The Arabian Nights

Tales from the Arabian Nights

“If you are not sleepy, tell us one of your lovely, little tales to while away the night.” Shahrazad replied, “With the greatest pleasure”:

Tales from The Arabian Nights proved an interesting challenge, because most collections of them in English are only selections, and their contents are highly variable. The first  set I started didn't mention Aladdin or Sinbad, the two stories which have the most name recognition in the west.  My reading of the Arabian nights was thus divided between two volumes, the respective translators being Hussein Hadaway and Edward William Lane.

The Arabian nights open with the framing story of two brother-kings in Persia and India visiting one another and discovering that both of their wives are cheating on them.  After retreating into the country to think things over,  they spy a demon who keeps his human wife locked in a box buried in the desert in an effort to keep her faithful,  only to have his efforts spoiled by her finding other men to sleep with  anyway. The brothers sleep with her before lamenting the unfaithfulness of womankind, and return to their respective realms, where one resolves to never keep a wife. Instead, each day he marries a virgin, sleeps with her, and then kills her after the fact. This goes on for quite some time until his vizier's daughter, Shahrahzad,  volunteers herself for marriage with a plan in mind.  Using her extensive knowledge of literature and poetry,  on her wedding night she begins telling a story that so ensnares the mind of her husband that he begs her to continue, and night after night puts the thought  of killing her away until he can hear the end.

The tales of the Arabian nights are not one long story with many chapters like War and Peace; instead, one story will unfold to have many stories inside it, or a character introduced in one story will then be followed in another story, ensnaring the reader in a multitude of threads.  They're replete with magic, of course; demons are as common as cattle, but I suspect the translation of that particular word  is awkward because the demons are not necessarily servants of a great evil power. The first one we meet is just a fellow burying his bride in a glass box in the middle of the wilderness, nothing diabolical there.  In the first collection I read, once the caliph Harun al-Rashid shows up in a story, most of the stories that follow involve his court.  (al-Rashid threatens his vizier Jafar with death every time they discover something untoward going on in the kingdom. Not exactly the happy little man from Disney's Aladdin.)  There are a lot of surprises here: Aladdin is set in China, of all places, but I suppose he could have been one of China's distant western minorities, like a Muslim  Uyghur.  Some of the stories are also far more salacious than I would have expected, given the image of Islam as straitlaced, but these stories emerge from popular culture which eludes heavy state censorship by its oral nature.

The Arabian Nights will probably rank among my favorite, or at least the most memorable, books in this Classics Club challenge.  The stories are rich in odd scenarios and characters, like the chance meeting of three one-eyed dervishes, or the discovery that the colorful fish in a pond introduced in one story are actually the citizens of a town which was cursed, and the stories-within-stories trick gets amusing, almost like a running joke. Of course each dervish, characters in a story, has to tell how they got there, and one of them has another story inside that story -- Shahrazad's ability to weave all these together is amazing.

Related:
The Canterbury Tales, G. Chaucer

Very Good, Jeeves

Very Good, Jeeves
© 1930 P.G. Wodehouse
304 pages

This past Saturday I had a very happy surprise. Taking a break from a day of  sacking my closet, wardrobe, and bookcases to donate to charity and get me closer to my simple-living ideal,  I grabbed a tale of Wodehouse stories to re-read during lunch. Imagine my delight to realize...this was a collection I'd purchased to read one April, then forgotten that I hadn't already read it.  (I have quite a bit of Wodehouse, and they all blur together in the imagination.)

Now, I've reviewed other Wodehouse story collection before, and he like Bernard Cornwell is so consistent that my comments, both descriptive and appraising, would only copy past reviews.   With a few adjustments, I could literally paste-in my review for Right Ho Jeeves, as the difference lies in one being a novel and the other (this) a collection of stories.   In short, Wodehouse has a brilliant way with the English language, which is never funnier than in his hands,  and he tells amusing stories about a society wastrel and his Machiavellian butler, who works endlessly to keep his young master out of trouble,  i.e. marriage and useful employment. Jeeves' solutions also have a way of destroying tacky articles of clothing and art that Bertie insists on dragging home. In a full-length novel there are multiple schemes from different people afoot, sometimes conflicting with one another and sometimes complementing one another.    What one values most (language aside) from a Wodehouse novel is how innocent they are, providing  mirth and drama without a hint of malice.  (A few months ago, an article called "P.G. Wodehouse: Balm for the Modern Soul"  made me especially appreciative of this.)


