Surviving is something to do

The ways of the heart cannot be explained. It does what it wants.

This morning I woke up and allowed myself a moment of wistfulness, I watched the hazy morning light through the curtains and thought of him, just for a second, how he'd commented on the view of naked me in the foreground with the light through the billowing curtains, and I thought how I miss waking up with someone, I haven't done that in years, I'd like that, not every day but once in a while, say, on a lazy weekend. 

But it's Wednesday and I woke up with the cat, she waits for me to put my feet on the floor before asking me to feed her, and already I'm thinking about work. I've enjoyed an extra long weekend, so I'm ready for it. I allow myself the time to enjoy the coffee, not simply consume it, and I do a German lesson, a 225-day streak.

I work steadily, productively. I join the online meditation group for a session at noon, it succeeds only in helping my mind wander. (What novel can I get for my mother? I don't know anything about historical romance. Some vaguely literary options cross my mind, but it turns out they're not available in Polish.)

I turn on the TV and despair that the US Supreme Court nominee refuses to comment on hypotheticals, and our reality consists of hypotheticals. Cigarettes cause cancer because it says so on the package, but human impact on climate change is hypothetical. 

The inspection on my mother's house comes back indicating potential mould in the attic, and the buyers are concerned. I wonder about the teenage years I spent in the room with door to attic and if the mould seeped into me then. I google remedies, for the house, that is, and costs. Any mould deep in my brain had better lie undisturbed.

After weeks of seemingly no news of the plague in the outside world, suddenly there is news, lots of it, none of it good. In Europe, record highs, school interruptions, partial lockdowns. Paris is closed.

I exchange sexy messages with a man I've never met who lives half a world away. I tell the man I've never touched how much I miss the possibility of touching him. I believe my words to be true.

Is any of this real? 

I work steadily, productively, for hours more, but I stop at a reasonable hour, before I'm finished. As is typical, I haven't even started the one thing I expected I would do today.

I watch a couple episodes of Dark (having watched the first season upon its release, I've had to rewatch it before seeing the rest of the series) and wish I could travel back 33 years, or maybe a year ahead, or maybe two months ago. My heart believes in free will, but some days it contradicts itself. I think about how random my life is with its occasional infuriating perfection.

I'm reading Solutions and Other Problems, by Allie Brosh, and it makes me laugh in the way you laugh when if you didn't laugh you would cry.

But, as long as you aren't dead, you need something to do. And surviving is something to do.

A hunger that whetted itself on what you fed it

One spared life might be worth more to the other side than all the blood that stained Red's hands today. A fugitive becomes a queen or a scientist or, worse, a poet.

This Is How You Lose the Time War, by El by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, is an incredibly poetic time-travel story.

Red is an agent of the Commandant; Blue is of the Garden. "My viney-hivey elfworld, as you say, versus your techy-mechy dystopia."

Red:"Red likes to feel. It is a fetish."
Blue: "She wears antique typewriter keys on her fingertips in veneration of the great god Hack."

Some reviews liken it to The Time Traveler's Wife (of which I'm not a fan). I have yet to see a review that makes something of the obvious Doctor Who reference. Whatever the inspiration for this novel, it is beautiful, romantic, fresh.

Two agents on opposing sides leave letters for each other across time and space as they manipulate strands of time. The type of beings they are is suggested rather than explained, and the nature of the war is never addressed (and I like that it's open to interpretation). Similarly their letters take on very creative forms (e.g., one message is read in tea leaves).

In this regard it is similar to Basic Black with Pearls: the agents see everything as having a coded significance, but they can never be certain of it.

All that supposing Blue even sent this message — that Red has not manufactured it, groping in despair for meaning in broken images the next braid's twist will wash away. Art comes and goes in the war. The painting on the subway wall might be an accident. She might be making this up.

But.

There is a chance.

At least here, the feeling is mutual.

I am yours in other ways as well: yours as I watch the world for your signs, apophenic as a haruspex; yours as I debate methods, motives, chances of delivery; yours as I review you words by their sequence, their sound, smell, taste, taking care no one memory of them becomes too worn. Yours.

The language at times pulled me out of the story. Nouns disguised as verbs led me down garden paths; I had to retrace my steps to unravel the syntax. But the poetry of it led me through the maze of my own heart.

