Orlando Furioso, by Ludovico Ariosto, translated by Guido Waldman. mixed: 3-5.

Orlando Furioso is an epic poem written in 1532 as the culmination of the chivalric legends of Charlemagne and the Saracen invation of France, and develops three principal stories:
*the knight Orlando(Roland)’s love for the princess Angelica
*the war between the Franks and the Saracens
*the love of Ruggerio(Roger), a Saracen, for Bradamant, a Christian

Voltaire himself said that Orlando Furioso was a combination of the Iliad, the Odyssey, and Don Quixote, only better.

what Voltaire forgot to mention was another ingredient here: 1001 Arabian Nights.

have you ever read the original 1001 Arabian Nights? I tried. the university library had the whole set (many multiple volumes) and I thought, hey I should read those. only, it’s really quite difficult to follow. not that it isn’t immensely interesting for the most part, or funny, or witty, but that there’s a story within a story within a story within a dream within another story. literally. and the stories go on and on and on. forever. in sometimes archaic wording in always small print in volumes of 600+ pages.

I have no doubt in my mind that if I sat down and read one story a night for the next, um, 1001 nights, that I would be thoroughly entertained. but I just couldn’t ever finish it otherwise.

it’s the same with Orlando Furioso. I wondered why it ook Ariosto over 20 years to write this epic poem (translated in my version into English prose), but once I started reading, I wondered no more. there are over 40 Cantos, something equivalent to chapters for the sake of our discussion, and each of them could be a full-fledged novel in its own right. details and details and action and plot twists and then checking up on the other knight, so-and-so, who when we left him last was battling a magician astride a flying horse. several decades of intertwined stories ago.

in Ariosto’s time, the stories of these knights were more than well-known; as well-known as the legends of Arthur and the Round Table were then and even more well-known than those legends are known today. so the details, to readers in the 1600s, were not something they had to absorb upon first hearing. they were just expounding on what legends everyone already was familiar with.

and they are interesting stories, and they are funny and smart. and I love the Iliad, the Odyssey, and Don Quixote. heck I love 1001 Arabian Nights, just not quite as much. so yes I do enjoy Orlando Furioso. but it might take me a thousand years to remember and understand all the twists.

for light reading, no, no, no. definitely not light reading.

for my purposes of enjoyment, it rates a 3 (worth reading).

for appreciation of the poet’s genius, it rates a 5 (don’t miss it). so, if you’re going to study literature for a course, I’d suggest this. if you’re just looking to pass the time, you might want to keep looking, unless you’ve got a thousand years to spare ;)

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more on A Rage To Live by John O'Hara

this one has spoilers.


*******


do I need to say, just because I think a book is well-written and enjoyable, it does not immediately follow that I am in league with the characters and their questionable behavior? I hope people already know that. I applaud a writer who can make a work of fiction seem, well, not like fiction but, instead, real. and if the work seems real, then it's usually because the characters seem like real people. and real people make mistakes and behave badly, some moreso than others.

it bothered me that Sidney died when he did. it honestly didn't affect Grace much, as she had lost him anyway. Sidney did not deserve to die; but perhaps it was more merciful to die than to have his means of leaving-with-cover (army/navy) withdrawn from him, or for him to go on living in his incredibly lonely, alienated way, completely disillusioned now with the one thing in his life that had made him happy. or maybe that's just an excuse; I mean, getting over it and moving on (no matter what "it" is) is always hard, but it is doable and there are great rewards for success.

Grace, no I do not think that Grace was just an independent soul blah blah blah. she knew the rules of the game, esp back then, and she broke them, and went on breaking them. she knew the price and she kept on. I know she says she couldn't help it, but just because something is hard isn't an excuse to stop resisting. in fact, that's when you need to resist the most. honestly I think Grace was spoiled more than independent; she never seemed to think much for herself at all, and even less did she think about other people. she never learned how to restrain her id, and never tried. you can't be independent if you're not even in control of yourself. that's just being a different kind of slave. I have no real respect for Grace; if she hadn't money, then she and more importantly her children could easily have ended up in destitute circumstances.

not to say that the men in the novel were angels, either. I think there is something to the idea that Roger Bannon was homosexual, and trying to compensate. he certainly was full of hate for women (I'm not saying that gay men are all misogynists) which seemed to stem from an unconscious hate of cultural expectations regarding gender roles, or hate for himself for failing to naturally want what his culture expected him to want.

