Of Mice and Men

This one's a country mouse driven by a little old lady on dialup
This one is an optical fellow, he needs glasses
This one's our patented oncomouse, he went to Harvard
This wee cowering beastie has the best laid plans
This one saved a lion, this one scared an elephant
This one ran up a clock, this one's a rat in disguise

The Rebel Angels

What a shitty book!

Professor Ozias Froats examines human excrement by the bucketful.

Clement Hollier is interested in Medieval Filth Therapy.

Maria Theotoky's mother uses horse dung to refurbish old violins.

John Parlabane bequeaths his arsehole to the university.

Urquhart MacVarish likes having ribbon shoved up his bum.

And here are a few pungent thoughts from the Reverend Simon Darcourt, after visiting Ozy's lab:

I walked on toward Ploughwright, thinking about faeces. What a lot we had found out about the prehistoric past from the study of fossilized dung of long-vanished animals. A miraculous thing, really; a recovery of the past from what was carelessly rejected. And in the Middle Ages, how concerned people who lived close to the world of nature were with faeces of animals. And what a variety of names they had for them: the Crotels of a Hare, the Friants of a Boar, the Spraints of an Otter, the Werderobe of a Badger, the Waggying of a Fox, the Fumets of a Deer. Surely there might be some words for the material so near to the heart of Ozy Froats better than shit? What about the Problems of a President, the Backward Passes of a Footballer, the Deferrals of a Dean, the Odd Volumes of a Librarian, the Footnotes of a Ph.D., the Low Grades of a Freshman, the Anxieties of an Untenured Professer?

But The Rebel Angels is not just a satire of university life, it is also a morality play. The title refers to angels tossed out of heaven, not all of them "sore-headed egotists like Lucifer. Instead they gave mankind another push up the ladder, they came to earth and taught tongues, and healing and laws and hygiene..."

The profs at the College of St. John and the Holy Ghost are rebel angels, flawed but well-intentioned. They are also medievalists, either by training (Hollier, Darcourt, McVarish, Parlabane and Maria) or in spirit (Froats). Maria's mother is a gypsy who's practically living in the Middle Ages; she gives tarot readings and knows how to cast a curse and prepare a love philtre.

Parlabane is the villain of the piece, "as slippery-tongued, as entertaining, and sometimes as frightening as the Devil himself." He is also one of Davies's most engaging creations.

The urbane prose is a pleasure to read, and the humour has a superb Rabelaisian flavour.

"Roberta, have I ever shown you my penis-bone?" Professor Burns, a zoologist, did not turn a hair. "Have you truly got one? I know they used to be common, but it's ages since I saw one." Urky detached an object with a gold handle from his watch-chain and handed it to her. "Eighteenth century; very fine." "Oh, what a beauty. Look, Professor Lamotte, it's the penis-bone of a raccoon; very popular as toothpicks in an earlier day. And tailors used them for ripping out basting. Very nice, Urky. But I'll bet you haven't got a kangaroo-scrotum tobacco pouch; my brother sent me one from Australia." Professor Lamotte regarded the penis-bone with distaste. "Don't you find it disagreeable?" he said. "I don't pick my teeth with it," said Urky, "I just show it to ladies on social occasions." "You astonish me," said Lamotte.

The Rebel Angels is the first book in the Cornish Trilogy. The second is What's Bred in the Bone, the third The Lyre of Oprheus.

The Professional

Frank Hughes is a war vet and old friend of Doc Carroll. He's doing a magazine piece on Eddie Brown, a 29-year-old welterweight whom Doc has been managing for nine years.

He was Doc's fighter. It is what a painter does in his paintings so that you would know them, even without his signature, and what the writer does in his writings, if he is enough of a writer, so you know that no one in the whole world but he could have been the writer.

Eddie's not just a better boxer than the current champ, he's a decent hard-working guy. He's not a showboat. He's as mild-mannered as his training camp diet -- stewed prunes, dry toast, soft-boiled eggs. Everybody likes him, and now he's got a shot at the title.

The month-long training camp and the fight itself are seen through Frank's eyes. We meet an assortment of colourful characters:

Johnny Jay - Doc's pail man
Memphis Kid - Eddie's sparring partner
Barnum, Polo and Charlie Keener - managers
Penna, Schaeffer, Cardone and Booker Boyd - fighters

Only a few of them truly understand the sport of boxing, which is "just too intricate for the average person, fight fan or not, to comprehend." To Frank and Doc, the same seems true for just just about everything else in the world. "Dreadful" is Doc's favourite word.

Frank and Doc live in hotels and do a lot of drinking and telling of stories -- about the war, about boxing and baseball. Like the time Doc opened his door and an enforcer named Razor Pete took a swipe at him with a knife. Doc drops him with a couple of punches, then politely lifts him to his feet and assists him to the elevator. He and Frank visit Razor Pete's boss, a gangster who wants a piece of Doc's fighter. The gangster compliments Frank's writing, Doc returns Pete's broken knife, and they have a friendly drink together and talk baseball.

Years later Frank bumps into Razor Pete, who is in poor health by then. He's asthmatic and has a bad heart. He offers profuse thanks for a glass of water.

It's a manly world where politeness is not a sign of weakness.

Hemingway

Papa's influence is obvious from page one. The author, W.C. Heinz, met him during WW2, and when The Professional came out in 1958, Hemingway immediately cabled him from Cuba, saying: "This is the only good novel I've ever read about a fighter."

This edition includes a foreword by Elmore Leonard, who became acquainted with Heinz after he too wrote a congratulatory letter. Leonard mentions his own debt to Hemingway, and remarks that Heinz was "the all-important link, the next step" in his own development as a writer. The two met later when Heinz came out to Detroit to interview Gordie Howe, who lived a few blocks away from Leonard.

Heinz passed away just last year. He's been inducted in the Boxing Hall of Fame, and his "Death of a Racehorse" is considered one of the best sports pieces ever written. His collaboration with a physician resulted in the novel MASH, which appeared under the pseudonym Richard Hooker.

Descartes' Bones

A Skeletal History of the Conflict between Faith and Reason

Descartes is:

a) the father of modern philosophy
b) the intellectual father of modern France
c) the author of one of the most influential books of all time
d) as peripatetic after death as before

Who would have guessed the last point? In 1650 Descartes died in Sweden, where his remains stayed for 16 years until exhumed and returned to France. But upon opening the casket, the skull was discovered missing and the rest of the skeleton to be in poor condition. Many of the bones had dissolved into dust.

