Good Reads meta data is 474 pages, rated 4.20 by 3254 litizens.
Genre: Historical fiction.
DNA: Garlic, oops, Gallic.
Tagline: It is worse than you think.
Verdict: I got lost in the backstabbing and betrayals.
That lady killer Giordano Bruno is at it for the fifth time, now in Paris of 1585. In addition to his harem he encounters a mountain of superfluous historical detail and a confusing cast of characters. Worse, he is inept, as usual, but gets away with it because this is a work of fiction.
Catherine d’ Medici is the villain-in-chief, and she cuts quite a figure. Her nearest rival is the Duke of Guise, who thinks he ought to be king since every mirror confirms that he is so damned kingly. Catherine’s son is King Henri III, and he occasionally, but rarely, acts kingly.
The wheels are turning for another religious ceremony of mutual slaughter since it has been so long since the last one in 1572. Check Saint Bartholomew’s CV for details. Along the way we get detailed descriptions of torture, not once but twice, and a recurrent emphasis on the smells of the city in those days before Pine-o-Scent.
I needed a score card to keep track of the characters, but the important ones are clearly differentiated: Catherine, Henri III, Guise, and, especially, Charles Paget, who plays all sides against the others. Also noteworthy was the anonymous doorman who wants no friends.
The tie-up to the plot is genetic. Catherine does what she does because she is a Medici. Why dig any deeper than the name? Very unsatisfactory.
IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 34 minutes, rated 7.3 by 42 cinematizens.
DNA: Czechoslovak.
Genre: Sy Fy.
Tagline: Boom!
Verdict: Hard to find but well worth the effort.
A conscience stricken scientist lies in a coma as he recalls in nightmares his discovery of a powder with the explosive force of the volcano Krakatoa. The story was published by Karel Ćapek in 1938.
The cinematography is inventive and at one point our anti-hero watches on screen his own vain efforts to control his invention. There is a mystery woman who appears and disappears like a dream. Then there is an American agent (named Oppenheimer [just kidding]) who wants the formula. In between is a jealous and unscrupulous colleague whom we know is not to be trusted since he does not return library books when they are due. What a rat!
Relentlessly downbeat. Our scientist is doomed after an explosion of the Big K poisoned him and lies dying while the jumble of his thoughts retraces the steps (some real, others illusory) that brought him to his deathbed.
There are a number of remarkable scenes as his delirium is played out:
the wax works aristocrats in museum poses
the menacing D’Hémon with the satanic eyebrows
his mini-Krakatoa of sex
the melting face of the femme fatale
the police in German uniforms like ghosts
the assembly of beer hall hooligans in furs and diamonds.
the grasping of krakatit from a dead body
most of all is the anxiety and torment of the scientist who is eating himself up with guilt
Plato’s Letters: The Political Challenges of the Philosophic Life (2023) by Ariel Helfer.
Good Reads meta-data is 301 pages, rated 4.0 by 2 litizens.
Genre: Straussian.
Verdict: Never has so little been made into so much.
Tagline: If you don’t know you cannot be told and if you know you don’t need to be told.
Leo Strauss (1899-1973) educated a well defined cohort in political theory in his years at the University of Chicago. He himself published a series of books that spelled out and exemplified his approach to interpreting texts, and his acolytes, while competing among themselves with the usual academic undermining and backbiting, continue the tradition to this day.
The north star of Straussianism was that great thinkers hide their meaning from both the oppressors and the masses, and these two can be one and the same. Ergo: meaning is hidden in plain sight in the text.
It takes an Indiana Jones of the seminar room to find this meaning, and avoid the snares and blind alleys left for the unwary. To find the way Jones first must study the explicit words of the great mind. That means learning the language used: ancient Greek, Latin, Italian, German, or French, and so on. One must acquire this tool before proceeding.
Next one must enter into the psychic world of the author by studying the context within which he (yes, they are all men) wrote.
Accordingly, there is a long apprenticeship of devotion to the task to be performed.
