Literature |
The summer is over, and you haven’t read a single one of the books you were planning to catch up on. You’ll go to a party and still have nothing to say when someone asks you, “So what do you think of this year’s choice for the Nobel Prize in Literature?” or “How do you feel about Hemingway?”As a public service, this column will tell you all you need to know about literature, so you can hold your own in any conversation. Here are the essences of some of the classics you should be familiar with, in an easy-to-read form that will enable you to discuss them intel-ligently. If the book under discussion is not one on this list, change the subject to one that is.
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J.K. Rowling. Magic. Wizards, witches, leprechauns, house-elves, dragons, death-defying challenges, self-sacrifice, and the glorious possibility of human redemption. This is the book that all the fuss has been about. Harry Potter is a 14-year-old orphan with magical powers who attends the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. He has a godfather-in-hiding named Sirius Black, and enemies Lord Voldemort and the sinister Death Eaters. Harry is going to attend the season’s premier sporting event, the Quidditch World Cup in which Hogwarts will compete with two other magicians’ schools, the Beauxbatons and the Durmstrang in a Triwizard Tournament. A lot of things happen, and in the end Good triumphs over Evil. According to one bookseller, people who read Harry Potter books also read Jacques Barzun’s It figures.
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller is the World War II satirical story about bombardier Captain John Yossarian, who is frantic and furious because thousands of people he hasn’t even met keep trying to kill him. He’s trying to get transferred, but the only acceptable reason for getting a transfer is insanity, and anyone trying to get a transfer is obviously not insane. That’s Catch-22. We’ve all encountered some form of Catch-22 in our own lives – a problem whose solution is denied by the circumstances of the problem itself. Now that you know what is means, try using the expression occasionally, if you can work it into the conversation.
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger has been one of the most banned books in the country. It tells the story of two days in the life of 16-year-old Holden Caulfield, who has just been expelled from prep school because he failed every subject except English. He’s full of angst. The school is crummy, his classmates are mean, and his parents don’t understand him. A typical smart-ass kid who knows everything. He ends up exhausted and in a psychiatrist’s office. Youth sucks.
Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco, translated from the Italian. Three book editors in Milan, who have spent too much time reviewing crackpot manuscripts on the occult, decide to have some fun. They feed random bits of information into a fancy computer, and things begin to get serious. People start dying. The book is full of esoteric information about the Middle Ages, about ancient orders like the Knights Templar and the Illuminati, about conspiracies and schemes to dominate the world. In any discussion be sure to refer to the author’s remarkable knowledge of semiotics and theology. Make references to occultist cabala, western mysticism, Satanic initiation rites and paranoid conspiracy theories. Try to say something about “pretentiousness” which begins to show up as early as the third sentence of the book .
A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway. Lieutenant Frederick Henry is an American volunteer serving with the Italian ambulance service during World War I. He falls in love with a beautiful English nurse Catherine Barkley after he is wounded. She becomes pregnant but refuses to marry him, so he returns to his post. Then he deserts from the Italian army to be with her, and they flee to Switzerland. Catherine and the baby die during childbirth, leaving him desolate. It’s the classic love story formula – boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back, they clinch – except that here they don’t live happily after. Typical Hemingway. Literary circles are excited about a new verse translation by Seamus Heaney of this thousand-year-old epic that some of us had to read in college English classes. Beowulf, a Scandinavian hero, saves the Danes by fighting and killing the invincible monster Grendel. Then he has to fight Grendel’s mother, who didn’t take kindly to her son’s death and dismemberment. Fifty years later he has to fight a gold-hoarding dragon. This time, Beowulf is not so lucky – he kills the dragon, but he also dies.
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky is a Russian novel about guilt and retribution. It examines the question of whether some people are so extraordinary that it is all right for them to kill if it benefits society. Raskolnikov, a desperately poor student in St. Petersburg, plans the perfect crime – he decides to murder his pawnbroker, a despicable old woman no one loves and no one will mourn. It’s okay for a man of genius to transgress moral law, if it will ultimately benefit humanity. He’s caught and sent to prison, where he comes to the realization that happiness cannot be achieved by a reasoned plan of existence but must be achieved by suffering.If anyone mentions the 1999 Nobel Prize in Literature, or the German novelist Gunter Grass, just nod and say, “The Tin Drum is definitely not for everyone.”