There's a full run-down of the stories on Wikipedia if you're curious. 

The Return of Horatio Hornblower

Hornblower Addendum
Collected 2011 eNet press
79 pages

Has it been eight years since I last sailed with Horatio Hornblower?  The naval adventure series by C.S. Forester, and the A&E movie series based on it were one of the highlights of 2010, and in the years since I’ve subjected many friends to those same movies so I could have the pleasure of watching them again in company.  In hunting for books like Horatio Hornblower, however, I stumbled upon a collection of Hornblower tales I’d missed -- or, mostly missed.  This is not a substantial collection by any means; it’s rather shorter than the shortest Hornblower work, Hornblower and the Hotspur, or Hornblower in the West Indies,  and two of its five stories have been previously collected.   The stories are chiefly of interest to those who know and admire Hornblower already,  as they put him in fascinating or morally demanding situations.  The last story here has him encounter a seeming lunatic who claims to be the emperor Napoleon, for instance, while another has him tasked with securing an Irish deserter and discovering a secret compartment in the man’s trunk filled with gold. In all instances Hornblower proves himself to be a perfectly honorable and charitable fellow.  Perhaps the most interesting story in the one in which Admiral Hornblower is asked to take insane King George III to rendezvous with another ship, but they’re stumbled upon by an American frigate in the latter part of the war of 1812.

Although this collection really only recommends itself to the completists among Hornblower readers, I felt instantly at home as soon as I started reading the first story. Forester and his naval hero were good to experience again.

I'd planned this book to be a Read of England post, but it's more "fun-sized" than a regular read. I am gearing up for that, however -- we're a week away from a solid month of English glory!

Declassified

Star Trek Vanguard: Declassified
© 2011 Kevin Dilmore, David Mack,  Marco Palmieri, and Dayton Ward
404 pages

At the edge of Federation space, at its shared border with the Klingons and the Tholian Assembly, lies trouble.  The area known as the Taurus Reach brims with mineral-rich planets supporting humanoid life,  but has remained curiously uninhabited for eons. The Tholians regard it with fearful reverence,  as if something is buried there that should remain so.  Here enter Vanguard Station,  a Starfleet starbase intended to oversee the colonization of the Taurus Reach  -- and more secretly, a lab to examine its buried secrets. The ST Vanguard series has combined excellent characters, intriguing scientific mystery and steady drama for five books.  Now, in Vanguard Declassified, we find four more stories of intrigue, set throughout the first four books of the series. Three of the authors are familiar for their contributions to Vanguard, but Marco Palmieri is better known as the editor who is responsible for spearheading the Star Trek Relaunch.

In “Almost Tomorrow”, the Klingons enter the scene for the first time, and a spy is revealed. This features our favorite Machiavellian Vuclan, T’Pyrnn, and a sex scene that’s more awkward than most because she has a malevolent ghost in her head who wants to possess her lover. Oh, you wacky Vulcans.

“Hard News” features a world-weary but determined journalist and his girl Friday, developing a story that will expose a connection between the Orion pirates and some Starfleet intelligence ops. Word to the wise, making Orions grumpy is a bad idea. They’re not Klingons and you won’t see them coming, green skin aside.

“The Ruins of Noble Men” is a  story set in two different time periods; in one, a Vanguard ship is dispatched to a suddenly isolationist colony world  to convince them to come back to the fold. The colony is hiding a secret, though, and  in attempting to establish meaningful communications with them Captain Desai finds herself thinking about an episode from her former boss-lover’s youth, when he had an usual run-in with a Klingon named Gorkon.  (Casual Trek fans may remember Gorkon as the assassinated chancellor in The Undiscovered Country.)

