Par Lagerkvist--Barabbas (1950)

We return to one of my favorite genres within the IWE program, the (usually earnest) Biblical-inspired novel. Unlike most books in this class, this one is quite short as well, coming in at 180 slight pages. It is also, I am pretty sure, the first Swedish book that has turned up thus far, of which there are surprisingly many (well. maybe 12 or so), on the program. It would not the first Scandinavian book overall though, Hans Christian Anderson and his works having turned up a couple of years back. Par Lagerkvist does not seem to be particularly celebrated today, though he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1951, the year after Barabbas, which in the English-speaking world at least seems to be his best known work, was published. While I did like this lean, understated volume, which undoubtedly possesses a substantial amount of literary skill, it did not stand out to me on an initial reading at least as fitting my idea of a Nobel-quality work. However, I haven't read any of his other works (and he had been nominated three times for the prize before Barabbas came out) and I generally don't get too worked up about Prizes--though obviously I don't mind their existence either--unless I really dislike the winner, which rarely seems to be the case with me. The reason given by the Nobel committee for Lagerkvist's prize was that it was "for the artistic vigour and true independence of mind with which he endeavors in his poetry to find answers to the eternal questions confronting mankind" which does seem however like something that could apply to most winners (besides its assumption of some fixed set of 'eternal questions confronting mankind' whose answers, or attempts at answers, at the very least one suspects would invariably reveal themselves to be hopelessly Euro- and phallocentric). Interestingly Hemingway would be awarded the Nobel Prize just a handful of years after this right after the publication of The Old Man in the Sea, a similarly stripped down, elemental kind of work, and Camus, whose most famous novels also seem to me to partake of these kinds of qualities, won it a few years after that. So even apart from the Swedish Academy, there was clearly something in the atmosphere of the reading portions of the postwar West, and especially Europe, that needed and responded strongly to this type of literature.


From the IWE introduction, after giving the background of the Barabbas Story:


"This is all the Gospels tell. The challenge to novelists is apparent and dozens of them have drawn on their imaginations to give the fuller story of Barabbas--where he had come from, what he had done, what became of him. This is the most distinguished of the many efforts. It has, of course, a Swedish and Protestant outlook...The English translation by Alan Blair is superb (ed--This is true)."



As is my habit I did not read this introduction closely before reading the book, and I did not pick up on the book's having a notably Swedish and Protestant outlook as opposed to anything else. Though I do not come out of that tradition specifically, I suppose its worldview meshes somewhat with my own temperament enough that it does not stand out as strange to me. In the book the character of Barabbas, even with witnessing several episodes of Christ's life, miraculous and otherwise, at first hand or very near to it, and being strongly affected by the experience, is never really able to believe wholeheartedly in the man's divinity, and as such life is a lonely, existential struggle for him devoid of peace or joy. I am guessing this is what is referred to by the Swedish and Protestant outlook.

I did not make any notes on this book as there were no individual sentences or passages that would be very striking taken apart from the rest of the novel. It is small and easy to read and I found it to be thought-provoking in a manageable, comprehendible way.

Here is my book. Unfortunately I was not entirely successful in effacing the sticker that comes on every book I have to order online. This Vintage paperback from the 50s, along with a 90s reprint, is the only English language edition of this book I could find.


The Challenge
1. C. S. Lewis--Mere Christianity.....................................................3,322
2. Barabbas (movie-1961)....................................................................164
3. Gregory A. Boyd--Crucifixion of the Warrior God............................45
4. Bruxey Cavey--(Re)Union..................................................................32
5. Gregory A. Boyd--Cross Vision..........................................................25
6. Colin Wilson--A Criminal History of Mankind...................................21
7. Robert J. Hutchinson--The Dawn of Christianity................................21
8. Rahim & Thomson--Jesus Prophet of Islam.......................................12
9. Marie Corelli--Barabbas: A Dream of the World's Tragedy.................3
10. Benjamin Constant--On Religion.........................................................0
11. Trench H. Johnson--Phrases & Names: Their Origin & Meanings....0
12. Now Barabbas (movie-1949)...............................................................0
13. Did Jesus Die? (movie--2003).............................................................0
14. The Jesus Tomb (Secrets of the Cross) (movie--2009)........................0
15. Lois Windon--My Walk With God........................................................0


This Challenge is inevitably heavy on Christian themes.


