On Summer Reading
Plus The Taco Psychosis Paperback Is Back!
First things first: those waiting for the physical re-release of The Taco Psychosis need wait no more!
It’s finally back! Click the link here to make sure your summer reading book pile is complete!
And I’m not kidding about summer reading either. Granted, my satire is about Mexican food and is the best book to read with a Corona and a slice of lime. Guaranteed! But irrespective of self-promotion I am very comfortable overall with the concept of summer reading.
It’s true that we associate this pastime with light reading. But it’s only the snobs - the wrong snobs, that is - who pooh pooh such things, assuming good literary artistry can’t be light. They’re probably jealous a lot of people are out enjoying themselves. But given that people will do that anyway because they enjoy life, I figure it’s good they’re reading.
Summer reading is often associated (if not synonymous with) “the beach read.” Which, I’m convinced, is a misunderstood term. Not unlike summer reading in general, we think of beach activities as anything warranting a B-52’s soundtrack. But for a lot of people today, it’s at the beach where 1) the most profound experiential activities occur, or 2) the foreplay to said profound activities. While 3) a lot of profound activities are not far from the beach even if those characters never go to the beach. We all need to shower and hang out at the seaside restaurant at some point.
Ecologically the beach might be an enclosed landscape in and of itself: but the same argument can’t be made socially. Ironically, it’s precisely because the beach is the most inhospitable landscape on earth: nothing grows on it, no freshwater springs are there to nourish us (if that’s true somewhere then I’m a monkey’s uncle, but it’s certainly not the norm) and very few animals inhabit the beach exclusively.
The best example of the first and second kinds of beach activities in our tradition is Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, which I’m now convinced is a misunderstood classic. (Put simply: it’s not a feminist classic but an anti-feminist classic) The heroine of that novel - if, indeed, she can be called that - anticipates and executes her death via Louisiana’s primary beach resort, Grand Isle. When one remembers that Louisiana - more swamp than sand - actually has little in terms of beaches, this takes on a curious symbolism of its own that turns everyone’s present-day understanding of the term “beach read” right on its head.
The best example of the third kind of beach relationship in our tradition is F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night, which is interesting to read in tandem with Ernest Hemingway’s posthumous novel Garden of Eden. One wonders if this isn’t Hemingway’s attempt to try and supersede his “old friend.” Either way: just as beaches are the foreplay or the setting for profound acts of love, so too is their close proximity a great atmospheric embellishment.
The beach has a similar function in both novels. It is the inaugural champagne for the world of seaside Provence. The undressing to reveal what’s hidden behind the cloth, if you will. In both cases the connection with liberation is unambiguous: the world of glamor for Fitzgerald, and the individual flipping of convention in Hemingway’s case. After all, as many have often observed in the cruder sense: a bikini is basically the same as women’s underwear. I peer at a woman in her underwear and it’s a scandal: I watch a parade of women in bikinis walk past me even with the lower half inches from my face and it’s totally normal. All (or most) of which is unlocked by the beach. The beach validates what other locales cannot.
A lot of you either have pleasant summer duties to attend to. Or a nice stack of summer reading. So I’ll part ways and go back to my own imminent summer reading plan—a fantasy series, a Maigret investigation, a writer’s bio, something Croatian and a cold historical Sigrid Undset saga to function as my ice cream, plus an undecided “traditional” beach read.
But before I do, here are several summer read/beach read winners I know of either by experience or unimpeachable reputation. Alongside Fitzgerald and Hemingway of course, for I would count both of those novels as well! (I’ll leave it to you to make up your minds about Chopin.)
The Taco Psychosis, by Felix Purat
Ahem…
Summer Book, by Tove Jansson
There are few books I haven’t read but would swear by due to (sensible) ravings from people I know (or have known) as well as the matching theme. This is one of them.
Jansson - a cherished literati treasure only sometimes known by others, kind of like Carlo Emilio Gadda among the Italians - was Swedish Finland’s foremost literary representative in her day, surpassed only in stature by the poet Edith Sodergran. In particular, her stories are a geographical celebration of all the numerous little islands off the Finnish coast.
Most people think of Finland and think of a brumal, wintry place. But even without having read it yet, I’m aware that Summer Book has altered that stereotype. This is summer reading that still plays with your brain in the best of ways: once read, Finland will always feel like a natural summer destination. (And after this recent heatwave, I’m most inclined to agree)
The story centers around the protagonist’s relationship with her grandmother. I think a very promising quality of summer reading is that the “serious part” need only be human. Everyone playing volleyball on the beach is ideally doing so with either cherished friends or new acquaintances who might well become cherished friends. (Or, perhaps, a new enemy) Jansson’s story is summer plus profound human relationship at its strongest.
Swimming Home, by Deborah Levy
One of my favorite books that I never mention here. I don’t because it’s quite precious and reminds me of my time in Paris, for I learned of Levy after she gave a reading at my alma mater. Swimming Home was her newest book at the time; and it changed forever the way I interpret the term “beach read.”
