Hanwell in Hell, by Zadie Smith

In the author's note at the beginning of this collection, Zadie said that this short story "came to [her] all at once, as nothing [she has] ever written has before."

This story gives me a weird feeling that neither novel I've written ever has: I truly feel that Hanwell exists somehow. Hanwell seems real to me in a way that Archie and Alsana and Alex-Li and the rest never do; as if this story of mine has opened up a little gap in the world where Hanwell once existed and continues to exist, eternally meeting Clive Black in the back room of a bar and walking with him across that dark, wet residential square in Bristol.

In a way, I believe her 'cos Hanwell now exists for me too. The story lingers and stays with you, like this poignant line:

"We made people unhappy because we ourselves were made unhappy in irrevocable ways."

Yet, there is hope as Hanwell, the colour-blind dishwasher paints a room for his daughters, thinking that the violent red is a sunshine yellow. The book ends with this beautiful sentence:

"Not many men can hope red yellow."

Read it here.

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Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth, by Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos Papadimitriou

This graphic novel is about the life and work of Bertrand Russell, a logician whose search for the foundations of Mathematics led to the formation of analytic philosophy. He is famous for the paradox he stumbled upon (known to us as Russell's paradox), which in layman terms goes something like this.

Of all the books in the world, there are those that are refer to themselves in the text (self-referential) and those that don't refer to themselves. If I were to compile a catalogue of all books that are NOT self-referential, would the catalogue contain an entry of itself?

Therein is the conundrum: if the catalogue were to list itself, then it is no longer not self-referential; but if it did not list itself, then it is not a catalogue of books that are not self-referential!

In Mathematical language, the catalogue is "the set of all the sets that are not members of themselves". Of course this seems kinda mind-boggling that a set could be a member of itself, but when you think of specific examples it is not so weird. For example, a set of all ideas is an idea and so the set would contain itself, but a set of all birds is not a bird and so it won't contain itself. (Of course the practical functions of sets in Mathematics befuddles me...)

This comic is thought-provoking. While this comic is about logic, philosophy and Mathematics, the authors are emphatic that it is not a "Dummy's guide to logic" in pictures; instead, they say that it is a story where logicians are the superheroes, or to be precise, a tragedy. This is a most interesting way of seeing itself because the book then becomes a reflection of the struggle of the protagonist — the struggle between reason and passion, logic and madness. It could be said that tragedy can only occur with paradox and conundrum, yet these are the very things that Bertrand spends his life's work trying to solve. Does he solve his own paradox? What is his personal resolution?

At the end, Russell felt like a failure. Ludwig Wittgenstein's clever sidestep of Russell's paradox in his "picture theory" (where the world is modeled by language), in addition to the Kurt Godel's devastating Incompleteness Theorems, which pretty much says that it is impossible to prove all arithmetic proofs, which was what Russell spent 20 years trying to do, meant the end of Russell's lifelong quest for the foundations.

Yet, there is transcendence. Russell doesn't succumb to his arch-enemy, madness (not for long, anyway), but he quotes his protege Ludwig Wittgenstein near the end of the comic: "All the facts of Science are not enough to understand the world's meaning". The comic ends with Athena's resolution of the dilemma in the old Greek myth "Oresteia", which is a grand way to end a paradoxical tragedy about logic.

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Stumbling on Happiness, by Daniel Gilbert

This book is about how the human brain imagines its own future, and about how well it can predict which of those futures it will most enjoy. I think the book's premise is that human beings are surprisingly bad at it.

All I got out of it is that the frontal lobe is in charge of planning. They used to take out a part of the frontal lobe to treat anxiety and depression, not realising that the poor fellas with frontal lobotomies, while happy as clams, could not imagine the future. To them, thinking about the future was like walking into a room and being asked to find a chair that was not there.

That's about as far as I got in the book. I will need to keep reading... BUT NOT ENOUGH TIME!!! ARRGH....

(will update post if possible)

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The Passion, by Jeanette Winterson

I confess: I skimmed through this one. I've just been too busy to read a storybook properly.

