Madame Maigret’s Friend by Georges Simenon; The Undiscovered Self by Carl Jung; The Hedgehog and the Fox by Isaiah Berlin; The Art of Controversy by Arthur Schopenhauer; The Moviegoer by Walker Percy; Inspector Cadaver by Georges Simenon; Mrs Bridge by Evan Connell; The Sea Around Us by Rachel Carson; Hocus Pocus by Kurt Vonnegut; The Wayward Bus by John Steinbeck – vel veeter Book Review

Madame Maigret’s Friend – 4/5 Stars

I liked this Maigret more than a lot of others I’ve read. Our mystery involves someone being arrested with a bloody coat hanging in his closet and the burnt remains of a body in his furnace. HIs lawyer maintains that he’s completely innocent of any wrongdoing (including questioning whether or not it’s actually known for sure that wrongdoing has occurred) because of the failure to link physical evidence to the crime. This becomes a bit of a musing on circumstantial evidence in general.

But what also happens here is that Mrs Maigret is roped into this mystery as well as she accidentally befriends (more or less) a key witness to the crime.

The Art of Controversy – 5/5

More a collection of short essays than a singular essay, this short piece tackles the question of knowledge, argument, and understanding by looking at logical fallacies (perhaps I guess the word itself was used) in bad argument and how to win arguments, but then in addition to that how to know not only what one knows, but how to make what you know, known to others, and how others makes known, what they know.

The Undiscovered Self – 5/5

This is a late lecture of Jung, from 1956, and speaking after WWII and the fall of the Nazis, and amid the more recent revelations about the Stalin regime from his death a few years earlier of the purges and the mass deaths, this lecture looks toward the question of the individual and society. Specifically, Jung is concerned with what the suppression of the unknown self, the suppression of the concept of the shadow self, and the collectivization of experience in society allows atrocities to occur.

Hocus Pocus – 5/5

It’s weird to re-read this novel, like many of my Vonnegut re-readings, and realize I had no real chance of understanding much about it. The thing I remember for sure is that the novel explains what Conestoga wagons were (I knew about wagons of course from The Oregon Trail) and how this also became the origin of the word: stogie.

The novel takes place in a prison with the narrator awaiting trials. He’s been charged with aiding a prison break. He is of late a teacher in the prison, and before that a teacher in the college across the frozen lake from the prison. He’s also a Vietnam vet (a first I think for Vonnegut) and an outspoken critic of all things bullshit. This gets him in trouble at the college, which has been set up for the children of rich people as many colleges are, but specifically the children who otherwise have never experienced academic success, well, like many colleges.

The Wayward Bus – 4/5

One of the first novels Steinbeck wrote after publishing Grapes of Wrath, depending on how you’re counting the short books, this short novel takes place over the course of a few days in a small town in the middle of nowhere. The interstate bus has broken down at this station, and the group of wayward or more so waylaid passengers, the station workers, the drivers, etc all interact for a few days and get on each other’s nerves.

The Hedgehog and the Fox – 5/5

I decided to read this for three reasons: It was on David Bowie’s book list, I recently-ish read War and Peace and had some questions, and it connected to the other topics I was thinking about in the recent weeks, namely, what it feels to be in the throes of history.

In the 1990s, I never felt like I was within history. Then 9/11 happened, I grew up, and I read The Handmaid’s Tale, which has the forgotten ending section that describes the Gilead timeperiod in the longview of History.

In this speech to a historical society, Isaiah Berlin thinks through the historiological vision of Tolstoy in War and Peace. He relates it to the idea of “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing” an ominous breakdown of knowledge as a set of facts and ideas, or a unifying vision.

Tolstoy then becomes a kind of visionary of both. The novel itself is 1300 pages of family and military drama, and then 100 pages of historical theory in which the totalizing effect of small moments in history add up to the broader whole of History.

Berlin breaks down that vision, seeks its historical antecedents, and reads through Tolstoy in the kind of 1920s Historical Literary Criticism that has fallen out of fashion (read who was being read). The result is an interesting reminder that we don’t have public intellectuals anymore. Also it’s a reminder that being within something can be a frustrating experience, and only seen from a kind of distance can emotional and historical reckoning happen.

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A second reading of this offers up some additional things to think about. For one, I don’t know that you can make everyone up as either a hedgehog or a fox, like you can a pointy or a round, but it’s still fun to think about. I am a fox I think.

Inspector Cadaver – 3/5 Stars

In this Maigret mystery, we begin on a train, which is more or less how many of mystery novels begin, and we find a dead body on the tracks. More to the point though, Maigret’s mystery is ALSO being co-investigated by Inspector Cadaver, or Carver. I don’t speak French and don’t have a copy of this book in French, so I would be curious to see how the pun works in the original. Here, well, you have it.

So many mysteries like to take our well-known detective, and this is our 24th book, has to deal with a rival. I like that Maigret kind of hates Carver and doesn’t care about him at all. He’s funnily arrogant about it.

