📚 24 - May
There are big spoilers for The Untidy Pilgrim and The Member of the Wedding! I know that some people have a different viewpoint, but I personally believe that spoilers do diminish the enjoyment of literature. It's a shame that the surprising endings of so many of our great novels are cocktail knowledge. Reader, beware!
Eugene Walter (1954). The Untidy Pilgrim.
The Mobile novel. I tried to read it when I was in high school but got distracted and bogged down, never making it past the first third. And yet I always remembered batty old Miss Fiffy in her big house downtown with its porch and sunroom and houseplants.
Something a bit cheeky about this book is that its sensibility is extremely gay (particularly in the narrator's arch voice, but also with its hints of matter-of-fact bisexual decadence in certain scenes partially outside of Miss Fiffy's purview) but the plot follows the narrator—a young lawyer from the country living in Mobile in a "that crazy summer" situation—through a series of semi-romantic and romantic liaisons with women, ultimately culminating in an ending so happy as to be camp.
Is the Gulf Coast the kingdom of the monkeys? Is Mobile (where I drove forty-five minutes each way in my navy polo and khakis to attend high school) sweet lunacy's county seat? I'd say not exactly, but there is indeed a certain antic/unhinged quality to the city that I love and miss, and Walter captures a distilled (or perhaps undiluted?) vision of that. (Incidentally, Walter lived quite a rich life—look him up! I'm sorry I never met him in this lifetime.)
Carson McCullers (1946). The Member of the Wedding.
Yes, it's true—I'm on a Southern Bildungsroman kick ("It happened that green and crazy summer...") and have been rereading books from middle school.
McCullers walks a real tightrope with the narrator, young F.—speaking with F.'s own dramatic, wounded, self-serious and confused viewpoint that could have become baby-speak corny so quickly, but doesn't.
For me the key to this novel is the ending, which I'd completely forgotten—young John Henry is absolutely dispatched and Francis barely seems to think about it. It might be sentimentality speaking, but there was a sense that her eccentricity, her sensitivity, and indeed her self-centeredness would ascend abruptly into a balanced adult wisdom, but instead her move to adulthood involves a shedding that complexity. The tragedy of some Bildungsromane is what their subjects are gebildet into.
Chester Himes (1961). The Heat's On.
A fun hardboiled detective novel with some memorable characters and scenes. As is always the case, it seems, with detective novels, I eventually lost track of the competing stakes, who knew what, who thought what which MacGuffins were. (I need the literary equivalent of someone sitting next to me while watching a movie whom I can ask, "What, why are they trying to kill him? And what's in the suitcase??")
Luckily, this novel's true gems are the scenes—the detectives spitting watermelon seeds at a nightclub, the faith healer taking clients upstairs, the goat eating the tablecloth while the healer's lover-turned-servant is trying to crack a safe. This book is one in a series; I bought another and hope to read it this year.
Jacques Lacarrière (1973). The Gnostics. [trans. Nina Rootes]
I absolutely loved this book—a French thinker's questing meditations on a faith tradition that could have rivaled Christianity had it not been snuffed out, and whose primary texts and history have been mostly destroyed and lost. The Gnostics seemed to believe roughly that our universe is the abortive creation of a lesser (much lesser) diety, but that through a direct transfer of knowledge we can catch glimpses of the true God. Ideas of what or how this knowledge could be gained differed between sects, but this worldview in which creation itself was the Fall opens up some fascinating lines of thought. Much to think about. I plan to re-read the work in its original French sometime soon, and will likely give the book a more thoughtful treatment then.
If this is a reading blog—one whose main utility it seems lies in my returning to it to remember what and how I read—then I'll note that I bought this at Watkins while on a trip to London, staying at the newly-bought home of an absent friend—instead of taking my coffee and talking with them, I took my coffee alone—sometimes joined by the neighborhood fox—in the garden with this book.
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