The last story, “The Stars Look Down”, is by David Mack and involves a secret mission to land on a Gorn-controlled world, infiltrate one of their ships, steal/copy data and compromise the original, then get out before the Gorn reprise Cestus III.   Features Quinn, a smuggler-scoundrel in the cut of Han Solo or Mal Reynolds,   along with his SF intel partner Bridy Mac.  This being a David Mack story, there’s intense drama and tragedy. (If you find yourself in a David Mack novel, pray that you are a one-page extra character who is not important enough to matter, either as a tragic death or as a plot driver. Be the guy behind the desk who nods to the main characters as they are running into action. It’s just not safe otherwise.)

The four stories span the entirety of the first five Vanguard books, and between then feature most of the favorite characters from the series.  All four are  enjoyable tales; I was most partial to “Hard News” because of the unsusual first-person perspective and the general story:  I like the pre-ENT Orion pirates. They got a little weird after ENT, with pheromones making people slaves and such. Fewer sex slaves and more organized crime, please, thank you.

Overclocked

Overclocked: More Stories of the Future Present
© 2016 Cory Doctorow
388 pages

I’d never heard of Cory Doctorow before  this week, but I encountered his name on a list of promising SF authors and looked him up. Amazon obliged my curiosity with a flash sale on one of his collections of short stories, and so I  began reading Overclocked. A collection of short pieces ranging from stories to novellas, Overclocked  has some fun with SF classics and exploring concepts like intellectual property, 3D printing,  robotics, and artificial intelligence.   AI is particularly important, with several stories using characters who have duplicated their consciousness and downloaded it into other carriers so they could achieve multiple goals simultaneously.  Doctorow freely borrows titles and concepts from other SF works, which is not surprising given that he believes strict legal protections of intellectual property smothers creativity and innovation; this belief finds expression in several stories here, particularly "After the Siege".  I took an immediate liking to these stories, aided in part by the fact that his best-known novel, Little Brother,  is a YA man-vs-state scenario.

The stories:
"I, Robot" has the most fun with SF classics, throwing both Asimov and Orwell in a blender and creating a world where Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia and both have partially roboticized societies....but the societies in question are very different.   It features robots, transferable consciousnesses, and a little futuristic law-enforcement.

"When Sys Admins Ruled the Earth".   A bioweapon has been released across the northern hemisphere and the world seems to be ending...but a handful of server admins are keeping the Internet up and the hope of recovery alive -- at least as long as the power generators hold out.

"Anda's Game" : a young teenager who finds meaning by playing in an elite women-only gaming clan is faced with a dilemma when she discovers a community of young Mexican girls online who are forced to play the game all day doing minor tasks to generate in-game gold, which is then sold for real money online.  Taking their plight seriously might mean abandoning her friends...

"After the Siege" is easily the longest and darkest, detailing the life of a young woman who is orphaned while her city is besieged by outside powers in retaliation for its open-culture philosophy,The story features an outsider who calls himself a wizard and who -- as the fearful and naive girl is turned by the war into a wary, cynical young woman --  seems ever more suspicious. This story has the same premise as the short piece which opens the collection, "Printcrime", but is enormously expanded. In that one, the police destroy and imprison a man who was using a 3D printer to reproduce copyright-protected goods.

"The Man Who Sold the Moon" is a nod to Heinlein, at least in its title. A man forced to look Death in the face encounters a friend who will change his life by dragging him to a Burning Man event, and  is enlisted  in a project to create a unique robot. When the friend has his own encounter with Death, however, a crowdfunded attempt to realize one of the stricken man's dreams takes readers to the moon.   The technical accomplishment  drives the story, but a lot of its heart is the three main characters' attempts to find meaning in an all-too mortal life now overshadowed by the threat of cancer.

"I, Rowboat".   The most speculative of the stories,  this features a sentient rowboat programmed with Asimov's Laws of Robotics attempting to protect some human shells (rented out to human consciousnesses who like to relive the days of having flesh and such) from a sentient coral reef.  There are plentiful Asimov references here, including a robot religion called Asimovism, and a rogue personality which refers to itself as R. Daneel Olivaw. The amount of consciousnesses being uploaded and downloaded from host to host  -- at one point the boat downloads himself into a human shell -- can get confusing, especially when a consciousness  has been temporarily cloned. (At one point the rowboat downloads himself into a human shell to  effect a rescue, and has a conversation with his rowboat self.)


