Thomas

Thrilling!

At first, I struggled to get into it. I think because of the plethora of names, locations, factions, etc., that are explored to set the scenery. Possibly because I knew absolutely nothing at all about The Troubles except whatever I've picked up from the odd Tom Clancy book/movie (and, thus, very probably less than nothing).

The book is exceptionally well paced, and the author threads the stories so delicately that when the pictures start to come together there are times when you can't help but sit upright.

The book explores themes of moral injury and ambiguous loss in ways I find deeply fascinating. More, the book explores the stories communities tell themselves and how factions interact with communities as mitigators and agitators. From page 402:

“In the intertwining lives of Jean McConville, Dolours Price, Brendan Hughes, and Gerry Adams, I saw an opportunity to tell a story about how people become radicalized in their uncompromising devotion to a cause, and about how individuals—and a whole society—make sense of political violence once they have passed through the crucible and finally have time to reflect.”

A great opportunity, and there are plenty of things we can view as analogous re: how populations/communities warp around themselves.

Great read — would recommend!

New review/thoughts from my April 2024 read: https://tbindc.substack.com/p/the-road


Below - review from July 5th, 2023.

The Road is a stunning book. It is dark, cold, and in many ways horrible. The love of the father for the son does radiate through it and ruptures off of the page. The most anxiety-inducing and bone-chilling questions imaginable by a parent are raised directly (“Can you do it? When the time comes? Can you?”) and indirectly.

The vignettes of interaction with other human show the frailty of life without our social contract and suggests how fragile it is. To me, it also suggests its durability over generations, with the child's internal sense of morality so strong - even buoying the father at times.

I'll have a lot more to say about sons and fathers and how this book reads when your own father has paled in comparison to this one in my substack. That said, fatherhood both practically and somewhat cosmically are major themes. Closing with two of my favorite quotes/sections from this readthrough:

“Do you think that your fathers are watching? That they weigh you in their ledgerbook? Against what? There is no book and your fathers are dead in the ground.” (pg 196)

“He rose and build back the fire and sat beside the boy and pulled the blankets over him and brushed back his filthy hair. I think maybe they are watching, he said. They are watching for a thing that even death cannot undo and if they do not see it they will turn away from us and they will not come back.” (pg 210).

More soon.

I picked this book off my shelf a few months ago knowing that I was on a high-speed collision course with a re-read. I am not sure where I got this copy. It is dated on the inside cover in handwriting 1966. It is blue clothbound and cotton paged, and the pages feel very nice.

Book spoilers below.

I love the book. It is 250 pages of heartbreak and lovesickness. Every character within is detestable. Jake, the protagonist, is wounded in the war and it is suggested that what happened is he got his penis shot off, or at least rendered totally inoperable. The first time I read this I thought it was his testicles that he lost, but this read I think it is more than that. Jake is in love with Lady Brett, a woman that passes in and out of his life seemingly with the sole purpose of torturing him. She claims several times to love him, too, but she cannot maintain any relationship and engages in numerous affairs with basically ever male character in the book.

One of her favorite things to do is talk to Jake about her affairs right after asking if he still loves her. She'll say she loves him and then talk about another man. Or she'll ask Jake to set her up with another man. And Jake, the masochist that he is, basically facilitates this. I wonder if it's because he feels that, since he can't sleep with her, this is the closest he can get to giving her pleasure.

I find all that pretty tiring. For one, I think it is insanely lacking creativity in a very straight way. There are more ways to give pleasure than a penis and besides, there are tools available for such a thing. I think if these two really loved each other, they could figure something out. Hence my thought that Brett does not actually love Jake at all. I think she is dependent on him for getting her out of messes. She uses him. I think there's a part of her that enjoys flaunting her triumphs in front of him. I think she is very cruel. I think there is basically no behavior that could be more cruel than what she does.

And yet, Jake just takes it all. Early in the book, a different character is lambasted by his fiance and Jake asks why he takes it. Why doesn't he ask himself? He does nothing at all to set boundaries with Brett. He seems just happy as can be to be punished over and over again. Part of me understands this in a frustrating way. But Jake seems to resign himself to getting drunk and watching all of this as a passenger. He always comes to her aid whenever asks. Very frustrating.

The book has a lot of stuff that any consummate depressee can appreciate. Some great quotes:

* p31 - My head started to work. The old grievance.
* p31 - Probably I never would have had any trouble if I hadn't run into Brett when they shipped me to England. I suppose she only wanted what she couldn't have. Well, people were that way. To hell with people. The Catholic Church had an awfully good way of handling all that. Good advice, anyway.. Not to think about it. Oh, it was swell advice. Try and take it sometime. Try and take it.
* p34 - It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing.
* p148 - I could shut my eyes without getting the wheeling sensation. But I could not sleep. There is no reason why because it is dark you should look at things differently from when it is light. The hell there isn't!

And sometimes it can be pretty funny. It has one of my favorite jokes in a Hemingway book:

* p136 - “How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.
“Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”

There is a bunch of stuff in the bullfighting about steers and all that and sure there's some themes you could connect Cohn and Jake to Steers and others to the others and blah blah blah. It doesn't really matter because I don't really care about all that. It's a book about Jake being in love with someone who isn't available to him and he doesn't know what to do with that other than to absorb all of the pain in the world. The book closes with Brett and Jake riding in a car, pressed together. Brett saying how good they could have been together (not that they put any work into even giving it a shot!). Jake says, “Yes. Isn't it pretty to think so?”

Pretty thoughts will only get you so far. And the prettiest thoughts and the darkest thoughts have this in common: they hurt the most.

A very good book full of hateable characters! Classic Hemingway, the asshole knows how humans are.

By the way – the more I read the more I'm convinced he might have been gay. Lady Brett and the other women are described in whatever way. But he is so interested in describing men and their faces and their pretty lips and eyes. He writes about men how I write about men. It's a shame because I am frankly sick of reading about straight relationships and would love to read about gay love and/or grief in the style of Hemingway.

Found this in a little free library and recognized Kotter's name. Yet another Business Fable. The fable is not the most interesting read, but it's better than Lencioni's atrocious writing. Pages 131-134 are the practical parts of the book. I'd guess this was made for people “too busy” to read Kotter's other stuff, but one wonders: if someone can only process change when told a story about penguins on a melting iceberg, will they ever be competent enough to manage it?