Requiem for a Dreamer

August 17, 2006 at 3:58 am (Favorite Fiction Authors, For those who paint with words..., Kurt Vonnegut)

Culture > October 15, 2004

Requiem for a Dreamer

By Kurt Vonnegut

Editor’s note: What follows is a conversation between Kurt Vonnegut and out-of-print science fiction writer Kilgore Trout. It was to be their last. Trout committed suicide by drinking Drano at midnight on October 15 in Cohoes, New York, after a female psychic using tarot cards predicted that the environmental calamity George W. Bush would once again be elected president of the most powerful nation on the planet by a five-to-four decision of the Supreme Court, which included “100 per-cent of the black vote.”

TROUT: I’ve never voted in my whole damn life. I didn’t want to be complicit. But is it time I did?

KV: The planet’s immune system is obviously trying to get rid of us, and high time! But sure, go vote for somebody. What the hell.

TROUT: Everybody’s so ignorant.

KV: The overwhelming popularity of President Bush, in spite of everything, finally shows us what the American people, whom we have so sentimentalized for so long, a la Norman Rockwell, really are, thanks to TV and purposely lousy public schools: ignorant. Count on it!

TROUT: You ever meet anybody who was really smart?

KV: Only one: Saul Steinberg, the graphic artist who’s dead now. Everybody I know is dead now, present company excepted. I could ask Saul anything, and six seconds would pass, and then he would give me a perfect answer. He growled a perfect answer. He was born in Rumania, and, according to him, he was born into a house where “the geese peeked in the windows.”

TROUT: Like what kind of questions?

KV: I said, “Saul, what should I think about Picasso?” Six seconds went by, and then he growled, “God put him on Earth to show us what it’s like to be really rich.” I said, “Saul, I’m a novelist, and many of my friends are novelists, but I can’t help feeling that some of them are in a very different business from mine, even though I like their books a lot. What would make me feel that way?” Six seconds went by, and then he growled, “It is very simple: There are two kinds of artists, and one is not superior to the other. But one kind responds to the history of his or her art so far, and the other responds to life itself.”

I said, “Saul, are you gifted?” Six seconds went by, and then he growled, “No. But what we respond to in any work of art is the artist’s struggle against his or her limitations.”

TROUT: OK.

KV: You seem unimpressed.

TROUT: I said, “OK.”

KV: You said it so emptily.

TROUT: Sorry. You know me: Always running on empty.

KV: Somebody else smart? OK, try this: After the Second World War I enrolled in the graduate division of the Anthropology Department of the University of Chicago, the most conceited university in the country. And in a seminar for about eight of us, half of us vets on the GI Bill of Rights, my favorite professor, in fact my thesis advisor, put this Socratic question to us: “What is it an artist does?”

TROUT: Hold on: What makes Chicago so conceited?

KV: That it isn’t Harvard.

TROUT: Got it: That it isn’t high society.

KV: Bingo. Anyway, I’m sure we all came up with smart-ass answers, since a graduate seminar in any subject is a form of improv theater. But the only answer I remember is the one he gave: “An artist says, ‘I can’t do anything about the chaos in the universe or my country, or even in my own miserable life, but I can at least make this piece of paper or canvas, or blob of clay or chunk of marble, exactly what it should be.’”

TROUT: OK.

KV: Did you forget to take your Viagra today?

TROUT: Very funny. But what he said an artist does is what I do every time I brush my teeth or tie my shoes. You thought this guy was smart? He’s an asshole.

KV: Look, when you put a piece of paper in your typewriter, don’t you try to make it exactly what it should be?

TROUT: No, I just effing write.

KV: What are you effing writing now?

TROUT: It’s about how the future has as much to do with the present as the past does. Giraffes can only have come from the future. There’s no way evolution in the past would have let something that defenseless and impractical live for 15 minutes.

KV: If you say so.

TROUT: Try this: The First World War was caused by the second one. Otherwise the first one makes no sense, wasn’t about anything. And all Picasso had to do was paint pictures that were already hanging in museums in the future.

KV: OK.

TROUT: Just trying to be Einstein. You never know. But hey, the two people you said were so smart were both men. Women say smart things, too. I went walking with a woman the other day, if you can believe it, and I stopped to retie my shoes, and she said, “Every time I go for a walk with a man he always has to stop to retie his shoes. Why won’t men tie double knots? A fear of commitment?” How’s that for anthropology, the science of man? I’ll bet they didn’t teach you about men and shoelaces at Chicago.

KV: That isn’t anthropology. That’s sociology.

TROUT: What’s the difference? I’ve often wondered.

KV: A sociologist is paid by the Sociology Department. An anthropologist is paid by the Anthropology Department.

TROUT: Glad to have that cleared up.

KV: Knowledge is power.

TROUT: Well, I’m off. Ciao, adios and aloha.

KV: Whither bound?

TROUT: Back to Cohoes for an AA meeting.

KV: But you’re not an alcoholic.

TROUT: It’s the only place I can pick up women. They have their defenses down. “Hello, I’m Kilgore Trout and I’m an alcoholic.” And I’ve met this babe named Flamingo who is a professional psychic. She’s going to tell me our country’s fortune. Who’ll win the next election.

KV: OK

TROUT: Take care.

KV: You too.

Permalink 24 Comments

Kilgore Trout

August 17, 2006 at 3:52 am (Favorite Fiction Authors, For those who paint with words..., Kurt Vonnegut)

 

Who is Kilgore Trout?

Those of you who are familiar with the work of Kurt Vonnegut have surely come across the name Kilgore Trout in his novels. He is one of the author’s favorite fictional characters and appears in many of his books (e.g. Slaughterhouse-Five, God Bless You Mr. Rosewater, Breakfast of Champios, Galapagos, Timequake etc.)
Kilgore Trout is an unsuccessful writer of science fiction, having few, yet loyal fans. He spends all his time writing, but he never gets a decent publisher. His stories get published only in porn magazines (such as the Black Garterbelt). The reason is simple: They cover the space between ‘wide-open-beaver’ photos and are incredibly cheap (Nobody reads them anyway). The few works that made it into a paperback edition serve as shop-window fillers.
The literary character, Kilgore Trout is said to be inspired by Theodore Sturgeon, a ‘famous’ sci-fi writer. The parallels are his style of writing and the obvious last name link. Both fish. Kurt Vonnegut admitted this in his interview with Hank Nuwer in 1987. Kurt Vonnegut answers the question with:

"Yeah. In fact, it said so in his
   obituary in the [New York] Times...
   Sturgeon got a nice big obituary in the
   Times.... I was delighted that it said in
   the middle of it that he was the
   inspiration for the Kurt Vonnegut
   character of Kilgore Trout."
Kilgore Trout seems to be a parody of Kurt Vonnegut himself. Not only of himself, but of all sci-fi writers. Sci-fi is considered to be trash by most publishers and so the authors have to send their work to various places in the hope of getting published. (Vonnegut’s past was like this, writing stories for various magazines etc.)