The unravelling of this mystery spans several centuries, and sounds as fantastic as a Dan Brown novel. When the skull was finally located, it was covered with graffiti -- a poem in Latin and the signatures of successive owners.

This part of the story reminded me of the bizarre travels of Einstein's brain, and the stuffing and mounting of Jeremy Bentham's body topped off with a wax head, which itself has wandered off on more than one occasion.

But no less fascinating is the role that Descartes' bones continued to play in advancing science. In telling this part of the tale, the author elucidates some aspects of the Enlightenment, drops in on the French Revolution, and spends time with Broca, Cuvier, and other famous figures. Phrenology, the Society of Mutual Autopsy, and the weight of Byron's brain are just some of the odder corners of science visited.

The world's greatest assembly of scientists had reached a conclusion, one that rested not on an ideal of certainty but on the modern notion of probability. They had applied their doubts to the very head that had introduced doubt as a tool for advancing knowledge. And in the end they gave the head a nod.

This is a great book. Check out its website.

Aqualung

Walking home at night, the weight of the tank on my shoulder, I'm thinking about partial pressures, and residual nitrogen, and how your mouth resembles a second-stage regulator.

All around me houses are hunched like wrecks at the bottom of the sea, lovers inside groping for each other like divers at 20 fathoms.

Bottom time, you and I once referred to it with sly smiles, but that was long ago, and still there are months of decompression ahead of me.

Now the raw winter wind slices at my eyes so I put on my mask and gaze up at the inverted sky, where an ocean of air ends in breathless space.

Finally I arrive home, and swim inside through a gash in the hull.

Fiskadoro

This is a post-holocaust tale published in 1985, just before the end of the Cold War. It's a mythopeic and hallucinatory work that questions the nature of reality, especially when memory fades and history is lost.

Fiskadoro is a 12-year-old boy living near Key West, now renamed Twicetown after being hit by two missiles carrying nuclear warheads. The warheads were duds.

Life is simple and uncouth, facilitated by the forgiving climate, the sea loaded with fish, and the debris of a pre-holocaust world. People use odd names, like Flying Man and King David Rat, and speak a mangled patois: "All I own do is gepback home."

Woven into the narrative are several journeys, the most important of which are the first two:

1. Fiskadoro, an Orpheus-like figure, is being taught how to how to play the clarinet by Mr. Cheung. He's captured by swamp-people who erase, among other things, his memory.

2. Mr. Cheung's grandmother was one of the last people to escape from Saigon before it fell to Communist forces. Now she is scarcely cognizant of her surroundings. Her long ordeal is described in detail.

3. Mr. Cheung himself travels to another island in pursuit of knowledge--a book that will explain the nuclear holocaust. He "believed in the importance of remembering."

4. Mr. Cheung's half-brother is "a famous, almost legendary figure" whose current name is Cassius Clay Sugar Ray. He recounts an odyssey to the mainland where he and his shipmates are captured by gamblers. He wants to obtain the drug used by the swamp-people to obliterate memories.

Fiskadoro is not a slice of sci-fi. It is a gritty surrealistic tale, closer to a novel like Fishboy by Mark Richard than McCarthy's The Road or Atwood's Oryx and Crake.

The author, Denis Johnson, is an award-winning poet and novelist. Some of his other novels are Already Dead, Recusitation of a Hanged Man, and Tree of Smoke.

Fiskadoro had nothing against the grandmother except that the whole time she sat there, every time, she smoked a long cigarillo backward, with the lit end resting in her mouth and the spit dripping down to darken the other end, the end she should have been smoking. Maybe this was how they smoked their cigarets in the old days...

Radio Cuba

A Brief History of Time

Stephen Hawking is a writer of cosmological space westerns, the most famous of which is this book, A Brief History of Time. His use of literary devices such as imaginary time and virtual particles makes our universe seem like the world of Bizarro in Superman comics, or an updated version of Alice in Wonderland.

Characters

First of all there’s Newton, a rather nasty fellow who pursued counterfeiters all the way to the gallows. Einstein was much nicer, but he disliked gambling, especially with dice. Heisenberg couldn’t make up his mind about anything, Godel proved nothing was provable, and Feynman said everything was possible. Fortunately most of these guys have a sense of humour, like the comedy team of Alpher, Bethe, and Gamow.

The villains of the book are as odd a bunch as you’ll find this side of a pack of cards. There’s a secret society of Mesons, and a couple of clowns named P-Brane and Glueball, and the weak but chubby Massive Vector Bosons.

Then there’s the Quarks, a slippery bunch named after a passage in James Joyce’s Ulysses, and described by Hawking as “somewhat metaphysical.” Thus did modern literature influence particle physics – not just in the trivial matter of names, but in the very subjectivity of existence.

Or to put it another way, stream-of-consciousness helped pave the way for quantum mechanics.

Plot

This is your basic coming-of-age story.

Quotes

A black hole has no hair.

String theory is rather like plumbing.

The universe is the ultimate free lunch.

The total energy of the universe is exactly zero.

Why do we remember the past but not the future?

An ordinary particle moving forward in time is equivalent to an antiparticle moving backward in time.

Black holes are not really black.

The Author

In my copy of this book, the previous owner had left a newspaper clipping dated 1995. It announced Hawking's second marriage. His first wife was quoted as saying that Hawking “is in the grip of forces that he can’t control.”

Of course, that is literally quite true. In 1963 he was diagnosed with ALS and given no more than two years to live. Yet despite being almost completely paralyzed and no longer able to speak, he's become a world-famous theoretical physicist and cultural icon. He’s addressed NASA, experienced zero-G, and appeared on numerous TV shows, including a famous episode of ST:TNG.

His picture on the book’s cover -- a crumpled body against a backdrop of stars -- sums up the pathos of human existence.

A Brief History of A Brief History

1988 - A Brief History of Time
1996 - The Illustrated A Brief History of Time: Updated and Expanded Edition
1998 - A Brief History of Time: Updated and Expanded 10th Anniversary Edition
2005 - A Briefer History of Time (with Leonard Mlodinow)
2008 - A Brief History of Time: 20th Anniversary Edition

More Cosmological Westerns

Interested readers might try the Shrodinger's Cat trilogy by Robert Anton Wilson, and The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics by Leonard Susskind.

The Road to Oxiana

In 1933 an Englishman named Robert Byron began a pilgrimmage to Persia, or what is now called Iran.

His main interest was Islamic architecture, and one of his goals was to reach the ancient river of Oxus (now called the Amu), which at the time marked the boundary between Afghanistan and the former USSR.