All in all, I most definitely got my .99 cents worth and hope to try Little Brother at some point.

The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis

The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis: Eleven Campus Stories
© 1951 Max Shulman
223 pages

Imagine if PG Wodehouse wrote stories about a girl-crazy freshman at the University of Minnesota, circa late 1940s. That's kind of what reader will find in The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. I first read this book in 2003; it was a going-away gift from my high school librarian, who had to discard it but thought I would like it. She was right -- I loved it. I loved the silly humor, the archaic slang ("Wow-dow", "he fractures me", etc), the presence of this world that was so obviously different from mine. The eleven stories are not sequential, or  integrated; unlike I Was a Teenage Dwarf, the Dobie here is not a fixed character. In one story he may be serious and cunning, and in another he's apparently been given a dose of ecstasy, nibbling on girls' fingers and jumping about "like a goat". He studies, variously, mechanical engineering, law, chemistry, journalism, and Egyptology. Every story pivots on Dobie's relationship with a girl, and more often than not he's the one being led around by the ear, a bobby-soxed captain at the helm. Other times his desire to impress or woo a woman lead him astray. These stories are FUNNY -- funny for the silly language, for the absurd scenarios, for the tongue in cheek narration. There's also a lot of physical humor, something that's hard to pull off in a literary medium. No wonder I took to Wodehouse so strongly when I first read him: he reminded me of this first brush with Shulman, who for me, never lived up to this book , no matter what else I read by him. (A lot of the other stuff was more bawdy than absurd.)

Read The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. It'll fracture ya. 

Related:

• The closest Shulman ever came to matching this book for me was Barefoot Boy with Cheek, another campus-life satire.
• "Love is a Fallacy". One of the stories is available online.  This is sort of a Frankenstein story in which budding law student Dobie tries teach logic to a girl he'd like to marry...only to have the tables turned on him. 

Ancestral Shadows

Ancestral Shadows: An Anthology of Ghostly Tales
© 2004 ISI Distributed Titles
Stories written by Russell Kirk 1950s and produced first in various magazines
410 pages

"Ghost stories" invariably makes me think of legends and folklore,  but Ancestral Shadows is an altogether different anthology.  Instead, its stories all feature ghostly characters and themes of redemption, revenge, or realization. The ghosts here are not transparent wraiths,   scaring mortals or playing tricks with the furniture.  They are  in the midst, caught in the veil between the living and the dead, dwelling in their own moments of time.  Some are corporeal enough that they believe themselves still living, and the news of their death comes as a surprise  to both them and the reader.  Ancestral Shadows enmeshes its characters in tradition and place; ghosts are inherently localists, but most of the the living featured here are likewise  bound to their villages,  family homes, and familiar places.  The collection opens, for instance, with a ailing woman who lives in a mostly-abandoned village that is targeted for destruction by the local planning authorities.  Living more in her memories than reality, she visits a church graveyard regularly to sweep the tombstones;  her distress at the hands of the bully-planner, and devotion to the departed, bring an unexpected ally in the form of a vicar who died mysteriously decades ago.  Time makes itself substantial in these stories;  in one, a pecuilar man  faced with a blizzard breaks into an abandoned home, and experiences a violent moment in the home's history -- but was it a moment etched into the memory of the house, or was it his?   The stories are set in the United States,  Great Britain, the Italio-Austrian border, and even east Africa, and each draw the reader and the main character deeper into a mystery, until -- fully enveloped by it -- there is a line dropped, a corner turned, and suddenly both parties realize something that had been hitherto hidden .  These stories aren't written just to envelope the mind in mystery; the clarity of the end-page doesn't dispel a puzzle so much as it centers the character; before they were lost, now they are found.  That's not to say they're feel-good parables, for the tales also include moments of vengeance and retribution.

If you can find it, this is an excellent collection of stories,  both chilling and thoughtful. I obtained a copy through interlibrary loan.