 

For more visit: http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/4953/trout.html

Original Kilgore Trout Stories:

From: God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
New York: November 1978; Dell Publishing Co.

Trout’s favorite formula was to describe a perfectly hideous society, not unlike his own, and then, toward the end, to suggest ways in which it could be improved. In 2BR0TB he hypothecated an America in which almost all of the work was done by machines, and the only people who could get work had three or more Ph.D’s. There was a serious overpopulation problem, too.

All serious diseases had been conquered. So death was voluntary, and the government, to encourage volunteers for death, set up a purple-roofed Ethical Suicide Parlor at every major intersection, right next door to an orange-roofed Howard Johnson’s. There were pretty hostesses in the parlor, and Barca-Loungers, and Muzak, and a choice of fourteen painless ways to die. The suicide parlors were busy places, because so many people felt silly and pointless, and because it was supposed to be an unselfish, patriotic thing to do, to die. The suicides also got free last meals next door.
And so on. Trout had a wonderful imagination.
One of the characters asked a death stewardess if he would go to Heaven, and she told him that of course he would. He asked if he would see God, and she said, “Certainly, honey.”
And he said, “I sure hope so. I want to ask Him something I never was able to find out down here.”
“What’s that?” she said, strapping him in.
“What the hell are people for?“(pages 20-21)

Venus on the Half-shell

Queen Margaret of the planet Shaltoon let her gown fall to the floor. She was wearing nothing underneath. Her high, firm, uncowled bosom was proud and rosy. Her hips and thighs were like an inviting lyre of pure alabaster. They shone so whitely they might have had a light inside. “Your travels are over, Space Wanderer,” she whispered, her voice husky with lust. “Seek no more, for you have found. The answer is in my arms.”
“It’s a glorious answer, Queen Margaret, God knows,” the Space Wanderer replied. His palms were perspiring profusely. “I am going to accept it gratefully. But I have to tell you, if I’m going to be perfectly honest with you, that I will have to be on my way again tomorrow.”
“But you have found your answer, you have found your answer,” she cried, and she forced his head between her fragrant young breasts.
He said something she did not hear. She thrust him out at arm’s length. “What was that you said?”
“I said, Queen Margaret, that what you offer is an awfully good answer. It just doesn’t happen to be the one I’m primarily looking for.”(pages 114-115)

Oh Say Can You Smell?

“You know–” said Eliot, “Kilgore Trout once wrote a whole book about a country that was devoted to fighting odors. That was the national purpose. There wasn’t any disease, and there wasn’t any crime, and there wasn’t any war, so they went after odors.”
. . .
“This country,” said Eliot, “had tremendous research projects devoted to fighting odors. They were supported by individual contributions given to mothers who marched on Sundays from door to door. The ideal of the research was to find a specific chemical deodorant for every odor. But then the hero, who was also the country’s dictator, made a wonderful scientific breakthrough, even though he wasn’t a scientist, and they didn’t need the projects any more. He went right to the root of the problem.”
“Uh huh,” said the Senator. He couldn’t stand stories by Kilgore Trout, was embarassed by his son. “He found one chemical that would eliminate all odors?”
“No. As I say, the hero was dictator, and he simply eliminated noses.”(page 156)

The First District Court of Thankyou

It was called, The First District Court of Thankyou, which was a court you could take people to, if you felt they hadn’t been properly grateful for something you had done. If the defendant lost his case, the court gave him a choice between thanking the plaintiff in public, or going into solitary confinement on bread and water for a month. According to Trout, eighty per cent of those convicted chose the black hole.(page 163)

Pan-Galactic Three-Day Pass

It was an exciting story, all about a man who was serving on a sort of Space-Age Lewis and Clark expedition. The hero’s name was Sergeant Raymond Boyle.
The expedition had reached what appeared to be the absolute and final rim of the universe. There didn’t seem to be anything beyond the solar system they were in, and they were setting up equipment to sense the faintest signals that might be coming from the slightest anything in all that black velvet nothing out there.
Sergeant Boyle was an Earthling. He was the only Earthling on the expedition. In fact, he was the only creature from the Milky Way. The other members were from all over the place. The expedition was a joint effort supported by about two hundred galaxies. Boyle wasn’t a technician. He was an English teacher. The thing was that Earth was the only place in the whole known universe where language was used. It was a unique Earthling invention. Everybody else used mental telepathy, so Earthlings could get pretty good jobs as language teachers just about anywhere they went.
The reason creatures wanted to use language instead of mental telepathy was that they found out they could get so much more done with language. Language made them so much more active. Mental telepathy, with everybody constantly telling everybody everything, produced a sort of generalized indifference to all information. But language, with its slow, narrow meanings, made it possible to think about one thing at a time–to start thinking in terms of projects.
Boyle was called out of his English class, was told to report at once to the commanding officer of the expedition. He couldn’t imagine what it was all about. He went into the C.O.’s office, saluted the old man. Actually the C.O. didn’t look anything like an old man. He was from the planet Tralfamadore, and was about as tall as an Earthling beer can. Actually, he didn’t look like a beercan, either. He looked like a little plumber’s friend.
He wasn’t alone. The chaplain of the expedition was there, too. The padre was from the planet Glinko-X-3. He was an enormous sort of Portuguese man-o’-war, in a tank of sulfuric acid on wheels. The chaplain looked grave. Something awful had happened.
The chaplain told Boyle to be brave, and then the C.O. said there was very bad news from home. The C.O. said there had been a death back home, that Boyle was being given an emergency three-day pass, that he should get ready to leave right away.
“Is it–is it–Mom?” said Boyle, fighting back the tears. “Is it Pop? Is it Nancy?” Nancy was the girl next door. “Is it Gramps?”
“Son–” said the C.O., “brace yourself. I hate to tell you this: It isn’t who has died. It’s what has died.”
“What’s died?”
“What’s died, my boy, is the Milky Way.”

Slaughterhouse-Five
New York: October 1971; Dell Publishing Co.

