This book had been giving me the eye in my local store for a couple months before I broke down and bought it. The premise of the novel as reported by the back cover struck me as fifty percent intriguing and fifty percent off-putting. The intriguing: Auden, Hoolboom's narrator/protagonist hears a voice in his head, a voice other than his own. When he moves from Sudbury to Toronto after discovering he's HIV-positive, he meets video artist Steve Reinke, only to discover that it is Steve's voice he hears inside his head. (Reinke, according to the notes, is a video artist out here in the real world too, though unlike his fictional counterpart, he is not HIV-positive. Some of his work is available to watch online.) Steve and Auden become... well, friends is the wrong word, I think, but they become close, anyway, and Steve helps Auden begin writing a book about Steve's life. The book isn't just a book; it's also a machine, designed to heal Auden, to change the voice inside his head, and to alter the reader in such a way that a new personality will emerge from the experience. Sounds pretty amazing, right? Steve's video art also plays a pretty big role, though personally I think that video art is one of those things that sounds much more interesting when you read about it than it actually turns out to be when you see it. The off-putting bits on the back are the descriptions of The Steve Machine as an AIDS fable and plague journal. Though not actually true of this book (thank God), I always feel like the author (or the publisher on their behalf) has confused themselves with a social worker, and that they've just been assigned my case. Note to authors: I don't give a shit about your social agenda, unless you're telling me an interesting story in an interesting way, with interesting characters. Even then I still won't give a shit about your agenda, but I'll probably like your book. Whenever I see a phrase like "AIDS fable," it makes me worried that I'm about to read a book about Gay People. I don't mean a book about characters who happen to be gay, because I'll take an interesting book about gay characters over a dull one about straight characters any day of the week. A book about Gay People is one in which the characters' homosexuality becomes their sole important characteristic, and the world of the novel has been built around that sexuality, rather than it being merely one fact among many in that world. (I won't even get into the fact that I know it's ridiculous of me to assume that a book with an HIV-positive male narrator means that narrator is gay, except to say that we're talking about literature as social work, not literature as art or even literature as a reflection of reality, because we know that in either of those last cases such an assumption would be foolish.) There's also the strong possibility that the book will become about The Disease, and that the world of the novel will be constructed solely so that we can cry over people dying of AIDS, and we can rage against an uncaring society and a corrupt system and I don't even care enough to finish the sentence that shit bores me so much. It turns out I didn't have to worry; neither Hoolboom nor Coach House Books thought he was a social worker. Instead, they all seemed to think he was a writer who wanted to tell an interesting story in an interesting way with interesting characters. As it happense, they were right.

Holboom's prose is casual and energetic, bordering on the Canadian Indie Style, but with enough discipline and control to avoid actually flying off into The Style. Though Auden seems to want to sublimate himself to Steve as the driving force of the story, it's Auden's strong, wonderfully developed personality that really shines through in sentences and paragraphs of The Steve Machine. I quite like this bit:

In my new dreams I savoured dinners with conversation so witty my guests ached with laughter, and all of them begged me to share their bed afterwards, startled by my perfect fashion sense and sexual athleticism. Shallow dreams, I knew, but sometimes even the unconscious gets tired of outputting Greek myths and new corporate logos. Meanwhile, in my waking hours, a small, angry man with a mouth in place of understanding hunted for blame. Like the hummingbird, he'd learned just one tune, and never tired of playing it. It was my fault. That's what he let me know. Even if the day hadn't started up yet, something somewhere was going wrong and I was to blame. When I spoke too frequently, this feeling would start creeping into conversation. Some were born with subliminal seduction, others with subliminal failure: it was a little trick some of us had learned to keep happiness from spoiling a view that had grown only too familiar.

There were two things I knew for sure when I tested positive. That I was going to die. And that I was going to hunt down the voice that was forever busy inventing new kinds of failure, and squeeze its little windpipe until it snapped between my fingers. I would not die guilty. I just didn't have the time. (p. 98)

So much of The Steve Machine is about the roiling course of Auden's attitudes and emotions as he becomes himself, the owner of his own true voice, in the face of his disease and blessing/curse of his relationship with Steve and the book they're writing together. For every moment of despair there's a moment of strength or apathy or affection. Interestingly, speaking of affection, I never really figured out if either Auden or Steve are gay; they clearly both like men, but there are passages that could indicate they might also like women. It just doesn't seem crucial to the book or to their identities to pin a definite sexual identity on either of them. And that's frankly refreshing. In literature, as in life, they are too many people whose sexuality eclipses all their other qualities to the point that it becomes the primary way you think of them as people (and don't those people irritate you?), but there are just as many people for whom phrases like "I don't like applying labels" actually means deep internal confusion, rather than the transcendence of labels that one imagines is the desired impression such phrases are intended give. Hoolboom ought to be commended for managing to create characters who actually achieve that transcendence.

