Has it Changed My Life? Quite Possibly.

So, Calvino's Invisible Cities is our next book.  Period.  I just finished reading it, which reading, as I've said before, was slow and savory, and I'm trying to decide: am I the same person, now that I've finished it, I was before?  Just the fact that the book's brought me to this question is saying a great deal.  Of course, to place it upon the pedestal aside the very few other truly life-changing books, I must compare it to them.  This also raises an interesting question: what is it that makes a book life-changing for its reader?  It's not a particularly difficult question, just interesting.  The answer, I think is simple: it must be a combination of [1] the book's quality (though generally to a lesser degree) and [2] the circumstances of time and place of the reader's life.  As it is, Invisible Cities is of a higher quality than some of the books way up there.  For example, as wonderful as Life of Pi is, it has its [few] limitations, one of which is word craft.  Don't get me wrong.  Martel is an excellent craftsman of the sentence, but Calvino is of the master-smithing status of Borges, Chabon, and McCarthy.  Other books include the obvious tomes of The Divine Comedy and East of Eden/Grapes of Wrath, as well as the Alice books, Ender's Game, Wonder Boys, and Blindness.  Each of these books arrived in my life at key moments, did their business, such as it was, and took up permanent residence upon my bookshelves--literal and metaphysical.  Does Invisible Cities, an essentially perfect book (yeah, really--and not perfect like Joyce, but perfect like, well, Joyce if he had a freaking heart or if Steinbeck could write briefly yet as powerfully), warrant place among the others?

Nearly all of the best books I've read, save All the Pretty Horses, which just bloody tortured me, broke me, heart and spirit, and highlighted in thirty-foot capital, fluorescent letters, "YOU CAN'T WRITE!" inspire me.  You see, I want to be a writer.  Rather, I want to be a successful writer.  I want to be a writer whose stuff people want to read!  The best books nearly always inspire me to write.  They tickle the muses who come and circle me and whisper in my ears and give my fingers and cerebral frontal lobe the itch and make me want to CREATE.  Yeah.  Well, Invisible Cities has done that--and in frickin' spades, man.  The last time I felt the bug this strongly (at least via a book) was when I finished Basho's Narrow Road to the Deep North (or however you want to translate it) and subsequently began my own hyohakusha and used the genre and text as model for my creative writing students' end-of-year project.  (My hyohakusha ultimately failed (I'm an inadequate poet), though many of my students wrote and created brilliantly, beautifully.)

Basho was a three years ago.  Since reading it, I've returned to it again and again.  I've studied its poetry and form and in four or five translations.  I've traced his path on maps.  I've referred to and used him as model in poetry and a book of my own.  Has it changed my life?  I dare say it has.  Maybe it just takes time for a book to climb the long stair to the top once it's arrived at--been permitted access to--the base.  If this is the case (and you can't tell right away if it's happened), I expect Basho will soon arrive at the top right along with Steinbeck et al and Calvino will have likely just recently begun the ascent.  Time will tell, I suppose.

Regardless, this book amazed and amazes me.  I am eager to read it again.

KIM I -- chapter 1.1: A VERY FEATHER UPON THE FACE

Kim astride the Zam-Zammah; illus.
from first edition (as far as I can tell)

NOTE TO READERS:  Though I came into this next book hoping for something short and simple, I can say with certainty that Kim does not fulfill my hope for brevity and likely similarly fails to fulfill the second--simplicity.  That said, and considering general time constraints of both you (hopefully collective) and me (definitely singular), we will be cutting most, if not all, chapters roughly in half.  I hope this isn't irksome at all, though if it is, well, then tough bananas.  Let's get started.

(This reading from beginning of chapter 1 through paragraph "The curator would have detained him: they are few in the world who still have the secret of the conventional brush-pen Buddhist pictures which are, as it were, half written and half drawn. But the lama strode out, head high in air, and pausing an instant before the great statue of a Bodhisat in meditation, brushed through the turnstiles.")

