Moon Tiger, by Penelope Lively

Penelope Lively is among the finest living British novelists. She moves with ease from the grand sweep of events to the telling details of select lives, and in Moon Tiger she steps from an external view of a character, to her thoughts and reactions, and into the mind of her conversant, seeing an event from an omniscient view, then through each participant. For this novel the technique is fitting: Claudia Hampton is an historian though not a dry one – she stirs up controversy, not least because she is good-looking and unattached, but also because she never hesitates to take a contrarian view of “settled events” – Cortez and Montezuma, Napoleon, Marshal Tito, the Paleolithic era… 

During WWII she works as a journalist in Cairo; in her milieu women are vastly outnumbered by young men. Talking her way onto a transport, she travels into the desert where soldiers are mustering against Rommel’s forces. Somewhere out there is her young man, the one who will not come back, whose death frees her to live independently, to build a fulfilling life without partnership or parenthood. 

“Sixty-seven-year-old Claudia, on a pavement awash with packaged American matrons, crying not in grief but in wonder that nothing is ever lost, that everything can be retrieved, that a lifetime is not linear but instant. That, inside the head, everything happens at once.” 

This book is also about the end of life. In the story’s present, Claudia lies in a hospital room, body failing and mind wandering. We are privy to her thoughts, as she writes “the history of the world” which coincides with her world of studies and experience. In flashbacks we meet the few people close to her, though she is coy, revealing slowly, almost reluctantly, her deepest secrets. For she is secretive. Her daughter knows nothing of the love of her life, not even his name, and as Claudia dies she tells the reader, perhaps because otherwise that love dies with her unknown. But she doesn’t tell Lisa. Little wonder the younger woman, raised by her grandmothers, feels so distant: all her life, Claudia has kept her further than arms-length even as she makes occasional nurturing gestures to others. 

The web of family scarcely exists, or is woven too tight. Claudia and her year-older brother Gordon are as close – and closed – as twins, shutting out even their mother. The bond continues through their lives – his marriage to a devoted supportive wife, her decade-long affair (resulting in Lisa) with a dashing half-Russian. Gordon works his way up in the Foreign Service while Claudia patches together books, a standing column in a respected paper, occasional professorships, living with as little compromise as seems possible. But finally, that makes no difference, or not enough: death awaits. And those secrets we carry, they die with us.

A refreshing look at Death

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From Here to Eternity; Traveling the World to Find the Good Death

by Caitlin Doughty

Reviewed by NC Weil

Even as the American funeral industry strives to sanitize death, increasing numbers of us are questioning the institutions, chemicals, caskets, and the secrecy that wall us off from those we love soon after they have died.

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This entertaining look at funerary practices worldwide offers plenty of examples of ways to celebrate the departed. Alongside this, Doughty, a Los Angeles funeral director, offers a pointed critique of societies’ relative comfort about the fact of death, and how cultural squeamishness robs us of acts of loving farewell: “A sense of purpose helps the mourner grieve.”  One of the strong points of this witty book is the abundant illustrations by Landis Blair, dispelling the revulsion and fear that for many of us surround dead bodies, mummies, and skeletons.

With Doughty as our guide, we visit communities and learn about burial practices in Colorado, North Carolina, California, Mexico, Bolivia, Indonesia, Tokyo, and Barcelona. To say that attitudes vary among this sample is the understatement of the year. In Indonesia, she visits families who lovingly dress up and groom their dead loved ones, even sleeping alongside them, during an annual festival. In Tokyo, mourners can visit the ashes of their dead relations in high-tech halls where there is nevertheless a strong sense of communion with the departed.

In Crestone, Colorado, a portable pyre enables a natural cremation celebration. In La Paz, Bolivia, indigenous villagers adorn and pray to skulls, asking for intercession in earthly matters. In North Carolina, a university professor studies decomposition in an effort to perfect techniques of composting the dead. We see there are many ways to deal with bodies, and by the time we’re done, we may be ready to think about our own flesh in a new light.