A Place in Time

A Place in Time
© 2013 Wendell Berry
256 pages

Come again to Port William (and vicinity), a community -- a membership -- on the banks of the river.  A Place in Time collects twenty stories of the community, all  of varying lengths, moving from the 1860s to 2013. The stories are often told in the first person, moving from person to person within the community as the years progress.    A quotation from Jayber Crow applies with force here, as to any book in the series:"Telling a story is like reaching into a granary full of wheat and drawing out a handful. There is always more to tell than can be told."   The Port William novels, are not discrete stories by themselves, though some (Jayber Crow, Hannah Coulter) have the outline of distinction.   Instead, the stories --- be they a few pages or a few hundred -- are part of a greater story, one that Berry describes (through his characters) as the conversation the town has about itself.   Every story is a different view of the river;  sometimes tales repeat from the same angle.   What happens to one life is remembered in another.

Remembrance is especially important to A Place in Time,  both because it takes place over a hundred and fifty years, and the characters grow through their losses.  Every generation does; first our grandparents leave us, then our parents, then our peers. But some of Port William's losses were particular tragedies,  forced upon the community by war.  That includes the greatest lost, Port William itself -- its agricultural rhythms forever marred by the industrial-technological complex that invaded farms after World War 2. But  despite the losses, the people of Port William remember what has gone on before, and it provokes them to act in ways that seem futile, because it's the only thing they can do.

If all this seems very general to the series itself, that's true enough. Berry here has created twenty tales of tenderness, loss, warmth, friendship, pride, weakness -- all knit together. Two stories might recount the same event from different perspectives; the events of one tale will be mentioned in another.  A reader who has read Port Williams books before will find it a reunion of old companions; someone new to the series might feel as though they had sat down in the middle of a conversation. But I think that's true with any Port William book; although my introduction to the series was through Jayber Crow,  and aided by a narrator who came to the town as a stranger and had to learn about it himself, even then I was aware that there was more to the town's story, that it had been going on before Jayber arrived. For me, this was just another visit with friends.

The Canterbury Tales

WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

*ahem*

If you've ever glanced at my Classics Club list, you'll see Canterbury Tales sitting there, and I've regarded it as one of the tougher ones on my list -- in the same tier as the Russians,  April is the ideal month for reading the Tales, in part because it's set during April ("Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote ..."),  but mostly because April is a month I've dedicated to England for the past several years.  With its girth in mind, I began early, on March 1st.   (That marked the first day of Lent, and I was amused by the thought of reading about a pilgrimage during a time inspired by pilgrimage.)

I will note from the beginning that I did not read the tales in Chaucer's original English. My library, happily, has a 900+ page volume that presents a column of Chaucer alongside one of 'modern' English, and it was the modern English which I largely read. I often compared the two columns, reading as much as I could of Chaucer before having to take a peek at the meaning of words, and I saw enough to realize -- based on the fact that certain words were suppose to rhyme - -that Chaucerian English really did sound much different from ours.

I assume most people are aware of the general premise of The Canterbury Tales, but just in case: a large group of people on pilgrimage to Canterbury (intent on honoring Thomas a Becket) converge on an inn. Since they're all headed the same way, they decide to engage in a little friendly competition: each person will spin a couple of tales there and back again, and when they all return to the inn they will decide who gave the best story, and all pitch in to give that person a free meal.  Such is the General Prologue,  after which various personalities step forward to give a story. The stories vary in length and in mood, as do the storytellers; some are noblemen, like Knights; others are commoners,  some are women, some are members of religious orders.  Some of the stories are noble, some tragic, some sad, and some very silly.

Rather than reviewing Chaucer (rather like reviewing Homer!), I want to share a couple of general comments and then recap some of the more memorable stories from the first half of the Tales, when I was still taking notes.  I was surprised by the varied settings of the stories; some are set as far afield as Russia, Syria, and Greece. As with The Merrie Adventures of Robin Hood, there are grievances aplenty against the landed nobility, including the church.  Lastly, while I've heard much about the medieval cult of courtly love, I never appreciated how fantastically silly medievals were for romance until I read through some of this preposterous goings-on.