Like Steve Reinke, Mike Hoolboom works primarily as a film and video artist. Though he's written other books, The Steve Machine is his only novel to date. I do hope there will be others.

Next is Dante's War, by Sandra Sabatini.

Wandering Time was a gift from a friend of mine, and it couldn't have arrived at a more necessary time. I'm not generally known as a nature loving sort of guy. Quite the opposite, actually. I'm known as a nature hating kind of guy. That's not strictly true, it's just the reputation I've acquired over the years by doing things like not wanting to go camping, preferring to do indoor things like read books and watch films, and leaving my rural logging town for the big scary city of Toronto. The truth is, I love nature in small doses. When I lived in Waterloo I'd go to the park to watch the ducks when I wanted to relax, and here in Toronto I go out and watch the squirrels as they frolic. They're very calming. During the winter months, I was going through a personal crisis that was particularly bitter and troubling. I needed a way to de-stress, and the usual methods weren't working. I couldn't even go out to look at the squirrels, because it was winter. It was then that this book, an upbeat collection of journal entries and meditations on nature, arrived in my mailbox. If I couldn't go out and explore what passes for nature in downtown Toronto (there's some lovely little nooks full of trees and bushes and squirrels and birds, actually), I could at least read about somebody else exploring a more rugged landscape.

I don't know anything about Urrea, except that he's a Latin American writer who grew up in the inner city and moved eventually to a more rural lifestyle. Wandering Time is essentially a much-edited journal of his encounters with man and (mostly) nature over the course of a full year, divided by seasons rather than more precise chronological measurements. It was a soothing book. Some of Urrea's observations were a little trite, but that's part of the charm. Wandering Time is gentle, meandering, and fun in the same way that many of the most simple pleasures left over from childhood can be fun. Urrea may be a great poet, an author of strong literature, but it doesn't really show through in this book. There was very little sophisticated or challenging about it; it's more like a cool bath on a hot day. I wouldn't recommend this book to everyone, but it made me feel good at a time when I needed cheering up.

Next up, The Steve Machine, by Mike Hoolboom.

Bragi Ólafsson's Pets, published by Open Letter Books and translated by Janice Balfour is really fucking good. It's the best book I've read in at least eight months, possibly longer. Bragi Ólafsson is probably best known to Canadians as the bass player for the Sugarcubes, the band Björk was in before going solo and becoming the coolest weird chick on Earth. If you're anything like me, the first thing you thought upon learning this fact was: "a novel written by a celebrity? When was the last time you read one of those that didn't suck?" It turns out that Ólafsson is a pretty big deal in Iceland's literary scene. He's a respected author who's won a bunch of prizes and runs his own publishing house. And no wonder, really. The Pets is goddamn brilliant.

Here's the rundown: Emil Halldorsson is a bit of an asshole, but he's a likable asshole, and he's just come home from a trip to England. He has a son (who lives with his mother) and a girlfriend, but on the way home he makes a date with a lovely young lady who doesn't know about his girlfriend. While he's waiting for her and some other friends to come over, Havard Knutsson, a rather horrible man from his past, shows up unannounced. Emil doesn't want to see him, but knows that Knutsson won't go away until he's good and ready, so he hides. Under the bed. It's not the most brilliant of plans, but Emil doesn't have a lot of options and Knutsson has him pretty rattled. Emil's right to be rattled; though it takes most of the book to get all the specifics about how destructive he really is, watching Knutsson slowly and deliberately descend on Emil's home in the opening sections of the book is incredibly intense. Knutsson invites himself in, and eventually winds up holding a kind of impromptu party for the parade of Emil's friends and acquaintances that show up at his door. All while Emil listens and watches from beneath the bed.

