Fleeing guilt

Most people know about the Titanic, and many have heard about the Lusitania, but how many have heard about the Wilhelm Gustloff? Yet the latter was the most tragic sinking in history, with more than 9,000 people losing their lives in the icy waters of the Baltic Sea. These were not Americans or British, but rather mostly refugees fleeing Russian troops at the close of World War II.

Ruta Sepetys, whose father's cousins were among those who died when a Russian submarine sank the Wilhelm Gustloff in 1945, tries to correct this neglect in her award-winning 2016 novel Salt to the Sea.

Her story is told in the words of several young refugees, each hiding a secret as they try to flee Germany. The main characters include Emilia, a pregnant Polish teenager; Florian, a Prussian who escaped military service thanks to artistic skills that made him invaluable in working with art stolen by the Nazis; Joanna, a lovely Lithuanian nurse; and Alfred, a young German sailor who likes to pretend he's a hero.

Sepetys keeps the chapters brief, sometimes just a page each, which makes the action fast. This is good, for it takes most of the novel for them to reach and board the ship. Getting to know these characters helps the reader better appreciate what happens after the torpedoes strike.

Her characters are all fleeing their own personal guilt as much as they are fleeing the Russians. In war there is more than enough guilt for all, and the tragic sinking of this ship dwarfs the rest. Perhaps this is the reason the Wilhelm Gustloff has been mostly forgotten. It is a guilty secret people would like to forget.

Wasted time?

 Reading is never wasted time, Ivy's father had told her.

Alice Hoffman, The Invisible Hour

Reading is discouraged in some families. My own mother often discouraged it, telling me to put down my book and go outside to play. But perhaps she only wanted more balance, more outdoor physical activity to go with all that indoor mental activity,

Other parents simply view reading, particularly the reading of fiction, as wasted time. I became a book reviewer, so my youthful reading actually benefited my career in a direct way. For those who wind up clerking in a store, laboring in a factory or building highways, the benefits of reading can be more difficult to determine. That doesn't mean there are no benefits, but they are less obvious.

Reading, especially reading fiction, puts us into the minds of other people, including those who are unlike us. It helps us feel what they feel and understand how they think. It shows us why they do what they do. Reading can make us more tolerant and more forgiving. A novel can be a parable that helps us understand our own life, as I wrote in my last post. Thus reading can benefit us regardless of what we do for a living.

But is reading ever a waste of time? Ivy's father, in the line quoted above from the Alice Hoffman novel, thinks not. For children learning to read, I tend to agree with that statement. A comic book can be as good as a classic if it is something a child wants to read and will read voluntarily. No reading is wasted time if it helps someone learn to read better.

As I rapidly approach my ninth decade I become more inclined to believe that some reading is, in fact, wasted time. Was that book really worth my time? Why did I spend hours reading that book when this other book is the one I really want to read? Or is the thriller I really want to read a waste of time when I could be reading Alice Munro or Thomas Hardy?

A friend of mine tells me she has a 50-page rule. If a book doesn't grab her in the first 50 pages, she puts it aside and tries something else. I do something similar, and I think it's a good idea, especially for those of us running out of reading time. Yet I know some books are slow to develop and will ultimately reward patience. A year or so ago I reread The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers. I was bored at first, yet I stuck with it and was ultimately rewarded. It was not a waste of time.

Later I tried reading Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr. I wanted very much to like it because I had enjoyed The Light We Cannot See so much. Yet I couldn't get into it and gave up after 100 pages or so. That was a waste of time. Perhaps it wouldn't have been if I had stayed with it and finished the novel. Or finishing it might have proved an even bigger waste of time.

Reading, like most things in life, is a bit of a gamble.

Making sense

Alice Hoffman

Real life is unbelievable. Souls are snatched away from us, flesh and blood turn to dust, people you love betray you, men go to war over nothing. It's all preposterous. That's why we have novels. To make sense of things.

Alice Hoffman, The Invisible Hour

I believe that Christianity helps us make sense of things, but novels certainly have their place. The best novels anyway.