Hollister... ot, that name had me thinking of The Happy Hollisters all the way through the book... I'm not sure what was his problem. he seemed full of hate as well. why? he had the wife and kids that he always set out to have, and the job that he'd always wanted too. he had the respect and the attention of the community and into the wider world. maybe he did just get a swelled head, thinking that he was not just better than everyone else but that they were beneath him, because he surely set out to have it all, including wife and mistress. but at the same time, he knew that he was destroying his relationship with his wife, kids, and that whole side of the family, and that he was ruining the future of a girl he sometimes claimed to love--- he seemed determined to destroy them, and in so doing, destroy his reputation, his means of livelihood, and himself, utterly. it seems to simple to say that power corrupts. maybe power did corrupt, and he hated himself for that, and turned against himself in the end. although we never know what happened to them in the long run, no matter how that turned out, the damage was done, irrepairably.

all that blarney about "principles"---coming from Jack Hollister! a man of no principles at all! and Amy's father trying to believe it, because he thinks he's supposed to? does it make you a better person when you knowingly let people use you? do you think the kids ought to grow up knowing that that's okay, that's the way to go? bah. oh I know, I know, believe me I know. most male-dominated cultures have (in the past at least) taken that line. the woman is not the authority and no matter what the man does, she should forgive him and try to make him a better person through her own example (or butt the hell out, either way). the man-man connection here in this context (trying to get Amy's father on his side just because they're both men)(and damn it, did it not work?) always reminds me of something Charlotte Perkins Gilman might say---why should the males compete against the males when it's so much easier for the males to compete with and dominate over the females instead?

moving on.

Sidney now, what a sad one. did he actually believe in this courtly love? seeing her at first sight and wanting nothing else but to worship her and give her everything she wanted? did he actually think that? that's very sad to me. that is the source of his loneliness more even than his foreigness to Fort Penn. did he choose that for himself, this exclusion from the world, knowingly? he wanted a fantasy life, and in order to have that, the real world must always be far away.

Charlie Jay and Brock, my goodness. what is there to say? who could be worse except maybe Miles, Roger's friend. how can you be friends with someone who rapes your sister or beats the mahen hell out of an unarmed woman, for no reason? don't you have to believe in the kind of person your friend is, in order to actually be real friends? I'm not saying people in general shouldn't have the chance to be forgiven and to have a second chance, in general... but if those crimes stem from an innate part of the personality or a still-cultivated mindset, etc, if, in short, the wellspring of the trouble is still well and sprung (if you'll forgive me), then you know damn well what kind of "friend" you have there, don't you? how can you be friends unless you are just as bad and, furthermore, don't care? what, nobody wants to be a better person anymore? everyone is so disillusioned and full of apathy and dislike for themselves and their fellows that this is acceptable?

the other women characters confound me. oh, I understand Amy Hollister, all right (maybe not the part about going back, but that's a difference in our times; I'll give her that). but the others... Connie, I can see how she ended up in a relationship with another woman. I wondered why the hell she always hung around Grace like that; who would? she didn't really seem to be wanting favor or priviledge; it was probably just a crush (or maybe a bit more, since it lasted so long). but in short the other women sound like the apathetic bunch I just mentioned. we really do talk ourselves into believing whatever we want, don't we? ("you keep on building the lies
that you make up for all that you lack")

well, 700 pages. I'm sure there's more to say. but for nowI should probably wrap this up. I know when I start to quote lyrics--- that's my cue lol

Bambert's Book of Missing Stories by Reinhardt Jung, rating =4/5.

lovely, lovely little book about 175 pages. very reminiscent of The Little Prince in some ways and A Wrinkle in Time in others. written for children, but a great read for adults too!

since it is such a short read, I’ll save it all for you to discover on your own.

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A Rage to Live, by John O'Hara. rating = 5.

I couldn’t sleep, so I put the Encyclopedia on hold for a while :p and finished A Rage to Live.

wow.

there is an introduction in my edition here, which states that O’Hara was considered in the same circle as Faulkner and Hemingway and Fitzgerald during his time. I was immediately intrigued, as I’m a huge fan of Faulkner, and of course I’ve studied Hemingway and Fitzgerald, but I hadn’t so much as heard of O’Hara.

more’s the pity! what an excellent author! I should have known; the read was suggested by none other than John McWhorter , who also suggested The Murder of Helen Jewett . I loved that book as well. they’re not the same kind of book, by any means, but this linguist knows his literature!

thank you Professor McWhorter ;)

A Rage to Live is an epic, to say the least. 700 pages. but more than just length… it’s not just length that blabs on and on and on and tries to impress the reader with big words or endear its characters by means of archetypal dramas. no, this is 100% pure, real Americana. straight-forward, undiluted, real people, the way real people act, talk, and go about their lives justifying their actions and their behavior to themselves.