While great minds may be prolific, everything they wrote forms, if properly decoded, a single text. Note that the process is decoding, not just reading what is on the page but sensing the context in which it was put on the page and – even more important – noting what is not on the page to find what is implicit. Yes, as in aboriginal astronomy the key often is what is not there. If a reader sees a mistake in the text, the fault is in the reader not the author. Think again. Why would a mistake be deliberately inserted? Is it a red herring to distract the unworthy? If something is not there, stop and think, and think again. If it should be there, there must be a deep and dark reason why it is not. Look for the clues. Absence may be evidence.
The single text is like an old dark house where a hidden sliding door set into a wall leads to passageways built into the fabric of the building that Jones using the light of a Straussian lamp navigates step-by-step. Legend has it that some of Leo Strauss seminars spent a semester of twenty plus class hours pondering, often in Quaker-meeting silence, a dozen lines from a Platonic text. Tin foil hats were optional.
If the coded passageways twist and turn that is not an accident or a compromise with the circumstances, still less a mistake, but profoundly intentional. Great minds do not make mistakes or have accidents. Homer did not nod. Everything that is there is meaningful, however specious it seems on the surface (to wit, many of the preliminary arguments in Platonic dialogues are not chaff, warm-ups, or false starts but may be the real message encrypted for Jones to fathom). Moreover, what is not there may be even more meaningful than what is there.
The pièce de résistance is the numerology. Word, page, chapter counts and numbers themselves bear significance in this approach. The seventh word in the seventh chapter must be interrogated with Gestapo thoroughness. An old favourite of this kind is Leo Strauss’s expressed amazement that Machiavelli’s Discourses has 142 chapters, exactly the same number as Livy’s History of Rome. Astonishing! Is it? The Discourses is a chapter-by-chapter commentary on Livy’s History so it almost has to have the same number of the chapters. Thus does the Straussian endow the mundane with mystery.
As regards Plato’s Letters the chief argument of this book is that the letters are to be taken together as a single text, not a scattering of remnants. This is partly proven by the fact that there is nothing in them to indicate that unity, no cross references, few if any continuities. It is a hidden single text that only an acolyte will detect. Likewise, the positioning of the letters in the count strikes another Straussian chord. There are thirteen letters. That cannot be an accident. The longest and most significant is number seven. Again no accident.
Ariel Helfer
This veneration of the text, one might think, is compromised in ancient authors like Plato because we have no original texts, but the Straussian thesis is that such genius as Plato’s prevails against the ravages of time and tide and translation from Ancient Greek into Arabic then Latin then later Greek then modern Greek then English for the masses. (Ancient Greek is to modern Greek as Old Norse is to contemporary English, I have been told.) Yes, the fog descends at this point but the momentum continues. For an outline of this approach I have tacked on at the end the notes I used to discuss this method with students in days of yore.
In most of the letters Plato is replying to someone who has asked his advice on what to do in a political situation. While the book runs to three hundred pages, its interpretation of Plato can be summarised this way: there is no point in offering advice because all existing polities are corrupt. This is true by definition because all that exists is frangible. Any advice would be corrupted and so serve no purpose. It takes 300-pages to air that less than nourishing conclusion.
Given the Straussian emphasis on context it is curious to note that in the discussion of the minute detail of Plato’s visits to Syracuse, the author makes no mention of the last time Athenians went to Syracuse in the Sicilian Expedition of 415 B.C.E. a generation earlier. It is all but certain that relatives of Plato’s took part in that debacle. But then Alcibiades, a leader of that expedition, is not mentioned in the text either, yet his name is on two alleged Platonic dialogues.
How do we explain spurious letters or other texts attributed to ancient writers like Plato? There was an incentive to forge letters in ancient world to sell to private collectors and to the libraries at Alexandria, Pergamon, and Byzantium and when these libraries fell down the memory hole, a quick and clever forger would turn out a letter that had allegedly been saved from the ruins and put it up for sale. Of course such creativity was not limited to letters. It may be the source for the spurious dialogues, essays, and plays attributed to Plato, Xenophon, and others. But short letters were the easiest to prepare and did not require much intellectual input. They sell on their provenance, not content.
….
How to read a book in the Straussian way.