1st Round


#2 Barabbas over #15 Windon


I am being discriminatory against the Windon book because it does not seem to be published by a respected house nor does it have any other signs of success going for it.


#3 Boyd over #14 The Jesus Tomb
#13 Did Jesus Die? over #4 Cavey


Upset special


#5 Boyd over #12 Now Barabbas
#6 Wilson over #11 Johnson
#7 Hutchinson over #10 Constant
#9 Corelli over #8 Rahim & Thomson


The Johnson and Constant books have been out of print for over 100 years. Corelli is a writer of some fame whose book interests me slightly more than her opponents'.

Final 8


#13 Did Jesus Die? over #1 Lewis



Brutal for the quality of the competition, but the documentary was entitled to a rare two upset tournament


#3 Boyd over #7 Hutchinson


I thought this would be a real game, but there isn't a single library in my state that has a copy of either of these books.



#9 Corelli over #2 Barabbas
#5 Boyd over #6 Wilson



This Boyd isn't available in any libraries either, while Wilson made it into two, but this Boyd has an upset to play.


Final 4


#3 Boyd over #13 Did Jesus Die?
#5 Boyd over #9 Corelli


No libraries have the Corelli book.


Championship


#5 Boyd over #3 Boyd

Author List Volume XIV

Abbe Prevost (1697-1763) Manon Lescaut (1731) Born: Riverside Holiday Home, 11 Rue Daniel Lereuil, Hesdin, Artois, France. Buried: Le Moulin de St Nicolas d'Acy, Corteuil, Picardy, France. Le Calvaire de l'Abbe Prevost, Rue du Calvaire, Corteuil, Picardy, France. College: Prytanee National Militaire.


Jules Massenet (1842-1912) Born: Montaud, St. Etienne, Lyonnais, France. Buried: Churcyard, Egreville, Ile-de-France, Seine et Marne, France. Monument, Jardin du Luxembourg, 6eme, Paris, France. College: Paris Conservatoire.

Giacomo Puccini (1858-1924) Born: Puccini Museum/Casa Natale di Giacomo Puccini, Corte San Lorenzo 9, Lucca, Tuscany, Italy. Buried: Estate Grounds, Private Chapel, Torre del Lago, Tuscany, Italy. Piccolo Hotel Puccini, Via di Poggio 9, Lucca, Tuscany, Italy. College: Milan Conservatory.




Edward Everett Hale (1822-1909) The Man Without a Country (1863) Born: Tremont Street, Boston, Suffolk, Massachusetts. Buried: Forest Hills Cemetery, Jamaica Plain, Suffolk, Massachusetts. Hale House, Matunuck, Rhode Island. Edward Everett Hale Monument, 16 Charles Street (Boston Common), Boston, Suffolk, Massachusetts. College: Harvard.


Andre Malraux (1901-1976) Man's Fate (1933) Born: 53 Rue Damremont, 18eme, Paris, France. Buried: Cemetery, Verrieres-le Buisson, Essonne, Ile-de-France, France. Museum of Modern Art Andre Malraux, 2 Boulevard Clemenceau, Le Havre, Normandie, France.

Walter Pater (1839-1894) Marius the Epicurean (1885) Born: Stepney, London, England. Buried: Holywell Cemetery (St. Cross Churchyard?), Oxford, Oxfordshire, England. College: Queens (Oxford).

Euripides (480-406 B.C.) Medea (431 B.C.) Born: Salamis Island, Attica, Greece. Buried: Arethousa, Central Macedonia, Greece.

Medea: Colchis, Georgia. Medea Sarcophagus, Altes Museum, Berlin, Germany.

Jason: Iolcus, Thessaly, Greece.

