Katherine Dunn’s book Geek Love is a captivating tale of the brutal sibling warfare that is part and parcel of any large family. What makes her book unique is the setting that allows her to explore the far fringes of these battles while informing us about our own reality. In some ways it me reminds of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Joss Whedon used the implausibility of horrible monsters to explore common themes in teenage lives from alienation to sex. In Geek Love, Katherine Dunn uses the extreme universe of the circus freak to explore the hell hole that is family.

In her book, the siblings are a collection of circus freaks and the parents the circus masters. The freaks are not some accidental genetic mutation but the explicit creation of the pater familia. He and his wife to create their mutant freaks, consume vast quantities of drugs that are designed to create mutations. And although we are meant to recoil from this form of parenting, how different is it, really, from any father who tries and to make his children into whatever image he has of them?

Starting from this extreme point in space, we then begin a descent into the mad, mad world that is Binewski family, a tale that is recounted to us by Olympia the last surving member of the clan. We learn about Arturo, Aqua Boy, the siamese twins and chick.

There are three basic threads that emerge. The first is the story of how Arturo slowly claims ownership of the circus, usurping his father’s power. The second thread is the tale of how Arturo rather than admit he is abnormal uses the power of his voice and show to convince normal people that because they are not like him they are abnormal. The third tale is the tale of stunted lust between Olympia, the twins and Arturo.

Interspersed within these threads we learn about the day-to-day life of being a freak, being in a circus, and being a member of this very unique family.

This is a good book. Disturbing, but a good book. I suspect it is disturbing because it forces us all to look at the freaks and wonder are we really that different from them?

For reasons I can not really articulate the lives and times of despots has always fascinated me. Maybe it’s staring into the abyss of the human condition to understand why. Maybe it’s the same urge to stare at a car accident, a morbid curiosity.

I’ve read about Stalin, I’ve read about Hitler, I’ve read about Pol Pot, I’ve read about Nanjing and I’ve read about Auschwitz. I’ve read about the Tai-Pan rebellion. I’ve read about the Norse raiders.

However, somehow, in all of that madness there seemed something redeemable in these madmen. They were deluded visionaries who believed that they could create a better man and therefore a better world. They were the kind of men who believed that if you had to kill a single innocent child to build a better world, why stop at one when you can kill a million.

Somehow the Mao of Jung Chang and John Halliday emerges as the most despicable vile disgusting self-absorbed butcher of our times. Unlike the others it was all about his own personal power. He cared about China not because he cared about China but because he viewed China as a projection of his own personal power. He was no patriot. He was no hero. He was no visionary he was a butcher who wanted to be at the top of the pyramid and was willing to sacrifice anyone and anything to get there.

The authors make a compelling case for putting Mao at the top of the inverted pyramid of despicable leaders.

The book is a very thorough treatment of the period. Consisting both of a secondary research and a significant amount of new primary materials we learn more about the details of Mao. We also learn about China.

One of the more interesting aspects about China is that China was a far more fluid and dynamic society than originally I had known. It was possible for anyone to scale into the Imperial Bureaucracy. Mao managed to destroy that and create the artificial homogeneous Chinese world we knew in the ’80s.

The one tragic figure in this book, other than China, is Chiang Kai-Shek. Tragic because he was too decent. Too caring of his family. Too willing to trust. Tragic because his lack of ruthlessness brought Mao.

As a counterpoint to Mao, Chiang let the Red Army flee on their Long March to save his son from the Soviets who held him hostage. Mao never cared for any of his children. Mao was too ruthless, Chiang too decent.

An excellent book.

Michael Chabon, the Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, presents a very different face in Summerland. Summerland is a fairy tale for children over the age of 10.

The story is set in a fantastical setting of Chabon’s invention derived from Norse mythology, some Christian mythology and his own imagination.

The story is about, in it’s own little way, baseball. Not the game, but the meaning behind the game. Summerland is the place where everything of any value centers around the game. Where there is always someone who wants to play the game. Where matters of importance, including whether the Universe will end hinge on the swing of a bat. But that inspite of the importance of the game, the joy of the game must never be lost.

As an embittered fan of the game, embittered by the lockout, the strike, the drugs, and the general callousness of the athletes and owners, Summerland reminded me what I loved about baseball.

As for the book itself, the central figure is a 10 year old boy named Ethan that must learn to embrace the pain in his life to save the Universe. The pain as a metaphor is a knot in the perfect baseball bat. A knot that prevents him from holding the bat. During the book he tries to ignore the pain the knot causes, to cut the knot, to give up on the bat, but it’s only when he embraces the pain the knot causes that he is able to swing the bat and hit the game winning home run. In other words, to become the hero that he is supposed to be.