Leo Strauss
First make explicit the assumptions naive readers make.
1. the text is accurate and complete as the author could make it.
2. the text conforms to the author’s intentions.
3. the author wrote freely, uncensored.
4. the unit of meaning is the chapter, paragraph, page, and line
5. the meaning is in the words used.
6. the author is trying to communicate with any and all readers.
7. errors, omissions, contradictions are errors, omissions, and contradictions. They may be explained but they have no meaning.
8. purpose of writing is to test arguments and propositions, and to persuade.
In contrast Straussian reading assumes:
1. There are Great Truths. The esoteric. Like the statue in the block of marble, they have to released.
But they cannot be explicitly spoken. Why not? Because they would infuriate both the elite and mass, because the elite is corrupt, and mass is inferior.
To speak the great truths would both shake the polity and so endanger the speaker.
2. Therefore the Great Truth sayers are always persecuted and censored. They react accordingly.
3. Great Minds know the Great Truths, and they know persecution prevails over Great Truths.
4. Great Minds elude persecution in writing Great Books.
Indeed, persecution is a necessary condition for writing a Great Book.
5. Great Books publicly deceive; they deceive censors and the censorious part of each reader.
Privately, between the lines, the Great Books carry a coded message to informed readers.
Great Books combine the advantages of general communication for being widely available but avoid the threat of censorship and danger with the advantages of private communication carrying a frank and important hidden message to select readers.
6. Great Books reveal themselves to Great Readers who:
– are careful for everything in a Great Book has meaning.
Everything. What is said and what is not said. What is there and what is not there.
– interpret not just each passage alone but each passage in the context of the work, and the life work of the Great Mind.
– read between the lines, giving meaning to silences, i.e., what is not there.
– realize that a Great Mind may repeatedly say A is B but mean by that repetition for the reader to conclude that A is not B.
– apparent errors, omissions, and contradictions are intended to encode the secret message.
– look for irony in things said but not meant. Thus is Plato’s repeated assertion that women equal men dismissed as a joke.
Divine that brevity may be a form of emphasis.
perceive that the coding may be within the structure, the middle line, etc. Hence the numerology.
See Leo Strauss, ‘Persecution and the Art of Writing’ (1941) for details.
—
This lengthy addendum is one reason why I don’t often comment on vocational reading. I get carried way.
Plato of Athens: A Life in Philosophy (2023 ) by Robin Waterfield
Good Reads meta-data is 255 pages rated 4.21 by 73 litizens.
Genre: Biography.
DNA: Greek.
Tagline: A new bottle for old wine.
Verdict: Old News.
Amazon web page opens with this sentence. So I thought it was a biography. How silly can I get? See below for an answer.
‘The first ever biography of the founder of Western philosophy.’
An account of the life and work of Plato (of Athens) from go to gone. It was a common name and became more common after his death, though it hardly seems necessary to say ‘of Athens’ since most of us never heard of all those others. Needless pedantry some might say. Right, Sal. (You either get it or you don’t. There is no try.)
The book pulls together a mass of material and relies mainly on ancient sources rather than the army ants of academic commentators that live off Plato’s corpus. Guilty of that myself. That reliance on the fragmentary remnants of ancient sources makes the book distinctive, though it is rather like assembling an incomplete jigsaw puzzle.
But wait, those ancient authors were not his contemporaries, apart from a very few, ahem, mainly Aristotle. Most of the venerable ancients the author scours wrote, such shards as survive, 400 or 500 years after Plato’s death. Ancient does not mean contemporary to Plato, though it certainly means closer, but does proximity mean accuracy? The assumption is that they had access to sources now lost which sources they seldom name.
The author sifts this material because it is, of course, contradictory. Even then scholars strove to be different. He, for example, denies the authenticity of the Platonic epistles while Ariel Helfer, Plato’s Letters (2023) affirms them. We readers are left no wiser in this clash of footnotes. The reasons Waterfield cites to reject the authenticity of a letter are the very reasons Helfer uses to affirm its legitimacy. Though these two books appeared in the same year, I doubt the authors’ paths crossed. The Englishman Waterfield on his Greek island, and Yankee Helfer in his hometown Straussian cocoon would not mix.