The Pets is alternately funny, creepy, and wonderfully strange. It never stops moving. Janice Balfour's translation is crisp and energetic; there's a wonderful sense of alien-ness, of a different culture, without the prose suffering from any awkwardness or "translationese". It feels almost like Ólafsson could have written the book in English himself, and I love that about it.

What else? The ending is phenomenal. It was dramatic, and frustrating, and a little bit shocking and awful, and the only possible way the book could have ended without being completely unsatisfying. Goddamn brilliant, I swear. I want to say more, but The Pets was surprising at every turn, and I think a lot of what works about the novel depends on not knowing what's going to happen next.

Bragi Ólafsson's The Pets was published by Open Letter Books, and translated by Janice Balfour. Next up is Wandering Time, by Luis Alberto Urrea.

The Taker and Other Stories, published by Open Letter Books and translated by Clifford E. Landers is the first of Rubem Fonseca's works to appear in English, though I understand he's been quite influential in Brazil for most of his career. He was a cop—commissioner of police, in fact—before picking up a pen. I didn't know that before reading the book, but it fascinates me now that it's come to my attention. These stories are dark, violent, and terrifying in some ways; many of the characters are so unapologetically apathetic about their behaviour and circumstances they border on the sociopathological. That's the sort of thing that really gives me the heebie-jeebies (that's the medical term, right?).

"Night Drive" is the perfect opener for the book, and if The Taker is representative of Fonseca's other work, then it's a perfect introduction to his writing. The story is simple, semi-anonymous, and shockingly brutal. In roughly two pages, Fonseca builds a normal-seeming, domestic world, and then brings it crashing down when we learn that the narrator and family breadwinner relaxes in the evenings by running down young girls with his car. I'd heard these stories were the subject of some controversy when first published in Brazil, and given that I've also heard Brazil has the same kind of rural-centred soft-focus literary tradition we have here in Canada, that makes perfect sense. These stories would be controversial here as well, if they managed to get published at all. (I'm not certain they would have been.) Urban brutality doesn't feel good, after all, and making us feel good is generally what we want our cultural myths to do for us.

For all its kick, "Night Drive" isn't the story that really stayed with me. There's actually two, and I'm a little bothered that they're still with me. I quite frankly don't understand what's going on in them. I don't mind saying that's a little unusual, though not entirely unprecedented. I've been baffled by short stories in the past (the first time I read Dubliners comes to mind). The first story is "The Book of Panegyrics," which appears to be about a man scamming some cash and a place to hide out by posing as a professional caregiver for a misanthropic old man who has a strange story about a book that was written in his honour, and various acts of vengance and cruelty. It could have been a straightforward piece about class conflict (The Taker has some fine examples of those), but from there it becomes exceptionally weird. The man posing as a caregiver winds up bedding the real female caregiver quickly and easily, on top of which he seems to be suffering from some kind of paranoid delusions (I write "seems" because he may not be delusional; it's hard to tell). The man posing as a caregiver is also the narrator, and that leads to other problems figuring out what this story is about. He spends most of his time telling the story of leeching off the old man and his family, and on the old man's story, but those things are clearly less important to him than whatever undisclosed conspiracy has him hiding out in the first place. Spending virtually no time on the issue that is clearly the most important to the narrator baffles the hell out of me.

The other piece that sticks with me is "The Eleventh of May", which appears to be about a retirement home where the residents are slowly being murdered to ease the burden on the state. There's a lot of the same tropes that you find in most retiree/inmate fiction (the boredom, the abuse and neglect, the paranoia), but there are clearly other things going on. I just don't know what they are. I have a feeling I can't explain that there are some pretty specific criticisms being leveled against the Brazilian government, about which I know essentially nothing except that there is one. That I was missing a big chunk of necessary cultural context was clear for most of these stories, but I feel like "The Eleventh of May" could be a darker, creepier One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest if I had a better grasp of Brazilian culture.

I'm reluctant to mention this next thing, because I really did enjoy the book, but I was bothered by Landers' translation. I don't mean its accuracy; I don't read Portuguese, so I can't speak to that. The one thing—perhaps the only thing—that I want out of a translation is that it function as an English document. By that I mean that the language of the translation flows easily. I've seen a variety techniques for shoe-horning the quirks of one language in the quirks of English, and they can all work just fine. A great example is Richard Pevar and Larissa Volokhonsky excellent work on The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol. However the awkwardness that you can't quite put your finger on, that sense that a sentence is correct without being quite right that we call "translationese" doesn't work for me. Unfortunately, The Taker has it in spades. (It's not terrible, not at all like Andrew Hurley's colossal failure with Borges' Complete Fictions.) I have a hard time putting my finger on specific instances, but whole sections of the book just didn't feel quite right. They felt like translations. These stories are worth dealing with the translationese, though. More than worth it.

