The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin by H. W. Brands

Very informative but a bit on the dull side

The First American, published in 2000, is a biography of Benjamin Franklin written by H. W. Brands, a professor of history at the University of Texas who has published about 40 books, many of them, like this one, written for a general reading audience. The First American was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in history. Having previously read Franklin’s incomplete Autobiography, I was looking for a more detailed account of this Founding Father’s life, one accessible to a nonhistorian. I was satisfied with the education I received from this book, but it wasn’t as engaging of a read as some of the other Founding Father biographies I’ve read from among recent bestsellers.

Brands has clearly done his research. It seems unlikely he left any sizable stones unturned. This is a very comprehensive and informative account of Franklin’s life filled with much detail. I just found it rather boring. Of course, Franklin did not lead a boring life. The problem, therefore, is that Brands chose to focus on aspects of Franklin’s life that didn’t really interest me so much personally. I work in the printing and publishing industries, so I was happy to read about Franklin’s career in those fields. Brands, however, is so admiring of Franklin’s writing that he wants to reproduce every clever turn of phrase, allegorical anecdote, and bon mot that Franklin ever put to paper. In particular, Brands seems a little obsessed with Poor Richard’s Almanac, to which he devotes much ink. The result often reads more like a book of quotations than a biography. Brands states that, “The primary source for any life of Benjamin Franklin is Franklin himself,” and Brands has certainly diligently mined his subject’s published writing and correspondence. What the book could have used more of is perspectives on Franklin from his contemporaries.

Real estate deals and legal proceedings are also favorite subjects of Brands that are discussed at length, with every dollar or pound amount meticulously enumerated. During his lifetime, Franklin was the world’s most famous American largely due to his scientific achievements. Although Brands does occasionally touch on Franklin’s career as a scientist (or natural philosopher, as they used to be called), I really wish there had been more on that aspect of his life rather than the constant praising of Franklin’s literary endeavours and witty correspondence.

Another problem with the book is that Franklin often seems like a supporting character in his own biography. Brands supplies so much historical context that Franklin is absent from the book for too many pages at a time. Lengthy asides are devoted to William Pitt and George III, for example, and much more than I ever wanted to know about British Parliament. Obviously, Franklin played a major role in the founding of the United States of America. He did so, however, mostly in London and Paris, so the reader gets more on diplomatic history in Europe than on the Revolutionary War in America. When Brands does cover the Revolution, it often feels like an unnecessarily lengthy aside. Why do we need a blow-by-blow account of the hardships at Valley Forge or the Battle of Yorktown, for example, when Franklin was on the other side of the Atlantic?

Even having said all that, I have to admit I did get a thorough education on Franklin and some insight into his personality. I just never felt compelled to move on to the next chapter. Unlike, say, Ron Chernow’s book on George Washington, reading The First American felt more like a chore than a labor of love. Given the fascinating life that Franklin led, and the impact he had on American and world history, that really shouldn’t have been a problem.

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Life: A Natural History of the First Four Billion Years of Life on Earth by Richard Fortey

An excellent paleontological overview of our planet’s past

Richard Fortey is a senior paleontologist at London’s Natural History Museum. In addition to his output of academic research, he has written several science books for a general reading audience, including Life, originally published in 1997. In this book, Fortey provides a four-billion-year biography of life on Earth, following the course of evolution from our planet’s first molecules of living matter to we humans today. Fortey has delivered an intentionally nonacademic book with very few footnotes and almost no bibliography, but the subject matter is not drastically dumbed-down for the lay reader. This impressive, engaging, and comprehensive work likely amounts to an undergraduate college course worth of natural history.

Although this book is aimed at a popular audience, Fortey doesn’t just jump right into the crowd-pleasing dinosaurs, mammoths, and cavemen. Much like history itself, the majority of the book is populated by microbes and invertebrates. Fortey, an expert on trilobites, has no problem giving the Precambrian and Paleozoic species their due for having ruled the Earth far longer than we have. His ability to make these earlier, slimier periods of our planet’s history compelling and engaging is quite remarkable. He has a knack for drawing scenes of long-past environments that make the reader feel immersed in a live-action diorama of biological activity. Fortey manages to make Ordovician molluscs every bit as exciting as a museum display of robotic dinosaurs.

