Discourses and Selected Writings by Epictetus

Epictetus was a freed slave who lived in Nicopolis, on what is now the northern Adriatic coast of Greece.  There he ran a school of Stoic philosophy.  His dates are given as c.C.E. 55-135.  He taught during the reigns of the Roman emperors Trajan and Hadrian.

His teaching were written down by his pupil Arrian, who is more famous for writing a history of Alexander the Great.  They are available to us courtesy of almost 2000 years of care and scholarship and, finally, by the modern cultural miracle that is Penguin Books.

Philosophy in the Roman world at that time was divided into four main schools: Stoic, Cynic, Skeptic and Epicurean. The latter three held an atomistic view of universe, where events happened mechanically and there was no room for either the gods or freewill.  The Stoics, on the other hand, believed in a Creator (the universe) and an odd mixture of free-will and determinism.  They believe that we all contain within in us a portion of the divine, that we are citizens of the universe, and that our task in life is to bring our will into agreement with the natural order.

Epictetus starts his discourse by examining what we can and cannot control.  Once this is done, he says, we can stop fretting over the things we cannot control and start cultivating the things we can control.  On his analysis, the only thing over which we have control is our character.  Our social aspirations, our reputations and even our bodies are beyond our control.  Happiness, then, lies not in "climbing the ladder" because our promotion depends on the whims of other people; nor does it lie in our reputations as these depend on the good- or ill-will of others; and our bodies will break and decay whether we like it or not.

Where does happiness reside? First, in accepting that we are mortal, that we will age, get ill and eventually die.  This is our lot.  Secondly, coming to the realisation that we can never really own anything, that all things are temporarily loaned to us and will be taken away from us - either now by thieves, or later by death.  Finally, by taking control of our character through our directing will.

The Discourses, Fragments and Enchirion (Greek for "manual") contained in this volume are filled with arguments and advice about how to slough off bad habits of the mind and start honing what is really important: our individual character.  "I must die," he says. "But must I die bawling?"  His answer is no.

The selections in this book cover many aspects of life, but sometimes they get repetitive; however, Robert Dobbin's lively translation staves off the boredom.  I was very pleased to be able to listen to the voice of a freed slave coming through loud and clear across the centuries.  At a junction of our history where humans are about to eat the world through over-population and super-fuelled consumerism, reading Epictetus may take us a step closer to cooling down our individual and collective neuroses.

Publishing details: Discourses and Selected Writings by Epictetus (trans. Robert Dobbin, Penguin, London, 2008, pp.276)

The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun by J.R.R. Tolkien

In this volume of posthumously-published work by J.R.R. Tolkien, we are treated to his reworking of two related tales  - from the Poetic or Elder Edda -  which  Tolkien's cast into modern(ish) English poems that follow the rules of Norse poetry. Christopher Tolkien guesses that his father wrote these poems some time in the early 1930s.

The two poems are preceded by an foreword by Christopher Tolkien which explains his father's interest in legends from "the nameless North", an essay by Tolkien, which probably was to be the basis of a lecture on the Elder Edda, and some brief notes related to the history and subject matter of the poems.  They are followed by three more broadly explanatory appendices by Christopher Tolkien regarding the origins of the legends, and the history of Attila the Hun.

The two poems themselves are a bit hard to follow if one is not already familiar with the original legends; however, Christopher Tolkien has provided helpful explanatory notes after each poem.  The difficulty of the poems is intentional: Tolkien was mimicking style of Old Norse poetry.  Here finesse in the form of the story was not paramount, what was desired was energy and the impact of the language and the sound of the language. As Tolkien says:

...Old English verse does not attempt to hit you in the eye. To hit you in the eye was the deliberate intention of the Norse poet ... Few who have been through this process can have missed the sudden recognition that they had unawares met something of tremendous force, something that in parts (for it has various parts) is still endowed with an almost demonic energy, in spite of the ruin of its form.

In short, the poems are fleet and vigorous, and they are short on narration and exposition.  And so it is with Tolkien's poems in this volume.  I admit I lost the thread of the story on more than one occasion, but I was rescued by the explanatory notes. Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed the experience.

So do you want to know what the poems were about? Well, read the book.

Publishing details: The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun by J.R.R. Tolkien (edited by Christopher Tolkien, HarpersCollins, London, 2009, pp.376)

The Dhammapada

This book is categorised as religion/mythology, so let's start by talking money.  When I bought this book, its r.r.p. was $8.95.  Those were the days!

