Curious is an apt word to describe both the contents of this book and the character of 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics winner Richard Feynman it describes. It is a collection of stories told to his drumming partner Ralph Leighton, the son of another Caltech physicist. Several things are obvious from the tales the book contains, some positive and some less so. Feynman was a formidable intellect with an extraordinary capacity for work. Equally he’s a formidable bore with an extraordinary capacity for smugness!
As someone who is famous for his popularisation of complex theoretical physics and other esoteric ideas, a lot of the scientific explanations were arcane and impenetrable to the layperson. Whether this was a fault of Feynman’s stories or Leighton’s account of them is hard to tell from reading the book but I would probably go for the latter. The stories chosen give a strange and lopsided view of Feynman. For example, a long series of recollections about working on developing nuclear weapons at Los Alamos as a young man focus mainly on how to pick locks and break into filing cabinets, which is about as interesting as it sounds. There’s also a lot of pervy material on how to talk to girls in bars, how to ‘befriend’ showgirls in Vegas and his appreciation for strip clubs.
Taken as a whole, the book was boring and reminded me of listening to a loquacious person with a very high opinion of themselves drone on about their various exploits. A lot of these exploits are couched in transparent false modesty, which compounds the problem of their tediousness. Of course, Feynman lived an extraordinary life in terms of his intellectual achievements but this is no guarantee of his brilliance as a raconteur. On the evidence of this book he is definitely not someone I’d like to share a few drinks with!
There were some admirable aspects of his character that shone through the monotony of the anecdotes. He was interested in anything and everything, always found things out for himself and never trusted received opinion and worked with an almost maniacal fervour. He obviously considered himself a leading authority on pretty much anything he studied, perhaps quite accurately, but this makes his claims of modesty ring all the more hollow. His opinions about the rigours of the scientific method contained in the final chapter (‘Cargo Cult Science, adapted from a Caltech commencement speech given in 1974) was by far the best chapter in the book. This gave me the idea that maybe it was the compiler of this collection that was the major problem and that Feynman would be better encountered in his own words.
Feynman’s attitude to winning the Nobel Prize was very pleasing to me. He thought it was more hassle than it was worth because it made him a celebrity when all he really wanted was to be a physicist. This rang true to me for some reason but also made me reflect that: if he hadn’t have won this famous prize then no one would have written a book like this about him, which is ironic!
This was a boring book, full of bad stories but I’m intrigued to read more of Feynman in his own words or listen to his famous lectures on physics because I have a strong suspicion that this collection does not do him justice!
Monday 30 September 2019
Thursday 12 September 2019
The Bhagavad Gita - Introduced and Translated by Eknath Easwaran
One thought I had on finishing this book was that humans are very fond of tradition and will countenance ideas they would otherwise reject, simply because they are old and venerated. As social animals, this kind of conformity is not exactly unexpected but religious texts do seem to show its extent in startling terms. Equally, humans are so afraid, or ashamed, of some aspects of their character that they will believe in almost anything that promises them salvation from themselves or the pain of the world. To my mind, these promises are empty and specious because what does it mean to be a human if not to struggle with the duality of one’s nature? Desires to be freed from ‘evil’, a very slippery and subjective concept itself, and suffering amount to little more than a desire to be special, to be chosen, to be superior to one’s peers. This desire strikes me as cruel, elitist and at variance with most religious texts professed teleos; in Hinduism, oneness, or in Christianity love and forgiveness. The Bhagavad Gita contains a very good passages on how shitty we are as humans (16:12 - 16). But I was left confused as to how this cycle of shittiness is ever going to be broken if the omnipotent Krishna insists on not saving those with ‘demonic tendencies’ who are abandoned to ‘fall lower still’ (16:19-20). As with almost all religious texts I’ve read, I start to wonder, ‘what kind of God is this?!’; more on this later. Another major problem that follows is, ‘how did these ancients have such a personal relationship with the divine and why are they so conspicuously absent from life today?’ Of course, the language and narratives can be read metaphorically but the problem still remains as to whether they contain any more valuable knowledge than say, a Shakespeare play or a George Eliot novel. Perhaps it’s just because of my cultural background and impoverished knowledge of Vedic traditions and texts but my opinion is that they contain a good deal less wisdom and are much less enjoyable to read. For a start, what modern author would be taken seriously if they went about purporting to have intimate knowledge of the divine and the nature of the universe? This is the stuff of charlatans and snake oil salespeople and does not correspond with my experience of the human condition at all.
