The Reader Travels

On the subject of drugged out road trips, James Michener’s The Drifters takes us on a trip through Spain and northern Africa in a Volkswagen Microbus with some young hippies who have lost their way. The trip starts with a draft dodger who escapes the US through Canada. He meets some new friends in Torremolinos, Spain, somebody buys a VW bus, and the adventures roll.

I enjoyed reading this book, even with the conservative Michener’s minor judgment upon these silly youths and their dangerous drugs. Of course, he had to have the obligatory bad acid trip scene. Thankfully, the girl slept through most of her bad trip, so that helped.

One fun thing about the book was all the little quotes at the beginning of each chapter, my favorite of which was, “King Kong died for our sins,” though I’m not quite sure what it means, even after reading this poem. I’m also not sure if the quotes added meaning to the chapters, or if they were just a fun diversion like singing camp songs to pass time along the highway.

When people ask me what I saw when I went to England, I say, “Oh, the usual – Stonehenge, Buckingham Palace, the Sistine Chapel.”  When D’s aunt told us not to make any plans for Wednesday, that she had a special surprise for us, none of us could have guessed we’d be taking a day trip to Rome.

Ever since I read Irving Stone’s The Agony and the Ecstasy, my thoughts of Rome have centered on one thing — Michelangelo’s Pietà — and though we saw so many things, this was the one that mattered to me. A student of philosophy, I’m more into Greece than I am Rome, but this image of a mother holding her dead son whose body has just undergone untold torture, this is something I can feel passionate about. It’s the juxtaposition of humanity and inhumanity, the universal love of a mother for her child.

For similar reasons, my favorite story from ancient Greece is that of Medea, a woman so scorned, so powerless that she takes the lives of her own children.  It’s the one thing she can do to hurt Jason, who has left her for a younger woman, and her need to hurt him surpasses her need to protect her children.  But she is cursed, for she must live with her choice and her own loss, magnified in this act of desperation.

Back in England, we caught a few scenes from Ordinary People on the television, yet another tale of a mother dealing with the death of her son.  We saw only one scene with the mother, and if you didn’t know what the story was about, you’d just think the mother was a bitch and write her off.  But knowing, as she lashes out at her remaining son, you can see her pain and know how deep her loss has cut her.

Ave Maria.

My fifth trip for the The Armchair Traveler Reading Challenge took me to the island of Crete, one of the many treasures of Greece. Since Zorba the Greek was written before the tourist industry started booming in Crete, Nikos Kazantzakis gives us an unspoiled look at the land and the culture. We see beautiful blue waters, birds and carob trees. We take a trip up into the forested mountains to a burned out monastery, along the coast to a convent and into some ruins left by the ancient inhabitants of the land.

Zorba the Greek is at once a celebration of and an apology for the misogyny that had its roots in ancient Greece and gained a new flavor with the transition to Christianity. I never read a book that had more to say about how wretched and disgusting women are. Zorba who claims to love women can’t say enough about how evil, and at the same time pathetic, they are. He takes pity on them.

We see all of this feminine vileness as a contrast to the beauty of the Platonic ideal of two men, one older, one younger, sharing a higher love with one another than could ever be achieved with a woman. Zorba the Greek explores the history of Greece, from the ancient religion to the philosophies of Plato to the Greek Orthodox faith to the politics of nationalism.

The book is thin on plot but strong on characterization. It seems as though nothing really happens until the last four chapters of the book, and then it’s over, back to the philosophical meanderings of the narrator.

On the other hand, the vivid characterization of Zorba makes him a perfect candidate for both stage and screen. He is Zeus and Dionysus and Eros, his life a celebration of women and wine and song. He is to be immortalized.

My third review for the The Armchair Traveler Reading Challenge takes us to the Eastern European city of Prague in the Bohemian land now known as the Czech Republic.

Originally published in 1891, The Witch of Prague, by F. Marion Crawford, gives us a picture of Prague rife with history, alchemy and images of architecture that still stands today. For a book written over a hundred years ago, the language is engaging and fluid, more action than description.

It does get pretty melodramatic, though, especially in the latter chapters. At times I felt like I was watching the action on a stage. The scene would open, the drama would unfold, and the scene would close, curtains dropping, adding to the mystery.

The story plays on the juxtaposition of science and mysticism which underlies Prague’s historical obsession with alchemy. The title character, whose name is Unorna, is known as a witch, and her talent lies in her ability to hypnotize people at will. There’s a whole discourse on the popular psychology of the day, speaking of hypnotism in scientific terms even as the nuns fear her talent as something granted by the devil.

Unorna works with a bearded little man named Keyork Arabian trying to find the key to immortality, which is Keyork’s life obsession. This search for the “elixir of life” is their secret as Unorna travels a journey of her own, falling in love with a man we know only as The Traveler. Her goal is to have him as her own, even if it means hypnotizing him into loving her.

I found the racism to be a little disconcerting in this book. The Devil is represented by a short Arab, while God is a tall old white man. One of Unorna’s victims is a Jew, who is described as having vulture like features and as suffering from “one of those intermittent phases of blind fatalism to which the Semitic races are peculiarly subject.”