Maniacs in the Fourth Dimension

The book was called Maniacs in the Fourth Dimension, by Kilgore Trout. It was about people, whose mental diseases couldn’t be treated because the causes of the diseases were all in the fourth dimension, and three-dimensional Earthling doctors couldn’t see those causes at all, or even imagine them.
One thing Trout said that Rosewater liked very much was that there really were vampires and were-wolves and goblins and angels and so on, but that they were in the fourth dimension. So was William Blake, Rosewater’s favorite poet, according to Trout. So were heaven and hell.
(page 104)

The Gospel from Outer Space

It was The Gospel from Outer Space, by Kilgore Trout. It was about a visitor from outer space, shaped very much like a Tralfamadorian, by the way. The visitor from outer space made a serious study of Christianity, to learn, if he could, why Christians found it so easy to be cruel. He concluded that at least part of the trouble was slipshod storytelling in the New Testament. He supposed that the intent of the Gospels was to teach people, among other things, to be merciful, even to the lowest of the low.
But the Gospels actually taught this:
Before you kill somebody, make absolutely sure he isn’t well connected. So it goes.
The flaw in the Christ stories, said the visitor from outer space, was that Christ, who didn’t look like much, was actually the Son of the Most Powerful Being of the Universe. Readers understood that, so, when they came to the crucifixion, they naturally thought, and Rosewater read out loud again:
Oh, boy — they sure picked the wrong guy to lynch that time!
And then that thought had a brother: “There are right people to lynch.” Who? People not well connected. So it goes.
The visitor from outer space made a gift to Earth of a new Gospel. In it, Jesus really was a nobody, and a pain in the neck to a lot of people with better connections than he had. He still got to say all the lovely and puzzling things he said in the other Gospels.
So the people amused themselves one day by nailing him to a cross and planting the cross in the ground. There couldn’t possibly be any repercussions, the lynchers thought. The reader would have to think that, too, since the new Gospel hammered home again and again what a nobody Jesus was.
And then, just before the nobody died, the heavens opened up, and there was thunder and lightning. The voice of God came crashing down. He told the people that he was adopting the bum as his son, giving him the full powers and privileges of The Son of the Creator of the Universe throughout all eternity. God said this: From this moment on, He will punish horribly anybody who torments a bum who has no connections!(pages 108-110)

untitled 1 – (Money Tree)

Trout, incidentally, had written a book about a money tree. It had twenty-dollar bills for leaves. Its flowers were government bonds. Its fruit was diamonds. It attracted human beings who killed each other around the roots and made very good fertilizer.
So it goes.(page 167)

The Gutless Wonder

This, too, was the title of a book by Trout, The Gutless Wonder. It was about a robot who had bad breath, who became popular after his halitosis was cured. But what made the story remarkable, since it was written in 1932, was that it predicted the widespread use of burning jellied gasoline on human beings.
It was dropped on them from airplanes. Robots did the dropping. They had no conscience, and no circuits which would allow them to imagine what was happening to the people on the ground.
Trout’s leading robot looked like a human being, and could talk and dance and so on, and go out with girls. And nobody held it against him that he dropped jellied gasoline on people. But they found his halitosis unforgivable. And then he cleared that up, and he was welcomed to the human race.(pages 167-168)

The Big Board

. . . It was about an Earthling man and woman who were kidnapped by extra-terrestrials. They were put on display in a zoo on a planet called Zircon-212.

These fictitious people in the zoo had a big board supposedly showing stock market quotations and comodity prices along one wall of their habitat, and a news ticker, and a telephone that was supposedly connected to a brokerage on Earth. The creatures on Zircon-212 told their captives that they had invested a million dollars for them back on Earth, and that it was up to the captives to manage it so that they would be fabulously wealthy when they were returned to Earth.
The telephone and the big board and the ticker were all fakes, of course. They were simply stimulants to make the Earthlings perform vividly for the crowds at the zoo–to make them jump up and down and cheer, or gloat, or sulk, or tear their hair, to be scared shitless or to feel as contented as babies in their mothers’ arms.
The Earthlings did very well on paper. That was part of the rigging, of course. And religion got mixed up in it, too. The news ticker reminded them that the President of the United States had declared National Prayer Week, and that everybody should pray. The Earthlings had had a bad week on the market before that. They had lost a small fortune in olive oil futures. So they gave praying a whirl.
It worked. Olive oil went up.(pages 201-202)

Untitled 2 – (Jesus And the Time Machine)

Another Kilgore Trout book there in the window was about a man who built a time machine so he could go back and see Jesus. It worked, and he saw Jesus when Jesus was only twelve years old. Jesus was learning the carpentry trade from his father.
Two Roman soldiers came into the shop with a mechanical drawing on papyrus of a device they wanted built by sunrise the next morning. It was a cross to be used in the execution of a rabble-rouser.
Jesus and his father built it. They were glad to have the work. And the rabble-rouser was executed on it.
So it goes.…
The time-traveller in the book went back to Bible times to find out one thing in particular: Whether or not Jesus had really died on the cross, or whether he had been taken down while still alive, whether he had really gone on living. The hero had a stethoscope along.
Billy skipped to the end of the book, where the hero mingled with the people who were taking Jesus down from the cross. The time-traveller was the first one up the ladder, dressed in clothes of the period, and he leaned close to Jesus so people couldn’t see him use the stethoscope, and he listened.
There wasn’t a sound inside the emaciated chest cavity. The Son of God was dead as a doornail.
So it goes.(pages 202-203)

Breakfast of Champions

London: 1988; Cox & Wyman Ltd.

Untitled – (Chicken Soup)

[Trout] wrote a novel about an Earthling named Delmore Skag, a bachelor in the neighborhood where everybody else had enormous families. And Skag was a scientist, and he found a way to reproduce himself in chicken soup. He would shave living cells from the palm of his right hand, mix them with the soup, and expose the soup to cosmic rays. The cells turned into babies which looked exactly like Delmore Skag.
Pretty soon, Delmore was having several babies a day, and inviting his neighbors to share his pride and happiness. He had mass baptisms of as many as a hundred babies at a time. He became famous as a family man.
And so on.
Skag hoped to force his country into making laws against excessively large families, but the legislatures and the courts declined to meet the problem head-on. They passed stern laws instead against the possession by unmarried persons of chicken soup.(page 21)