With reference to the format of this edition in particular, I disliked the introduction and ‘explanations’ that preceded each chapter. I would have preferred the material here to focus on the textual history of the Bhagavad Gita, it’s earliest known version (15th century, apparently), how it changed over the years, how it has been used by the communities that have preserved it etc. Instead, what you get is someone telling you what it means, which begs the obvious question of why the text can’t speak for itself concerning meaning? Clearly, a glossary of some of the terms that may be unfamiliar to the Western audience this book is aimed at is helpful. But given that each reader will, and should, have an individual response to any book I found it annoying that someone was trying to preface my interpretation and tell me what to think. I stopped reading them after the first couple of chapters.
Much of what is contained in the book I would describe as wishful non-thinking or fantasy. For example, 6:22 states of enlightened people, “they desire nothing, and cannot be shaken by the heaviest of burden of sorrow”. I wonder if anyone has ever attained this state and, even if they had, is it even desirable? What kind of person would be left unaffected by the death of a loved one? It seems to me that this level of detachment would rob the practitioner of the rich variety of life. Is it possible to love without the pain of loss? Here the text seems to gloss over the fundamental duality of human experience in a rather glib and unconvincing way.
Another issue, which I alluded to earlier, is the idea that there can be a hierarchy of human souls while simultaneously claiming that everything is one and that the ego is an illusion. For example, 12:6-7: “But they for whom I am the supreme goal, who do all work renouncing self for me and meditate on me with single-hearted devotion, these will I swiftly rescue from the fragment’s cycle of birth and death, for their consciousness has entered into me.” Not only does this strike me as contradictory given the claim that everything is one and depends on the creator, it also seems very petty and human in its conception. At its centre are the desires to be different from one’s peers and to be part of a special elite that will receive better treatment. 7:17-18, 9:22 and 9:33 would all serve equally well as an examples. What kind of omnipotent, all loving creator would indulge in such childish ‘them and us’ thinking? But Krishna goes even further than this in 16:19-20 saying, “Life after life I cast those who are malicious, hateful, cruel, and degraded into the wombs of those with similar demonic natures. Birth after birth they find themselves with demonic tendencies.” What kind of creator would do this to people? Certainly not one that I would dedicate myself to. Why can’t he save these people too? They seem more in need of salvation than the kind of emotionless sycophant that Krishna seems to want for devotees. To me, all humans are simultaneously the saved and the damned in varying degrees. Here I would quote Aleksander Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago when he writes, “If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” (p75). To me, there is more wisdom and understanding of humanity in this than the whole Bhagavad Gita.
Furthermore, it seems highly plausible to me that, like all important, powerful texts, this one has been created by a ruling elite or, at least, heavily redacted by one. “Devote everything to me”, it says, but of course there are no Gods on earth so this equates to, “give everything to this institution, which happens to be run by some humans”! I’d rather work the world out from my own experience and the experience of other humans rather than rely on make believe stories and imagined Gods. As an example, ‘The Gulag Archipelago’ by Alexander Solzhenitsyn gave me a far more moving and nuanced account of humanity without appeal to fanciful ideas and transparent attempts to control the thoughts and actions of the readership. For a document purporting to be divine, the Bhagavad Gita struck me as laughably human in its conception and aims. A good example of this is Krishna’s proud claim that the caste system came from him (4:13). This is a system that most people would now see as racist and abhorrent.
Another contradiction I found in the book was the idea that no one is responsible for their actions because it is all controlled by ‘gunas’ (3:27-28). Nonetheless, the whole book is peppered with calls to certain types of action for example only a few lines later (3:31-35). How is this possible if it is all controlled by ‘gunas’? Surely, humans either have agency and can be expected to act and discriminate or they do not. It is not immediately obvious to me how both can simultaneously be true. Again, these calls to a certain type of action or behaviour have the strong scent of humans who want to put themselves above other humans and to have privileged access to some kind of special knowledge. For example, “I will give you the secret of action, with which you can free yourself from bondage” (4:16). To me, life is not bondage and no one has the secret to free anyone from it except perhaps death, which no living person would be able to comment on. This kind of thinking belongs in the realm of fantasy. Examples are myriad, the end of fear with all action devoted to the holy class (6:14), the end of sorrow through meditation (6:17), attaining perfection (7:3). The contradictions are just as numerous. Later in the same chapter that introduces the fantasy of a life without sorrow we are told, “When a person responds to the joys and sorrows of others as if they were his own, he has attained the highest state of spiritual union” (6:32). If someone has moved beyond sorrow, how can they treat someone else’s as their own? This seems problematic for many reasons. First, Spinoza tells us that self-interest is the most powerful force in the universe. Second, from my own experience, I don’t believe there can be a life without sorrow nor that it would be desirable. Third, the text seems to be contradicting what it said only a few lines earlier. It simultaneously says, ‘you can get beyond sorrow and this is the highest aim’ and ‘experiencing sorrow is the highest aim’. Compared to the volumes of the thoughtful, coherent prose that one can read on the human condition, the Bhagavad Gita reads like confused gobbledy-gook!
