If you are reading this now at the start of April 2023, you do not know how close I came to quitting this whole thing over a single book. I will get into this further but know that I truly appreciate your following along on this journey.
If this is your first time checking this newsletter out, I also have a YouTube channel where I post immediate reactions to books. These are meant to be immediate, fresh, unpolished takes on books that most often I have just finished reading that moment before recording.
There is also some social media presence with Twitter and Instagram.
I also have a Pango Book shop where I sell used books that I have read either for this project or before I started this silly thing.
This will be a catch all for some of the works I didn’t cover in the catch all newsletter last month because the beginning of 2023 has been challenging.
Anonymous - “The Life of Metjen”
Alexandre Dumas - The Count of Monte Cristo
Upton Sinclair - The Jungle
(cut due to length constraints Octavio Paz’s Labyrinth of Solitude - this will be featured next month)
Anonymous - “The Life of Metjen”
The Life of Metjen was both one of the more frustrating and one of the least engaging reads in this history of this project as I imagine a lot of the Ancient World Literature list will be. There is some speculation that the Life of Metjen may be the oldest form of human communication we have. The Life of Metjen was written in hieroglyphics as a biography on a tomb. There is something interesting to me to think about the need to communicate the life story of a person whose grave you are standing near. We do this in the west still where we will place someone’s headstone near their interred body with the name and dates of birth and death on them. Some inscriptions will read something to the effect of beloved attributes of the person buried there. The Life of Metjen is 12 panels long and has been taken and reconstructed in a museum in Germany. I was able to see photos of the tomb on their website and a sort of virtual browsing of the images as collected there. I wanted to get a reliable translation of all of the text but I couldn’t get a sense from Google which were summary and which were direct translation. I took a weird amount of time to sus this whole thing out. I finally decided to read a blog post by an Egyptologist and historian Bill Manley on the subject. I don’t like to read secondary sources on a particular work if I don’t have to because I would rather walk up to the item on its own terms. I will read secondary literature about an aspect related to the thing I am reading there by providing background and context rather than analysis. Some of the best introductory work I have read often skews towards this rather than interpreting the text for the reader before the reading begins. It can be a key indicator to me of the rhetorical situation the introducer feels the piece fits inside of. This can be more illuminating to me than a great deal of additional research. I think of this for Herland specifically that one introducer was concerned about the modern reception to the text rather than explaining or illuminating the text itself. Here, Manley is concerned that the reader engage with the inscriptions here in a narrative way and to understand one a first person point of view sort of way the life and time of Metjen to understand the significance of the work.
Manley believes that Metjen forms some sort of rags to riches story and goes to great length in unpacking the timeline of Metjen’s life to see his meteoric rise from the abandoned son of a middle class official to that of head engineer for important projects for the crown as it is pointed out the riches he was gifted during Metjen’s life. It is an unusual thing to note in the funerary proceedings the poor dealings of the man’s father. I ended up reading the Manley piece twice because I had read it so far apart that I forgot that I had read before and this idea pops up again. It is noted in the tomb inscriptions of perhaps the oldest known piece of cohesive writing that the man who is buried at this location was neglected by his father presumably whose grave we are not aware of. It is this score settling or maybe the pettiness of this appeal that struck me both times reading this piece. Manley doesn’t seem to note this aspect and I may be misreading the tone or the reason for mentioning this detail. The reason I came back to this is Manley’s characterization that Metjen’s life is considered a rags to riches story which I find interesting and one reason perhaps that this inscription was preserved or noted in the first place. There is something deeply universal to the appeal of this message across the longest possible span of time and human culture and meaning. We have always loved this story that through grit or hardwork or overcoming adversity, we as individuals can achieve great things. It appears that from the inscription one of the reasons why Metjen was chosen to succeed in life was because he was particularly helpful in a rowing exercise or sport of some kind. So there is an element of chance involved but physical strength, dexterity and hard work seem to be at the forefront of Metjen’s experience as it is detailed here.
Post Rock Jukebox
During the course of reading Count of Monte Cristo almost all facets of the Random Number Lit project ground to a halt. I was only trying to process the Count and its 52 hours of audiobook. During that time though the one shining moment in all of that turmoil is that I found the post rock band Jakob. Its is a simple and unassuming name but it is a truly fantastic band. If you get a chance to check them out start with the album Solace. All of their records are good, but Solace is the one I kept coming back to over and over again over these couple of months.
