The hitherto unsuspected versatility of "n't"

In Death and the Dancing Footman, Ngaio March has written herself a corker of a thriller, a smashing piece, what?

It really is a good, suspenseful story. That the characters are all caricatures of British dandies can be either a hindrance, or a supplement, to your enjoyment of the story. A supplement, for the likes of me.

My new favorite line in all fiction: “You used to have a pair of Canadian snow shoes, usen’t you?”

USEN’T??????

You took a walk around the block, tookn’t you?

You ate all the candy, aten’t you?

You rode your bike the to the exterminator, rodent you?

See, that last one is a pun, because “rodent” is an actual word! In a sentence about an exterminator! Clever!

Death and the Dancing Footman is full of stuff like that, those old (not ancient, but old) English idioms, that style in which every speaker is a)grammatically correct, b) sophisticated and c) able to choose words and put them in order instantaneously in a sophisticated way.

After Mandrake has been rescued from a freezing pool in the middle of a blizzard:

“I can’t tell you how distressed I am. Another sip, no, do.”
“Jonathan, somebody came behind me and thrust me forward.”

Next time you want to insult someone: “He is a poltroon as well as a popinjay.”

A subplot is that one character is desperate to keep his real name a secret, because it is utterly humiliating. I was expecting something like “ Hemorrhoid” or “Poopbutt”. Nope: “Footling”. I had to look it up. It means “something trivial.” Speaking as a Celer, I find that not even worth mentioning, let alone making a subplot.

Anyway: excellent murder mystery. And a lot of fun if you like language.

And I have blogged. Blogn't I?

Cakes and Ale and Pi

Cakes and Ale fell apart while I was reading it.  Literally, the book disintegrated during the weeks it occupied me on the bus.  I had to hold it together with a rubber band.

And that’s my review of Cakes and Ale.

Actually, it’s a pretty good book by Somerset Maughan, published in 1930 and thus continuing my series on English writers of the Late 19^th and Early 20^th Centuries.  These writers generally adopt class and manners as a theme, either mocking or accepting the English fascination with propriety and social order.  This one mocks. 

It’s about writers, specifically, one who has died but had reached the firmament on which sit Shakespeare, Fielding, etc.   As the establishment begins eulogizing, it turns out the guys did his best writing while living with a gregarious free spirited woman, with whom he cared not a whit for class distinctions or “acceptable” behavior. Which is not at all what the establishment wants to know.

Very well written, of course, and engaging characters.  If you can find it, and it doesn’t fall apart on you, read it.

Evidently there as some controversy at the publication, as some contemporary authors thought Maugham was satirizing them.  Ironically, in the book I’m reading now, by Ngaio March (published in 1941), there’s a controversial writer with a club foot who, I think, is based on Maugham.  Though it’s a fun-house-mirror version of Maugham on which he’s based.

Between Cakes and Ale and the Marsh book, though, came Life of Pi by Yann Martel.  It’s about a teenage boy who winds up crossing the Pacific on a lifeboat with a tiger.  It is very similar to what happens every day on the bus.

The boy, Pi, had become, at an early age, a Hindu-Catholic-Moslem.  This , of course, is ridiculous, as the Catholics, at least, would not allow it.  But lets say it happened.  It was still no excuse to write this book.

The story of his survival is equally ridiculous:  initially, his companions are a crippled zebra, an orangutan and a hyena, as well as the tiger.  Eventually, just the tiger.  He survive s storms, heat, sharks, a blind cutthroat   in another llifeboat, and a carnivorous island made of algae.  After 6 months, he lands in Mexico.  What is the one thing everyone wants him to talk about?  Yes – ther theory of story telling from the viewpoint of a Hindu-Catholic-Moslem.

I mean, there were some good parts, and one can certainly suspend disbelief when a story demands it.  It’s the ending that ruins it:   a teenage boy goes through all this, and in the end all he's interested in is debating the Japanese maritime investigators about whether or not life itself is a story?  Blech.

Next entry soon: I just found something in the Ngaio Marsh book I can’t wait to write about.  Have to finish the book first, though.

Harry Potter, Buddhist

Well, my determination to read two books at once didn't really pan out. I'm up to page 10 of Cakes and Ale. I have finished all 7 harry Potter books. Again.