I wouldn’t say there were many surprising revelations in this book. Don’t expect a definitive answer to the origin of life, for example. Fortey seems disposed towards the cosmic seeding theory, in which organic molecules were deposited on Earth by comets or meteors. That may very well be possible, but whenever I hear that theory it just seems like a cop out to me, a theoretical passing of the buck. Even if life did came from space, somewhere in the universe, at some time, there had to have been a primordial soup, yet we still can’t come up with a viable explanation of how physics and chemistry created biology.

The cause of the extinction of the dinosaurs, as explained here, is no surprise either. Fortey does, however, provide some very interesting background on how the meteor theory was formulated and the history of resistance against it. That’s pretty indicative of the book as a whole. Most of us already know much about the history of life on Earth from school or science magazines or educational TV programs. Fortey makes the subject more exciting by fleshing out the basics with fascinating details and intriguing examples. He also frequently delves into the history of paleontology as a discipline, highlighting key figures, their momentous discoveries, and the major debates in the field. In addition, Fortey includes anecdotes of his own paleontological field work. The result of all this is like sitting in the study of a distinguished professor as he regales you with his encyclopedic knowledge of nature and evolution in a casual, conversational manner. I not only learned a great deal about natural history from this book, I also gained a much better idea of what exactly paleontologists do and how they work.

I had previously read Richard Dawkins’s The Ancestor’s Tale, which is a book with a similar scope and purpose as this one. Dawkins covers the history of life on Earth by moving backward in time, while Fortey starts at the beginning and moves forward. Of the two, Fortey’s writing is far better. His prose is more engaging, his asides more relevant, and his overall delivery of information more educational. If I had to choose one book to refer to on matters pertaining to paleontology and natural history, Life would be it. It is really an impressive achievement.

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A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

Too much style and not enough substance

A Clockwork Orange, a novel by British author Anthony Burgess, was first published in 1962. It is a work of dystopian science fiction set in a near-future London of unspecified date. Burgess may be considered a giant of letters in Britain, but most American readers likely only know his name from the famous 1971 film adaptation of this novel, directed by Stanley Kubrick. In my opinion, this is one of those rare cases where the film is better than the book.

The first aspect of A Clockwork Orange that strikes the reader from page one is that the book is written in its own idiosyncratic language. The novel is narrated by Alex, a juvenile delinquent, who speaks in a futuristic slang invented by Burgess. Alex leads a gang of four who spend their nights wreaking havoc in London—beating, raping, and robbing random targets. There is certainly more to the book than that, but for those who may not have seen the film, I won’t reveal any more of the plot. Burgess injects the book with satirical social commentary on everything from the justice system to the profession of psychiatry to middle class family values.

Many science fiction writers use invented words to denote everything from futuristic technology to alien races in their novels. Books such as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World or Frank Herbert’s Dune require the reader to accustom oneself to the terminology of their fictional worlds. In A Clockwork Orange, however, the entire text is written in this slanguage in which every fourth or fifth word is replaced by an invented term, even common words such as “face,” “hand,” or “guy” (“litso,” “rooker,” and “veck,” respectively). At first this hits the reader like a barrage of Mad Libs using nonsense words. After a few chapters, however, one picks up the slang and can understand what Alex is saying with little trouble. It never really comes across as realistic, however, since the slang terms sound anything but natural. Burgess apparently used Slavic words to form many of the new terms, but yet there is never any explanation for this Slavic influence on London. By the end of the book, we find out that not everyone in future London speaks this way, just some teenagers, which makes it seem even more unrealistic and unnecessary.

The slang also has the effect of deadening any emotional impact the book might deliver. Scenes that should be scary, repulsive, or funny are seen through a filter of this slang that blocks out much of their power to shock or move the reader. Much like Kubrick’s film adaptation, Burgess’s novel is notorious for its scenes of violence and rape. The book, however, comes across as tame compared to the movie, likely because of this slang effect. As a dystopian future, A Clockwork Orange isn’t shocking enough, and as a satire, it’s not funny enough.

