The Sirens of Titan

Kurt Vonnegut – 1959

“At first glance, the laboratory-gowned scientist seemed to be a perfect servant of nothing but truth. At first glance, one was convinced that nothing but truth could please him as he beamed at his test tube. At first glance, one thought that he was as much above the beastly concerns of mankind as the harmoniums in the caves of Mercury. There, at first glance, was a young man without vanity, without lust – and one accepted at its face value the title Salo had engraved on the statue, Discovery of Atomic Power.

And then one perceived that the young truth-seeker had a shocking erection.”

Empathy and cynicism meet and meld in The Sirens of Titan, which is Kurt Vonnegut’s second novel but the one in which he truly found his voice. The satire is often unbearably brutal and there are moments of powerful grace and humanity. Though not a solipsistic writer, Vonnegut’s inner conflict is never concealed. He sees life as futile and human beings as horribly flawed, but at the same time he finds so much redemption in the smallest instances of sharing and kindness between any two people. It’s a philosophical battle that never quite gets settled in his greatest books, which is what makes them so potent. An eccentric millionaire, Winston Niles Rumfoord, builds a spaceship and blasts off with his dog to explore the universe, getting sucked into some kind of wormhole or vortex that transforms him into a multi-dimensional being who can see the future, at least well enough to seem omniscient to most mortals, allowing him to remake society in his image, orchestrate interplanetary wars, and unify the world under a new religion called The Church of God the Utterly Indifferent, the sole tenet of which is that all events are complete accidents, not the will of the Almighty. Meanwhile, another rich man, Malachi Constant, lives a completely frivolous life and becomes a pawn in Rumfoord’s agenda to demonstrate the absence of divine justice in the cosmos. And just when we think that Rumfoord is essentially a demigod, we find that he is not only at the mercy of natural forces but also of an alien race known as the Tralfamadorians, who have manipulated human history for no other reason than to make them able to produce and deliver a replacement spaceship part for one of their messenger robots stranded on Titan, a task that takes hundreds of thousands of years. (One other point of interest about the book is that it describes a future society where citizens accept handicaps to minimize any kind of physical or intellectual advantages they may have other others, a concept that will become the main premise of Vonnegut’s later famous story “Harrison Bergeron.”) The plot is not dependent on twists and turns, but there are several that bowled me over. More than the story, though, are various isolated scenes and subplots that really surprised and moved me. The Tralfamadorian robot, Salo, alone for millennia, has developed compassion and a profound sense of loneliness. Salo is crestfallen to find that Rumfoord, the only other intelligent being on the Saturn moon, has no interest in his friendship and only resents him as a fellow tool of the Tralfamadorians. This leads to Salo committing suicide by disassembling himself by a lakeshore. Chrono, the estranged son of Constant, is a surly brat on Earth but after being on Titan for many years, he goes feral and leaves his family to live with the native bluebird flocks, wearing feathers and learning their language, and even building votive structures in their honor all over the landscape. Near the end of his life, the repentant Constant undertakes cleaning and maintaining these shrines as a means of bonding with his son. Most striking of all, for me, is the tale of Unk and Boaz marooned in the deep catacombs of Mercury, (thereby – by Rumfoord’s design – surviving the disastrous Mars-Earth war). There is a native species in these caverns called ‘harmoniums,’ creatures that have no higher functions or thoughts beyond existing and who are fueled by vibrations. Dazzled by their simple beauty and the music they produce, Boaz bonds with the harmoniums, letting them feed on his own pulse, and ultimately chooses to remain alone with them on Mercury rather than escape with Unk. Whether foolish or heroic, or both, the willingness of characters to risk self-destruction to experience a bit of genuine warmth, kindness or tranquility is a phenomenon that Vonnegut returns to often. As he writes in The Sirens of Titan, “It was all so sad. But it was all so beautiful, too.”