1. The opening verse of the chapter is the first of 9 stanzas of the poem "Buddha at Kamakura," from Kipling's collection (originally published just a couple years after Kim), The Five Nations.  Here is a background on the collection, and here is the poem in its entirety within the collection.
2. The "Zam-Zammah": like the red bull (to come) is quite potentially a symbol of some sort, considering Kim's heritage and current status, as he sits astride it and heckles the locals.
3. Summarize the position of Kim's birth and his birthright, particularly regarding his status of British orphan left in India.
4. What do you make of the "red bull in a green field," apart from the brilliance of the image?  Regardless of the "magic" of the Masonic Order, what magic must there always be for Kim in those three papers?  With this magic in mind, what weight might the opiated "prophesy" hold over him?
5. Label the connection (perhaps it's obvious) between Kim and a prominent character from "Arabian Nights"?  Anything significant here beyond the superficial connection by age and lifestyle?
6. "The Middle Way."
7. First impression: The old Lama entering the museum with Kim reminds me of the two Mr. Kumars from Life of Pi.
8. "Pilgrimage," apart from religious excursion, is a perfect label for which of the -romans?  And so a connection to the Arrow that became a River.
9. Kim is generally lost listening to the Lama and the curator discuss the museum's holdings, so, as per the note below, I don't see any particular need to ensure our knowledge of the material as this book is narrated through Kim's eyes.  However, the spectacle clearly makes an impression upon Kim.  Thoughts?
10. "So it comes with all faiths."  What does the curator intend?
11. The Lama's personal faith interests me.  I am no scholar of world religions, but it seems a little self-contradictory.  Maybe one of you can help me out: What is the Lama's faith?  Buddhist, Muslim, Hindu?  And then what's with the rosary (is this where Martel got the triple-faith backdrop for LoP)?  Why might he want to break free (via the River of the Arrow) of The Wheel of Things?
12. What of the gift exchange between the two disciples, as the Lama describes the curator and himself?

Wikipedia will surely become an even closer friend than ever through the reading of Kim.  While a certain amount of knowledge--schema--is required, I don't think that to understand what in the world Kipling is talking about, we need to be experts in Islam, Buddhism, Indian history, etcetera, so I don't plan to particularly over-clog the discussion points/questions with links to the encyclopedia (it would, after all, I think amount to a thousand points-per-chapter!), nor will I overindulge myself in writing up my own ecstatic discoveries of India and British-Indian culture.  However, as we read, if you believe I'm remiss in the omission of some key point or observation you've come across, please say so!

The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana III -- chapter 2: I AM A BURNING LOG

Cornell's copy of the "First Folio"

Regardless of the edition you have of the book, you should have something pop-culturish to look at on its cover. This ties into the title of the book, which we'll go into a little deeper a little later.  However, I can't let a title like this of a book like this go without at least some minor examination.  "The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana" is an episode title of an old, American adventure comic called, Tim Tyler's Luck, which was translated into Italian.  With this, as well as any flipping-through you might have done (and which, in this rare case, I encourage), I'd like to preface a secondary "big question" for this book: what does pop culture have to do with the formation of our memory--our memory as it applies to our definition of self, inasmuch as Yambo has lost his (memory/self)?  As it turns out, and if I remember rightly, there's a lot more pop culture affecting this highly-learned man's personal history than stuff so highbrow as Shakespeare's First Folio.

1. Yambo's discourse about jumping reminds me of Life of Pi: (approximately) You run as far as the legs of reason will carry you and then leap.
2. I wonder (insubstantially; inconsequentially): If we know our own smells and the smell of our home and car so well that we don't even notice them, would Yambo "notice" his own smell, or that of home, car, wife, kids, etcetera?
3. Considering the other novels mentioned (The Betrothed, Orlando Furioso, and Le Pere Goriot), what do supposed is Eco's position on Catcher in the Rye?  (Having read a lot of Eco's literary criticism and philosophy, Rye doesn't seem like typical reading for study by Eco.  Salinger is a different kind of brilliant (though, in my opinion, certainly no less, and, well, perhaps even greater) than Proust and Joyce, whom he definitely admires and even loves.
4. The languages from which Yambo quotes a few verses are also Eco's second languages: German, French, and English.
5. Interesting that Yambo documented fog even before the amnesia.  Any connection, or just coincidence (as author, certainly Eco did it intentionally, but is there anything to this within the confines of the novel)?  Regardless, fog, if I remember correctly, will be a lasting motif and even theme of the book.  How might one be born into a fog?
6. Yambo's life was fractious before the amnesia.  Does this lower the significance of the amnesia, or mean that anyone who's life is split like Yambo's undergoes his own kind of amnesia?  Or something else?
7. As alluded to earlier, Eco doesn't do anything by accident.  What of the mention of the Garden of Eden (despite the shtick of the "tree of good and evil")?
8. Compare the predictions by the tolling clock to the running start before the leap.
9. ....like Tom Sawyer ... or Luke Skywalker!
10. Interesting the automatic response (and the Eco thought of it!) of Yambo's old and best friend, who, in the face of him with whom he's experienced nearly everything and with whom the past doesn't need to be discussed, as it's always been present between them, he can't help--and you get the impression the he can't help finally--reliving all those old events.
11. Such dividing lines are always marked with turmoil--or tumult.  What we were before the event is very different from the person after the event, though, as far as I've observed and experienced, the change after the fault is usually linked directly to the tumultuous event itself, like changing religions, giving up drugs/alcohol, vowing an honest life.  In this case, Yambo, of course, is entirely innocent of the cause of the divide.  Will he change? Certainly he's different now, but will he remain so--changed, for better or worse--once his self has been returned to him or reclaimed?  For instance, he's discovering that he was quite a playboy.  Does he regret it?  Will it cause change?  (There more's substance for discussing this in the next chapter.)
12. Finally, keep your eyes open for treasure.  For bibliophiles like us (and I'm assuming, I doubt foolishly or presumptuously, that anyone who actually reads this blog must consider themselves, to one advanced degree or another, bibliophilic), Yambo deals daily in treasure; it's his job.  We will come across the "First Folio" soon (-ish?), as well as other treasures, which will offer substance for discussion.

