The Naked and The Dead

The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer is a massive book about the invasion of a Pacific island by American troops in World War II. Despite the size of the book, Mailer proves to be quite adept at moving the story along (even though it took me forever to finish the book...I actually finished a few days ago).

The book focuses on one particular platoon, which is nominally led by Sergeant Croft. At times the story broadens out to examine the commanding general, Cummings, and his staff of officers. But Croft's platoon, the grunts, are the main characters in the book. And boy are there a lot of characters. Too many perhaps. But the characters are one of the things that make this book great. Wilson, Roth, Goldstein, Martinez, Ridges, Red, Brown, Stanley, Gallagher, and more and more. These are men that you feel like you live with in the book. You live through the terror of landing on the beach, the boredom of camp life, the fear of the firefight, the fear of the jungle, and to a large degree, fear of failing your buddies and fear of their derision. Mailer uses flashbacks in sections titled "Time Machine" that give you the story of a soldier's life before the war. These men come from such disparate backgrounds that you'd think it impossible for them to work together as a unit. The Farmer, the Irish low level political machine operative, the redneck, the Mexican-American, two very different Jews, the stoic Texan...many different walks of life came together during the conscription draft for WWII. In the previous sentence I categorized these men in just a general word or two. This is really a failure on my part. I've often talked about character development in other reviews, but I wonder if Mailer can be topped. You understand each of these men as extremely complex individuals, each with their own many flaws and strengths. The only way I can really describe it is that these characters come as close to being real people as in any piece of fiction I've ever read. For that matter, they come off as more real that some actual people written about in non-fiction.

Perhaps the next most impressive thing about the book is the description of the war on the island. Despite having read many books about war before, I don't recall ever reading such an un-sanitized depiction of war. The way Mailer describes mortar and artillery attacks can actually make you break out in a sweat. I was terrified and gratified to find soldiers in the book having reactions like I think I would have in that situation. While the artillery rounds come in, you have men cowering in their foxholes, ears ringing from the constant barrage, pounding the ground and screaming "stop it, stop it, stop it." In instances like this, it really put a human face on war for me. Other instances included a character defecating in his pants during an attack out of sheer terror. Something you never hear about, but something you know happened. And further on the excretory front, you normally don't hear about characters moving their bowels, let alone having diarrhea. If you do, it's normally in a comic context. In The Naked and the Dead, going off in the tall kunai grass when nature calls can get you killed. Speaking of the kunai grass, the book brings home the fact that the environment, as much as the Japanese, was the enemy. Jungle sores all over your skin, feet constantly soaked in water, brain baking in the direct sun, feet slipping in the mud, or mountain crevasses that are nearly impossible to pass. Unlike baseball, war isn't called off because of rain. And yet, despite all this, the characters in the book carried on and did their duty to the best of their ability. Mailer gets into the heads and explains their motivations, and you understand why they literally soldier on, but you're left wondering if you could have done half of what they did given the circumstances.

Even more frightening is the suddenness of death in the book (in some instances). A patrol would be going on just like normal. Nothing special would be happening, then bam...a character you've grown to know (over many pages) is dead. No rhyme, no reason...just dead. But that is how it happens in a war zone. For example: "Quite naturally, he assumed the point and led the platoon toward the pass. Half an hour later, [X] was killed by a machine gun bullet which passed through his chest." That's it. About 100 or so pages spent getting to know the character, and then he's ripped from you in less than 20 words. Sudden, stupid, and cruel.

Finally, I want to touch on Mailer's use of the language. The man was a true virtuoso. If nowhere else, you can see this in the contrast between the language in the dialogue and the language of the narrator. The narrator uses complex sentences and draws amazing pictures with words. The characters use the vernacular of the day and Mailer makes only one concession for propriety's sake; the soldiers say "fug" instead of saying "fuck." And their speech is peppered with fug's. We don't like to think our grandfathers would have talked that way, but indeed they did. Further, Mailer seems to catch the dialect of each character just right. Again this is something that really helps make these characters fully recognized.

In closing, I suspect I've found my heavyweight champion for this reading project (and I'm not talking just about the weight of the physical book!). Even though it took me an awfully long time to read it, it's stunningly superb work. I know that we don't have the attention span these days, but I think every kid who's thinking about joining the service should read this book first, just so he has a broader perspective of what he/she might be getting into.

A Slow-Down

Well, I came down with the summer cold from hell, so I wasn't much up for reading. More in the mood for bad TV and NyQuil. I find it really hard to read when I'm hopped up on NyQuil.

In the meantime, I'm a little bit more than half-way through Norman Mailer's 700-plus page The Naked and the Dead. But I got distracted from that because I was able to get David Sedaris's new book When You Are Engulfed in Flames from the library and thus, had to put aside everything, including the NyQuil bottle, to read.

So anyway, that's why there hasn't been much in the way of posting recently. I'm hoping to have the Mailer book finished by early next week. It's really good, so I don't think it should be a problem (but it is long). Perhaps I should have set a page count goal rather than a monograph goal.

The Updated List

For you new readers, I decided to do a recap of the project (I'm just going to lift the text from an early post---nothing quite like self-plagiarism):

So I turned 37 in March. In honor of this usually unceremonious birthday, I've decided to try to tackle 37 "great" books in the calendar year of 2008. Why would I embark on such a task? I've no earthly idea, but it seems like something different to do.