The Passion is set during the Napoleonic wars. I think it has something to do with identity: among boatsmen in Venice, only boys get born with webbed feet, all except for cross-dressing Villanelle. But it is so much more than that too.

I think you're better off reading the blurb here.

I'm telling you stories. Trust me.

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The Tap Dancer, by Andrew Barrow

Andrew Barrow won the McKitterick Prize and the Hawthornden Prize for The Tap Dancer. The reason I know this is because I found this novel on the "award winning shelf" at the Central Library and decided to borrow it because it says "a comic masterpiece" on the front cover. (See the small red print by the trousers?)

How can a bookworm like me pass by a "comic masterpiece" on the award winning shelf at the library?

Unfortunately, I didn't find it that funny. (Is it because I am not English?) It was almost rambly at certain points, going on and on about the minute details of British living. Nothing extraordinary happens plot-wise, but still, I found it a strangely compelling read. I couldn't put it down.

Perhaps it was the keen and humorous dialogue. Or perhaps it was the weird, off-the-wall characters. Barrow described them so well that I half expected them to climb out of the book and shake me by the hand. The protagonist, the father of the first person narrator, is unforgettable, along with all the other characters from the novel. Barrow is quite the genius at characterization.

Reading the novel also gives the reader a feel of Britain after World War II, where you can get a meal in London for under a pound.

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Invisible People by Will Eisner

I am so impressed with Eisner's ability to pick up an ordinary black ink pen, sketch a few lines, and create such expressive and unique characters that seem to jump out of the book. Eisner is considered as one of the early shapers of the genre, and rightly so, because not only did he draw, he weaved stories.

Invisible People is part story, part social commentary. It is about the anonymous faces in every crowd, the "invisible people" we pass by every day. Eisner tells the story of three "invisible people": Pincus Pleatnik, the man whom the world pronounced dead; Hilda Gornish, a spinster involved in a perverse romantic triangle; and Morris, a man who was blessed with the ability to heal others.

I liked the first story best because of its poignancy and tragedy. What happens when an ordinary man, someone who shunned the limelight, suddenly realises one day that the world thinks he is dead? A curious thought, isn't it?

Invisible People is very readable — I mean, it is a comic book! — but the content is serious. It is like a parable in pictures. It is a great resource for teachers actually. Lit teachers can use the first story to introduce foretelling or tragedy; GP teachers can use it to introduce social issues.

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The Stone Gods by Jeanette Winterson

This is possibly the funniest book by Jeanette Winterson I've read so far. It isn't all-throughout funny the way Terry Pratchett or P. G. Wodehouse is funny — this is fundamentally still a Winterson book: lyrical, beautiful, heart wrenching — but seriously, there was one particular scene that had me rolling on the floor (see page 175-77).

I'm so tempted to type it out for you here but somehow I think that you need the previous 174 pages to appreciate the hilarity (it is also a bit too R.A. for the family readership of this blog, but who am I kidding that I have a "family readership"?); besides, you may want to read the book and I don't want to spoil it for you.

The Stone Gods is about the future but it is also about the past. It is about a world on repeat, and how love — interplanetary love — is an intervention. But I'm giving away too much as it is. Read it with your own experiences as a guide.

Again, Winterson takes me by surprise with her words.

Spike came forward and put her arms around me. `One day, tens of millions of years from now, someone will find me rusted into the mud of a world they have never seen, and when they crumble me between their fingers, it will be you they find.' (79)

I said to Spike, `Is this how it ends?'
She said, `It isn't ended yet.' (88)

Your lips are moving, what is it you say? Your lips are moving over mine, what is it? I will set you in the sky and name you. I will hide you in the the earth like treasure.
Snow is covering us. Close your eyes and sleep. Close your eyes and dream. This is one story. There will be another. (93)

Life is all partings. James Hogan, First Mate. I loved him with the patience of an oyster longing for a pearl.
So be it. (102)

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A Spot of Bother by Mark Haddon

A Spot of Bother is a disarmingly accurate portrayal of the complexity of relationships.

