The Stranger, by Albert Camus

Here is the Symphony No 5 in B flat major, Op 55 by Alexander Glazunov.

My husband sat down next to me and sighed. 

"First books.  Now post cards?"

I have joined an international post card club, called "Post Crossing".  I send post cards to people around the world and receive international and domestic cards in return.  Going overboard as usual, I have bought a lot of post cards to send out.  I enjoy selecting the cards and mailing them more than even receiving them from others.  I try to cram as much about myself on the small space as possible.  I want people to know that in Texas we do more than just chew hay seeds while we sit on a fence and watch horses.  Although, in fact, I do that too.  

Here are a few of the cards I have sent out.  The two landscape photographs are by a Texan photographer:

The Stranger by Albert Camus

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Camus writes in a simple, yet mesmerizing style as he gives the first person thoughts of a socio-path. The narrator, a French Algerian, Meursault, tells us in an emotionless voice that his maman has died. He goes to the funeral because he has to. He feels nothing. He smokes and drinks coffee by the coffin.

The next day, he meets up with a girl, Marie and begins an affair with her. A man in his apartment has a dog that he abuses. He observes the man's treatment of the dog but does not care, because he does not think it matters.

Another apartment dweller, Raymond asks him to write a letter to Raymond's girlfriend to entice her back to his apartment so he can abuse her. Meursault does so. Raymond abuses the girl so badly that the police come. Meursault watches all of this without emotion.

The girlfriend's brother and his friends, who are Arabs, begin following Raymond and Meursault as they go to the beach with Marie.

On the beach Raymond and Meursault confront the Arabs. Raymond gives Meursault his gun and, without provocation, Meursault shoots and kills one of the Arabs. He is arrested and goes to jail.

His lawyer tries to get him to show remorse, all Meursault feels is annoyance. All he cares about is his physical needs, hunger, sex, etc..Staying alive is the only thing that has meaning for him. He does not understand why the lawyer is upset because he does not care that his mother died or that he killed a man. He does not know why he killed the man, he just did. That's all there is to it.

Meursault is condemned to die. He refuses to see the Chaplain, but the Chaplain comes anyway and tries to speak to him of God and the afterlife. Meursault is bored.

As his life finally comes to its conclusion (he is sentenced to having his head cut off in a public square), he thinks about small things: the sun setting, the shadows gathering in his room. He simply cannot seem to care about anything that actually matters.

I have not studied any commentaries on this book but it seems that Camus experienced some kind of emotional fatigue or bankruptcy after the World Wars and arrived at the conclusion that nothing matters and life has no meaning.

This book, I think, encapsulates life without God. There is nothing left.



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The Centurians, A Practical View of Chistianity, and Lucky Jim

A gift from my baby sister for my birthday.

I am on another book fast.  Not from reading, of course.  That will happen when I'm dead.  But from buying books.  I must read one hundred books that I already own before I can buy another single book.  Josh said to me, "I guess this means your book reviews are going to be reduced to 'book good' or 'book bad'."

He's right. Which is why I decided I don't have to review all one hundred books, just read them.  Be that as it may, I am going to review three books in one pop on today's post.

The Centurions by Jean Larteguy

 

The Centurions by Jean Larteguy was first written in 1960 and it starts with the battle of Dien Bien Phu.  Larteguy describes in rich, colorful detail the agonizing experiences of the French prisoners of war.  He dives into the psychology of both the French and Vietnamese cultures and through his characters attempts to explain the motives of each side.  His expressive use of dialogue between the Vietnamese commander and his prisoners are especially poignant in view of the fact that this commander had been educated by the French.  It was this desire to belong to the French community but to be excluded because of his race that ultimately led him and other Vietnamese to seek dignity and equality through communism.

The book carries us through the soldiers' imprisonment, ultimate release, and continues into the battle in Algiers.  Larteguy provides the same explanation as to why the Muslims wanted liberation from French rule as the Vietnamese: a conviction that they would never be accepted as equals by the French.  Particularly sad are the Algerian soldiers who fought side by side with the French in Vietnam who now fight against those same men, even using brutal acts of terrorism to extricate their country from a people whose culture and values they consider incompatible with their own. 

While this book is worthwhile to read for its information rich storytelling, I must say I got tired of all the mindless sleeping around.  It leads me to wonder if the French only believe true love can be attained by first marrying one woman and then cheating on her with another woman.  

I can't help comparing this book on war to those written by Americans.  American war stories focus on how many lives of their compatriots they saved.  This book's thrust (no pun intended) is centered around how many women the soldiers have slept with.

Jean Larteguy (1920-2011) was a French journalist and soldier.  His stories are drawn from his personal knowledge and experience as a war correspondent for Indochina, Korea, Algeria and Vietnam.