The Godfather

Mario Puzo – 1969

Possibly one of the most mediocre novels ever to be turned into a masterpiece of a film, Mario Puzo’s The Godfather was nevertheless a bestseller that captured the public’s imagination, largely due to Puzo’s ingenious idea to fuse recently exposed details about the American mafia in nonfiction books like The Valachi Papers and Gay Talese's Honor Thy Father with the trashy roman à clef novels of Jaqueline Susann and Harold Robbins. It’s not great literature, and even Puzo himself, (like director Francis Ford Coppola), was not especially happy about his name being synonymous with mafia epics over the more serious, personal works that he took pride in. But it’s easy to see why the book lent itself to a screen adaptation. The characters are well-drawn, with the family dynamic being loosely patterned on The Brothers Karamazov. Without Coppola’s involvement in the film, it would likely have been a more routine Hollywood affair like Airport or Love Story. Speaking as someone who has seen the movie a hundred times and read the novel once, I can only say that the latter seems incredibly soapy, artless and puerile in comparison. Coppola was generous in sharing credit with Puzo for the adaptation, even insisting on the phrase “Mario Puzo’s” above the title on screen, but it’s apparent that Coppola is primarily responsible for everything great about the film, including Brando, the music of Nino Rota, Gordon Willis’ cinematography, and the huge cast of newcomers that he discovered. It was Coppola who outmaneuvered Paramount chief Robert Evans’ relentless interference. Evans, who wanted another Love Story, pushed for Robert Redford or Ryan O’Neal to play Michael Corleone instead of Al Pacino, and generally needled, harassed and second-guessed Coppola the whole way. When the time came for a sequel, one of Coppola’s requirements was that Evans be kept away from him; (pretty much the last time Coppola would have the clout to make such a demand). The point is that I believe Coppola retroactively made the Puzo novel seem better than it was. For every “make him an offer he can’t refuse,” there are endless paragraphs that dwell on the sordid details of minor characters’ lives, like Lucy the bridesmaid who doesn’t know what to do about her abnormally spacious vagina. The writing is ridiculously misogynistic. Dwelling ad nauseum on Johnny Fontaine’s entire sexual history or on Sonny Corleone’s massive phallus and animal libido, Puzo’s prose comes off like the work of a terribly insecure and unattractive man with minimal experience with women trying to sound like he knows everything about them. Worst of all, probably, is the fact that Puzo allows no space in this 450-page novel for reflection or to critique the milieu he depicts. He describes the behavior of all these reprehensible people in almost a journalistic way, with a dearth of feeling about it all, which got translated faithfully into the film, which in turn led to the impression that both Puzo and Coppola were glamorizing the mafia. This is why Coppola made sure that the sequel was unambiguous in showing Michael, (despite being an impressive Machiavellian strategist), as a soulless shell of a human being due to the evil he had wrought, all thinly justified with a pretense of concern for “family.” The finale of film The Godfather, Part II shows Michael completely alone, having killed, exiled or alienated all of his loved ones. Puzo’s novel contains no moments even remotely comparable in depth, poetry and pure decisiveness in its treatment of themes. This, combined with the absence of any style or beauty in Puzo’s writing, makes The Godfather pretty underwhelming, in my opinion.

What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?

Henry Farrell – 1960

It’s not great literature by any means, but it’s an interesting, light read as kind of a fan-fiction mashup of A Streetcar Named Desire and Sunset Boulevard, leaning towards the sordid instead of pathos or poetry. Possibly because the 1962 movie is so famous and is such a strict adaptation, the book reads like a novelization of it, not incredibly graceful or visceral, just efficient in its juicy storytelling.