Talking about them thar days, The Dhammapada was probably composed about 2300 years ago, and is supposedly the words of the Buddha.  The book is divided into 26 chapters, and is made up of 423 short verses.  Each chapter treats with one or more of the concepts of the eightfold path of Buddhism, but its central message can be summed up with this verse:

Do not what is evil.
Do what is good.
Keep your mind pure.
This is the teaching of the Buddha.

 The translator Juan Mascaró has provided an extended introductory essay that is a gem especially cut for those who are seeking the Inner Light. 

I loved this book when I read it all those years ago. I love it now. And I have loved it all the times I have read it in between. The Dhammapada is compact; it is terse; it is short and easy to read, and yet it is powerful. There is a statement on every page that forces us to examine our preconceptions, our misconceptions and our complacency, and challenges us to change for the better. IMAO.

Publishing details: The Dhammapada translated by Juan Mascaró (Penguin, London, 1973, pp.93.)

The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien by J.R.R. Tolkien

I never thought I would enjoy a book of someone's letters.  In the case of this book I was happily mistaken.  Of course, it doesn't hurt that J.R.R. Tolkien wrote my favourite book - The Lord of the Rings - so it makes sense that I might like to get an insight into his mind via a route other than his fiction.

The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien encompasses his life from 1914 (when he was 22 years old) to 1973 (when he died a widower, aged 81) and is comprised of 354 of his letters (or excerpts thereof).  The first letter in the volume was addressed to Edith Bratt, his future wife and the mother of his four children.  The last letter was addressed to his only daughter Pricilla and was written just four days before his death.

The contents of the letters cover the main aspects of Tolkien's life: his family and friends, his academic career, his dealings with publishers and translators, and his fiction.  Through these letters we get a partial glimpse into an unfolding life. We find a man who is deep-minded, conservative, religious and loving and who, by turns, is also playful, fastidious or even utterly serious.

Fellow Middle Earth enthusiasts will enjoy the letters of explanation Tolkien wrote to his curious fans in the 50s and 60s who asked for details about hobbits and dwarves and elves and their histories.   I enjoyed those particular letters too. Amongst the other letters two are, to my mind, particularly memorable.  In the first, Tolkien describes the death of his former friend C.S. Lewis as 'an axe-blow near the roots', and an old man's pain is very evident and yet expressed with Edwardian restraint.  The second was addressed to his (now adult) son Michael, who was suffering from depression and 'sagging faith'.  Tolkien gently comforts his son and then tells him about the consolations of Christian faith: tender, poignant and deeply personal.

I am very glad that I read this book of Tolkien's letters.  I liked it so much that I think I will read it again in the near future, perhaps one letter a day, so I can stretch it out over the course of a year.   

Publishing details: The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Humphrey Carpenter (Harper Collins, London, 2006, pp.502)

As I Crossed a Bridge of Dreams by Lady Sarashina

"One thousand years ago a woman in Japan with no name wrote a book without a title." So says Ivan Morris in his introduction; it is an imprecise description but an provocative one.  Although we don't know the author's given name, we do know her family name was Sugawara, and that she was the daughter of a man named Takasue. However, she is known to us as Lady Sarashina - a name derived from her mentioning a mountain in the province of Sarashina; and the title of this translation of the nameless book is taken from a poem.  Even so, there is something intriguing about a "nameless" Japanese woman living a thousand years ago, writing a nameless autobiography.

The book covers the period 1020-1059, at the height of the Heian period.  At this time, although very few people could read,  there was a flourishing of literature, mainly originating from the educated aristocrats and courtesans.  Lady Sarashina was both a beneficiary of, and a contributor to, this culture.  In her book, Lady Sarashina covers her life from ages twelve to fifty (or so).  The author spent her first twelve years in the remote eastern provinces of Honshu, the largest of Japan's four main islands.  In the first chapter she straightaway sets out her main theme : 

Yet even shut away in the provinces I somehow came to hear that the world contained things known as Tales, and from that moment my greatest desire was to read them for myself ... [and I prayed to Buddha]: "Oh, please arrange things so that we may go to the Capital, where there are so many Tales, and please let me read them all.

Her prayer is soon answered and her family moves to the Capital, Heian Kyo (now present-day Kyoto) and before too long she is given a copy of Lady Murasaki's Tale of Genji.  We soon find out that Lady Sarashina was a dreamy youth without either spiritual or worldly ambitions, and she waits passively for a Prince Charming to whisk her away.  By the end of her account, the author is a sad and bitter woman in ill-health. She says: "If only I had not given myself over to Tales and poems but had spent my time in religious devotions, I should have been spared this misery."

