Posted on 11/18/2002 3:34:26 AM PST by PJ-Comix
This month's Freeper Reading Club (now over 100 members) discussion is about Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man." As I stated when assigning this book, as soon as you think you know where this book is heading, it completely changes directions and surprises you. Upon re-reading "Invisible Man" it seems apparent to me that Joseph Heller, author of "Catch-22," must have read this book since much of the surreal absurdity in "Invisible Man" was reflected in his own acclaimed book years later.
As we saw in "Invisible Man," nobody really saw the man (never named) as he really was. To them he was just a symbol but never really existed as a man. Does this remind you of something nowadays? I sure saw a lot of this in how liberals treat blacks. To them, black people are merely voting blocks to be counted on at election day. Too bad that this strategy didn't quite work this time around.
I really like the section of "Invisible Man" where the man (not named) puts on a hat and sunglasses and is immediately mistaken for Rinehart, another black man who uses his invisibility to assume many different roles. Somehow on the first reading of this book, I missed the significance of this. It sure opened the eyes of the Invisible Man to the possibilities of life.
Also fantastic was the often hilarious look at the internal workings of the Communist Party U.S.A. circa the 1930s era. The character of Brother Jack was right on in it's characterization of a deceitful Communist Party bigwig.
Oh, and one other thing. Can anyone out there tell me why "Invisible Man" (Ralph Ellison book) has NOT been made into a movie. If ever there was a book SCREAMING out to be made as a movie this one is it. Perhaps its Politically Incorrect look at the antics of the Communist Party makes this book too embarrassing for liberals to make as a movie.
All in all, "Invisible Man" is an incredible book! Those of you who didn't read this one missed out on an incredible treat.
I also saw so many parallels between the Brotherhood (Communists), and the race pimps of today (Extremely left leaning Democrats). The thing that angered me was the lack of conscience shown by the white Brothers in using the Black Brothers to get to there end.
I do admit I am confused at where Sybil comes in? To me she was kind of out of place. I also was a little confused at the end during the riots. I know how the Brotherhood engineered them, but I am still confused as to why?
p.s. Anybody not in the Freeper Reading Club may still want to read this book and join in on the discussions in January. This book will AMAZE you with it STUNNING level of QUALITY writing. It is definitely the GREATEST American novel ever written.
That's OK, FHTE is absolutely going to amaze/stun you.
I have read the first 300 pages of it (only 500 to go) and it has truly lived up to the advance billing PJ-Comix has given it. Easily the most readable book of the Freeper Reading Club so far (not including the first book "Shane"). It's truly an epic and I'm going to be really bummed when it ends, just like I was with other long books like LOTR.
I will include some comments extracted from Peggy Noonan's column from about a year ago about this book:
For America for Christmas this year there's only one gift, a history book. And we should all get busy writing it.Today is the 60th anniversary of "the day that will live in infamy," the sneak attack on the American fleet at Pearl Harbor. We know a lot about what happened on Dec. 7, 1941, but not enough. Some of the best of what we know came from a work of fiction, James Jones's great classic novel, "From Here to Eternity." Jones had been there that day, a young enlisted man at Hawaii's Scofield barracks, a nascent novelist looking for experience. He got it. He wrote the great novel of World War II. It is amazing to realize that unlike the great novels of World War I, "From Here to Eternity" hinges on the day the war began, at least for America, and never touches upon the war's execution or ending--and it was published near the end of the era in which novels really, truly mattered, when they were seen not as a tributary off the great river of American literature but the river itself.
It was a great book with wide cultural impact. People knew the names of its characters; I can still remember my father watching TV once about 20 years ago as someone played taps on a bugle, and my father said, "Play it, Prewitt." A reference to Pvt. Robert E. Lee Prewitt, the brokenhearted Southern boxer who wouldn't fight but who could make a bugle sing. The great novel was made into a great movie directed by Fred Zinnemann. Like the novel of course but unlike the recently released movie "Pearl Harbor," it actually had a story, a wonderful story of a lonely wife in a bad marriage and a tough man in a cold barracks, not to mention Pvt. Angelo Maggio, Prewitt's best friend, a tough little Brooklyn boy who had issues with authority.
