The Lunatic at Large

The Lunatic at Large
by J. Storer Clouston, 1899
205pp
Read: 3/30 - 04/06

This is a Late Victorian comic novel, which if you don't know, is what happens when a dapper gent is mistaken for a cad. I sometimes conceive syllabi in my mind--or at least whole Roman numeraled sections of syllabi--for high school or undergrad lit classes. Reading this book, I had the idea that assigning it would be a fun reward for a class of teenage boys who'd just slogged through Austen. Actually, a comedy depends on its context, and I probably received 90% of my understanding of the Victorian mores at play here through a high school reading of Pride & Prejudice.

The plot is as follows: a man with no recollection of his past finds himself as a patient at Clankwood Asylum, "home of the best-bred lunatics in England." Employing subterfuge and charm, he affects a daring escape. Again with the subterfuge & charm, he ingratiates himself to one Baron Rudolf von Bliztenberg. Lives lavishly at the Baron's expense, then alienates him. Returns to London, where he rediscovers his own true identity.

Now re-read the above paragraph, being careful to insert "hilarity ensues," after every sentence.

The premise is a funny one, the situations are humorous, and the dialogue is occasionally rather witty & Wildean. (The intro speaks of Clouston as being a kind of link between Wilde & Wodehouse in the English Comic Tradition. I think it'd be fair to say the dialogue owes a debt to Wilde, whereas the social lampooning anticipates Wodehouse.(NOTE: I have never read any Wodehouse whatsoever, though I am thoroughly acquainted with the proper pronunciation of his name.)) I don't have much to say beyond that: it's a funny book. It's not much else, although it may be the origin of the word "bonkers." If you find it amusing when people impersonate English priests & German nobles--particularly when hilarity proceeds to ensue--you'll enjoy this book.

A book's chapter lengths can be one of its greatest strengths. There's that quality "readability" that has nothing to do whatsoever with "literary merit." This is a highly readable book, largely because the chapters are so perfectly apportioned. Some of my favorite authors write in dense, enormous chapters. This is a book of short chapters, quickly read. Not that I hold "readable" books as superior to "good" books (many people do, often out of ignorance), but there are plenty of times when what I want is a readable book, not necessarily a good one.


This is Volume 5 of McSweeney's "Collins Library," a series of handsome clothbound editions of books that have been too long out of my print. This book was last published in the US in 1926. That this book would so fall out of publication surprises me, not because of the book's merits so much as because the book was once pretty popular: it was made into a silent film on three separate occasions. No copies of any of those films is known to survive today. It's as though some force were actively trying to suppress knowledge of the book. I have to wonder whether later editions would have been published had copies of the movie survived. There's an alternate universe where the film stock did not decay, the book stayed in publication, and Chevy Chase starred in a 1980 remake.

Mr. Palomar

Mr. Palomar
by Italo Calvino, 1983
126pp
Read: 3/27 - 3/30

I'll start with the "Index":

You'll notice that it's more of a table of contents or schemata. The book is arranged by three's: its three sections, "Mr. Palomar's Vacation," "Mr. Palomar in the City," and "The Silences of Mr. Palomar," are each divided into three subsections, each of which consists of three scenes. So, twenty-seven parts.

But observe the coordinate system on the left. Those numbers, Calvino explains, correspond to different modes of perception or experience (he's a little unclear here, and I think that the translation probably does his ideas some disservice). Roughly, 1 = Observation (particularly of aggregations), 2 = Anthropology (as well as semiotics, apparently), and 3 = Meditation. Roughly, I suppose he's trying to establish a hierarchy: one's relation to objects --> one's relation to society --> one's relation to the universal. So, for example: 1.3.3, "Mr Palomar's Vacation: Mr. Palomar Looks at the Sky: The contemplation of the stars" is two parts "meditation" to one part "observation." Or that's how it ought to work.

So the book works less like a novel than a series of essays. Mr. Palomar observes the things around him (hence the observatory reference), and he reflects on these things. In reading it, I experienced a fair deal of synchronicity, despite the unlikely objects of Mr. Palomar's observations: I read his meditation on "The loves of tortoises" just before seeing a picture of copulating turtles; "The infinite lawn" likewise resembled a friend's comments about his own lawn, and "The order squamata" reminded me of a museum exhibit I'm planning on taking a certain three year-old to.