Love:
"I want to be a context for you."
"Only in this nonexistent place our letters weave do I feel weak. How I love to have no armor here."

And hunger:

But hunger is a many-splendoured thing; it needn't be conceived only in limbic terms, in biology. Hunger, Red — to sate a hunger or to stoke it, to feel hunger as a furnace, to trace its edges like teeth — is this a thing you, singly, know? Have you ever had a hunger that whetted itself on what you fed it, sharpened so keen and bright that it might split you open, break a new thing out.

Blue has deep hunger inside her, and they have yet to learn what timey-wimey role Red had in inspiring it.

I remember a kiss and something to eat. It was so kind, I couldn't fathom it as unfriendly. As fairy tale as it gets, really. I remember bright light, and then — hunger. Hunger that was turning me inside out, hunger in the most primal way imaginable, hunger that obliterated every other thing — I couldn't see, I was so hungry, I couldn't breathe, and it was like something was opening up inside me and telling me to seek. I think some part of me must have been screaming, but I couldn't tell you which; my body was an alarm bell sounding. I turned all of myself toward Garden to be fed, to stem this, to me from disappearing —

Love somehow feeds itself.

My own folk are great gardeners. Our games are long and slow, and our maturation also. Garden seeds the a past us — your Commandant knows this already, whether or not it's considered need-to-know for you — and we learn from and grow into its threads. We treat the past as trellis, coax our vineyard through and around, and harvest is not a word for swiftness; the future harvests us, stomps us into wine, pours us back into the root system in loving libation, and we grow stronger and more potent together.

I have been birds and branches. I have been bees and wolves. I have been ether flooding the void between stars, tangling their breath into networks of song. I have been fish and plankton and humus, and all these have been me.

But while I've been enmeshed in this wholeness — they are not the whole of me.

By losing the time war, they win time and each other.

The best of all possible worlds

"So here is the question. Given that the information you have is necessarily imperfect. Given that the history of events is necessarily under-determined. The history that you choose to believe will determine the person that you are. If only in a small way. You will be a person who chose to see the world one way instead of another. And that choice will color the way you see the world, and your future, and your image in a mirror. You will never be able to determine conclusively why she acted as she did. But you can determine what kind of person you want to be.

"I can tell you this. That in the absence of perfect information, I choose to believe in the version of events that would occur in the best of all possible worlds."

Version Control, by Dexter Palmer, is a time-travel story. Only, without much time travel. And don't call it a time machine; the physicists in this story prefer "causality violation device."

This is the story of Rebecca, a customer service rep for an online dating service, and her physicist husband Philip, and all their issues. Set in the near future, Version Control covers marriage, grief, alcoholism, friendship, internet dating, self-driving cars (and the insurance implications thereof), racism, white privilege, male privilege, academia, big data, mass personalization, and secession of the Dakotas.

"If everyone could get on the same page and realize that we live in the future, we wouldn't have to deal with this bullshit."

There's a government conspiracy (possibly several). And some questions regarding free will and predetermination.

This is a future where Ronald Reagan is on the 20 dollar bill. At least some of the time.

I first heard about this novel during the 2017 Tournament of Books, where it was noted that "Version Control feels like 400 pages of realist, suburban minutiae with 100 pages of genuinely engaging science fiction slapped on at the end." The ensuing discussion sold me that Version Control was a must read.

In general, I'd say I like science fiction more than I like suburban minutiae. But I also rather like minutiae (it's the suburban stuff I'm not so keen on). What's interesting here is the effect of something as massive as time travel on the minutiae of an otherwise very ordinary existence.

So I read a few hundred pages sharing Rebecca's sense that something was out of whack, with no evidence of any kind that the time machine actually worked. And it was absolutely engrossing.

Who's to say what the best of all possible worlds is? Though the novel's ending is in some ways troubling, ultimately I find in it a hopeful message urging an acceptance of this world as the best of all possible worlds, as it cannot be proven otherwise.

Discussion of Version Control in the Tournament of Books:
Opening Round (vs My Name Is Lucy Barton)
Quarterfinals (vs The Mothers)
Semifinals (vs The Underground Railroad)

Complexity and simplicity

"You're interested in time?"

