Convergence by Christopher Paul Turner

Convergence book site

Convergence combines career advice with commercial fiction in a novel about 4 young scientists striving for academic success. Each journey takes many twists and turns as these researchers make significant discoveries, under impossible conditions, while dealing with unscrupulous colleagues. To keep their careers alive, however, they are in the end forced to consider something that would normally be unthinkable. What directions each of them end up taking may not only define their character but ultimately determine their destiny.

Convergence documents the surprisingly cut-throat world of science and reflects the real-world experiences of tens of thousands of young researchers everywhere. There are four main storylines, each involving a woman seemingly unrelated to the other three. Convergence begins by slowly taking the reader into the world of science and discovery, a seemingly benign culture that appears full of supportive people. However, despite the apparent purity of the four main protagonists, sinister undercurrents are ever-present and each storyline gets ever darker as the novel progresses. After many unpredictable plot-twists Convergence stops being purely a science mystery and develops into a slow-burning political drama.

The quotes come from the book's site (linked above). When the author contacted me earlier this year I was too backlogged at work (not to mention reading), but I was interested in the descriptions. Having seen dubious choices made by doctors on which medical devices (implanted into the brain) to use, the topic intrigued me. The book is available for $8.50 and you can read the first chapter for free.

The book reads mainly as a mystery, or rather mysteries, unraveling what has happened with four individual Neuroscience researchers in addition to the narrator. While each story is unique and separate, an overarching trend emerges as well as the possible convergence of their stories.

In addition to the surface story and allegorical meaning, there was a symbolic linking of the researchers’ plights with that of a cell’s difficulty during (and after) a stroke—people/agents intended to assist can inflict maximum damage. While there are many quotes at the book’s site, I’ll add one that I don’t believe is there:

“A truly skilled Machiavellian knows that formal conspiracies will almost always fail. They much prefer the stealthy approach of seeding a network with false beliefs, then stepping back and letting nature take its course. The inherent nature of any human network will allow any agenda to resonate within the community; the beauty of this is that the network does all the work. Indeed, the agenda will eventually get distorted and then amplified by countless reiterations before it becomes part of the collective awareness,” he explained.

His Excellency by Joseph Ellis

George Washington by Gilbert Stuart (1795)
Picture source

Yet another history book…one I’ve intended to read since its release…

Joseph J. Ellis’ biography on George Washington weighs in at around 275 pages, which is a change from recent (literally) weighty tomes on the founding fathers. Ellis keeps the work shorter by summarizing surrounding historical details, going into detail when necessary. The conversational style masks, at times, an impressive amount of scholarship that is revealed in the notes.

Ellis embraces a “warts and all” approach (instead of a Zinn-like “warts only” view), but takes pains to look at how Washington’s actions fit into an overall framework of his make-up. Pointing out someone’s flaws doesn’t lessen monumental achievements. By putting the flaws into an overall context, it can help understand the person better…especially when it comes to someone like Washington and the mythology that surrounds him.

Here is a quote from the end of the book which summarizes one of Ellis’ overarching points on Washington:

His genius was his judgment. But where did that come from? Clearly, it did not emanate from books or formal education, places where it is customary and often correct to look for the wellspring that filled the minds of such eminent colleagues as Adams, Jefferson, and Madison with their guiding ideas. Though it might seem sacrilegious to suggest, Washington’s powers of judgment derived in part from the fact that his mind was uncluttered with sophisticated intellectual preconceptions. As much a self-made man as Franklin, the self he made was less protean and more primal because his education was more elemental. From his youthful experience on the Virginia frontier as an adventurer and soldier he had internalized a visceral understanding of the arbitrary and capricious ways of the world. Without ever reading Thucydides, Hobbes, or Calvin, he had concluded that men and nations were driven by interests rather than ideals, and that surrendering control to another was invariably harmful, often fatal. Armed with these basic convictions, he was capable of a remarkably unblinkered and unburdened response to the increasingly consequential decisions that history placed before him.