If you take away this slang, however, what’s left is a pretty simple and predictable plot. Like the Kubrick film, most of the exciting stuff happens in the beginning of the book, while the third act makes for a relatively dull and inevitable conclusion. The film, however, has the benefit of Kubrick’s vision (or his art director’s) in depicting Alex’s future world in far more detail than Burgess describes it. The milk bar, for example, amounts to little more than the phrase “milk bar” in Burgess’s novel, while Kubrick and company crafted it into an innovative and memorable environment. A Clockwork Orange has been hailed by various critics as one of the greatest novels of the 20th century, but if you read a lot of dystopian science fiction you would think there are other books in the genre more striking and influential than this one, like Huxley’s Brave New World, Orwell’s 1984, Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, or Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Probably the only people who should read A Clockwork Orange are those obsessed with Kubrick’s movie, but that same demographic is likely to find the book disappointing by comparison.

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The Treasure of the Sierra Madre by B. Traven

Riveting and realistic adventure novel

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is the second novel by B. Traven, a German author who lived for years in Mexico, where most of his fiction is set. The novel was first published in German in 1927, then published in English translation in 1935. This is by far Traven’s most famous book, due largely to the 1949 film adaptation, which won three Academy Awards. The movie is quite faithful to Traven’s novel, so if you’ve already seen that film, don’t expect any plot surprises here. Nevertheless, the book is every bit as riveting as the movie, thanks to Traven’s skillful and suspenseful writing. Even though the novel was published over two decades before the film adaptation, Traven’s dialogue remarkably reads as if it were written for Humphrey Bogart and Walter Huston. If you haven’t seen the movie, how lucky you are that you get to experience this story for the first time in its original form.

The story opens in Tampico on the Gulf Coast. Traven introduces us to the white underbelly of this Mexican city—an assortment of unemployed gringo drifters who wander from town to town, looking for work with oil companies, mining companies, and other resource extraction industries (almost all of which, in the 1920s, would have been owned by American and European corporations). Two such drifters, Dobbs and Curtin, meet while looking for work. When spending the night in a fleabag flophouse, they meet an old prospector named Howard who regales them with stories of a lost gold mine. Sick of the grind of dead-end short term jobs of back-breaking labor for low pay, Dobbs and Curtin decide they want to try their hand at gold-hunting, and they invite Howard to be their partner and mentor. The three venture into the mountains of the Sierra Madre where they have some luck finding a promising dig site. As Howard points out, however, finding the gold is easier than getting it out of the ground and carrying it somewhere safe.

Adventure novels were ubiquitous in the early 20th century, but The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is one of the few that rises to the level of great literature. The story is very realistic and deliberately unromanticized. Only in three flashback stories-within-the-story does the narrative venture into something approaching folklore and legend. Traven’s depiction of Mexico bears the mark of someone who has been there and lived this drifter’s life. This is no tourist’s outsider vision of the romantic tropics. The Mexicans in the book are illustrated with the same perspicacity as the leading trio of American characters. Going back to Jack London and beyond, so many thousands of stories have been written about what gold does to a man’s mind and morals that the premise has become cliché. None of those stories, however, are as psychologically authentic as what Traven presents here. His characters think and behave like real flawed human beings, not storybook heroes and villains. With his intelligent insights into human nature and his realistic depiction of life-and-death drama, Traven’s novel reads as if it could have been written by one of the great naturalist novelists like Frank Norris or Emile Zola.

Traven often expresses socialistic, anarchistic, and atheistic views in his writings. Here such ideas are toned down a bit from the more overt statements and satire in his debut novel The Cotton-Pickers. Nevertheless, Traven still manages to work some anti-capitalist, anti-church, and anti-imperialist sentiments into The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. You won’t find much of that expressed in the Bogart film, which is another good reason to read Traven’s original text. Judging by what I’ve read in this novel and in The Cotton-Pickers, Traven is a writer who was way ahead of his time, both in terms of the blunt frothrightness of his realism and the fearlessness with which he deviates from the conservative mainstream literature of his time. Both of Traven’s first two novels are excellent, and I look forward to following his literary career further.
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Ferdydurke by Witold Gombrowicz

If Eugene Ionesco wrote Billy Madison

Witold Gombrowicz (1904-1969) is one of Poland’s internationally best-known authors of the twentieth century. Ferdydurke, published in 1937, is his debut novel, after having previously published some poetry and short stories. I have an outsider’s interest in Polish culture, and I like to explore Polish literature old and new. I had previously read Gombrowicz’s 1965 novel Cosmos, which I enjoyed quite a bit. Like Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, or Eugene Ionesco, Gombrowicz is known for his absurd sense of humor and for pushing the envelope of narrative form in his fiction. In Ferdydurke, however, his envelope-pushing challenged my attention span, and his absurdity failed to inspire laughter.

