A Girl's Guide to Modern European Philosophy

Wouldn't A Girl's Guide to Modern European Philosophy be a totally offensive non-fiction title (as husband Ben thought it to be)? It's a novel, though, and it takes place at Sussex University in England during the 1970s so I guess it's about a "girl". The girl in question is Susannah, a twenty-year old involved with two men, studying philosophy and unexepectedly pregnant and contemplating abortion. The book flap makes it sound as though Susannah actively seeks guidance from the philosphers she's studying, but it's more that as she tries to decide what to do with the men and the pregnancy, she delves into her dissertation (which sounds like something a little different from what we Americans mean by that--it's basically a year-end paper, I think). she discovers that everything she reads relates back to her pregnancy dilemma. Nietzsche's human's secret destiny is like an unsuspected pregnancy, she reads; Kierkegaard goes on about Abraham's sacrifice of his child Isaac; and even her friend talks about the sadness of the orphaned baby elephants she's hoping to save during her internship in Africa. There was also something about Hegel, but I've forgotten it now.

In any case, reading A Girl's Guide made me glad that a) I didn't come of age in the 70s b) I'm not pregnant, considering abortion and c) that I didn't get a degree in Philosophy in spite of the best lobbying efforts of my extended family. I think I got a good dose of it from reading this book. It's intriguing to see how the basic contemplations of meaning of human life take on new meaning for Susannah in her own dilemma, but in general it's too much navel-gazing for me.

Susannah tries to come across as worldly and the opposite of "straight" (the vaguely amusing term she uses to discuss boring, mainstream students), but like many women in the 70s, she kind of has to work at figuring out her independence. She needs to ditch her "older man" boyfriend, and probably her younger fellow student as well. She unexpectedly decides to insist on getting called Ms when the nurse wants to call her MRS (repeatedly). She calls the doctor on his sexist comment. So we've fallen by the wayside, have we? For a moment, I was nonplussed. I stared at him. He was a florid man with a big, meaty face and fat, stubby fingers. The I said, "No, we haven't."

But Susannah really isn't a firebrand and she comes to all this self-awakening slowly, late, and calmly. She just begins to take control of her destiny, just as Kierkegaard suggests to her in a really weird dream. You can't sit out the dance, he says. So yeah, she "comes of age" in the age of the ultimate "coming of age" for women.

It's not a dreary book, by any means. Susannah's a little annoying in her meandering, wide-eyed, almost innocence, but she's funny and the author gets several things spot on. The description of choosing carefully which bar you'll wander into to find friends is really funny. You need two exits, otherwise everyone will see you come in, look around and turn to leave. With two exits, you can walk through and no one will know you weren't sitting at the bar before leaving. So true. I still feel weird in busy, unfamiliar bars.

Another funny bit is when an attractive French student sings (and plays!) a song for Susannah. He's pretty good-looking and obviously wants to sleep with her but the song is really bad. It's just that the song was so awful. There was no question of my fancying anyone who could write a song like that.

And, it being an English book, there's a bit about bad food as well (fruit cake, no less!) After about half an hour, I went to the buffet car and got a cup of tea and a piece of fruitcake. British Rail fruitcake is so horrible that, once you've eaten a piece, you didn't feel like eating anything else, however hungry you were. I was starving and I didn't have much money, so it was just what I needed.

It may seems trite, but I liked the lesson of one of Susannah's dreams. She's hiking with Kierkegaard and he's regaling her with philosophy, but points out that the path is narrow and she has to continue on alone. This of course, signifies that she has to decide for herself what to do with her life and her pregnancy, but she doesn't want this responsibility. But when the swaying bridge breaks, she realizes she has to go on. She may be trapped high on the mountain with no return, but she knows there's no turning back anyway and she'll be fine on solid ground up ahead. I didn't need to read any philosophers to figure this out, but it's a nice reminder to live life fully and to forge ahead. The alternative is to stagnate.

I guess this could count as a smart beach read. The title's a little embarrassing, I suppose, but you would feel like you're learning something (philosophy!) while you read what is essentially a "I have two boyfriends, what do I do" novel.

I See You Everywhere

I'm pretty sure this is my book club book for next month, but we're a little lax these days, especially with summer coming on. I really enjoyed Julia Glass' book, The Whole World Over, perhaps more than her better-known Three Junes, so I've been looking forward to reading I See You Everywhere. This is ostensibly the story of two grown sisters and their relationship, but it felt more like the story of two separate people with competing personalities. I suppose that's what life does to siblings once they grow up and out of the house, but I kind of wish I'd gotten more of a sense of how Clement and Louisa were the same, why where they came from made them who they are. Isn't that the point of a "family" novel? These sisters were just too different.

