Samanta Schweblin, Fever Dream ****

Schweblin has a new collection of stories out, and reviews of it always mention her "unsettling" novel Fever Dream. So I picked up a used copy at Powell's.

The author is indeed a master at building mood. The plot is almost beside the point, serving primarily as a delivery medium for creeping dread. It involves two mothers with young children, natural poisons, dying animals, and a terrible vacation town. You can read the entire book in one sitting, proven by the fact that I did so.

As an aside, I am not a fan of the title Fever Dream, because the term has become an overused cliché for anything that has an undercurrent of anxiety. I have to direct my complaint to the publisher of the translation, because Schweblin called the book Distancia de rescate ("rescue distance"), which actually relates to a theme in the story.

Jane Alison, Meander Spiral Explode ***

For centuries there's been one path through fiction we're most likely to travel -- one we're actually told to follow -- and that's the dramatic arc: a situation arises, grows tense, reaches a peak, subsides. ... If you ask Google how to structure a story, your face will be hammered with pictures of arcs. ... But something that swells and tautens until climax, then collapses? Bit masculo-sexual, no? So many other patterns run through nature, tracing other deep motions in life. Why not draw on them, too?

Alison correctly notes that there are other ways to organize a satisfying novel, and she attempts to categorize the alternatives in terms of naturally occurring patterns such as spirals, radials, and fractals. I was intrigued by her close reading and analysis of unconventional novels (W.G. Sebald's The Emigrants in particular), but was unconvinced that her taxonomy provided any insight.

The first few chapters cover stylistic elements that provide a story's texture: word length, sentence length, speed of reading vs speed of action, repeated images. I really liked the examples she provided, especially her rewrite of a Raymond Carver passage that removes the patterning of the sentences. These textural elements don't really fit in with the larger organizational elements she covers in subsequent chapters.

In the end, Meander Spiral Explode encouraged me to read closely and notice how the author achieves various effects -- for example, I have always been intrigued by the way Patrick O'Brian varies the speed with which time passes, and how Sebald writes allusive novels without using figurative language -- but also frustrated me with the way Alison tried to stuff her examples into abstract patterns,

Zane Grey, The Lone Star Ranger / The Mysterious Rider *** 1/2

You can't have a collection of Classic Westerns without some Zane Grey. The collection I'm reading has two Zane Grey books that feel like three.

The Lone Star Ranger is an early book (from 1915!) that spends a great deal of time exploring the mental state of its main character, Buck Duane. Duane inherited from his father a "fighting instinct, a driving intensity to kill" that is in constant conflict with his better nature. Duane kills a man at the beginning of Part 1, in self defense but after passing on numerous opportunities to avoid trouble, and goes on the lam in the outlaw country of West Texas. He spends a lot of time alone with his struggles ("As he walked he fell into the lately acquired habit of brooding over his misfortune"), but falls in with a gang of outlaws whose consciences do not trouble them. He determines to save a young girl held captive by the gang. In Part 2, Duane is recruited as an undercover agent for the Texas Rangers, using his outlaw reputation to infiltrate a massive cattle rustling organization.

Part 1 of The Lone Star Ranger is the first book in the collection that really feels like a Classic Western, with its gunslingers, outlaws, and Texan locale. The story is well plotted and well written; I especially liked the scene where a posse traps Duane in the thicket. Part 2 is quite different in style, reading almost like a Hammett detective novel with lots of overheard dialogue and an organized criminal syndicate. It's almost as if the two parts where written separately.

The Mysterious Rider (from 1921) is a domestic drama, a love triangle that never leaves its Colorado ranch. Columbine promises her adoptive father that she'll marry his no-good son in an attempt to tame and improve him, but she loves one of the cowboys. As Buck Duane struggled between his violent nature and his moral compass, Columbine struggles between duty and desire. The title character is an old hunter who serves as a Greek chorus and hand of fate, not to mention being Columbine's biological father.

The Mysterious Rider has narrative problems -- Columbine barely registers the announcement that she was a foundling, the rancher's blindness to his son's faults is unbelievable, the later chapters are repetitive as the heroes give the villain many chances to reform -- but its descriptions are lovely. For example, I absolutely love the quiet scene where Wade (the mysterious rider) beds down in the valley of the White River: fine scenery, fading light, contemplative attention to Wade's routine, the sound of the wind and animals (p 614 - 618).

Isaiah Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity ****

This collection of Isaiah Berlin's writings* focuses on his views regarding pluralism, which he repeatedly distinguishes from relativism, and nationalism, which he differentiates from national consciousness.

'I prefer coffee, you prefer champagne. We have different tastes. There is no more to be said.' That is relativism. ... Pluralism [is] the conception that there are many different ends that men may seek and still be fully rational, fully men, capable of understanding each other and deriving light from each other, as we derive it from reading Plato or the novels of medieval Japan - worlds, outlooks, very different from our own. ... We are free to criticise the values of other cultures, to condemn them, but we cannot pretend not to understand them at all, or to regard them simply as subjective...

National consciousness I regard as a normal human feeling, which is not at all to be condemned, which creates solidarity, loyalty, patriotism and other feelings which unite human beings. ... Nationalism [is] the condition where members of the nation regard themselves as superior to others, and entitled to dominate them as being selected by God or by Providence to play a special role in the development of mankind... 

Berlin's key point, repeated in several pieces, is that up to the time of the Enlightenment, people believed in an immutable human nature and a single set of universal values; in principle we could discover them and design a way to live that conformed to them. The past two centuries have shown that the universal set includes contradictory values, making it impossible to avoid moral conflict.

I was especially intrigued by Berlin's point about how our values change over time. For example, we admire a person who remains true to his or her principles, even if we think those principles are wrong. People in the Middle Ages or earlier would find this admiration almost inconceivable: dedication to the truth is the only virtue. Valuing fidelity to one's own ideas only makes sense in the context of a Romantic worldview, where personal expression is a key value.

The central essay, the longest in the book, is about a thinker I never knew previously: the arch-conservative Catholic Joseph de Maistre, from the early 19th century.  Maistre believed that all of the most important things in life are the irrational parts shrouded in darkness, and that therefore men needed to avoid applying reason and just submit to their betters, who received direction from the Church and God. Berlin cites Bertrand Russell as saying that "truly to understand the central doctrines of an original thinker, it is necessary...to grasp the particular vision of the universe which lies at the heart of his thought." Berlin does an excellent job of that for Maistre, so that I can apply pluralism and understand (while condemning) his values and worldview.

Reading The Crooked Timber of Humanity reminded me of reading Hilary Putnam's Mind, Language, and Reality, which was similarly a collection of papers that overlap to a great extent, providing multiple opportunities to hear his arguments and see how they apply in different contexts. Berlin's approach and prose reminded me of William James': they both have a warm conversational style that lacks the rigor of most professional philosophers, and they both offer optimistic views about the possibility of people living together in harmony.


* Apparently, Berlin didn't really "write" most of his work. Instead, he dictated it or had it transcribed from his lectures. This fact goes a long way toward explaining his conversational tone and lack of footnotes, and makes his complex sentence structure more impressive.