The Sea Around Us – 5/5

There’s a chapter in Moby Dick that people talk about all the time, the cetology chapter, which teaches the reader about whales. Well, more so, shows the reader what was known, thought, or understood about whales circa 1850. People always complain about these chapters, and they’re wrong, but they are essential to understanding how that novel resists the summation and totalization of knowledge, because of the necessary mysteries about life. There’s also a funny moment when the narrator is discussing blue whales, saying something like: little is known about these whales — especially not knowing that they are the largest inhabitant of the earth in known history.

We get a lot in this book that does the same. Published in 1951, 100 years after Moby Dick, we still don’t know all that much about whales, or the ocean depths, or sonar even, or undersea geology, or even plate tectonics. But what we do know, is here for us to read. In addition, this book does a great job of showing us how to present what we don’t know in the form of questions, discuss reasonable inferences about those questions, and absent any firm proof, leave the mystery intact.

One of the funniest, although serious, involves the chapter on sonar, where trying to discover what echoes back the pings in sonar, one theory suggests a layer of squids. It’s squids all the way down. It may very well be accurate, but funny nonetheless.

Mrs Bridge – 5/5

I can’t begin to express how funny this novel is. It doesn’t seem like it should be and if your parent also rented the Paul Newman/Joanna Woodward version of the film in the early 1990s, I don’t think that will do much to prove it. But it’s really funny.

So the novel begins with a page and half chapter relating the meeting, courtship, and marriage of Mr and Mrs Bridge in the early 1920s. Within a page or two more they have first one, then two, and then a third child–two older girls and a boy named Douglas.

The novel then spends a page, two pages, and sometimes a little more in successive 115 chapters each detailing some small event, part of the marriage, detail here or there, or events that cover the next 30 or so years in the marriage. Mrs Bridge is a earnest, if naive, and political neuter person who defers to her husband’s (and the country’s wider) conservatism in all manners. She’s not hateful and she’s not treated with disdain, just allowed to plod forth here and there with small social and emotional misadventures. I can’t really explain any of the scenes, because they won’t really mean or add up to much. But the novel very clearly spells out a life.

The star of the show however is definitely Douglass, the boyest boy to ever boy. He’s not good, but not quite bad. He hates being told, anything, and he’s always up to something, and he cannot be stopped.

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A second reading has offered up some additional ideas. First, Mrs Bridge’s entire being is based in received ideas. There’s a chapter that opens with something like: Mrs Bridge believed that there was a time in people’s lives that they needed to wear certain items. For her daughters, that means girdles, and for her son, that means a hat. So she goes and buys her son a hat, and he fights and fights and fights, but then just starts wearing the hat everywhere, no matter what he’s doing. This bothers Mrs Bridge because you don’t just wear a hate any old place, but out! And of course the hat deteriorates quickly, the hat gets gross, and Mrs Bridge ends up throwing the hat away. It’s never quite clear how Douglass felt about the hat. This is Mrs Bridge writ small, ideas are not to be had, but held and applied.

The book also uses Douglass to constantly be the bugbear here. He’s wicked, in some ways, but also very sensible in others. He just doesn’t believe that he should do things in a proscribed manner, and when he’s older, this comes to the fore when it turns out he’s grown into a whole separate being, with his own legitimate view on the world.

The Moviegoer – 4/5

This is the second time reading this book, which came out in 1960 and won the National Book Award that year, beating out Catch-22, Franny and Zooey, and Revolutionary Road among others. Maybe this was a safe pick, but I do think this book is very good in some key ways.

The book follows Binx Bolling, a stock broker from New Orleans, as he approaches his 30th birthday. He’s been summoned to his great aunt’s house where he is given the ultimatum to at least come up with an idea for what he would like to do with his life. Maybe living in an apartment, having a solid job, and occasionally dating his secretaries (I know, I know) feels like it’s good enough, and for Binx, it often is, but his aunt decides that as a scion of his family name, he does need to do something more meaningful. We learn about Binx’s college past, his past romances, and his relationship with his cousin, Kate, who is depressive (and maybe suicidal). We also learn that Binx’s life attitude has always been a kind of affability (a sour affability he proclaims) that often means he never really decides much. And man do I get it.

Anyway, as the week passes and he begins to think about his past and future, he has to come to terms with a few things, and because of a few choices he makes, his aunt also needs to come to terms with things.

The book is a novel written by a practicing Christian, trying to make sense of someone who is not Christian, and lacks a fundamental drive in life. The book does not move toward a religious enlightenment, but does look for some kind of secular sense of purpose, and more or less figures one out. It’s a Southern novel of a type, where a white character has neither the inclination to tackle the race question, but also no strong sense of racial prejudice, which speaks to Binx’s situation, but also to a kind of obliviousness. The novel also borrows heavily from Kierkegaard in looking for some answers.