Plague on Wheels

The words in the book, incidentally, were about life on a dying planet named Lingo-Three, whose inhabitants resembled American automobiles. They had wheels. They were powered by internal combustion engines. They ate fossil fuels. They weren’t manufactured, though. They reproduced. They laid eggs containing baby automobiles, and the babies matured in pools of oil drained from adult crankcases.
Lingo Three was visited by space travelers, who learned that the creatures were becoming extinct for this reason: they had destroyed their planet’s resources, including its atmosphere.
The space travelers weren’t able to offer much in the way of material assistance. The automobile creatures hoped to borrow some oxygen, and to have the visitors carry at least one of their eggs to another planet, where it might hatch, where the automobile civilization could begin again. But the smallest egg they had was a forty-eight pounder, and the space travellers themselves were only an inch high, and their space ship wasn’t even as big as an Earthling shoebox. They were from Zeltoldimar.
The spokesman for the Zeltoldimarians was Kago. Kago said that all he could do was to tell others in the Universe about how wonderful the automobile creatures had been. Here is what he said to all those rusting junkers who were out of gas: “You will be gone, but not forgotten.”
…
So Kago and his brave little Zeltoldimarian crew, which was all homosexual, roamed the Universe, keeping the memory of the automobile creatures alive. They came at last to the planet Earth. In all innocence, Kago told the Earthlings about the automobiles. Kago did not know that human beings could be as easily felled by a single idea as by cholera or the bubonic plague. There was no immunity to cuckoo ideas on Earth.
And here, according to Trout, was the reason human beings could not reject ideas because they were bad: “Ideas on Earth were badges of friendship or enmity. Their content didn’t matter. Friends agreed with friends, in order to express friendliness. Enemies disagreed with enemies, in order to express enmity.
“The ideas Earthlings held didn’t matter for hundreds of thousands of years, since they couldn’t do much about them anyway. Ideas might as well be badges as anything.
“They even had a saying about the futility of ideas: ‘If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.’
“And then Earthlings discovered tools. Suddenly agreeing with friends could be a form of suicide or worse. But agreements went on, not for the sake of common sense or decency or self-preservation, but for friendliness.
“Earthlings went on being friendly, when they should have been thinking instead. And when they built computers to do some thinking for them, they designed them not so much for wisdom as for friendliness. So they were doomed. Homicidal beggars could ride.”
Within a century of little Kago’s arrival on Earth, according to Trout’s novel, every form of life on that once peaceful and moist and nourishing blue-green ball was dying or dead. Everywhere were the shells of the great beetles which men had made and worshipped. They were automobiles. They had killed everything.
Little Kago himself died long before the planet did. He was attempting to lecture on the evils of the automobile in a bar in Detroit. But he was so tiny that nobody paid any attention to him. He lay down to rest for a moment, and a drunk automobile worker mistook him for a kitchen match. He killed Kago by trying to strike him repeatedly on the underside of the bar.(pages 26-29)

The Dancing Fool

A flying saucer creature named Zog arrived on Earth to explain how wars could be prevented and how cancer could be cured. He brought the information from Margo, a planet where the natives conversed by means of farts and tap dancing.
Zog landed at night in Connectitut. He had no sooner touched down than he saw a house on fire. He rushed into the house, farting and tap dancing, warning the people about the terrible danger they were in. The head of the house brained Zog with a golf club.(pages 58-59)

Untitled – (Dirty Movies)

It was about an Earthling astronaut who arrived on a planet where all the animal and plant life had been killed by pollution, except for humanoids. The humanoids ate food made from petroleum and coal.
They gave a feast for the astronaut, whose name was Don. The food was terrible. The big topic of conversation was censorship. The cities were blighted with motion picture theaters which showed nothing but dirty movies. The humanoids wished they could put them out of business somehow, but without interfering with free speech.
They asked Don if dirty movies were a problem on Earth, too, and Don said, “Yes.” They asked him if the movies were really dirty, and Don replied, “As dirty as movies could get.”
This was a challenge to the humanoids, who were sure their dirty movies could beat anything on Earth. So everybody piled into air-cushion vehicles, and they floated to a dirty movie house downtown.
It was intermission time when they got there, so Don had some time to think about what could possibly be dirtier than what he had already seen on Earth. He became sexually excited even before the house lights went down. The women in his party were all twittery and squirmy.
So the theater went dark and the curtains opened. At first there wasn’t any picture. There were slurps and moans from loudspeakers. Then the picture itself appeared. It was a high quality film of a male humanoid eating what looked like a pear. The camera zoomed in on his lips and tongue and teeth, which glistened with saliva. He took his time about eating the pear. When the last of it had disappeared into his slurpy mouth, the camera focused on his Adam’s apple. His Adam’s apple bobbed obscenely. He belched contentedly, and then these words appeared on the screen, but in the language of the Planet:THE END
It was all faked, of course. There weren’t any pears anymore. And the eating of a pear wasn’t the main event of the evening anyway. It was a short subject, which gave the members of the audience time to settle down.
Then the main feature began. It was about a male and a female and their two children, and their dog and their cat. They ate steadily for an hour and a half–soup, meat, biscuits, butter, vegetables, mashed potatoes and gravy, fruit, candy, cake, pie. The camera rarely strayed more than a foot from their glistening lips and their bobbing Adam’s apples. And then the father put the cat and the dog on the table, so they could take part in the orgy, too.
After a while, the actors couldn’t eat any more. They were so stuffed that they were goggle-eyed. They could hardly move. They said they didn’t think they could eat again for a week, and so on. They cleared the table slowly. They went waddling out into the kitchen, and they dumped about thirty pounds of leftovers into a garbage can.
The audience went wild.
When Don and his friends left the theater, they were accosted by humanoid whores, who offered them eggs and oranges and milk and butter and peanuts and so on. The whores couldn’t actually deliver these goodies, of course.
The humanoids told Don that if he went home with a whore, she would cook him a meal of petroleum and coal products at fancy prices.
And then, while he ate them, she would talk dirty about how fresh and full of natural juices the food was, even though the food was fake.(pages 59-61)

This Means You

…It was set in the Hawaiian Islands, the place where the lucky winners of Dwayne Hoover’s contest in Midland City were supposed to go. Every bit of land on the islands was owned by only about forty people, and, in the story, Trout had those people decide to excercise their property rights to the full. They put up no trespassing signs on everything.
This created terrible problems for the million other people on the islands. The law of gravity required that they stick somewhere on the surface. Either that, or they could go out into the water and bob offshore.
But the Federal Government came through with an emergency program. It gave a big baloon full of helium to every man, woman and child who didn’t own property.
There was a cable with a harness on it dangling from each baloon. With the help of the baloons, Hawaiians could go on inhabiting the islands without always sticking to things other people owned.(page 73)

Gilgongo!