Louisa is the practical one. She has to be right and she's downright cranky about other people's mistakes or flaws (And she'll correct them). I saw some parallels to my own personality that I wish I hadn't because I didn't find her very likeable. She does soften as the book goes on (it spans the years between 1980 and 2005). Clement, in contrast, is the free-spirit, the sister who can't and won't be pinned down. Both sisters seem to know what they want, but Louisa for all her practicality and caution seems to take much longer to reach the life she thinks she should be living. And even then, it's not exactly what she had imagined. I like that. I don't know anyone who lives the way they thought they would, but some of my friends reach a close enough variation. I don't say that in a bad way. I think, unfortunately, that as we grow older, we realize we aren't really losing the dreams of youth (so to speak), but changing them to fit reality. You could see this as sad or you could see it as life. Towards the end of the book, Louisa says: As we grow older, however, our tragedies diminish in their grandeur...Because tragedy...proliferates all around us. Your boss succumbs to lymphoma. One friend has a stillbirth, another loses an eye. Someone's parents plummet off a cliff while driving on vacation in Scotland. Another friend's sister-in-law, the mother of a newborn baby, drops dead on a treadmill at the gym. You begin to understand that there are no quotas for hard knocks. It's not, alas, like you've used up your allotted share. You're simply growing older and this is how it is. One day you're no longer hearing "oh my God I can't believe it!" You're hearing "These things happen" and "There but for the grace of God." (Really? Plummeting off a cliff in Scotland?)

Not that this is a book about tragedy, though like life, this book has its share of--shall we say--transitions. It is not without humor, either. I love the scene that semi-explains the title. Louisa gets a typically garbled message from her mother to call her sister, though she won't be able to speak with her, she's told. Just call her "here." and Louisa calls the number, having no idea that Clement is, not for the first time, in a hospital after a terrible accident. But I call the number, I'm frantic, and this woman answers, 'I see you?' as if I'm supposed to answer, 'Aha, but I see you, too!' Like a game of some kind. All I can say is 'You see me? How?' But of course it's the Intensive Care Unit (ICU), and although it's funny to the nurse and to the reader, Louisa is furious at the casualness in the face of her sister's potential death. Louisa does not really have a sense of humor, though she does mellow over time.

Clement mellows over time, but not in a good way. I didn't quite buy the end to Clement's story and I felt like the end of the book tried too hard to tie the sisters together, but I haven't reached that age yet, so maybe I'll find it more believable some day.

I'm not sure Julia Glass got the diffferent ages right, in fact. I suppose that's the trick in a decade-spanning novel, especially told first-person in competing voices. I didn't quite believe the characters as 20 and 24 year-olds, though I found the parents mostly believable throughout. There's a random post-elderly aunt (grandmother?) thrown in at the beginning who seems like she'll have a bigger part than she does, but I wasn't convinced she was 98. (Wishful thinking on Glass' part?). As the sisters age, they become more believable, or else I adapted to their personalities.

Louisa, not being practical for once, says "Everything's an omen, I can't stand it."

Ray, the boyfriend says, "Superstition's the easy way out."

Okay, so we can read into everything or go along for the ride. If you're lucky, your life will be worth a story or two.

Devil May Care

What fun! A reinvented James Bond novel by Sebastian Faulks "writing as Ian Fleming." (hunh?) This has got everything the old books had: Monkey paw disease! A Rube Goldberg-rigged tennis match to the death! Exotic locales! Weird "futuristic" machines! The obsession with fine clothes, lots of cigarettes, though, strangely, not much sex.
I don't know if Austin Powers ruined or saved the whole Villain Monologue of Great Plans while hero is being slooooowly killed by yet another Rube Goldberg inspired contraption, but the Death Monologue is back in this outing. Perfect. Gorner, the villain, does say: I'm not one of those idiots who looks for a protracted or picturesque death for their arch-enemy. A single bullet is good enough for British scum like you. But then doesn't follow through! Yay!
His own death, however, is, um, picturesque. There is some pretty gory stuff, more so than what I remember being in the original novels. Sure, I remember Tee-hee slowly breaking Bond's pinky back then and some other vicious stuff happened in the old books, but I had to avert my eyes (or at least skim) several passages in this one. Then again, I'm a wimp about violence.

Bond races off to Tehran, Paris, Moscow (at the height of the Cold War, mind you, which is so quaint now). His mission? Um, to save British youth from the dangers of marijuana. Well, there's more to it, but Bond is vaguely out of touch and old in this book. He's a bit surprised by the "hippies" in London. Yep, this Bond is a bit tired, a bit worn, and getting a little old and scarred.
The villain he faces is typically maniacal, has a huge ego and a weird affliction (monkey paw in this case! Does that really exist?). He doesn't want to take over the world so much as he wants to destroy England. He's got a typically convoluted plan that naturally involves Bond. There's a "girl" of course. Twins, actually. Every man's fantasy, as Scarlett says herself. There are dank cells, derring-do, and skin-of your teeth escapes. Underwater scenes that will hurt your lungs. Torture, death, and lots and lots of alcohol. I'm talking pitchers (!) of martinis. It's a wonder, Bond can save the world, half in the sauce as he must be.