Certainly the world we live in often is unbelievable and senseless. It is unpredictable. Fiction doesn't so much explain all this confusion as break it down into bits that help us understand human behavior and human emotions a little better. Such things as loss, betrayal and war may become a little more comprehensible in a novel or short story. And this can also be true of more positive things such as love and loyalty.

Alice Hoffman's own novel, The Invisible Hour, may be a romantic fantasy, yet it too helps make sense of real life. It's a story about freedom from oppression. It's a story about the power of books. It's a story about a mother's love. It's a story about sacrifice.

Metaphors and parables have always been used to help explain life, and a good novel is just a metaphor or a parable that goes on for hundreds of pages. Of course, some novels are so complex that we may even need help making sense of them.

Disappearing into time

She had heard of writers who were so affected by loss, writing became a trap rather than a joy, and the words that once came so easily to them vanished, as if they were writing with invisible ink.

Alice Hoffman, The Invisible Hour

In time-travel romances, it is generally the man who goes back in time — or sometimes forward in time —and finds the love of his life. Consider the film Somewhere in Time or that wonderful Jack Finney novel  Time and Again. In Alice Hoffman's 2023 novel The Invisible Hour, a woman makes that journey and finds that lover. And like the hero of Somewhere in Time, she knows exactly who she is looking for.

Mia is born into a New England cult. Her mother, a pregnant teenager, ran away from home and joined the cult, then married its dictatorial leader, Joel. Rarely is anyone allowed to leave the farm. Parents cannot raise their own children. No books are allowed. Everyone must work hard for the good of the community. Joel controls everything and everyone.

Even so, as a teenager Mia sneaks away to a nearby library, where she finds an old copy of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, inscribed, amazingly enough, to her. She steals the book and reads it over and over again.

Later, after her mother's death and with the help of a librarian, Mia manages to escape the farm, but with Joel always in pursuit. She finds refuge back in time in the arms of a young Nathaniel Hawthorne, still struggling to write something worthwhile.

The theme of invisibility runs through Hoffman's book until, near the end, Mia sees the words of her favorite book disappearing and, looking into a mirror, sees that she herself is disappearing. She must return to her own time and let Hawthorne write his great book.

The novel may be about time travel, but don't call it science fiction. It is romantic fantasy, of the kind Alice Hoffman does so well.

The amazing octopus

An octopus is an amazing creature. You probably already knew that, but you will be even more amazed after reading The Soul of an Octopus (2015) by Sy Montgomery.

An octopus has eight legs and nine brains, one in each leg in addition to a central brain. It can taste with each of these legs.  Not only do octopuses have different personalities, but even the those legs seem to have different personalities. Some are reserved, while others are more bold and eager to explore.

An octopus is much stronger than a human being. It is able to open tight jars, solve puzzles and escape from all but the most secure enclosures.

A female octopus lays eggs by the thousands. Only about two out of 100,000 eggs will survive and result in an adult octopus.

An octopus has three hearts. It can change color and blend in with almost any background.

An octopus can understand pointing and even watch television.

Yet for all its intelligence and strength and curiosity, an octopus's lifespan is shockingly short, usually just three or four years.

Montgomery, the author of a number of books about wild creatures, got to know several octopuses in a personal way through many visits to an aquarium in Boston. She also learned to scuba dive in order to see octopuses in their natural habitat.

She writes beautifully and tenderly. As for her title, she defines a soul as "the fingerprint of God." By that definition she concludes that an octopus has a soul, and in her book she attempts to relate her own soul to that of several wondrous and mysterious octopuses.

Thieving in Amsterdam

The Good Thief’s Guide to Amsterdam (2007), the second novel in Chris Evan’s Good Thief series, finds Charlie Howard in Amsterdam trying to work out a flaw in a novel about a thief he is trying to get ready for publication.

But Charlie, a writer, is also a thief, and he is enticed by another thief just out of prison to steal two seemingly worthless monkey figurines. At first he declines the offer, then changes his mind, only to find the other thief has been murdered by someone else who apparently wants those monkeys.

Soon Charlie finds himself a suspect in the murder case, as well as the target of two goons trying to steal the monkeys from him.