"Complexity and simplicity," he replied. "Time was simple, is simple. We can divide it into simple parts, measure it, arrange dinner by it, drink whisky to its passage. We can mathematically deploy it, use it to express ideas about the observable universe, and yet if asked to explain it in simple language to a child — in simple language which is not deceit, of course — we are powerless. The most it ever seems we know how to do with time is waste it."

So saying, he raised his glass in salute to me, and drank it down, though I found suddenly that I was not in a drinking mood.

— from The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, by Claire North.

Revisiting Ravenscrag

The other week I attended the launch of Alain Farah's Ravenscrag at Drawn & Quarterly (although the term "launch" seems to be used rather loosely by the store, as the book has been available since January).

The conversation with author Alain Farah (left) and his translator, Lazer Lederhendler (right), was moderated by Catherine Leclerc. Interestingly, it's Lederhendler who held the floor for most of the evening, probably because 1. his command of English is superior to that of the other parties, and 2. as translator, he's had to read and interpret the text particularly closely. He could've carried the evening on his own with his insight into the problems of translation.

Lededhendler notes that the novel may seem crazy — or better, "madcap" — but it's not insane. It holds to an internal logic.

The novel in French is titled Pourquoi Bologne, which I would think makes the thing as a whole something other than Montreal-centric, whereas the English takes for its title the name of a city landmark, grounding it very firmly. I can't help but think the title, and the impression it creates, affects the reception of the novel. Is it a different novel in English than it is in French? In fact, Farah occasionally refers to the translation as "Lazer's novel."

What I hadn't considered is how much the schizoid experience of the book is meant to reflect a francophone's experience in English Montreal — I can't tell if I didn't recognize this because I'm still so much an outsider to this city that I can't see some of its essential paradoxes, or that I'm so much of here already that the issues appear commonplace and don't strike me the way they would if I were reading about some foreign place.

The underground geography of the McTavish reservoir, its pipes and tubes, Farah says was inspired by Terry Gilliam.

This novel is not a linear narrative because that's not Farah's experience of the world.

[I had several issues with the event: it started late (about 30 minutes or so, though I'd stopped checking the time); the way chairs were set up severely restricted movement, particularly access to the author (for a subsequent event I attended, someone had the sense to stack chairs to clear floorspace once the formal portion of the event was through); in fact, the author appeared to be at a cocktail party rather than a book-signing (I had every intention of buying a copy of the book for a friend, but I didn't, because it was difficult to interrupt his small talk and more awkward to ask that he bestow the favour of his signature (at the subsequent event, the author sat at a table and there was a clear lineup for signings). Keeping it casual can be cool, but I'd bet it's detrimental to book sales.]

Things I would've liked to ask the author (but didn't, because the question period was cut short because it was weirdly silent and I'd already asked a question, and because I failed to schmooze my way into conversation with him):

• What exactly is retro scifi? Is it a thing your marketing department came up with, just because you mention Philip K. Dick?
• What is the relationship between insanity and time travel? You seem to be deeply influenced by Philip K. Dick; to what extent is the relationship between insanity and time travel in your novel inspired by or modeled after Dick's depictions?
• Although he has a cult following, Dick has never really been accepted by the literary establishment (to the extent even that none of the reviews of your novel I've read appear to recognize his influence): Does that hold true among French readers? (To what extent is genre an English problem?) How do you feel about the genre-ification of literature, that Dick should be ghetto-ized? How would you feel if your book were shelved in SF?

It was a dark and stormy night

So begins Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time. "It was a dark and stormy night." What kind of deprived childhood did I have that I'm reading it only now?

It's touted as a classic, and I'd picked up a copy this summer thinking it would make for perfect mother-daughter bedtime story reading. I hadn't read it, and I figured I could force it into Helena's perfect childhood, or rather, with this act I would perfect her childhood, and right my own.

(Also, she reads at this level comfortably in French, and readily picks up whatever her peers deem the cool livre du jour. She's not exposed to English books much except through me, and I continue to find it tough to inspire her with anything other than comic books and compilations of weird facts [not that there's anything wrong with that]. This novel seemed likelier than some.)

So we started. And she fell asleep. A few nights later, we decided to continue. Only she didn't remember anything, so we went back to the beginning. And she fell asleep. And some nights after that... Lather, rinse, repeat.