The plot, basically, is everything one would expect of a beach read. Love story, beach setting (Provence, like F. Scott Fitzgerald) and the requisite twists. That’s all fine and dandy, of course. A beach read should provide such things and provide them well: which Levy does.
Where Levy shifts gears is in her artistic touch: it’s almost as if an Impressionistic painter can switch from being Monet to Renoir simply by picking up a different paintbrush, that’s how nuanced the difference is. Put another way: a book that might have struck me back then as chick lit becomes, aesthetically, something that owes more to J.G. Ballard than any romance classic one would find in one’s nearest shop. For those women authors spending more time writing than sunbathing, this is a crucial thing to study: if one thinks they won’t appeal to men who read via a thematic or subject change, they might consider that the change needed is all in the wrist. And in some respects, always has been.
Highly recommended! Hopefully I’ll write a beach read one day that’s as good.
The Baron in the Trees, by Italo Calvino
While I have nothing against beaches, I’m more the arboreal sort: give me some greenery, an outdoor terrace or gazebo with architectural aesthetics reminiscent of Rivendell and a tall, cool drink to go with my reading pile and I can have a pleasant summer. For that environment, there’s no better story to match one’s surroundings than Italo Calvino’s The Baron in the Trees. (Though I’m happy for the English lit nerds to correct me with some 19th century genteel park-based classic with swans)
This short novel/novella doesn’t count as nature writing as an American reader would understand it. But it gets the reader to ponder the role of trees - their type, their sturdiness, their symbolism - with the same amount of efficacy. Calvino’s baron protagonist is intensely relatable: the fact that he is a baron is irrelevant given that most people live materially better lives than some barons a hundred years ago. The human connection, as with Jansson, is alive and kicking.
The Baron in the Trees is often published with The Cloven Viscount and The Nonexistent Knight under the very traditionalist title Our Ancestors. Both are also suitable, if heterodox, summer reading options.
Summer of Caprice, by Vladislav Vancura
There’s thinking and then there’s thinking. Or perhaps it’s pondering, ruminating, cogitating—one of the reasons certain literati pooh pooh the summer read or beach read has to do with the concern that the use of a book disguises a desire to stop thinking, and to get away from it. In other words: the anti-intellectualism they don’t like vs. the brainwashing kind they do like.
This is precisely why I defend the summer read and beach read. Granted, a lot of readers probably do escape from thinking. But what’s the solution: encourage them to stop reading? Force my unpopular favorites down their throats? That would be outright retarded. The solution, in fact, is remarkably simple: just enhance (if not outright alter) the meaning of summer read and beach read altogether. The next two titles are examples of how that can be done.
We’ll start with the Czech classic: Vladislav Vancura’s Summer of Caprice. It’s the summer-themed book that won’t allow you to stop thinking. Guaranteed! In fact, I would argue it’s the greatest celebration of domestic tourism ever written if we measure said greatness by literary quality.
As I don’t want to spoil the fun, I will merely suggest that those who want a sampler can watch the legendary Jiri Menzel’s film adaptation of the novel from the late 1960s. One of those great masterpieces of the Czechoslovak New Wave era.
Rather than pontificate about who’s being literary enough in their bikini (or out of it) why not put ourselves to the test instead? Are you a real literatus who can read real literature during the summer that fits the season? Or are you a poser? If you read Summer of Caprice and are bored, then you’re not the real deal. If you do and you get it, love it or both; then I’ll grant you the right to be our subculture’s summertime snob.
The Lake, by Bianca Bellova
If I’m extra charitable, however, there are those (especially from America) who are deeply invested in politics. To them, summer reading isn’t just offensive because the reading piles are often very popular, light to the point of emptiness or kitsch. It’s apolitical: and that, if anything, is even worse!
My reading of the country this 250th birthday season is that most people are weary of political topics; by which I mean very weary. I know I am, and I’m a geopolitical nerd who once wanted to be a diplomat. Still: there are some readers - a declining number, perhaps, but a real demographic - who’ll want something that never lets their interest in political affairs leave their mind. The best candidate that is also an artistic gem the less political can appreciate for their own reasons is Bianca Bellova’s The Lake.
If I was to formulate a theory about summer reading with political themes - since some kind of relaxation, if not escape, is an experiential virtue here - it would be that the actual escape isn’t from a political worldview altogether, but one’s own worldview. By which I mean topically, not in terms of sides.
A lot of people are deeply invested in the environment, for instance. But if I was to survey them and ask if the drying up of the Aral Sea and the subsequent desertification of that ex-Soviet region is their primary hill to fight on, I doubt more than one out of a hundred thousand would answer in the affirmative even if we restricted all other issues to just ecological issues. Most Americans have never heard of the Aral Sea.
The Lake is that opportunity. But it’s also a genuinely artistic novel that combines a lush and beautiful, almost phantasmagoric writing style with a cynical if no less rich portrait of human society around a lake that, while fictional, has since been revealed to be the Aral Sea. The story itself is adventurous enough to where it’s a good fit for those who like individual adventures as well as coming of age stories. Czech lit fans will find in The Lake a close cousin of Jachym Topol’s Gargling With Tar. But in that specific case, The Lake is a better novel.