The main reason this hapened, of course, is that the Potter story is so interssting and easy to read. A subsidiary reaosn, perhaps, is that, as I started making my way through the first book, I wanted to keep everything -- everything -- fresh in my mind. I didn't want, for instance, a reference in The Order of the Phoenix to befuddle me, or make me scramble back in a blind search through the earlier books; I wanted to remember what the reference was about.

Weird thing. At times I really resented the hold the story had on me: I wished I could do something else. But that very resentment kept me reading, so that I'd get the project over with. And reading kept me hooked on the story, the same story I resented. Catch-22.  Viscious circle.  Whatever.

Buddhism  often refers to a double structure to insure the success of a project, of the fruition of a dream. There is a vertical connection between a dsiciple and the mentor, and a horizontal relation between various disciples. I didn't notice this in my first reading, but toward the end of The Half Blood Prince, and throughout The Deathly Hallows, it becomes obvious this double structure is what the Potter story is about. Harry would have nothing to do without the vision and instruction of Dumbledore, and he would be unable to do it without the support and encouragement of Ron and Hermoine. As a Buddhist, that just leapt out at me, the importsance of those two streams of relationships. Teacher, friends -- and Harry's own determination and loyalty ("I am Dumbledore's man through and through").

Another thing I picked up this time was the depth of the supporting characters, even the ones I didn't like. Snape is a great creation, but one of the 5 Stars, I would say (with Harry, Dumbledore, Ron and Hermoine). It's the peripherals: Luna Lovegood is a treasure, Lucius Malfoy lusciously oily, Dobby -- Dobby! Dobby changes over the course of the books, but stays so consistent in his personality (unlike, say, Neville) that one wonders how Rowling did it (and I admit to crying more at his fate than at any other occurrance, even the manipulative "hooks" at the end, when all heroes emerge simultaneously when [of course] least expected).. Some of them I got tired of, while still admitting their completeness. I mentioned Neville - not particularly fond of him, once his character is established, until the heroic end. Fred and George became too predictable. Other little things too.

Lost ends 4 days from now.  The Potter saga ends in a little over a year with the two Hallows flicks. Lost stands alone, but, frankly, the Harry books are superior to the movies, in every single way.

On to Cakes and Ale!

New Colony Six Gets Mentioned!

One things about long series that really interests me is: did the artist have it all planned out, in minute detail, from the beginning? Or did events – or popularity, actors’ contracts or other effects of time marching on – influence the direction the story takes?

I think, for instance, that a lot of Lost’s last couple of seasons was made up as they went along; they did not know, for instance, that Michael Emerson would be so terrific as Ben, so I doubt Ben was a big deal when they were outlining the arc. And I don’t think Tolkein had a clue about Aragorn (for instance) when he started The Hobbit, but most certainly did have a very detailed outline by the time he started The Fellowship of the Ring.

It strikes me, having now re-read the first Harry Potter book, that Ms Rowlings pretty much had it all down when she started. I found nothing inconsistent with later books, and a lot of positively accurate foreshadowing (Scabbers!) Groundwork laid sor Sirius Black, even.

I admire that.

“I Love You So Much” by the New Colony 6 on the speaker at Goodwill today!

Oh no - not again!

I've decided once again to read two books at once.  I've done it before with A Streetcar Named Desire and Madame Bovary.  This time, I was really intrigued by a yellowed old Pocket Books edition of Somerset Maugham's Cakes and Ale, but can no longer hold back the impulse to read all the Harry Potter books again.  So, now, a medley of Cakes and Ale and The Sorcerer's Stone.  Great fun.

I Enjoy AStupid Book Once In A While

Didn’t get far into Castenada.  It seemed to me you had to have read his earlier books to get this one – there was a sort of “starting in the middle” feel to it.  I’m not sure it was  a “story” as much as a lecture.  It also seemed like a bunch of people sitting around talking to each other.  Snooze.

So instead:  Total Control by David Baldacci.

This is one of those books where the bad guys are invincible, omniscient and successful until the last few pages when suddenly the good guys beat them.  It’s like the Michael Jordan Bulls playing the Knicks:  “Knicks lead.  One minute left, Knicks are ahead.  Knicks lead with ten seconds left.  That’s the game – Bulls win.”

Part of the bad guys’ problem (in this and other books like it – and on TV shows like Monk, too) might be that they kill everyone immediately, until they capture the hero.  Then, inexplicably, they keep her alive for one reason or another – in the case of Total Control, so the villain can explain to the readers all the intricacies of the convoluted plot.