Dreams figure prominently in the writing, and they mostly of a spiritual nature, which the author fails to take to heart. She also undertakes many pilgrimages to sacred sites, but these tend to be diversions from life at home rather than spiritual quests. 

Lady Sarashina tells her own tale using a combination of plain narrative, travelogue and poetry.  Descriptions of her fellow humans are usually terse, while those of the natural world are fuller and certainly more lyrical.  We are privy to her thoughts and emotions, but they are uneven: she is very aggrieved by the deaths of her sister and her parents, but she does not mention her marriage and hardly mentions her husband or children.

As I Crossed a Bridge of Dreams gives us a sketchy but beguiling insight into Japanese life as it was at the beginning of the last millennium and a wistful journey through life with the flawed and pitiful Lady Sarashina.

Publishing details: As I Crossed a Bridge of Dreams - Recollections of a Woman in Eleventh-Century Japan (Penguin, London, undated, trans. Ivan Morris. pp.153)

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by S.T. Coleridge

("A thousand thousand slimy things lived on,
and so did I."
The Mariner, with albatross hung around his neck,
cannot see the beauty of his fellow creatures,
the sea snakes. Etching by Gustave Doré)

A recent encounter with someone about twenty years my junior made me remember that the Western Canon is no longer something automatically transmitted to the next generation.  "Dead white males", I think sums up the  pedagogical argument that killed the transmission of the Canon.  Oh well, I liked most of what I read of it, and it is now that I return to one of its quirkier constituents: "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner".

The Rime is the longest poem that Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote.  It is the story of a man who does not know how to love the world.  Being insensitive to the wonders of nature, he shoots an albatross that had befriended the crew of his ship in the Southern Ocean.  Shortly afterward, a supernatural revenge for the slaying takes place.  The Mariner, at this time a young man, is stranded "alone, alone, all, all alone" without human companionship until such time as he has learned to love the world.

There are plenty of critiques of the poem available, so I won't try to write a new one;  I do want to say a thing or two about my latest reading of this poem.

Firstly, when I re-read the passage about the killing of the albatross, I suddenly had the image of John Lennon in my mind.  As you will remember, Lennon sang about peace and love and about how we are really all one and the same ("Tomorrow Never Knows", for example), and someone shot him for his troubles.  The end of the beginning of the Mariner's troubles starts when he realises the beauty in even the ugliest of creatures and loves them.

Secondly, when I re-read the passage where the Mariner's ship becomes immobilised in the ocean:

Day after day, day after day,
We stuck, nor breath nor motion;
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean

I was reminded of the film Groundhog Day.  There are definite parallels in the two stories. For instance, just as Bill Murray's character is released from his curse when he learns to be other-centered, the Mariner learns his lesson too: "He prayeth best, who loveth best All things both great and small".

Survival ends and living begins when Love starts.

Publishing details: "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (in Coleridge, OUP, Oxford, 1965, ed. J.Colmer)

The Bhagavad Gita

In 2001, I had the good fortune to visit London.  I was doubly lucky to have been able to have dinner at the Hare Krishna restaurant near Soho Square.  Outside the front door on that occasion was a life-size cardboard cut-out of Krishna and Arjuna riding on the latter's chariot.  The caption read: "The Bhagavad Gita - The Greatest Dialogue Ever Written."  A bold claim, but one that to my mind is true.

The Bhagavad Gita forms part of the great Indian epic The Mahabharata.  It comes at the point when two powerful families of cousins, the Pandavas and the Kuravas, are just about to fight a war for control of an Earthly kingdom.  Arjuna, a prince of the Kuravas, asks his charioteer Krishna to drive his chariot midway between the two armies so that he can see the faces of the relatives he is about to slay; and in viewing those cousins and uncles he loves so, he breaks down and loses all taste for action.  Krishna tells Arjuna to arise and take action, and so begins the dialogue.

Of course, the scenario is a metaphor: Krishna is the omnipotent God, Arjuna is the human mind, the chariot is the body, the two contending armies are the forces of good and evil, and the kingdom is the human soul.  "On the battle field of life" are we to side with good or evil, or do we do nothing?

