Last Weeks of A Complex Life: "Zoltan Beck Is Dying"

 

Joseph Kertes. Last Impressions (2020) “Zoltan Beck is dying”, announces the jacket blurb. We follow Ben, the son delegated to deal with his father’s day to day problems, as he tries to make his father’s last weeks tolerable. Alternate chapters tell Zoltan’s history, first as boy under Hungary’s Nazi collaboration, then under Communist government until his escape to the West and eventually to Canada. The two strands come together in a meeting between Zoltan and his Hungarian family, a sentimental ending to what is otherwise an astringent but comic and loving account of a man who has found a way to cope with his painful memories. It’s also an account of the refugee immigrant experience, and of living with a damaged parent, both of which slowed my reading of the book. I don’t like my fragmentary memories of the war and its aftermath surfacing without warning.
     Recommended. ***

Gahan Wilson, Master of Surrealist Horror: The Cleft (1998)

 

 Gahan Wilson. The Cleft and Other Odd Tales (1998) If you know Wilson’s cartoons, you will find reading these odd tales a familiar experience. Wilson is an acquired taste. If you're a newbie, I suggest you begin with his cartoons.

     Wilson has the knack of narrating the most disturbing events so matter-of-factly that one almost accepts them as normal. A valuable gift. It’s an odd feeling to enjoy such strange, unpleasant, and disorienting fantasies. But one needs to understand evil, and to recognise its (usually merely) traces in oneself. Recommended. ***

Peters teases and reveals: Naked Once More (1989)

 

Elizabeth Peters. Naked Once More (1989) The title is a come on, an allusion to Naked in the Ice, a best selling historical fantasy-romance. The McGuffin is a contract for writing a sequel, since the author has been declared dead seven years after her disappearance. The winner, herself a writer of light historical fiction, suffers accidents much like those suffered by her predecessor before her disappearance. The plot, nicely tangled, teases the reader with two questions: Did the author of Naked in the Ice disappear, or was she killed? The denouement, presented in a Hercules Poirot-like gathering of the usual suspects, is plausible, but only just. Peters has concocted a wittily written tale, which moves swiftly enough that the I didn’t note thinness of the characters and the sketchy ambience until I finished the book and wondered what I thought about it.
     So what do I think about it? A well-done entertainment, well above average for its genre. Much of its charm is in its style, and the casual (and revealing) asides about the publishing racket. Recommended. ***

Two more Lapham collections: Epidemics and Comedy

 Lapham’s Quarterly XIII-3: Epidemic. (2020) The current issue, with timely reminders that all our current protective measures against covid-19 have been used as far back as we have records. The ancients didn’t know about viruses, but they did know that staying close to infected people somehow transmitted the contagion. Lock downs, quarantines, masking, miscellaneous nostrums, and reliance on the protection of the gods are as old as epidemics. So are the hostile reactions to these measures, including distrust of whatever authorities imposed or prescribed them.

     The collection also shows that the school histories that everybody knows ignore the impact of plagues. We hear a lot about the great squabblers and their bloody wars, of the merchants and their wide-ranging travels, and the inventors and their ingenious devices for improving both war and wandering. The story of the plagues visited by Yahweh on the Egyptians is one of very few instances that gives illness its proper historical weight. But in the school accounts of the 30- and 100-Year wars which marked the transition from medieval to Renaissance Europe, the fact that plague killed somewhere between one-third and one-half the population is glossed over. Like many other crucial facts, I did not learn it until university.
    Another excellent collection. ****    

Lapham’s Quarterly VII-1: Comedy (2014) Enjoyable, as always. Someone has claimed that humans are the only animal that laughs, and the only animal that needs to. Recent careful observation of animals shows that some other animals display what looks very like the laughter of pleasure, the only kind exhibited by human babies, which suggests that all laughter expresses some kind of pleasure. The questions are what kinds, and why.
     In their answers, several of the writers quoted here distinguish between wit and humour, and several others claim that true humour transcends cultural specifics. I’d say that wit requires that the creator and audience share the same range of knowledge and insight, while humour relies on the most basic prompters to laughter, which are mostly the (usually less than lethal) mishaps of other people. Another constant is the sad and sometimes dangerous fact that authoritarians have no sense of humour whatsoever. Nor do the moralists who believe they have the duty to impose their moral purities on the rest of us. ****

 

Upun my word: a book of puns.

 Himie Koshevoy Treasure Jest of Best Puns (1969) The puns are usually laboured and often lame, displaying more ingenuity than wit. Which means for full effect they need the delivery of a stand-up comic who has mastered the inflection and timing of long jokes. No one-liners here. The collection also shows that wit depends on common cultural references, and since the 1960s many of these no longer apply, and some are now in poor taste. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the book well enough, thus proving I’m an old fogey. I’ve read it twice or thrice over the years (I’ve forgotten). It is a well made book, printed on excellent paper, with at least tangentially relevant old-timey engravings facing each joke. But not a keeper.  **½

Sample (edited): The exploits of Alexander the Great are wondrous and many, but few realise he was an inventor who might well rank with Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell. It was he who discovered that timing mattered in battle. He needed a device to ensure his troops would arrive on the scene all at the same time, or thereabouts. Alexander took to his tent to think it over, and when he emerged he had the forerunner of the modern chronometer Every soldier had to wrap a chemically treated rag around his wrist. As the day wore on, the cloth changed colour, thus marking the passing of time. It was Alexander’s rag time band.

Food and Human Behaviour

 

  Lapham’s Quarterly IV-3: Food (2011) All human societies have devised rules, customs, conventions, and moral judgements about food. There some constants: One must compliment the host on their generosity in sharing food, and their skill in its preparation. One must demonstrate that one knows the best table manners. One must show appropriate restraint in eating. One is permitted or required to display good taste in the table settings. One must be on one’s best behaviour either as host or as guest.
    Just how these requirements defined and met in different times and places makes for entertaining and instructive reading. There also some recipes. Here and there, the selections hint at what underlies our species-specific elaboration of food-related behaviours: we’re an omnivorous social species, who would fight over our food without these restraints on our behaviour. ****

The Sea

  Lapham’s Quarterly VI-3: The Sea (2013) Lapham’s family operated a shipping company in California. One of his earliest memories is of watching one of the family-owned ships breaking up on the rocky California coast. Most of the people in it survived, but Lapham was duly impressed by what he saw. His introductory essay-cum-memoir to this collection is alone worth the price of the magazine. The rest reminds us that we humans have at best merely survived on the seas, which we know we have never subdued as we believe we have subdued the land.
     The collection tells a great deal of first hand experience. Recommended for any landlubber who wants to know why they don’t want to sail the seas, and for any seafarer who wants to relive the exhilaration and terrors of sailing. ****