Despite the many complications Ewan weaves into his story, the plot never gets too complicated to follow. It remains a joy throughout.

Those who have enjoyed Lawrence Block’s Burglar series of mysteries will probably enjoy these, as well, although Ewan does seem to copy Block’s format a little too closely. Not only is his thief a hero in comparison wuth the worse criminals in the novels, but in both cases the thief has a female confident who is not a girlfriend but just someone to describe his adventures to in a lighthearted way.

That whooshing noise

Some writers need a deadline. Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, needed a babysitter. M.J. Simpson, author of Hitchhiker, the 2003 biography of Adams, says this writer needed someone in the same room preventing him from playing his guitar, playing games or going for a walk. Under these conditions, Adams could write a book in lightening speed.

One observer described Adams writing a novel as a spectator sport. He required an audience, someone to watch him write. Yet as his fame and income grew, fewer people were willing to discipline him in this way, and like Truman Capote he became known more for talking about what he planned to write than actually writing anything.

Another problem was that Adams was given advances for books he was supposed to write. Having already been paid, he had less reason to actually write the books. He joked about deadlines. "I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by," he said.

Thus this writer's output was disappointingly small, even considering his disappointedly short life. Even much of what he did write was a rehash of something he had written before. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was a novelization of the radio series he wrote. One of his Dirk Gently novels was a rewrite of two of his Doctor Who stories.

The Hitchhiker phenomenon, however, made so much money that Adams really didn't have to work. First came the radio show, then the novel, then the follow-up novels, then an LP, a TV show, a play and a game. Although there was much talk about a movie, and he made trips to Hollywood, the movie was not actually made until after his death.

In his youth Adams was besotted with both the Beatles and Monty Python, and he managed to get close to both groups, working closely, for example, with John Cleese, Terry Jones and Graham Chapman.

Simpson may bury his readers in detail about this life, yet he manages to reveal a wonderfully witty, creative and talented man whose weaknesses almost, but not quite, defeated him.

Drowning in words

I'm surrounded by silence but at the same time I am drowning in words and it hardly ever leaves me, that sense of disconnection.

Anthony Horowitz, A Line to Kill

Anthony Horowitz

One of the attractions of the Daniel Hawthorne series of mysteries written by Anthony Horowitz is that he makes himself one of the main characters. In the novels, as in real life, he is a writer of mysteries. He often mentions some of his other books in these books. He writes about his agent, his publisher, his readers, etc., and much of what he says about the writing life rings true. The line above from the second page of A Line to Kill is one such comment.

A writer, he says, is "surrounded by silence" and "drowning in words" at the same time. Writing tends to be a solitary occupation, best done alone in a quiet place, yet words rush constantly through the writer's mind, not just while writing but at other times, as well.

Novelists imagine conversations they cannot hear. They describe things they cannot see, at least not at the time they are writing. They are drowning in words, even those writers who in real life are introverts with little to say.

Brilliance

Anthony Horowitz, the successful British mystery writer, turns himself into a fictional character in his popular Daniel Hawthorne series of novels. The third book in the series, A Line to Kill (2021), proves as pleasing as the others.

Hawthorne is a former police investigator who lost his job after being suspected of pushing a crime suspect down a flight of stairs. Yet because he is such a better detective than those on the force, he is called in to assist with tough cases. Horowitz plays the role of Hawthorne's bumbling Watson who tags along to observe and eventually write about the investigator's brilliance.

This time the pair are invited to a book festival on the island of Alderney, where residents brag there has never been a murder. Yet there are two puzzling murders during the few days they are on the island. Why anyone would commit a murder while a famous detective is on the scene is one mystery that remains unsolved in this novel.

The guests at this festival become suspects after a wealthy party host is found stabbed to death. Later the body of his wife is found. Yet the main suspect appears to be a man named Derek Abbott, the very man, a suspected dealer in kiddie porn, whom Hawthorne supposedly pushed down those stairs. Yet this seems too easy, both for the reader and for Horowitz, who wonders if he can even turn this case into a book.

The final solution, of course, proves more interesting and more satisfying, thanks to Hawthorne's brilliance as a detective and Horowitz's brilliance as a writer.