The Taker and Other Stories was published by Open Letter Books. Next up is The Pets, by Bragi Ólafsson, also published by Open Letter Books.

We've reached the end of my current foray into historical adventure fiction, though that box my father sent me contained more than just four books, so no doubt I will make further sallies as the year progresses. Sword Song is the fourth and as of this writing last book in The Saxon Stories, a series of novels by Bernard Cornwell that explores the rise of King Alfred the Great and the making of the nation we now think of as England. Cornwell has chosen to write about the period using the adventure mode (quite fitting, really; all that fighting is a lot less fun when writing in other modes), using Uhtred, the displaced Lord of Bebbanburg as his narrator.

All that maturing Uhtred did while he was a slave aboard a Danish trading vessel in The Lords of the North comes in handy in Sword Song, as Alfred gives him more and more authority over military matters. He takes on the task of building highly effective fortifications for communities along the Temes (Thames), and is eventually charged with driving Danish raiders from the river entirely (he doesn't completely succeed, but he definitely deserves an "attaboy" for the effort). Alfred's daughter is kidnapped at one point, and Uhtred effects a daring rescue that succeeds despite itself. This book is awash with thrilling violence, ninth century mysticism (I am amazed at how little the Christian characters know about their own religion)—including a con artist who tricks Uhtred into believing that the dead are coming to life—and a healthy dose of political intrigue. I think I knocked this off in one sitting, and I enjoyed the hell out of it. I'll definitely be turning to Bernard Cornwell when next I need the literary equivalent of a candy apple.

Next up is The Taker and Other Stories, by Rubem Fonseca.

This third book in The Saxon Stories takes rather an unexpected turn. Uhtred (our hero, such as he is), completes a period of service with King Alfred, whom he doesn't much like, and then returns to Northumbria in order to take the first step in regaining his lost lands, killing Kjarten, the man who killed his adopted father. Things don't go according to plan for Uhtred, as he is more or less immediately captured and sold into slavery. He serves two years aboard a Danish trading vessel before he's rescued and returned to Alfred's service. Well, a bit more happens than that, but you get the idea.

In the real ninth century, being sold into slavery to the Danes probably would have killed Uhtred, hardy warrior though he was, and The Saxon Stories would have come to a rather swift and inglorious conclusion. But this is historical adventure fiction, so instead, though he is worked nearly to death and comes to the very edge of his sanity and is nearly broken as a man, Uhtred actually comes out of the experience with a new resolve, a new kind of strength, and a completely new level of savagery in the battlefield. Lots of steam to let off, one would imagine.

The Lords of the North is less fun than the first two books, but it forces Uhtred to mature considerably, advances the story by two years without having to go into descriptions of long gaps between significant events, and allows for old characters to reappear and new political machinations to be set in motion. I really have very little to say, except that I continue to find Cornwell's books to be light and exciting. Cornwell's books and I have come to an agreement: they will provide me with a few hours' pleasure and escapism, and I, for my part, won't look too closely at them. A good deal all around, I think.

Next is Bernard Cornwell's Sword Song, the last of The Saxon Stories to date.

Cornwell was already a veteran when he wrote The Last Kingdom, so there was no real danger of The Pale Horseman displaying any trace of a freshman slump. I'm pleased to say that he did not disappoint. Uhtred is again the narrator, but instead of focusing on his life with the Danes, The Pale Horseman shifts back to England and introduces Alfred and his political maneuverings in a more serious way. (Also his stomach problems, most likely colitis, a condition that I'm well aware is difficult to cope with nowadays, never mind in the ninth century.) It's often easy to fall into the trap of thinking that people in the distant past, due to their lack of technological advancement or their ideas about the natural and social orders, were somehow less intelligent, less sophisticated than we are today. This idea is sadly reinforced by a lot of popular media, particularly in films of the Conan variety (though less so in literature; Howard's barbarian was actually quite shrewd). The gift of hindsight allows us to imagine ourselves better than we are. Reading Old English (or West Anglo-Saxon) poetry, one finds that it's actually incredibly sophisticated, in some ways far more so than the vast majority of the contemporary poetry that I've read. Ninth century minds did not lack for intellect. Cornwell doesn't fall into that trap, and never lets his readers fall into it either. While it's true that there are characters in The Saxon Stories that are less than bright, they appear in no greater proportion than what you would find stepping out onto the streets of any modern community.