I see a bit too much of myself in Jamie and Katie.

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Heartland by Daren Shiau

This book is so Singaporean that I feel that I could have written it myself. Of course that is an obnoxious statement to make since I am only an arm chair critic with no books to her name, but the sentiment is true: it feels like I could have written it, because everything in the book is so run-of-the-mill Singaporean.

I could have talked about the atrocity of maids sitting at dinner tables minding the kids while the parents eat. Or about the class gap, the language gap, the NS experience (okay, maybe not that). Every opinion is so ordinary.

Perhaps if I had read it in a nostalgic mood while living overseas I would have lapped up the Singaporean references greedily. The bus tickets folded into the metal bar of the seat in front; the midnight charge of taxis, etc. But since I was in a mood for something that transported me from my present life — something that gave me a new perspective of life — I was disappointed with this novel. Besides, what kind of an ending was that?

Although I don't usually buy my books, I don't regret paying good money for Heartland at all. Literature holds the culture and history of a nation, and it is important to cherish these things.

I think as for now, our films may be better than our books though. I thought the film Singapore Dreaming kicked ass.

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The Motive for Metaphor, by Northrop Frye

"The Motive for Metaphor" is the first essay in Northrop Frye's collection "The Educated Imagination". Metaphor is the basic building block of all literary work, hence "The Motive for Metaphor" is an essay justifying the place Literature has in society. As Frye says, “Every child realises that literature is taking him in a different direction from the immediately useful, and a good many children complain loudly this.” (15) Haha! Adults complain loudly too.

In this essay, Frye proposes that there are three levels of the mind, and three languages for each of them. There is the level of consciousness and awareness. The English of this level is that of ordinary conversation, full of adjectives and nouns, the language of self-expression. Then there is the level of social participation, and the English of this level is the working language of teachers and preachers and politicians and advertisers and lawyers and journalists and scientists. Then, there is the level of the imagination, which produces the literary language of poems and plays and novels. (22-23)

Science starts with the world we live in, and moves towards the imagination. Art, on the other hand, begins with the world we construct in our minds, and moves towards reality. The closer they get to the middle, the more alike they are: "A highly developed science and a highly developed art are very close together, psychologically and otherwise." (24) Just think about the quark and you will see what I mean.

However, this different starting point means that while science is constantly evolving and discovering new and wonderful things about the world we live in — an average scientist today knows more than Isaac Newton; it is different from art because art begins in the imagination, and so nothing is ever completely new. As far as tragedy is concerned, Oedipus Rex is it. It can't get any better than that.

This collection is really quite good. I'm tempted to buy it.

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The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemmingway

It is said that Hemmingway revolutionized modern fictional writing with his direct, almost brusque style of writing. Some call it the "hard-boiled style": macho and to-the-point.

The Old Man and the Sea is a novella. I finished it on the train journey to and from school. It is about an old fisherman — how he catches an extraordinarily huge marlin — and his relationship with a boy apprentice.

Primarily, it is an adventure-type of story. His relationship with the boy adds a bit of "heart" to it.

The religious comments, such as when Hemmingway writes: "Ay, he said aloud. There is no translation for this word and perhaps it is just a noise such as a man might make, involuntarily, feeling the nail go through his hands and into the wood" (107), isn't central to the story. They seem to be off-the-cuff remarks.

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Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

And so concludes the most popular novel of the decade.

J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series is akin to Charles Dicken's serialised novels in the 19th century. Very popular. Hugely successful. And a damn good story.

It was the most I had ever forked out for a fictional book, but how could I not be a part of this 21st century wave?

A poll: how many of us have read it? (I know Jim wins the record for handling the most number of books..)

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The Well of Lost Plots by Jasper Fforde

I'm on a bit of a Jasper Fforde roll, but this third book of his fell slightly below expectations for me. I think it was a lack of dramatic action. This novel is set in the well of lost plots, a place where wannabe books are formed and re-formed before they are published.