One special touch in reading this book, was the volume itself. I checked the book out via inter-library loan from the Texas Tech University library. It had been printed in 1909, its binding worn, its pages yellowed and powdery, the illustrations fading. There was an old date stamp log glued to the inside cover, and I could see the dates where it been checked out -– 1924, 1945… It added to the gothic intrigue, the feelings of continuity, history and eternity.

Overall, the journey to Prague was time well spent.

Something of the divine has touched me this week. I started a new book, Eat, Pray, Love, by Elizabeth Gilbert. A dozen books were waiting on my shelves to be read, and none of them seemed right, until I spotted this one, a recent birthday gift from a dear friend. I felt something akin to relief when I opened its pages and started to read.

In the opening chapters, she spoke of her failed marriage, and how she cried on her bathroom floor every night until one day she found herself praying to God for the first time in her life. When God told her (in her own voice) to go back to bed, she did. I closed the book and slept with her.

The next morning, I woke to a letter from my husband telling me he had this strangely out-of-character thought that God might be challenging him so he could be a better person. There was something in his letter that connected with the chapters I had read the night before, so I left them for him to read. After he read them, he said, “That’s just plain spooky.” And I had to agree.

As I read further, something else she wrote connected with me. She said to a Balinese medicine man, “I guess what I want to learn is how to live in this world and enjoy its delights, but also devote myself to God.” This is an important theme for the memoir, and an important theme for me too. To deny myself the pleasure of love and good food and wine is to deny myself a connection with the divine.

Last night I spent the evening with my three best friends in celebration of an upcoming wedding. We ate a wonderful meal at a Spanish restaurant we’d never been to before, and afterward we had wine and chocolate while listening to live jazz music and sharing gifts with the bride to be. I stared across the table at these three women I love, watching them laugh, loving their talk of language and connecting with people across the world, and I felt blessed.

Today I am resting. I wrote in my journal, read part of my book, took a long nap with the dog and watched a movie. The movie was Babette’s Feast about these two austere women in Denmark who have devoted their lives to the memory of their father, a pastor and leader in their small community. They give shelter and work to a Parisian woman exiled from her home, and she teaches them about the enjoyment of life, love and good food.

At the feast we hear the words of the long-dead father spoken by one who remembered them. “For mercy and truth are met together. And righteousness and bliss shall kiss one another.”

Following the little people back to the Rhine, I find myself in Germany during World War II, picking Stones from the River. Trudi is a bitter dwarf with a good heart, and through her eyes, we can see what it must have been like to live under the fear of Hitler.

Since my heart doesn’t bleed, I was a little annoyed by Trudi and her sappy-ass story. Woe is Trudi. She’s short and stubby and her ma is loony and she can’t get laid and she’s living in troubled times and she can’t grow no matter how many times she hangs by her fingernails from the door frame. Poor, poor Trudi.

Don’t get me wrong. It was a great read, and I loved the picture it painted of a happy, little town turned into a land of paranoia and violence. I just found myself sighing in exasperation at how pathetic she was sometimes.

She’s kinda like Holden Caulfield. If you read Catcher in the Rye, try to count the number of times Holden says, “And then I got more depressed.” Trudi’s story has a whole lot more adventure, but see if you can count her woes. She’s a friggin’ drama queen.

If you want to immerse yourself in the Norse myths, Thorarinn Gunnarson can take you travelling on the wings of valkyries, soaring from the heavens to the tree that gave birth to the gods on earth, to the Rhine river and beyond. His novels Song of the Dwarves and Revenge of the Valkyrie are a fun way to learn all about the origins of the world and the forging of that pesky ring, blessed with power and cursed with blood.

My first step in writing this entry was to retrieve these two books from my shelves so I could spell the author’s name. The second step was to look for a biography in the back of the books so I could maybe figure out if Thorarinn was a he or a she. That having failed, I looked it up on the Internet.

That’s where things got interesting. Every reference I’ve found refers to Thorarinn as “he,” but that’s about all anyone can say about this mysterious writer, other than the fact that “Thorarinn Gunnarsson” is, in fact, a pseudonym.

I really enjoyed this piece on the myth of Thorarinn Gunnarsson. He has not only rewritten the Norse myths, he has made of himself an all new mythology. And I am now convinced that Thorarinn is no mere Viking. He must truly be Odhinn himself.

From Avalon in the British isles, we travel across the North Sea to enter the mainland via the Rhine River. The river has a rich and magical history, whose mythologies gave birth to modern day fantasy fiction. If Middle Earth were a real place, this is where it would be.

Stephan Grundy’s Rhinegold takes us back in time and imagination, where we can take part in the wicked games of the Norse gods - Wodan and Loki and others. We learn the tale of the ring forged from gold found in the Rhine River. There are dragons and dwarves and gods making magic.

But this is no ordinary fantasy. In fact, it’s one of the most righteously violent books I have ever read. Sure there were wars and battles aplenty in Tolkein’s works, but that’s not what I’m talking about. This is man to man, man to beast, cutting to the bone.

Some of the best scenes are of the hunt, one man, one blade. It makes me think what wimpy sportsmen we have today, hunting with guns. If you can chase that animal down and grab it with both arms and wrestle it to the ground as your knife stabs into it, and your heart beats faster as you feel your prey’s heart stop, well then, you, my friend, are a sportsman.