Sixty years later we are at war again, and I happen to think the estate of James Jones should flood the market with a new paperback version of "From Here to Eternity." It would become a great bestseller again, would speak to our times and would give America a sense once again of what it is to be a soldier in the army of our country. Modern novelists don't know about those things.
Thanx. I'm about at that point myself. BTW, I've done a lot of research on James Jones and he bases almost ALL his characters and locations on REAL people and places. I am almost sure there were real-life counterparts in the Army of Sgt. Warden, Maggio, and Ike Galovich that Jones knew. As a matter of fact, someone named Maggio who served with Jones did sue him after the book came out (and I think Maggio won the lawsuit).
It's truly an epic and I'm going to be really bummed when it ends, just like I was with other long books like LOTR.
I know what you mean. On my first reading of FHTE, I purposely slowed down my reading rate because I didn't want to get to the end.
Sixty years later we are at war again, and I happen to think the estate of James Jones should flood the market with a new paperback version of "From Here to Eternity." It would become a great bestseller again, would speak to our times and would give America a sense once again of what it is to be a soldier in the army of our country.
Yeah, I wish this would happen too. FHTE is definitely the BEST American novel ever written. Amazingly, the sequel, The Thin Red Line is the BEST WAR novel ever written.
Švejk: A Hero For Our Time
“In both civilian and military life, Josef Švejk lives by his wits. His chief ploy is to appear witless to those in authority. In fact, he is fond of pointing out that he has been certified to be an imbecile by an official military medical commission, a fact also included in the first sentence of the novel. Consequently, he reasons, he cannot be held responsible for his questionable actions because he’s a certified nitwit! His method of subverting the Austrian Empire is to carry out his orders to an absurd conclusion.”
” “Unlike K., fellow Czech Franz Kafka’s stunted stand-in for modern intellectual man, the rascal Švejk belongs to the men and women of the workaday world — the bartenders, cleaning women, gamekeepers, petty larcenists, lathe operators, janitors, drunkards, office workers, shopkeepers, undertakers, adulterers, nightclub bouncers, butchers, farmers, cab drivers and others who populate Hasek’s imagination as they stumble through the lunacies of the first World War.”
Let me assure you: all those people and many like them populate our world today. The increasing number and burden of absurdities they deal with is putting them in a position to relate to and viscerally understand Švejk, i.e. the book, the character, and the method. Untold hundreds of thousands and perhaps even millions of Americans experience and operate in “švejkárna”. This is a relatively new, younger derivation of the original term “švejking”. “Švejking” is the method for surviving “švejkárna”, which is a situation or institution of systemic absurdity requiring the employment of “švejking” for one to survive and remain untouched by it.
Švejk is indeed an ascending hero for our time. Not because we desire it or prefer it on the basis of some intellectual abstraction, a result of scientific endeavor, or any other sublime exercise of reason. It is a matter of survival in the inhospitable circumstances of the ever more complex and absurd entanglements of the postmodern society we have become. Survival, after all, is not sufficient, but the first necessary condition for realizing other, higher order goals, lofty or otherwise. And Švejk represents one of the most unique survival strategies ever conceived by man. “
NYPL’s list of 100 most important books of the 20th Century contains this modern classic which most Americans haven’t heard of, let alone read: Commonly known as The Good Soldier Svejk its full title is The Fateful Adventures of the Good Soldier Švejk During the World War. It is the most famous, beloved and reviled Czech book.
This Chicago
woman believes you
won’t be able to put
the book down, and
here she tells you
why: http://www.zenny.com/svejk/Ruth Cooper.mp3
I thought you might be interested in these Švejk-related projects:
1) a new English translation at http://zenny.com
2) the SVEJK CENTRAL at http://SvejkCentral
3) a GENUINE ŠVEJK’S FACEBOOK PAGE at http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Good-Soldier-Svejk/133349009873
4) Jarda Šeráks tri-lingual web site at http://www.serak.cz/Svejk/b1_en.htm and
5) Jomar Hønsi’s Google Maps application http://honsi.org/literature/svejk/?page=7&lang=nn charting Švejk’s progress which you can find at his Norwegian language sitehttp://honsi.org/literature/svejk/
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