And now, recaps of a few more memorable tales, complete with a moral:


Knight's Tale:  Two cousins imprisoned together fall in love with the same woman, and are violently jealous even though they're in a tower and there is zero chance of them courting her.    Naturally one escapes and the other is pardoned, and upon pursuing the girl they meet in a field and start fighting. Who should discover them but the king who imprisoned them in the first place, who -- persuaded by the girl, who turns out to be his sister -- allows them to meet one year hence, with their respective armies, and enter into trial by combat to see who shall win her hand.

The moral:   Finders keepers.

The Miller's Tale:  One woman is pursued by two men while still married to a third. The story involves two occasions of rear ends being kissed by mistake.

The moral: Wait until daylight to kiss people.

The Clerk's Tale:  A King is pressed by his people to marry and decides to marry a beautiful and virtuous peasant.  Despite her character, wisdom, and beauty, the King is constantly suspicious of her and inflicts a series of Job-like tests upon her which amount to (1) making her believe he's killed her children,  (2) making her believe he's going to annul their union and marry someone less controversial, and (3) having her PLAN THE NEW WIFE'S WEDDING.   When the wedding guests arrive, and lo! The "bride" is actually her long-lost daughter, with long-lost son in tow,  everyone enjoys a happily-ever-after moment. (Instead of "What the heck, Dad? moment.)

The moral:   What seems like psychopathic behavior may, in twenty years, turn out to be  a convoluted plan with a happy ending.  So uh, have patience.

The Wife of Bath: After entirely too much information about her five husbands, the Wife of Bath tells the story of a Knight who raped a woman and was brought on trial to the King's court, whereupon the Queen gave him one year to  solve the question: What do women want?   Having queried high and low to no avail, the Knight resignedly begins returning to the court to meet his death, only to chance upon a horribly disfigured old woman who will give him the answer if he promises to anything she wants.   He gives the answer to the Queen and is promptly confronted by the old woman, who bids him marry her.   He resists by recounting her faults (poverty, age, etc);  she rebuts them by praising poverty, age, etc, and finally he relents to marrying her.  She then asks him:  would he rather she be old and faithful, or young and tempting to others?   He leaves the matter to her, and  she -- happy that he has ceded his judgement to hers -- decides to become both young and faithful. (Oh,  and the answer to 'what do women want?' is 'to be in charge'.)  Hurrah for...resignation...?

The moral:   Rape is evil, but if you find a witch who wants a husband, you might get away with it.

Middle English prologue read at 1:14

From Narnia to a Space Odyssey

From Narnia to a Space Odyssey: The War of Ideas between Arthur C. Clarke and C.S. Lewis
ed. Ryder Miller © 2003
175 pages

First of all, reader, understand that the title of this book is overstated. It is not a series of letters, a debate held in your hands. The first quarter of the book follows the exchange between Lewis and Clarke -- one pensive, one optimistic -- about mankind's seemingly imminent conquest of space, but this is then followed by essays and SF short stories by both Lewis and Clarke. Both men were interested in science fiction as a genre, having witnessed it erupt from obscurity within their own lifetimes. Although Lewis is remembered more as a medieval literature scholar and a Christian apologist. his letters to Clarke evidence a deep familiarity with the SF of the day, from serious novels to pulp trash.

The spirit of the letters is intended to serve as a theme for the stories and essays that follow, though frankly I found it a collection of miscellany. The correspondence begins when Clarke reads Perelandra and takes offense that the scientists are portrayed as grasping imperialists, wanting to subject the whole of the poor solar system to mankind's vices and ambition. He protests to Lewis that the proponents of rocket societies, both laymen and scientists, are among the most pacifistic and philanthropic people in society. Lewis' response is that while there may be no "Westons" (his technocratic imperialist character) in the rocket clubs as of yet, they will quickly follow once idealistic explorers have broken the 'quarantine of space'. The two then chatter about science fiction.