The second aspect of the book I mentioned in the introduction - that people are afraid of their nature and want to be saved from it - is eloquently expressed in this book, especially chapter 16. Krishna gives a description of the two paths - the ‘good’ path of unity with him and the ‘bad’ path of rebirth. He says if we want to be good we should, amongst other things, not harm any living creature even though he has told Arjuna he is free to kill his enemies because he is only an instrument (11:33). However, the ‘bad’ path, to me, is really just a description of what it means to be a human. For example, “hypocrisy, arrogance, conceit, anger, cruelty, ignorance” (16:4) are listed as things that make a human more ‘inhuman’; but which human doesn’t have these qualities in some form? I would argue these are the very characteristics that make us human, even though that may be an unpleasant truth. What the Bhagavad Gita attempts to do in this chapter is to describe some of the less attractive aspects of humanity, 16:13-16 is another great example, and hold out the totally false idea that a person could escape being like this if they would only dedicate themselves to Krishna. To me, this is totally erroneous and misplaced. Humans must come to terms with the good and evil that run through all of us and I cannot see how it can be helpful to fantasise about attaining perfection when it has no basis in reality. The understanding of ‘evil’ presented is facil in the extreme. I prefer the nuance and acknowledgment of limitation described in works of literature like Shakespeare, “there is nothing good nor bad, lest thinking makes it so” (Hamlet), or Tolstoy, “it's not given to people to judge what's right or wrong. People have eternally been mistaken and will be mistaken, and in nothing more than in what they consider right and wrong” (War & Peace). The highly simplistic presentation in the Bhagavad Gita is, to me, a marketing trick to make people feel bad about themselves in the hope they will then join the cult. This kind of understanding of the human condition is absurdly basic and lies firmly in the realm of fantasy.
My final complaint are the unsubstantiated, petty claims the book makes about things humans could never know anything about. These struck me as little better than tarot card readings or astrology. 8:6 tells us that whatever we think about when we are dying determines “the destination of the dying”. Not only did I think this was silly and arbitrary, it also seems to contradict 2:20 when Krishna tells, “you will never die”. Not to mention the fact that I don’t believe that any human has any knowledge about what happens when you die. Chapter 14 splits everyone on earth into three types and claims you can identify them based on what kind of food they eat, I thought I may as well be reading a fucking horoscope! For me, there is such an abundance of good literature out there it’s a waste of time to bother with stuff like this except from a historical or anthropological perspective where I would agree it could be seen as a fascinating text.
With reference to the format of this edition in particular, I disliked the introduction and ‘explanations’ that preceded each chapter. I would have preferred the material here to focus on the textual history of the Bhagavad Gita, it’s earliest known version (15th century, apparently), how it changed over the years, how it has been used by the communities that have preserved it etc. Instead, what you get is someone telling you what it means, which begs the obvious question of why the text can’t speak for itself concerning meaning? Clearly, a glossary of some of the terms that may be unfamiliar to the Western audience this book is aimed at is helpful. But given that each reader will, and should, have an individual response to any book I found it annoying that someone was trying to preface my interpretation and tell me what to think. I stopped reading them after the first couple of chapters.
Much of what is contained in the book I would describe as wishful non-thinking or fantasy. For example, 6:22 states of enlightened people, “they desire nothing, and cannot be shaken by the heaviest of burden of sorrow”. I wonder if anyone has ever attained this state and, even if they had, is it even desirable? What kind of person would be left unaffected by the death of a loved one? It seems to me that this level of detachment would rob the practitioner of the rich variety of life. Is it possible to love without the pain of loss? Here the text seems to gloss over the fundamental duality of human experience in a rather glib and unconvincing way.
