Hello avid followers of Whiskey Before Breakfast and other book lovers. It's so great to see you all back here again. I hope the holidays brought you all joy, laughter, and an excessive amount of eggnog and Christmas songs. Upon returning home from a draining semester at school I proceeded to pound my life back into something more recognizable and immediately devoured as many books as I could get my hands on. One of these was Ernest Hemingway's Pulitzer Prize winning novella, The Old Man and the Sea.
Because I was feeling somewhat pretentious (and lacking in my classics genre compared to Spence), I decided to begin a six hour endeavor on this work. In the end, I can truly say, I was very much rewarded. Let me be forthright, this is and was the first Hemingway book I had ever read. So, much like a babe in the woods, I had no idea what I was getting myself in to.
The Old Man and the Sea is a methodical and very much existential work that involves a strong-willed fisherman and an equally stubborn marlin. The two battle each other over the course of three days, testing both the endurance and will of the other. That's it. If one is looking for a book that includes pages upon pages of action, fighting, and suspense, then they will be sorely disappointed. Heck, if one is even looking for a book that includes chapters then I would suggest they keep moving. This work spends much of its time exploring the thoughts and actions of a fisherman and flows from beginning to end much like the sea itself.
Hemingway wastes no time in piercing the heart of the matter in his work. Throughout the novella, the fisherman refers to the marlin as his "brother" and elicits a profound and emotional connection with the fish. He even questions the fact of whether he should be killing such a nobel creature since the two are so intertwined in their professions. That's another thing Hemingway extracts from his story: the concept of destiny. The fisherman accepts his art and profession as something he was born to do and decides that the marlin had no choice in the matter either.
It often reminded me of the scene in Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men, where Chigurh, the villain, demands that a gas station owner call a coin flip. He states that the coin had been traveling all these years in order to reach this one point and that the owner must call it. He has no other reason than that of destiny. In the same way, the fisherman and the marlin were connected like that of the coin and the gas station owner. The gods had spoken.
There are so many things that I loved about this novella that I'm finding it difficult to wrap it up in only 700 words. Yet, I'll leave you with one last thing to note. Hemingway beautifully portrays the mental battle raging in the fisherman's head. Often times I would read the fisherman's thoughts and then the next line discover his dialogue stating the exact opposite. I think this is very essential to a powerful book because humans themselves are not linear thinkers. We often times contradict ourselves on a daily basis, whether it be for better or worse. With that, I highly recommend this short, but compelling read.
"Imagine if each day a man must try to kill the moon, he thought. The moon runs away. But imagine if a man each day should have to try to kill the sun? We were born lucky, he thought."
-- Zach
Friday, December 28, 2012
Wednesday, December 19, 2012
The Long Walk
Hello beautiful people,
Okay, we're back. Here at Whiskey Before Breakfast, Zach and I took a brief hiatus from our weekly postings to acknowledge our final exams. Thank you for your patience. And your thunderous applause.
When Stephen King was a freshman at the University of Maine in 1966-67, he wrote his first novella, entitled The Long Walk. He published this story in 1979 under the pseudonym Richard Bachman (among several other stories, called the "Bachman Books").
The Long Walk takes place in the not-too-distant future (for all you dystopian lovers). The U.S. is now a totalitarian police state, and each year on May 1st, the government randomly selects one hundred teenage boys to participate in The Long Walk. The rules are simple: you must stay on the road and maintain a constant speed of four miles per hour. If you fall below that speed for thirty seconds, you receive a warning. If you exceed three warnings, you will be shot (the characters call it "getting your ticket"). The last man standing receives The Prize: anything and everything he wants for the rest of his life.
The narrative is told through the eyes of sixteen year-old Ray Garraty, Contestant Number 47. We know little of Ray's past except that his father was taken away (and presumably killed) by the government, and that he was raised by his mother. He has a girlfriend named Jan, about whom he daydreams and fantasizes. Ray does not know why he is a part of The Long Walk; he just knows that he didn't back out when he had the chance. With each step, he becomes more unsure of his sense of place and purpose.