His description of this journey has been called the first modern travel book for its unique combination of humour, erudition, and splendid writing. His influence on Bruce Chatwin is immediately obvious.

One of my favourite passages, which even my schoolboy French was able to comprehend, takes place in Damascus:

“Guide, Monsieur?” Silence. “Qu’est-ce vous désirez, Monsieur?” Silence. “D’où venez-vous, Monsieur?” Silence. “Où allez-vous, Monsieur?” Silence. “Vous avez des affaires ici, Monsieur?” “Non.” “Vous avez des affaires à Baghdad, Monsieur?” “Non.” “Vous avez des affaires à Téhéran, Monsieur?” “Non.” “Alors, qu’est-ce que vous faites, Monsieur?” “Je fais un voyage en Syrie.” “Vous êtes un officier naval, Monsieur?” “Non.” “Alors, qu’est-ce que vous êtes, Monsieur?” “Je suis homme.” “Quoi?” “HOMME.” “Je comprends. Touriste.”

It's a silly passage, but a good example of Byron's irrepressible wit, which runs throughout the book.

Sadly, the places he visited (Iran under Reza Shah, Afghanistan with Russia menacing the border) are no less volatile today. When he learns a rumour is circulating that he works for the Secret Service, he remarks prophetically, "Next time I do this kind of journey, I shall take lessons in spying beforehand. Since one has to put up with the disadvantages of the profession anyhow, one might as well reap some of its advantages, if there are any."

Back in England he spoke out loudly against the policy of appeasement, and in 1941 agreed to work for British Intelligence. The ship he set out on to return to the Middle East was torpedoed before it arrived. He was only 36.

The edition of The Road to Oxiana pictured above contains excellent introductions by Rory Stewart and Paul Fussell, as well as maps and several B&W photos of the buildings that Byron sought out.

If you enjoy travel writing, read this book.

Untitled

Outside, the city was lurching into stunned awareness. The clockwork began to turn, motors gasped like asthmatics, and smoke dribbled into the sky. People appeared on the streets as though propelled from cuckoo clocks, only to be packed into subway cars like cans on a conveyor belt.

Through this turmoil trotted Danny, as unconcerned as a hound free of its leash. He moved along board fences plastered with posters and curses, and came to a rail line which he followed over a canal of oily water by means of a blackened steel bridge.

This brought him to a section of the city composed of puffing factories and battered warehouses, and then to a suburb of row after row of grimy houses.

All day he walked, until at length the skyline rose behind him and the impatient grunting of autos diminished.

Computer Fungus

It was inevitable that this would happen, that an organism miles in length would eventually find its way here, a dump clogged with circuit boards. The fungal mat sent forth rhizomorphs that explored the fibreglass substrate and traced the metal rootlets within. The mycelium took on a geometrical shape, and the fruiting bodies became boxy and cubical with gills that resembled the metal vanes of heat sinks. Soon digital spores drifted across the landscape, and, after warm summer rains, hackers roamed the forest looking for mushrooms to incorporate into their computers.

Gravity's Rainbow

"A great steaming slagheap of a novel." That's how David Quammen puts it in one of his essays.

Paragraphs go on forever, scenes and POVs blur into an endless torrent. Characters flicker past with names like Lloyd Nipple, Ronald Cherrycoke, and Blodgett Waxwing. Four hundred of them, including an octopus and a guy who can change the colour of his skin. Take a trip down a toilet, throw pies at airplanes, relax at the Casino Hermann Goering.

When you come up for air you're dazed and blinking, disoriented by the encyclopedic detail, nasty sex, strange conspiracies, acronyms and aliases, druggie humour, snippets of German, and doggerel like "The Penis He Thought Was His Own."

Oh, and don't forget the formulas:

So Is It Any Good?

Imagine Richard Brautigan and Henry Miller co-writing an entire season of The X-Files and you'll get a notion of what to expect. Portions of the novel are absolutely brilliant. But it is such a convoluted work that you'll need to read it several times to get a handle on it. You'll need to study it. But look on the bright side. Master the book and you'll be able to teach the sucker at university.

Search for the word "Vsesoynznyy" in Google Books and read 2 or 3 pages for a sample of Pynchon at his best, an inspired mixture of farce and erudition.

Now decide. Is this, as some feel, one of the greatest novels of the 20th century? Or is it, as the 1974 Pulitzer committee said, "unreadable, turgid, overwritten and obscene"?

Need Help?

You can buy Steven C. Weisenburger's A Gravity's Rainbow Companion: Sources and Contexts for Pynchon's Novel. You can also check out the following sources on the Web:

Character Index
Gravity’s Rainbow Wiki
NY Times review by Richard Locke
Ultra-Condensed Version by Glenn Davis
Some Things That “Happen” (More or Less) in Gravity’s Rainbow by Michael Bell

Edward Whittemore

A forgotten author whose work reminded me very much of Pynchon is Edward Whittemore, author of the hard-to-find "Jerusalem Quartet," which consists of Sinai Tapestry, Jerusalem Poker, Nile Shadows, and Jericho Mosaic. I've only read Jerusalem Poker, but I'd definitely put it in the same ballpark as the two Pynchon novels I've read, V and Gravity's Rainbow.

Whittemore was apparently as inscrutable as Pynchon.

Life of Johnson

The greatest achievement of Samuel Johnson, the most famous man of English letters, was the first comprehensive dictionary of the English language, a task that he accomplished almost single-handedly.

He is also remembered for:
• his essays in two periodicals, The Rambler and The Idler
• an influential edition of the plays of Shakespeare
• a series of biographical and critical sketches called Lives of the Poets
• a novel called Rasselas, which he wrote in a week
• a travelogue called A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland

But that’s not all. He was a celebrity in his own time, not just as a literary figure, but also as a conversationalist who could deliver incisive, well-formed sentences on any subject, and so loved verbal combat that people were sometimes were afraid to open their mouths around him. He had an almost oracular status.

Johnson achieved fame despite the handicaps of poverty and ill health. He was afflicted with scrofula, gout, dropsy, depression, asthma, weak eyes, and odd compulsive behaviour later diagnosed as Tourette’s Syndrome. He was forced to leave Oxford without taking a degree due to lack of funds, and later in life was arrested for non-payment of debts.

When he was 53, Johnson met a young Scottish man named James Boswell, and they formed a deep and lasting affection for each other. "Bozzy" immediately began recording Johnson’s conversation with the ultimate aim of producing a biography. The result is a work that has transmitted Johnson’s fame through the centuries.