If I dare say, the first book is all action, slight diversion; the second book 50% action, 50% diversion; and the third is all diversion, slight action. I like the second book best.

Though I must admit that that had had and that that debate had had me rolling about the floor laughing.

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Two books by Jasper Fforde

Fforde's stuff is funny. I read two books by him recently, The Eyre Affair and Lost in a Good Book.

The Eyre Affair took some getting used to — did Fforde just talk about jumping into books and kidnapping the main character (Jane Eeyre, to be precise) ? — but once I got used to the extent to which Fforde suspends my disbelief, I enjoyed the ride better.

By the time I got the second book, Lost in a Good Book, I was rolling about in laughter. Let me be the first to say it: some of the jokes are really really silly; but gosh, if read in the right frame of mind, they are funny in a nerdy kinda way. The main character's name is Thursday Next, a thirty-something year-old female who is a bit of a mix between Lara Croft and Bridget Jones. Doesn't that make you want to read the books already? ;)

I love Thursday's dodo, Pickwick, who says "Plock-plock". And the bookworms who spit out apostrophes and punctuations when frustrated. And the secret lives of fictional characters.

It's a crazy ridiculous world!

---------------

Find it in a library.
Singapore: The Eyre Affair & Lost in a Good Book
Rest of the world: The Eyre Affair & Lost in a Good Book

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Unix for Mac OS X by Dave Taylor and Brian Jepson

Easy to understand. But I am quite sure that I will forget everything I've read in a month since I no longer work for a company with a server I may access, and I don't foresee myself printing, surfing, transferring files, or doing email from the terminal.

I only hope I remember these.

cd Go to your home directory
pwd Find your working directory.
/user absolute pathname
user relative pathname
../user backtracks one directory
ls list files
; command separator

And these too.

ftp something.org.sg
put filename
get filename
quit

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The Quiet American by Graham Greene

The New York Times
March 11, 1956

"In Our Time No Man is a Neutral"
By ROBERT GORHAM DAVIS

Graham Greene's new book is quite different from anything he has written before. It is a political novel -- or parable -- about the war in Indochina, employing its characters less as individuals than as representatives of their nations or political factions. Easily, with long-practiced and even astonishing skill, speaking with the voice of a British reporter who is forced, despite himself, toward political action and commitment, Greene tells a complex but compelling story of intrigue and counter-intrigue, bombing and murder. Into it is mixed the rivalry of two white men for a Vietnamese girl. These elements are all subordinate to the political thesis which they dramatize and which is stated baldly and explicitly throughout the book.


As the title suggests, America is the principal concern. The thesis is quite simply that America is a crassly materialistic and "innocent" nation with no understanding of other peoples. When her representatives intervene in other countries' affairs it causes only suffering. America should leave Asians to work out their own destinies, even when this means the victory of communism.

In Greene's previous novels, geographic and social backgrounds have been used with great skill to make the foreground action more dramatic, but social or national issues have never been argued for their own sake. In "The Quiet American" the effect of circumstances is specifically ideological and political. Everything that the British reporter, Fowler, sees of the war, of the indiscriminate slaughter of civilians, drives him out of his "uninvolvedness" toward a decision. Above all, he is moved by his hatred of the Americans. "I was tired of the whole pack of them, with their private stores of Coca-Cola and their portable hospitals and their wide cars and their not quite latest guns." The sensual Fowler, incidentally, seems to have been tired of everything, including himself.

In this novel, as in Greene's earlier "entertainment," "This Gun for Hire," a murderous outrage occurs, intended to affect the war's course. A badly timed bombing in the public square of Saigon, planned to disrupt a parade, instead kills mostly women and children. Fowler sets to work to discover the author of this outrage and finds it to be an American, Pyle, whom he already knows as a love rival. Intending to marry her, Pyle has taken Fowler's mistress, Phuong, away from him, but has tried to do it in as candid and decent fashion as possible.