Love and death

If you enjoy mystery and romance wrapped up in one package, you can't do much better than the Clare Fergusson/Russ Van Alstyne novels by Julia Spencer-Fleming. I recently enjoyed reading I Shall Not Want, published in 2008.

The titles, such as A Fountain Filled with Blood and All Mortal Flesh, often come from hymns or the Bible, and for good reason. Clare Ferguson is an Episcopal priest in the town of Millers Kill, while Russ Van Alstyne is the police chief. In previous novels, Russ and Clare are clearly drawn to each other, but because he is married, they manage to keep their relationship proper. His wife's tragic death at the end of the previous novel leaves both Russ and Clare feeling guilty and doing their best to avoid each other as this novel begins.

Then comes a series of murders of illegal aliens, one body found on a dairy farm owned by members of the chief's own family. It turns out that they, like other farmers in the area, have been hiring illegals to save money, and kind-hearted Clare is among those trying to keep this fact a secret from Russ. The murders reveal the secret, but also serve to draw Russ and Clare back together. And once talking to each other again, they have great trouble keeping their hands off each other.

Two other love stories also percolate throughout the novel. One involves an alien worker and the sister of the prime suspects in the murder case. The other involves a young hotshot police officer and an older woman, the mother of two, who becomes a police officer only because it pays better than any other job opportunity.

The tension, sexual and otherwise, escalates throughout the novel, which despite a few false notes remains entertaining throughout.

Attitudes change, novels don't

Times change, attitudes change, moral positions change, yet great novels stay the same, and therein lies a problem for many readers. The same is true of movies, of course, but let's stick with novels.

The novelist Richard Ford, for example, was paid in advance to write an introduction to Walker Percy's The Moviegoer. He thought he should read this novel he loved once again. "And I found things in it that I didn't want to have to argue for," he said. He then declined to write the introduction and sent the money back. He still loved the novel, he said, but he didn't want to be caught in the middle of the inevitable criticism by cultural critics about the novel's outdated points of view.

Many, if not most, novels from earlier eras reflect attitudes toward women, people of other races, etc, that once were commonplace but now seem objectionable. I still like to read Donald E. Westlake's comic crime novels on occasion, but I now cringe at some of the attitudes reflected in them.

Yet I also find objectionable many of the attitudes found in so many modern novels. Perhaps worst of all are the modern attitudes found in so many historical novels being written today. Authors want their heroes in stories set in the 1930s or 1860s or whenever to think and behave like most of their readers do in the 2020s. It just makes their characters seem phony, unrealistic. Yet too much historical accuracy would certainly decrease book sales, assuming such books could even be published at all.

Some balance is required by both writers and readers. For writers, that may mean softening, without eliminating, the faults common even in the best people of earlier times. For readers, that means accepting novels as they are, whether or not one accepts the views of its characters.

One doesn't have to admire Humbert Humbert to admire the novel about Humbert Humbert. Novelist Donna Tartt has called Lolita her favorite novel. When asked if changing attitudes had changed her opinion of the novel she replied, "I don't have an altered view of it. It's a masterpiece." Good for her.

The science of prayer

Some people believe in the power of prayer. Others don't. Those who don't are perhaps more likely to put their faith in science. So Lynn McTaggart's scientific approach to prayer in The Power of Eight (2017) may come as surprise.

McTaggart, who begins by describing herself as "a hard-nosed reporter," more often uses the term intention than prayer, perhaps to give her work a more scientific air. Her thesis is that a group of people — eight being an ideal number, she finds, though sometimes her groups number in the thousands — can lead to physical healing, decreased crime rates, improved relationships and even peace in war zones when everyone intends at the same time that such things take place.

Her early work took the form of actual scientific experiments, complete with control groups. Her groups intended that certain plants grow at a faster rate than other plants, and that is exactly what happened. In what she calls the Peace Intention Experiment, a large number of people around the world all focusing on peace in Sri Lanka at the same time led to a sudden decrease in hostilities there in 2008. "This was like entering another dimension," she writes.

