After years of reviewing new books for several publications, I decided I needed a break from squinting at PDF files and highlighting quotable sentences in loosely bound ARCs (advance readers’ copies).
Something old, “classic,” and without dust jackets could be new again and suitable for a few days of pleasure reading.
So I hopped into my way-back machine (which, given my age, goes wa-a-a-y back) and went in search of some books that I had not read since high school or college and some that I had intended to read but never found the time. Or energy. Or interest. Or willingness to try again to absorb and comprehend. (Paradise Lost me after a few pages, for example. And Finnegans Wake quickly put me into a deep, troubled sleep).
The results from my first way-back foray? At a library book sale recently, I came up with The Stranger by Albert Camus, Trout Fishing in America by Richard Brautigan, and War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells.
Photo by Si Dunn
The Stranger
The Stranger literally could be called a slice of life (and death). Camus’s first short novel or novella, published in 1942, follows an ordinary man named Meursault who is living in French Algeria. First, Meursault shows virtually no emotion as he deals with the death of his mother and her funeral. Later, he decides to shoot and kill an Arab man on a beach. After his arrest, a lawyer tries to defend him, but Meursault insists on telling the truth, that he didn’t fire five consecutive shots into the man’s body. He informs the jury, prosecutor, and judge that he fired just one shot first and then, a few moments later, decided to shoot the victim four more times. As Meursault’s impending execution draws near, he tries to explain to a priest why he accepts that he will die on the guillotine and why he rejects God and the notion that he can for forgiven for his crime. In his cell, Meursault has been learning to love “the benign indifference of the universe.” But he does hope there will at least be some kind of afterlife where he can remember the life he is about to leave.
The Stranger was on reading lists when I was in high school in the early Sixties. I somehow escaped having to look at it. I’m glad that I’ve read it now. I don’t recommend it for light afternoon reading on a beach or sun porch. But Camus is a good writer and Meursault is an interesting character. He plunges into truths from which most of us would flee. “Serious” readers and writers who’ve deliberately skipped The Stranger may find it to be a quick and thought-provoking read.
Trout Fishing in America
In San Francisco in 1963, I could have walked right past Richard Brautigan on Market Street or sat somewhere near him while listening to poetry readings at the famous and infamous City Lights bookstore. I was not a wannabe Beatnik or hippie at the time; just an awkward new sailor temporarily stationed at Hunter’s Point Naval Shipyard while my ship, the destroyer USS Higbee, was in drydock and being refurbished. Brautigan wrote many works and was well known within America’s counterculture movements in the 1960s. But only his 1967 novella Trout Fishing in America achieved best-seller status.
Ironically, some people bought the book thinking it is a how-to manual for catching trout. Actually, it is a comic satire of life in mainstream America. The capitalized phrase “Trout Fishing in America” appears in the text in several unusual ways. Not only is it the book’s title, but it’s also the name of a hotel, and one of the tale’s recurring characters is named “Trout Fishing in America Shorty.” A few of the characters engage in actual trout fishing. There is a “Trout Fishing in America peace parade.” One short chapter, titled “The Autopsy of Trout Fishing in America,” is a report written “as if Trout Fishing in America had been Lord Byron and had died in Missolonghi, Greece.” Yeah, it’s a weird book in 2024, but its experimental and comic style caught a big wave of popularity during the days of massive anti-Vietnam War protests, “flower power,” and “Black power” marches and young people dropping out of mainstream society and moving restlessly from place to place in search of new experiences and new meanings for their lives. I loved the book back then, and a few of its pages still make me chuckle sixty years later.
The War of the Worlds
H.G. Wells’ 1898 novel The War of the Worlds has generated numerous movie and television spinoffs. (And the best one, in my opinion, was the 1953 science fiction thriller film “The War of the Worlds” directed by Byron Haskin, produced by George Pal, and starring Gene Barry and Ann Robinson. I first saw that movie at age 9, and it scared the Irish bejesus out of me. It also got me fascinated with the stars and the possibilities of life on other planets. As I grew older, I nearly decided to become a radio astronomer, but my mediocre math skills eventually steered me to journalism.
In Wells’s book, one of the very first popular science fiction novels, the unnamed narrator of the story spends a lot of time walking, running, or hiding in wrecked houses. His life is in mortal danger now, because of his curiosity. He wanted to get a closer look at the arriving spacecraft, the hideous Martians (essentially heads with tentacles), and their strange but effective weapons of mass destruction, including a black, foglike gas and long-range heat rays. Now the Martians are still arriving and roaming across the countryside, destroying nearly all life and structures as they go. The narrator gets caught up in crowds of panicked Londoners fleeing their home city with what they can carry. He also breaks away from the crowds and heads in other directions on his own, because he knows the area a few miles from his home. He fears that his wife already has been killed by the invaders–he left her there alone when curiosity overpowered his common sense. But he must find his house again and learn the truth.
— Si Dunn
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