Etc.: early Saramago, plus Frank Herbert's 'Dune' meets poet Ted Hughes

raised-from-the-groundJOSE VS. THE MAN: Back in 1980, 18 years before he won the Nobel Prize for Literature, Jose Saramago was a newspaper deputy editor who got canned from his job (nobody treats deputy editors right, do they?). He penned a big, fat novel that lets us know exactly how he was feeling, "Raised from the Ground: A Novel" (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa.

Here we meet the Mau Tempo family -- poor peasants -- and follow them in their travails and misfortunes against the privileged> We hear that wry, mischievous narrator's voice that Saramago went on to perfect in a novel like "Baltasar and Blimunda"; and we relish the prose: "Ah, but life is a game too, a playful exercise, playing is a very serious, grave, even philosophical act..."

Classic Saramago, and to think: This was only the beginning for him.

***

poet-ted-hughesFRANK HERBERT'S "DUNE" MEETS TED HUGHES?: Someone pointed me in the direction of a long letter that's very uplifting and inspiring in spite of the circumstances surrounding it.

A recent post on Letters of Note, a worthy site maintained by Shaun Usher, offers in a letter the inspirational insights of Ted Hughes to his son, Nicholas.

You should check it out.

What unexpectedly resonated for me -- beyond the power and unique metaphors of Hughes' insights -- was something quite science fictiony and unexpected ...

Suddenly, I was thinking of Frank Herbert's novel "God Emperor of Dune" which I decided to reread this holiday season (I can't even explain what made me pick it up again - did Santa make me think of sandworms?).

Near the end of Hughes' letter, he alludes to an ancient bit of wisdom: "And as the old Greeks said: live as though all your ancestors were living again through you."  That, I realized, is exactly what the man-turned-Worm Leto II experiences -- all the voices of House Atreides speaking through him.

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The 13th century's Stieg Larsson: new in bookstores

My geography is a bit off -- Stieg Larsson, the late author of "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo," was from Sweden; the early epic chronicler Snorri Sturluson, who wrote in the 13th century, hailed from Iceland.

Still, I think the comparison works. Both authors have created enormous public curiosity about the way people live in the windswept, icy lands of Scandinavia.

Larsson gave us the incredible, unforgettable heroine Lisbeth Salander; Sturluson gave us her fierce, warhammer-wielding ancestors (that must be where Lisbeth gets her skills with a broken chair leg -see Book #2).

In "Song of the Vikings: Snorri and the Making of Norse Myths" (Palgrave Macmillan), Nancy Marie Brown chronicles his life and times, along with our continuing infatuation (and Brown's) of all things Norse. This is perfect reading for anytime of year, but especially now, on one of our (rare) chilly days in Southern California.

An open bottle of stout by your side, cigar smoldering in a dish ... you are ready.

Brown gives us Snorri's life -- the best that we can know it -- and it was an extraordinary one. He was a chieftain and a "lawspeaker," a rich man with a taste for beautiful women, as well as a poet who pieced together stories of his people's gods into a brilliant mosaic. He picked up a raven-feather quill and wrote down what he knew -- and added a few stories of his own invention. Even though Thor was popular in the Norse pantheon, for instance, Brown says Snorri was more interested in one-eyed Odin, and devoted much of his attention to him.

Brown's book is fascinating, especially as it shows how the "odd love lives and dysfunctional families" of the 13th century world were reflected in The Prose Edda, which is Snorri's synthesis of Norse myth. Loki's mischief, broken oaths, secret alliances, greed and lust -- it's all there, in the Icelandic world, and Snorri was brought down by it, too. Assassinated in 1241, Snorri was not only an important epic chronicler: His life could have belonged to the epic, too.

Brown describes the almost-magical influence of Snorri's work on many artists -- like William Morris and J.R.R. Tolkien -- and, in the process, I found an answer (at least one answer) for why the Scandinavian world interests so many of us and leads to the enormous bestselling success of authors like Stieg Larsson.

What is it?

Our concerns sometimes seem so ridiculous and unreasonable: We gripe about traffic congestion or a long line in the grocery store. The people of that region  had far more important things to worry about:

"Earth fire--lava--was just something Icelanders lived with," Brown writes, "like the glacial rivers that burst in raging floods, the sea ice that clogged the island's shores, the constant whining wind, and the winter's darkness."

The Norse were (are) an elemental people. And Snorri captured their essence, thank goodness, with ink and a raven-feather quill.

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Ancient H2O: new in bookstores

Realms like Westeros, in George R.R. Martin's "Song of Ice and Fire," or Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast are imaginary landscapes -- places that exist only in the reader's mind. Until about 80 or 90 years ago, you could have added my Southern California to the list of imaginary topographies.  More than 22 million people consider my region their home today, but that number would have stunned scientists in the early 20th century. This land lacked a single element to support such an enormous population: Water.

But sunny SoCal is hardly the first region to ever grapple with natural resources: Steven Mithen's "Thirst: Water and Power in the Ancient World" (Harvard University Press) supplies a marvelous tour of long ago civilizations whose fates rested on water and making it available to their populations.Request Feedback

That marvelous face on the cover says it all, doesn't it?

Sumerians, Nabataeans ("masters of the desert," says Mithen), Minoans, Mayans, the Hohokam--Mithen's book is a fascinating survey of the many civilizations affected by a resource that we take for granted.

Find a comfortable chair, pour yourself a tall glass of water if you're thirsty, and spend a few hours reading about ancient efforts at hydraulics and irrigation described with evocative, often personalized prose. Then, once you're finished, take a sip and remember how lucky you are.

 

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Relic, relique, reliquus: Part 2

Besides having a great name, Ransom Riggs is a good fellow (we once sat on a panel together at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books) who's in the habit of making relics. Sort of.

As I was thinking about Umberto Eco and my personal artifacts in a previous post, Riggs came to mind. The plot of his novel "Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children" was influenced by all the unusual black-and-white vintage photographs scattered throughout the book. The pics don't belong to his family history, they're not self-generated: No, he acquired them at flea markets. They were context-less when he found them: no captions, nothing to explain them.

That left him free to invent his own stories (reminds me a little of what Chris Van Allsburg does in his children's book "The Chronicles of Harris Burdick"). Riggs also does the same in a new book, "Talking Pictures: Images and Messages Rescued from the Past" (It Books).

I wish I had the energy to rove like him through flea markets for interesting old spars of knowledge, dim wares of price (E.P.). That doesn't mean I'm without my own relics, though. A few are:

icon of St. Nicholas (previously mentioned)

rocks and shells (from many places)

a tarnished ruble (from Kiev)

Shiva Nataraja figurine (from a departed close friend)

Drawings by my sons (obvious)

My father's chunky $5 ring (obvious too)

A daruma doll

Movie ticket (first date with my wife)

So, now that I've shared some of mine, turn to your own shelves and desk drawers. You must have relics.

What are yours?