A Practical View of Christianity by William Wilberforce

 

A Practical View of Christianity is William Wilberforce's treatise on what exactly makes a person a Christian and contrasting it with what many people claim to be Christianity.

His main attack is against Cultural Christianity and he spares no words describing the duplicity and hypocrisy of his day by church-going people who show no respect for the authority of God as revealed through His written Word.

His arguments are highly relevant for today since there exists a profound Biblical illiteracy among too many Christians who seem to be ignorant as to how to conduct their lives in a manner that honors God. 

While I determinedly plowed through this book with its original manuscript, I highly recommend reading a version with updated language.  Wilberforce is extremely wordy and he takes a long time expressing his ideas, as brilliant as they are.

 William Wilberforce (1759-1833)

Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis

Finally, a little fun.  Kingsley Amis has to be one of the funniest writers I've ever read.  he writes about nothing at all.  There's no plot to speak of, just parodies of characters who run England's highest educational institutions such as Oxford.

Poor Jim Dixon is a first year professor who is trying very hard to please his supervisor, Professor Welch who uses Jim as his personal servant, having him, in addition to writing his own lectures, doing the professor's work and research as well.  Jim is afraid not to because he has no guarantee he will be hired for the next year.  He does all sorts of things he'd rather not, like spend a weekend at Welch's house for a silly musical gathering.  

There he meets Welch's son, Bertrand, an extremely arrogant, unpleasant person who nevertheless has an extremely pleasing girlfriend who Jim attaches himself to.

And then there's Margaret, another professor who is kinda, sorta, Jim's girlfriend, except when she's not, who thrives on romantic tension and expertly blackmails Jim emotionally so that he never can keep off edge.

The storyline weaves in and out of several characters and their back-stories like a mouse running through a maze.  What makes this story so successful is Amis' genius at wordplay and sharp comedic thrusts.

Here's an example of Amis' masterful manipulation of words and concepts:

Dixon grinned to himself at 'Uncle Julius'.  How marvelous it was that there should be somebody called that and somebody else to call him that, and that he himself should be present to hear one call the other that. 

The effortless artistry with which Kingsly Amis allows his story to flow along an oily river of silly people saying absurd things in a delightfully witty way makes up for any lack of "profound plot".

 Kingsley Amis (1922-1995)

I have now completed thirteen books.  Only eighty-seven to go.

 

A Maigret Trio by Georges Simenon (Maigret's Failure; Maigret in Society; and Maigret and the Lazy Burglar)

Hello from the Hill Country, south of Austin Texas.  Josh and I are enjoying our first anniversary returning to near where we spent our honeymoon.  This time we're staying in an Airstream Trailer.  It's cute and cozy.  I told Josh I think it would be fun to live here.  I would only need an outside room because even though I could squeeze my active library in the trailer I would need another room to house the rest of my books and also the occasional guest.

Josh said, yeah and that outside room would need to have four rooms inside of it and a full bath and high ceilings then he wouldn't mind living in an Airstream, either.  

Well, it was a romantic thought.

While here I finished the last of three novels by Georges Simenon.  Simenon was a Belgian writer best known for his prolific amount of murder mysteries centered around a Parisian detective, Inspector Jules Maigret.

Maigret is a cynical slow moving character that is incapable of drawing conclusions as to the moral compass murderers and thieves live by.  He seems to solves these problems because they are his job and they seem to ningle him like some mathematical problem that gives him no peace until he finds the solution.

None of his stories are formulaic.  In the three murders in this collection the people are murdered for very different reasons.  The first man is an extremely unpleasant man and everyone connected to him, including his family, had good reason to want him dead.  This of course leaves the reader clueless as to the actual perpetrator because everyone else had equally good motives and when we do find out who did it, it leaves one shrugging and thinking, "Oh. That one did it."  

The next one,  everyone involved in the victim's life is suspected, especially one unpleasant and uncooperative caregiver to the dead man but the ending is as unexpected as it is different from the first story.  Not all things or people are as they seem.

Finally, the last story is about a petty thief who is brutally murdered.  Maigret had dealings with the man before and had grown to have a sort of, not affection, but perhaps a compassion, for him.  Maigret himself doesn't know how to describe it.  He simply cannot dislike the man, even though in my opinion, he was a creep.  Apparently this murder victim, Honore Cuendet is some sort of adrenaline junkie.  He carefully cased his houses, only of the very rich, and only robbed them while they were at home.

Because a parallel storyline about a gang of bank robbers travels abreast with the murder mystery, one assumes there's a connection but it turns out to be a red herring (sorry for the spoiler).  And the actual murderers are people who one could not have suspected because they were barely in the story.  Yet the conclusion is entirely logical.