I hardly know where to begin with this story. This isn't a thriller about clowns or monsters or Mockingjays. The Long Walk is raw and gritty and in-your-face from start to finish. We watch Ray's optimism in the beginning of the story spiral downward into the torturous, hellish experience of the final chapters. Stephen King brilliantly captures the Walkers' excruciating physical pain as well as their deep spiritual contemplation; as Ray becomes physically depleted and exhausted, his mind descends into insanity, and he questions the purpose of life and the value of human relationships. He befriends several of his fellow Walkers, and their camaraderie in the face of certain death is incredibly complex and powerful.
I think The Long Walk can be seen as a metaphor for the Vietnam War (or maybe any war): the lottery-type draft on TV, the horror of watching young friends die without dignity, and the sheer meaninglessness of "victory"--because even if you win, you lose everything.
As always, Stephen King tells the truth. I don't think there is any higher praise for a storyteller. The Long Walk will haunt you; it will strike a chord deep inside you, and you might hate it. That being said, this story will teach you what it is to be human, and what it means to be alive.
"But of course it had hurt. It had hurt before, in the worst, rupturing way, knowing that there would be no more you but the universe would roll on just the same, unharmed and unhampered."
--Spence
Okay, we're back. Here at Whiskey Before Breakfast, Zach and I took a brief hiatus from our weekly postings to acknowledge our final exams. Thank you for your patience. And your thunderous applause.
When Stephen King was a freshman at the University of Maine in 1966-67, he wrote his first novella, entitled The Long Walk. He published this story in 1979 under the pseudonym Richard Bachman (among several other stories, called the "Bachman Books").
The Long Walk takes place in the not-too-distant future (for all you dystopian lovers). The U.S. is now a totalitarian police state, and each year on May 1st, the government randomly selects one hundred teenage boys to participate in The Long Walk. The rules are simple: you must stay on the road and maintain a constant speed of four miles per hour. If you fall below that speed for thirty seconds, you receive a warning. If you exceed three warnings, you will be shot (the characters call it "getting your ticket"). The last man standing receives The Prize: anything and everything he wants for the rest of his life.
The narrative is told through the eyes of sixteen year-old Ray Garraty, Contestant Number 47. We know little of Ray's past except that his father was taken away (and presumably killed) by the government, and that he was raised by his mother. He has a girlfriend named Jan, about whom he daydreams and fantasizes. Ray does not know why he is a part of The Long Walk; he just knows that he didn't back out when he had the chance. With each step, he becomes more unsure of his sense of place and purpose.
I hardly know where to begin with this story. This isn't a thriller about clowns or monsters or Mockingjays. The Long Walk is raw and gritty and in-your-face from start to finish. We watch Ray's optimism in the beginning of the story spiral downward into the torturous, hellish experience of the final chapters. Stephen King brilliantly captures the Walkers' excruciating physical pain as well as their deep spiritual contemplation; as Ray becomes physically depleted and exhausted, his mind descends into insanity, and he questions the purpose of life and the value of human relationships. He befriends several of his fellow Walkers, and their camaraderie in the face of certain death is incredibly complex and powerful.
I think The Long Walk can be seen as a metaphor for the Vietnam War (or maybe any war): the lottery-type draft on TV, the horror of watching young friends die without dignity, and the sheer meaninglessness of "victory"--because even if you win, you lose everything.
As always, Stephen King tells the truth. I don't think there is any higher praise for a storyteller. The Long Walk will haunt you; it will strike a chord deep inside you, and you might hate it. That being said, this story will teach you what it is to be human, and what it means to be alive.
"But of course it had hurt. It had hurt before, in the worst, rupturing way, knowing that there would be no more you but the universe would roll on just the same, unharmed and unhampered."