David Balducci also wrote Absolute Power, another one with a totally absurd plot.  In that one, it was “burglar witnesses President of the United States kill someone”.  In Total Control it’s “Fed chairman killed in plane crash while computers take over the world” (written in 1997, before computers actually did take over the world).  Actually, it’s much more complex and confused than that, even;  in the last few chapters, the heroine explains the crime, then the villain explains it, and then the FBI agent explains it – all without repeating what the others have said.  All that explication was necessary, too.  In short:  an overly complicated plot, to the point of absurdity.

One of my favorite pet peeves makes a book-wide appearance too.  That is characters whose dialogue is directed to the readers, not to the other characters.  Or, worse, dialogue that is the writer thinking out loud, engaged in character development on the fly.

Ridiculous as it all is, I kept voraciously reading.  Because sometimes you just have to read absurd, badly written escapism.  You just have to.  It really is a page turner, one thing happening after another.  When you’re traveling, sometimes the scenery stinks, but you just enjoy the feeling of movement.  Sometimes so with books, too.

Book Switching

So I’m not going to be reading The End of the Affair just now.  I started it, but it begins with the guy in the affair kind of mocking the husband of affair-ee.  Not in the mood for that.  So I tried E.M. Forster’s The Longest Journey.  That one is full of 1907 English colloquialisms, references to things probably easily understandable in 1907 England, and what I suspect are inside jokes of 1907 English vintage.  Too iconoclastic.

So I’ve switched to something easier to understand:  Carlos Castenada’s The Eagle’s Gift.

(That's an inside 2010 American joke.)

Substitute bus driver again this morning.  As I got on he asked “Am I early?”  “I don’t know,” said I.

No watch.  No cel phone.  Plus, I forget what time the bus is supposed to arrive.  I leave the house at 6:42, and usually wait on the corner a few minutes.  Seemed about normal today.  

Quite cold still in the morning, but warm in the afternoon.  Hard to dress for.

Pothole is to Hawaii as Bus is to ????

The regular bus driver knows where the potholes are.  Just as we approach my stop – 42^nd Street for 2 or 3 blocks – the right lane is like the surface of the moon.  The regular driver takes it slowly, which I don’t mind, as getting to work is not a big moment in my day.

Today we had a substitute driver.  He did not slow down.  We all have bumps on our heads from bouncing on the roof. 

The Songs of Distant Earth by Arthur C. Clarke:  I don’t read much science fiction (at least, not much written after 1900 – H.H. Wells rocks!) 

And this did nothing to whet my appetite.  In fact, I can’t figure out what the point is, other than to give Clarke a chance to expound on why he doesn’t like religion.

There’s a planet that is kind of like Hawaii, all perfect and everything, on which refugees from a doomed Earth landed hundreds of years ago and established a quite benign civilization.  Suddenly, more refugees from Earth, who left after the first ones but in a faster ship, show up on their way to colonize a more distant planet. They pick up supplies – mostly, ice.  Then they leave.

Great story, huh?

I expect more satisfaction from my next book:  Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair.

Absolutely Nothing!

"Nothing is more barbarous than war. Nothing is more cruel . And yet, the war dragged on. Nothing is more pitiful than a nation being swept along by fools." --Daisaku Ikeda

For the first time in maybe 5 months, when I walked out the door this morning birds were singing.  Not geese honking, but real songbirds, really singing.  That’s one of those things you take for granted, I guess, and never think you’d notice so dramatically.    But, whew – I noticed it like you’d notice a light going on in the middle of the night.

I would write a song that begins “Little darling, it’s been a long cold lonely winter”, but that would be redundant.

All Quiet On The Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque

This book got Hitler P.O.ed at Remarque, so already it’s got s lot going for it.  It as hugely popular elsewhere, in its day (c. 1929), and at least 2 movies have been made from it.

It is a powerful, powerful anti-war book. 

I suppose the quality of the writing depends on the translation – I thought the copy I had seemed a bit clumsy with language, though I’m not sure there are any pothers – but there is no denying the intensity of thought, action, emotion.