Cannery Row, by John Steinbeck
It’s summertime! Why get all pent up with hatred? Steinbeck hatred is as much a sickness of pathological hatred as any other kind: why not just let it go? Aren’t there bigger fish to fry?
It just occurred to me that the reason Cannery Row becomes the butt of a lot of jokes has less to do with its quality (which is absolutely superb) and more to do with finding the right time and place in our artificial, digital, sterile reality. Which isn’t easy. Nonetheless, Cannery Row hasn’t aged: rather, the human experience has been so intentionally otherized by the progress religion (and, in other instances, by the happy directive) its peak triumphs are illegible to more people than should be the case.
(This is assuming the Steinbeck hater isn’t a race pathologist: in which case, I’ll defer the deprogramming to God.)
The right time and place is the same time and place as The Beach Boys: summer, ideally in a place where California warmth and Pacific cool meet and mingle as sentimentally as they do in Monterey.
While Cannery Row isn’t a Dust Bowl saga it isn’t an escapist read either. America has struggled, fascinatingly, with trying to rediscover what “wholesome” means. They usually fail by coming up with something so detached from reality the system rejects it with the white blood cells of artistry; then the anti-wholesome crowd artistically celebrates the most anti-moral behavior in the world with the implication that that’s what wholesomeness is, which is categorically false. America, for whatever reason (cough cough pretension), is fundamentally unable to meet halfway on this.
By sticking to good old humanism and throwing pretension in the garbage can, Steinbeck came the closest to actually pinning down a healthy, realistic artistic depiction of wholesome experience. Cannery Row is the result: and this is why it’s a greater artistic triumph than the low energy Steinbeck haters care to admit.
Best of all for those who like it: there’s a sequel! Sweet Thursday if you’re hooked; as I hope you’ll be.
And with that: a happy summer! I decided to just post little during the summer: I think others have as well, though maybe it’s for other reasons. One thing to look forward to: plans to recharge The Swamp Rat Samizdat are afoot! Including the re-commencement of my stalled sci-fi story, Isolde’s Maker.
Also, I think starting in September I will use The Drunk, Slumbering Giant for serialization too. But essays: it’s the only way I feel I’m actually putting Substack to any real use. And as some have seen, I’ve already been testing that in May and June.
Once done, the essays will go on Amazon, paid subscribers will get a free copy; and then the giant will either go back to sleep or start another project. People will move on from the posts but my oeuvre will have expanded one book at a time; which is the point! It’s why I’m here.
I’ve become wholly convinced at this point that Substack is not the answer to writing success; at least not artistically. It can be an accompaniment, a cog in the machine. But nothing more. There was a short, early window where that was possible: and I think if any publishing success (which is not artistic success) comes it’s through serialization. Unless I missed some key caveat that’s about all that one can say about this.;
I don’t base this only on me. I’ve seen good writers turn their output into generic blog entries and derivative essays because they feel it’s how they can keep up with the algorithm. In doing so, they have probably played every mystery card in their writer’s hand, cards they should have keep as long as 20-30 years down the road. While their artistry becomes like the classic Bilbo Baggins quote: “butter scraped over too much bread.”
But Dostoyevsky didn’t need an algorithm to become the greatest writer in history; Kerouac didn’t need an algorithm to become America’s bonafide answer to Proust; and even Hemingway didn’t really need Papa in order to become America’s literary icon. If Hemingway had sucked as a writer Papa would have been impotent from the start. But he’s among the best; that’s why Papa succeeded!
Quality, artistry and truth matter: nothing else. You can put out one novel like Ralph Ellison or you can write a Comedie Humaine like Honore de Balzac; what’ll endure are the stories that pertain most strongly to the literature of truth. Literature used to entertain and still can, but has basically lost the entertainment war on the wider social front. It is only the art form of ideas (genre fiction) or the art form of truth that’ll enable literature to survive. Any movie can do what an entertaining bestseller can do. No other art form can do what Solzhenitsyn did. The current subversion of other artistic forms has been remarkably straightforward, even easy. The subversion of literature has proved to be intensely challenging. The millions (if not billions) but into the current media campaign to desecrate and subvert J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth has not soiled the ability of millions of Tolkien fans to appreciate what he did. Nor will it. Similarly, the attempted subversion of George Orwell’s Animal Farm was outright rejected by the world at large even if the movie itself, from the looks of it, took every subversive angle possible to try and turn an anti-Communist parable into anti-capitalist (aka pro-Communist) propaganda.
Anyway I’ll end there. Get your copy of The Taco Psychosis TODAY! Drink your fill of pina coladas. And don’t get skin cancer too early. This stack may seem like a 3-4 year occasional drag. But trust me: the real goods are just getting started! That support is as beneficial as your subscribing here. From the bottom of my heart, I thank you all!