The challenge Doughty spells out for us is to push against a funeral industry that separates us not from death but from loved ones who have died. By showing how we can participate in the last phase of their bodies, she inspires us to look in the face this mortality we all await, and to embrace it instead of hiding from it. Give this book a read, then give some thought to what you want done with your remains, and what you don’t.

Being Mortal, by Atul Gawande

Being Mortal, Atul Gawande's compact book about aging in our modern world, is compassionate and practical. He challenges us to re-examine the ways we end our lives - the ways we force those we love to end their lives - and posits some alternatives to constraints none of us want for ourselves but prove all-too-willing to foist on our elders.

My mom says AGE is an acronym for Aggravating Geriatric Experience. She would know. She doesn't want to be babysat, monitored, checked on, "helped" in her home, forced to eat or drink "the right things" or prevented from sitting alone in her apartment. But the combination of being sedentary and stubborn is untenable. She falls. She gets dehydrated. She forgets. And she's not suffering alone - her refusals impact those who love her, who must rescue her from her choices.

But when we can't take care of ourselves, Here Comes Medicine to keep us alive. We can't see far enough into the future to recognize when to stop. The medical model of dying is a juggernaut of procedures and drugs, and only in hindsight do we know when we should have said, Enough!

Gawande's solution is to ask his patients what activities they love, and the ability to do these things becomes his yardstick for the value of treatment. A man whose joy derives from watching football on TV and eating chocolate ice cream, can weather paralysis of his legs. But if being able to walk is what keeps him ticking, paralysis is unacceptable. That's where I draw the line.

Or so we might say, when we're able-bodied, at a remove from death. As we draw nearer, it's common to discover that being alive, hearing the voices of loved ones, touching them, seeing the sunrise, make that earlier line easy to cross. Well, I can't walk, but I can still -- And so we trap ourselves. Medical advances allow us to pass one limit after another, until we lack the awareness to say I've gone too far. 

This book, powerful as it is, addresses physical not mental debility. In my grandma's final year she was senile, though physically intact. We were close, and all my life I'd known she never wanted to be without her mind. I had a very strong urge to put a pillow over her face and hold it there until her body quit. She would have thanked me. I knew I must not do that, so I didn't, but I still think I should have.  And I hope someone will help me check out, before I'm at the mercy of too much treatment.

War and Peace Wrap-up

I finished reading War & Peace a couple of weeks ago, but I've been stymied by the challenge of distilling this 1200 page tour-de-force into a manageable review. The work consists of a fictional story, with characters immersed in the challenges of war and love; views of battle bowing to both historical record and these characters; and philosophical ruminations on a range of subjects: history; war; power; genius; human searches for meaning; life and death; and Russia as a nation and its people.

Tolstoy places his characters at critical events to provide us eyewitness experience, and while these events are as historically accurate as any account can be, they are also beautifully written. The night before he is killed in battle, 16-year-old Petya Rostov, who has run off to immerse himself in the thrill of war as part of the Russian force pursuing the retreating French, has a reverie while listening to a man sharpen his saber: the youth directs a many-voiced hymn which becomes a march, and at his command it takes glorious form: "Ah, how lovely that is! As much as I like and however I like," Petya said to himself... "Softer, softer now, fade away." And the sounds obeyed him[...] and drops dripped, and bzhik, zhik, zhik... whistled the saber, and again the horses scuffled and neighed, not disrupting the chorus, but entering into it. (Vol IV, Part 3, Ch. X). A mere two pages later, "Running into the campfire smoldering in the morning light, the horse balked, and Petya fell heavily onto the wet ground. The Cossacks saw how his arms and legs jerked rapidly, though his head did not move. His head had been pierced by a bullet." (ibid, Ch. XI).

Tolstoy intersperses these vivid scenes with treatises on how wars come to be. He regards Napoleon as the inevitable consequence of myriad actions and movements - though the man is hailed by historians as a military genius, Tolstoy goes to considerable lengths to explain the chaos of battle, the involvement of myriad individuals in actions which create the whole, and generally discredits the "great man" theory of history. He finds it all, to some degree, preordained: this soldier will utter a valiant full-throated cry which inspires his regiment to unwonted bravery, while other regiments in the same battle retreat in confusion because the captains leading them are uncertain, disorganized or afraid. None of this occurs in response to orders from generals, who in an age of limited communication are not aware until afterwards what has actually happened, including even victory or defeat.

