Bookstorm

Happy Halloween.

I'd planned on reading Bram Stoker's Dracula over Halloween, but I got sucked into other Halloween books: Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights and Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes. I'm surprised at how Halloween-like Wuthering Heights is; Heathcliff is a creep and a ghoul (literally), and the book's gothic atmosphere perfectly reflects the stalking and domestic violence themes. Someone once told me Wuthering Heights is a love story, but I fail to see how that could be; I think this person confused the nineteenth-century concept of romance with its modern equivalent. Heathcliff is more Count Dracula than Fitzwilliam Darcy. But the story isn't as dusty as you might expect; you could easily transpose it into a modern setting without changing any major details. Wuthering Heights holds up extremely. And, yes, it's a little scary.

Now, Something Wicked This Way Comes: I read this book years ago, and I remember it more for its elements than for its story. Bradbury seems to have gotten more crochety over the years--more like an old man--but with Something wicked This Way Comes, you'd think he never really grew up. I've always thought it the perfect Halloween novel: it's a horror novel, but without the genre's usual baggage, and it's creepy, but it's also a lot of fun--just as Halloween should be. (From the Dust Returned is also a Halloween book, but I remember it being dry and forced.) And Bradbury's prose here is pitch-perfect. It's like reading poetry.

Antonio Beccadelli's The Hermaphrodite sounds excellent.

... Following the publication of this collection of startlingly sexually explicit Latin poems in 1425-26, there was an outcry from moralists. Effigies of Beccadelli were burned in Bologna and Milan. Pope Eugenius IV threatened to excommunicate anyone found reading The Hermaphrodite. The work is honey to a decadent sensibility. In the 19th century, one of Beccadelli's biggest fans was Leonard Smithers, up-market pornographer and publisher of Aubrey Beardsley and OscarWilde. These poems are vivid and raunchy. If there is a tendency to associate the Italian Renaissance only with high culture, then Beccadelli reminds you that Renaissance thinkers were all too familiar with the gutter.

[ ... ]

There is much ribald humour in this work. Beccadelli loves inverting cliches and playing with our expectations. One poem begins with a stereotypical description of the beauty of the countryside. Birds sing in the trees, a gentle breeze blows while a stream gurgles in the background. The muses dance in attendance ready to bestow their inspiration. It is a tired bucolic vision rehearsed by numerous poetasters. But Beccadelli won't allow us to enjoy this idyll for long. For on to the scene comes a bloated peasant who promptly evacuates his bowels with such force that the birds fall from their perches and the muses depart in disgust. All attempts at poetic composition are impossible in the face of such a stench. The description is so graphic it makes it impossible to enjoy any other pastoral scene again. One is always looking out for the peasant in the corner preparing to shit.

That asshole reverend Pat Robertson would probably enjoy this round-up ...

• I want to "read" Lynd Ward's six wordless novels.
• Linguists are bringing the King James Bible back to Earth, and finding that God's word isn't as influential as most people think.
• The Paris Review talks with Robert Crumb about how he adapted Genesis.
• "This shit writes itself."

The Garden of Eden might be the best thing Ernest Hemingway ever wrote. It's also very erotic, centering around David Bourne and his new wife, Catherine, and their travels on the French Riviera in the 1920s. The Garden of Eden is a love story, but it has a darker side: Catherine is manic depressive--something Hemingway struggled with his entire life--and David is overwhelmed: she had never shown signs of depression during their courtship.

Hemingway explores his themes--polyamory, depression, and jealousy--with a furtive touch. I'm wondering how autobiographic the novel is. If you read it carefully, you'll find Hemingway himself lurking in the pages, wrestling with his own demons. The Garden of Eden is deeply personal. It's no wonder he worked on it for fifteen years without ever finishing it.

Sylvia Plath committed suicide in 1963, at the age of thirty, and her death has been the subject of a lot of creepy fascination. Now the New Statesman has published a previously-unseen Ted Hughes poem, in which he details the days leading up to Sylvia Plath's 1963 suicide.

"Last letter" is a poem that describes what happened during the three days leading up to the suicide of his first wife, the poet Sylvia Plath. Its first line is: "What happened that night? Your final night."--and the poem ends with the moment Hughes is informed of his wife's death.

Here's more:

In the poem's last stanzas, Hughes describes the cold winter's morning when he found out what had happened.

"I lit my fire. I had got out my papers. And I'd started to write when the telephone jerked awake, in a jabbering alarm, remembering everything.

"It recovered in my hand, and a voice like a selected weapon or a measured injection coolly delivered its four words deep into my ear.

"Your wife is dead."

I have little sympathy for Hughes, who must have been a very charming man: he left Plath to settle down with his mistress, Assia Wevill. Wevill killed herself (by asphyxiation, like Plath) and their four-year-old daughter in 1969.

Mario Vargas Llosa won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Peter Englund, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, said in an interview on the Nobel Prize's Web site that Mr. Vargas Llosa "is a masterful when it comes to dialogue ... and always goes for the big picture." Mr. Englund also noted that the author has "continued to produce a number of excellent works in fiction."

I have The Bad Girl sitting around somewhere. I'll get to it sooner or later, which isn't saying much; I've owned J. M. G. Le Clézio's Wandering Star for years and haven't even cracked it open.

October crept up on me, and now some Swedish panel has selected the next Nobel literature laureate. They'll announce the winner on October seventh, and I'll do my best to give a damn. It's getting harder every year, though.