Summer Reading

I usually read a couple of novels during the summer. This year I also read two, one I had been intending to read for sometime and the other was a bit of happenstance, more or less.

The first book was Ernest Hemingway's, The Sun also Rises. This, my first exposure to the famed novelist, was a great disappointment. I found the writing so dull (not unlike some academic monographs) and the story so unremarkable (not unlike the theses of most undergraduate term papers) that it took two prolonged attempts to finally reach the end. If the author's only purpose was to recreate in the reader a sense of the lostness of the post-Great War generation, then, fine, he succeeded admirably. Fun aside, it is entirely possible that my own limitations prevented me from really getting this book. After all, it was included in Time Magazine's list of best 100 novels from 1923-2005.

The second book, Andrew Davidson's, The Gargoyle, I only read because my wife was reading and enjoying it, and we were on vacation in Vancouver. This is the story of the becoming-human of a pornographer through a relationship with a mysterious woman whom he meets after surviving a car accident severely burned--and emasculated. The book deals with some weighty and even theological themes. Part of its mystery involves a medieval monastery in Germany and mystic theology. The book walks many fine lines, between the sublime and the absurd, the profound and the silly or cliche, sometimes stumbling onto the wrong side. I doubt many critics would call it a literary masterpiece (but, after The Sun also Rises, so what?). And I sometimes tired of its many detours. Still, overall I enjoyed this and appreciated the author's grappling with big questions.

Update: An interesting coincidence between the books just occurred to me: the protagonists of each are men who are incapable of normal sexual functions. In one the lack is curiously only implied and though I want to say it is another signal of the senselessness of life, I'm guessing there's more there, and perhaps something different, than that; in the other of course it is instrumental (pardon the pun) of the protagonist's transformation.