The bulk of the book consists of odd stories and essays by Lewis and Clarke, ostensibly related to the argument. The only real trace I saw of that was in Clarke's stories, though: in one, "Meeting with Medusa", an airship probing Jupiter's oceans of cloud discovers a new kind of life. While not sure it is intelligent, the characters immediately put into effect the "prime directive", protocols regarding the circumspect treatment of intelligent life -- specifically, do no harm. The term prime directive brings Star Trek to mind immediately, and so does Clarke's optimism that man will learn from his mistakes. In one of the last pieces of the book, Clarke rebuts an enthusiastic essay from an American military personality that the United States should lay claim to the Moon in its entirety, and Clarke appears so disturbed at the naked avarice and nationalistic aggression that he muses that perhaps it would be better for the galaxy if man were kept inside Lewis' quarantine of space for a while longer.

I'm the odd bird who enjoys both Lewis and Clarke, whose own mind is divided between the hope of Star Trek and the sad wisdom of history, and so I found this collection odd but fun. If nothing else it is an example of two men who -- to borrow from Lewis -- can argue without quarreling.

Azazel

Azazel: Fantasy Stories
© 1988 Isaac Asimov
221 pages

George isn't an ordinary fellow, for in times past his ancestors possessed the arcane knowledge required to summon creatures -- demons? aliens? -- from another plane of existence.  The best George can manage personally is a tiny little fellow named Azazel, who -- demonic appearance aside -- conscientiously refuses to use his great powers to help George out.  Azazel will do favors for other people at George's request, purely for philanthropic reasons. Too bad these favors always result in extraordinary trouble for the beneficiaries!   Azazel collects twelve stories featuring the attempts of George to help his friends out,  all of which backfire -- either for George's friend or George himself, since he invariably has an angle for putting his ethereal pocket pal to work.

The misfires are never predictable;  sometimes they're simplistic, caused by George not phrasing his request wisely enough;   other times, the fulfilled wishes simply produce unexpected results.  One woman who wishes to become more beautiful destroys her engagement after the transformation renders her vain and less interested in her homely finance;  one man's favorite singer gives a performance so incredible that all other music is ruined for him forever.  Other times, the wish succeeds brilliantly but it is George's covert desires that are stymied. To a friend suffering from writers' block on a novel, George promises him boundless creativity...if the friend will sign over 50% of his future novel earnings. The wish comes true and the man writes brilliantly -- but not novels, and thus no revenue for George!

 This is light fiction, mere amusement -- but I find Asimov a very companionable writer, one whose offhand comments match my taste for humorous storytelling, and for that reason I hunted a copy of this book down and brought it with me on my weeklong tour of New Mexico.

Tevye's Daughters

Tevye and his Seven Daughters
© 1894 Sholom Aleichem
300 pages

Consider the question: is it possible to enjoy a book while having music from a movie it inspired playing incessantly in your head every time a page is turned? Well, more or less. This is has been my experience with Tevye's Daughters, a collection of short stories by Sholom Aleichem (aleichem shalom!), the basis of Fiddler on the Roof.    The stories are not all part of the same narrative; those told by Tevye the Dairyman,  Fiddler's star, comprise only a fraction of the book. The rest have other narrators, most anonymous, but all Jews living in Tsarist Russia.  There is humor here, some of it dark. Most of the entertainment value is derived from the narrators' collective gift of gab. In one, "The Man from Buenos Aires" the story consists of a businessman rambling on about his financial prowess (and his modesty). Page after page this goes on until our narrator is about to disembark when he finally asks: what is it it you do? The businessman's reply is "Well, I don't sell prayer books, that's for sure!".  There's no conventional drama-conflict-resolution scheme to these stories, and the point of quite a few slipped me entirely. The writing, though, just drew me in, and I suppose it was helped by the Russian setting, which is completely new to me. Tevye is utterly lovable, though being a man of the musical made me fond of him from the start.  Like the movie-musical,  Tevye's Daughters drifts toward the sad, ending with the expulsion of the Jews from Russia. There is a bright light at the end, however, when Tevye is restored to one of his daughters. Altogether the stories were charming enough that I'm glad I took a chance on ordering through interlibrary loan.

Originally written in Yiddish, this translation retained enough to require a glossary in the back.