One weird thing was the obsession with mentioning the washroom. The author was forever having the bad guys take Bond off to the "washroom." I kept thinking they wanted him clean (some villains don't like dirt), but remembered that means "bathroom" in England, so then it just seemed like a weird thing to keep bringing up. I mean, no one goes to the bathroom in novels unless it advances the plot, which Bond's frequent trips never did. Perhaps the evil henchmen felt sorry for his bladder due to his level of alcoholic intake.

It took a bit to get used to M being a man (as he always was in the books) because I've grown so accustomed to Judy Dench in that role in the movies. Oh well. Scarlett, the love interest is fairly modern and holds her own, so that balances things. This Bond is no Daniel Craig, but still worth rooting for. After all, he has to save England.

Good Grief

It turns out this book isn't quite so much of a handbook on widowhood as it is a handbook on how to reinvent yourself in a beach read kind of way. I'm not complaining, by the way. 36-year -old Sophie Stanton does lose her husband to cancer and author Lolly Winston does hit some of the right notes on how that kind of grief might affect a person, but I thought a lot of the protagonist's efforts to navigate the world without Ethan as fitting any single woman's life.

I like that the book is in sections, because the first section is a bit painful as Sophie sinks into depression. It's like that with grief: You know it's going to hurt forever so you just want to skip forward 6 months or so because you think that by then you'll have found a pattern to your new life. In Sophie's life, she moves to Oregon and rashly becomes a Big sister to a troubled Little Sister. Warning bells went off with that, but it wasn't slapstick at all and Sophie makes a good go of it. More warning bells went off when she becomes involved with an local actor (the cleft chin and square face put me off too, but apparently he's assumed to be handsome), but that romance works okay, too.

One thing Winston gets right, is the loneliness of widowhood. Not just the lack of companionship, but the desire to touch someone intimately, or to be held. Sophie also turns to Ethan when things are going wrong. She's stuck on a terrible, terrible attempt at a dinner with a creepy guy from a grief group and she can't manage to leave. Ethan, I need a ride! Wherever my husband is, however dark that place might be, I want to go there, right now, she thinks. Sophie, like the rest of us, is so used to having someone to call in emergencies, and suddenly she can't. That's just one more of the indignanties of being unexpectedly single. Who do you put down for an emergency contact? Who do you call when you need a ride? Who even picks you up from the emergency room?

I like the dreams Sophie has, too, always thinking Ethan is just somewhere else. I dream that I run into Ethan...His hair glistens like a mink coat and I want to touch it. He's with a policeman. They explain that Ethan's been in a car accident and the officer is trying to help him find his way home. I look down and see the edge of Ethan's hospital gown hanging out from under his parka...I want to tell him that he wasn't in a car accident. He had cancer and now he's dead. But I'm afraid I'll hurt his feelings, like telling someone they could lose a few pounds or their clothes don't match.

Things more or less work out for Sophie in this book, but it's never a patronizing book or too simplistic/formulaic in the writing, though Windston does add in a homeless guy and a mother-in-law suffering from not-too-annoying-or-scary Alzheimers. At least with Ethan's mother's Alzheimers, Sophie gets to mention her husband's name several times a day, something for which Sophie is touchingly grateful. She pulls her new life together which is just what you hope for for anyone who has suffered a loss, even if it's not as dramatic as a death.

On a related note, Lolly Winston might have reconsidered using such a cheerful author's photo in this book. It just doesn't fit. Her other book is about someone who can't have children. Obviously she's got a dark side. I guess she can't adapt her photos to the subjects, but still, it seemed a little icky and added to the overall feeling that she hasn't really experienced grief of this magnitude. I guess that's probably good because grieving people probably can't write a good work of fiction with any distance. I suppose the photo helps to not scare people off and really, it's the kind of book that's not hard to enjoy on some easy level.

Images: I like her description of COBRA as an ill-tempered snake who wants to cover only 50 percent of "allowable" charges for out-of-network doctors. And her aside that people have too much junk. Sophie tries to drop off Ethan's things at Goodwill (when she's finally ready to do so) and finds the bins overflowing. There's simply too much junk in the world. Each person should be allowed a small quota, the way you're allowed only two bags when you fly. I'd be in trouble, but it's a nice idea.

Miss Don't Touch Me

I thought this might be a fun little graphic novel romp through turn of last century French brothels (um, does that make sense?), but I found this book a little gross, a bit perverted (American sensibilities, perhaps?), and the first graphic novel I've read in which I thought the story would be better told in another genre.

The beginning is confusing and the end is baffling. Blanche witnesses the murder of her beloved, wild sister and goes undercover in a high-end brothel to find the "Butcher of the Dances." Little hilarity ensues and the torture scenes would already be uncomfortable for me even if there weren't the added weight that we as American people are wrestling with about the meaning/effectiveness of torture. Obviously the torture in Miss Don't Touch Me is of a sexual nature, but the subject is ugly nonetheless.

I will say I rather liked the art work in the book. It's colorful and playful, yet detailed. The subject is dark, but softened by the illustrations. The faces are very expressive and emotions are obvious (in a good way), but I think the story would work better as a straight mystery.

If anyone understands the fate of the main character at the end, let me know.