Another issue, which I alluded to earlier, is the idea that there can be a hierarchy of human souls while simultaneously claiming that everything is one and that the ego is an illusion. For example, 12:6-7: “But they for whom I am the supreme goal, who do all work renouncing self for me and meditate on me with single-hearted devotion, these will I swiftly rescue from the fragment’s cycle of birth and death, for their consciousness has entered into me.” Not only does this strike me as contradictory given the claim that everything is one and depends on the creator, it also seems very petty and human in its conception. At its centre are the desires to be different from one’s peers and to be part of a special elite that will receive better treatment. 7:17-18, 9:22 and 9:33 would all serve equally well as an examples. What kind of omnipotent, all loving creator would indulge in such childish ‘them and us’ thinking? But Krishna goes even further than this in 16:19-20 saying, “Life after life I cast those who are malicious, hateful, cruel, and degraded into the wombs of those with similar demonic natures. Birth after birth they find themselves with demonic tendencies.” What kind of creator would do this to people? Certainly not one that I would dedicate myself to. Why can’t he save these people too? They seem more in need of salvation than the kind of emotionless sycophant that Krishna seems to want for devotees. To me, all humans are simultaneously the saved and the damned in varying degrees. Here I would quote Aleksander Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago when he writes, “If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” (p75). To me, there is more wisdom and understanding of humanity in this than the whole Bhagavad Gita.
Furthermore, it seems highly plausible to me that, like all important, powerful texts, this one has been created by a ruling elite or, at least, heavily redacted by one. “Devote everything to me”, it says, but of course there are no Gods on earth so this equates to, “give everything to this institution, which happens to be run by some humans”! I’d rather work the world out from my own experience and the experience of other humans rather than rely on make believe stories and imagined Gods. As an example, ‘The Gulag Archipelago’ by Alexander Solzhenitsyn gave me a far more moving and nuanced account of humanity without appeal to fanciful ideas and transparent attempts to control the thoughts and actions of the readership. For a document purporting to be divine, the Bhagavad Gita struck me as laughably human in its conception and aims. A good example of this is Krishna’s proud claim that the caste system came from him (4:13). This is a system that most people would now see as racist and abhorrent.
Another contradiction I found in the book was the idea that no one is responsible for their actions because it is all controlled by ‘gunas’ (3:27-28). Nonetheless, the whole book is peppered with calls to certain types of action for example only a few lines later (3:31-35). How is this possible if it is all controlled by ‘gunas’? Surely, humans either have agency and can be expected to act and discriminate or they do not. It is not immediately obvious to me how both can simultaneously be true. Again, these calls to a certain type of action or behaviour have the strong scent of humans who want to put themselves above other humans and to have privileged access to some kind of special knowledge. For example, “I will give you the secret of action, with which you can free yourself from bondage” (4:16). To me, life is not bondage and no one has the secret to free anyone from it except perhaps death, which no living person would be able to comment on. This kind of thinking belongs in the realm of fantasy. Examples are myriad, the end of fear with all action devoted to the holy class (6:14), the end of sorrow through meditation (6:17), attaining perfection (7:3). The contradictions are just as numerous. Later in the same chapter that introduces the fantasy of a life without sorrow we are told, “When a person responds to the joys and sorrows of others as if they were his own, he has attained the highest state of spiritual union” (6:32). If someone has moved beyond sorrow, how can they treat someone else’s as their own? This seems problematic for many reasons. First, Spinoza tells us that self-interest is the most powerful force in the universe. Second, from my own experience, I don’t believe there can be a life without sorrow nor that it would be desirable. Third, the text seems to be contradicting what it said only a few lines earlier. It simultaneously says, ‘you can get beyond sorrow and this is the highest aim’ and ‘experiencing sorrow is the highest aim’. Compared to the volumes of the thoughtful, coherent prose that one can read on the human condition, the Bhagavad Gita reads like confused gobbledy-gook!
