Review: TRIPS TO THE MOON by Lucian of Samosata

Original Publication Date: c. 150

Genre: comedy

Topics: philosophy, history, satire, adventure

Other titles: True History, A True Story













Review:

Lucian of Samosata was a rhetorician in Ancient Rome and, from what I gathered in the introduction to this book, a thorn in the side of everyone he ever met. His modus operandi was to ridicule the practices of other philosophies; in Trips to the Moon, historians are his main victims.

A 2nd-century rhetorical treatise doesn't exactly sound like a laugh riot. The only reason I downloaded Trips to the Moon was because le fabeau Ralph Snelson narrated it. While it wasn't laugh-out-loud funny, it was amusing, and an interesting read.

The book is divided into three parts: first is the introduction from the translator, then "Instructions for Writing History," and finally "True History," which Lucian tells us is completely made-up.

As a disillusioned academic, I have to say I found Lucian's criticisms of historians to be spot-on. Apparently the behavior of over-educated elitists hasn't changed that much in the last 1800 years! Seriously, you put some unimaginative khakis on these guys instead of togas and you've got modern academia in all it's glory, which probably shouldn't surprise me as much as it did.

To boil down his argument, Lucian thinks that historians should only write about things they know from first-hand experience. Obviously, if you're writing about events that happened before you were born, this would be impossible. Thus Lucian argues historians are just using their imaginations to make stuff up, then pretending that what they've written is "fact." Ergo he's going to write the truest history that ever was, by making everything up but being totally honest about what he's doing.

So follows an adventure where Lucian and some companions travel beyond the Straight of Gibraltar and wind up having all sorts of adventures, including being trapped in a giant whale, flying to the sun, meeting gods and goddesses, and traveling to the moon just in time to become embroiled in a war.

Trips to the Moon is categorized as the first science fiction novel and a precursor to Edgar Rice Burroughs and HG Wells, but personally I think that's a total misunderstanding of both Lucian's point and the genre of science fiction. This is a satire of contemporary culture and a story meant to be beyond ridiculous. The appeal of science fiction is that it might happen, which is a conceit Lucian not only doesn't make claim to, but would probably make fun of if he was alive today. Even if you're only passingly familiar with ancient writings, it's easy to see that he's referencing previous works and then upping the ante to make the tales absolutely incredulous.

Also, there are a lot of references in the text that have no purpose other than to mock past and current historians. For instance, Lucian meets Herodotus in the belly of the whale, where he's being eternally tortured for telling lies in his own Histories, and reflects that he's happy he's never told one. Before that Lucian meets Homer, who spends most of his time telling historians who disagree with him to go fuck themselves (in summary).

Overall I found Trips to the Moon very interesting. It does start to drag at the end, but it's very inventive and clever, and occasionally amusing. Every criticism Lucian has of the study of history was and still is completely valid, and I only wish we had our own Lucian to remind academics not to take themselves so seriously.


Read Trips to the Moon at Project Gutenberg|Librivox|Sacred Texts

Review: THE LOST STRADIVARIUS by John Meade Falkner

Original Publication Date: 1895

Genre: Gothic, epistolary

Topics: ghosts, evil, temptation

Proposed alternate title: The Devil Went Down to Oxford











Review:

John Maltravers is a respectable student at Oxford, until one day he and his V E R Y close friend, Mr. Gaskell, decide to play a Gagliarda, whatever that is. The melody calls up the ghost of a man who is mad, bad, and dangerous to know, and who just happened to have occupied John's rooms a century ago. When the ghost passes on his Stradivarius violin, John sells his soul to the devil to become the greatest fiddle player in all the land, and is soon ignoring his fiancee, familial responsibilities, growing out his hair, acting like a dick rock star, traipsing off to Naples at the drop of a hat, smoking the pot, and spending way too much quality time with nubile Italian boys.

The only reason I downloaded The Lost Stradivarius from Librivox was because a good portion of it is narrated by my man Ralph Snelson, whom I am stalking (only on Librivox, though, don't worry). As always, he does an excellent job. There was one chapter where I started crying because he conveyed the emotions of the narrator so well.