On being sent to war by others:  “While they taught that duty to one’s country is the greatest thing, we already knew that death-throes are stronger.  But for all that, we were no mutineers, no deserters, no cowards – they were very free with all these expressions.  We loved our country as much as they ; we went courageously into every action; but we also distinguished the false from true, we had suddenly learnied to see.  And we saw that there was nothing of their world left.  We were all at once terribly alone; and alone we must see it through.” (Chapter 1)

On the military perspective:  “e were trained in the army for ten weeks and in that time more profoundly influenced than by ten years at school.  We learned that a bright button is weightier than four volumes of Schopenhauer.” (Chapter 2)

War’s effect on soldiers:  “…we reach the zone where the front begins and become on the instant human aniumals…A column – not men at all.”  (Chapter 4)

On the enemy:  Paul speaking to someone he’s just killed):  “Comrade, I did not ant to kill you.  If you jumped in here again I would not do it, if you would be sensible too.  But you were only an idea to me before, an abstraction…it was that abstraction I stabbed.  But now, for the first time, I see you are a man like me.  I thought of your hand grenades, and your bayonet, and your rifle.  Now I see your wife and your face and out fellowship.”  (Chapter 9)

War is hell.  A stupid, unnecessary hell.

Weather, and Wither

The snow is ugly now, surviving in clumps, some still tightly packed but covered in dirt and exhaust, losing to Spring, jagged pitiful. The newly freed grass, too, in places is ugly, so saturated it sinks at the touch, brown from the great weight it’s carried since December.

The yard is full of dog poop, but it’s way to wet for anyone to start cleaning it up yet.

On top of all that – The Big News – is that the Goodwill across from work is closing!

To refresh: the blog is supposed to be me reviewing books I find randomly at Goodwill, which I read while riding the bus to and from work. The cool thing is that the books are necessarily “random” – Goodwill doesn’t stock by popularity, or by request; it gets what people give it. Hence, you buy, not what you're looking for, but what is there.

Random.

Fortunately, I have a backlog (and I guess I have until June, when the store boards up, to increase the backlog). I’m currently reading All’s Quiet On The Western Front (review in maybe a week or so). And yet to come (note the randomness!):

Empire Falls (Richard Russo)
Life of Pi (Yann Martel)
Murder at the National Cathedral (Margaret Truman)
Villa Incognito (Tom Robbins)
Unlearning to Fly (Jennifer Brice)
The Last Woman In His Life (Ellery Queen)
The Fruit of My Lipstick (Shelley Adina) (probably won’t even actually read that one)
Total Control (David Baldacci)
The Eagle’s Gift (Carlos Castaneda)
The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon (Stephen King)
Rabbit Is Rich (John Updike)
Nevada (Zane Grey)
Giles Goat Boy (John Barth)
The Log From The Sea of Cortez (John Steinbeck)
The Picture of Dorian Gray and Other Writings (Oscar Wilde)
Go Down Moses (William Faulkner)
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (Mark Twain)
Miss Marple - The Complete Short Stories (Agatha Christie)
Death and the Dancing Footman (Ngaio March)
50 Great American Short Stories
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (Tom Stoppard)

That’s about a third of what’s left right now. So there's probably 3 or 4 years of reading ahead, even without a sourtce of new oldies. And I hope to be done with this hellish job by then anyway.

It has occurred to me that I need a publicist. Not for any selfish reason, but because it seems to me I'm performing something worthwhile here. We have a tendency to let things drop out of fashion and then, out of existence. Where, for instance, are the songs on the album Along Comes...The Association? Why isn't Your Show of Shows rerun on KPTM late at night?

And: what kid today is going to think: "Wonder if there's abook called All's Quiet on the Western Front." Probably none. Also probably not many thinking about Candide, or Winter of Our Discontent, or The Time Machine. Maybe (so I flatter myself) I can remind them such things exist. Sure, they know of Grapes of Wrath, have had Ivanhoe and Huckleberry Finn forced on them at school. But the Second Tier, Steinbeck's and Twain's Others, the little gems -- not a big market, not something they will think of on their own.

I hope I help a little in keeping these things in mind.

Do NOT base your civilization on this book!

The Odyssey by Homer: I hope this Homer hasn’t written anything else besides The Odyssey. This book is one tired cliché after another, with a tired old theme (guess what it is – an odyssey! Duh.) and characters that behave as if they weren’t all human.

Cliches: Beautiful enticing women are called “Sirens”. Come on. A one-eyed giant is – what else? – a “Cyclops”. But the worse thing is that Homer names his main character “Odysseus”. Yep - a guy on an odyssey is named Odyesseus. It’d be like if Mark Twain named his runaway boy “Rafty”, or if Tolkein called his hero “Ringo”. We get it – he’s on an odyssey! No need to name the character after the plot!