SPARKS OF LIFE: HELP!

OPEN QUESTION:

What is the value of the "Spark of Life" in literature?  

This is weighing on me as I just finished my wholly-negative consideration of Joyce's flat "After the Race" from Dubliners, and amidst a casual reading the reputedly terrible The Riddle of the Traveling Skull (full review with photographs coming within a week or so) by the once-famous (quite some time ago and not for so very long) Harry Stephen Keeler.

I can only describe Keeler's book as ecstatically bad.  The writing and subject are ridiculous--ridiculous as in freaking absurd--so far over-the-top as to disappear into the stratospheric yellow glare of its own blinding, cloudless hyperbole.  Joyce, on the other hand--well, we all know about Joyce.

Keeler's book, as bad as it is, is impossible to put down and virtually trembling--crackling--with that spark of life.  I can hardly believe that I'm caring as I do about these absurd characters and their absurder plights.  Meanwhile--  Well, read my review of "After the Race."

My functioning definition of the "spark of life" comes from the preface of Yann Martel's Life of Pi.

Jane Eyre III -- chapter 3: MORE REAL THAN REAL

Reading Questions

1. Bessie gains dimension!  How shallow can she be if she sympathizes with Jane now that Jane's so pathetic, and yet amidst the sympathy she defends the honor of the family by lying to Mr. Lloyd as he questions Jane later in the chapter.  What might this say of Bessie's true nature?  Consider also Bessie's song, whose words are so pointedly directed at Jane, the orphan.
2. "Vain favor! coming, like most other favors long deferred and often wished for, too late!"
3. Jane says herself, in this same paragraph that also includes elves and Lilliputians (whose book, Gulliver's Travels, she considers "a narrative of facts"), that her imagination is just as alive and real for as is reality for the less fanciful, which tends toward a sore of hyper-reality, more real than real, and emphasizes the phantasmagoria of chapter II, for which she's still suffering; yet here, at the end of this very paragraph, the fantastical escape she seeks from Swift has lost its charm.  Why?  Has it also lost its perceived reality?  A partial answer might be found in a connection between Gulliver and tart, but there's more here than what this connection is limited to.
4. Further question along these same lines: How is it that fantasy can indeed be more real than reality, and why do we so crave it?  Please use examples.
5. Is the apothecary, Mr. Lloyd, playing devil's advocate through the questioning (example: "“Ghost! What, you are a baby, after all! You are afraid of ghosts?"), and if so, what are his motives?
6. Whom does poverty strike harder, children or adults (a deliberately obtuse question)?  I see Jane's preference of caste over liberty as surprisingly mature.  It is idealism that tends most frequently to claim the contrary.  Defend or refute.
7. Guy Fawkes
8. Abbott: "if she were a nice, pretty child, one might compassionate her forlornness; but one really can not care for such a little toad as that."  (I love the "verbed" form of compassion, whose spelling is exactly the same as the adjectival!)  In extra minutes of the science classes I'm currently teaching, we've been watching bits and pieces of the Discovery series Planet Earth.  It's fun to listen to and watch the students who cheer and gasp at the surprises, triumphs, and brutalities of nature.  There are as many grunts of disgust as anything else.  And it makes sense.  A lot of nature is gross--at least if you take our modern culture's little pettinesses and preciousnesses and fastidiousnesses (*so many Ss!*) and drape them over the animals and pretend they should fit.  Anthropomorphism at its worst and most ignorant!  Abbott here reminds me of my 7th and 8th graders, basing and justifying her entire opinion of Jane on appearance, hearsay, and opinion and looking nothing at the inner clockworks.  Where's the informed objectivity?  Further it reminds me of the mirror in the Pondicherry Zoo from Life of Pi, whose sign invites patrons to examine a picture of the zoo's most dangerous animal.  The saddest thing is the truth of her statement, speaking generally of humanity.  Why do we prefer pretty?  Interesting, though: isn't her deliberately blind assumption that her ignorance is truth kind of the evil twin of Jane's preference for fantasy over reality?