The story itself is narrated, not by Maltravers, but by his sister Sophia, in a letter to his son. Overall I thought John Meade Falkner did a really good job both in choosing Sophia as the narrator and fleshing out her character believably (even though I did have to wonder how she knew so many details about what went on in her brother's life when he was away from home). We need her to be the narrator because Maltravers becomes increasingly unsympathetic as the book goes on, and the story she tells is a thinly veiled metaphor about how she lost her brother to addiction. That's why I don't think of this as a "ghost story"--the ghost in question really has only a minimal amount to do with the central narrative. When Maltravers moves to Italy, the book takes on an unexpectedly Gothic flavor, with abandoned castles, skeletons, and murders mysterious.

SO WHAT, I'm still a rock star, I got my rock moves, and I don't neeeed youuuuu!

I was actually thinking The Lost Stradivarius was pretty good until the final chapter, which is an addendum by Mr. Gaskell, the "very intimate" university friend of Maltravers. There was some ethnocentrism, and paranoia about the undue influence of pagan (read: classical, read: homosexual) Italian culture on Our Susceptible Young People earlier in the book; but in Gaskell's note it was so over-the-top that I was literally LOLing. Falkner also added a bunch of extraneous plot elements in the final chapter, I have no idea why. Am I supposed to care about the ghost's murder and missing pages from his diary? BECAUSE I DON'T.

Still, even though I found the last chapter ridiculous and annoying, it's very zeitgeist-y in that it reflects the Symbolists' concern with art and beauty and overindulgence. I just wish it had been more subtle and not so much with the xenophobia.

The Lost Stradivarius is an interesting mixture of ghost story, Symbolist writing, and Gothic novel, and for the most part it works. I think it would be a great read around Halloween or for the RIP Challenge.


Find The Lost Stradivarius by John Meade Falkner on Project Gutenberg|Librivox|Gaslight

Short Story Review: The Black Cat by Edgar Allan Poe

Original Publication Date: 1843

Genre: horror

Topics: madness, unintended consequences, guilt













Review:

The Black Cat is probably Edgar Allan Poe's most famous short story. I know it was one of the two Poe stories that was in my English textbook in middle school (and the fact that I remember it should tell you a lot about what an impression it made upon me as a kid). Basically it's about a guy who's a mean drunk and winds up killing a faithful pet, his cat. He later suspects the cat has come back to life to haunt him and this leads him to make some rather poor decisions.

After re-listening to this on Librivox (read by the boss Ralph Snelson) as an adult, I have to say I didn't really enjoy reading it. It's way cynical, and also a little predictable (I have read it before, but still). It's very well-written, of course, but it's not the type of story you come away from with the thrill of being scared silly--more like the sense that it's time to take a good long look in the mirror. Still, you should read it if you haven't.

And now it's time to play What Is the Cat a Metaphor For?! Here are my ideas:

Theory #1: Slavery

When the narrator hangs the cat, he says

Who has not, a hundred times, found himself committing a vile or a silly action, for no other reason than because he knows he should not? Have we not a perpetual inclination, in the teeth of our best judgment, to violate that which is Law , merely because we understand it to be such? This spirit of perverseness, I say, came to my final overthrow. It was this unfathomable longing of the soul to vex itself - to offer violence to its own nature - to do wrong for the wrong's sake only - that urged me to continue and finally to consummate the injury I had inflicted upon the unoffending brute. One morning, in cool blood, I slipped a noose about its neck and hung it to the limb of a tree; - hung it with the tears streaming from my eyes, and with the bitterest remorse at my heart; - hung it because I knew that it had loved me, and because I felt it had given me no reason of offence; - hung it because I knew that in so doing I was committing a sin - a deadly sin that would so jeopardize my immortal soul as to place it - if such a thing wore possible - even beyond the reach of the infinite mercy of the Most Merciful and Most Terrible God. (excerpt from Literature Network)

The hanging of the cat resembles a lynching in that it's an act of revenge, but not against any wrongdoing on the part of the cat--rather, the cat represents what the narrator should and could have a partnership and friendship with, yet he can't because every time he sees it, he's reminded of what a terrible person he's become, by his own hand. So he lashes out. Even after the cat is dead, the narrator still fears that it will bring a reckoning he knows he deserves.

Aubrey Beardsley's illustration of the Black Cat

Theory #2: The Wife

It's probably more likely that the cat is a metaphor for the narrator's wife. She's the one who gets the cat for him, and early on the cat is likened to a witch by the wife herself ("I'm not a witch, I'm your wife!"), which seems to plant the seeds of his later attitude toward the cat. The wife shares his love of animals, and when the narrator starts drinking, he admits to beating both her and their pets. And of course there's the fact that in his attempts to kill the cat--again--the narrator actually ends up killing his wife.