Splinter of the Mind’s Eye

Alan Dean Foster – 1978

The king of movie novelizations and the ghostwriter of “George Lucas’” Star Wars novel, Alan Dean Foster was commissioned to write a sequel to the hit film, but was advised that it had to be something that could be easily adapted into an inexpensive movie if the powers-that-be decided that Star Wars needed a sequel. Obviously, and thankfully, that plan was scrapped in favor of The Empire Strikes Back. Nevertheless, Splinter of the Mind’s Eye retains the distinction of being not only the first Star Wars sequel but the very first work of “expanded universe” building in the Star Wars fiction galaxy, a sub-genre all its own that has flooded the earth with seemingly innumerable comics, novels, TV shows, video games, etc. Yes, it even precedes the notorious Star Wars Holiday Special, which taught us about Life Day and introduced Boba Fett before he ever appeared in film. Foster’s novel, presumably crafted with input from Lucas, is pretty underwhelming. It feels like Foster barely got Star Wars, and in all fairness, hardly anyone at that time could conceive of what it would become. The plot has Luke and Leia, still before knowing of their own sibling connection, crash land on an industrial outpost planet and scramble to evade capture by the always pursuing Empire. Luke retains some of his youthful humility from the 1977 film (aka A New Hope), but Leia is more irritable and unlikeable than she previously was. The focus stays on them the entire time as they pass through a frontier mining town and witness injustice while trying to stay undercover. Eventually, late into the book, Darth Vader finally shows up to fight a duel with Luke, whose Force powers are magnified by his contact with a sacred crystal. It’s an interesting read, but it never gets past the TV-movie mentality that would later give us The Ewok Adventure, an economical detour into a somewhat Star Wars-y landscape. But all this restraint makes no sense because it’s a novel. Foster could have made it more epic and ambitious than any movie, but he was curtailed by the demand to keep it simple for the sake of a future B-movie budget that never even came to pass. Thus we see that, as early as 1978, Lucas was already bending his art over to accept the insertion of corporate demands, something that would only get progressively worse over the years, culminating in his sale of the whole beloved franchise to the Disney media conglomeration.

Pictures of the Gone World

Lawrence Ferlinghetti – 1955

“...couples going nude into the sad water in the profound lasciviousness of Spring in an algebra of lyricism which I am still deciphering.”

Not only is this Ferlinghetti’s first book, it’s the first publication by his bookstore and printing company City Lights in San Francisco, which went on to put out books by fellow poets Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder and many others. Ferlinghetti just died a few years ago at the age of 101! These poems are printed in scattered fashion across the pages, making use of wide unused spaces and without punctuation or justified edges. Altogether, they give the impression of someone reflecting upon considerable travels around the world. Ferlinghetti has the same detached, ironic voice of most of his fellow Beats, reacting to human activity with an alien’s bemusement and a bit of disdain. By far, my favorite poem in this collection is ‘The World is a Beautiful Place.’

“The world is a beautiful place to be born into, if you don’t mind some people dying all the time.”

Dandelion Wine

Ray Bradbury – 1957

“Knew the names of all the wild flowers and when the moon would rise or set and when the tides came in or out. He was, in fact, the only god living in the whole of Green Town, Illinois, during the twentieth century that Douglas Spaulding knew of.”

