What I Read in April 2012

Mary Renault, The Nature of Alexander. I have long been a fan of Renault’s historical novels set in ancient Greece — The Last of the Wine, The King Must Die, Fire from Heaven among others — but this is the first biography I have read. It is a measured account of an extraordinary life, with careful attention to the contemporary accounts.

Evelyn Waugh, Officers and Gentlemen. This novel is the middle book of Waugh’s trilogy about the adventures of Guy Crouchback during World War II. I read the first book, Men at Arms, but too long ago, so I had trouble keeping the many characters straight. Vintage Waugh, in which the capers of the officers come up against the realities of the evacuation of Crete.

Julie Otsuka, The Buddha in the Attic. Their voices rise in a chorus together, yet each separate voice can also be distinguished. The speakers are the “picture brides”, the women who came to the United States from Japan to marry men they had seen only in pictures.

Susan Cheever, Treetops: A Family Memoir. The daughter of writer John Cheever tells the story of three talented and complicated families. Treetops is the summer place in New Hampshire where they gathered to love and to fight and to remember.

Yoko Ogawa, The Housekeeper and the Professor, translated from the Japanese by Stephen Snyder. A short, sweet novel about the relationship between a mathematics professor, his housekeeper and her young son. Due to a brain injury, the professor’s memory is limited to 80 minutes and all new experiences must fall within that time frame.

Louisa May Alcott, Little Women. This is my first complete reread of the 1868 classic after many years. I am preparing a course on Louisa May Alcott and will be posting extensively on this, her most popular book in July, as I participate in A Year of Feminist Classics.

Herman Melville, Moby Dick. I finished rereading Melville’s great classic about the struggle between mad Captain Ahab and the White Whale. This time around, my sympathies are with the whale and all of his persecuted companions. Some read the novel as the struggle between good and evil. I read it as the insanity of man, abusing this world which provide so much if we take its gifts in moderation.

Louisa May Alcott, Little Men. This is the sequel to Little Women, written three years after it. It continues the story of Jo March, no Josephine Bhaer. With her husband she runs Plumfield, a school for boys. It continues the spirit of fun of Little Women, but we now find Jo in a warm maturity, reminiscent of Marmee.

Caroline Stoessinger, A Century of Wisdom. Subtitle: Lessons from the Life of Alice Herz-Sommer, the World’s Oldest Living Holocaust Survivor. A pianist, Alice Herz-Sommer survived Theresienstadt to create a new life for herself and her son in Israel and England. This book is a tribute to survival, but also to a cheerful old age and, most of all, to the power of music.

Fast Fish, Loose Fish

Yes, I know that a whale is not a fish. Fish are cold blooded and breathe through gills. Whales are warm blooded and breathe through lungs — they are mammals like us. Yet Herman Melville in Moby Dick calls them fish because the sea is the only environment in which they can live. Old English law also called them fish. It is concerned with who owns the fish or whale. Melville quotes it:

I. A Fast-Fish belongs to the party fast to it.

II. A Loose-Fish is fair game for anybody who can soonest catch it.

But what plays the mischief with this masterly code is the admirable brevity of it, which necessitates a vast volume of commentaries to expound it.

Most of Moby Dick is a commentary on a simple commandment: go and hunt and the kill the whale. But who owns that whale? In these laws the Fast-Fish is not the one who is fast (quick) to get away, but who is fast to some human boat or device. Then he belongs to his captor. Does he own himself if he is a Loose-Fish? Only while he can avoid your harpoon. The harpoon continues to belong to the harpooner, but if that harpooned fish gets away — Loose again — and is then made fast by someone else, that person gets the fish and the original harpooner is only entitled to the return of his harpoon. These niceties of property law are helpful to the pursuers, but not to the pursued whale.

The structure of Moby Dick is frustrating to the reader who is a Loose-Fish made Fast in its many pages. After we leave on the Pequot, meet the many characters aboard, learn that Captain Ahab is almost certainly mad, and butcher a few whales, the action slows to a stop while Melville contemplates the whale. We learn of the size of the whale, the variety of whales, the face of the whale, the brain and spinal chord of the whale, the ancient beliefs about the whale, the tail of the whale and more categories and subcategories than I can recite here. We read all this while waiting for Ahab to get on with it, to meet his destiny.

Perhaps we need this pause for reflection, with all its sometimes tedious detail, so that we can understand what it means to kill such a magnificent creature. Ahab tells us Moby Dick is evil, but I don’t see him that way. Moby Dick is asserting his right to be a Loose Fish, now and forever, not to be Fast to Ahab or anyone else. Ahab knows no moderation when taking what nature provides; he sees it as a struggle is which only he has the right to prevail. Melville’s narrator asks:

What are the Rights of Man and the Liberties of the World but Loose-Fish? What all men’s minds and opinions but Loose-Fish? What is the principle of religious belief in them but a Loose-Fish? What to the ostentatious smuggling verbalists are the thoughts of thinkers but Loose-Fish? What is the great globe itself but a Loose-Fish!

And what rights do that great globe and all the fish within it have to be free of being Fast to us?