“Gilgongo” was about a planet which was unpleasant because there was too much creation going on.
The story began with a big party in honor of a man who had wiped out an entire species of darling little panda bears. He had devoted his life to this. Special plates were made for the party, and the guests got to take them home as souvenirs. There was a picture of a little bear on each one, and the date of the party. Underneath the picture was the word:GILGONGO!
In the language in the planet, that meant “Extinct!”
People were glad that the bears were gilgongo, because there were too many species on the planet already, and new ones were coming into being almost every hour. There was no way anybody could prepare for the bewildering diversity of creatures and plants he was likely to encounter.
The people were doing their best to cut down on the number of species, so that life could be more predictable. But Nature was too creative for them. All life on the planet was suffocated at last by a living blanket one hundred feet thick. The blanket was composed of passenger pigeons and eagles and Bermuda Erns and whooping cranes.(pages 86-87)

Hail to the Chief

Trout couldn’t tell one politician from another one. They were all formlessly enthusiastic chimpanzees to him. He wrote a story one time about an optimistic chimpanzee who became President of the United States. He called it “Hail to the Chief.”
The chimpanzee wore little blue blazer with brass buttons, and with the seal of the President of the United States sewed to the breast pocket.
Everywhere he went, bands would play “Hail to the Chief.” The chimpanzee loved it. He would bounce up and down.(page 88)

Untitled – (But it Sounds Good!)

It was about a planet where the language kept turning into pure music, because the creatures there were so enchanted by sounds. Words became musical notes. Sentences became melodies. They were useless as conveyors of information, because nobody knew or cared what the meanings of words were anymore.
So leaders in government and commerce, in order to function, had to invent new and much uglier vocabularies and sentence structures all the time, which would resist being transmuted to music.(page 110)

The Barring-gaffner of Bagnialto (or This Year’s Masterpiece)

The name of the planet where Trout’s book took place was Bagnialto, and a “Barring-gaffner” there was a government official who spun a wheel of chance once a year. Citizens submitted works of art to the government, and these were given numbers, and then they were assigned cash values according to the Barring-gaffner’s spins of the wheel. The viewpoint of character of the tale was not the Barring-gaffner, but a humble cobbler named Gooz. Gooz lived alone, and he painted a picture of his cat. It was the only picture he had ever painted. He took it to the Barring-gaffner, who numbered it and put it in a warehouse crammed with works of art.
The painting by Gooz had an unprecedented gush of luck on the wheel. It became worth eighteen thousand lambos, the equivalent of one billion dollars on Earth. The Barring-gaffner awarded Gooz a check for that amount, most of which was taken back at once by the tax collector. The pictire was given a place of honor in the National Gallery, and people lined up for miles for a chance to see a painting worth a billion dollars.
There was also a huge bonfire of all the paintings and statues and books and so on which the wheel had said were worthless. And then it was discovered that the wheel was rigged, and the Barring-gaffner commited suicide.(pages 128-129)

 

Galapagos
New York: August 1988; Dell Publishing Co.

Untitled 4 – (Sports Robots)

… I just want to add that my father, who was a science-fiction writer, once wrote a novel about a man whom everybody laughed at because he was building sports robots. He created a golf robot who could make a hole in one every time, and a tennis robot who served an ace every time, and so on.
At first, people couldn’t see any use for robots like that, and the inventor’s wife walked out on him, the way Father’s wife, incidentally, had walked out on him–and his children tried to put him into a nuthouse. But then he let advertisers know that his robots would also endorse automobiles or beer or razors or wristwatches or perfume or whatever. He made a fortune, according to my father, because so many sports enthusiasts wanted to be exactly like those robots.
Don’t ask me why.(pages 70-71)

The Era of Hopeful Monsters

It was about a planet where the humanoids ignored their most serious survival problems until the last possible moment. And then, with all the forests being killed and all the lakes being poisoned by acid rain, and all the groundwater made unpotable by industrial wastes and so on, the humanoids found themselves the parents of children with wings or antlers or fins, with a hundred eyes, with no eyes, with huge brains, with no brains, and on and on. These were Nature’s experiments with creatures which might, as a matter of luck, be better planetary citizens than the humanoids. Most died, or had to be shot, or whatever, but a few were really quite promising, and they intermarried and had young like themselves.(pages 82-83)

Permalink 2 Comments

Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)

August 17, 2006 at 1:37 am (Favorite Fiction Authors, For those who paint with words..., Oscar Wilde)

Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde was born on 16 October 1854 in Dublin. He would later assert that a name which is destined to be in everyone’s mouth must not be too long. All the world would come to know him simply as Oscar Wilde.

 

Educated at Trinity College, Dublin, and later at Oxford–where he discovered the dangerous and delightful distinction of being different from others. While at Oxford he fell under the influence of Walter Pater and the doctrine of art for art’s sake. And in 1879, he established himself as the leader and model of the aesthetic movement.

He wore velvet coats with contrasting braid, knee britches, loose-fitting wide-collared shirts with flowing ties and lavender-colored gloves. He frequently carried a jewel-topped cane and was caricatured in the press flamboyantly attired and bearing an over-sized sunflower–an icon of the movement.

On the heels of the success and titillating scandal of The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), Mr. Wilde produced his best known plays. Among these timeless social comedies were: Lady Windemere’s Fan (1892), A Woman of No Importance (1893), Salome (1893), The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), and An Ideal Husband (1895). They were well received by the public and Mr. Wilde became the toast of London society–lionized for his brilliant wit, his gregarious charm and manner.

Although married and the father of two children, Wilde’s personal life was open to rumours. His years of triumph ended dramatically, when his intimate association with Alfred Douglas led to his trial on charges of homosexuality (then illegal in Britain). He was imprisoned for homosexual acts in 1895 and went bankrupt before he left prison, and had to sell his house and possession to pay his debts.

Wilde died in 1900, broke in Paris at the age of 46, but his name is still synonymous with the bohemian lifestyle, wit and comic theatre.

More on Oscar Wilde:http://www.online-literature.com/wilde/

Picture of Dorian Gray

Though he wrote many plays, short stories and poems, Oscar Wilde only wrote one novel. The Picture of Dorian Gray tells the story of a young man named Dorian Gray, who is the subject of a painting by the artist Basil Hallward. Dorian is selected for his remarkable physical beauty, and Basil becomes somewhat infatuated with Dorian, believing that his beauty is responsible for a new mode of art. Talking in Basil’s garden, Dorian meets and speaks with Lord Henry Wootton, a friend of Basil’s, and becomes enthralled by Lord Henry’s world view. Espousing a new kind of hedonism, Lord Henry suggests that the only thing worth pursuing in life is beauty, and the fulfillment of the senses. Upon realising that one day his beauty will fade, Dorian cries out, wishing that the portrait Basil has painted of him would age rather than himself. Dorian’s wish is fulfilled, plunging him into more and more debaucherous acts. The portrait serves as a reminder of the effect each act has upon his soul, each sin being displayed as a new sign of ageing on the portrait.