I know chapter 1. I know every square inch of Meg's attic. I can picture every shelf of the pantry. I know intimately Mrs Whatsit's socks. (Helena has not yet had the pleasure. Or at least, she doesn't remember it.)

One dark and stormy night this week I'd had enough and stormed off to read the rest on my own.

Suddenly she was aware of her heart beating rapidly within the cage of her ribs. Had it sopped before? What had made it start again? The tingling in her arms and legs grew stronger, and suddenly she felt movement. This movement, she felt, must be the turning of the earth, rotating on its axis, traveling its elliptic course about the sun. And this feeling of moving with the earth was somewhat like the feeling of being in the ocean, out in the ocean beyond this rising and falling of the breakers, lying on the moving water, pulsing gently with the swells, and feeling the gentle, inexorable tug of the moon.

Beautiful! And it reminded me of something else I'd heard by a fellow also familiar with time travel.

Do you know like we were saying? About the Earth revolving? It's like when you're a kid. The first time they tell you that the world's turning and you just can't quite believe it 'cause everything looks like it's standing still. I can feel it. The turn of the Earth. The ground beneath our feet is spinning at 1,000 miles an hour and the entire planet is hurtling around the sun at 67,000 miles an hour, and I can feel it. We're falling through space, you and me, clinging to the skin of this tiny little world, and if we let go... That's who I am.

Verdict: utterly charming. Space travel, time travel. A showdown between good and evil. A two-dimensional planet. Alien music. A dystopian planet with some semblance of a hivemind but controlled by an evil intelligence. Furry, tentacle creatures of wisdom. What's not to like? The religious references felt a bit heavy and unnecessary, but really, I didn't mind. I think Helena would like it.

Oh, and! Tesseract! And lots of useful quotations in various languages! And a general appreciation for math and science and history and words.

"In your language you a have a form of poetry called the sonnet." [...] "It is a very strict form of poetry, is it not?" [...] "There are fourteen lines, I believe, all in iambic pentameter. That's a very strict rhythm or meter, yes?" [...] "And each line has to end with a rigid rhyme pattern. And if the poet does not do it exactly this way, it is not a sonnet, is it?" [...] "But within this strict form the poet has complete freedom to say whatever he wants, doesn't he?"

[...]

"You're given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself. What you say is completely up to you."

"For most people hindsight only works backwards"

The most ridiculous thing I read this summer was a Doctor Who book. And it wasn't even a "proper" Doctor Who book. The Angel's Kiss: A Melody Malone Mystery.

It's written by Justin Richards channelling Melody Malone, who wrote the pulp mystery novel the Doctor was reading in "The Angels Take Manhattan," and Melody Malone turns out to be the pen name of River Song, back in time. It's not actually the same novel that was worked into the plot of that episode, but it's all River à la femme fatale.

Evening was drawing in and the cars had their lights on, cutting through the inevitable rain. I watched the drops paint clear lines down the grubby cab windows. We drove in binary fashion — either stop or go. Go was fast, and stop was sudden. The journey was punctuated by a liberal use of the horn, presumably to make up for the complete avoidance of the indicator lights.

Finally the cab drew up at the kerb with a jerk. The jerk stayed behind the steering wheel as I eased myself out.

"You need a ride later?" he asked, apparently serious.

I found the exact fare and told him: "Oh, I hope not." If he wanted a tip, then I was ready with: "Stop for red lights."

It's a short book, short for a novella even, and it's not exactly big on plot, though there is one. It makes up for all that in attitude.

It made me laugh — and I was guffawing loudly at its awful punniness more than chuckling lightly at its charming wit.

Much of the humour is pretty sexy, "buttoned and unbuttoned in the best places and pointing in the right direction." Nothing I wouldn't let my 10-year-old read, but the flirtation would be entirely lost on her. Too much River. Not enough Cybermen, or Daleks, or Weeping Angels. Hell, the Doctor's not even in it. The kid would be bored to tears.

I, on the other hand, am old enough to know better. I love the Doctor and science fiction, River and noir. And it's easy, and thrilling, to imagine this story being purred to you in the voice of River Song herself.

Ridiculous, but such fun!

Have you read anything embarrassing lately?