I don't know if everyone would enjoy Simenon's stories.  He writes as though everyone were clinically depressed.  No one shows emotion over anything.  I know it is a characteristic, even a stereotype, of French culture but everyone, I mean  everyone, has mistresses or are mistresses.  There is really no moral compass to anyone's life.

When Maigret interviews a girlfriend of Cuendet, he asks why the victim never married her.  The woman shrugs and replies that she assumes he probably already had a wife.  As if it were of no importance.

And yet, Maigret does not have a mistress.  His wife is there in the background, calm, loving and supportive.  When he is woken at 2am for an investigation, she is immediately in the kitchen making him coffee.  She is waiting for him when he returns at the end of a harrowing day.

Strangely there is no emotion revealed between the two of them but the actions show a genuine love: her's through support and his through his implied fidelity.

While I find none of the characters sympathetic or particularly likeable, I still enjoyed romping through the Parisian streets with this laconic inspector and encountering the different character types that he must confront in order to solve his murders.

Whether Simenon is giving the reader a realistic taste of Parisian life and culture, who knows?  As Oscar Wilde says, perhaps our image of a thing is more enjoyable than the actual thing itself.


Georges Simenon (1903-1989)

Paris: Day two

No emails to share this time.  I'll just describe the photos and what I remember about them.

The Louvre

The Winged Victory of Samothrace:  Nike

Rodin sculpture inside the entrance to the Louvre

The Seine

You can see Notre Dame Cathedral in the distance.

Notre Dame Cathedral

The thing that struck me about Notre Dame was its powerful presence.

The park behind Notre Dame was a great place for lunch.  It also had free wifi.

Gargoyles

Inside Notre Dame

                        We were privileged to witness mass.

The Last Days of a Condemned Man by Victor Hugo

The Last Days of a Condemned Man is a short novel written by the great Romantic writer, Victor Hugo. Hugo is best known for his novels, The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Les Miserables. It's always a pleasant surprise to come across yet another work by a favorite writer, so it was a serendipitous moment when I happened to see this novel in the book store.

The book is exactly what the title says. Victor Hugo writes in the first person, describing the last couple of days of a man condemned to the guillotine. His purpose, as he states in the prologue, is to provide the horror of someone waiting to die in order to make the death penalty illegal. The book has been reprinted by Amnesty International in hopes of using Hugo's work as an influence towards this end.

I'm not going to give any opinions on whether the death penalty should be outlawed or not, I'm simply going to comment on the book.

The writing, needless to say, is as powerful as any of Hugo's work. You are sitting in the cell with the condemned man, experiencing what he is experiencing. Hugo shows how degraded prisoners are-especially when citizens come in to observe them as a type of freak show for their own amusement. It is appalling that the executions were public and extremely popular among the citizens, including the children.

To me this is proof that exposing people to violence does not make them more aware of injustice or motivate them to end it. It serves to desensitize them to it. I say this in response to the rationalization I've heard that certain movies are necessary (like Goodfellas or Taken) because they reveal the horrors of certain situations and the public needs to know. I watched Taken on a bus full of high school students. Judging from all the cheering and laughing throughout the film, I'd say not too many of them left the movie feeling motivated to end violence.

As I read the story, what I kept waiting for, was some sort of regret or repentance from the condemned man. His crime is barely mentioned. Apparently he murdered someone. He doesn't seem to reflect on this much. He mostly focuses on his own fate. He wants to see his wife and daughter again. He hopes against hope that he'll be granted a reprieve.

If Hugo's intentions were to garner sympathy for his protagonist, for me at least, he failed. For one. This was not a real person. Hugo was projecting his own conclusions on someone, trying to imagine what someone about to die would think. I'd be more interested in knowing what a real condemned person is thinking.

Hugo's protagonist mostly gripes and complains. He never once thinks about his victim. What he so desperately desires for himself, to live, he took from another person who had every bit as much right to live as he did. More so in the sense that victim was innocent.

In one respect, I think Hugo does succeed. Hugo successfully portrays a man without a conscience. He has no remorse for his crime. He only feels a sense of wrong concerning himself. I saw this played out so many times at the school where I taught for many years. In the nine years that I taught, being the music teacher, I taught thousands of children. This allowed me to observe human behavior on at least a small scale.

One thing I noticed about certain children, the bullies, predators, etc...They had no conscience toward how they treated others. But they were outraged that any consequences should happen to them. It was as though they couldn't connect the dots between cause and effect. There was no sense of personal responsibility.

This thin book is probably little known, being over shadowed as it is by Hugo's epic works but it is thought- provoking and worth sitting down one evening and reading.

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