Arjuna asks the questions, Krishna supplies the answers.  We are told of a cosmogonic vision of God, the universe and our place in it.  Separateness is an illusion.  God is in all, and all is in god.  The motive force of Creation is love.  We can apprehend the Truth in three ways: through knowledge, through work and through devotion.  Krishna says the easiest way for most people is through devotion to him (in his form as he appears in time and space), then through holy work according to the principles he lays down in the last few chapters.
  

The Bhagavad Gita is the ultimate mindfulness handbook: do everything as though you were doing it for the god you adore, and do it in the awareness of the light of the Eternal.  Luckily for us, Krishna had a good editor, and the whole thing weighs in at 120 pages.  Once read, The Bhagavad Gita is the gift that keeps on giving, eternally.

Publishing details: The Bhagavad Gita (Penguin, London, first published 1962, trans. Juan Mascaró)

The Inner Reaches of Outer Space by Joseph Campbell

Originally published in 1986, this is the last work of Joseph Campbell published in his lifetime.  It consists of three essays.

In the first essay, Campbell examines human history to date.  He finds that humans are very concerned with nourishing themselves, reproducing themselves and acquiring and accumulating power and territory.  As for compassion, he finds that this is something extended only to people in the in-group, whether it be village or nation.  Campbell points out that we live in the space age but our myths are still those of the bronze age, still myths of in-groups. A space age mythology, he feels, must be one that involves universal compassion.  Our planet is too small now for in-groups.

In the second essay, Campbell looks at what myths are and how they can be applied correctly.  Myths, he thinks, are something that gets denoted by language and images of the phenomenal world but which connote something that transcends the phenomenal world and cannot be described by language or represented by images.  He calls this thing eternity.

In the final essay, "The Way of Art", Campbell compares the aesthetic theories of Aristotle, James Joyce and ancient India.  Art, he says, is something which can generate mythologies, and it can lift us out of our limited understanding of the world and put us in touch with the great mystery of existence.

The Inner Reaches of Outer Space is not as easy to read as some of Campbell's other work, but it an impressive work of thought and scholarship.  I enjoyed it greatly.

Publishing details: The Inner Reaches of Outer Space - Metaphor as Myth and as Religion by Joseph Campbell (New World Press, Novato C.a., 2002. pp.146)

Myths of Light by Joseph Campbell

Pure genius.  Joseph Campbell is the Deep Thought of mythography and comparative religious studies.  He has the knack of comprehending the important and complex questions and answers of life, the universe and everything and transmitting his findings in a supremely entertaining and understandable form.

Campbell begins by relating the Hindu story "The Humbling of Indra", in which the top god of the pantheon has his colossal ego lanced by a small child.  We learn how ego is delusion, and how everything we need to be happy is really within us.

The rest of the book is an examination of the three main religions of the East - Jainism, Hinduism and Buddhism - as seen through their theology and their mythology.  He also explains the social and spiritual development of the individual by way of the several yogic philosophies: raja, hatha, jnana and bhakti (breathing, stretching, thinking, adoring).  If you have ever wondered what chakras are all about, this is the book for you. 

There is a challenge for western readers, especially those from Christian, Jewish and Muslim backgrounds: these myths are not about good vs evil, they are about being and non-being.  It is an idea about religion and spirituality that can seem very alien to some of us.

Sounds daunting? Don't forget that Campbell makes it easy for his readers.  Even so, this is a book to be read slowly for several reasons.  One is to savour the prose.  Another is to take time to consider the images and ideas Campbell describes.  A third is assimilate the message - bliss: if you don't get it here (and it is within you), you ain't gonna get anywhere - and it is a message well worth the effort.

Publishing details: Myths of Light - Eastern Metaphors of the Eternal (New World Library, Novato Ca., 2003. pp.166)

Peace is Every Step by Thich Nhat Hanh

Buddhists talk about the various branches of their religion as vessels. These are the means by which you are transported from Samsara (on this shore) to Nirvana (on the far shore). Hinayana is the vessel for monks. Zen is the vessel for the warrior. Mahayana is the vessel for the rest of us.

In the Mahayana tradition, we do not need to practice arcane rites or meditate for hours a day in a monastery to get to Nirvana. No, in the Mahayana tradition, everything we do (including washing the dishes and mowing the lawn), if it is done with the right attitude, gets us to Nirvana.

This attitude is called "mindfulness", and it consists of being here in the present moment in everything we do - what Aldous Huxley called "The Yoga of Everything". If our minds had their way, and for many people they do, we would spend most of our time regretting the past and worrying about the future. Mindfulness is about living life in the only place it really can be lived: the present moment.