Like much of its content, the word “Ferdydurke” is simply nonsensical, and isn’t even used in the text. The narrator of the novel is Johnnie, a 30-year-old writer whom critics have accused of immaturity. Such criticism is taken very literally when a professor named Pimko, an old acquaintance of the narrator, demands that Johnnie relive his youth. Pimko sends Johnnie to a school for boys, where everyone inexplicably perceives him as roughly a 15- or 16-year-old. Also inexplicable is why Johnnie doesn’t just say no to Pimko and refuse to be demoted to youthdom, but then there wouldn’t be much of a story to tell. Eventually, Johnnie becomes infatuated with a teenage girl and vies for her affection with other suitors, young and old, with comic results.

Ferdydurke is a satirical novel. In fact, it satirizes just about everything—the young and the old, the rich and the poor, the liberal and the conservative, the urban and the rural, literary criticism, the educational system, class distinctions, the pretensions of intellectualism, love, nostalgia, conventions of masculinity, so-called modernity, and the fetishizing of youth. Unfortunately, I found very little of this satire to be actually funny, and only small portions of it to be mildly amusing. Maybe with some good comic actors and some rapidly paced direction, this might amount to a somewhat entertaining movie, but on paper it felt like a witless waste of time.

What I do like about Gombrowicz’s writing is that even though it’s experimental and intended to be humorous, he does tell his story through actual sentences with correct syntax. It’s not an anything-goes modernist language game like something by James Joyce or Gertrude Stein. As he did in Cosmos, Gombrowicz does repeat a few choice words over and over again like a beat poet beating a bongo. In this case, those words are “thighs,” “youthful,” “stable-boy,” “fraternize,” and “bum” as in buttocks (from the English translation by Eric Mosbacher).

Ferdydurke is now considered a cult classic, which probably means many people like to think they’re cool for liking it whether they understand it or not, something like the Polish equivalent of William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch. I suspect probably the only people who really understand Ferdydurke, however, are Poles or their European neighbors who lived through the 1930s or thereabouts. Rather than a satiric masterpiece, I thought this was just a self-indulgent exercise in nonsense. It didn’t offend me with its self-indulgence like, say, Gunter Grass’s The Tin Drum. Instead, Ferdydurke just bored me. It was like listening to a silly children’s song repeated over and over again until it just makes you want to go to sleep. Cosmos was also innovative and goofy, but I felt it had a purpose, whereas here the satire just seemed simplistic, pointless, and unfunny.
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The Labyrinth of Solitude by Octavio Paz

Insightful analysis of a national psyche

In 1990, Octavio Paz became the first (and only, thus far) Mexican writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. His literary output includes over two dozen books of poetry. A volume of essays, however, is likely his best-known work among a worldwide readership. El laberinto de la soledad was first published in 1950. In 1961, it was published in English translation as The Labyrinth of Solitude. As indicated by the book’s subtitle, Life and Thought in Mexico, Paz analyzes the national character and spirit of his homeland, encapsulating not only the political but also the psychic state of the nation at the time of publication.

The original edition of The Labyrinth of Solitude is divided into nine chapters, each of which could be a free-standing essay on one or more aspects of Mexican culture. (Later editions, after 1970, may include an additional essay.) Because the book is now over 70 years old, some of its content may unavoidably be a bit outdated, but for the most part Paz’s observations still bear a timeless ring of truth. This is largely due to the fact that so much of Paz’s elucidation of the Mexican character revolves around the Mexican people’s coming to terms with their past—with their pre-Colombian history, the myths and religion of their heritage, the Spanish Conquest, Catholicism, the War for Independence, the Revolution, and the historical role of women in Mexican society. Born during the Revolution and writing less than four decades after that momentous upheaval, Paz illustrates how the mindset of the modern Mexican was forged from the country’s turbulent history. Paz’s attitude toward the Spanish Conquest, and Catholicism in particular, is not entirely negative and comes across as relatively lenient by today’s standards. We now regard European colonization as unilaterally evil and tragic, but Paz (and others of his era) seem more resigned to the brutal past as if it were an ugly contaminating ingredient that nevertheless proved essential in forging the strong and resilient alloy of an enduring racial and national spirit.

