Ideas that kill

Trotsky in Exile - Peter Weiss (trans. Geoffrey Skelton, Pocket Books, 1973)

I'm not sure how widespread this school of thought actually is, but I know that studying Soviet Russia in my youth, there was a strain of counterfactual imagination that wistfully contemplated how different things would have been had Trotsky outmaneuvered Stalin in the years following Lenin's death. In this world, we might have seen a kinder, gentler communism.

Ugh. While sure, the only thing we can really know is that Trotsky's USSR (and the rest of the world around it) would not have looked like Stalin's, it's certainly difficult to believe he would have ushered in some sort of socialist utopia. Trotsky was just as violent, just as conniving, and by a long shot more dedicated to the worldwide part of the worldwide proletarian revolution.

To me, Weiss's Trotsky is of the "man, if only it could have been him" ilk. We visit him in set pieces that travel around in space and time, Trotsky exiled from Soviet Russia at the same time he re-lives moments from his life in prison and exile from tsarist Russia, his intellectual debates and disagreements with Lenin, the chaos of revolution, and the show trials that cemented Stalin's consolidation of power.

I have to keep reminding myself that this play was written during the Cold War, during the Brezhnev Era and just a year after the Prague Spring. (The play dates to 1969, later published in English.) And not only that, it was written by a naturalized Swede of German and Jewish origin. I have the luxury of both a chronological and emotional remove. But still, I don't know how I was supposed to feel about Trotsky, as an intellectual or a revolutionary. Or certainly as a husband or father.

Or maybe I just don't get plays.

I think I'm missing the point

Major Barbara - (George) Bernard Shaw (Penguin Books, 1913, 1951)

I am pretty sure I'm exactly the kind of fan GBS would not have wanted. I swoon over the witty dialogue and fast pace and the sort of ineffable charm that his plays possess. I also manage to read them as sort of skewed romantic comedies, or I least I did with Arms and the Man, which I am now once more desperate to see staged.

But if you read the plays and slog through the author's prefaces, you'll see what is so easily glossed over by the audience, which is that GBS is trying to make rather biting commentary about society and capitalism and the class structure and morality and and and. It's all rather exhausting.

When I'm feeling particularly bright, I like to think that it's the way that he packages the two things together - the comedy of manners and the sharp critique of someone who would enjoy such a thing (namely me) - that is what I admire in his work. But I fear that might be painting too rosy a picture.

Whatever. George Bernard Shaw knew exactly the kind of audience he was reaching, and I'm going to try not to feel guilty about liking the "wrong" things about his plays.

Oh, which reminds me that maybe I should tell you about Major Barbara. Said Major is a wealthy young lady who has joined the Salvation Army. Her estranged father is an arms manufacturer, her mother an aristocrat. Her mother calls her father back to town because the family needs more money - one daughter is marrying a doofus who won't come into money for a few more years, Barbara is doing her Salvation Army thing and marrying a (rather upwardly mobile, it turns out) Greek professor, and the son is fairly worthless as well. And what ensues is much banter, including a scene at the Army site, which involves dialogue with an accent so thick I had to read aloud to figure out what was being said. And in the end, well I suppose everyone is made to look the hypocrite. And it was delightful.

Did we meet in Capri?

The Overnight Socialite  - Bridie Clark (Weinstein Books, 2009)

So, the rain in Spain now falls mainly on the isle of Capri. Or something like that. The novel is billed as a modern retelling of Pygmalion, but it's really far more My Fair Lady, up to and including the moment where I expect our good Pygmalion to dance Eliza around the room.

Lucy is a wannabe designer from the heartland, and Wyatt is the best of Old Money New York as well as a promising anthropologist who never bothered to have a career. So when he breaks up with his It Girl girlfriend, he claims he can train anyone to be a blue blood socialite... and he'll write a book about the process. Lucy just happens to be nearby when he hits on this plan, and besides, she could use the connections to make inroads with the fashion industry.

And the plot is pretty obvious from there, but with some nice minor character plots as well. It's fun to get to know Wyatt's mom, and the "will he propose or won't he?" drama between Wyatt's best friend and his longtime girlfriend is probably the most interesting relationship question of the entire novel. Plus you get a whole bunch of aspirational brand name-dropping, even though the book is set against the collapse of the financial industry. All the chick lit Ts crossed and Is dotted.

And while we are adapting GB Shaw, can I get Arms and the Man?

Elizabethan Sci-Fi, except not

Shakespeare's Game - William Gibson (Atheneum, 1978)


I'd like to have someone to blame for this. Somewhere along the line, I came under the impression that cyberpunk doyen William Gibson started his publishing career with an early novel that somehow brought in Shakespeare and would be tame enough for someone like me to actually dip my toe in the genre. This is totally wrong (unless Neuromancer is somehow about the Bard). The Gibson above is an older Gibson, a playwright, who offered a structural and textual analysis of Shakespeare's plays based on years of teaching graduate students. So I guess I need to talk about him and that book, although I maintain that "Shakespeare's Game" would be a fantastic title for some sort of science fiction-esque work (or it sounds just like Da Vinci Code... one of those).

Anyway, this work. Look, 200 pages of analysis is not going to be exciting, no matter how much Shakespearean iambic pentameter you include.Well, not exciting to me at any rate. And so I may not have been the close reader that this book deserved. Even so, I found things to learn, having not studied Shakespeare since high school. I think - think - Gibson argued that the climax of the plays tends to occur at the end of Act III (of V); everything else from this point is essentially pre-ordained, and thus tidying up to get to the inevitable conclusion. He also talked quite a bit about how deftly Shakespeare presents false antagonists, who stand in or draw attention from the real conflict. (On this note, I wish he had spent some time with Julius Caesar.) And how sloppy and nonsensical Shakespeare can be in service of other goals (chiefly entertainment); for the life of me I couldn't tell whether Gibson considered this a failing or not.

Lots of Hamlet (which will forever be the Reduced Shakespeare version to me... below) and King Lear. And then Merchant of Venice and Othello. What I realized: I don't know Shakespeare as well as I'd like. Goal: watch more. :)