Cornwell's no slouch when it comes to excitement, either. The Pale Horseman opens with Uhtred charging into Alfred's church on his horse, drawing his sword (a practice that had been recently made illegal, no doubt letting those charged with protecting the king sleep a bit easier at night) and loudly accusing another lord of being a liar, of taking credit for Uhtred's deeds. It seems a bit melodramatic, clichéd even, but Uhtred is narrating from decades after the fact, and his voice is wry and more than a little self-conscious. Whenever Cornwell does something that could be considered going a bit overboard on the melodrama, he hangs a lantern on it, as movie people would say. He winks at the reader, lets us know that he's aware he's gone a bit overboard, and then we can all share in the fun.

These comments are a bit slack, I'm aware, but I've read five and a half books since The Pale Horseman, and I consumed these Saxon Stories like so many Skittles™ (which was all I wanted from them). Next is my third Bernard Cornwell novel, The Lords of the North.

No doubt we've all had moments in our lives when we think "wow, I really should have listened to my father on that one." As far as books are concerned, my biggest such moment was when I finally sat down to read Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin series. I had been putting them off for years despite my father pushing them at me, and as a result I spent a long time in the dark when I could have been reading perhaps the best historical fiction ever written. My father didn't raise any fools, though, so having learned my lesson about Patrick O'Brian, when he (my father) sent me a box full of Bernard Cornwell's novels a while back, I put them in my stack, in the special spot I reserve for books that will allow me to blow off a little steam and have some fun. My father's taste in historical adventure fiction, it turns out, remains reliable.

Cornwell is apparently best known for a series of books about an English soldier during the Napoleonic wars by the name of Sharpe (adapted into a television series starring Sean Bean), but these particular books, of which The Last Kingdom is the first, are called "The Saxon Stories", and follow the rise of King Alfred the Great, the man who unified England in the face of repeated (successful) Danish invasions. I studied Alfred a bit when I was in school, and it's exciting stuff, even when you're hip deep in Sweet's Anglo-Saxon Reader. Cornwell chooses to tell the story from the perspetive of the fictional Uhtred of Bebbanburg (in Northumbria, just south of the Scottish border).

Though perhaps lighter on social details than an O'Brian book, Cornwell's choice of narrator allows the reader to see both sides in the conflict between Saxons and Danes as human beings out to make the best lives they can for themselves and their people. Uhtred is captured by the Danes as a youth, and raised by them, and so we, as readers, see more of the pagan Danish customs than the mostly-Christian English do, and we are better able to understand the Danes as a people. For a long time, even as the Danes ravage England until only Wessex stands free, Cornwell is rather obvious about directing the reader's sympathies towards the Danes. Not that it's hard. They are strong, proud, a little scary, and seem to have a greater capacity for joy in them than the dour English (though also, it seems, a greater capacity for cruelty and violence). Though there are battles a-plenty in The Last Kingdom, the real story here (as it is the other three books in the series) lies in Uhtred's confusion over his place in the world. Should he remain with the Danes, who raised him and whom he loves? Or should he return to the English and take revenge on those who killed his father? He's a walking, talking metaphor for England in the 9^th Century, really, on the cusp of becoming a new entity with its own identity, it's own traditions, but unwilling to completely let go of its past and its ties to Scandinavian culture.

The Last Kingdom has all the things that are great about historical adventure fiction. Thrilling battles, fun characters, and most importantly a convincing sense of time and place. Not the deepest book I've read this year, but one of the most fun.

Next is The Pale Horseman, also by Bernard Cornwell.

When I was in high school I worked in the kitchen of a fast food restaurant. I was happier at that job than at any other job I've ever had. I worked with some of my best friends, and we had fun. It wasn't a hugely demanding job, but it was more challenging than it looks. They weren't the kind of challenges that I'd look for in a job today, but at the time they were enough. I was happy there, but not fulfilled. The job wasn't what brought meaning to my life. Happiness, as Frankl correctly asserts, is not everything. It's not even the most important thing. That's not something we like to hear in this day and age, but I have no doubt that it's true, and many of us need to hear it.