The Picture of Dorian Gray is considered a work of gothic horror fiction with a strong Faustian theme.It also deals with the artistic movement of the decadents, and pederasty, both of which caused some controversy when the book was first published. However, in modern times, the book has been referred to as “one of the modern classics of Western literature.”The BBC placed it at #118 in its “Big Read” list, a list of of the 200 most popular novels.

The Preface

The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim. The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things.

The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography. Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.

Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

The nineteenth century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass.

The nineteenth century dislike of romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass.

The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium. No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be proved.

No artist has ethical sympathies.

An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style.

No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything.

Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art.

Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art.

From the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician.

From the point of view of feeling, the actor’s craft is the type.

All art is at once surface and symbol.

Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.

Those who read the symbol do so at their peril.

It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.

Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital.

When critics disagree, the artist is in accord with himself.

We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.

All art is quite useless.

Quotes from the book

“But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face.” Chapter 1, pg. 3

“How sad it is! I shall grow old, and horrible, and dreadful. But this picture will remain always young. It will never be older than this particular day of June. . . . If it were only the other way! If it were I who was to be always young, and the picture that was to grow old! For that-for that-I would give everything! Yes, there is nothing in the whole world I would not give! I would give my soul for that!” Chapter 2, pg. 29

“Humanity takes itself too seriously. It is the world’s original sin. If the cave-man had known how to laugh, History would have been different.” Chapter 3, pg. 46

“My dear boy, no woman is a genius. Women are a decorative sex. They never have anything to say, but they say it charmingly. Women represent the triumph of matter over mid, just as men represent the triumph of mind over morals.” Chapter 4, pg. 53

“I hope that Dorian Gray will make this woman his wife, passionately adore her for six months, and then suddenly become fascinated by someone else. He would be a wonderful study.” Chapter 6, pg. 84

“If this girl can give a soul to those who have lived without one, if she can create the sense of beauty in people whose lives have been sordid and ugly, if she can strip them of their selfishness and lend them tears for sorrows that are not their own, she is worthy of all your adoration, worthy of the adoration of the world. This marriage is quite right. I did not think so at first, but I admit it now. The gods made Sibyl Vane for you. Without her you are incomplete.” Chapter 7, pg. 92

“You have killed my love. You used to stir my imagination. Now you don’t even stir my curiosity. You simply produce no effect. I loved you because you were marvellous, because you had genius and intellect, because you realised the dreams of great poets and gave shape and substance to the shadows of art. You have thrown it all away. You are shallow and stupid.” Chapter 7, pg. 98

“His unreal and selfish love would yield to some higher influence, would be transformed into some nobler passion, and the portrait that Basil Hallward had painted of him would be a guide to him through life, would be to him what holiness is to some, and conscience to others, and the fear of God to us all. There were opiates for remorse, drugs that could lull the moral sense to sleep. But here was a visible symbol of the degradation of sin. Here was an ever-present sign of the ruin men brought upon their souls.” Chapter 8, pg. 108

“For there would be a real pleasure in watching it. He would be able to follow his mind into its secret places. This portrait would be to him the most magical of mirrors. As it had revealed to him his own body, so it would reveal to him his own soul.” Chapter 8, pg. 120

“How different Sibyl was! She lived her finest tragedy. She was always a heroine. The last night she played– the night you saw her–she acted badly because she had known the reality of love. When she knew its unreality, she died, as Juliet might have died. She passed again into the sphere of art.” Chapter 9

“Even now I cannot help feeling that it is a mistake to think that the passion one feels in creation is ever really shown in the work one creates. Art is always more abstract than we fancy. Form and colour tell us of form and colour–that is all. It often seems to me that art conceals the artist far more completely than it ever reveals him.” Chapter 9

The life of the senses was described in the terms of mystical philosophy. One hardly knew at times whether one was reading the spiritual ecstasies of some mediaeval saint or the morbid confessions of a modern sinner.

“It was a poisonous book. The heavy odour of incense seemed to cling about its pages and to trouble the brain. The mere cadence of the sentences, the subtle monotony of their music, so full as it was of complex refrains and movements elaborately repeated, produced in the mind of the lad, as he passed from chapter to chapter, a form of reverie, a malady of dreaming, that made him unconscious of the falling day and creeping shadows.” Chapter 10

“Yes, there was to be, as Lord Henry had prophesied, a new Hedonism that was to recreate life, and to save from that harsh, uncomely puritanism that is having, in our own day, its curious revival.” Chapter 11, pg. 147

“What a way for a fashionable painter to travel! A Gladstone bag and an ulster! Come in, or the fog will get into the house. And mind you don’t talk about anything serious. Nothing is serious nowadays. At least nothing should be.” Chapter 12

“He held the light up again to the canvas and examined it. The surface seemed to be quite undisturbed and as he had left it. It was from within, apparently, that the foulness and horror had come. Through some strange quickening of inner life the leprosies of sin were slowly eating the thing away. The rotting of a corpse in a watery grave was not so fearful.” Chapter 13

” Gradually the events of the preceding night crept with silent, blood-stained feet into his brain and reconstructed themselves there with terrible distinctness.” Chapter 14

“‘It is perfectly monstrous,’ he said, at last,’the way people go about nowadays saying things against one behind one’s back that are absolutely and entirely true.’” Chapter 15

“‘To cure the soul by means of the senses, and the senses by means of the soul.’ Yes, that was the secret. He had often tried it, and would try it again now. There were opium dens where one could buy oblivion, dens of horror where the memory of old sins could be destroyed by the madness of sins that were new.” Chapter 16

“Difference of object does not alter singleness of passion. It merely intensifies it. We can have in life but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible.” Chapter 17, pg. 223

“Now if Geoffrey had done the thing on purpose, how interesting he would be! I should like to know someone who had committed a real murder.” Chapter 18, pg. 233

“anybody can be good in the country. There are no temptations there. That is the reason why people who live out of town are so absolutely uncivilized. Civilization is not by any means an easy thing to attain to. There are only two ways by which man can reach it. One is by being cultured, the other by being corrupt. Country people have no opportunity of being either, so they stagnate.” Chapter 19

“The things one feels absolutely certain about are never true. That is the fatality of faith, and the lesson of romance.” Chapter 19

“The picture itself– that was evidence. He would destroy it. Why had he kept it so long? Once it had given him pleasure to watch it changing and growing old. Of late he had felt no such pleasure. It had kept him awake at night. When he had been away, he had been filled with terror lest other eyes should look upon it. It had brought melancholy across his passions. Its mere memory had marred many moments of joy. It had been like conscience to him. Yes, it had been conscience. He would destroy it.” Chapter 20

The End.