Life of Johnson

First published in 1791, Boswell’s work has been called the most famous biography ever written. It's also one of the longest -- my edition clocked in at 1400 pages, not including an 90-page index. There are some rather dry stretches, due in part to issues that are no longer relevant, and to a style of writing that can be pompous and long-winded. And at times Boswell injects more of himself into the book than is warranted. For example, he launches into a lengthy defense when Johnson criticizes his Latin.

What I enjoyed most about this book was seeing Johnson's human side, particularly his wit, courage, and generosity. This great grotesque man is worthy of our respect and study. I was left with a desire to dig deeper into his writings, and to read a more modern biography.

In search of the latter I found this excellent article in The New Yorker.

Life of Boswell

Boswell was a likeable but somewhat aimless fellow, who during the course of his life met some of the greatest minds who ever lived. He was literally a student of Adam Smith at the University of Glasgow. During his travels on the continent he met Rousseau and Voltaire. Back in England, as part of Johnson’s circle of friends, he was on familiar terms with Edmund Burke, David Garrick, Oliver Goldsmith, and Sir Joshua Reynolds. He was also acquainted with David Hume and Laurence Sterne, and chatted with Captain Cook at a dinner party.

Thus it comes as something of a shock to learn that Boswell was a compulsive drinker, gambler, and fornicator. He was also a failure as a lawyer.

Open Net

In 1977 George Plimpton put on the pads for the Bruins in a pre-season game against the Flyers. He was 50 years old and could barely skate.

The team welcomed him by cutting the bottom out of his underpants and applying a smelly substance to the rest of his clothes.

As coach, Don Cherry serves up lots of colourful quotes, especially when talking about hockey legend Eddie Shore, who once called a meeting with players and their wives and ordered them to cut out the sex.

He would tie his goaltenders to the crossbar to keep them from going down, and make them practice alone in an empty arena, without a puck. He told a player who was in a slump to part his hair on the other side of his head.

Other observations recorded by Plimpton:

Phil Esposito on Gilles Gratton: "The craziest player we ever had. Spaced out. One night he wouldn't play because the moon was in the wrong part of the sky."

Don Cherry on Boom-Boom Geoffrion: "He referred to himself by his nickname. In a restaurant, he'd announce, 'Boom-Boom is pleased. Boom-Boom likes this chicken.'"

John Wensink on Keith Magnuson: "The poor man. He ran into one punch after another."

What Bobby Orr's knee looked like: "A bag of handkerchiefs."

And my favourite, from a fan: "It's hard to throw an octopus with pinpoint accuracy."

A fast, entertaining read.

True Grit

The novels of Charles Portis are alike in their southern voice and setting, their humorous dialogue and eccentric characters.

Where True Grit differs from the others is that it takes place in the past -- during the 1870s after the American Civil War.

It's an anti-western.

Mattie Ross is a 14-year-old girl whose father has been shot down by a hired hand named Tom Chaney.

She sets out after him with a Texas Ranger named LaBeouf (pronounced "LaBeef"), and a one-eyed federal marshall named Rooster Cogburn, who eats corn dodgers and drinks "double-rectified busthead."

On one level the book reads like a YA novel, particularly at its climax, which involves a cave inhabited by bats, snakes and a skeleton.

But it is rescued from this one misstep by great dialogue, Mattie's pungent observations, and an ending that is far from treacly.

A sample:

I sat at one corner of the table between her and a tall, long-backed man with a doorknob head and a mouthful of prominent teeth. He and Mrs. Floyd did most of the talking. He traveled about selling pocket calculators. He was the only man there wearing a suit of clothes and a necktie. He told some interesting stories about his experiences but the others paid little attention to him, being occupied with their food like hogs rooting in a bucket. "Watch out for those chicken and dumplings," he told me. Some of the men stopped eating. "They will hurt your eyes," he said. A dirty man across the table in a smelly deerskin coat said, "How is that?" With a mischievous twinkle the drummer replied. "They will hurt your eyes looking for the chicken." I thought it a clever joke but the dirty man said angrily, "You squirrelheaded son of a bitch," and went back to eating.

The book contains laudatory quotes from Esquire, The New York Times, The Saturday Review and from Jonathem Lethem, Roald Dahl, and Walker Percy (the man who saved A Confederacy of Dunces from oblivion).

Weird and Tragic Shores

The Story of Charles Francis Hall, Explorer

Great title for a fabulous book about a self-made man from Cincinnati who becomes obsessed with the Arctic. In 1860 he mounts a one-man expedition and heads north by bumming a ride on a whaler.

He spends eight years living among the Inuit, first on southern Baffin Island, where he is astonished by tales of Frobisher's visits three centuries before, then on the Arctic mainland where he is thrilled by stories that a few men from Franklin's lost expedition may have survived long after the rest had perished.

Hall returns to the US something of a celebrity, meeting President Grant and Lady Franklin. He writes a book, Life with the Esquimaux, and mounts a new expedition, this time with government backing.

It is a bitter disaster. He dies claiming he's been poisoned, and half the company is marooned on an ice floe for over six months.

This book is a rarity in that it contains much original research without sacrificing readability. It is topped off by the author's visit in 1968 to Greenland, where he exhumes Hall's body. Analysis of hair and fingernail clippings reveal that Hall had ingested toxic amounts of arsenic. Loomis carefully works out the ramifications of this discovery.

Ebierbing and Tookoolito

As remarkable as Hall's story is, equally affecting is that of Ebierbing and Tookoolito, an Inuit couple he met on Baffin Island. They were to remain his companions for the rest of his life. They accompanied him to the US, then back to the Arctic on his second and third expeditions. It was Ebierbing's skills as a hunter that enabled 19 people to survive for the six months they spent on the ice floe drifting south.

Their story is worthy of its own book.

Nostromo

A Tale of the Seaboard

Reading this book, I imagined it as a dark hulk steaming slowly and irrevocably toward a hidden shoal, while the author moved among the passengers and crew, holding up a lantern to illuminate their faces, one by one. The ending arrives with the force of a Greek tragedy.

The novel takes place in Costaguana, a fictional and politically unstable Central American country. Its greatest resource is the blood-soaked San Tomé silver mine, now the focal point of a revolution. Rebels attack Sulaco, a port near the mine, but are overcome at the last moment, allowing the province to separate from Costaguana and become an independent country.

Nearly everyone in the book is tainted by the mine's silver. It becomes a barrier in the marriage of Charles Gould, the administrator, and drives Sotillo mad with greed. It assists in the suicide of Decoud, who fills his pockets with ingots before shooting himself in the chest and falling overboard. Finally, it turns the heroic and incorruptible Nostromo into a skulking thief, resulting in the ruination of the only family he has known.