the setting is the turn of the century, 1900, Pennsylvania. I’ve never been to Pennsylvania, and pardon me but I’ve never thought much about it either. not that I think much about New York or Vermont or the West Indes. it just hadn’t come up. but O’Hara puts you there. and the vista from which you experience it is not just from the upper class, not just the middle class, not just the poor and the servants. you experience life from all levels, and it’s just like you’ve grown up there watching it unfold before your very eyes. from life on the farm to life in the city, perfectly natural. from the eyes of the craftsman to the eyes of the newspaperman to the eyes of the idle gentry. from the native’s perspective to the foreigner’s perspective. from the Irish view point to the Pennsylvanian Dutch view point to the Black American view point. from the child to the adult.

if there is a universal truth about Americans, it is that we are all so darn independent and we all have our own views, independent from each other (comparatively, considering other cultures in the world), and that there are so many different kinds of us. O’Hara captures this perfectly and conveys it in a straight-shooting manner that makes no character evil or pure (but sometimes both); in other words: real.

the Caldwells are a prominent, practically the founding, family in the fictional Pennsylvanian capital of Fort Penn. (O’Hara’s replacement for Harrisburg.) to sum up very very quickly, the story covers their daughter, Grace Caldwell, from early childhood to her later life, and documents the events leading to the inevitable fall of the Caldwell family; and also how at no point in time does Grace herself ever consider herself fallen or defeated, or even, one might interpret, responsible. O’Hara starts the narrative in media res, and then, when our attention has been seized by the collar, backs up and explains things (very deftly) while building up momentum towards the revelation of secrets we just almost guessed and, even though we see where it all must lead in the end, we read on in apt fascination.

highly recommended!

O’Hara was highly praised for his short stories especially; I’ll have to go read them all now :D

some of my favorite quotes, trying for no spoilers…

page 25: They would all go on doing what they wanted to do and what they didn’t want to do, without him, for the next few minutes and for as long as the war would last, and afte the war when he came back he would try to fit himself into the place he had occupied before the war, but that would be easy and impossible. It would be easy because there had been no place for him and because there had been no place for him it would be reimpossible for him to reinstate himself in the place he had occupied before the war.

page 143: Emily Caldwell, an Episcopalian by membership, held the private opinion that churches got between the individual and God, and she was not at all sure that she did not regard Christ as part of the Church and therefore in the way. Her religion was between herself and God the Father, with whom she felt on good terms.

page 157: the important weddings in Fort Penn always had followed the system of taking care of the sheep and the goats by inviting the persons of goat status to the church but not to the reception.

page 324: ...so I walked in here and immediately am accused of doing something that’s so against my principles that it’s as though you never knew me. As though we’d never had any intimacy of body or mind, Grace. I don’t know how many million words we’ve spoken to each other, but apparently not one word, or not ten million word had the effect of showing you what I believe in. All this time you haven’t been listening! Nothing I said, or did! for that matter, has taught you what kind of person I am.

page 341: But there it is, the fact that you need one other person, just one, that shows that—-well, I tell you what it does. It breaks the ice. It breaks the illusion of satisfactory solitude.

page 395: Billy turned his face away from them and put his head in his arms and lay on the floor, weeping in the inconsolable, desperate, eternal way of a child who no longer is a baby but has not yet grown up into anything else. There is nothing to say to him, nothing to do for him, nothing that will stop him, and until he does stop it is the most awful sound we can hear because it is the eternal cry without hope, plea and protest to nobody and nothing.

the death on page 415.

page 421: The world’s still one-sided, in favor of the men, because the women like it that way too. They like the men to fetch and carry and make the money, and it’s a small price the women pay, to be taken care of after they lose their prettiness and their teeth and run to fat.

page 604: She smiled. “My normal self? I wish I knew what that was.” / “Now, now, now,” he said. “Now, now.”

agh! the audacity and hypocrisy of 665,666. planned, no doubt; a commentary, a message to those who would hear. but agh!

page 688: It was like a small circle, the mouth of the pistol, getting larger and larger. Invisible, but you knew it was there. It got bigger and bigger until we were all in it. Not only the three of us, but [“X”] too. And that was the world. <--- this is friggin brilliant

page 693, for the linguists! ”...to bear the brunt of the whole thing,” said Brock. / “What is this brunt?” said Renee [from France]. / “To bear the brunt,” said Brock. “It’s an expression, like, uh, carrying the load. At least that’s what I think it means.” / “A brunt is a load? A brunt of coal, for instance?” said Renee. / Brock stood up. “God damn it, this is the way I’m learning to speak English. I say something I’ve been saying all my life, and she wants to know what it means and I have to look it up in the dictionary. Edgar, do you know what a brunt is? How many tons in a brunt? How many cubic yards in a brunt of sand?”

5= must read

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