Permalink Leave a Comment

Neil Gaiman

August 16, 2006 at 5:20 am (Favorite Fiction Authors, For those who paint with words...)

I’m not very into fantasy books, but someone from my english class a few semesters ago highly recomended that I read a book entitled Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman. I thought it was an intresting title, so I decided to give it a try. I’m very happy I did. I was not at all what I expected. I was expecting fairies and wizards, and instead I was presented with a story full of magical imagery, in an adventure exploring all the souls who get lost between the cracks. I was very impressed, and went out and bought two more of his books, which I was also just as pleased with.

More About Neil: Bestselling author Neil Gaiman has long been one of the top writers in modern comics, as well as writing books for readers of all ages. He is listed in the Dictionary of Literary Biography as one of the top ten living post-modern writers, and is a prolific creator of works of prose, poetry, film, journalism, comics, song lyrics, and drama. f

For more visit: http://www.neilgaiman.com

Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman

Richard Mayhew is an unassuming young businessman living in London, with a dull job and a pretty but demanding fiancee. Then one night he stumbles across a girl bleeding on the sidewalk. He stops to help her–and the life he knows vanishes like smoke.
Several hours later, the girl is gone too. And by the following morning Richard Mayhew has been erased from his world. His bank cards no longer work, taxi drivers won’t stop for him, his hundred rents his apartment out to strangers. He has become invisible, and inexplicably consigned to a London of shadows and darkness a city of monsters and saints, murderers and angels, that exists entirely in a subterranean labyrinth of sewer canals and abandoned subway stations. He has fallen through the cracks of reality and has landed somewhere different, somewhere that is Neverwhere.

For this is the home of Door, the mysterious girl whom Richard rescued in the London Above. A personage of great power and nobility in this murky, candlelit realm, she is on a mission to discover the cause of her family’s slaughter, and in doing so preserve this strange underworld kingdom from the malevolence that means to destroy it. And with nowhere else to turn, Richard Mayhew must now join the Lady Door’s entourage in their determined–and possibly fatal–quest.

For the dread journey ever-downward–through bizarre anachronisms and dangerous incongruities, and into dusty corners of stalled time–is Richard’s final hope, his last road back to a “real” world that is growing disturbingly less real by the minute.

If Tim Burton reimagined The Phantom of the Opera, if Jack Finney let his dark side take over, if you rolled the best work of Clive Barker, Peter Straub and Caleb Carr into one, you still would have something that fell far short of Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere. It is a masterful debut novel of darkly hypnotic power, and one of the most absorbing reads to come along in years.
from http://www.neilgaiman.com/works/books/neverwhere

American Gods
by Neil Gaiman

Released from prison, Shadow finds his world turned upside down. His wife has been killed; a mysterious stranger offers him a job. But Mr. Wednesday, who knows more about Shadow than is possible, warns that a storm is coming — a battle for the very soul of America . . . and they are in its direct path.

One of the most talked-about books of the new millennium, American Gods is a kaleidoscopic journey deep into myth and across an American landscape at once eerily familiar and utterly alien. It is, quite simply, a contemporary masterpiece.

Hugo Award for Best SF/Fantasy Novel, Bram Stoker Award for Best Horror Novel, Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel, Nebula Award for Best Novel

Critical Praise:

  • “Mystery, satire, sex, horror, poetic prose – American Gods uses all these to keep the reader turning the pages.” –Michael Dirda, The Washington Post
  • “A fascinating tale . . . by turns thoughtful, hilarious, disturbing, uplifting, horrifying and enjoyable — and sometimes all at once, in a curious sort of way. Those who are familiar with Gaiman’s earlier work will find a satisfying yarn by a familiar master storyteller. Those who are meeting him for the first time may be surprised at just how good he is.” –St. Louis Post-Dispatch
  • “Saying Neil Gaiman is a writer is like saying Da Vinci dabbled in the arts.” –Minneapolis Star Tribune
  • ” A crackerjack suspense yarn . . . juicily original . . . Wagnerian noir.” –Salon.com
  • “American Gods is sexy, thrilling, dark, funny and poetic.” –Teller, of Penn & Teller
  • “Here we have . . . a real emotional richness and grandeur that emerge from masterful storytelling.” –Peter Straub
  • “Neil Gaiman, a writer of rare perception and endless imagination . . . is . . . an American treasure.” –William Gibson

Anansi Boys

When Fat Charlie’s dad named something, it stuck. Like calling Fat Charlie “Fat Charlie.” Even now, twenty years later, Charlie Nancy can’t shake that name, one of the many embarrassing “gifts” his father bestowed — before he dropped dead on a karaoke stage and ruined Fat Charlie’s life.
Mr. Nancy left Fat Charlie things. Things like the tall, good-looking stranger who appears on Charlie’s doorstep, who appears to be the brother he never knew. A brother as different from Charlie as night is from day, a brother who’s going to show Charlie how to lighten up and have a little fun … just like Dear Old Dad. And all of a sudden, life starts getting very interesting for Fat Charlie.

Because, you see, Charlie’s dad wasn’t just any dad. He was Anansi, a trickster god, the spider-god. Anansi is the spirit of rebellion, able to overturn the social order, create wealth out of thin air, and baffle the devil. Some said he could cheat even Death himself.
Returning to the territory he so brilliantly explored in his masterful New York Times bestseller, American Gods, the incomparable Neil Gaiman offers up a work of dazzling ingenuity, a kaleidoscopic journey deep into myth that is at once startling, terrifying, exhilarating, and fiercely funny — a true wonder of a novel that confirms Stephen King’s glowing assessment of the author as “a treasure-house of story, and we are lucky to have him.

Permalink 1 Comment

Kurt Vonnegut

August 14, 2006 at 10:04 am (Favorite Fiction Authors, For those who paint with words..., Kurt Vonnegut)

Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)

I first read this as an assignment for my Studies in Fiction class. I was told it was a war story. So I put off reading it until the weekend before the commentary was due (I avoid reading war stories). I read it three times that weekend. It was the first Vonnegut book I ever read, and after it I went to the bookstore and bought two more (that’s all the bookstore had). The book turned out to be an ANTI-war story. It is the story of Billy Pillgrim, a soldier in Dresden during WWII, who becomes unstuck in time and has no control over where he is going next.

