Reviews for A man flourishing

The average rating for A man flourishing based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-07-23 00:00:00 Joseph Calverase i tried reading this when i was 15, i think around the time it first came out. perhaps i was too ambitious, because the novel was too much for me, and i gave up. i suppose i just didn't get it. but i can be competitive - even with books, even with myself. so i promised young mark monday that the battle wasn't over, that i'd return to re-engage 25 years later, when i had become an old, wise man...and i would eventually conquer this one. well, mark, it is now 25 years later. __________ ...and so i promptly lost my original paperback right after i started reading it - after holding on to it for 25 frickin' years! it took time to get a new copy. but now that i'm finished with this one, i'm not even sure what to say. a lot of different things went on in my head when reading this. it is pretty one-of-a-kind. i think i'll give it some time to sink in before i write a real review. overall: a fascinating, challenging, often off-putting, dryly humorous, always intriguing experience. but after all the headiness, i think i need to read a kid's novel to rinse the intellectual palate, so to speak. __________ well, it's a few days after the above. today i've been enjoying my favorite Kate Bush songs on my back patio and at one point was surprised to recall that i had fully enjoyed these bizarre and challenging songs way back in high school, back when A Maggot was so intimidating. and so i became embarrassed at avoiding the review at hand. thanks Kate for the guilt trip! the story five figures in a landscape, traveling on horseback to an unknown destination. they do not speak; they exist, at first, simply as enigmas to contemplate. a nobleman. his faux-uncle, an actor. his manservant, or lover. a maid - or, perhaps, a whore. a soldier - or, perhaps, a lifetime liar. it is May 1736, in England. three will return, one will be found dead, the last will have disappeared without a trace. the style i have read many times over that Fowles has a style that is challenging... prose that is dense and oblique, narratives that often veer off confusingly into the metaphysical, a guiding hand that shows little to no interest in offering the reader their more traditional pleasures. A Maggot is all of those things. it is a journey that ends in a kind of transcendence; it is a narrative that has no interest in answering your questions, silly reader. and yet this is by no means a difficult book to read - the difficulty lies in digesting and understanding any or all of its myriad implications. roughly three-quarters of the novel is in the question-and-answer format of a police interrogation and police procedural, except in this case the questioner is a curmudgeonly, reactionary, cynical old lawyer, with interests clearly vested in the keeping of station - the poor with the poor, the rich (his client, the nobleman's father - a Duke) firmly with the rich. there should be no challenge to the capable reader during these parts - the format allows all stories to be told in a reassuring first-person format, the tales told are straightforward (but only in the telling), and there are many acidic comments from the dear aged lawyer to enjoy, to roll around the tongue and then say out loud, with the utmost haughty, lawyerly disdain. interspersed between, before, and after these long interviews are sequences that can best be described with that hoary adjective, Brechtian. these parts are striking in what they do not tell. they view the actions and words of our characters at a firm distance, as players in a play that the reader has stumbled upon halfway, the activities a tableau rather than a display of actual movement. it seems intended to distance the reader, to force contemplation, and in that it certainly succeeds. perhaps too well... the tactic can be off-putting. the intent appears to be to separate emotion from content, to allow the reader to decipher entirely on their own the motives and meaning of what they see displayed before them... and in that the method is clearly successful. now i have to wonder why i was unable to finish this back in high school. this is not the most difficult of books. well, who knows. perhaps i was too shallow and more interested in fast-paced genre fiction. i suppose things have not changed too much on that front. the ideas so what is this novel about? well, now is the time to answer questions with questions. is it indeed a police procedural? at that it succeeds, in spades. the mystery is palpable, the truth seems just around the corner. lies are told and liars are caught in them. the death is a suicide or a murder. the party of five are many things and none of them what they appear. at first it appears to be an intrigue of surprisingly cozy proportions. surely this mystery can be solved? the lawyer seems to think it all hinges upon a secret gay relationship between intense young nobleman and mute, well-hung manservant. silly lawyer! is this a tale of witchcraft and dire deeds in a dark and eerie cavern? one of the tales told is explicitly so. it all becomes so clear to the reader accustomed to fantasy and horror during this very long sequence - at last, the truth comes out! it is a very well-constructed trap for the reader who demands an answer and who somehow equates vivid tales of perverse enchantment with an actual answer. and by "the reader", i am of course speaking of myself. it was certainly satisfying on the level of having an answer that turned out to be enjoyably dreadful, perversely erotic, and full of grim fantasia. it is an almost comfortably relayed tale of easily recognized horrors and i swallowed it whole - until i realized i was barely halfway finished with the book. i wondered: so now that the truth is out, what is left to tell? and then this familiar answer to the mystery began to seem unreal, the explanation began to unravel. it became a straw man, a paper tiger, a stalking horse. is this a tale of time travel, the future not just looking upon the past, but stepping in to mold that past, to create the future? the vision of a silvery "maggot" - in essence, a silver spaceship, complete with futuristic dials and knobs, strange fabrics, and viewing screens that show scenes that could never be seen in the viewer's lifetime - is a wonderfully clever nod to the trappings of science fiction. alas, no doubt 'tis