Have you read The Black Cat?

Short Story Review: The Monkey's Paw by WW Jacob

Original Publication Date: 1902

Genre: horror

Topics: wishes, unintended consequences













Review:

Another audiobook from Ralph Snelson, aka the bossest reader on Librivox and the person I'm currently stalking.

Do I really need to tell you what a story called The Monkey's Paw is about? The Whites are a happy if boring family, until one day when a friend of Mr. White's, a Sergeant-Major, shows up out of blue and is like, "Hey, look at this monkey's paw I got in India! It's supposed to grant three wishes, but it's really dangerous. You guys don't even know." Then he tries to throw it away, except naturally the Whites pick it up because they want to try it out. The Sergeant's like, "Your funeral!" and leaves. Wow, what a great friend.

Is this going to end badly? You know it.

The Monkey's Paw is probably a little predictable and cheesy by now, especially considering how many adaptations there have been of it, but I personally think it's worth reading. It's a very well-told story, where people destroy their own lives through the innocent things they wish for. Plus there's incipient zombieism!

I found this short story to be pretty creepy, mainly because I would have totally wished on that monkey's paw. Seriously, if someone hands you something and tells you it grants wishes, how can you NOT test that out? But it's like Karl from An Idiot Abroad says: "Never wish for anything. You'll just end up being disappointed."

Also, monkeys are scary.


Find The Monkey's Paw at Librivox|Gaslight

Short Story Review: The Oval Portrait by Edgar Allan Poe

Original Publication Date: 1842

Genre: horror

Topics: art, obsession, death













Review:

Another Librivox short story! First of all, I have to give a shout-out to the narrator of this short story, Ralph Snelson, who is the bossest narrator I've ever encountered in a Librivox audiobook. Keep up the good work, my man! The story is really good, too.

The Oval Portrait is one of Edgar Allan Poe's shortest stories, but it packs a punch. The narrator is recovering from injuries in Italy, and finds himself in a room filled with paintings. Suddenly he comes upon a portrait "in the style of Sully" that takes him aback with its "absolute life-likeliness". The rest of the story is an account of the creation of painting--basically, an artist painted his wife, but every brush stroke stole a bit of her life until the painting was complete and she was nothing but an empty shell.

Thomas Sully, Portrait of Fanny Kemble, 1834

As someone who knows a bit about art, I found this kind of chilling. There are plenty of tales about artists falling in love with their work or their subjects, one of the most famous being the tale of Apelles and Campaspe. Campaspe was Alexander the Great’s courtesan and the most beautiful woman in Ancient Greece. Apelles, the ancient world's greatest painter, was commissioned to paint Campaspe's portrait by Alexander; but while painting her Apelles fell in love. He knew that the day he finished the painting, he and Campaspe would have to part, so he delayed as long as he could; but finally Alexander asked for her portrait. After taking one look at the portrait, however, Alexander knew Apelles loved Campaspe more than he ever could, so he offered the painter a trade: he’d take the portrait and in exchange, Apelles could have the living and breathing woman.

Renaissance artists like Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael were obsessed with Apelles and strove to imitate him, despite the fact that none of his works of art survive. Because of the legend of Apelles and Campaspe, Leonardo said the "Modern Apelles" would be able to paint an image of a woman so realistic it would inspire desire in the viewer. This was the driving force behind many of the Renaissance's most famous works of art, including Botticelli's Venus and the Mona Lisa. Ever seen a Raphael portrait and noticed the eyes follow you no matter where you stand in the room? That's a little trick he developed to make his paintings of women seem as if they were alive.

Raphael, Madonna of the Chair, 1515, Pitti Palace, Florence

Considering the portrait that the narrator in The Oval Portrait sees is formatted like many of Raphael's Madonna paintings, and the story is set in Italy, I think Poe had to be deliberately drawing on this tradition. But Poe, being the morbid bastard he was, gives it a twist by making the artist steal the life of the woman he loves in order to create a beautiful work of art. Instead of the painting representing his love for the subject, as in the story of Apelles, it represents monomania and selfishness. Poe himself believed that the most beautiful poetry was that about the death of a woman--I bet he was AWESOME in relationships.

The Oval Portrait inspired many other works, including The Picture of Dorian Grey. This is a great short story and I highly recommend you check it out!


Find The Oval Portrait at Classic Lit