and cultural heritage through systems like the residential schools and prohibitions on speaking native languages or practicing native religions.

In the world of 'The Memory Police' part of the tragedy is the interactions between those who don't forget and those that do.

"I imagine you'd be uncomfortable, with your heart full of so many forgotten things." "No, that's not really a problem. [...] Memories don't just pile up -- they change over time. And sometimes they fade of their own accord. Though the process, for me, is quite different from what happens to the rest of you when something disappears from the island. [...] My memories don't feel as though they've been pulled up by the root. Even if they fade, something remains. Like tiny seeds that might germinate again if the rain falls." (p.82)

This is the perspective of 'R', the only member of our cast of characters who doesn't forget the things that have been disappeared. In his hiding place from the Memory Police, he keeps small reminders of things the other islanders can't remember: books, a harmonica, sour candies, a ferry ticket.

He gives another main character a music box -- something that was disappeared long ago-- and tells him to listen to it every day in the hopes of bringing back the memories of it. But it's to no avail. No matter how hard he tries to help the protagonist and their mutual friend remember the things they've lost, the objects only distress them. They understand that the objects are meaningful, but they've been stripped of the knowledge of why that might be. The objects are curiosities, but they hold no meaning.

Much in the same way that elders of a marginalized group might cling to their language and small cultural mementos, they can only insist to younger generations that these things are important; they cannot make them feel the significance. Because of colonialism or marginalization, that line of collective memory has been severed forever.

'I looked over at R. "So you really think our hearts are decaying?" "I don't know whether that's the right word, but I do know that you're changing, and not in a way that can be easily reversed or undone. It seems to be leading to an end that frightens me a great deal." (147)

That is the ultimate assertion of 'The Memory Police': when something is truly lost, one can never get it back.

Our protagonists try to carry on as best they can despite feeling increasingly full of holes with each disappearance. Our protagonist raises this fear to her friend:

"If it goes on like this and we can't compensate for the things that get lost, the island will soon be nothing but absences and holes, and when it's completely hollowed out, we'll all disappear without a trace." (p.53)

In the end, she's proven right; there's no more need for the Memory Police because the islanders have nothing left to disappear, and retain only their voices, and even those drift away on the breeze in a conclusion that ends not with a bang, but a whimper.

It's a very bleak message if it is indeed analogous to the effects of colonialism.

Ogawa largely has a fairly delicate touch to her writing, which did make the clunkier moments stand out. In a very on the nose moment after novels have been disappeared and the townsfolk go out en masse to burn them, the protagonist quote Heine's famous line: "Dort, wo man Buecher verbrennt, verbrennt man am End auch Menschen." (Where books are burned, people will also be burned in the end.)

And this never really goes anywhere because the focus isn't on the fates of those who keep their memories, but on those who don't. We get the imagery of people being taken away by a government agency, and we can infer that they don't come back alive, but this context is presented as more of a set piece than a fully integrated part of the story and is the weakest aspect. Ironic, considering that the Memory Police take the title.

Nevertheless, despite this pretty large blemish, there's a lot of good to be contemplated in 'The Memory Police.' It's beautifully written, the story within the story is haunting, and the questions about memory and identity are thought provoking and certainly relevant.

Yoko Ogawa is clearly a skilled writer with a fresh and intriguing point of view, and while 'The Memory Police' may not have been my favorite thing I've ever read, it was a good appetizer to get me started, and I'd read more by her in the future.

In a broader context, Ogawa exists in conversation with a crop of other contemporary female writers that hasn't been left unnoticed. Works by fellow Booker Prize short-lister Mieko Kawakami ('Heaven'), and Best Translated Book Award nominee Sayaka Murata ('Convenience Store Woman') have begun rising to the top of discussions of translated works on platforms such as Youtube and TikTok.

Booktuber 'Books and Bao' noted in their video essay on Yoko Ogawa's body of work:

"What makes a lot of the books by contemporary Japanese women so unique and beloved [...]is their ability to pull open the human chest and take a look at its heart. But of course, whatever we see, we project a bit of ourselves onto it, and so they all look at the human heart and they project a bit of themselves onto it. Maybe that's love and adoration, maybe it's cynicism, maybe it's hate, maybe it's anger. [...] And Yoko Ogawa is full of an awful lot." ~

Definitely an author to keep an eye on.