The book is thus a morality tale about the corrupting influence of material wealth, and a warning about the dangers of imperialism. (Costaguana is partially modeled on Panama, which separated from Columbia in 1903 with the encouragement of the USA. Nostromo was published the following year.)

While the novel is considered one of Conrad's best, it contains an amazing number of improbable events. For example, when Nostromo is charged with spiriting silver out of town to keep it from falling into rebel hands, he collides with Sotillo's ship, the very one he is trying to evade. Even more unlikely, a stowaway on Nostromo's boat is borne away clinging to Sotillo's anchor. These events, together with an unlikely last-minute love affair, contribute directly to Nostromo's downfall.

But that's not all -- several ironies underscore the improbabilities. Nostromo is a surrogate son to old Viola and his wife, and unofficially espoused to the older daughter Linda. Yet he ignores a deathbed request made by Viola's wife (fetch a priest) due to the urgency of transporting the silver out of town; and though he is not present, the woman's last words are addressed directly to him (save the children). Instead he uses Viola and the two girls as a cover for spiriting away the stolen silver, in the course of which he develops a sudden infatuation for the younger daughter, Giselle, and ends up being shot by old Viola, who mistakes him for another suitor, who just happens to be Nostromo's protégé.

There are more improbabilities, too many to be unintentional. It is Conrad stacking the deck against Nostromo, implying that no matter what he does he cannot escape his doom. The question then becomes, can we accept as accurate Conrad's portrait of human existence? Are the improbabilities merely an artistic shaping of events in order to contain his vision within the covers of a book? Or is the vision itself inaccurate, warped by Conrad's gloomy view of life?

Either way, the novel is a gothic edifice.

Internet Cafe

Silverland

A Winter Journey Beyond the Urals

"A typical old Irish Leftie" is how Dervla Murphy was once described.

A grandmother in her 70s, she embarks upon her second journey through Siberia. She travels alone, speaks no Russian, and stashes money in her vagina.

This trip seems a little grimmer than the first one. The openness and generosity of many people are counterbalanced by the rudeness and xenophobia of many others. The word "Nyet!" is heard far too often, and there are sad examples of poverty, alcoholism, bureaucratic tangles, and "pollution on a truly sinister scale." Towards the end of the book she is robbed at gunpoint.

Murphy is an engaging, well-read, and plain-speaking traveller. She suffers the occasional hangover, provides apt historical asides, and collects interesting observations from others, such as support for the US invasion of Iraq, the reason for gigantism in Soviet architecture, and the opinion that Russia is "too big for democracy".

For me, two lines sum up the book:

I met no one who could honestly express optimism about Russia's future. Siberia's uninhabited vastness mesmerizes me; as I write these words I long to return.

Details

1. Silverland is a companion volume to Through Siberia by Accident, which recounts the author's abortive attempt to bicycle through the Russian Far East in 2002. She returned in 2004, drawn by Siberian hospitality and such natural wonders as Lake Baikal (a "Hallowed Sea").

2. She travels almost entirely by train -- from Cologne to Moscow with an awkward interruption in Belarus, then over the Urals with stops in Severobaikalsk, Tynda, Komsomolsk-na-Amure, and Vanino. Her return journey takes her through Khabarovsk, Ulan-Ude, and Rostov-on-Don, with a final week in St. Petersburg.

3. She airs some personal views. Bicycle helmets are "wimpish," the IMF has caused "despair and death on three continents," and crematories release dioxins into the air and mercury vapour from dental fillings. She recommends a "woodland" burial -- no coffin, just a winding-sheet of wool or cotton.

4. The book contains a map, bibliography, and four pages (eight sides) of B&W photos.

More Quotes

electric "butter-lamps" tea sweetened with blackcurrent jam the sordid engine room of the capitalist ship that notorious Soviet mix, zealotry and incompetence a society dazzled by but not fully comprehending the workings of capitalism

A Hero of Our Time

The prose in this slim volume is as clear and bracing as a mountain stream.

The book presents five episodes in the life of a Byronic character named Pechorin. The unusual narrative structure allows us to see him first through the eyes of other characters, for whom he is a cipher.

The core of the book, both in terms of length and psychological depth, is the fourth episode, "Princess Mary," which is told in Pechorin's own words. He describes himself as a "moral cripple."

The final piece, "The Fatalist," has an eerie Poe-like quality to it, describing a man with "the mark of death" on his face.

Now examine the cover of the novel above. This is a portrait of Lermontov. Do you see the mark of death on his face?

Lermontov was a soldier as well as a Romantic poet -- brave, dashing, and equipped with a lethal wit. He was twice exiled to the wild Causcasus region, once for a poem he wrote on the death of Pushkin, and the second for fighting a duel. The character of Pechorin is clearly modelled on himself.

Byron (the name comes up several times in the book) was an important influence. Another was Pushkin's Eugene Onegin. Pechorin and Onegin (both characters named after rivers) are similarly bored but dangerous men. Both kill a friend in a duel.

The duel in A Hero of Our Time is impossibly Romantic. It takes place on the ledge of a cliff against a backdrop of mountains. Even a wound is likely to prove fatal. A coin is flipped to see who will shoot first. The men are positioned six paces apart, so that a miss is highly unlikely.

Like Pushkin, Lermontov himself was killed in a duel. He died in 1841, the year after A Hero of Our Time was published. He was only 27.

Mikhail Lermontov was the greatest Russian poet of his age, after Pushkin, and his influence on later Russian writers has been great -- Tolstoy, Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Pasternak.

The Rat

It takes considerable skill to pull off such a fantastic and convoluted work as this, but Grass is equal to the task. The book is far richer than any brief summary can indicate.

Narrative duties are shared by the author and a rat, while another character, Oskar Matzerath, pipes up now and then to suggest how the novel should proceed. There are several plotlines that twist, double back on themselves, and branch out in truly amazing directions.

Really Big Spoilers

1. The narrator gets a rat for Xmas. It speaks to him in dreams and explains how rats survived the Flood and what really happened at Hamelin. Eventually rats cause WW3 by infiltrating the computers of Eastern and Western powers. The only human to survive is the narrator, who is orbiting the earth in a space capsule. Meanwhile the rats prosper, though their fur has turned green. Eventually a new species of rat appears -- with blue eyes, blond hair, and a penchant for marching in columns.