Along the way, we meet some rather fun characters. There is the giant who is shorter than Ethan. There is the scientist so obsessed with the problem in front of him that he becomes a Flat Person, a completely empty person. A person who cares only about the problem to be solved not the consequences of solving the problem. There is the land of Liars, the legendary home of folks like Paul Bunyan. And there is the sasquatch who is looking for her children.

Rudyard Kipling’s Kim is a beautifully written book about India during the Raj. The story is nominally about the coming of age of Kim and his transformation from an Indian to an Englishman. The story really is about India.

I spent two months in India two years ago. The experience was amazing. I stayed in Bangalore which is South India. The intensity of the life, not just human but animal and vegetable and insect and reptile can be overwhelming to a westerner accustomed to his sterile world. The biomass of the world around you in India can overwhelm your ability to process information.

Reading Kim and especially his descriptions of the roads and the multi-coloured and textured individuals reminds of me of my time in India as well. The chaos, the claustrophobia of people on top of each other, the pagentry of the open road has not changed very much. And Kipling captures that in his prose.

Kipling is also able to use the written word to contrast the Indian and English word. When he describes India the prose becomes more flowery, more filled, when he describes English scenes the prose becomes dryer, stiffer. Almost as if to be Engish is to be functional not magical.

Having said that, the book can be irritating to readers accustomed to the short clipped sentences of our post-hemingway literature. Kipling writes in long luxurious sentences with multiple clauses and references. Many times his words are not meant to be descriptive but evocative somewhere between poetry and prose. And that can be frustratingly difficult to read. In addition,o the book is full of references to Indian terms that require an appendix. The first read of the book can be very disruptive as you jump between a sentence and the appendix.
The tale itself has all of the elemens of a early 20th century tale with all of the normal and natural prejudices of its time.

I wonder if Kim serves as a metaphor for Indian progress as well? While in India, I watched how the old India world was being slowly and systematically obliterated by a more modern, cleaner western world. People’s lives improved, but at the same time something was being lost.

I have read the book twice already. I will read it a third.

In the 19th century two distinct empires almost collided around the Eurasian landmass bordering the Russian and British Empires. For almost 150 years their agents fought a shadow war of influence and power, a war that was called The Great Game. A game that was described by one of it’s last living participants Harry Hodson:

The Game was really a game, with scores but no substantive prizes.

The geopolitical reality that motivated the game was that the Russian Empire through it’s eastern expansion threatened the British Raj. The British Raj maintained by the passive acquiesence of the locals and a tiny garrison, could not hope to withstand a determined assault by the Russian Empire. So the British struggled to ensure that Afghanistan and Tibet continued to be neutralized as pathways into India.

So much for history. The book itself is a cross between real history and a fantasy novel. In real history we are presented with a coherent thesis that is buttressed by facts and rationale argument. This book is a collection of tales about the various adventurers with no rhyme or reason to the story. So for example, we learn in Chapter titled: High Mischief as much about Dolan’s, an American explorer of Tibet, sexual piccadillos as we do about what he did in Tibet. The authors are torn between the colourful tales of the persons and the colourful tale itself.

I wish there was more exploration about the motivations for the Great Game. Why the Great Game was fought with so much passion. How the politics of the Great Game evolved and less vignettes into the personal lives of the protagonists. This reminds me of NBC’s Olympic Games Coverage where we learn of every athletes tragic childhood.
Nevertheless, the book is a fun read. It’s not good history, but the again Afghanistan and power politics between the Russian and British Empires are probably not sexy areas of modern historical research so this will have to do.

One of the more fascinating aspects of the book was the description of the “Forward Theory”. The British government was torn between two conflicting approaches to dealing with the Russian threat. On the one was the forward school that said that continuous expansion and creation of buffer zones was essential to the defense of the Empire. This theory said that unless the British occupied Afghanistan or at the very least neutralized Afghanistan, the Russians would swoop through her and destroy the British Raj. To this theory, Sir John Lawerence said:

In that case let them undergo the long and tiresome marches which lie between the Oxus and the Indus; let them wend their way through poor and difficult countries, among a fanatic and courageous population, where in many places every mile can be converted into a defensible position; then they will come to the conflict on which the fate of India will depend, toil-worn with an exhausted infantry, a broken down cavalry, and a defective artillery.

Sir John Lawerence, was pointing out that occupying territory was less valuable than occupying defensible territory. Sadly his position did not allow for conquest only defence and the adventurers in India would have none of that. So of course he was described as defeatists. One could observe reading this passage a lesson to all would-be conquerors and occupiers of Afghanistan.

Another interesting tale in this book is the obsession the West had with Tibet. Tibet in my mind is a country that was ruled by a parasitical monastic order that was absorbed into the China. I could never fathom why so many people for so long were fascinated with the country. It turns out that mystery and absurd race theories explain all. Tibet was the original forbidden country. For centuries no one was allowed in. This created a theory of what would be found inside. Including a belief that it was in Tibet that the Aryan race was born, and that the original pure Aryan’s lived there.

