Down And Out in Paris and London

I've been looking forward to reading this book for a long time. This and "Homage to Catalonia" are two of Orwell's books I'd never gotten around to, so it was good to get my hands on this volume. After 1984, Animal Farm, and many of his essays, my expectations for this wok were very high and Down and Out didn't disappoint. It falls a little short compared to his great classics, particularly 1984. I love Orwell's prose style for it's clarity and concision, and in this book he develops some of the themes that later became the foundation of his genius - his great concern for human welfare, and a fascination with society in it's relation to the individual. This was one of the attractions of this book - seeing a genius at work on the development of his overriding themes.

"Down and Out" is an observation of life in the Parisian and London barrios of the early twentieth century that also conveys many of the larger cultural difference between Paris and London, and I found that fascinating. In the opening of the book Orwell sketches the Parisian barrios so well that (for better or worse) you feel you've been there with all the filth, the hardship, and the desperation. It seems that in Paris life under these conditions more than endures, in its peculiar way almost flourishes. So many great artists have emerged from the Parisian barrios, one sees them as almost an asset to society. Yet Orwell does not in any glorify such an existence. He's upfront about it's suffering and its great risk to one's survival.

The overall theme of the book, which is a work of fiction that reads like autobiography, contrasts such lives in Paris and London, respectively, and the conclusion is that if one were poor in Europe at the time, it would have been better for one's chances of survival to to be in London, but far better for one's spirit to be in Paris. In London one would have probably had less chance of dying outright from deprivation, but without an extraordinary stamina and imagination (as exhibited by one particularly clever character in the novel, a street artist) life would have been unendurable drudgery.

Orwell makes the point that lives of such hardship and hopelessness are unnecessary, and he addresses a little of that question directly, but as in his later work, fictitious revelation is used more than direct explanation. The virtue of the book is its detailed observation of life at the margins, its empathy for its subjects, and its manner of allowing you to live that life vicariously a life that, like it or not is the enduring condition of great multitudes of mankind. It gives a window onto a tragic and pervasive aspect of existence allowing you to experience it without having to pay the price inherent in living it.

Brent Hightower
Copyright 2016 Brent Hightower
21stcenturyperceptions.blogspot.com

Cold Mountain

This book came to me highly recommended, but I was tempted to give it less than two stars.

Somehow I did find my way to the end of the thing. That was some time ago and I don't remember any of it. All I remember is that it wasn't an easy journey. At times I remember thinking I would gladly trade my struggle to read this dense, tiresome, and incoherent prose for the hapless journey of its caricatured protagonist through the War ravaged South!

I won't attempt to recreate the story line here - there wasn't one. Such as it is, it could be summed up in one sentence, "A man find's his way home." So the "substance" of the novel has to do with an attempt to convey history, and the human condition, in an intriguing, poetical, and insightful manner. That is a noble aspiration. The problem is that the author completely in his effort to accomplish it.

That this book is held up as a noteworthy novel is an insult to the literary tradition of the American South, which has produced such great writers as Faulkner, O'Connor, and Tennessee Williams. It simply has nothing new to say about anything, and doesn't do so in the most pretentious, predictable, (and yet also nebulous and dreary) manner conceivable!

It's fame is not a negative testament to the incapacity of American writers - but to the ineptitude and corruption of current publishing and criticism - the state of which, is for the most part, a scandal and like this novel a disgrace.

Brent Hightower
Copyright 2014 Brent Hightower
21stcenturyperceptions.blogspot.com
*Image public domain

A Balanced Look at Justinian and Theodora? (a review of Theodora Empress of Byzantium)

This novel was well researched and clearly written by an author steeped in the deep complexities of the Byzantine Age, but I had a real problem with his apparent intention to "rehabilitate" the reputation of Empress Theodora, regardless of almost any degree of moral ambiguity and contradiction. It seemed as though the author could find no consistent world-view - no clear lens through which to interpret the life of this woman; one of histories trans-formative figures.

In the author's defense he isn't alone in this difficulty. The tremendous moral, political, and cultural complexities of the Byzantine Age often afflict those who attempt to chronicle them with a deep confusion!

Although the dominant perspective of the novel is clearly Catholic/historical and attempts to present Theodora as a defender of the faith, at other points I felt as though the author were presenting her from a modern feminist perspective. At yet other times I felt as if he were defending her from the charge of relentless and single-minded cruelty, of ruthless tyranny, and doing so from the perspective of a purely Machiavellian pragmatism! And these are just the beginning of the unresolved contradictions in the book.

My problem is not that I can't envision a person of that complexity. There is, obviously, virtually no limit to the potential complexities of the human personality. A failure to delve deeply enough into that complexity is, in my opinion, the failing here. The mystery of Theodora, the subject of the book, has defeated him. Her life remains an enigma that simply resists his every attempt to make it conform to some handy modern concept, to put it in some "box" where a modern reader can glance at it, understand it, and turn away content that their essential world-view hasn't been disturbed - because the far deeper truth is that if you look at Theodora's life and you aren't both confounded and deeply disturbed then you simply haven't been paying attention.

Brent Hightower
Copyright 2016 Brent Hightower
21stcenturyperceptions.blogspot.com

Hypatia, Alexandria, and Holy War

I cannot give the author enough credit for writing such an enlightening account of the life of Hypatia based upon such limited historical resources. This was clearly a labor of love and the result of painstaking research.