2. The narrator convinces Oskar to make a film about the plight of dying forests. Oscar is a successful producer whose company, Post Futurum, "pre-enacts" future scenes -- "prevision" or "clairvoyant film" it's called at one point. While visiting Gdansk to celebrate his grandmother's 107th birthday, WW3 takes place. His withered remains and those of his grandmother are treated by the rats as relics.

3. The narrator's partner, Damroka, and four female shipmates (all of whom were romantically involved with the narrator in the past) embark on a scientific journey to count jellyfish in the Baltic Sea. A talking flounder directs them to the submerged city of Vineta, but just as they reach it they are incinerated by an atomic blast.

4. Fairy tale characters take up the plight of the dying forests. They travel to Bonn to appeal to the Grimm Brothers who head up the Ministry of Medium-Term Forest Damage. Rumpelstilkskin drives a car that runs on witch piss. Other characters include Little Red Cap, who pops in and out of a wolf's zippered belly, and Snow White and her sex-crazed dwarfs. They take the Chancellor prisoner in a fairy tale fashion, but eventually are crushed (literally) by the military.

5. A painter named Lothar Malskat successfully completes a magnificent art forgery in a Lubeck cathedral. The narrator compares him to two "political forgers," Konrad Adenauer and Walter Ulbricht, leaders of the postwar Germanies. Grass writes:

That was the era of winking, of appearances, of whitewashing. In the decade of innocent lambs and clean bills of health, of murderers holding public office and Christian hypocrites, no one wanted to know too much, regardless of what happened.

6. Oskar returns from Gdansk to celebrate his 60th birthday. The party is attended by the narrator and Damroka.

Notes

Reading this, I imagined a resemblance between Grass and another famous writer. The avuncular mustaches, the similar war records (each captured by the other's army and held as a POW), a taste for the fantastic, the use of recurring characters, and the importance of WW2 as a central theme, especially in their most famous works, Slaughterhouse-5 and The Tin Drum. Both grappled with political and moral issues. Both were graphic artists.

Oskar Matzerath is the protagonist of Grass's first novel, The Tin Drum.

Damroka and the talking flounder are characters who first appeared in The Flounder (the only other novel by Grass that I've read). So too a woman named Ilsebill, after whom the boat in this book is named.

Lothar Malskat is not a fictional character.

The cover image is a fine pen-and-ink drawing by the author.

Gunter Grass won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1999.

Other Ratworthy Books

Doctor Rat by William Kotzwinkle - During a lab revolt, an insane rat becomes an apologist for animal testing.

The Papers of Andrew Melmoth by Hugh Sykes Davies - A scientist disappears into the sewers where he has been studying rats.

King Rat by China Mieville - A young man in London discovers he's part rat.

Daybreak 2250 AD by Andre Norton - One of her earliest and best YA books. After a nuclear war, rats have mutated into creatures that walk on their hind legs, wear loin-cloths, and wage war on humans.

Rats: Observations on the History and Habitat of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants by Robert Wilson - A personal investigation into the life of the modern rat.

The Cyberiad

Tales for the Cybernetic Age

In this collection of whimsical nonlinear tales, vanity gets a pair of friendly rivals into a number of ridiculous predicaments, often at the expense of a good shellacking.

Trurl and Klapaucius are "constructors," but everything they build has unforeseen effects or does not work properly. Some of their contraptions are:
-an electrobard
-a kingdom in a box
-a probability amplifier for summoning up dragons
-a machine that can create anything beginning with the letter n.

While not all the tales are equally good, the language throughout is imaginative and fun. There are photon schooners, ion crumpets, antimatter sabres, and three Voltaic brothers. There is also a Battery Age and an Empire of the Cold Welders. Someone wears a semi-permeable cummerbund. Another is "innocent as a brand new fuse."

As the stories progress it becomes apparent that Trurl and Klapaucius are robots, and gradually a serious, if not bitter, undertone creeps in. In the penultimate story a philosopher describes the utter failure of robotkind's godlike powers to bring peace and happiness to the universe.

The last tale in the book (and the only one that does not include Trurl and Klapaucius) concerns a princess who spurns "every suitor who seeks her radioactive hand." She will marry no one but a human. Infatuated, a neighbouring prince dons a disguise that is "flaccid, drooping, doughy." His description of human customs is hilarious.

Misc

The Cyberiad was first published in 1967. This edition was translated by Michael Kandel, and illustrated with delightful line drawings by Daniel Mroz. There is no introduction or afterword, which could have illuminated some of the challenges in translating Lem's prose, which contains many made-up words.

The book's subtitle might easily have been Don Quixote in Space, for the tales take place in an "age of electric errantry." Indeed, Lem uses the same word as Cervantes when he describes these adventures as "sallies."

The author, a famous and prolific Polish writer of SF, passed away in 2006. His work has been compared to that Kafka, Vonnegut, and Douglas Adams.

Official website

Don Quixote

Considered the first modern novel, and one of the greatest works of world literature, Don Quixote has been translated into English many times. This version by Samuel Putnam appeared in 1949.

The book, whose full title is The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote De La Mancha consists of two parts that were published separately in 1605 and 1615. Together they take up more than 1000 pages in the Putnam translation.

One of the book's most remarkable aspects is the freshness of the language. It does not sound like a work that is 400 years old.

The Story

Don Quixote, approaching 50 years of age and guilty of reading too many books of chivalry, takes it into his head to go on the road as a knight-errant. He cobbles together a suit of armor, including a helmet with a pasteboard visor, and sets out on a bony nag named Rocinante.

His self-appointed task is to right wrongs, defend honour, and proclaim the beauty of a farm girl he's never met. Upon her he bestows a grand-sounding name, Dulcinea del Toboso.

Accompanying him is a fat peasant named Sancho Panza, who is simple and loyal, happiest when his stomach is full. He rides out on an ass, spouting proverbs and malapropisms, sustained by the hope of receiving an earldom or the governorship of an island.

As a result of his delusions, Don Quixote is repeatedly thrashed, pummelled, and humiliated. He mistakes windmills for giants, an inn for a castle, and a brass pot for a helmet. Yet despite such mishaps his faith in himself never wavers, and he has a convenient explanation for his misfortunes. They are the work of an evil enchanter.

Part I contains a number of famous scenes (the windmills, the slaying of wineskins, the attack on a flock of sheep) and is said to be the more popular of the two books. Putnam’s preference, however, is for Part II, which he considers a more accomplished work.

Part I is weighed down by several tales of romantic intrigue. There is "The Captive's Tale" and "The Story of the One Who Was Too Curious for His Own Good," as well as some improbable love affairs that displace Don Quixote and Sancho Panza for large portions of Part I.