I gave in to the temptation to read this book because Amazon offered it as a biography, and I wondered how one could write a biography of Plato, who himself was reticent and from whose time so little has survived. That answer came quickly: It is not. It a contextualization of Plato’s works. Indeed, the book is a serial interpretation of the Plato’s dialogues with reference to the social and historical context of the times. When I realised that I reached for a paraphrase of Thomas Carlyle: Biography is history, but history is not biography.
Since I have spent so much time in the last several years with the difficulties of a biography of a Sixteenth Century figure, I was primed for this exercise. (You know whom I mean.)
The most biographical part of the account is the one we all want to know more about, Plato’s three trips to Syracuse, and these are given due weight, but no revelations follow. That is asking too much. And despite denigrating the Platonic letters, much use is made of two since they are the main source for the visits.
Robin Waterfield, renowned.
Aside: I tried to read a biography of Plato many years ago, Ludwig Marcuse, Plato and Dionysius: A Double Biography (1947), written as a see-it-now novel in which Dionysius stands in for Hitler and Plato for Churchill. Not recommended.
A reader particularly interested in these insular adventures might do better to read Mary Renault’s novel The Mask of Apollo (1966). Surely banned in Florida for its casual acceptance of homosexuality. Indeed, most ancient Greek texts would have to be banned for the same reason. Thus does the world get smaller and smaller.
Good Reads meta-data is 408 pages, rated 3.77 by 31,854 litizens.
Genre: Krimi.
DNA: Yankee 1914.
Verdict: Pluck galore.
Tagline: Conny got her gun.
When in 1914 the arrogant and not very bright young company town mill manager, drives his new-fangled auto-mobile into Constance Kopp’s horse drawn carriage outside Paterson New Jersey, he meets a woman who fights back. Barely stopping he refuses to acknowledge fault or pay compensation, and buzzes off. Constance (Connie to me) doesn’t take ‘No’ for an answer and pursues him by fair means or foul for restitution.
He retaliates, so unaccustomed is he to being held responsible for his stupid actions as a rich man’s son, he ignores her and then turns even uglier. The town police have no interest in challenging the son of the owner of the town in all but name, but the county sheriff has his own reasons for taking up the case.
Escalation follows as the young man’s threats take the form of bricks and bullets, and the sheriff, seeing in Constance someone who is constant, gives her shooting lessons against the final solution.
In the course of digging into the owner’s many other misdeeds, Constance is reminded of one of her own. Ahem. Not all is as it seems among the three Kopp sisters living alone on a farm outside of town. There are a lot of back- and side-stories. [Yawn.]
Nonetheless, justice is done, though less because of the sheriff’s considerable efforts, and the dire risks Constance took, than the revulsion of the manager’s family at his criminal actions. Bit late in coming that. Without the family behind him, he was suddenly alone. Very neat but a long time in coming.
Amy Stewart
The time and place are well realised and the characters are differentiated from the repellent plutocrat to the cross-pressured sherif and the sisters themselves alike but different. First in a series: Miss Kopp Won’t Quit, Dear Miss Kopp, Kopp Sisters on the March, Miss Kopp’s Midnight Confessions, Lady Cop (Kopp) Makes Trouble, Miss Kopp Investigates, and counting.
Good Reads meta-data is 300 pages rated 4.54 by 759 litizens.
DNA: Holmes (attenuated).
Tagline: … [can’t think of anything].
Verdict: Number 18 in the series and it shows.
Mr and Mrs Holmes of Baker Street are at it again. Mary Russell may be Mrs Holmes, but the absent and deceased Irene Adler remains the love of Holmes’s life, now personified in a son from that brief and sinful liaison. Holmes has to rescue Son and then Son has to rescue father. Then Mary Russell has to explain it all to them.
Despite the turbans and lascars inconspicuously getting up to no good in rural Provence, this is a Holmes family reunion. And like most family gathering where the participants have nothing in common but blood, it is b-o-r-i-n-g.
