The Roman Summer

When I was a young woman with some time on my hands, I devoted every summer to one exceptionally long book.  One year it was War and Peace, another V.  This year, I've decided to (finally) read The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.  One could say I'm a glutton for punishment, but I've been planning to read it for years now and, having acquired it for a breathtakingly low price, I've decided to add the Decline to my pantheon of summer behemoths.

So far, it's a little like reading the Old Testament except instead of an endless litany of "begats," The Roman Empire boasts several chapters of Emperors who enter and exit quickly.  I've now embarked on the actual decline.

As an antidote to the lengthy history, I'm also currently reading Hotel Honolulu by Paul Theroux.  Again, another incredibly cheap acquisition.  I've been an on-again-off-again fan of Theroux since I read The Mosquito Coast.  This book doesn't compete as yet.  We'll see.

Finally, A Couple Of New Ones

Morgan's Passing, Anne Tyler

This is another of one of those books I literally have to force myself to finish. I bought the book because it was $1.00 at my local thrift store. I should have known better; I read another book written by Tyler several years ago and had to slog my way through that one, too.

Morgan, the main character, is an eccentric. In one review, he was compared to Garp. The World According to Garp was hard for me to finish and I've never understood its popularity. You'd think the comparison to this character alone would be warning enough not to venture past the front cover.

Morgan dresses up in costumes and pretends to be a variety of people. He meets a young couple and delivers their baby, leading them to believe he's a doctor. Morgan continues the relationship with the couple and realizes, after many years, that he's in love with the young woman. Eventually, Morgan leaves his wife to live with the young woman and their son.

Stupid book. No more Anne Tyler.

The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, Jose Sramago

This book won the Nobel Prize for literature.
"We must never forget that fate is a casket like no other, open and closed at the same time. We can look inside and see all that has happened, the past transformed into fulfilled destiny, but we have no way of seeing into the future, apart from an occasional presentiment or intuition...."

"...to speak of yesterday, today and tomorrow is simply to give different names to the same illusion."

From a conversation between God and the devil:
"...I neither accept nor pardon you, I much prefer you as you are, and were it possible, I'd have you be even worse. But why. Because the good I represent cannot exist witho9ut the evil you represent, if you were to end, so would I, unless the devil is the devil, God cannot be God. Is that Your final word. My first and last, first because that was the first time I said it, last because I have no intention of repeating it."

Garden State, Rick Moody

The book was described by one reviewer as a teenage version of Mrs. Bridge. It's a tough Jersey world where kids lose their way in ennui, drugs, alcohol and mental illness. Their parents are unavailable, being busy with their own sad lives, unable to cope or just plain uninterested.

One of the characters spends most of her time longing for the days when she believed rock and roll stardom was within her grasp. Time mowed down her dreams. Unable to imagine a new future, she drifts along in an alcoholic haze.

Lane, a young man with an unidentified serious mental illness attempts to kill himself with the help of some friends who insist that he go to a party with them. They want to help him find his way back to that storied past in which they're all stuck in one way or another.

In the end, there's no redemption. Garden State is bleak, but beautifully written.

The Double Bond: The Life of Primo Levi

http://www.themodernword.com/scriptorium/levi.html
http://www.powells.com/review/2002_06_27.html

The Double Bond is one of two biographies published recently about Primo Levi, a chemist, writer and Auschwitz survivor. I read The Periodic Table (probably his most well-known work by Americans) shortly after my father committed suicide, at a time when I read everything I could find about the subject. I don't recall how I came to know about him, but what I knew first was that he was a survivor of Auschwitz who committed suicide in 1987.

Levi became something of an obsession, in the same way that I'm obsessed about many things. I read about my obsessions relentlessly, over a period of years, until I've exhausted my interest. This biography, written by Carole Angier, is emotional and deeply personal. Because of it and perhaps in spite of it, I'm definitely going to find that other bio written about him, Primo Levi: A Life, Ian Thompson. Obsession. Can't live without it.

Angier recounts, carefully, Levi's life as a chemist, his time spent in the Lager, as an Auschwitz survivor and as a writer. His need to offer testimony to the rest of the world kept him alive during his experiences in the Lager and gave birth to his role as a writer. Levi documented, time and time again, the experience of living in a concentration camp (not only his own, but others as well) and of what that means to all of us as human beings. He was obsessed with Auschwitz, he said.

The real question at the heart of this book is this: why would someone who could summon the emotional and psychological resources to survive Auschwitz choose to commit suicide so many years later. In my own investigations, I've learned about many people who chose to end their lives after their experiences in concentration camps. Generally, these suicides seemed to occur shortly after liberation.

Angier searches for a motive, a clear meaning as to what his death signified. It's an attempt to understand exactly what motivated him to kill himself, why he chose that time in his life and why he chose those means. I recognize that need.

My personal understanding is that there is never just one event, that had it been missing, would have changed the suicide's mind. There is never anything we can point to and say, "Yes, that's it. Had these things never happened, (s)he would be with us still." Suicide is complex. Always. Ultimately, even their brain chemistry changes. The world to a suicide is a very different place than most of us have ever been.

Update posted 4/30/07

I've seen it from both sides of the coin, as one who has seriously contemplated that choice to end how and when I choose, and as the survivor of someone who made and acted on that choice. I see signs and a history that makes Levi's death inevitable. Ultimately, though, those signs and that history aren't the reasons. Only he knew the reason. And he is not here to share it with us.

The Double Bond is a book that requires commitment, commitment to the sheer bulk of the biography and commitment to its intellectual demands. It's worth the work, though. Primo Levi was an extraordinary man and a gifted writer. I will read his work with a clearer understanding of who he was.

Touching the Void, Joe Simpson

I just started this book. It was written by a man who miraculously made it down a mountain in the Peruvian Andes.

Update: Needless to say, he survived. It was an amazing commitment to life. Even though I'm afraid of heights, I'm quite taken with mountain climbing. I'm an armchair mountain climber. The need to test ourselves is exemplified by climbers. They need every ounce of intellectual, physical and emotional strength they can muster. They also need extraordinary luck.

I've tested myself in many ways, most recently through my breast cancer diagnosis and treatment. I count myself as one who has triumphed in all of the ways I've spoken of above. I'm also mindful of my own extraordinary luck.

This is very short book and worth every harrowing moment.

Nonfiction, Crazy Parents

"The Glass Castle" Jeannette Walls

Crazy parents. Dad's an alcoholic genius crazy person. Mom's just crazy, but I can't figure out which mental illness describes it. Neither can my therapist.

She's a survivor.