Time-slip, gubble, gubble

I can see what lies ahead for me if I continue to lose, step by step, to this completely psychotic boy. Now I can see what psychosis is: the utter alienation of perception from the objects of the outside world, especially the objects which matter: the warmhearted people there. And what takes their place? A dreadful preoccupation with — the endless ebb and flow of one's own self. The changes emanating from within which affect only the inside world. It is a splitting apart of the two worlds, inner and outer, so that neither registers on the other. Both still exist, but each goes its own way.

It is the stopping of time. The end of experience, of anything new. Once the person becomes psychotic, nothing ever happens to him again.

Martian Time-Slip, by Philip K. Dick, is a gem of a novel.

For some reason, it's taken me ages to read this slim book (220 pages). Everything moves along nicely (though some sci-fi fans call it slow), the English is easy, you want to know what happens next — it's not exactly demanding, but I think it deserves to be processed, not to be rushed.

It's set on Mars, but it's not a distant shiny high-tech future — it's a wild west–type frontier, with land claim stakes, the maltreatment of aboriginal people (Bleekmen), travelling salesmen, and Union politics.

Earth is overpopulated. Mental illness afflicts one in three. Earth has established other colonies, but Mars is a near-forgotten outpost — humans have never managed to irrigate the land sufficiently (or understand the ways of the Bleekmen) to support large numbers. Jack Bohlen emigrated to Mars to ease his schizophrenia, by living a simpler life. Jack's wife regularly pops pills to stave off mental illness, and this it portrayed as a commonplace practice.

Jack encounters Arnie Kott, a tycoon of sorts with his own psychological problems. Arnie's son is in a facility for children with, as we say these days, special needs — he's autistic, as is the Manfred, the son of Jack's neighbour. Manfred's dad early on commits suicide, the ultimate manifestation of his depression.

One doctor has a theory regarding mental illness: that if life is a movie, for the mentally ill it plays at too many frames a second for them to comprehend. To establish communication with those who are closed off by or trapped inside their illness, life must be replayed for them in slow motion. Arnie commissions Jack to build such a mechanism.

Dick conflates schizophrenia with autism, and with depression too. Whether the basis for this comes from the medical literature of the period or from Dick's own experience I do not know, but for an open-minded reader this conflation shouldn't upset the exploration of how time is perceived and processed.

Because of this time-processing distortion, it's believed that Manfred can see the future. Indeed, Jack and others appear to have flashes of what is to come, but Arnie, while ostensibly seeking to help his own son, is interested in tapping knowledge of the future as evidenced in the most disturbed individuals for personal gain. But then, everyone has an agenda.

The novel starts getting a little trippy about halfway through. There's a brilliant and disturbing sequence where the same scene is replayed, including from Manfred's perspective (gubble, gubble) — it's an overlay of potential outcomes. Add to Manfred's visions the Bleekmen's shamanistic-like practices, and Arnie believes he's found a way to travel through time and better manipulate his business dealings. But, fate and all that.

Martian Time-Slip has political intrigue and personal drama. And Immanuel Kant. And as a time-travel novel, it is remarkably complex and subtle.

Written in 1964, it is slightly dated in its portrayal of women and its understanding of mental illness, both of which I believe are forgivable as a product of its time.

Reviews
Brian Aldiss:

ANY DISCUSSION OF DICK'S WORK makes it sound a grim and appalling world. So, on the surface, it may be; yet it must also be said that Dick is amazingly funny. The terror and the humor are fused. It is this rare quality which marks Dick out. This is why critics, in seeking to convey his essential flavour, bring forth the names of Dickens and Kafka, earlier masters of ghastly comedy.

Bill Sherman, Blogcritics: "But his core ideas and characterization remain transcendent; even if some of the jargon employed to explain the psychological ideas seem a bit dated."

Jason K., PhilipKDick.com: "It's avoidance of unbelievable and fantastic futuristic adventures works in its favor. The characters are faced with very recognizable and realistic dilemmas."

Read Martian Time-Slip online.

Windows onto time

I've just seen Uraniborg, an exhibition of the work of Laurent Grasso at the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal. The exhibit is named for Tycho Brahe's island castle-observatory.

