Today is one of those no good wretched really bad days where I don’t have any time to pick up a good book. It’s an egregious error in good judgment to even be writing about them, but I’m not giving away the last of my sanity that easily…
Over the weekend, I read Code of the Woosters and Thus Spake Zarathustra, two books about as different from each other as possible.
Code of the Woosters is, of course, part of the P.G. Wodehouse universe. I can’t say his name tends to mean much in America, but the butler (valet really) name Jeeves has become part of the world’s collective consciousness and the excellent filmed versions brought the world Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie. Thus: Code of the Woosters is basically House in England doing his best to escape various social mishaps with the assiduous advice of his butler. Good stuff!
More interesting to me is the use of Bertie Wooster, a well-meaning but foolish fop, as the narrator. It’s a strange sort of thing for the voice of the story to reveal their own general failings and in doing so make a secondary character seem so damn clever. It’s genius really. In truth, the stories border a bit on the ridiculous, but they run by so quickly and so smoothly you never really stop to demand more than a token plausibility. The character’s are just too damn interesting to ask how or why the various plot twists comes to emerge in the first place. It’s all done with a velvet hand and it’s phenomenal.
There’s no statement less true in regards to Thus Spake Zarathustra, Nietzsche’s self proclaimed masterpiece. In all truth, I found it impossibly convoluted. Perhaps I read too quickly, perhaps it’s smoother in German, either way it all came together very much a muddle. The best sections dance around points that were explored much more cleanly in Beyond Good and Evil and other works. The use of the faux-biblical style was intriguing, but Nietzsche’s natural style is so engaging the added flourish did nothing. It’s not a fiction story to begin with, but any semblance of plot gets quickly lost. All in all, I was underwelmed. I expected more and it came out lacking.
Next up is The Man in the High Castle by Phillip K Dick. I’d love to start tonight, but I’ve got an insurance claim to fret over, an apartment near boiling to suffer through, classwork to study, and a wounded ego to massage. Sigh. Hopefully this week will be better books for better days!