In Part II there are still a number of romantic interludes, but none are as intrusive or cloying as those in Part I.

As evidence of the novel's modernity, I present the following excerpt in which Don Quixote tells Sancho Panza of a balm that can restore health despite the severest injury. The scene is eerily similar to the famous encounter with the Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Don Quixote says:

…whenever in any battle you see my body cut in two—as very often happens—all that is necessary is for you to take the part that lies on the ground, before the blood has congealed, and fit it very neatly and with great nicety upon the other part that remains in the saddle, taking care to adjust it evenly and exactly. Then you will give me but a couple swallows of the balm of which I have told you, and you will see me sounder than an apple in no time at all.

Narrative Structure

In Part I the narrator tells us the book has been written in Arabic by a Moor named Cid Hamete Benengeli. The narrator has only a fragment in his possession, but in Chapter IX discovers the complete work in a Toledo marketplace, and hires a Moor to translate it.

In Part II the narrator frequently interrupts the tale with comments about the fictional author and translator. It is a delightful irony that most readers will be reading a real and not a phony translation.

A metafictional layer is added when the characters begin talking about Part I, whose success has made Don Quixote and Sancho Panza famous. Other characters are aware of their exploits, and several shortcomings in Book I are discussed.

A further complication is the existence of a spurious Part II, which was published one year before Cervantes’ Part II. In the latter, Don Quixote learns that the rival version has him visiting Sargossa to take part in a tournament, and this causes him to deliberately bypass it.

If Don Quixote is the first modern novel, it is also the first post-modern novel.

Miguel de Cervantes

Not much is known about his early life, other than that his childhood was itinerant and impoverished. As an adult he spent time in Italy before entering military service. He took part in the Battle of Lepanto, where he was shot in the chest and lost the use of his left hand.

When he recovered, he resumed active duty only to be captured by pirates and held as a slave for a number of years in Algiers. He was finally ransomed by his family after several abortive escape attempts. These events are reflected in the Captive’s Tale.

Even after his return to Spain, Cervantes’ life continued to be somewhat precarious. He wrote plays, became a purchasing agent for the Spanish Armada, and was imprisoned more than once.

He died in the year following the publication of Book II of Don Quixote – 23 April 1616 – the same date as Shakespeare’s death.

So popular was Don Quixote that it had a significant impact on the Spanish language.

The Even More Complete Chess Addict

This 1993 book is a revised and expanded version of The Complete Chess Addict, which appeared in 1987. It's a collection of chess anecdotes written in a breezy style, and includes eight pages of black-and-white photos, a bibliography, and an index.

The largest section in the book is taken up with a survey of famous chess players, grouped under these headings: The Royals, The Holy, The Sinners, The Musicians, The Artists, The Writers, The Entertainers, The Sportsmen, The Thinkers, The Politicians, The Soldiers, The Aristocrats, The Businessmen, The Rest.

Subsequent sections are:

The Greatest: the 64 strongest players, the 64 greatest games, etc.

The Frightful: worst games and performances at tournaments, including a game in which a player lost three pieces in 1-1/2 moves.

The Unorthodox: fantasy chess variations. Reverso is one example, in which the opening positions of knights and bishops are reversed. "All opening theory goes out the window. Try it against your club theoretician and watch him flounder!"

The Unacceptable: bad behaviour at the board, including games that turned violent.

The Awesome mentions a number of records, including:
- longest announced mate - 45 moves
- longest series of mutual captures - 13
- longest sequence of successive checks - 43
- longest sequence of moves without a capture - 100

The Bizarre: chess-playing animals, strange openings, and other oddities (eg Bobby Fischer and Barbra Streisand were classmates in Brooklyn).

Desert Island Chess: puzzles and problems.

The final two sections are the most dated, but still fun to read: The Future describes up-and-coming possible greats, and The End? talks about the influence of computer chess programs.

In all, 369 pages of trivia that range from the magnificent to the loony. A very entertaining read.

Terminal Beach

As he walked slowly through the deserted streets, he seemed to see the image of a different village superimposed over this one, where any shadowy doorway might contain a man-eater.

But these roofs were not thatched, and it was not a Mannlicher that he held in his hands.

The blistered concrete walls matched the colour of the sand that was sweeping in from the desert, and the rigidly assembled structures with their stencilled alphanumerics suggested this had once been a military installation.

Invisible Cities

Another unusual and bewitching work from the ever-imaginative Italo Calvino -- though novel may not be the correct term for this collection of sketches.

The narrator, Marco Polo, is describing to Kublai Khan the cities he has visited in his travels. There are 55 in all, described in spare but evocative prose.

My favourite is the city of Armilla, which consists only of plumbing. No houses, only a forest of water pipes rising in the air. Occasionally one glimpses a woman bathing in a tub or showering in midair.

But most sketches are far less visual than this, focusing instead on mysterious behaviour and odd routines. Sophronia, for example, is composed of two half-cities, one permanent, one temporary. The former is an amusement park of roller coasters and ferris wheels. The latter is made of stone and marble; every year it is dismantled and transported to vacant lots in the amusement park.

There is no plot to unify these tales, and the reader, like Kublai Khan, struggles to extract meaning from them. Wide and exotic his kingdom may be, yet how can such cities be real? Are they different views of the same city, Marco Polo's Venice perhaps? Can they be likened to squares on a chessboard, or an atlas of cities not yet discovered?

Further complications are the names of the cities (all feminine) and the order in which they appear. The 55 cities are composed of eleven groups:

Cities and memory
Cities and desire
Cities and signs
Thin cities
Trading cities
Cities and eyes
Cities and names
Cities and the dead
Cities and the sky
Continuous cities
Hidden cities

Within each group there are five cities, numbered thusly:

Cities and memory 1
Cities and memory 2
Cities and memory 3
Cities and memory 4
Cities and memory 5

These sketches are scattered throughout the book in nine numbered sections. The middle sections (2-8) contain five fables each, while the first and last sections contain ten each. The order of the first section seems arbitrary:

1
Cities and memory 1
Cities and memory 2
Cities and desire 1
Cities and memory 3
Cities and desire 2
Cities and signs 1
Cities and memories 4
Cities and desire 3
Cities and signs 2
Thin cities 1

But a glance at the second section reveals the secret:

2
Cities and memory 5
Cities and desire 4
Cities and signs 3
Thin cities 2
Trading cities 1

The numerical pattern is repeated through the remaining sections, save the last, whose order is now predetermined:

9
Cities and the dead 5
Cities and the sky 4
Continuous cities 3
Hidden cities 2
Cities and the sky 5
Continuous cities 4
Hidden cities 3
Continuous cities 5
Hidden cities 4
Hidden cities 5

The significance of the book's mathematical structure is murky. Either it is done purely for effect (unlikely), or it is invested with a meaning I've not been able to decipher (likely).