Mist summary

A street artist portraying Unamuno, Barcelona, 2006
Photograph by luna (follow the source link for more pictures)
Picture source

I didn't provide any online resources for Unamuno or Mist, but hopefully I'll get to more of his works soon and can do so at that time. Links for posts related to Mist:

Mist discussion

Quotes from The Life of Don Quixote and Sancho and Mist

Quote from Mist when Unamuno received a visit from his character

Mist discussion

I don’t feel too bad “giving away” the ending or the plot twist in previous posts since Unamuno talks of Augusto’s death in the Prologue as well as begins the author’s playful take on the blurring fiction and reality. Unamuno has one of his characters (Victor Goti) write the Prologue, which allows the author to give some of his views in the third person. Unamuno then pens a Post-Prologue, disclaiming some of Goti’s statements while allowing others to (ambiguously) stand. And with that the fun is just beginning. Such an approach allows Unamuno to defiantly leave things open-ended and allow multiple possibilities.

Ivan Turgenev’s speech on “Hamlet and Don Quixote” looked at man torn between the differing traits of those characters. Perverting his intent, imagine a Hamlet-like character dropped into a Quixote-esque world and you have a sense of Mist. The novel reflects not just the problems of man but also how novels represent him. Unamuno places heavy emphasis on dialogue (which includes soliloquies) to highlight the uncertainty between reality and fiction, between what we hear or see and what is. While this removes some levels of doubt, it introduces many others. With dialogue the narrator is apparently removed, but as the visit of the character Augusto to the author Unamuno shows it is simply a substitution of one arbitrary point of view for another. Literature, in Unamuno’s mind, does more than reflect life, it creates it as well.

But who is the creator and who is the created? Unamuno turns this question in on itself with the meeting between Augusto and the author:

“It cannot be, my poor Augusto,” I said, taking him by the hand and lifting him up. “It cannot be. I have now decreed it—it is written—and irrevocably; you can live no longer. I no longer know what to do with you. God, when he does not know what to do with us, kills us.”
(All translations are by Warner Fite)

The alleged creator of Augusto is but the creation of someone else. Unamuno (the character) confesses that he is restricted by basic rules of art on what he can have his characters do and say. So Unamuno (the character? the author?) is twice constrained, by his creator and by his creation. As several characters mention, life is a play and we all play our roles.

There is much that can be discussed about the novel (or nivola). Fiction vs. reality, images vs. reality, the mist of life, and the tragic sense of life just for starters. I’ll just cherry-pick a few of the notes I made…

Unamuno has one character (Victor) lay out how Mist will be written—dialogue, monologues, a dog to talk to, etc. By saying dialogue is preferable over description and later saying that man lies when he speaks (or with the dog Orfeo’s lines about man falsifies with speech—quoted in a previous post), what is to be trusted? Or can nothing be trusted?

Man’s craving for immortality, as Unamuno saw it, is the basis for “the tragic sense of life” (his work of that name was published in 1912…Mist in 1914). Some thoughts from that work appear throughout Mist. “Yes, the second birth, the real birth, consists in being born through pain to that consciousness of ever-continuing death of which we are dying all through life.” One outcome of man’s craving for immortality was marriage and procreation. Yet the depictions of relationships and marriages in Mist run from the hilarious to the wretched. The twists and turns of many of the relationships add much of the comic nature to the novel. Unfortunately it turns out that love can be a lie, just like speech. However love can help offset the realization and sooth the acceptance of death, too. Although in Augusto’s case, he sees love as clearing his muddled outlook, while the reality is quite the opposite.

The tension between our knowledge of death while desiring immortality can cloud our outlook, which is only one reason for the title of the novel. Two quotes from the novel on the mist of life:

“It is not the great pains, nor the great joys, to which we succumb; and this is because the great pains and the great joys come wrapped in a vast mist of trifling incidents. And life is just this—mist.”

“The mist of life precipitates a gentle tedium in the form of a bitter-sweet liquor.” This tedium “has invented all the games and distractions, the novels, and love.”

Which includes this novel. There is much more to this nivola and I highly recommend exploring it.

Mist excerpt: existence

The character Augusto Pérez, upon feeling suicidal, visits author Miguel de Unamuno:

”Very well, then. The truth is, my dear Augusto,” I spoke to him the softest of tones, “you can’t kill yourself because you are not alive; and you are not alive—or dead either—because you do not exist.”

“I don’t exist! What do you mean by that?”