The author reports scores of positive results from her Power of Eight groups. Here is a partial list: "Kristi's digestive issues disappeared; Marie began attracting new tax clients with no effort; Bev reconciled with her estranged brothers; Iris's chronic congestion began clearing up; Martha's insomnia completely resolved." Individually none of these occurrences could be described necessarily as a miracle. Taken as a group these and countless other examples make one wonder.

Yet the benefits of intention or prayer fall not just on the targets of these intentions and prayers but also on members of those groups. She calls it the Mirror Effect. "Focusing on healing someone else brings on a mirrored blessing." It helps explain, she writes, why people who attend church services regularly on average live seven years longer than those who don't.

Hers is a remarkable book, one that will tempt readers to conduct their own experiments in prayer.

Something in common

It's wonderful when a man and a woman discover they have something in common. What Delwood Reese and Rae Lynn Cobb have in common in Donna Everhart's 2022 novel The Saints of Swallow Hill is very uncommon: They both have out-of-body experiences. They are dead, but then alive again with incredible stories to tell, though they both hesitate to tell them.

Set in Georgia in 1932, the Depression well under way and jobs hard to find, Del is a womanizing young man who has a relationship with the wrong man's wife. That man is his boss, who in revenge gives Del the dangerous job of climbing inside a grain bin to break up the corn inside. But then his boss opens the door at the bottom of the bin, letting the corn run out and causing Del to get buried. Later he can remember watching other men trying to rescue him, even though his unconscious body is buried in corn.

Now having lost his interest in women, becoming the first of our saints, he ends up working on a turpentine farm with a boss even more savage than his previous one. Any man Crow doesn't like and or who he doesn't think is working hard enough he puts in a small sweat box for days at a time. Del is one of these victims, though he manages to survive, unlike some others.

Meanwhile Rae Lynn Cobb kills her badly injured husband in a desperate act of mercy, then flees to Georgia and that same turpentine farm, where she gets a job by pretending to be a man named Ray Cobb. She can't keep up with the men and is placed in the sweat box for three days, where she has her own out-of-body experience. 

Finally released and barely alive, she is discovered to be a woman. Cornelia, the abused wife of the storekeeper, brings her back to life and gives her a place in the store, against her husband's wishes.

The relationship between these two characters takes the entire novel to develop, through many hardships, all of which make it sweet and believable, the miracles notwithstanding.

Autoconfusion

"She recently had lost much with Rick and Pam."

That was a sentence in an otherwise clear email I received recently from a friend from high school. But what did it mean? What had been lost? What did Rick and Pam have to do with it? Instead of emailing back for an explanation, I decided to call my friend, Judy. Nothing had been lost, she told me. Linda, another high school friend, had simply had lunch with Rick and Pam, two other friends from high school.

It's nice to know that after more than 60 years, we Swanton Bulldogs remain connected, and also that Linda, Rick and Pam hadn't actually lost anything. So what happened in that email? Blame autocompletion.

When you are writing on a computer or phone, the device seems to look over your shoulder and try to complete your thoughts, correct your errors and save you trouble. Sometimes this works nicely and actually does save time and trouble. Other times it just gets you into more trouble, as in the above email. We can only imagine what series of typos and "corrections" turned "had lunch" into "had lost much," thanks to autocompletion, One needs to read over everything you have written with great care, which of course takes more time than autocompletion usually saves.

In his book Knowing What We Know, Simon Winchester calls autocompletion a "somewhat diabolical and wholly unnecessary nuisance, the bane of the writer's life."  

Smilin' Ed and Froggy

When I was a kid back in the 1950s I loved a Saturday morning TV show featuring a puppet named Froggy the Gremlin, about whom we often heard the catchphrase "Plunk your magic twanger, Froggy." The best part of the show, as far as I was concerned, came when Smilin' Ed McConnell and later Andy Devine tried to tell a story, while Froggy, in effect, autocompleted his sentences in outrageous ways, greatly irritating Smilin' Ed or Andy to the amusement of children like me.

It was great fun. Then. Now I sympathize more with Smilin' Ed and Andy. Do we really need a Froggy the Gremlin in our phones and computers?