According to the museum website,

Grasso continues his exploration of space and temporality as he seeks to create what he calls a "false historical memory." In this in-between place where true and false intermingle, the all-pervading observation of the sky underlies a broader examination of seeing, watching and surveillance, at the same time as it opens up a path to possible worlds.

Please see Canadian Art for a most excellent summary of this conceptual installation.

The exhibit is a marvelous experience — the space is labyrinthine, it's dark, it's full of ambient sound, it feels like a mystery and a discovery. It feels like the videogame Myst — mysterious islands, weird technology, messages from a future past.

It's a perfect fit with the odd manuscripts lately invading my mind. Today I read about Kircher leading his blindfolded biographer into a labyrinth beneath a basilica, and as part of a science experiment. My discovery today of Uraniborg embodied the same spirit.

A child is rather horribly perfect

Good science fiction movies for kids are hard to find, but The Last Mimzy may qualify.

Helena and I watched The Last Mimzy this weekend, finally, many, many months after the IT guy at my office (since retired) recommended it. (Actually, we'd watched the beginning on Youtube but had been unable to find all the movie's parts; conveniently, a DVD turned up to be included among Helena's birthday presents.)

You may recognize "mimzy" as "mimsy," a word occurring in Lewis Carroll's "Jaberwocky," which served as inspiration for Lewis Padgett's 1943 short story, "Mimsy Were the Borogoves":

How can an immature human understand the complicated system of social relationships? He can't. To him, an exaggeration of natural courtesy is silly. In his functional structure of life-patterns, it is rococo. He is an egotistic little animal, who cannot visualize himself in the position of another, certainly not an adult. A self-contained, almost perfect natural unit, his wants supplied by others, the child is much like a unicellular creature floating in the blood stream, nutriment carried to him, waste products carried away —

From the standpoint of logic, a child is rather horribly perfect. A baby may be even more perfect, but so alien to an adult that only superficial standards of comparison apply. The thought processes of an infant are completely unimaginable. But babies think, even before birth. In the womb they move and sleep, not entirely through instinct. We are conditioned to react rather peculiarly to the idea that a nearly-viable embryo may think. We are surprised, shocked into laughter, and repelled. Nothing human is alien.

But a baby is not human. An embryo is far less human.

The story is rather philosophical (as all the best SF is), and uses a mathematical paradigm to demonstrate its thesis. The film diverges greatly from its source material, and at times comes across as more new-age-y than scientific. But it embodies a similar, even broader, spirit to the story, and it is nonetheless thoughtful and thought-provoking.

Full text of "Mimsy Were the Borogoves."
William Shatner reads "Mimsy Were the Borogoves" (in 6 parts).

This is a secret

[I am writing this after the household has fallen asleep.]

Clare: This is a secret: sometimes I am glad when Henry is gone. Sometimes I enjoy being alone. Sometimes I walk through the house late at night and I shiver with the pleasure of not talking, not touching, just walking, or sitting, or taking a bath. Sometimes I lie on the living room floor and Listen to Fleetwood Mac, the Bangles, the B-53's, the Eagles, bands Henry can't stand. Sometimes I go for long walks with Alba and I don't leave a note saying where I am. Sometimes I meet Celia for coffee, and we talk about Henry, and Ingrid, and whoever Celia's seeing that week. Sometimes I hang out with Charisse and Gomez, and we don't talk abut Henry, and we manage to enjoy ourselves. Once I went to Michigan and when I came back Henry was still gone and I never told him I had been anywhere. Sometimes I get a baby-sitter and I go to the movies or I ride may my bicycle after dark along the bike path by Montrose beach with no lights; it's like flying.

Sometimes I am glad when Henry's gone, but I'm always glad when he comes back.

I must be the last person on the planet to have read Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife. A friend had been pressing it on me, loaned me her copy, and I've kept it on standby for months. Being that I'd just read a story that featured a time-traveler's knowledge of the future in all its free-will-versus-determinism glory, now seemed like the right time.

Best book ever? I'll have to tell my friend, No. But very charming, and worth reading. I'm a little puzzled actually, because this friend loves science fiction and disdains romance; this novel, however, has just a hint of sf in its premise, which is mostly incidental to a first-class love story.

It does remind of a few books that I do love, namely, The Gold Bug Variations by Richard Powers (for the tone, the character interaction) and What I Loved by Siri Hustvedt (for what it says about absence being fully present). Also, the several quotes from A.S. Byatt's Possession has me thinking about rereading that book.