More potently than any other novel I have experience with, Dandelion Wine exudes a warm, melancholy nostalgia not just from its text but even from its pages, cover and title. This was my third time reading it after reading it twice in high school, which means not much of it was still in my head after 30 years except for the basic notion of 12-year-old Douglas Spaulding becoming conscious of the world and trying to savor his summer months in 1928 small-town Illinois. There’s not much I can say about the book that other reviewers haven’t covered, so I’ll just make a few observations. I didn’t learn until recently that it is actually a fix-up novel mixing the main Spaulding plot with several short stories that Ray Bradbury had already published elsewhere. I wish that wasn’t the case, I wish it had all been original for the book and planned as a complete novel, but I can’t deny that it works and that I would never suspect it’s a fix-up if I didn’t know. Details that stand out for me: 1) An early chapter about Douglas, on the cusp of puberty, lying in the woods and being overwhelmed by the sensuousness of nature, eating fruit, and feeling the breeze on his skin. Soon after, he goes to the edge of an ominous ravine next to town and is struck by the contrast of primordial wildness and civilization and wonders how the two can possibly be reconciled. 2) There is a serial killer in the town, targeting women walking alone at night. He has been conflated into an urban legend about a being the townsfolk call “the Lonely One,” an almost supernatural boogeyman figure that parents use to scare kids with and about whom boys tell each other tall tales. 3) A couple things foreshadow Bradbury’s next novel, Something Wicked This Way Comes; a traveling junk man with mystical powers is a bit like the lightning rod salesman in the later story, and in one chapter, Douglas and his brother Tom visit a carnival and are captivated by a lifelike fortune-telling machine that they “rescue” with the intention of reviving it to restore its powers of prophecy. 4) A few times, modernization is dealt with as a corrupting influence, i.e. the “happiness machine” a man builds that backfires by distracting him and his family from the true happiness in their lives together, Aunt Rose reorganizing Grandma’s kitchen and buying her a cookbook, which spoils the magic of her instinctive cooking skills, and Grandpa’s rejection of a miraculous new type of grass that would never have to be mowed. In keeping with the style of Bradbury’s numerous short stories, many of the vignettes are ironic or tragic in nature, with twists that emphasize punishment for not appreciating the here and now, and reward for taking time to smell the roses. Sometimes this technique can seem needlessly cruel, like Twilight Zone episodes, such as the young man who falls in love with a woman based on her photograph only to find out that she is really decades older than him, and the elderly man in a rest home who dies in the midst of calling strangers in foreign countries so they can hold the phone to their windows and allow him to hear bustling life around the world. One of the stories I enjoy the most involves Douglas’ best friend John Huff, also 12 years old, who seems to be everything a boy should be, agile, kind, brave and knowledgeable about everything worth knowing. Being forced to move away, John is worried about being forgotten. Douglas assures him that’s impossible, but when John shuts his eyes and asks Douglas to tell him what color his eyes are, Douglas can’t remember. This is key to the theme of the novel, as Douglas learns to celebrate the vibrance and diversity of life, but also becomes aware of death, loss, the passage of time, and the fleeting nature of memory. The overall feeling of nostalgia for the magic of childhood is off the charts throughout Dandelion Wine, but it isn’t quaint or cloying. It’s genuine because it’s Bradbury’s honest agenda and not seasoning added to artificially create a sensation the book wouldn’t otherwise have. What makes it great is Bradbury’s unabashed pleasure in his use of language, pleasure in memory and reverie, celebrating reverie, celebrating both sensory experience and consciously reflecting upon and analyzing the experience.