Strangely, for a book that's so much about the interaction between ego and the outer world, we don't really get to know Mr. Palomar. Though we constantly hear his observations and meditations, the traditional avenues of characterization (interactions with other characters, seeing him make decisions) are largely closed to him. Consequently Palomar feels a bit like Mr. Magoo, a comic character whose interior life we can only intuit.


The covers of the Harcourt Brace editions of Italo Calvino all sport these rather straightforward illustrations of the book in question, all by one Shelton Walsmith. It's always kind of fun to see how he manages to capture a piece of experimental fiction in ten square inches.

The Autumn of the Patriarch

The Autumn of the Patriarch
by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 1975
255pp

In theory, this should have been a very difficult book to put down. It provides almost no stopping points. This book is a thick stew of run-on sentences, eschewing paragraph and sentence breaks almost entirely. In its 255 pages, the book probably has around twenty periods. This has the effect of making it seem like a much longer book than it otherwise appear.

I first picked up this book back in November. Then the new Pynchon book came out, for which I would've dropped my own mother. After finishing Pynchon, I wasn't particularly interested in getting back to this book. After a few more reads, I picked this back up in early February. I don't think it was a week before I had selected another book to distract me from this one. By the time I had finished this book, I'd also read Hunger, The King, About Alice, and "Alcestis" & "Heracleidae" on the side.

Despite my distractions, I loved this book. Garcia Marquez tells the story of a tropical dictator's life through a series of flashbacks, and a stream of consciousness that runs from consciousness to consciousness. The book is at times narrated by the General himself, sometimes by someone speaking to him, sometimes by someone speaking about him. The narration of one event creates tangents, along which the narration runs to the details of some other event--never pausing to begin a new sentence--all the while shifting among its narrators. Reading this feels like you've dropped something slippery, which you catch, only to lose your grip on and catch in a different place, where it slips away again...

There is a rhythm by which the book regularly wraps up the anecdote at hand and returns to some regularly recurring image. Every twenty pages or so we hear the General described in more or less the same terms: his elephant-like feet, his denim uniform, his hands like claws, his herniated testicle. Likewise the General's various routines are repeated periodically, like the rosary.

Amongst the established order of recurring elements, we read the story of the General's impossibly long reign, though not always narrated chronologically. He betrays a friend, he introduces an enemy among his inner circle, he pursues a beauty queen, she eludes him, his mother died, the church will not make her a saint, the church is expelled, he falls for a former nun, she marries him and gives birth to an heir, they are killed, he creates a new branch of government to hunt & torture the conspirators who killed them, he exacts revenge on the man he installed in this ministry of vengeance. He's in power for over a hundred years, during which time he is alternately portrayed as being of limitless power & cunning, a man who commands every aspect of his realm, and powerless figurehead, whose government beneath him constantly seeks to placate him and convince him he still holds real power.


I often read in my tub, during which I can never keep my hands totally dry, and consequently the edges of pages of my books lose their crispness. This book, however, was sitting on the floor when streams of water from some misdirected jacuzzi jets shot out of the tub and soaked it through. Thus it is wavy, and waterlogged, and full of character.

"Alcestis" & "Heracleidae"

"Alcestis" & "Heracleidae"
Euripides, 5th Cent. BC
about 20pp

A few years ago I was in the habit of reading Greek tragedies when I was "between" books. I read these during two different "breaks" from the same book.

I picked up "Alcestis," after Raine's book on Eliot described it as a "resurrection play" and the template for Eliot's "The Cocktail Party." The play is set in the aftermath of a neat little myth with which I wasn't familiar: Apollo, angry at Zeus for smiting his son Asclepius (poss. the awesomest figure in classical mythology), slays the Cyclopes (the Cyclopes being the ones who forge Zeus' lightning bolts). Zeus in retaliation forces Apollo to be a slave in a mortal's home. Which brings Apollo to the home of Thessalian king Admetus, where Apollo becomes the king's shepherd and is treated rather well. In gratitude, Apollo makes a deal with Destiny: Admetus can avoid his own death if he can get anyone else to substitute himself and die in his place.

