This is my early morning spot. Notice the cool computer-rack that tilts it at a better angle for my hands and neck.
I’ve been reading. And reading. And reading. Not traveling, because of my recent surgery, not walking because of same, and because of snow. And more snow. And cold. And more cold. Having exhausted the last mystery series I was reading, I tried David Baldacci, who I recognized as a writer who’s been at this a long time. A former attorney. They typically make good mystery writers. And Obama reads him.
I have to say, Baldacci knows how to develop a plot. I quickly finished the four-book Atlee Pine series in which she searches for her twin sister, Mercy, snatched from her side in bed thirty years ago. What I was increasingly annoyed by is the clunky vision. It feels as if someone translated a cartoon into language. Biff, bam, slam against a wall! Twist the arm into grotesque positions! Grab the gun! The men (and Atlee herself) get to have magnificent muscles. Characters step onto the scene and are described in full detail as if it were an assignment to get that part over with before commencing with the story. He had sandy hair, a chiseled jaw, and was wearing tan pants, light blue shirt, expensive leather shoes. Okay, so?
Why, you ask, did I read all four in the series instead of putting it down after the first? Each novel ends with the resolution of a crime, but the BIG story, will Atlee ever find her sister, only advances a bit, novel by novel. Like a crack addict, I needed to know what happened, finally.
The value of a mystery is that there is a finally. An artificial boundary has been set to allow me the brief pleasure of feeling that life is less ambiguous, less confusing than I know it to be.
Speaking of ambiguity, I have devoured, with much underlining, a book by Chilean writer Benjamin Labatut, called When We Cease to Understand the World. I have never read anything like it. It follows Fritz Haber, Alexander Grothendieck, Werner Heisenberg, and Erwin Schrödinger, among others, into, as the New York Times reviewer says, “ the complicated links between scientific and mathematical discovery, madness, and destruction.” As the Times reviewer says, “Some of their discoveries reshape human life for the better; others pave the way to chaos and unimaginable suffering. The lines are never clear.” It’s mostly fact, but where there’s not information, he fictionalizes.
The plunge into ambiguity can make you mad. Better read mysteries. Just kidding. Or not kidding. The deeper any of us explore the world, the more likely we’ll run up against uncertainty. Which is unsettling, scary. Which is also true. We would do well to live more comfortably with it. Certainly there’s no harm in a good mystery story, as long as we recognize it as a pleasantly broad delineation of what we wish were true, but not the true truth.
The epigraph to Maus (why mouse): “The Jews are undoubtably a race, but they are not human. Adolf Hitler”
Speaking of the true truth, I at last got around to reading Art Spiegleman’s Maus, his Pulitzer prize winning graphic novel, serialized from 1980-91, of a parent’s memory of the Holocaust. I read it because many schools have been asked to pull it off the shelves, so I felt obligated to order a copy and read it. Heaven forbid that our children should know the truth.
It’s strikingly good, graphic or not. It’s nuanced, kind, and even though I can only relate to the Jewish suffering second-hand, that’s also true of the son, who’s interviewing his father. The father-son relationship is difficult and evolving. I may order Maus II.
The P.S. . . . .
I’ve gotten two poems so far from the Labatut book. One is the longest poem I think I’ve ever written, eight pages, about the mathematician Alexander Grothendieck. I’m waiting for someone to publish it before I show it to you.
I have a lot shorter poem, “Someone is Walking the Pig,” in Plume magazine. (click on Plume)
Obama loved When We Cease to Understand the World, too.