Beginning of the story:
“Billy has gone to sleep a senile widower and awakened on his wedding day. He has walked through a door in 1955 and come out in 1941. He has gone back through that door to find himself in 1963. He has seen his birth and death many times, he says, and pays random visits to all events in between.”

The story is told from Billy’s perspective. And consequently follows the schizophrenic narration he experiences. He also travels to the planet Tralflamadore where he is enlightened of the true nature of reality and the futility of war.And still this all ties together with the stories theme.

Kurt Vonnegut is a master satirist able to convey his great wit and strong narrative voice to present social and political issues in a way that lightens the weight of fatalism. This book is definitely one that could be read in one sitting, and which is usually the case whether the reader intends to or not.

One of my favorite parts (the Tralfalmadorian perspective on reading):
“We Tralfalmadorians read all at once, not one after the other. There isn’t any particular relationship between all the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep. What we love about our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time.”

 

Cat’s Cradle (1963)

This is the second Vonnegut book I read, and also read it all in one sitting.

From the back cover:
“Cat’s Cradle is Vonnegut’s satircal commentary on modern man and his madness. An apocalyptic tale of this planet’s ultimate fate, it feautures a midget as the protagonist; a complete, original theology created by a calypson singer; and a vision of the future that is at once blackly fatalistic and hilariously funny. A book that left an indelible mark on an entire generation of readers, Cat’s Cradle is one of the century’s most important works…and Vonnegut at his very best.”

Evreything about that commentary is true.

Quotes from the book:

  • “She hated people who thought too much. At that moment, she struck me as an appropriate representative for almost all mankind. The fat woman’s expression implied that she would go crazy on the spot if anybody did any more thinking.”
  • “I smiled at one of the guards. He did not smile back. There was nothing funny about national security, nothing at all.”
  • “Science is magic that works.”

    • First sentence in The Books of Bokonon (the originial theology that drives the story):
    “All of the true things I am about to tell you are shamelss lies…Anyone unable to understand how a useful religion can be founded on lies will not understand this book either.”

    Breakfast of Champions (1973)
    This story is based on my favorite fictional author. His name is Kilgore Trout and he appears throughout Vonnegut books as a science fiction writer. Here are some examples of Trout’s stories:

    “Trout, incidentally, had written a book about a money tree. It had twenty-dollar bills for leaves. Its flowers were government bonds. Its fruit was diamonds. It attracted human beings who killed each other around the roots and made very good fertilizer.” , Slaughterhouse-Five pp. 167

    “It was about a planet where the language kept turning into pure music, because the creatures there were so enchanted by sounds. Words became musical notes. Sentences became melodies. They were useless as conveyors of information, because nobody knew or cared what the meanings of words were anymore. So leaders in government and commerce, in order to function, had to invent new and much uglier vocabularies and sentence structures all the time, which would resist being transmuted to music.”, Breakfast of Champions pp. 110

    More Kilgoure Trout stories at: http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/4953/trout.html

    Back Cover:
    “Breakfast of Champions is vintage Vonnegut. One of his favorite characters, aging writer Kilgore Trout, finds to his horror that a Midwest car dealer is taking his fiction as truth. The result is a muderously funny satire as Vonnegut looks at war, sex, racism, sucess, politics, and pollution in America and reminds us how to see the truth.”

    More about Vonnegut at : http://www.vonnegutweb.com/

Permalink Leave a Comment

Milan Kundera

August 14, 2006 at 9:04 am (Favorite Fiction Authors, For those who paint with words..., Milan Kundera)

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

I thought that I should start things off by listing one of my favorite books, by who has now become one of my favorite authors. I first read it in grade 12, as a recommendation by my English teacher, and have read it at least four more times since. What struck me most about this book is how beautifully it’s written. Its context deals with complex existential issues, yet it is done with such lyricism that the ideas are able to flow naturally into the readers minds. There are absolutely no moments of philosophizing overload.

From the back cover:
“In a world in which lives are shaped by irrevocable choices and fortuitous events, a world in which everything occurs but once, existence seems to lose its substance, its weight. Hence, we feel ‘the unbearable lightness of being’ not only as a consequence of our private actions, but also in public sphere, and the two inevitably intertwine.”

Page One:“…the myth of eternal return states that life which disappears once and for all, which does not return, is like a shadow, without weight, dead in advance, and whether it was horrible, beautiful, or sublime, its horror, sublimity, and beauty mean nothing.”

Putting it very simply, it basically deals with the problem that because all our lives are inevitably going to meet death, they are all equally meaningless. What purpose can there be if we’re all going to die anyway? (Don’t worry the book is much more inspiring).

I have never encountered a bad review of this book, and this says a lot considering the fastidious breed of literary critics. This is definitely time well spent, and will provide you with a more self-affirming perspective towards life and its meaning.

Immortality

About Immortality:

“It is necessary to understand the dial of life: Up to a certain moment our death seems to distant for us to occupy ourselves with it. It is unseen and invisible. That is the first, happy period of life. But then we suddenly begin to see our death ahead of us and we can no longer stop thinking about it. It is with us…We have a formal suit made for it, we buy a new tie for it, worried that others might select the clothes and tie, and select badly…This is the second period of life, when a person cannot tear his eyes away from death, is followed by still another period, the shortest most mysterious, about which little is known and little is said…At that stage death is so close that looking at it has already become boring. It is again unseen and invisible, in the way objects are when they become to intimately familiar…The third stage of life, is when a person ceases to minister his immortality and no longer considers it a serious matter. Not everyone reaches this furthest limit, but whoever does reach it knows that there, and only there, true freedom can be found.”, Excerpt from text (pp.75-76)

Back Cover:
“Milan Kundera’s sixth novel springs from a casual gesture of a woman to her swimming instructor, a gesture that creates a character in the mind of a writer named Kundera. Like Flaubert’s Emma or Tolstoy’s Anna, Kundera’s Agnes becomes an object of fascination, of indefinable longing. From that character springs a novel, a gesture of the imagination that both embodies and articulates Milan Kundera’s supreme mastery of the novel and its purpose; to explore thoroughly the great, themes of existence.”

Ingeniously crafted, full of brilliant imagery sprung from Kundera’s characteristic lyrical prose. This book will leave you inspired, and grant you a new appreciation of all life’s simple beauty.

Permalink Leave a Comment