Which brings us to the opening of the play. Admetus' friends and parents have refused to die in his behalf, and instead Alcestis, Admetus' wife and mother of his children, agrees to die. Apparently this is what a devoted Hellenic wife ought to do. And so she dies, and Admetus is distraught, and their kids are distraught. Enter Heracles, who's on his way to fetch some man-eating horses. Because Admetus would never dream of turning away Heracles, and because Heracles wouldn't stay chez Admetus if he knew that the master of the house was mourning his wife, Admetus conceals his house's state of mourning from Heracles. Naturally, Heracles finds out, and is so upset that he goes to Alcestis' tomb to wait for Death to come & claim her. So, off-stage, Death comes to the tomb, when Heracles beats up Death, thereby resurrecting Alcestis. Twenty five hundred years later, Superboy would punch a hole in reality.

It turns out that Euripides is Western Lit's go-to guy for the dramaticization of the life of Heracles. I'd always thought that he existed in outside of Classical Literature as handed down in epic poetry and drama; I figured we mostly knew the stories of Heracles through folklore, marble statues, and Kevin Sorbo. But Euripides wrote a few plays based on Heraclean myth, which one would have to think would pack the amphitheater way better than another damn play about Orestes.

Nor had I realized that Heracles had a full-fledged arch-nemesis in Eurystheus. The guy was a blood-relative to Heracles, and a rival for his power; it was Eurystheus who sent Heracles on his Labors. And when Heracles ascended into heaven, Eursytheus tried to wipe out his children. Which brings us to the "Heracleidae."

The sons of Heracles, under the charge of Iolaus--Heracles' own fidus Achates--have traveled from city-state to city-state seeking refuge. Every place they've gone has turned them away, swayed by Eurystheus' threat of Mycenaean force. Until the gang gets to Athens, naturally. The city must still be young, because it's under the rule of the two sons of Theseus. When reminded that they, like every Greek who could swing a club, are blood relatives of Heracles, they rebuke Eursytheus' herald and offer sanctuary to the Heraclids (dare I call them the HeraKids?). Of course the herald promises to return with Eurystheus' army, so Athens girds herself for war.

In accordance with the peculiarities of time in Greek drama, in the time it takes a servant or two to enter and exit, the Mycenaean army is outside Athens. And there's a problem. The oracle's been consulted, and she says Athens won't win unless the daughter of a noble is sacrificed. None of the nobles can bear to give up their own daughters, and no one wants to take a daughter by force. All is saved when Macaria, a virgin of suitable birth volunteers to be sacrificed, which makes her family proud. Apparently ancient Greece was rife with opportunities for the honorable act of feminine self-destruction.

So of course Athens wins, and the play really could end there, but it doesn't. Alcmene, Heracles' mom, demands the execution of Eurystheus. The chorus of Athenians politely explain that, as a captured prisoner, they don't have to kill him; to do so would go against their laws of war. To which Alcemene responds, in essence, "nuts to that!" They end up killing Eurystheus, and according to folklore, the presence of his corpse on Athenian soil protected the city from the descendants of Heracles, ie, Spartans & Argives.



I got this book pretty cheap at the WFU Library book sale. It's a volume from the Encyclopaedia Britannica "Great Books of the Western World" series, and it's got about all the Greek drama you'd ever want. In its ~650 pages I'd guess it has about 50 plays. It does this by employing small type, arranged in two columns on every page, and by abbreviating characters' names in the stage instructions. Which just strikes me as such a beautifully low-tech means of storing and compressing data. In today's world of Google & wikiwhatnot, it's easy to forget just how impressive the notion of an encyclopedia used to be: the promise of substantially all of mankind's useful knowledge, leatherbound and right there on your bookshelves. The "Great Books" series was probably an extension of this same idea: fifty volumes or so gave you every word of every primary text of the Canon of Western Literature. As a sidenote, I bet encyclopedia salesmen were pretty cool. Not only were they drifters and drunks who couldn't hold down regular employment, their peculiar realm of salesmanship required them to be conspicuously erudite. I bet they had a strategy for entering your living room and proceeding to casually make reference to all the important things you don't know but feel you should.