Harry Leon Wilson (1867-1939) Merton of the Movies (1922) Born: Oregon, Illinois. Buried: Unknown (?)

Elbert Green Hubbard (1856-1915) A Message to Garcia (1899) Born: Bloomington, Illinois. Buried: Died at sea in Lusitania sinking. Elbert Hubbard Roycroft Museum, 363 Oakwood Avenue, East Aurora, Erie, New York.

Ovid (43 B.C.-18) Metamorphoses (8) Born: Sulmona, Abruzzo, Italy. Buried: Statue, Ovid Square, Constanta, Romania.

Narcissus: Thespies, Boeotia, Central Greece, Greece.

Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847) Born: Hamburg, Germany. Buried: Dreifaltigkeitsfriedhof, Kreuzberg, Berlin, Germany. Mendelssohn-Haus, Goldschmidtstrasse 12, Leipzig, Saxony, Germany. College: Humboldt University (Berlin).


Max Rheinhardt (1873-1943) Born: Baden, Austria. Buried: Westchester Hills Cemetery, Hastings-on-Hudson, Westchester, New York. Schloss Leopoldskron, Leopoldskronstrasse 56-58, Salzburg, Austria.


Karl Gjellerup (1857-1919) Minna (1889) Born: Roholte Vicarage, Praesto, Denmark. Buried: Old Cemetery, Klotzsche, Dresden, Saxony, Germany. College: Copenhagen.


Frederick Marryat (1792-1848) Mr Midshipman Easy (1836) Born: Great George Street, Westminster, London, England. Buried: St Andrew and St Mary Churchyard, Langham, Norfolk, England.


Herman Melville (1819-1891) Moby Dick (1851) Born: 6 Pearl Street, New York, New York (*****2(?)/1998*****) Buried: Woodlawn Cemetery, Bronx, New York (*****2/1999*****). Arrowhead, 780 Holmes Road, Pittsfield, Berkshire, Massachusetts (*****8(?)/2000(?)*****). Herman Melville House, 2 114th Street, Troy, Rensselaer, New York. Whale Rock, Canyonlands National Park, Moab, Utah.


As you can see, I have been to several of these places, but as the years go by, the exact dates, and in some instances even the year that I was there, have become lost to my recollection. All of these dates were recorded on some now long-lost computer or disk. I went to Arrowhead after the 2 New York City sites (which I remember visiting on separate occasions in successive years) but before my children were born, which would put the excursion somewhere in the 1999-2001 period, but I cannot remember which year it was.

Ahab (c. 852 B.C.) Buried: Samaria, Israel (West Bank).


Ascot Racecourse, Ascot, Berkshire, England.


Daniel Defoe (1660-1731) Robinson Crusoe (1719), Moll Flanders (1722) Born: Fore Street, City, London, England. Buried: Bunhill Fields, Islington, London, England (*****9-3-1996*****). Robinson Crusoe House, Bottcherstrasse, Bremen, Germany.


Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) Born: 56 Rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, 9eme, Paris, France. Buried: Calvary Cemetery, Altuona, French Polynesia. Paul Gauguin Cultural Center, Atuona, Marquesas Islands, French Polynesia.


Unfortunately the Gauguin museum in Tahiti appears to be permanently closed.


Wilkie Collins (1824-1889) The Moonstone (1868) Born: 11 New Cavendish Street, Marylebone, London, England. Buried: Kensal Green Cemetery, Kensal Green, London, England


Grazia Deledda (1871-1936) The Mother (1923) Born: Grazia Deledda Museum, Via Grazia Deledda 42, Nuoro, Sardinia, Italy. Buried: Cimitero Comunale Monumentale Campo Verano (Near Termini), Rome, Lazio, Italy. Parco Letterario Grazia Deledda, Via Sassari, Galtelli, Sardinia, Italy. Grazia Deledda Restaurant, Via di Sacco Pastore 14, (Libia), Rome, Lazio, Italy. Hotel-Ristorante Grazia Deledda, Loc. Tilzitta, Arzachena, Sardinia, Italy. Hotel Grazia Deledda, Viale Dante 47, Sassari, Sardinia, Italy.