Alexandre Dumas - The Count of Monte Cristo
It has happened a few times now over the course of this project that a single work consumes my ever waking thought. I don’t know if it simply a product of how long these works are but, for me, Don Quixote and War and Peace and the Count here have become my personality for a few months while contending with them. These works are titanic in the annals of classic literature and for good reason. I resent the fact that I love these books so much because it feels ridiculous to me. As a person of very specific tastes, I should like the more obscure and less predictable works. Oh, you like Don Quixote, do you? Well, have you read Cervantes’ lesser work or whatever? I loved the Count all the way through. It will be hard for me to really get my hands around in such a short post so I want to recount a few specific moments that I think are of a type of genius that is truly staggering.
Spinoza mentions in his Ethics a Spanish poet who lost his memory and lost the memory of himself ever having been a poet. Spinoza does not retell this moment but only draws on it for his illustration which I think is fascinating but it reminds me of moments in lesser fiction where we just glance off a moment that in its later echoes is picked up and changed, the pacing is sped up or the stakes are heightened so that the parody or updated version end up being more enjoyable than the original. This is not the case with the Count.
There is a moment in the middle of this book that actually is where some of the book begins to drag a bit where Villefort’s rebel father, Monsieur Noirtier - who has become mute due to what seems to be a stroke and communicates through a series of blinks and gestures, regales the party with a tale of having killed his grand daughter Valentine’s bethrothed’s father himself. It is an ecstatic moment in fiction that I gasped as it unfolded. Noirtier (pronounced knock-tea-a) often has his interpreters get out a dictionary and let him point to the word he means and after forcing the fiancee to his grand daughter to read a secret letter written about the night that the boy’s father died, it leaves the mention of the assailant to just the name ‘president’ of a secret society. At the end of the scene, the young man becomes so frustrated with the moment that he demands to be told who the president assassin was and Noirtier has the young man turn the “M”s and finally the old man points to the word, “myself” in the dictionary. This is a riveting scene that I think may be one of the most captivating moments I have ever read. Dumas’ is in full control of the reader in this moment. He is guiding the reader by the nose, leading you down each and every avenue of thought, literally guiding the finger down the page of anticipation as you come to the end. Who could have been the killer? Why does Noirtier know these details. Why does Noirtier resent this suitor for his beloved grand daughter so much? The old rebel killed the boy’s father, that is quite a reveal and one that I honestly did not see coming until the moment. There were several moments like this throughout the book that I found breath taking, exhilarating and as brilliant as anyone could hope for from classic literature.
The only thing I will say about my impression of this text that I think is worth mentioning that modern representations of this text do not do it justice is the complexity of character of the Count. There are long stretches of this book that feel like a comic book adventure because the Count can be everywhere all at once. He is invincible and somewhat of what a teenage boy might think a sophisticated person is supposed to be but the book resolves in a way that I think challenges the entire enterprise and that bravery of story telling is truly something to behold. The 2003 movie is a brilliant story in its own right and I think tells a similarly just and engrossing story but these two stories are not the same. Shawshank Redemption is another retelling of this story that I think is a wholly separate tale that does not approach this text in complexity of emotion.
I painted a quote from this book on a board that is now hanging in my new house because I loved the moment from the book so much. It is from when the Count is redressing the wrong of his capture with Monsieur Morrill. He has the ship Pharaon rebuilt and posing alter ego says to his old friend, “Be Happy Noble Heart Be Blessed” for his ship has literally come in. I loved that moment.
There is deeply affecting scene between Maximilian Morrell and the Count when the boy finds he has lost his bethrothed Valentine to poisoning. Morrell is desperate and pleading with the Count why things have happened as they have. The Count assures the boy that there have been those that have been more troubled than he. Morrell recounts the ways he has been buffeted and how the Count may not be able to relate as he experienced loss in a different way. The Count says back to the boy, “Regarde Moi,” or “Look at Me” in this way that asserts forcefully and halted me. I loved this moment very much.