About the "rules of war" he has this to say, "Let us imagine two men who came with swords to fight a duel by all the rules of the art of fencing; the fighting went on for quite a long time; suddenly one of the adversaries, feeling himself wounded, realizing that it was not a joking matter, but something that concerned his life, threw down his sword and, picking up the first club he found, started brandishing it...
"The French were the fencer who demanded a fight by the rules of the art; the Russians were the adversary who dropped his sword and picked up a club; those who attempt to explain everything by the rules of fencing are the historians who have written about this event.
"From the time of the burning of Smolensk, a war began that did not fit any of the former traditions of war. The burning of towns and villages, the retreats after battles, the blow struck at Borodino and then another retreat, the abandoning and burning of Moscow, the hunt for marauders, the cutting off of transport, the partisan war - these were all deviations from the rules.
"Napoleon sensed that, and from the moment when he stopped in Moscow, in the correct position of a fencer, and instead of his adversary's sword, saw a club raised over him, he never ceased complaining to Kutuzov and the emperor Alexander that the war was being conducted against all the rules (as if there existed some sort of rules for killing people)." (Vol IV, Part 3, Ch. II). Here is Tolstoy, heaping his scorn upon the pretensions to civilization of the brutish business of war.

Meanwhile, even as he repudiates the historians and tacticians for their orderly views of battle, he takes us into the mind and soul of a fatally injured man. Andrei Bolkonsky, severely wounded at Borodino, has been transported to and beyond Moscow with the Russian retreat. "But Prince Andrei's soul was not in a normal state in this respect. The forces of his soul were all clearer and more active than ever, but they acted outside his will. The most diverse thoughts and notions took hold of him simultaneously. Sometimes his thought suddenly began to work, and with such strength, clarity and depth as it had never been able to do in healthy conditions; but suddenly, in the middle of its work, it broke off and was replaced by some unexpected notion, and he was unable to return to it....
"And each time the fly touched his face, it made a burning sensation, and at the same time he was surprised that, hitting against the very area of his face where the edifice was being raised, the fly did not destroy it. But besides that, there was something else important. It was the white thing in the doorway, it was the statue of a sphinx, which also weighed on him." (Vol III, Part 3, Ch. XXXII). This "white thing in the doorway" is Natasha, lodging in the same inn, compelled to look at this wounded man to whom she had been in love and betrothed, but through the interference of others, had rejected. In the days that follow, the pair grow close, then Andrei puts aside all human affection as he faces his death:

"Prince Andrei not only knew that he would die, but felt that he was dying, that he was already half dead. He experienced an awareness of estrangement from everything earthly and a joyful and strange lightness of being. Without haste or worry, he waited for what lay ahead of him... Formerly he had been afraid of the end... The more he pondered the new principle of eternal love revealed to him, the more, though without feeling it himself, he renounced earthly life. To love everything, everybody, always to sacrifice oneself for love, meant to love no one, meant not to live this earthly life....
"Love? What is love?" he thought. "Love hinders death. Love is life. Everything, everything I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is connected only by that... Love is God, and to die - means that I, a part of love, return to the common and eternal source." These thoughts seemed comforting to him. But they were only thoughts. Something was lacking in them, there was something one-sidedly personal, cerebral - there was no evidence."...
"But in the same instant that he died, Prince Andrei remembered that he was asleep, and in the same instant that he died, he made an effort with himself and woke up.
"Yes that was death. I died - I woke up. Yes, death is an awakening." Clarity suddenly came to his soul, and the curtain that until then had concealed the unknown was raised before his inner gaze. He felt the release of a force that previously had been as if bound in him and that strange lightness which from then on did not leave him." (Vol IV, Part 1, Ch. XVI)

I could not help feeling that Tolstoy himself must have experienced a moment close to death, to write about it with such convincing beauty. Even as he applies his intellect to it, he tells us that's what he's doing, and that it's false, failing to grasp the completeness of death.