Peace in Every Step is a book about mindfulness. It is divided into three parts. In the first part the author tells us how we can go about being present in many of the work-a-day situation of our lives, from eating to driving a car. In the second part, we are shown how we can use mindfulness to work with our negative emotions. According to the author: "Mindfulness is the foundation of a happy life." After reading this book I am many steps closer to agreeing with him. The third sections deals with seeing the inter-connectedness of all things - "inter-being" is the term the author uses.

Peace in Every Step is a highly accessible and sane guide to living a better life. The examples given are plausible, charming and workable, and especially thought-provoking and lively in the section on inter-being. The prose is straightforward, as is the wisdom:

In us, there is a river of feelings, in which every drop of water is a different feeling, and each feeling relies on all the others for its existence. To observe it, we just sit on the bank of the river and identify each feeling as it surfaces, flows by, and disappears.

I will be buying a copy of this book, I like it so much.

Publishing details: Peace in Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life by Thich Nhat Hahn (Rider, London, 1991. pp 134)

A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle

This may be Oprah's favorite book, but to me it is a well-presented mixture of Hindu cosmology, fatalist philosophy, some psycho-babble and pragmatic psychology.  Having said that, I enjoyed this book. 

You are the universe experiencing itself.  You are not the content of your mind.  You are not anything you can describe.  You are that indescribable something that allows thought to exist and occur but is not thought itself.  The thing that you may think is you is actually your ego and your fear.  When you learn to "let go" of these two powerful delusions, you find your true self.  You find peace.  The tool for achieving this is mindfulness. Be here now.  In the present. In this moment.  It is the only time you really have.  The past and the future exist only in the mind, which is delusory. Be here, now.

I liked the book.  The prose is nice.  The explanatory stories drawn from Buddhist tradition are charming.  I'm prepared to overlook the chaff because the grain is so helpful.  I may even read it a second time.

Publishing details: A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle (Michael Joseph Ltd, London, 2005. 313pp.)

The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work by Alain de Botton

In his latest outing, de Botton proves that style and eloquence are not enough.  We also like clarity, conciseness, insight and affability.  All four of the latter are rather lacking in this book.

I really don't need someone to tell me that the world is a complex place, or that having a job is a good way to avoid starvation.  I don't like it when an advantaged person talks disdainfully about someone who does not show outwards signs of pleasure as they mop a floor.

I got to chapter seven, where de Botton took me on a charmless stroll through the countryside of Kent, and there I abandoned him.  Although I enjoyed The Consolations of Philosophy and The Art of Travel, my appreciation of de Botton's efforts have decreased with each subsequent book.  To paraphrase Anthony Burgess: "This is the end of the road for me, Alain, the end of the road!"

Unseen Academicals by Terry Pratchett

Unseen Academicals is the 37th novel in the Discworld series.  In it we see the wizards of Unseen University faced with being reduced to only three meals a day due to the looming possibility of losing a substantial financial bequest.  This can only be thwarted if they field a team in the now legalised (but traditionally very violent) Ankh-Morpork foot-the-ball league.

In the course of their preparations for the match, we are introduced to: Trev Likely, son of the foot-the-ball legend Dave Likely (deceased); Mr Nutt, a mysterious polymath of the non-human persuasion; Juliet, a budding fashion model; and her boss Glenda, who bakes great pies.  A "star-crossed lovers" story unfolds as these four get entangled in the varying fortunes of the Unseen Academicals foot-the-ball team.

I read Pratchett's first Discworld novel, The Colour of Magic, shortly after it was published in 1983.  Over the intervening years it has been a pleasure to await the publication of the next novel.  Who would have thought all those years ago that we would be here in 2010 reading the 37th novel in the series?  What a delight the last 27 years has been, at least in this respect.

Unseen Academicals is by no means the best story Pratchett has produced, being tangentially inspired by Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.  The plot is straightforward (by Pratchett standards), and the characterisation is as crisp as always.  However, this book has a lot of dialogue.  I couldn't help but feel that Pratchett made the dialogue do too much work by way of narrative, description and exposition.  Even so, it was a pleasure to read and good for a giggle and a guffaw, as always.