The second aspect of the book I mentioned in the introduction - that people are afraid of their nature and want to be saved from it - is eloquently expressed in this book, especially chapter 16. Krishna gives a description of the two paths - the ‘good’ path of unity with him and the ‘bad’ path of rebirth. He says if we want to be good we should, amongst other things, not harm any living creature even though he has told Arjuna he is free to kill his enemies because he is only an instrument (11:33). However, the ‘bad’ path, to me, is really just a description of what it means to be a human. For example, “hypocrisy, arrogance, conceit, anger, cruelty, ignorance” (16:4) are listed as things that make a human more ‘inhuman’; but which human doesn’t have these qualities in some form? I would argue these are the very characteristics that make us human, even though that may be an unpleasant truth. What the Bhagavad Gita attempts to do in this chapter is to describe some of the less attractive aspects of humanity, 16:13-16 is another great example, and hold out the totally false idea that a person could escape being like this if they would only dedicate themselves to Krishna. To me, this is totally erroneous and misplaced. Humans must come to terms with the good and evil that run through all of us and I cannot see how it can be helpful to fantasise about attaining perfection when it has no basis in reality. The understanding of ‘evil’ presented is facil in the extreme. I prefer the nuance and acknowledgment of limitation described in works of literature like Shakespeare, “there is nothing good nor bad, lest thinking makes it so” (Hamlet), or Tolstoy, “it's not given to people to judge what's right or wrong. People have eternally been mistaken and will be mistaken, and in nothing more than in what they consider right and wrong” (War & Peace). The highly simplistic presentation in the Bhagavad Gita is, to me, a marketing trick to make people feel bad about themselves in the hope they will then join the cult. This kind of understanding of the human condition is absurdly basic and lies firmly in the realm of fantasy.
My final complaint are the unsubstantiated, petty claims the book makes about things humans could never know anything about. These struck me as little better than tarot card readings or astrology. 8:6 tells us that whatever we think about when we are dying determines “the destination of the dying”. Not only did I think this was silly and arbitrary, it also seems to contradict 2:20 when Krishna tells, “you will never die”. Not to mention the fact that I don’t believe that any human has any knowledge about what happens when you die. Chapter 14 splits everyone on earth into three types and claims you can identify them based on what kind of food they eat, I thought I may as well be reading a fucking horoscope! For me, there is such an abundance of good literature out there it’s a waste of time to bother with stuff like this except from a historical or anthropological perspective where I would agree it could be seen as a fascinating text.
Sunday 1 September 2019
Denis Johnson - The Largesse Of The Sea Maiden
This collection of short stories was overwhelming in more ways than one. Both the prose and the narratives have the feeling of an overflowing plate where delicacies have been heaped upon each other to a detrimental extent. Stuff gets buried as the food piles up and what might have been delightful and delicious on its own becomes indistinguishable or invisible amid the glut. This is by no means to say that all the stories are bad or unenjoyable. Most of them I found confusing and forgettable and I would put ‘The Starlight On Idaho’, ‘Strangler Bob’ and ‘Triumph Over The Grave’ in this category.
I really liked ‘Doppelganger, Poltergeist’. In this instance, I found the complexity of the narrative to be perfectly judged. It was intricate and had many excellent kinks and contortions but was still easy to follow. I loved the way the story took place over a long period of time but was detailed sparsely using a few key encounters to populate the landscape. It was nonetheless vivid and the characters were adroitly drawn. The way the story moved from an mid-life crisis rant about Elvis to a compelling conspiracy theory about lost twins and swapped identities before climaxing to a revelation about the narrator’s own identity was masterful. It’s hard to know what to make of the various stages of the plot’s development and while I would say my overall attitude remained sceptical, like that of the protagonist, it's impossible not to entertain the elaborate, enticing theories at some level. After this story, the final one in the collection, I could begin to understand what all the gushing praise from famous authors littered across the covers and first pages was on about. As opposed to obscuring one another, the ideas came together and catalysed each other. It was a wonderful symphony of ideas, characters, places, prose and dialogue. The only part that felt extraneous was the random account of the 9/11 attacks in New York. It felt like it had been added in as an afterthought or should have been edited out as it bore no relation to the rest of the story and was out of place.
The opposite of this fantastic story was the first one in the book called ‘Silence’. The first 25-odd pages of the story are discombobulating. There are almost as many characters introduced as there are pages and a mind boggling array of events occurs. A man asks a woman to kiss the stump of his amputated leg at a dinner party then starts crying. A different man burns some expensive art after a drunken evening. A man speaks to his ex-wife for the first time in 40 years and learns she is dying; this one later turns out to be the protagonist. Another man commits suicide. A friend of the protagonist interviews someone on death row and then meets his widow, who turns out to be a sex worker, and regrets not trying to sleep with her. Yet another man finds a phone on the street belonging to someone who has been killed in a car crash and then goes to meet his widow who has been calling the phone every 30 mins since his death. This man then commits suicide. It’s frantic, shouty and feels like the author has tried to squeeze every idea he has had for a story into as few pages as possible. The protagonist even gets propositioned in a bathroom stall via a message scrawled on some toilet paper, which leads nowhere, like large swathes of this book. From there on the story sets a more manageable pace and some semblance of a single plot emerges rather than the clamour and screech of 20 different plots all competing to be more scandalous than the last. The main character, Bill Whitman, is not really likeable, twice divorced because of his lies and infidelities. He comes across as a vacuous ad man who’s saving grace is his ability to recognise own mediocrity and propensity to say the wrong thing. He seems detached from his family, worn, jaded and loveless. The main thrust of the story seemed to be how mundane Whitman’s life has become but this is oddly juxtaposed to the absolute explosion of characters and events at the story’s beginning. Perhaps the idea is that Whitman is looking back over his life comparing the eventful with the quotidien. I found it a bit overwhelming and felt that it was overflowing with content and this made it somewhat grotesque because so much was crammed into so few pages. I wanted the various narratives to be more fully developed and finished the story with the sensation of reading the first few pages of about 10 different short stories!