“No, you do not exist except as a fictitious entity, a character of fiction. My poor Augusto, you are only a product of my imagination and of the imagination of those of my readers who read this story which I have written of your fictitious adventures and misfortunes. You are nothing more than a personage in a novel, or a nivola, or whatever you choose to call it. Now, then, you know your secret.”

Upon hearing this the poor man continued to look at me for a while with one of those perforating looks that seem to pierce your own gaze and go beyond; presently he glanced for a moment at the portrait in oil which presides over my books, then his colour returned and his breathing became easier, and gradually recovering, he was again master of himself. He rested his elbows on the arm of the sofa opposite me, against which he was leaning; and then with his face in the palms of his hands he looked at me with a smile and he said slowly:

“Listen to me, Don Miguel—it can’t be that you are mistaken, and that what is happening is precisely the contrary of what you think and of what you have told me?”

“And what do you mean by the contrary?” I asked, rather alarmed to see him regaining his self-possession.

“May it not be, my dear Don Miguel,” he continued, “that it is you and not I who are the fictitious entity, the one that does not really exist, who is neither living nor dead? May it not be that you are nothing more than a pretext for bringing my history into the world?”

- From Chapter 31, Mist, Miguel de Unamuno (translated by Warner Fite)

Nonfiction update

I have made a few posts on nonfiction I’ve read this year (The Spartacus War by Barry Strauss and A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599 by James Shapiro), and thought I would add a few more nonfiction books I’ve enjoyed recently.

The biggest joy has been rediscovering Barbara Tuchman. I received A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century when it was released and had read most of it, lugging the book across the country, eventually selling it during one of my last moves. What a boneheaded move (nice to see ‘boneheaded’ passes the spellcheck function…while ‘spellcheck’ doesn’t). How on earth can history in schools be so boring (OK, an over-generalized statement) when the material is so rich? Highly recommended for a sweeping overview of the challenges faced by different levels of society during this era—war, plague, and schism are only the beginning. For those unfamiliar with the book, Tuchman starts by providing background leading up to the century, covering various aspects of life. As the century moves along, she focuses on one French noble who was near the center of many pivotal moments. One drawback to the book is the scale is so large that some areas don’t receive as much detail as I would have liked (for example, more on Italy during this period would have been helpful). Even so, Tuchman does not shortchange any area…that’s just my wish to have an expanded look under such an expert hand.

I also read Tuchman’s The Guns of August, her detailed look at the first month of “The Great War”. She details, day by day and sometimes almost hour by hour, military movements and political machinations that defined the positions combatants found themselves in by early September 1914. The mistakes and blunders made on both sides during August would have severe repercussions for the remainder of the war. For those looking for causes of the war or other usual approaches, you will need to go elsewhere. Instead, the focus is on military strategy and planning, both the nuts and bolts of it as well as the political environment various military planners worked in leading up to the start of World War I. The plans would provide the framework which would guide the operations during that first month and, again, define the situation faced by leaders for the next four years. Deviations from these plans, as well as the weaknesses inherent in them, would have far-reaching consequences.

One that deserves its own post is Elie Wiesel’s Night, a powerful and moving memoir. It captures the emotional and spiritual aspects of living in (as well as surviving) World War II’s concentration camps. I'm at a loss on summarizing this book in a short paragraph, so I plan on revisiting it soon and giving its own post.

All three books are highly recommended.

Mist discussion: quotes

In which I give away the ending and hint at a major plot twist in Mist:

And I even suspect that while I have been explaining and commenting this Life of Don Quixote, I have secretly been visited by the two of them, and that without my being aware of it they have unfolded and uncovered the innermost recesses of their hearts. And I must add here that though we oftentimes consider a writer to be a real, true, and historic person because we see him in the flesh, and regard the characters he invents in his fictions as purely imaginary, the truth is exactly the reverse. The characters are real, it is they who are the authentic beings, and they make use of the person who seems to be of flesh and blood in order to assume form and being in the eyes of men.

- from Chapter 74, The Life of Don Quixote and Sancho, Miguel de Unamuno (translated by Anthony Kerrigan)

Maybe this is a good time to point out that the English subtitle for Mist (Niebla) is a "tragicomic novel", while Unamuno subtitled his novel (novela) a nivola in order to distance his work from 'standard' novels. ""My novel hasn't any plot; or rather, the plot is what comes out of it. It makes its own plot." (from Chapter 17 of Mist) OK, enough with quote marks and italics.

