meghan rose allen

Why do I do things? My head is filled of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy stuff right now, so I feel like Zaphod when he realizes he’s locked off part of his brains from himself. But, instead of stealing space ships, I’m like why did I request a six hundred page Austrian satirical play from the 1920s to read? What possessed me to do that? At least I managed to request it in English and didn’t get six hundred pages of Austrian-German vernacular when my German skills are roughly on par with reading books in German that have one noun per page, i.e. Katze (underneath picture of cat), Hund (underneath picture of dog), etc.

So why do I do things? I don’t know.

So I spent the past week reading my six hundred page Austrian satirical play from the 1920s. I read an act a day, plus the intro and the glossary at the back. I have an epub and there doesn’t seem to be any clever way of getting back and forth between the glossary and the play itself (am I missing something on my kobo or is it really just not possible to do this simply), so I simply read the glossary after finishing the play. That was no real problem. Likely I missed a lot of the specific political jokes, but I don’t feel like I was really missing that much. Most of what the play says is this: the war benefits the rich, manipulates the press, and sends the poor to their deaths. So lots of fat men bemoaning a lack of butter while war amputees wander about in the foreground. About five hundred pages of this reiterated, then a descent into a Boschian bacchanal of talking hyenas and Martians. I seem to read a lot of books where aliens suddenly appear. Do I have some subliminal interest in surprise aliens? I’ll add that question to the why do I do things one.

Basically The Last Days of Mankind is an unperformable play. There are stage directions such as continue for two hours and I think something like forty googol characters. I don’t even know how one would stage certain parts, although I guess projecting film on a screen behind might solve that problem. I couldn’t help thinking that if one is going to write an unperformable play, why not recast it as a novel? I guess art comes to the artist as it comes, but essentially, long soliloquies in the play are taken from newspaper articles of the time, so there are pages and pages that already reads less like a play and more like a creative non-fiction essay. But it’s a play. So a play it is.

I know I’m sounding really down on The Last Days of Mankind, but it ends up transcending a lot of my complaints (not the one about surprise aliens though). I gave it four stars out of five. It’s surprisingly prescient for a play from the 1920s. There’s the foreshadowing of Nazis with the casual antisemitism (although Kraus was ethnically Jewish, so it isn’t necessarily his antisemitism, more a comment on the antisemitism of the time). There’s a harsh critique of globalisation. The Grumbler, Kraus himself inserted into his own play, has media critiques that would fit into any modern issue of AdBusters. It’s surprisingly readable, in part due to Kraus and in part due to the translation, which has been, as the translators explain, modernized for an English speaking audience. But it is long, and it hits many of the same points again and again: War is Hell, in a democracy we are all complicit, and those who profit from it aim to keep it going for as long as they can. I don’t know if I needed six hundred pages to hammer that point home.

And Martians.

The Last Days of Mankind by Karl Kraus, newly translated by Fred Bridgham and Edward Timms went on sale November 24, 2015.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

I took my Brownie troop to the Observatory last week (twenty-four seven year olds in a tiny, enclosed space — not my smartest idea), so it seemed fitting that the next book I reviewed was about the Cosmos. In German, the universe translates to das All, which I also wonderfully appreciate. Einstein spoke German, so there we have it — tying everything in together!

So The Hunt for Vulcan: . . . And How Albert Einstein Destroyed a Planet, Discovered Relativity, and Deciphered the Universe (ellipses in a title; really? Really?) reads like a science article run a little amok. It has quite a readable, polished, and leisurely tone; a bit chummy, which isn’t a problem. The odd changes in tense to present whenever something happens is off-putting. But, basically, even for a short book, it seems too long. I can see it being an article in a magazine. A book seems a stretch.

The title too seems a bit of misnomer. Einstein’s destruction of Vulcan, a purported unsighted planet between the Sun and Mercury necessary to account for Mercury’s orbit under Newtonian laws of physics, was hardly a Godzilla-Einstein coming in and purposefully stomping out Vulcan. Vulcan’s non-existence came as a consequence of Einstein’s theories of relativity, and ends up being almost a non-event. A good deal of the book is about pre-Vulcan: the initial sightings of Neptune and Uranus and how those fit so perfectly into Newtonian physics, so not even falling into the title at all. For me, I didn’t need the huge background sections on earlier astronomical outings. I mean, ha ha ha Edison shot a stuffed jackrabbit, my life isn’t changed for knowing that.

Finally, we get to Einstein and the two halves of the book: the hunt for Vulcan and let’s follow around Einstein for a bit, came together rather ineptly. It seemed like Levenson was torn between which story he wanted to tell. Both are worth telling. In a magazine article maybe. Or in a longer book with deeper focus. But in this book, it feels both like a tease and like a slog.