--Spence
Sunday, December 2, 2012
The Road Virus Heads North
Events upon events have piled up over the last week so I can understand how all of you have been held in utter suspense, waiting for our next review to be posted. With a combination of both school work and a social life, I've been left with little to no time to read this past week. For those of you who are concerned, I'm still making my way through House of Leaves, but progress has been hindered to about snail's pace. And for those of you who aren't concerned, I went to the zoo yesterday. I think one of the more profound and enlightening animals I was able to see was the giraffe. To my understanding, they're the only mammals that sleep standing up. This must mean that their leg muscles are some of the strongest in the world (right?).
Anyways, all this is related to a short story that has been at the forefront of my mind ever since being exposed the master of modern horror himself, Stephen King (animals to horror - there's a connection there somewhere). It's hard to sum up all that King has done in his career, from snorting lines of cocaine, to writing in drunken stupors, to composing entire novels and not remembering a single event from the night before; naturally King is nothing short of a "mad-artist". In one of his earlier short story compilations, Everything's Eventual, he pens a story entitled "The Road Virus Heads North" about a man, Richard Kinnell, who purchases the bizarre painting of a malevolent-looking man who's driving a car similar to his own. The painting has an equally disturbing past, which captivates Kinnell, who's always a fan of the slightly horrific (much like King). When the tortured artist who created the painting died, he burned all his other works and left a cryptic message behind stating how he couldn't take what was happening to him.
As Kinnell continues his trip back home to Maine (a recurring setting in almost every King story), he notices the painting begins to change with each place he stops at. At one point, Kinnell attempts to ditch the painting at a rest stop, but finds to his horror, the sinister image has beat him to his own house and now displays a bloody massacre of a yard sale from whence he first purchased the painting. As the man in the car looms ever closer to Kinnell's house, Kinnell begins to frantically think of ways of how to change his impending death.
King has always been a fan of "moving pictures" stories and this is certainly an outgrowth of that love. The reader is immersed in a sense of dread and anxiety as Kinnell's painting gradually becomes more violent and warped. Along with being a solid stand-alone story, the rest of Everything's Eventual is equally macabre and enjoyable. While there can't be much drawn from the story in the way of changing mankind or one's soul (as Spence's novels seem to be about), this one is merely for entertainment and horror purposes only. Yet, that's not to say it's not worth reading, though.
-- Zach
Anyways, all this is related to a short story that has been at the forefront of my mind ever since being exposed the master of modern horror himself, Stephen King (animals to horror - there's a connection there somewhere). It's hard to sum up all that King has done in his career, from snorting lines of cocaine, to writing in drunken stupors, to composing entire novels and not remembering a single event from the night before; naturally King is nothing short of a "mad-artist". In one of his earlier short story compilations, Everything's Eventual, he pens a story entitled "The Road Virus Heads North" about a man, Richard Kinnell, who purchases the bizarre painting of a malevolent-looking man who's driving a car similar to his own. The painting has an equally disturbing past, which captivates Kinnell, who's always a fan of the slightly horrific (much like King). When the tortured artist who created the painting died, he burned all his other works and left a cryptic message behind stating how he couldn't take what was happening to him.
As Kinnell continues his trip back home to Maine (a recurring setting in almost every King story), he notices the painting begins to change with each place he stops at. At one point, Kinnell attempts to ditch the painting at a rest stop, but finds to his horror, the sinister image has beat him to his own house and now displays a bloody massacre of a yard sale from whence he first purchased the painting. As the man in the car looms ever closer to Kinnell's house, Kinnell begins to frantically think of ways of how to change his impending death.
King has always been a fan of "moving pictures" stories and this is certainly an outgrowth of that love. The reader is immersed in a sense of dread and anxiety as Kinnell's painting gradually becomes more violent and warped. Along with being a solid stand-alone story, the rest of Everything's Eventual is equally macabre and enjoyable. While there can't be much drawn from the story in the way of changing mankind or one's soul (as Spence's novels seem to be about), this one is merely for entertainment and horror purposes only. Yet, that's not to say it's not worth reading, though.
-- Zach
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