It is customary at the end of a novel, as soon as the hero or protagonist has died or married, to give an account of what happened to the rest of the characters. We shall not follow custom here… . We shall make only one exception, and that will be in favor of him who felt the death of Augusto most deeply and sincerely, namely, his dog Orfeo.

Orfeo found himself an orphan. When he jumped upon the bed and, sniffing at his dead master, scented his master’s death, his canine soul was enveloped in a thick, black cloud. He had experienced other deaths. He had smelt dead dogs and cats, and he had seen them; he had killed an occasional rat, and he had scented the death of men; but his master he supposed to be immortal. Because his master was for him a god. And when he saw now that he was dead he felt that within his own soul all the foundations of belief in life and the world were crumbling; and his heart was filled with an immense desolation.

And crouched at the feet of his dead master, he thought: … “What a strange animal is man! He never seems to notice what is before him. He caresses us and we never know why—but not when we offer to caress him. When we devote ourselves most to him he drives us away and beats us. There is no way of knowing what he wants, if indeed he knows it himself. Always he seems to be somewhere else than where he is, and what he looks at he never sees. It is as if there were another world for him. And, of course, if there is another world this world has ceased to exist. …

But he barks in a way all his own—he speaks. And this has enabled him to invent what does not exist and to overlook what exists. As soon as he gives a thing a name he ceases to see the thing itself; he only hears the name that he gave it or sees it written. His language enables him to falsify, to invent what does not exist, and to confuse himself.

- from “Funeral Oration (By Way of an Epilogue)”, Mist, Miguel de Unamuno (translated by Warner Fite) [emphases mine]

eBook: A Listening Thing by William Michaelian

How do we face life’s seemingly insurmountable problems? For Stephen Monroe, an unsuccessfully self-employed typesetter still in love with his ex-wife, Mary, the only acceptable thing to do is to hang in there and fight — for love, for what he believes in, and for the voice inside him that’s struggling to be heard.

With humor and grace, A Listening Thing reveals the crumbling world of a talented man finally learning to face himself and the many mistakes he has made. Leaving behind the shabby desolation of his apartment for a weekend visit with Mary at his mother’s home, Stephen finds hope, and discovers love is more generous than he’d ever expected.

- About the novel from the book site

- The Wikipedia entry on the book

I don’t recall how I first stumbled on William Michaelian’s main website, but I do know Recently Banned Literature, his site of “poetry, notes, and marginalia”, became a daily visit. The link for the book noted above has several good synopses and reviews, as well as readers’ and the author’s comments. Since those overviews cover the basics (and much more) I’ll focus on items that initially struck me and have stayed with me in the week since I read it, as well as a few things I don’t see mentioned in the comments yet.

Repeated references to Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable give an idea of the framework, with Stephen Monroe blending musings and recollections with details of his less than ordinary life as he searches for meaning. Stephen has self-awareness…maybe too much so, as he dwells on his own and society’s shortcomings. Yet he does so with humor and self-deprecation, endearing him to the reader. He is full of contradictions, reflecting his current status of limbo between states of being and not being.

Since I visited Recently Banned Literature before reading the novel, part of the book felt like a continuation of Michaelian’s posts. Through Stephen the reader is continually challenged to look at things in different ways…to approach something in various manners in order to fully experience and understand it. Dreams, as surreal or inaccurate as they appear, can contribute in comprehending or appreciating something:

Memory, after all, is a delicious thing. It is also a dangerously inaccurate medium in terms of self-exploration. Often, what we think we remember is not what happened at all, but, rather, what we wished had happened. Or, depending on what has taken place since, memory can supply us with a litany of excuses for why we are the way we are. Experience settles on us layer by layer. In time, with geologic force, information is distorted, compressed, or even obliterated — until it surfaces again in a different, yet familiar and recognizable form, triggered by a sight, scent, or sound. This causes things to shift and buckle at a psychological level, shaping us in the process, making us who we are. All the while, to preserve our hard-earned identities, we tell ourselves stories. These stories are endlessly fascinating. They also provide nourishment for our egos, which prefer fable over the challenge of new, reality-based information. We often mistake the comfort that results for sanity.