I've been putting off writing this for a long time. I finished reading Man's Search for Meaning almost two months ago, but it's presented me with problems like no other book has. How does one review a holocaust memoir? The simple fact is that one can't. What could one possibly say about the content? I'm not Jewish, but my maternal grandmother was Romany. She survived the war, but I lost whole branches of my family to the camps. Some didn't even make it that far, according to the stories that have been passed down; they were simply lined up against the wall and shot. To take a critical approach, even the incredibly lax approach I take on this site, to reading such a book would seem, well, almost taboo. The second half of the book is a basic primer on logotherapy, Frankl's approach to psychotherapy. I don't know much about psychology, and I know even less about psychotherapy, and although I don't mind admitting that I've sought counseling with a psychologist in the past, I don't know anything about what school of therapeutic treatment he subscribed to. I'll do my best to represent Frankl's thinking as best I understand it, but to really talk about this book and the impact reading it had on me, I'm going to have to talk about myself and my life more, a lot more, than I'm normally willing to do on this site. Ten years ago I read Stephen Mitchell's translation of the Tao Te Ching, and it's the only other book to have affected my thinking as much as this one. I simply won't be capable of taking myself out of the conversation. Don't worry, I won't name names.

So: happiness isn't everything. Frankl's ideas are more complicated than that, obviously, but for the modern reader I think that's one of the most important things to take away from this book, if not the most important. In Frankl's view, meaning is paramount and happiness is among its potential consequences. Frankl makes the point a number of times, but never as succinctly as this (although I would now expand his point to most of the industrialized world, and not just the United States):

To the European, it is a characteristic of the American culture that, again and again, one is commanded and ordered to "be happy." But happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue. One must have a reason to "be happy." Once the reason is found, however, one becomes happy automatically. As we see, a human being is not one in pursuit of happiness but rather in search of a reason to become happy, last but not least, through actualizing the potential meaning inherent and dormant in a given situation. (p. 138)

The problem is that of course too many of us are in pursuit of happiness rather than meaning. (Frankl never really gives us a proper definition for "meaning", except to say that what constitutes "meaning" will necessarily be different for each of us.) The frantic pursuit of happiness is a self-centred approach—in itself not a terrible thing—and self-centredness can lead, when a patient has genuine neuroses, to the proverbial vicious cycle, and in turn more and more problems breaking that cycle. By focusing solely on ourselves we lose sight of the fact that the world doesn't work that way. Our friends, families, partners, jobs, pets, all those things that can bring meaning to our lives, all come from outside of us. They are things the world gives to us. I think, and I feel confident that Frankl would agree, that making those things about us, about our wants and desires could potentially lead to approaching our lives in more and more mercenary ways, and that is a bad thing. How will ever be able find meaning or satisfaction in a thing if we always have one foot out the door and our eyes looking out for something that might be even a tiny bit better. Life is more than a numbers game, but that's really all that a mercenary outlook allows for. Anyway: onward and upward.

Frankl probably isn't read (at least by laypersons like myself) for these ideas, though. His greatest contribution seems to be his approach to dealing with suffering. He often quotes Nietzsche, writing "he who has a why to live for can bear almost any how." I can attest to this with my own statistically irrelevant anecdotal experiences. I'll no doubt be over simplifying things, but let me do my best to explain in my own words how Frankl suggests approach suffering. Bad things happen, and sometimes they can't be fixed. Death, disease, the betrayal of a loved one, any number of things can happen that can cause a person to suffer, and there's nothing we can do about those things. We also can't judge the amount of pain and suffering that those things can cause in others, since...

...man's suffering is similar to the behavior of a gas. If a certain quantity of gas is pumped into an empty chamber, it will fill the chamber completely and evenly, no matter how big the chamber. Thus suffering completely fills the human soul and conscious mind, no matter whether the suffering is great or little. Therefore "suffering" is absolutely relative. (p. 44)

When these bad things happen, it's okay for us to be upset, to feel pain and to be unhappy. We don't have to feel ashamed of those things. But that's not really a way to cope. If the situation can't be changed, what then? We change ourselves, the way we look at the situation. We find meaning in our pain. It's not a matter of merely "thinking positive" or anything so trite; there's often a great deal of work involved, and it doesn't necessarily end happily. Life is like that.