Pierre, in a group of prisoners of war, witnesses the firing-squad execution of a number of his fellows. He expects to be shot next. "Another two were led up. In the same way, with the same eyes, these two also looked at everyone, in vain, with their eyes only, silently, begging for protection, and clearly not understanding and not believing what was going to happen. They could not believe it, because they alone knew what their life was for them, and therefore did not understand or believe that it could be taken from them....
"Pierre ... saw smoke, someone's blood, and the pale, frightened faces of the Frenchmen, who again were doing something by the post, pushing each other with trembling hands. Pierre, breathing hard, looked around as if asking, "What does it mean?" The same question was in all the gazes that met Pierre's gaze.
"On all the Russian faces, on the faces of the French soldiers and officers, on all without exception, he read the same fear, horror and struggle that were in his heart. "But who, finally, is doing this? They're all suffering just as I am. Who is it? Who?" flashed for a second in Pierre's soul." (Vol IV, Part 1, Ch. XI). Pierre is spared execution, but this confrontation with death has demolished the life he once prized. He becomes fully the earthy simple Russian who has lived unacknowledged beneath his wealth, idleness and comfort - being a prisoner has liberated him.

Do not be intimidated by the length of this book. Chapters are short, often only two or three pages, and once you settle in with the principal characters you enter a world so fully realized that it has the force of truth in all its particulars. Whether it's Tsar Alexander afraid to make his horse jump a ditch; or generals at a party ignoring the news that the French forces have crossed into Russia; or the burning of Moscow because a wooden city will inevitably have fires, and once the residents have fled, no one has the responsibility to quench them - we see simultaneously the broad sweep of war and the details of struggle. Tolstoy exposes the mundane actions that underlie events, and convinces us theory is a vain attempt to force order onto the chaos of life.

This writer has written not only a history that will stand alongside any other account of the Napoleonic wars, he has given us individuals in all their complexity: weak and brilliant, foolish and courageous, petty and joyful, brash and impressionable. He spares none of them the heights of glory and depths of human suffering, and we scramble to keep up, fascinated at this mirror held up to our own souls.

The Things They Carried, by Tim O'Brien
reviewed by NC Weil

This book has won many accolades, as short pieces and as a whole. It deserves them all. But I'm afraid to recommend it to my sons, who are in their twenties. Its juxtapositions of life and death, of ghoul humor and matter-of-fact insanity, are so raw, I fear my young men will fall in love with war.

In today's paper in 2010 there's a story about the 5th Stryker Brigade in Afghanistan - five soldiers are being tried for murder-for-sport and corpse desecration. In their cruelty I see the young men of this story - nineteen years old, just been drafted and dropped into Hell. They do callous things to survive, to differentiate themselves from the slaughter they must daily encounter. They do them to push back the fear that stalks every waking second and hunts them in their fitful sleep. They distance themselves from the meat they want not to be. By pushing each other to shows of indifference, and joking about what would otherwise make them incapable of what they are required to do, they survive - or die.

What is the worst death: to be flung in shreds into the treetops so your mates have to climb up and gather your fragments? To be sucked down in a flooded field of mud and shit in the driving rain, so your buddies have to foul themselves finding you, digging you out to send your corpse home? To be shot taking a piss on a lovely morning?

Or is it the death of your own self, your civilian carelessness and ease? Is it the pretty girl smuggled in by her boyfriend, who takes to war with an addict's intensity, joining the Green Berets so she can melt into the jungle and come back with human-body-part trophies, dead to ordinary life? Every story in this book could be made up. Every story is too real to be disbelieved.

It's about how we look at the world, how we draw the lines between ourselves and the emptiness surrounding our little sparks. By layering fact and experience, it's about how we can force death to a draw, play the game out longer, relish another morning of not being dead yet. Heartbeats and friends are all we have.