Eventually I found myself imagining the book as a deck of cards, the kind used for divination, partly because of the elusive meaning of the tales, and partly because the eleven city groups reminded me of suits.

Were I to read this book again, I might forsake the order of the sketches as they appear in the book, and read them group by group in correct numerical sequence.

Tristes Tropiques

Part memoir, part travelogue, and part anthropological essay, this is Levi-Strauss's most personal book.

He mentions his debt to Rousseau, his attachment to Marxism, and his rejection of Existentialism. He devotes six pages to describing a sunset, summarizes a play he'd written based on one by Corneille, and describes his escape from France during WW2 (which played out in my mind like a scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark).

The writing is often erudite and abstruse, yet enlivened by arresting phrases (the "nostalgic cannibalism of history"); arresting ideas ("the primary function of written communication is to facilitate slavery"); and arresting images (the moon "an anguished lantern drifting across the sky," cultivated fields like "geographical musings by Paul Kee," and "date merchants with their produce piled up in sticky mounds of pulp and stones suggesting the excreta of some dinosaur").

The bulk of the book, and the most accessible part, describes the time spent by the author among the Bororo and the Nambikwara in South America. Here are poisoned arrows and penis sheaths (foreskin required), brazil nuts big enough to kill if they struck an unlucky head, parasitic fish able to swim up a stream of urine, and an astonishing 4-hour opera performed by a man in a trance.

The book communicates the dizzying intoxication of anthropology, especially in its narcissistic examination of primitive cultures (though it made me wonder to what extent anthropologists themselves, by their prying and poking, contribute to the wreckage of such societies).

Levis-Strauss, himself brooding on the role of anthropology, points out that it is a discipline that only Western society has produced. The anthropologist "is incomprehensible except as an attempt at redemption; he is the symbol of atonement."

Descartes' Secret Notebook

A True Tale of Mathematics, Mysticism, and the Quest to Understand the Universe

Descartes continues to fascinate us not just because he was a titan. He lived in a strange and unruly age, and led the sort of life one would not expect of a philosopher. He was a gentleman soldier and intellectual tourist whose life continues to provide a rich field of speculation for writers three centuries after his death.

The raison d'etre of this new biography is a secret notebook found after Descartes' death. It was written in code because (argues the author) it contained information that Descartes felt would endanger his life should the Inquisition get wind of it.

Leibniz apparently cracked the code but kept the secret to himself. (He was preoccupied by a feud with Newton over calculus.) Not until 1987 was the code deciphered and made public. Descartes had discovered a formula regarding geometric figures that is a property of space itself, and a foundation for the science of topology. A century after his death this formula was rediscovered by the Swiss mathematician Euler.

Descartes' Secret Notebook is smoothly and gracefully written, and its author, Amir Aczel, who is himself a mathematician, concisely explains some of the esoteric aspects of Descartes' work. Best of all are the final three chapters, which describe events after Descartes' death, including the involvement of Leibniz.

Existentialism

Descartes was a Catholic and took great pains not to run afoul of the Church, as Galileo had. Aczel quotes him as writing, "Fear of God is the beginning of wisdom." How ironic then that another Frenchman, 300 years later, would take a very different view. Sartre, an atheist, writes in Nausea, mocking Descartes:

I am, I exist, I think, therefore I am; I am because I think, why do I think? I don't want to think any more, I am because I think that I don't want to be, I think that I...because...ugh! I flee.

Both men lived through times of great upheaval in Europe -- Descartes the Thirty Years War and Sartre WW2, during which he spent nine months as a POW.

The Erasers

Nine murders have taken place in nine days, all at exactly the same time. Special agent Wallas is sent to investigate the most recent death. He's new at the job and it's a confusing case. He spends a lot of time walking the streets and getting lost. He stops in at several shops to buy an eraser.

Soon the reader is as confused as Wallas. It's difficult to know what's real and what's imagined. Even the identity of certain characters, who are often described in terms of the coats they wear, becomes blurred. The writing is packed with banal detail, often in the form of numbers and measurements, as though this is the only way to pin down what's demonstrably real:

...on a bed of toast, spread with margarine, is arranged a broad filet of herring with silvery-blue skin; to the right, five quarters of tomato, to the left, three slices of hard-boiled egg; set on top, at specific points, three black olives.

Finally Wallas, who is on job probation, begins to doubt himself. At the post office he receives a "pneumatic message" that appears to be incriminating. It seems that he physically resembles the alleged murderer and has the same type of gun that was used in the shooting. When he returns to the scene of the crime, he ends up killing the man whose death he was sent to investigate.

Characters

Roy-Dauzet - Minister of the Interior, who, distrusting his own police force, sends Wallas to take charge of the investigation.

Commissioner Laurent - the local police chief.

Daniel Dupont - a professor who receives a superficial gunshot wound.

Albert Dupont - a wood exporter mistakenly identified in the newspaper as the original victim, later killed in an auto accident.

Dr. Juard - a gynecologist who issues a fake death certificate to protect Daniel Dupont's life.

Marchat - a wood exporter in collusion with Juard and Daniel Dupont who comes to believe that he is the next victim.

Garinati - bungles the murder of Daniel Dupont.

Jean Bonaventure - Garinati's boss, aka Bona.

Fabius - the best sleuth in Europe, adept at disguises, Wallas's immediate superior.

Madame Dupont - Daniel Dupont's estranged wife, from whom Wallas purchases an eraser.

Jean - Daniel Dupont's illegitimate son, who may or may not exist.

Anna Smite - Daniel Dupont's half-deaf housekeeper who thinks Juard killed Dupont.

Juliette Dexter, Emilie Lebermann, and Madame Jean - post office employees.

Andre WS - the addressee of the "pneumatic message," described by post employees as resembling Wallas; the message's sender is indicated by a set of initials, J.B.

Madame Bax - a watcher at a window.

Nameless drunk - keeps turning up at the Cafe des Allies, where Wallas is lodging, to ask meaningless riddles.

Nouveau Roman

The Erasers was first published in 1953 as Les Gommes. At its most superficial, it could be read as a humourless parody of a detective novel, a recursive tale that keeps doubling back on itself. At a deeper level, it's a statement about the nature of reality.

The author, Alain Robbe-Grillet, was a leading figure in the nouveau roman movement. The translation is by Richard Howard.