Pyle is an idealistic young United States official with gangly legs, a crew cut and a "wide campus gaze." He is the son of a famous professor who lives on Chestnut Street in Boston. There is nothing self-interested in his motives for the villainy which Greene has concocted for his role. He is working for the O.S.S. "or whatever his gang are called," and is convinced that in intriguing with the dissident General Tho he is moving effectively to create a "Third Force" against both the French Colonials and the Communists. Fowler sees the Third Force as a merely political abstraction Pyle got out of books. "He never saw anything he hadn't heard in a lecture hall, and his writers and lecturers made a fool of him."

"Innocence," Fowler says, "is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm. You can't blame the innocent, they are always guiltless. All you can do is control them or eliminate them." The elimination of liberals and social democrats always comes first, of course, in the Communists' program for political seizure of power. The symbolic act toward which Fowler is driven by the events of the book is the elimination of the American, with the aid of Vietnam Communist agents. There is nothing personal about this, as far as Fowler's conscious mind is aware, for Pyle had saved his life during a brilliantly described night of violence and suffering on the road outside Saigon.

If much of the description of Indochina at war is written with Greene's great technical skill and imagination, his caricatures of American types are often as crude and trite as those of Jean Paul Sartre. He is not ashamed as an artist to content himself with the picture of America made so familiar by French neutralism; the picture of a civilization composed exclusively of chewing gum, napalm bombs, deodorants, Congressional witch-hunts, celery wrapped in cellophane, and a naive belief in one's own superior virtue.

Even in this indictment the book is inconsistent. As a non-implicated man who really understands the East, Fowler scorns American liberals for trying to introduce into Asia their textbook notions of democracy and freedom. "I have been in India, Pyle," Fowler says, "and I know the harm liberals do." At the same time, sounding very much a liberal, he accuses the Americans of selfish opportunism, of letting the French do the dying while they clean up commercially. Emotionally and usually Fowler describes the war as a meaningless slaughter of women and children, as if no enemy existed, and yet he is in touch with this enemy, the Communist Vietminh, and expects it, because of its superior understanding and organization, to win the war.

Admiring American girls for their bodies, Fowler insists to himself that they could not possibly be capable of "untidy passion." He has contempt for their bright vacuousness; yet Phuong, the comely Vietnamese, the only person in the world who means anything in his life, shows few qualities beyond self-interested compliance. She prepares his opium pipes and allows herself to be made love to at his convenience. She says nothing of interest, takes her rewards in bright-colored scarfs, and pores over picture books of the royal family.

What will annoy Americans most in this book is the easy way Fowler is permitted to triumph in his debates with the Americans. The priests whom Greene makes argue so tersely and effectively with the skeptics at the conclusions of "The Power and the Glory" and "The End of the Affair" did not have so easily their own way. When Americans are condemned for letting others do their dying for them no one speaks of Korea. Fowler says that only the Communist respects and understands the peasant. "He'll sit in his hut and ask his name and listen to his complaints; he'll give up an hour a day to teaching him -- it doesn't matter what, he's being treated like a man, like someone of value." Pyle, the American, does not remind Fowler of the thousands of individuals who make desperate escapes from Communist countries every week in order to life as humans. He only replies uneasily, "You don't mean half what you are saying." There is no real debate in the book, because no experienced and intelligent anti-Communist is represented there. Greene must feel either that such men do not exist or that they do not serve his present purposes.

It would be wrong, of course, to wish to argue, if these custom-made characters were merely characters and merely speaking for themselves. Fowler, however, is often quoting almost verbatim from articles which Graham Greene wrote about Indochina for The London Times last spring. He had visited the Communist territories and been much impressed by the Communist leader Ho Chi Minh. When these articles were published in this country they caused an especially strong reaction in the Catholic press. Greene had regretted that the Catholic Bishops with their people had withdrawn from Communist territory. "The church has not ceased to exist in Poland." He criticized the Catholic Church for identifying itself with American "militarism" and with the regime of Ngo Dinh Diem, the southern Vietnamese Premier, "a patriot ruined by the West." Subsequently Greene has visited Warsaw for private talks with Polish Catholic leaders.