So what of this eponymous journey? Well, it takes up only three of 23 chapters (or “Books”, as the author ostentatiously calls them), and even then they’re not really happening. They’re merely related, after the fact, by Odysseus as he’s eating dinner. It’s like that terrible Forrest Gump movie, about a guy sitting on a bus bench, who ruins the story by rambling on and on about stuff that happened years before. Big deal, Odysseus – a six headed dog with 12 feet ate your crew a few years ago. Ancient history! Who cares?

So dude gets home and it turns out every guy in town is hanging out at his place because they all want to marry his wife. Okay – he’s been gone 20 years, so she’s what? Let’s be generous and say 38. On this whole island, there’s no woman anyone wants except a 38 year old mother of a 20 year old whose fierce warrior husband may or may not still be alive and coming home?

Right.

Odysseus comes home, spends a few chapters planning to brutally murder the suitors, and then does so. Not only that, but as one chapter – excuse me, “book” -- heading so succinctly puts it: “The maids who have misconducted themselves are made to cleanse the cloisters, and then are hanged”.

Yeah, there’s a guy worth waiting for. Domestic abuse potential? Nah!

There are other characters running around, most notably “Athena”, who is sometimes a bird, sometimes an old man, sometimes a beautiful woman; and Poseidon, who evidently controls the sea, like Lilo’s fish in Lilo and Stitch controls the weather.

What can you say about The Odyssey?

Great Book Reviewed Here (It's about time)

(For some reason, today Blogger is not allowing any special formatting such as italics. Ergo, no italics.)

So Friday night, January 29, saw the semi-rare occurrence of the moon reaching its perigee the same time it’s full. Result: brightest moon of the year (the January full moon is called the wolf moon – strange but true…..)

Our niece Britta was born under that full moon, and will, undoubtedly, walk under many full moons almost as bright as herself.

It’s been good, the last few days, to see the moon and the sunrise at the bus stop. It seems like it had been cloudy for a month. Sunrise always has surprising colors.

And it’s pure coincidence that all this happened just as I was finishing Cormac McCarthhy’s The Road. The story of a child in a devastated environment, where the moon is not seen and the sun is little more than a rumor and a memory – it “circles the earth like a grieving mother with a lamp”.

There has been some catastrophe, unnamed, that has left the world lifeless except for a few surviving humans who have to compete for whatever old canned goods they can find, however questionable the quality of what’s in the cans. Snow falls and turns dirty immediately: the atmosphere is ashy, the sky forever gray.

The boy and his father, both nameless, travel through this hell, on foot, pushing a cart with their vital belongings, tarps and blankets and whatever food they’ve found and saved, traveling to the ocean. Why? I imagine because it’s there, and it’s the ocean. “We got to go”. The Man repeats over and over. “We can’t stay here.” So, to the ocean.

That’s not their only concern. The concern of the few humans left is their own survival, and they’ve, most of them, turned to murder and cannibalism.

The Man and the Boy, though, want to survive on more noble terms. The Boy keeps asking, and the Man keeps reassuring him: “We’re the good guys, right?” and “We’re carrying the fire, right?”

This is the point, I think. The Boy wants to do good, wants to be compassionate. The father can’t allow that in this environment; interaction of any kind could be their doom. But the father knows it’s important, knows that the Boy’s compassion and love have to be kept alive; and, in the end, that’s all there is, all that matters. The catastrophe has exposed our race: “The frailty of everything revealed at last. Old and troubling issues resolved into nothingness and night . . .(He) read old newspapers while the boy slept. The curious news. The quaint concerns.”

The starkness of the writing brings this all into incredibly sharp focus. There are no chapters, only occasional double spacing between paragraphs. There are no diversions into philosophy, only a grim account of every step, every morsel of food eaten, every dream resented.

The language and writing forms are whittled down, the setting is stripped bare, the supporting cast is mostly is shadow; and the result is a clear, sharp focus on the emotional bond of these two people, for there is nothing else but their love, their need and struggle to preserve goodness, the precariousness of the survival of Hope and Compassion.

The Road, for me, was almost impossible to read because the danger was so stark, so immediate on every page. And yet I had to keep reading for that very reason – I couldn’t stop there, I had to move on, I had to find a better place. I had to know the good guys were still good, the fire was safe for another day.