The person who gave me this book said they had to read it twice before the stories really sank in. I’m not sure I liked it enough to do this and there is so much more to read but ‘Doppelganger, Poltergeist’ definitely piqued my interest in this author in a way none of the other stories did and ‘Silence’ actively did not.
I really liked ‘Doppelganger, Poltergeist’. In this instance, I found the complexity of the narrative to be perfectly judged. It was intricate and had many excellent kinks and contortions but was still easy to follow. I loved the way the story took place over a long period of time but was detailed sparsely using a few key encounters to populate the landscape. It was nonetheless vivid and the characters were adroitly drawn. The way the story moved from an mid-life crisis rant about Elvis to a compelling conspiracy theory about lost twins and swapped identities before climaxing to a revelation about the narrator’s own identity was masterful. It’s hard to know what to make of the various stages of the plot’s development and while I would say my overall attitude remained sceptical, like that of the protagonist, it's impossible not to entertain the elaborate, enticing theories at some level. After this story, the final one in the collection, I could begin to understand what all the gushing praise from famous authors littered across the covers and first pages was on about. As opposed to obscuring one another, the ideas came together and catalysed each other. It was a wonderful symphony of ideas, characters, places, prose and dialogue. The only part that felt extraneous was the random account of the 9/11 attacks in New York. It felt like it had been added in as an afterthought or should have been edited out as it bore no relation to the rest of the story and was out of place.
The opposite of this fantastic story was the first one in the book called ‘Silence’. The first 25-odd pages of the story are discombobulating. There are almost as many characters introduced as there are pages and a mind boggling array of events occurs. A man asks a woman to kiss the stump of his amputated leg at a dinner party then starts crying. A different man burns some expensive art after a drunken evening. A man speaks to his ex-wife for the first time in 40 years and learns she is dying; this one later turns out to be the protagonist. Another man commits suicide. A friend of the protagonist interviews someone on death row and then meets his widow, who turns out to be a sex worker, and regrets not trying to sleep with her. Yet another man finds a phone on the street belonging to someone who has been killed in a car crash and then goes to meet his widow who has been calling the phone every 30 mins since his death. This man then commits suicide. It’s frantic, shouty and feels like the author has tried to squeeze every idea he has had for a story into as few pages as possible. The protagonist even gets propositioned in a bathroom stall via a message scrawled on some toilet paper, which leads nowhere, like large swathes of this book. From there on the story sets a more manageable pace and some semblance of a single plot emerges rather than the clamour and screech of 20 different plots all competing to be more scandalous than the last. The main character, Bill Whitman, is not really likeable, twice divorced because of his lies and infidelities. He comes across as a vacuous ad man who’s saving grace is his ability to recognise own mediocrity and propensity to say the wrong thing. He seems detached from his family, worn, jaded and loveless. The main thrust of the story seemed to be how mundane Whitman’s life has become but this is oddly juxtaposed to the absolute explosion of characters and events at the story’s beginning. Perhaps the idea is that Whitman is looking back over his life comparing the eventful with the quotidien. I found it a bit overwhelming and felt that it was overflowing with content and this made it somewhat grotesque because so much was crammed into so few pages. I wanted the various narratives to be more fully developed and finished the story with the sensation of reading the first few pages of about 10 different short stories!
The person who gave me this book said they had to read it twice before the stories really sank in. I’m not sure I liked it enough to do this and there is so much more to read but ‘Doppelganger, Poltergeist’ definitely piqued my interest in this author in a way none of the other stories did and ‘Silence’ actively did not.
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