When "The Quiet American" is read against the background of these articles, it can be seen to be more profoundly related to Greene's earlier religious novels than its polemic character at first suggested. In those novels God is reached only through anguish because religion is always paradoxical in its demands. Rationalists are forced to accept the crassest of miracles. In believers, love and pity often war with the chance of salvation. God is most God when His earthly Kingdom is weakest, and His mercy sometimes looks like punishment.

When Graham Greene grants primary justice to the Communist cause in Asia, and finds insupportable its resistance under the leadership of America, he raises inevitably this question: Has he reconciled himself to the thesis that history or God now demands of the church and of Western civilization a more terrible surrender than any required of the tormented characters in his fiction?

Mr. Davis is chairman of the English Department at Smith.

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Weight

When I walked out of Kinokuniya yesterday evening, I was grinning like a squirrel on drugs. I had just bought more books at one go than I have ever had in my entire life. My head was light; my pocket was light; the only thing that kept me firmly on the ground were the two heavy bags of books.

Concise Oxford English Dictionary $66.10
How to Travel with a Salmon (Rushdie) $27.69
Clash of Civilization (Huntington) $26.25
Weight (Winterson) $17.33
Sexing the Cherry (Winterson) $22.10
Spoken Here (Abley) $25.73
The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald) $17.33
Elements of Style (Skunk & White) $13.60
Oxford Mini School Dictionary $13.95 [Three copies]
The Sandman Papers $34.41
Season of Mists (Gaiman) $27.08

Total (after 20% discount=$63.89) $255.58

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The Art of Reading Poetry by Harold Bloom

Adagios of islands, O my Prodigal,
Complete the dark confessions her veins spell.
~ Hart Crane, Voyages II

I don't think I could ever look at the word adagio again without turning red.

There are two methods of approaching poetry. One breaks it down to meter, metaphor, symbol and every literary device in between. The other method is Bloom's, so inspired that it is hard to fully understand.

He speaks of recognition and allusions, and of poetic voice, a nebulous but unmistakable tone in every poem. He believes in the superiority of the sense of inevitability — unavoidable phrasing as opposed to the invariable. For example, Edgar Allan Poe's "In there stepped a stately Raven of the saintly days of yore" is invariable; Walt Whitman's "If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles" in what Bloom calls "unavoidable phrasing", the best kind.

And he speaks of strangeness. Consciousness is to poetry what marble is to sculpture, and the best poems generate a felt change in consciousness.

How cheem.

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Blink by Malcolm Gladwell

This book shows that our instincts are sometimes better than our analysis. Gladwell gives evidence that it is sometimes impossible for us to explain adequately the reasons why we come to a particular decision. We are a mystery even to ourselves.

An interesting read, but his prose is not as tight as Bryson's, nor as lyrical as Sharman Apt Russell's.

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The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

America in the 1920s: the wealthy throw lavish parties, America is divided into the East and the West, where Middle East refers to the America continent rather than to the Arab equivalent that we have become used to since the 1990s. Even the lack of air-conditioning adds to the oppressive atmosphere in the pen-ultimate scene before they "drove on toward death through the cooling twilight," the excellent sentence that Fitzgerald uses to prime us for the climax.

I love the phrases he uses. They are so good that it catches me by surprise and I have to re-read the sentence.

When I looked once more for Gatsby he had vanished and I was alone in the unquiet darkness. (21)

Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known. (59)

Her wan, scornful mouth smiled, and so I drew her up again closer, this time to my face. (80)

He put his hands in his coat pocket and turned back eagerly to his scrutiny of the house, as though my presence marred the sacredness of the vigil. So I walked away and left him standing there in the moonlight — watching over nothing. (145)

It was after we started with Gatsby toward the house that the gardener saw Wilson's body a little way off in the grass, and the holocaust was complete. (162)

Brilliant stuff, if you catch what I mean, old sport.

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