Felix Salten--Bambi (1923)

Thought of, doubtless due to the Disney cartoon, primarily as a children's book,  the novel Bambi is actually a highly emotional, and in some ways rather brilliant meditation on the arc of life, nothing like I expected. For some reason--probably because I had confused him with Maurice Maeterlinck--I was thinking when I started the book that Felix Salten was Belgian and wrote in French, though in fact he was Jewish and a native of Hapsburg Budapest who wrote in German. Salten was very prominent in intellectual circles in his time as far as activity goes, though most assessments of his raw brainpower in these tough crowds did not accord him a particularly high rank. At least one writer has opined that Bambi can be interpreted as a commentary on the Jewish experience in Europe. I found it to be very sad, though essentially truthful. It really is not a children's book. There is nothing in it of humor or whimsy, despite which I think it is quite good, and well worth the time to read, if you have an intellect and psychological makeup like I do, which admittedly does not seem to be very many people.

p. 20 (I started pretty early with the notes in this book) "These were the earliest days of Bambi's life. He walked behind his mother on a narrow track that ran through the midst of the bushes. How pleasant it was to walk there." The melancholy, wistful tone is established right at the beginning. The English translation by the way was done by Whittaker Chambers, who was a name of some renown in his lifetime, though I don't have a good sense of what specifically he was renowned for.


p. 56 "In a moment Bambi darted after her. Gobo followed him. They flew around in a semi-circle, they turned tail and fell over each other. Then they chased each other up and down. It was glorious."


p. 59 "And Bambi's mother said to him, 'Come, it's time to go.' 'Wait just a little longer,' Faline pleaded eagerly, 'just a little while.' 'Let's stay a little longer, please,' Bambi pleaded, 'it's so nice.' And Gobo repeated timidly, 'It's so nice, just a little longer.'"


See what I mean.


Around this point I made a rather snide note that if a marginalized culture had produced this story, it would probably be held up as so subtly profound and wise as to be inaccessible to us.


pp.70-73 "'It was a bad business', he said, 'a monstrous uproar! You wouldn't believe how scared I was. I hunch myself up as still as a mouse in the corner and hardly dared move. That's the worst of it, having to sit there and move. And all the time you're hoping nothing will happen." This is a squirrel talking. I thought this passage might have been related to the Jewish experience in Europe.


Fall comes for the first time and Chapter VIII is a brief aside featuring the last couple of brown leaves clinging to a branch in complete denial about their future prospects, a real meditation on the reality of death. It hit home with me.


p. 234 I don't know what happened in the middle of the book, I meant to write down some notes but never got around to it. By this time Bambi has come to the point in life where I seem to be: "For his thoughts had grown serious and his heart heavy. He did not know what was happening within him. He did not even think about it. He merely recalled things aimlessly, and his whole life seemed to have become darker."


p. 258 Then he suffers injury and illness: "Not until the fever had entirely left his body did Bambi begin to think over all that had happened to him. Then a great terror awoke in him, and a profound tremor passed through his heart. He could not shake himself free of it. He could not get up and run about as before. He lay still and troubled." Obviously this whole passage would be lost on a child and would have to some extent been lost on the me of ten years ago. The depiction of the emotions of aging, not even out of youth, but really out of the prime years of life is eerily good. Salten, for the record, was 54 when Bambi was published, so he still had a few years on me. Books on these classics lists written by authors older than I am at the time of publication are not quite rare yet, but it has definitely reached the point where the circumstance is worth noting.


p. 268 "But of all his teachings this had been the most important; you must live alone, if you wanted to preserve yourself, if you understood existence, if you wanted to attain wisdom, you had to live alone."

Stolen picture. Since it's getting harder to do this, I'm going to have to start preparing more from my own materials. It shouldn't be hard.