Let me give you an example from my own life: some time ago, I was fiercely in love with a young woman, and she with me. She had to leave town for several months for a job, and while she was away, I agreed to care for her pet. She wasn't gone long when she met someone else (a doctor, naturally), and decided that she didn't love me at all; fierce wasn't even in it. There were still several months left in her job, and here I was with this pet, a sweet, gentle animal to be sure, but a constant reminder of the amazing thing that had just been taken from me. I had any number of options. Should I take care of the pet until she got back? Give it to the OSPCA (or somebody else)? Some folks even suggested that I kill it as retribution (an idea that I found beyond appalling). What I did was take care of the animal to the best of my ability until the young woman returned to reclaim it. I don't mind telling you that doing so sucked a lot. Every time I looked at that animal it was like being dumped all over again, a particularly horrible experience, as I still loved the young woman. I didn't realize until after she took the animal back that there was actually meaning to my suffering. While I was taking care of her pet, I could at least say the following things: that I was fulfilling my responsibility as the guardian of a living thing that probably could not survive on its own. That I was also in some small way doing a good thing for someone that I loved, making her life easier, whether she loved me or not. And finally, no matter what else, I was doing the right thing, and living up the responsibilities that I agreed to take on. I don't tell this story to make her look like a bad person or to make me look like some kind of saint; she and I are both just regular people trying to make our way as best we can. But when she came back and took the animal away, the burden of seeing that creature every day, that reminder of what I'd lost, was lifted, but the pain got harder to bear. Why? Because the meaning behind my suffering had gone as well. I was no longer hurting because I was doing the right thing, or hurting while helping someone I loved, or whatever. I was just hurting because something in my life sucked. I had to re-orient myself to once again find meaning for what was happening in my life. Finding meaning in suffering won't necessarily bring you happiness, but happiness isn't the point; it's a superficial thing, next to meaning. A man with a why can bear almost any how.

I'd have to re-write the book entirely to do it any justice, that much is plain from this ramshackle "review". I suppose what I'm really aiming to do here is to document the impact reading it had on me. I'm not just skeptical of self-help books, I actually have a certain disdain for most of the genre. Neither am I much of a fan of old-school psychology. Recently there has been much discussion about book blurbs claiming "this book will change your life," and how inaccurate and preposterous such claims are. This book won't keep you warm at night, pay off your loans, buy you a car, make the girl in the office across the hall fall in love with you, or put food on your table. But there are some things, some moments, some experiences—like the first time I was kissed by that fierce young woman—that change everything. You raise your head and look around you, and though everything is the same as it was a second before, nothing will ever be the same again. Reading this book was just such an experience, though I don't mind admitting that I was dragged through that experience kicking and screaming, determined not to be taken in by some guru, holocaust survivor or not. I would recommend the experience of reading this book to anyone, particularly to anyone in pain, even if they have to be dragged kicking and screaming to get there.

Next is The Last Kingdom, by Bernard Cornwell.

I must say, Not Quite Dead was absolutely the weakest of John MacLachlan Gray's three historical novels. There's two major flaws with the book. Well, okay, before I get started on the two major flaws, I should point out there are lots of things I liked about the book, and I'd be interested in seeing more books featuring some of these characters (Inspector Shadduck in particular), but these are not the things that stuck with me about this book. So the two big things: first, the plot was complicated and slow. Complicated and slow, while fine in any number of other books, is not a quality that I look for when selecting a mystery/thriller. The complexity of the plot (or perhaps, seeming complexity) is mostly the result of having too many characters and differing points of view for a book this short to assimilate. It jumps all over the place, from Dr. Chivers to Shadduck to Finn Devlin to Charles Dickens and more. It was just too much. My second complaint is that Edgar Allan Poe, around whom most of the book revolves, is also its least interesting character (and Charles Dickens, who is far more interesting, barely matters). In this case, my aversion to novels featuring real historical figures as major characters was justified. What Gray did succeed in doing (though not until close to a hundred pages in, when Inspector Shadduck, easily the best character in this novel, finally made his appearance), was to paint the same sort of vivid picture of mid-Nineteenth Century America that he did with Victorian England in The Fiend in Human. This vision of America has tremendous potential as a setting, filled as it is with spectacular minor characters and other wonders. But that potential was not realized in Not Quite Dead.

Next is Man's Search for Meaning, by Viktor E. Frankl.