The scope of Paz’s text is not strictly confined to Mexico. Much of what he has to say about the Spanish Conquest and colonialism applies more broadly to Latin America in general. Also, in one of the latter chapters, Paz presents a very interesting and thoughtful perspective on twentieth-century world history, focusing primarily on the political and economic ramifications of numerous third-world revolutions and liberations from imperial colonizers. In the final chapter, Paz also addresses issues of gender roles, women’s rights, love, marriage, and sexuality with statements that shed light on Mexican attitudes but also speak of humanity as a whole. Paz is first and foremost a poet, not a historian, philosopher, or sociologist, so unlike writers in those disciplines he can get away with making bold metaphorical or opinionated statements without necessarily backing up his assertions with hard empirical evidence. Nevertheless, his arguments here are soundly reasoned and articulately stated (at least in the English translation by Lysander Kemp).

I read this book as an outsider with an interest in Mexican culture. I was hoping for insightful glimpses into Mexican life from one of that nation’s greatest intellectuals and men of letters, and in that regard, Paz did not disappoint. This book will no doubt be more meaningful, however, to readers of Mexican or Latino heritage. The Labyrinth of Solitude is a concise yet deep examination of the Mexican cultural and political zeitgeist as it existed almost three-quarters of a century ago. Much has changed in Mexico since then, but many of Paz’s conclusions are still very relevant today.  

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Six Characters in Search of an Author by Luigi Pirandello

Innovative for its time, but an underwhelming read today

Italian writer Luigi Pirandello won the 1934 Nobel Prize in Literature. He is best-known and highly acclaimed as a playwright, though he also published novels, short stories, and poetry. His play Six Characters in Search of an Author was first staged in 1921. At that time, the audience responded with jeers. History has been kinder, however, and the play is now regarded as a groundbreaking work in theatrical history. For its time, the play pushes the envelope of what was acceptable on a stage in a way that presages the works of later “Theatre of the Absurd” playwrights like Eugene Ionesco and Samuel Beckett.

The play consists of three acts. The scenes take place on a stage during rehearsals for a play, so the sets present a behind-the-scenes look at the theatrical process, from a relatively bare stage to some apparently unfinished stage decorations for the future performance to come. The members of a theatre troupe are gathered on the stage, rehearsing for the production of a play (also by Luigi Pirandello). Then, in through the backstage door wanders a family of six unnamed individuals, led by a father figure who explains that they are six characters looking for a playwright to dramatize their story for the stage. The manager of the theatre company resents the interruption of his rehearsal and demands that the interlopers leave immediately. The six characters, however, manage to relate enough of their story—involving extramarital affairs, a broken marriage, and prostitution—to pique the director’s interest. He decides to adapt the family’s story for the stage and produce it as a play to be performed by his company.

This sort of meta-drama would have been very novel and even shocking to Pirandello’s audience of 1921. A century later, however, such plays-within-plays have become commonplace in theatre, television, and film. Actors in today’s biopics frequently collaborate with their subjects on the development of their characters (if those subjects are still living), much like the relationship between the stage director and the family depicted here. In the postmodern era, the boundaries and intersections between fiction and reality have been explored to much more extreme lengths than Pirandello has done here. Charlie Kauffmann’s films Being John Malkovich and Adaptation spring to mind, or even some episodes of Seinfeld. By comparison to these and many other recent examples, Characters in Search of an Author feels relatively pedestrian. But someone had to break every boundary first, and thus the value of this play relies on its historical precedence and subsequent influence. There have been plays-within-plays going back to Shakespeare and likely earlier, but Pirandello certainly takes a leap forward here in terms of thinking outside that box.

When performed on a stage, Six Characters in Search of an Author might very well be a lively and entertaining play. When read from the page, however, it is far from enthralling. The dialogue consists largely of the theatre company and the family disagreeing about how the story should be told. One side will say, “It should be done like this!” and the other responds, “No, that’s wrong, let’s do it this way instead!” over and over again for 70 to 90 minutes. To today’s readers, the play isn’t absurd enough to be funny and isn’t serious enough to be compelling drama. It may have historical significance, but you’d be better off reading works by those “Theatre of the Absurd” writers who built on Pirandello’s idea.
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