> US Author
> RL book club read for February
> Luis Aparcio, real player, shortstop for White Sox, Hall of Fame, All Century Team, link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luis_Aparicio
> Characters: Henry Skrimshander (protagonist, best short stop ever), Schwartz (Henry's friend, recruiter, mentor, trainer, Pella's lover), Owen (Henry's gay roommate, teammate and dear friend), Guert Affenlight (Westish College President, Pella's father, Owen's lover), Pella (Affenlight's daughter, Schwartz's lover, returns after leaving her husband of four years, David)
> Epigraph: "So be cheery, my lad, Let your hearts never fall, While the bold Harpooner, Is striking the ball." - Westish College Fight Song
> Vocabulary:
- litotes: noun, always plural, understatement, especially that in which an affirmative is expressed by the negative of its contrary, as in “not bad at all.”
- Prufrockian paralysis: The inability to utter what you want to say, after T.S. Eliot's character in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"
- deadlift: origin....lifting the dead or weightlifting? "a direct lifting without any mechanical assistance, a situation that requires all one's strength or ingenuity.
Origin:
1545–55
- Melville's journey on the Erie Canal, tour of Great Lakes
- Owen and Guert's tattoos, a sperm whale rising from the water
- Pella's first paycheck: "Like Ismael said: Being paid--what will compare with it?"
- Henry wonders why Anne Frank didn't just pretend to not be Jewish.....concludes he is who he is...no escaping.....
- Emerson's return to dig up his beloved wife's grave....as they do for Affenlight...... see eulogy notes below
- Laying down a bunt, or sacrifice fly......Biblical reference: "Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends."
> Quotes I liked:
- p. 31..."Me, I hearken back to a simpler time....A time when a hairy back meant something."
- p. 54..."It was easy enough to write a sentence, but if you were going to create a work of art, the way Melville had, each sentence needed to fit perfectly with the one that preceded it, and the unwritten one that would follow. And each of those sentences needed to square with the ones on either side....."
- p. 86..."She'd gotten so far ahead of the curve that the curve became a circle, and now she was way behind"
- p. 248..."It was amazing the way people hemmed each other in, forced each other to act in such narrowly determined ways, as if the world would end if Henry didn't straighten himself out right now, as if a little struggle with self-doubt might not make him a better person in the long run....."
- p.256..."the paradox at the heart of baseball,.....You loved it because you considered it an art, an apparently pointless affair, undertaken by people with a special aptitude, which sidestepped attempts to paraphrase its value yet somehow seemed to communicate something true or even crucial about The Human Condition. The Human Condition being, basically, that we're alive and have access to beauty, can even erratically create it, but will someday be dead and will not."
- p.259..."What other sport not only kept a stat as cruel as the error but posted it on the scoreboard for everyone else to see?"
- p.306..."It always saddens me to leave the field. Even fielding the final out to win the World Series, deep in the truest part of me, felt like death."
- p.308..."He felt a touch of sadness now that it had happened, now that he knew what it was like. Not because it wasn't enjoyable, or wouldn't be repeated, but because one more of life's mysteries had been revealed."
- p.346..."Henry knew better that to want freedom. The only life worth living was the unfree life, the life Schwartz had taught him, the life in which you were chained to your one true wish, the wish to be simple and perfect."
- p.363..."That was the idiot hopefulness of humans, always to love what was unformed."
- p.503..."You told me once that a soul isn't something a person is born with, but something that must be built, by effort and error, study and love."
> Loved the idea of juke boxes with poetry to choose from
> Henry's swim after leaving the game....coming ashore was some sort of rebirth imagery
> I liked the comparison Pella makes between "face-to-face" love and "side-by-side" love
> Owen's eulogy for Guert:
In Herman Melville's Moby Dick, the lee shore is figured into one of American literature's transcendent passages:
"Let me only say that it fared with him as with the storm-tossed ship, that miserably drives along the leeward land. The port would fain give succor; the port is pitiful; in the port is safety, comfort, hearthstone, supper, warm blankets, friends, all that's kind to our mortalities. But in that gale, the port, the land, is that ship's direst jeopardy; she must fly all hospitality; one touch of land, though it but graze the keel, would make her shudder through and through. With all her might she crowds all sail off shore; in so doing, fights 'gainst the very winds that fain would blow her homeward; seeks all the lashed sea's landslessness again; for refuge's sake forlornly rushing into peril; her only friend her bitterest foe!
"Know ye, now, Bulkington? Glimpses do you seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore?
"But as in landlessness alone resides the highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God -- so, better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety! For worm-like, then, oh! who would craven crawl to land! Terrors of the terrible! is all this agony so vain? Take heart, take heart, O Bulkington! Bear thee grimly, demigod! Up from the spray of thy ocean-perishing -- straight up, leaps thy apotheosis!" (Chapter 23, "The Lee Shore")
> LibraryThing Review: Just read it! "The Art of Fielding" is a good, not a great story, but it is written really, really well. I cried at the end. It deals with common enough themes: coming of age, friendship, love, loyalty, losing and then finding oneself. Plenty of literary allusion, Melville, Emerson, and the Bible...yep...they are all there. It is the use of language in this novel which made it special and memorable. It is the phrases such as, "You told me once that a soul isn't something a person is born with but something that must be built by effort and error, study and love", that I liked. The author's voice seemed unique and fresh and it made this novel memorable for more than the beloved Guert, Pella, Owen, Schwartz, and Henry! And by the way, I read all 512 pages in two sittings. What does that tell you?
No comments:
Post a Comment