To bring the generations together several laws of nature are set aside. The plot is a kaleidoscope that must have been worked out by Barry Jones in one of his maze flow charts. Turns out Holmes is Indian or Sikh, a Swami, or something. Dunno lost the plot. There is very little detecting and much musing.
Ahem, I can’t let that high score on Good Reads pass without a comment. I wonder if number 19 in this series appeared as 200 blank pages, would it get a similar rating. The author has a loyal following that sees what it wants to see. This book will not add any new adherents to that happy crew.
IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 1 hour and 30 minutes, rated 5.7 by 1,500 cinematizens
DNA: Japan.
Verdict: Shoot ‘em up! We’re good at that. [Indeed.]
Tagline: The Munchkins are coming!
No sooner did the Mysterians leave in 1957 than the Munchkins arrived in 1959, setting up a military base on our Moon! While the Mysterians said they went to Pearl Harbor in peace, these Munchkins skip the soft soap and get right to the zap. Peace is for wimps. They came to conquer.
It takes one to know one and in response the world Co-Prosperity Sphere unites behind Japan to battle the Munchkins, repeatedly for at least two-thirds of the runtime. Where would we be without the peace-loving Japanese to blow things up?
In a favourite ploy of cheapskate invaders, the Munchkins exercise mind control over a couple of key individuals to save on make up. These zombies go around looking vacant when turning off valves that would save the world. Some plumbers they are!
The budget went on models to create effects, and these are very well done. Better even than Gerry Anderson’s toys. Albeit, the moon buggies looks too much like Oscar Meyer Weinermobiles to take seriously.
The story has parallels with The Earth versus Flying Saucers of 1956 but even less character development. There are also reflections of it in the space battles of Star Wars.
The Master and the Margarita (1967 [1928+]) by Mikhail Bulgakov (1891-1940)
Good Reads meta-data is 320 pages rated 4.29 by 364,380 litizens
Genre: Fantasy, satire
Tagline: The devil you say! Yes, I do.
Verdict: Trip without arrival.
A conversation in public park between two savants – one a pompous professor and the other a prosperous poet- is interrupted by a distinguished gentleman who intrudes to correct an assertion the professor made, namely that there was not an historical Jesus. Oh yes, says the interrupter, there was and proceeds to recount Pontiac (spellchecker bite) Pilate’s interview of this man, a telling that does not quite accord with the gospels, but these, according to the professor, are indeed fiction. But the gentleman named Woland insists his account is true, because he witnessed it!
Thus the pair suppose Woland to be a lunatic. But we readers, thanks to the blurb, know better. He’s a charming devil and that is the literal truth. In the translation I read, there are many references to the devil and to god. How did that sit with the Comrades at the time, I wonder. Had they not yet become godless communists?
The stories thereafter proceed in parallel as we find out more about Pilate and witness the superficial corruption of the new approved artistic elite of Moscow who are beguiled by prestidigitator Woland whose entourage include a large talking cat with a taste for vodka and a witch with a Boeing broom stick for flight.
The Master and Margarita (the Qantas broom stick was late arriving) only enter in the second act and through many trials and tribulations (see above) they achieve a certain kind of survival in limbo, resonant of Dante’s Purgatorio.
The book has a varied and vexed publication history. It was written over a period of years, and in regime thaws parts of it were published with heavy censorship, while several samizdat versions came and went, but it was not until 1967 the version I have was published. I read this same version shortly after publication as a student and recall liking it, although on this reading I found the string of incidents tedious since there seemed to be no purpose but the string itself.
Good Reads meta-date is 236 pages, rated 4.06 by 4,705 litizens.
Genre: Sy Fy.
DNA: UK.
Verdict: Enough, already!
Tagline: All show, no go.
Our hero gets caught between the Titans and, well, other Titans. These titans really are big, and one can only become a titan with the wealth of an Arab oil sheik. Think of them as bodybuilders on the ultimate steroid. They are the 1% who own the government, police, media, and …. When one of them is murdered, who you gonna call? Someone who can’t say no, that’s who: a Tiny investigator with gum on his shoe and chip on his raincoat shoulder.