Then finally, very near the end of the text, Morrell’s son Maximilian asks the Count on what the boy thinks is the cusp of suicide, “Does it hurt to die, Count?” And the Count answers, “Yes.” This moment stopped me in my tracks, and I had to hit pause and reflect on the beauty and clarity of this moment.
If you ever have the chance to give yourself over to a single work for good and for bad, to take it all in the long winding asides and tangents and digressions and just experience a master work of fiction, read this book please. It is unbelievable in its scope and genius. I loved it. I hope you will too.
Upton Sinclair - The Jungle
I have wanted to read Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle for a long time. I bought this paperback copy a long time ago and have probably moved this book to every college dorm and apartment and now house that I have ever lived in. I didn’t read out of this copy because I found out at some point in my adulthood that I am very allergic to book dust and the older and crummier a book is - the worse I will feel while cracking the spine.
I have always been drawn to classic literature since I was a teenager and I would buy Signet Classic editions to books probably because they were cheap. That probably started with Dante’s Inferno because the Signet version had a macabre book cover and I heard that it was a classic. I bought a copy of Milton’s Paradise Lost and did not end up reading that version. I still have that paperback that I bought when I was a teenager. I bought this copy of The Jungle at some point at some used bookstore or thrift store and felt like I was going to read this book at some point in my life. I finally did and I loved it. I pulled it just after finishing the Count and the hangover from the Count actually propelled me to want to finish the next book even faster because of how much time I felt like I lost with Dumas’ epic.
I want to start by saying that Upton Sinclair is a complicated figure in American literary history. Sinclair lived in a commune at some point in his life, and finally running for Governor of California. He published 100 books in his life on every different subject. He was well known for lots of things from his diet to his politics. What is interesting about Sinclair is that some of the writing he did had a direct effect on American life. The Jungle resulted in some actual legislation in Congress the next year. One of his novels was turned into a Disney movie which seems as unlikely as having had a bill passed in Congress or being the Democratic nominee for Governor of California.
It is often said that the book The Jungle is about the meat packing industry in Chicago which I suppose is mostly true but more than that the book is about what it means to be poor in America which is a truly riveting account of such a life. The end is a long recitation of the positive aspects of socialism and Sinclair feels like he is speaking directly to the reader through some of the speakers’ voices as the novel is closing. The novel has a punchy quality to it that made me start to tune out of some of the emotional resonance of the novel. Where in the Count I found some passages arresting and deeply affecting, here in Sinclair’s voice I found even more horrendous scenes less affecting because of the onslaught of the grizzly scenes. By the time Ona died, I was sort of through being punished by the book. I really enjoyed the process of reading this book though some of the emotional resonance didn’t land for me. Some of Sinclair’s writing reached for some of the highest heights of American English writing that I have ever come across and I was transfixed by certain passages that jump off the page of eloquence and style. I am glad that I read this book, and I think you should as well.
Currently Reading
I am currently reading two texts that do not have audiobooks to them so I will be taking awhile to get through these texts I might think. April is a little bit busier of a month for me than February or March but I hope not to come back with the next newsletter and think that I am going to be reading the same texts. Neither are very long in and of themselves.
Notes on the State of Virginia offers a certain type of challenge that is common to this project but no less difficult as I look to approach it. I am sure there are some hideous things to be revealed in this text. One of the first books that I read for this project was Frances Trollope’s Domestic Manners of the Americans, which to give you the cliff notes version - not good, mentions Thomas Jefferson and to Trollope’s estimation this man was a true villain in his day and age so we will see what this text reveals. The fact that it does not have a readily available audiobook suggests some things to me.
The other author/poet that I drew here is Edmund Waller who does not have a signature work that he is known for other than a smattering of famous poems. He is included in some anthologies for this era of British poetry. Since there is not a work that rises to the top here I will use a classic collection of his poetry to get a sense of his work. The version I am reading from is from Project Gutenberg which was collected from 1857 so this collection is itself a member of the classic literature canon. Let’s see what’s in there.
If you are reading still, then thank you for doing so. I apologize for the haphazard way I continue to publish these dispatches. I hope to have each out by the first of each month. I am a lot closer at this point than I was with the start of the year. That was a tumultuous time. I appreciate the company on such a long journey.