King Jesus

Robert Graves – 1946

“Do you ever relax from your monomania of holiness?” - Pontius Pilate to Jesus

I don’t think I’ve ever been as happily captivated by a novel from beginning to end as I was while reading Robert Graves’ King Jesus. I loved it so much that I felt like it was written especially for me. How Graves was able to present his enormous knowledge of antiquity, blended with his own theories and observations, filtered through his somehow poetic and completely accessible writing style, is nothing short of miraculous in my opinion. Equally remarkable is his ability to tell the story of the life of Christ from secular and pagan perspectives while also displaying due admiration for Jesus himself. The fictional historian who guides us takes the position that most of Jesus’ reported miracles were misunderstood or exaggerated in the retelling, but that Jesus was not only a genuinely gifted holy man with sharp human ethics, and who was legitimately entitled to be known as the King of the Jews as well. I was hooked from the very first page, on which Graves describes the antagonistic relationship between Judaism and “mother goddess” cults in the ancient Levant. This connects to Graves’ other major work of the 1940s, his nonfiction study of paganism and poetry, The White Goddess. The scholar/historian narrator in King Jesus asserts that the great secret of ancient Judaism is that the right of kingship is actually passed through the female line, not the patriarchal. The Biblical characters Hannah (Anna), Elizabeth, Miriam (Mary), the mother of Jesus, and Mary of Cleophas all belong to a parallel or interior sect within Judaism that maintains the ways of the older cults devoted to the mother goddess. “In the name of the Mother,” is a password phrase recognized by them all. Graves suggests that Jesus’ birth was engineered by a clever, farsighted high priest who arranged a surreptitious marriage between Mary, the last in the royal matriarchal line, and Antipater, King Herod’s eldest son and heir, giving their offspring indisputable claims to the Judean throne through both parents. Herod spoils these plans when he condemns Antipater to death as an Abrahamic sacrifice intended to help cure him of the mysterious festering diseases that would claim his life soon after Jesus’ birth, forcing Mary to seek out an arranged second marriage with the carpenter Joseph and to flee to Egypt to protect the infant from the murderous Herod. One of the running themes of the novel is the misogyny that Graves seems to consider inherent in Judaism. The Israelites dread being on the sea, identifying it with the Female, i.e. female sexual power, the lust that corrupts and distracts holy men from their holy business. The great rarely-spoken-of enemy of the Jewish tribes is the mother goddess embodied by the apocryphal Lilith, “the first Eve,” and her fellow priestesses down through the ages. Lucifer/Satan/the Devil is never even mentioned, but it is stated that Jesus’ mission is to personally “destroy the works of the Female.” There is a remarkable and heady chapter in which a type of doctrinal wizards duel takes place between Jesus and Mary of Cleophas (Clopas), a prostitute ringleader and high priestess of the goddess cult, which climaxes with an agreement between the two of them to marry in order to fulfill messianic prophecies that both of them have vested interest in, although the actual marriage, to Mary’s chagrin, is to remain unconsummated. Jesus’ many recorded miracles are explained as either misunderstandings or exaggerated by word of mouth, and in some cases, the result of the power of suggestion. Jesus is careful not to attempt healing anyone who is blatantly incurable. A crippled man is able to stand because Jesus relieves him of his debilitating guilt. The changing of water into wine is just a metaphor, not an actual phenomenon. It is told that Lazarus, a cousin of Jesus’ witch wife Mary, was cursed by her with a condition resembling death in order to lure Jesus home, and that Jesus is somehow able to remove the trance, allowing Lazarus to seemingly rise from the dead. There are unexplained miracles too, however, which the author seems to accept, having no rational explanation, including Jesus’ resurrection. After exiting his tomb, he is last seen disappearing into the mist over a hill in the companionship of three women; Mary, his mother, Mary, his queen, and a third, unidentified woman. As in Frazer’s The Golden Bough, it is observed that crucifixion is an ancient tradition in many cultures, starting as a propitiatory ritual requiring kings themselves to be killed, and degenerating over time into a punishment for lowly criminals. As such, Jesus ends up accidentally fulfilling the pagan “dying god/dying king” prophecy, which he could have averted if he had accepted Pontius Pilate’s help, who clearly accepted that Jesus was King Herod’s grandson, even noting the facial resemblance. Just after his tortuous execution, Jesus’ wife/queen Mary comments to observers that her husband’s actual crime was not against the Pharisees or Rome but “the Female,” whose prophecies cannot be rushed into fruition, not even by someone of Jesus’ great gifts and genius. In losing his battle against the great mother goddess, fervently praying to his Father god to his last breath, Jesus is discredited and condemned. We are left to discern the meaning of his resurrection ourselves, as Graves’ narrator appears to run out of theories in the book’s final pages, but the implication could be that the Female’s, the Triple Goddess’ magic has won out over the Israelites’ slight-of-hand miracles and superstitions, as the three mysterious women on the foggy hill, like Macbeth’s trio of witches, lead the healed and resurrected Son of David off to his true destiny. King Jesus is a truly unique, beautiful, challenging and satisfying work of literature by one of the great English author/scholars.