About Alice

About Alice
by Calvin Trillin, 2006
78pp

There seems to be this weird subgenre of memoirs and appreciations written by New Yorker-style intellectuals about their loved ones taken by cancer. I'm not just thinking about meditations on loss like Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, I'm also including posthumous collections edited and introduced by the surviving spouse, like Timothy Noah editing Marjorie Williams' The Woman at the Washington Zoo, or Sarah Dudley Plimpton writing the intro to George Plimpton's The Man in the Flying Lawn Chair (OK, so that one wasn't cancer). I tend to find these books affecting; I have this idea of this elite set of East Coast intellectuals as living somehow removed from the rest of us, ensconced in the Upper West Side, and literally above our day-to-day concerns. (I have a feeling you could have guessed this about me). So when they write about how they shared their lives with these people, authors and intellectuals like themselves, and how they miss them, I'm reminded not only that they experience good old-fashioned sentiments, families and love-lives; I'm reminded that they aren't so jaded and given to irony as to be incapable of these things, and that moreover they didn't have to give it all up to pursue a life of sophistication.

So I find it moving when a wit like Calvin Trillin publishes a slim volume to tell the world how much he loved his wife, how he went through his whole life thrilled and feeling lucky to be with her. I'm sure that everyone feels that way about his own wife must wish he could write some book that would communicate everything he loves about her, but whose writing skills are up to the task? Trillin's a gifted writer, but the reader doesn't get the privilege of falling in love with Alice the way he did. One does get the impression of having spent some time with an amazing person, though.




Sometimes, a good NPR interview renders the act of reading a particular book unnecessary. I'm pretty sure that with every page of this short book I found myself reminded of what I'd heard in a Bob Edwards interview.

The King

The King
by Donald Barthelme (1990)
158pp

I own more Don Barthelme and John Barth than I know what to do with. This is partly my fault: I am unfortunately tolerant of postmodernism, metafiction, experimental fiction, and the 1960s. This is also the product, however, of this strange phenomenon whereby you can always reliably find Barth & Barthelme paperbacks at pretty much every used bookstore I've ever been to. Generally, they are falling apart, but they'll only cost you a dollar & they tend to have pleasingly kitschy cover art. Consequently, I have around 3000 pages of (oh wow, good guess: the exact figure comes to 2989) Barth & Barthelme on my bookshelves. (And I don't even own The Sot-Weed Factor!) If this narrow band of the alphabet were representative of my entire book collection, my fiction shelves alone would have literally miles of books. (Side note. Total number of pages of Frederick Barthelme on my shelves: 0.00)

So when I picked up this Barthelme I knew that I had enjoyed his work in the past, and could reasonably anticipate what I was getting into. Ironic, since it was Barthelme's originality that initially drew me to him. Now that he's become familiar, I choose to read him because I know it'll always be an easy, though smart & entertaining, read. When I chose this particular book, I hoped to jump-start an interest in Arthurian Grail Lore that might lead me to read the copy of From Ritual to Romance that I bought a few months back.

Which brings me to this book: it's a reimagining of Arthurian Grail Lore in the context of World War II. Most assuredly, plot is not Barthelme's strength. The characters, and their basic story arcs are of course familiar, being borrowed outright from Malory. And the WWII "twist": the Grail = the atom bomb, which Arthur rejects as "not a knightly weapon." Having thus considered and yawned at the book's plot, we now consider technique, which is why you read Barthelme in the first place.

Like a lot of Barthelme, the story is told almost entirely through dialogue. The book, essentially, is a collection of dialogues interspersed with occasional sentence fragments establishing location & characters' positions. There are a handful of amusing passages of "action"--mostly clashes between knights--that are told through the artificially narrative and exclamator exchanges of peasant onlookers.

"Sir Belvedere has single-handedly taken an entire battery of 105mm howitzers! The captured gunners line up with their hands behind their heads!"
"O noble Sir Belvdere! Sir Ironside is lashing with his ancient blade as one enchafed by a fiend!"
"But Mordred, too, is doing mighty deeds! He fights extremely well for a traitorous poltroon!"

So it's amusing, in an intelligent way, which is Barthelme at his best. Incidentally, he does his best in short fiction, which he seems to know. Any Barthelme "novel" I've ever read has been a collection of dialogue-driven two- or three-page "chapters." The King, though, works better than Snow White or The Dead Father.




This edition was published by "Dalkey Archive Press," who I first encountered when I read The Dalkey Archive itself. Thus far, I'm pleased with that publisher's selection of titles.