The Wild Birds

The Wild Birds
© 1989 Wendell Berry
160 pages

            Within the membership of Port William, a close knit farming village, lays another  more intimate still. It is the membership of a neighborhood of families who, working adjoining lands, make it their business to help each other through life. They help sow one another’s fields, and help reap them.  Hannah Coulter, the story of a young widow adopted into this private membership, introduced it; in Wild Birds, Wendell Berry delivers six stories about its other members,  advancing through the years, and delivering a sense of real people developing through time and through their relationships with one another.  The young mature into older adults; Wheeler Catlett opens the piece as a young newlywed, tasked yet again with hunting down his drunken uncle, and closes it as an older  lawyer contemplating retirement.  There's a prevailing theme of coming of age and owning one's responsibilities here, though as always Berry creates a sense of timelessness: his characters have moments in which every season of their life is being lived simultaneously  This is best exhibited in "The Boundary", which for me is the most tender piece I've ever read by Berry, about an aging farmer who decides to go on one last patrol of his fields to inspect a boundary fenceline. Leaving home, he departs from his wife with  a hug, noting that she seems to have changed while he held her from schoolgirl to grandmother, a lifetime lived in one another's embrace. As he eases down a hill he scrambled down as a child, he relives the many times he and his fathers before him, and he and his sons after that, had walked those paths before, tended those places together.   Berry is a master at creating intimacy, inviting the reader to draw close to his characters, so endearing even in their flaws.  To read these stories is to take a deep draft of the milk of human kindness, to be loved almost by an author who delights in stirring one's soul and bringing to remembrance a sense of being at home in the world.  

Related:
Hannah Coulter, Wendell Berry
Jayber Crow, Wendell Berry

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
© 1820 Washington Iriving; illustrations 1966, Leonard Fisher
58 pages

Long ago in a quiet part of the north country near Hudson Bay lived a superstitious and gangly schoolteacher whose amorous affections for a local heiress threw him headlong into trouble. The man's name? Ichabod Crane, and if that name sounds familar to you, so might the Tale of the Headless Horseman. Though I've been familar with Crane, the Horseman, and name "Sleepy Hollow" since childhood, I have never read the story.  It's a short story, a fantasy-horror tale with a comic main character in a barely independent America. While I initially peeked into the petite volume to learn where the tale went (ending in dread mystery),  surely it was worth reading for the language alone. Irving's prose is ornate, yet highly readable, like the rare piece of cursive writing that is rendered artfully without slowing down communication.  The work has the added appeal of painting a picture of an America still very much wet behind the ears;  America is still more a colony than a Nation, and the Dutch population of Sleepy Hollow have not yet been ironed out of existence by the forces of cultural homogenization.  It is thus not only an elegantly-told short story perfect for occasions such as Halloween, but a charming piece of early Americana.  Another example of such is the story of Rip Van Winkle, also laden with Dutch characters though much shorter.  I trust the name and story are singularly familiar to most;  the tale of a happy-go-lucky farmer who has a lie-down under a nap and wakes up twenty years later to find  his wife dead, his country a republic, and his town burgeoning is also captivating.

The Early Asimov

The Early Asimov, or, Eleven Years of Trying
© 1972 Isaac Asimov
400-500 pages

Long-time readers know of my enormous affection for the good doctor Asimov; imagine my delight in finding this anthology of over two dozen of his earlier and previously uncollected works, from his first eleven years as an author. These were stories written in the late 1930s and throughout the 1940s, when young Asimov worked in a candy store to pay for college, later doing civilian work for the army before being drafted. It's a splendid collection for an Asimov fan like myself. Although the stories are rougher than one would expect (judging by his usual standard), seeing him write outside the conventions established by his adult self is fascinating. Aliens abound, for one thing: it's a rare story in this collection which doesn't see Earthmen fighting against wicked Martians, or putting off Venusian rebellions. Asimov has maintained in other works that he disliked the antagonistic relationship editors demanded to exist between humans and aliens, so he established his own human-only universe. His generous use of alien life here hints at the stories' lack of scientific polish; although simple datedness is easy to understand, often Asimov should have known better. Even the science of his day ruled out the possibility of extant life on Mars, and he acknowledges this in his extensive commentary, which knits the book together and makes it semi-autobiographical. The collection also includes his legendary essay, "The Endochronic Properties of Sublimated Thiotimoline", which satirized the language of academic articles.

It is available in either a three-volume set, or this complete edition.