Part of me simply wants to find flaws in this book that seems to be everybody's darling. Clare's too perfect (her loving The Eagles, a definite flaw, seems out of character). The amount of sex this couple has is unrealistic. The lottery didn't seem fair. Some passages tried too hard to be poetic. But who am I kidding? I was late for work one day last week cuz I just had to read to the end of the chapter, and I spent a good chunk of Saturday teary-eyed as I finished it off.

Henry: [...] Running is many things to me: survival, calmness, euphoria, solitude. It is proof of my corporeal existence, my ability to contol my movement through space if not time and the obedience, however temporary, of my body to my will. As I run I dispace air, and things come and go around me, and the path moves like a filmstrip beneath my feet. I remember, as a child, long before video games and the Web, threading filmstrips into the dinky projector in the school library and peering into them, turning the knob that advanced the frame at the sound of a beep. I don't remember anymore what they looked like, what they were about, but I remember the smell of the library, and the way the beep made me jump every time. I'm flying now, that golden feeling, as if I could run right into the air, and I'm invincible, nothing can stop me, nothing can stop me, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing — .

This same friend who loaned me The Time Traveler's Wife wonders if I've read other books that jump around in the chronology, books with a nonlinear narrative structure. Of course I have, I thought, but titles fail me, and my bookshelves are staring me down. Possibly The English Patient, but I don't have a copy on hand to check. Can you think of others?

Hope in hopelessness

Maybe because I don't care for Mahler.

The Lost Prince, by Selden Edwards, has a romantic and time-travelly premise, but I never fully engaged with it. It is the sequel to The Little Book, which I haven't read and don't feel compelled to.

The Lost Prince starts in Boston, in 1898. Eleanor Putnam has returned from Vienna with lovely reminiscences and remarkable knowledge. She brings a manuscript she has written about Vienna's musical life; a jewel that will serve her in making her fortune; and a journal that outlines her future. Eleanor in essence leads a secret life, putting in motion events she knows must come to pass.

Spanning 20 years, the book is peopled by William James, Gustav Mahler, JP Morgan, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung. Eleanor sings Mahler's praises, so early in the reading of this novel I was inspired to put some on. And I was reminded that I don't really care for Mahler. Too watery. Too florid.

The narration mostly has the tone of a biographical account. There is detachment, but also a sense that the narrator is judging characters in light of how the narrator knows the story to turn out. It's an interesting angle that mirrors how the characters are burdened with their own foreknowledge, but it's to the detriment of forming trust with and extracting sympathy from the reader.

A lot of information is divulged only as its required, as if the narrator suddenly remembered that it might be useful for the reader to know something even though it occurred 14 years previously and there's been no mention of it till now. And as often occurs in biographies, when the "story" shifts to cover another aspect or character, some information is repeated, either to remind the reader or to reconsider it in a new light.

The title was a bit of a mystery to me. It's about halfway through the novel that it becomes clear to whom the title is referring, and only near the end that the title is explained (and it's not relevant at all). I feel the story lacks focus and takes a long time to decide what it wants to be about.

A good chunk of the ssecond half of the novel covers the devastation of the first World War, in the form of letters from the front and later in Eleanor's search of the hospitals and wards that house the unfortunates, unknown and unclaimed.

"There is a great deal of hope within the hopelessness of your mission. There are thousands of unidentified and unaccounted-for soldiers in the aftermath of this horrible war. The odds are on your side."

This novel is about 200 pages too long. The war sections contribute little to the plot; while the repetition of the horrors might work to great literary effect when used by some writers, here it's at cross-purposes with the biographical tone, and so it managed only to bore me. The text is very repetitive, to the point that I felt no guilt in skimming for several pages at a time.

Yet. The Lost Prince has a great number of interesting threads to pull on. The exercise of free will in order to attain that which is predestined. How the present, and even the future, informs our past. Jung's collective unconscious, and how our dreams can inform our waking life.

I know little of William James, and what I know of Freud and Jung is mostly learned from popular culture. I'd be curious to know how well their ideas are represented by Edwards. I wish Edwards had spent more energy on these men and their ideas than on the eponymous subject.