I don’t often read popular science books, so this was good for me, at least, even if I wasn’t particularly taken with the book. I expanded mein All, but I often skimmed the science explanations. I should work on learning how to read science. As a former scientist, I am quite lazy about that. I don’t know if, in this case, it’s me or Levenson. Did I gloss over the science because I need to work at reading non-narrative or because Levenson’s explanation didn’t grab my interest?

And, from a technical standpoint re: epubs; someone’s got to get footnotes and endnotes less awful on my kobo. Computer scientists: you have your goal!

The Hunt for Vulcan: . . . And How Albert Einstein Destroyed a Planet, Discovered Relativity, and Deciphered the Universe by Thomas Levenson went on sale November 3, 2015.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

A few months ago, when I reviewed The Skeleton Road by Val McDiermid, I mused a little on what it would take to put something horrific into your novel. The Skeleton Road had the Balkans conflict, and I used the word, albeit kindly, disrespectful to describe its inclusion. I don’t think I’ll use words like that to describe the inclusion of the Balkan conflict into The Little Red Chairs. There’s nuance here. The horror here doesn’t supplant character development. There is horror in this world, The Little Red Chairs says. And I don’t have to justify or relativasize or explain it to you. O’Brien is smart enough and trusts us enough not to need explanation. We can be confronted with it. She trusts us to do that.

I’ve only read O’Brien once before, The House of Splendid Isolation, which took me something like six tries to get past page twenty. I couldn’t see it with that book, but with this one, I can see why she is considered one of the greats. She takes apart the narrative, the point-of-view, the tense, like threads all placed next to each other. But instead of a jumble, it’s like an abstract painting you can’t turn away from. A car wreck. You can see it coming, the downfall. O’Brien doesn’t hide who Vuk is from the reader. He’s a wolf. He’s a criminal. He’s an exterminator of people. He exists as he is, without, as I said before, explanation or justification. Evil is there. How easy it is though, like Fidelma who starts an affair with Vuk when he arrives as an alternative healter in their sleepy Irish town, to see something different. It isn’t that Fidelma is willfully blind to her lover’s past. It isn’t that she knows but chooses not to. She just doesn’t know. But can you know someone though? Ever? Truly? Always? Does Fidelma know her husband Jack? Does she know the people she meets in London? In The Hague? Anywhere? Do we know her? We all keep things from each other. The beauty of The Little Red Chairs is that what we are given of the characters is enough to support a novel that shimmers and clings like gossamer. It makes you sick but you keep reading.

So it would be perfect but isn’t. There are *shudder* dream sequences. Dreams that have meaning. Dreams that offer insight into characters. I hate that. I hate it so much. So I took away a star. The Little Red Chairs is four stars out of five. Please don’t put dreams in your novels.

The Little Red Chairs by Edna O’Brien went on sale October 29, 2015.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Since one of the stories in Past Habitual has the word topology in the title (a rather surreal story about dental cleaning and a meditation about M and W’s and dental hygienists’ bosoms), I feel justified in using topology to describe my feelings of Past Habitual by Alf Machlochlainn.

Yay math!

Let’s take the earth. I’m going to assume that most of you agree the earth is round. But locally, it doesn’t feel round. It, generally, feels pretty flat wherever one is standing. The curvature of the earth is so massive compared to a teensy-tiny person that it can feel mind-boggling that really, we’re on a big (almost) sphere when it really seems, in our perspective, to be a flat plane. Such is it with my enjoyment of Past Habitual: give me a page of the book and I’ll like it. I’ll like the writing. I’ll like the words. I’ll like the way each page pulls you right into Ireland, one of my favourite places to read about, with its complex history and shifting loyalties. But pull back far enough and I’m like “What the f*ck is going on?” because the stories tend to jump, these massive, unprepared, leaps of logic and time and characters and style and I just don’t know. I do not know how to describe it other than baffling. Globally, in respect to Past Habitual, I spent a fair deal of time being baffled.

As for style, there’s a lot of almost stream-of-consciousness, memory. The ones focusing on Ireland’s past could all be linked, all told from the same characters one may suppose. Themes reappear: the Irish War of Independence and Civil War of the 1920s, Germans coming to Ireland during the Second World War, the Catholic Church, sentences here and there in Irish. The book doesn’t explain Ireland for the non-Irish. I don’t mind that. I like the narrator’s voice most of the time — not so much when he offers to kill the kittens, but most of the time. It’s rural without being idyllic. Most of it feels true, at least, as I’ve said, locally. Globally? Incomprehensible.

Past Habitual by Alf Machlochlainn went on sale April 13, 2015.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.