I found the book to be enlightening in a number of ways - firstly, in the way Ms. Dzielska clearly illuminates a very complex historical era, so that it is approachable for any educated reader - secondly, in the manner she clearly introduces the reader to the neo-Platonic concepts Hypatia taught and represented with her life, and finally, the lucid manner in which she develops her case for the reasons Hypatia was murdered.

Hypatia of Alexandria is, in my opinion, a work of first-rate scholarship and literary artistry: I will not say anything regarding the book's conclusions and thereby possibly diminish the enjoyment of this book for the reader - only that I am not entirely convinced by the somewhat startling final thesis. Yet that reservation in no way diminishes either the solid factual foundation of her argument or the brilliance with which she presents it.

I would highly recommend this volume to anyone interested in late antiquity, in neo-Platonic philosophy, or the development of Christianity in Byzantium.

The Stranger

A Review of The Stranger by Albert Camus

It has been perhaps three years since I've read The Stranger, but the book left an indelible impression on me. The reason, I think, is that this under appreciated work addresses the most profound question of our times: the question of the narcissistic and anti-social personality disorders and their challenge to civilization. Beyond a doubt this was the question Camus was addressing here, and he was doing so long before these issues were in the forefront of psychological thought.

In his seemingly casual anticipation of the significance of these conditions and his realistic interpretation of their banal nature lies the work's misleadingly prosaic quality; yet under that seemingly tepid surface lies the horror of the human spirit disconnected from love.

This, along with the crystal clear prose that always characterized Camus, resulted in an understated novel that is a triumph of Western Literature.

Whatever our interpretation of the origins of these mental conditions, or our understanding of their meanings - whether it is the result of overpopulation, or of individualism vs. the collective good, or of simple genetics, or of some other factor - there is no doubt that this is the great question of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. From Hitler to Ghandi, from spirituality to science, from plutocracy to democracy, from frugality to materialism: human nature itself is the catalyist and human nature comes down to the individual.

Within this mystery of the individual, as much as that of society itself, lies the origin of the two world wars and all of the subsequent strife of the hyper-material age. We are trapped in a duality between survival and connection, between selfishness and transcendence, between life and death.

That "The Stranger" can be completely unmoved at his own mother's funeral, that he can exist isolated from any emotional connection and that he can eventually be led to murder without any more effort than a child is led to candy is the profound message of this novel. It is a condemnation of our increasing isolation from one another, from community, and from spirituality. It is a clarion call alerting us that an individualistic, impersonal, hyper-technical society not only produces these people, but perhaps even encourages them, and at times elevates them to positions of great power.

With the second world war in clear hindsight it was this towering quandary that clearly absorbed Camus in this work, and there is no more important question for a current reader to engage.

And so, seen in it's proper light, "the Stranger" is a riveting story of loveless alienation, spiritual meaninglessness, and of the inability of the individual to even understand what they are missing - the kind of existence that resulted in a Nazi Germany or a Soviet Russia, and of it's consequences. We must not allow our distance from this work in space and time to obscure the fact that it is still the central question of today. That was the gift Camus gave to us in The Stranger, and we should receive it with gratitude.

Brent Hightower
Copyright 2012 Brent Hightower
21stcenturyperceptions.blogspot.com

Light In August

A review of Light In August by William Faulkner:

In "Light in August," Faulkner achieves the highest standard of prose I have read in an American novel. There were passages I read over and over again, and I marveled at the sheer visionary concentration of the writing - at the author's ability to focus on a specific scene so clearly, so intently, that he brought me completely into his vision. The below description of nothing more than a wagon rolling down a country road, is a fine example:

"The sharp and brittle crack and clatter of its weathered and ungreased wood and metal is slow and terrific: a series of dry sluggish reports carrying for a half mile across the hot still pinewiney silence of the August afternoon. Though the mules plod in a steady and unflagging hypnosis, the vehicle does not seem to progress. It seems to hang suspended in the middle distance forever and forever, so infinitesimal is its progress, like a shabby bead upon the mild red string of road. So much is this so that in the watching of it the eye loses it as sight and sense drowsily merge and blend, like the road itself, with all the peaceful and monotonous changes between darkness and day, like already measured thread being rewound onto a spool. So that at last, as though out of some trivial and unimportant region beyond even distance, the sound of it seems to come slow and terrific and without meaning, as though it were a ghost travelling a half mile ahead of its own shape. . ."

It takes tremendous focus and commitment to create such evocative prose, and I have to admit that it took me many years to become patient enough, and reflective enough, to fully appreciate Faulkner for his descriptive brilliance. An equally great, or greater achievement of this novel, was in his commitment to portray human existence exactly as he saw it. There was really no social or political "agenda" in Faulkner's work at all, in my opinion, although some have made that claim. Instead, what I see, is a courageous and unflinching determination to portray his world with absolute fidelity, to hold a mirror up to life and human society, so that we might look at that image and draw our own conclusions about where society has succeeded and where it has failed.

This, in my estimation is a heroic and monumentally difficult thing to attempt, and not only does Faulkner attempt it in "Light In August," he achieves it admirably. As in the passage excerpted above, what I see in Faulkner's work is courage: the courage of a writer willing to face himself and to portray both his inner-impressions, and his external reality unflinchingly, with the deepest exertion towards absolute honesty. I can think of no higher praise for any writer, or any novel.

Brent Hightower
Copyright 2013 by Brent Hightower
21stcenturyperceptions.blogspot.com