I wonder what Hitler would have said if he could have seen Tibetans…

This is a fun book. And once you take it for what it is: a history channel special it’s quite informative.

Never Let Go is a classic gothic horror story. In a good gothic horror story, everything seems perfectly normal. The world is a picture of beauty except for one minor detail that reveals a horror, a terror that is so disturbing that it causes your skin to crawl.

The book is ostensibly about growing up and learning to accept the responsibilities and roles the world has created for you. The story is said in the first person by a 30 something thinking back to the set of events that have lead her to where she is right now. We go back to her childhood, to her teenage years, to her first love to her first explorations of the outside world.

SPOILER ALERT!

Except that she is a clone, whose sole purpose in life is to be harvested for organs so that the rest of the normals out there can live. And that’s what’s creepy. This is the story of how clones grow up to be harvested and killed so that the rest of us can live. And how they learn to accept their lot in life.

What makes the book creepy is that the fact they are clones and what exactly they are created for is never actually revealed to the reader until about 2/3 of the way through. The narrator assumes you know what she’s talking about when she talks about being a carer or when she talks about friends who completed and the fact that she attends operations. What she’s really talking about is that her lot in life is to console clones and ensure that the clones whose organs are being harvested do so without too much fuss. And she seems to be curiously fine with that job.

What makes the book even creepier is that everyone acts as if this is perfectly normal. As the reader your taken aback by the heartlessness of the society that would destroy these living beings so that the rest of us can stay alive. And that in some sense is the point of the book. That in our pursuit of eternal life we are willing to create a meaner world.

In the debates around cloning, stem-cell research etc, Kazuo asks us: if we had to choose between our children and a clone who would we choose? And Kazuo also asks what would the clones do? Could we make them believe that they were serving a higher purpose by being harvested?

At points in the book the clones will scream about the horror of dying, the fear of dying the pain of dying and the injustice of it all, but no point do they protest or run.

The only real limitation of the book is that no one explains why the clones don’t just run. Our narrator has a car, why she doesn’t take her lover, another clone, and just run away.

And that’s the most horrifying part of it all. What if we could teach the clones to want to be harvested so that we could live?

I liked this book. But it does force me to think about choices we make.

What if the Devil showed up and no one believed he was the Devil?

Starting with this rather absurd premise Bulgakov explores Moscow, faith, religion, politics, the world at large and religion. Reading the book you are struck by the wierd thought that Bulgakov must have known that the book would never be published. This book must have existed for his own personal entertainment. And so it’s almost like exploring the author’s brain as he ran through different streams of conciousness.
Which brings me to the thought that the most famous quote in the book: Manuscripts don’t burn was an attempt to convince the author that eventually at some point the story this book would be published.

The book oscillates between the sublime, such as when he is describing the first arrival of the Devil, the surreal such as when the author describes the Devil’s ball, and the fascinating during the long sections when the author describes daily life in Moscow under the Soviets.

My favourite section, by far is when Woland does his little magic trick in front of an entire audience and spreads chaos and mayhem throughout Moscow. And everyone assumes it must be anything but the Devil. The money changing into random coins, tricksters and liars, the empty suit something bizarre in the atmosphere, spontaneous dancing and singing a group dementia.
The book ends well, even though it was never polished.

This is not an easy book to read and requires a substantive personal investment of time and effort.

Five times I have read this book. Everytime I read it I learn to appreciate it a little bit more and a little bit less.

On the positive side, the depiction of the mafia, fictionalized as it is, the twisted logic of the world it inhabits continues to fascinate and disturbe me. There is something very twisted about how Don Corleone and his family live their sociopathic ways. How the Don is pleased how his family takes care of it’s own during the depression. How the Don simultaneoulsy helps Johnny Fontane and hurts him.

Micheal Corleone summarizes our ambivalence to the Godfather when he walks in Sicily and observes how if the Don’s world were to take over, the Sicily would be the outcome, and that that was not a pretty outcome.

On the negative side, do we really need to learn about vaginal tears, vaginal reconstructive surgery, and Nino Valentine’s manic depression? The entire side story involving Johnny Fontane and his crew in Hollywood seems bizarre, odd and irrelevant. It’s almost as if Mario had some extra material about Hollywood in the post-war era, and felt compelled to share it with us.

On the further negative side, the endless speaches by characters as they expose their feelings reads like Ayn Rand. And that’s not a compliment. Michael’s speech before the assissination of Solazzo, although informative is a soliloquouy. The belief that a bunch of tough guy gangsters would have enough patience to listen to Michael spew, when I have barely the patience to read the spew breaks the spell the book has.

I suspect that I read it most recently because the Soprano’s started again. And if you’re going to watch Tony, you might as well read about Michael.