Brilliant.

(I’m happy that it’s getting easier for me to compile a “favorite” list; I’m discovering about one a year, it seems: To Kill A Mockingbird, Madame Bovary, The Bell Jar, and now The Road. One more for a Top 5 Bus Book List).

The Hazards of Occupational Hazards

Almost a month after the last storm, and the snow is still piled so high on street corners that I can’t wait for the bus on the sidewalk, and have to stand out n the intersection – not on the busy streets, Center and 42nd, but on the side streets, 114th and Pierce. The bus lights seem brighter lately; maybe they have new buses, or maybe I’m just happy to see them coming.

On the bus, I really got into Occupational Hazards for a while. It’s by Jonathan Segura, about whom I can find no detailed biographical information, but who evidently spent a good deal of time in Omaha. Don’t misunderstand – the book is repulsive and clichéd. What kept me going was the setting – Omaha – and the plot centered around real events dressed up a bit.

The real events are the renovation of an area near downtown, which happened around 2002 or so; and the Franklin Credit Union scandal, which came to a head around 1988.

The book is repulsive because of its inability to fashion a paragraph without the F word. It’s cliched because the next two most frequently used words are “cigarette” and “grease”: every place the “hero goes has to be dirty, the food he eats has to be greasy, the people he hangs with have to be scamming something. Get it? It's noir! Segura's read Dash Hammet and Raymond Chandler, but doesn't understand them. On second thought, maybe he just read synopses -- is there a Cliff Notes for The Maltese Falcon? The masochism (I assume his hero is fulfilling some fantasy of the author) builds and bills to a truly disgusting climax, and then the hero is saved by a deus ex -- literal -- machina.

And Segura should have spent a dime to rent The Incredibles, for a lesson on bad-guy-monologues. It is especially hackneyed when they bad guys kill everyone who crosses them, until the hero comes along – the one who can do them the most damage – and they keep him alive. Sure.

I applaud the attempt to dig out interest in the Franklin cover-up, but I wish it had been done by someone who can write a good story.

Sad to say, but Occupational Hazards is terrible.

It Don't Mean A Thing If It Ain't Got That Swing

Body and Soul by Frank Conroy

“Body and Soul” is a jazz standard and more – it’s a requirement for, at least, anyone who aspires to play sax in a jazz band. From what I’m told, “Body and Soul” is as basic and routine as a scale. If you can play the sax, you have played “Body and Soul”.

So it’s an important thing.

The book, Body and Soul, is about a musician: not a jazz musician, though he dabbles and likes to listen to jazz. And at no time are the words “body and soul” used in the book, except in the title. Go figure.

I guess there is an implication of “Body and Soul”, because this is a musician’s book, and I can’t imagine anyone not a musician getting caught up in the plot. And not just a casual musician, like me, but an accomplished musician, a student of music. Many of the conflicts, the sources of much of the tension, arise from situations the lay person couldn’t possibly relate to:

“Five or six bars in, Fredericks said, ‘Wait. Stop. Let me here is not legato. See if you can play it non legato’. Claude thought about it for a minute and began again, concentrating on the value of the notes . . .” (Chapter 6)

(On Charles Ives) “I guess it was a question of whether it’s a synthesis, a kind of prophetic use of dissonance as the only way to pull all the themes together and rise above them, or whether he’s thumbing his nose at us.” (Chapter 20)

“What happened was this: after having played the first four bars two beats G minor two beats C seventh…they suddenly found themselves ascending by half tones…It was so exciting, the apparent escape from tonality . . .” (Chapter 21)

Well, okay. Those aren't just isolated passages: there are pages and pages of stuff like that, where the dramatic tension is "Gosh, can he do it?", when few casual readers will understand what it is he has to do. My friend Vito might get excited reading this,but Conroy expects me to, and he has written way over my head – and I bet over most people’s heads.

There’s also a chapter in which a jazz musician cryptically hands Claude a cryptic note, and then cryptically drops dead in the Automat. The significance of the note is never made clear.

Body and Soul is a pretty long book – 447 pages, and it took me a month to read on the bus – and ultimately not worth the trip. The lack of comprehensible tension is made worse by the fact that Cklaude can do no wrong, that everything works for him, that he’s invincible. So why be interested? I’m not, any more. I was for a while, wondering when someone was going to play “Body and Soul”. The song.