Stephen’s disappointment in himself, as well as watching the discontent of others, has the potential to continue his downward spiral. Yet his triumphal moments come when he simply ‘is’, released from the past (or at least as he views it) and from expectations (his, more than others). He goes beyond thought when translating his drawing of Uncle Leo into a story. In the trip to his mother’s house, his reconciliation with Mary begins when he lets go of both the past and the future.

Stephen’s resilient nature, causing him to carry on even though he doesn’t know how to or why, provides the opportunity for things to improve. Resiliency figures in all the characters lives in one form or another. Mary and Stephen’s mother both carry on in the face of loss and grief, the mother essentially willing Stephen and Mary’s reconciliation. As trite as it can sound, it is easy to discount our capacity for endurance as well as the ability to shape ourselves. Many thanks to William for making this novel available for free, especially after the troubled history in getting it published!

eBook: A Trip of Goats by Kim Crawford

When twelve-year old Jule runs away from home in search of a mystical goatherding vagabond, he is unprepared for life on the backroads of Georgia. Jule must confront a strange menagerie of adults, from the pathetic to the comic to the depraved, and shield a young girl from the depradations of harsh life in the mid-sixties south. But even as he stays a step ahead of the private investigator his domineering father has dispatched to retrieve him, his own goal proves more elusive still.

- Book description from the book site

The book description sells short some of the better parts of the book. The book is currently available for download for $5 at the above link. I’m not much in the habit of disclaimers, but for the record I have no connection to the author other than occasionally reading his weblog.

The book covers two episodes in Jubal Lee (Jule) Jackson’s life during the summer and fall of 1966. The first section introduces the reader to Jule and his family during their summer vacation. The most important person in Jule’s life, his father and former state senator Montgomery Jackson, initially comes across as a crude and rude pleasure-seeker who only thinks of himself. As you learn more about the father, however, a more complex character emerges.

The second episode, and the bulk of the book, follows Jule’s picaresque romp through eastern Georgia as he searches for the Goat Man. Jule hopes the “goatherding vagabond” he glimpsed during the summer can help him understand why his father acts the way he does. Maybe picaresque is technically the wrong word as Jule is only a part-time rogue, displaying a sense of morality and maturity sometimes beyond his twelve years. But the characters he encounters, including the neighborhood drunk, a porno maker, escapees from the criminal psych ward (who sometimes display more sanity than those around them), and many more make for colorful convergences.

The southern flavor is strong which disproportionately increases its appeal to me. From the geographical detail(such as physical descriptions of the countryside or of landmarks like the Uncle Remus Golf Course) to cultural touchstones (whether the brief mention of a Stuckey’s pecan log or the recurring Merle Haggard song), I was transported back to that time and (a close by) place.

When reading one of Rick Bragg’s family books (All Over But the Shoutin’ or Ava’s Man), I find myself thinking “I KNOW these people,” having grown up with family and friends that exhibited many characteristics of his family. While I (fortunately) didn’t have the exact same reaction to Crawford’s characters, it was like I had heard about many of the characters while growing up. It’s what helped the story ‘feel’ real despite characters and action that descends into apparent simple satire. Or what would work well with the story, a screenplay of growing up in the South in the ‘60s.

The message delivered by the Goat Man can seem commonplace with his bland (but focused) analysis, but I didn’t mind at all. When you can identify with both Jule and his father, it’s a message that doesn’t hurt being heard often. In addition Jule gets an early lesson in the disparity between an idealized life and its reality. As I hope you can tell, I enjoyed Crawford’s eBook quite a bit. I know it’s not for everyone, but it hit the spot for me.

I was too freaked out to deal with it all

Officially declaring myself overwhelmed, I'm changing plans for August and will read some ebooks I've been wanting to tackle. I've downloaded three that should help me get through everything. The first two aren't too long so I should have something up on them soon. I'm impressed with the quality of output from the self-publishing firms I've seen (keep in mind that's a population of two).

Hopefully I'll find a chance to comment on some of the non-fiction I've been reading/listening to as well. As well as find time to read some of the 'book' blogs now that I have my computer back up and running.

Please stand by

Between work (the joys of a start-up), home (fortunately everyone survived a camping weekend in one piece--each), and now having to completely reinstall everything on my computer I'm way behind on everything. My apologies for the lack of posts. Hopefully I'll be back to a normal schedule soon...