The story meanders a little more in the second half, though it is obviously still an allegory. Though perhaps I should see it again, I think this aspect was completely lost in the Disney adaptation, which Salten apparently liked nonetheless.


I suppose I should at least briefly touch on the question of whether hunting is evil or not. Besides the brutality of humans which are duly noted, many of the animals are obviously predators too. After a heartwarming description of a family of ducks, a fox drags the mother duck out of the water and devours her, the mice live as virtually universal prey, and so forth. While death and inter-species violence are endemic to life, I think Salten would not have us find them lovable or heroic aspects of existence. He has chosen as his hero-animals the deer, who do not attack other animals, after all. I have, of course, never been on a hunt of any kind, unless we count setting mousetraps, the bringing of which latter death I must confess I have never lost any sleep over. I do not avoid hunting for any ideological reason, but merely because I did not grow up among people who ever did those sorts of things. It is a skill, and historically an important one for humans, especially male humans, to have, and I don't have any strong feeling that it was a skill that would better have remained undeveloped, so I have no urge to denounce it. Even the desire to virtue signal in me at this point is not powerful enough to give me any real pause in considering a position.


The edition of the book I read I found some years back in my attic (two copies of it in fact) in one of the many boxes of books that had been left up there for many decades by my wife's family. The book was published by Noble and Noble, with a brief forward by John Galsworthy and illustrations by Kurt Wiese. It looks like it dates from the World War II era, since there is an announcement on the copyright page declaring the book to have been made in strict conformity with WPB regulations of essential materials. It is a nice little book, though unfortunately I got something on my hands one day while I was reading it and smudged the cover.

The Bourgeois Surrender Challenge


1. Chicken Soup For the Cat Lover's Soul.......................................2,055
2. Philip Pullman--The Subtle Knife...................................................718
3. Jane Yolen--Owl Moon...................................................................268
4. Emile Zola--Germinal.....................................................................158
5. Bob Grant--Bambi (Golden Book)..................................................134
6. Kenneth Oppel--This Dark Engineer................................................84
7. Mary Eberstadt--It's Dangerous to Believe.......................................57
8. Victor Hugo--The Man Who Laughs.................................................37
9. Pippa Mattinson--Total Recall...........................................................28
10. Victor Digenti--Windrusher............................................................21
11. Velda Brotherton--Once There Were Sad Songs............................21
12. Maxim Gorky--Mother....................................................................20
13. Felix Salten--Bambi's Children........................................................13
14. Susanne Davis--The Appointed Hour................................................7
15. David Zindell--Splendor....................................................................5
16. Jana Richard--Lies and Solace...........................................................5


First Round


#16 Richard over #1 Chicken Soup


This is a pretty excruciating matchup.


#2 Pullman over #15 Zindell


In battles of two genre books, I am going to go chalk until the final four from now on.


#3 Yolen over #14 Davis


The Yolen book is a children's book but it did win the Caldecott medal


#4 Zola over #13 Salten


A rare clash of IWE authors in the Challenge. I am actually curious about the Bambi sequel, but it wasn't enough for me to give it a win here.


#5 Grant over #12 Gorky


Upset card played over another IWE stalwart.


#6 Oppel over #11 Brotherton


#10 Digenti over #7 Eberstadt


Eberstadt's book is about religion and contemporary issues, not a genre novel. Unfortunately Digenti has an upset card.


#8 Hugo over #9 Mattinson

No one really studies like this anymore, but at least someone else wishes they did.


Elite Eight


#2 Pullman over #16 Richard


#3 Yolen over #10 Digenti


#4 Zola over #8 Hugo


Another clash of titans


#6 Oppel over #5 Grant


Oppel uses up his upset card.


Final Four


#2 Pullman over #6 Oppel


#4 Zola over #3 Yolen


Champiuonship


#2 Pullman over #4 Zola


Pullman had a upset coming that he didn't have to use until the final. His books certainly appear to be popular. I have no idea what they are about.

This is that Philip Pullman guy.