another feint. is this a treatise on the inherent lack of godliness in any class-based system, in organized religion, in the lack of equality between the genders? yes, it is. dynamically so. angrily so. is this a vaguely postmodern whimsy on the roots and beginnings of Shakerism? the end of the novel is nearly a love poem to one of the most fascinating religious figures i have had the pleasure of learning about - the Shaker proselytizer Anna Lee. have you ever heard of the Shakers, outside of their excellence at furniture-building? i have, but then in my early youth i was raised in some aspects of the Quaker faith, from which many of the Shaker tenets developed. if you haven't heard of the Shakers, look them up! their belief system is truly compelling, not least in their unshakable conviction that equality between the genders was an absolute for truly living in God's world. an admirable belief! they even thought that Jesus may return in the form of a woman, which was surely a beyond-radical concept for the time (and may still be so). and those Shakers danced! thus the name "Shakers". they danced and sang in crazy, awesome concentric circles. just about the only thing that i find questionable about the faith is their determination that all forms of sexuality, of carnality, were the devil's work. so... no sex. ever. not even for procreation. is this a tale of transcendence, a vision of the world as God intended, a reclamation of a lost soul, a transfiguration of sorts? such is the final tale, and no doubt the one closest to the truth. have our key players transcended, either shedding their physical form and earthly existence for the beyond or shedding the grossly carnal and materialistic forms of their current lives for something finer, something richer in spirituality, community, equality, and destiny? well, let me just tell you this: do not expect an answer to your questions. expect to be forced to think, and not to be led to the well to drink. expect a certain lack of satisfaction, a clear lack of narrative resolution. expect to be... frustrated. the title is A Maggot "a maggot"? in the intro, Fowles recalls the obsolete definition of the word: namely, "a whim, a quirk". this is perhaps the only interpretation with which i resolutely disagree. A Maggot is far from a whim. its intentions are too serious, its possible meaning too compelling, too multi-leveled. unlike a mere whim, it exists to be contemplated seriously. its ideas are no fanciful quirk; indeed, it is a puzzle for the mind (and soul), an almost brazen challenge from beginning to end. __________ the Kate Bush apropos of nothing at all, here are my Top 10 Kate Bush songs: (by the way, the videos are actually horrible. so incredibly dated, pretentious, almost unbearable to watch. and yet i love these songs!) Leave It Open Running Up That Hill Army Dreamers Get Out Of My House Wuthering Heights James and the Cold Gun Hammer Horror Coffee Homeground Ken This Woman's Work

Review # 2 was written on 2011-03-24 00:00:00 Ryan Carey Dazzling. Stunning. The best I've read of him. On second reading, the novel holds up remarkably well. It seems at first a study in the perpetuation of literary suspense. The book jumps between third-person narration; a kind of mock-legal deposition which permits multiple narrative voices; essayistic asides, and epistolary elements. The third-person voice often refers to the gap between events at the time of the story--the 1730s--and our present day. For example: "Closer,...groups of children noisily played lamp-loo and tutball, those primitive forms of tag and baseball. Modern lovers of the second game would have been shocked to see that here it was preponderantly played by girls (and perhaps to know that its traditional prize, for the most skilled, was not the million-dollar contract, but a mere tansy pudding.)" The novel begins with a tableau of five individuals, four of them male, of varying ages, who make a journey to the west of England on horseback. There is an uncle, his nephew, and three servants, one female. We come across them as they travel a muddy road to a bleak village. It is there at the musty inn, and later in a nearby cave, that much of the action occurs; action that will later be dissected by way of a series of legal depositions run by the dwarfish (and hateful) London lawyer, Henry Ayscough. We learn a few things during the interrogations: that nephew and uncle are in fact unrelated; that the nephew is the true leader of the excursion; that the uncle is an actor by profession; that the maid is a prostitute; that one of the servants is deaf and dumb; and so forth. Only the nephew who is not a nephew knows the true purpose of the trip, which for most of the book remains a mystery. We also know that the nephew believes he has hit on a mathematical device or formula that once fully developed will allow him to foretell the future. That is to say, he's crazy as a loon. Still, what can it mean? Why the trip? Why the subsequent investigation? And where has everyone gone? Slowly, one by one, at the behest of the nephew's aristocratic father, the lawyer tracks down all of the participants save one. And in a question and answer format that allows no room for description, or authorial commentary, he painstakingly gets a story. But is it the story? That's a very good question and in large part the novel's point, questioning narrative constructs as it does. It is the prostitute's deposition that for this reader was the most engrossing. For since her excursion to the cave she has given up whoring and has returned to the Quaker community of her parents in Manchester, fully forgiven. What she experienced during that journey she interprets, perhaps the only way she knows how, as an ecstatic Christian experience. She has been vouchsafed a vision of heaven and hell. Christianity is the only tool she has for interpreting such a fantastic experience. And there's no doubt that she thinks her story is truth. Lawyer Ayscough can not shake her from it. Nor can he believe it. And in the end is shaken himself. Like her, he is limited, by virtue of his place in time, to viewing it as nothing more than religious hysteria. The 21st century reader, however, sees what has happened in the cave as something quite different. I'll stop there. Like Fowles' French Lieutenant's Woman, the narrative toys with metafictional devices, but never to the point where they distract. Oh, yes, you'll have to read this one.