Publishing details: Unseen Academicals by Terry Pratchett (Corgi, London, 2010, pp.540)

Seven Days in New Crete by Robert Graves

Seven Days in New Crete is the story of a week in the life of Edward Venn-Thomas, who awakens in the far future, having been magically transported there by a coven of witches.  Here he finds a peaceful and prosperous society based on five distinct castes - there is a place for everyone, and everyone is in his/her place.  War has been transformed into a robust but harmless ball game played on Tuesday afternoons.  The problem with New Crete (as the society is called) is that it contains no real challenges or dangers, and the citizens are dull, unenterprising and unimaginative.  With the arrival of Venn-Thomas, all that is about to change.

Seven Days in New Crete was one of the first sci-fi books I ever read, and for this reason it has a special place in my heart. Graves has Venn-Thomas narrate the story in first person.  The story-telling is masterful, even if the tale is a bit weak.  Graves presents us with an intriguing future society.  Like Aldous Huxley did with Brave New World, Graves questions the value of a civilisation that is conformist and risk-free, and finds that it is not one worth having.  His problem, then, is how to rehumanise such a bland and ovine society.  The answer is: by re-introducing the seven deadly sins.

Graves wrote Seven Days in New Crete in 1949.  Its original readership would have been used to a world of shortages due to the Great Depression and WWII.  For them, an imagined world of peace and plenty may have played to their desires, and yet Graves' message is that evil and conflict are necessary if humans are to flourish.  Now that we in the West live in a society of plenty rather than scarcity, we may not be so easily shocked by Graves' thesis.  The question is: do we agree with him?

Publishing details: Seven Days in New Crete by Robert Graves (Quartet Books, London, 1975, pp.281)

Notes From Underground by F. Dostoyevsky

This story, first published in 1864, is considered by many - including Jean Paul Sartre - to be one of the first exemplars of existential thought in modern literature.

The story is told by an anonymous narrator, 40 years of age and living in St Petersburg, who initially says of himself: "I am a sick man ... I am an angry man. I am an unattractive man."  He also tells us that he is a thinker more concerned with "the highest and the best" sentiments than are his peers.

The narrator divides his story into two parts.  The first part occupies about a third of the whole.  In it the narrator ranges over a  number of philosophical and rhetorical questions, such as action and inaction, free will and determinism, and the nature of revenge.  In the second part, the narrator tells of a series of incidents that occurred over two days and nights when he was twenty years of age.  He reacquaints himself with some old school chums with whom he was never close and quarrels with them, then he disillusions a young woman about her prospects for a happy life.

By the end of the story, we find that the narrator, despite his knowledge of "the highest and the best", is unable to live up to his own high standards or live down to those of others - he is paralysed by inaction, which he fully recognises, and this leads him to be consumed with spiteful thoughts.

Shakespeare's Cassius was lean and hungry and thought too much, and "such men are dangerous".  Not always.  While Cassius was able to effect the assassination of Julius Caesar, the equally lean, hungry and pensive narrator can do no more than gnaw at his old wounds in a self-imposed exile from society - in his "underground".

This edition of Notes from Underground was translated by Jessie Coulson.  Coulson has managed to give us a text that is lively and contemporary in feel.  In a mercifully short 150 pages, Dostoyevsky has managed to give us a masterful insight into the psychology of a man who thinks too much and does too little.

Publishing details: Notes From Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Penguin, London, 2010, pp.152

Deadeye Dick by Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut is no Hermann Hesse. In his essay "Why They Read Hesse", Vonnegut states:  

Hesse is no black humorist. Black humorists' holy wanderers find nothing but junk and lies and idiocy wherever they go.  A chewing-gum wrapper or a used condom is often the best they can do for a Holy Grail.

Deadeye Dick is perhaps the blackest and least humorous of Vonnegut's novels that I have read so far.  In it we find junk and lies and idiocy.  One stray bullet alters, possibly for the worst, the lives of a clutch of people in the fictitious Midland City, Ohio.

The protagonist Rudy Waltz narrates the story.  He tells the tale of the decline in the fortunes of his family members.  Along the way we are shown the collateral damage done to those that come into contact with them.  No-one, except the Haitian cook and voodoo master, seems to come away unscathed.

The satire is dark, unrelenting and almost unbearable because of the absence of clowns -  Deadeye Dick, lamentably, is a Tralfamidorian-free zone.  Reading this book is certainly an experience, but a harrowing one. Admire the craftmanship, by all means, but be prepared for the essential horror that is life, as told by Kurt Vonnegut.

Midland City is the setting of another Vonnegut novel, Breakfast of Champions