The murdered Titan was an odd ball, even, or especially for a Titan, and Investigator spends a lot of time and adds to the body count unravelling the deceased’s past. How did such a schomo get to be a Titan? And what was he up to once he became? And what does cage fighting have to do with it? All good questions.
The plot is outlandish, to say the least, but the pace, the dialogue, my curiosity kept me reading, but – warning – the author seems to think ‘noir’ means keeping the reader in the dark. Much of the dialogue is cryptic and incomprehensible. There are pages and pages of pointless banter filling out the bulk. Passing points are laboured and pivotal plot points flash by.
Nick Harkaway
It is sold as noir but I would say it is more nihilism than noir. Part of a series, but this one is probably enough for your reader to ingest (but not digest).
Balzac as He Should be Read (1946) by William H. Royce
Good Reads meta-data: it is listed without any details. It has 48 pages.
Tagline: Useful.
Verdict: A gem.
A retirement project I once had in mind was to read in sequence Honoré de Balzac’s La Comedie humaine. I made a false start more than a decade ago and got bogged down in one of his novels that was epistolary, letters between two sisters, which was boring. He must have needed the francs per word and spun it out. The reading I did then was in publication order, which is not the sequence in which his grand comedy of life fits together.
The difficulty at that time was compounded because the Rocket e-Book reader of the day did not make it easy. The text was there but not word wrapped on the screen. That made a considerable difference to my surprise. Moreover the only available digital editions were out of copyright Victorian translations that were censored and stilted
To begin anew, I needed a kick start, and this little book did it. In case a reader does not realise why a spark-plug is needed, please note that more than ninety (90) stories comprise the whole, and many of those are full-length novels. Balzac was a Niagara of words.
The complete Human Comedy in translation.
Royce offers three suggestions about how to immerse oneself in Balzac’s waters. One is to read in publication order as I tried. Royce himself rejects this because in subsequent editions, Balzac manipulated the sequences to suit the growth and interaction of the 2,450 characters he created on the page. The time of publication did not coincide with the overall narrative which grew in all directions, including backward. Ergo to read a novel published in 1840 set in 1840 before one published in 1842 with many of the same characters set in 1830 when they were younger convolutes the narrative in favour of the publication date. Balzac often birthed characters at age 30 or 40, and then later went to back to them when they were younger. Eugène de Rastignac appears in nearly thirty of his novels at different ages. Needless to say these thirty were not published in chronological order of Rastignac’s age. (See Anthony Pugh, Balzac’s Recurring Characters [1974] for pedantic detail.)
Second is by the order of events dated in the novels and stories and this he offers to the reader with the gargantuan appetite for the whole. Let it be noted that Balzac is largely consistent on dates within each novel and refers to an event or person that can be dated in nearly every story.
Willian H Royce
Third, embedded in that chronological list Royce bolds the titles of twenty novels that he deems the core of the Comedie humaine. That is a much more digestible banquet, and since long ago I read The Chouans, Père Goriot, the Wild Ass Skin, The Unknown Masterpiece, and Cousin Bette which were included in that twenty, I had a running start with this selection. Assuming those six I went to Amazon to find a Kindle version of the next novel: Une Ténébreuse Affaire. It has many titles in English but none are available for Kindle.
While confirming that absence, Amazon began besieging me with other titles, and I bit on one which I will comment on later. Suffice to say here that it is a biography (not of Balzac) but of seven of his principle characters. It was an intriguing idea and I have started on it to my satisfaction. More on this later, if you are good.
Personal indulgence. The first Balzac title I read was Père Goriot in high school for an AP World Literature class. The other Balzac’s I read in college for a similar class. What do students read today in high school classes? Comments welcome.
I went through Maison de Balzac in 1980, but all I can remember is that there was a secret backdoor through the rear garden that he used to escape the creditors and bailiffs when they came in the front door, usually by kicking it in. He moved around a lot and used false names to elude debt collectors who were legion.
Royce’s long out print book came into my hand thanks to Katester’s perspicacious insight in making it a Christmas gift.