May 2018

A List: E. M. Forster--"The Road From Colonus"................4/10
B List: Between Books
C List: Gloria Steinem--Marilyn.....................................117/182


When I started working on this month's update I had just finished 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. I have enjoyed all of Jules Verne's tales of masculine adventure during this strangely anomic period I have been going through. He had a true storyteller's gift, as well as a gusto for the idea of inventions and scientific breakthroughs that seem more appealing and less off-putting in its attitude and triumphalism than I find in contemporary champions of technological progress, though this is doubtful. I'm sure if I had lived in the 1860s I would found every new innovation as terrifying and threatening as I do the ones today. But having finished this run of books by Jules Verne I will miss him until he comes up again, if I live that long.


The C entry is a half-coffee table size book of photographs of Marilyn Monroe published in 1986 with an accompanying text. Amazingly my library retains a copy of it in their basement storage, but for how much longer will anyone keep this sort of thing around? Who besides me would ever take this book out again? This kind of book is like taking a holiday from my usual reading. I have never been particularly fascinated by Marilyn Monroe, who was a very sad person and does not appear to have been particularly bright, although she was so unsophisticated compared to almost everyone in the modern media world that her manner of expressing herself was at least unique at times. (for example, from an interview excerpt. Marilyn is discussing one of her more intellectual ex-lovers: "'You cry too easily,' he'd say. 'That's because your mind isn't developed. Compared to your breasts it's embryonic.' I couldn't contradict him because I had to look up that word in a dictionary.") If nothing else this book reinforces the idea that it's a benefit to children to have their parents around even if the parents are mediocre or in some instances decidedly below average. Lots of men had sex with Marilyn Monroe. There isn't much of a record of her turning anyone down who applied any amount of aggression, which in those days of course everyone did under the delusion that it was healthy masculine behavior. She did refuse to meet, or at least avoided having to meet, Norman Mailer when he expressed an interest in meeting her. He famously developed a bit of an obsession with her that lasted well after her death. It is suggested in the text that short-lived husband and onetime American hero Joe DiMaggio gave her bruises on several occasions during their brief marriage, which is disappointing. Needless to say many of the successful men especially at this time were by today's standards near perpetual sexual harassment machines, and proud of the virility it revealed. It's no wonder some of the older men who have recently been punished for what was once expected behavior (Mailer ridiculed rival Arthur Miller's failure to make a pass at Monroe when they first met in 1950 in a play about her that he later wrote) don't seem to think they have done anything especially wrong.

Gloria Steinem is of course a famous feminist and, yes, that informs her writing, though compared to more contemporary feminists, she seems, if not exactly mild, more restrained in her vision and far less inclined to take a contemptuous attitude towards (men?). She seems very much to be concerned with things like women's being able to achieve respect (when deserved) in male-dominated fields. The idea that women would ever threaten to become numerically a majority in a number of these fields, as seems to be happening in today's younger cohorts, does not seem to have been something that was on her radar as having any likelihood as late as the 1980s.


"The Road From Colonus" looks like it is about an old guy dying. Not a subject dear to my heart these days.


Also during this month I read a book of stories for the C List called 20th Century Ghosts by a writer named Joe Hill, who is actually Stephen King's son. Both because of this and because the book was advertised as vaguely horror-y, I was not too excited about reading it, but I have to say I liked it quite a lot. Much better than anything by his father, actually, whose books I have never been able to get into. While the stories do turn on horror or supernatural effects, the overall tone is literary and nostalgic, with the grotesqueries insinuating themselves into an ordinary story that has an interest of its own rather than overwhelming it. The stories here were first published between 1999 and 2005. They all are set in the kinds of New England or upstate New York faded towns and small cities such as the one where I live, and take place among a (somewhat scarily) already fading world of video store employees. movie theaters, tenured academics with "heartbreaking dreams of someday having a poem published in the New Yorker"), low circulation magazines that print fiction, and the like. I was very impressed and even moved by it, which doesn't happen with me very often.


I have some other poignant anecdotes I wanted to write about, but maybe I will save them for another post. I have to get this out tonight.