It's definitely going to be a challenge, as I usually read around 35 books per year (last year I went into the 50s). So we'll see how that goes.

I'm including both fiction and non-fiction in the reading list (which will be developed on an ad hoc basis) and they'll all be in English (since I don't read any other language well at all) but this doesn't preclude reading translations. Since it's my project and likely nobody will read this blog but me, I'll be identifying books that are considered "great." I'll largely rely on other folks lists, such as the Modern Library Top 100 lists, but I want to get some 19th century stuff in there too (possibly some 18th as well). I've read quite a few of the books on the Modern Library list, so I know those are good recommendations. We'll see how it goes. If you have any suggestions, let me know. I'm still open to eliminating books and adding others.

Several of the books I've read before (mostly in high school) and I thought it might be a good idea to re-visit some of them as an adult. In looking at the list today (in July), it seems that I've chopped many of those off though a few remain.

Anyhoo, here's the current list:

1. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain (finished Jan. 22)
   
2. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (finished Feb. 3)
   
3. The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow
4. All The King's Men by Robert Penn Warren (finished Feb. 19)
   
5. Beloved by Toni Morrison (finished August 25)
   
6. Deliverance by James Dickey (finished April 1)
   
7. Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe (finished June 6)
   
8. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
9. The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M. Cain (finished May 1)
   
10. Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy (finished March 6)
    
11. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
12. Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
13. Candide by Voltaire (finished Feb. 23)
    
14. Don Quixote by Cervantes
15. White Noise by Don DeLillo (finished May 29)
    
16. The Age of Jackson by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
17. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (finished August 12)
    
18. Lord of the Flies by William Golding
19. Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell (finished September 5)
20. Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie
    
21. On the Road by Jack Kerouac (finished August 2)
    
22. The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
23. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
24. Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman
    
25. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (finished June 15)
    
26. The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane (finished June 25)
    
27. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll (finished June 16)
    
28. Night by Elie Wiesel (finished September 7)
    
29. The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien (finished May 6)
    
30. The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer (finished July 26)
    
31. Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole (finished April 13)
    
32. The Strange Career of Jim Crow by C. Vann Woodward (finished March 27)
    
33. Rabbit, Run by John Updike
34. Kim by Rudyard Kipling (finished July 2)
    
35. For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway (finished April 28)
    
36. The Making of the President, 1960 by Theodore White (finished May 22)
    
37. (placeholder)

Kim by Rudyard Kipling

On the face of it, Kim is a coming of age story of a boy in colonial India. But it is so much more than that. Kipling gives us a tapestry of life and lives in late 19th Century India under British rule. We learn about the collage of religions and cultures that co-existed in India (and modern day Pakistan) as well as much of the rest of Central Asia. This is all set in the context of "The Great Game" which is perhaps best defined as the colonial rivalry between Russia and Great Britain in Central Asia.

Kim O'Hara is a poor orphan boy who has lived on the streets after his native Indian mother died in childbirth and then his Irish-born father, a soldier in the British colonial army, passed away. Throughout the novel, Kim is pulled by both his love of India and its culture (from his early years and from his mother's blood) and his sense of duty to the British (through his father's heritage). Kim is a successful beggar boy on the streets of Lahore, where he seemingly knows and charms everyone and is known as "Friend to All the World." Early in the book, Kim meets an itinerant Buddhist monk who intrigues Kim and to whom Kim becomes a disciple. Kim and the lama then take to the road together in an effort to fulfill each one's prophecy. Kim's destiny comes to him first, as he meets up with and is taken in by his father's old regiment. They insist that Kim must be raised as a "Sahib" with all the attendant benefits of the racial system in place at the time. At the lama's insistence, Kim goes off to be schooled as an Englishman, but he still has his independent streak and insists on "going native" and rambling with his lama when he can. Kim comes to the attention of the British Secret Service and they realize what a useful person Kim would be to them, with his ability to speak the native language and naturally use the native customs. Kim enjoys the thrill of "the Great Game" but also feels he must be true to his lama. In the end, Kim proves himself worthy to both the British Secret Service and to his lama.

Kipling's novel, published in 1901, is still an outstanding work. In fact, I'll go so far as to say it was the best book I've read so far on my list. Because in addition to being a good story, I really feel I learned a lot by reading this novel. I never really thought much about the confluence of cultures in India, let alone much about British rule there (other than that it was extractive colonialism). It was really wonderful to learn about those cultures and the times from someone who lived in them. You have to put it in context of Kipling's traditional racism of the time (remembering that this is the man who gave us "The White Man's Burden"), but he isn't terribly heavy-handed about it. Moreover, he describes how the different cultures have an odd respect and disdain for one another at the same time. For instance, the lama, while Buddhist, is still given the respect due a holy man in Hindu towns and cities. However, certain individuals cast aspersions on his faith, while still trying to curry his favor. It makes for an interesting paradox.

Beyond that, Kipling creates some unforgettable characters. First and foremost, Kim and the Teshoo Lama are amazing character studies. Beyond them, Mahbub Ali, the Kulu woman, Hurree Babu, and Lurgan Sahib are incredibly well-drawn and compelling characters.

In closing, I don't see how some consider Kim to be children's literature. I think those critics don't give the book a deep enough reading. Just because it's about a boy becoming a man, it doesn't mean that it's a boy's book. Kim is a fascinating and well-written book, that I'm putting at the top of the heap of books I've read this year.