The shortest route into my heart is paved with books and bottles. Since I’ve come of age and learned to enjoy a drink or two, booze is a gift sure to please. Books, of course, go without saying. I’m no collector, I’m not even that great of a reader (though in high school I did make All State), but unwrapping a new book, even one I already owned or had heard uncomplimentary rumors about, has been a consistent source of pleasure for the last twenty-odd years.
Imagine my joy this last Christmas, then, when I received, along with two bottles of wine, a bottle of Wild Turkey 101, and a bottle of Bailey[there is no apostrophe, I just checked]s Irish Cream (to be shared with Aimee), two of the greatest books I could ever hope to receive.
The first, from my grandmother Mar, is Stephen Mitchell’s translation of Gilgamesh. Unlike my dear friends JD and Nate, I don’t much like to indulge in superlatives. Gilgamesh, however, gathers "–ests" like a big ball of taffy rolling through an unswept hallway gathers fluff. It’s the oldest story in the world, for starters, having been written at the very least 3700 years ago. And, having been at one point carved into the foundations of the last great Assyrian king Ashurbanipal’s (668-627 BCE) sumptuous palace, it may have enjoyed the costliest publication run. As to whether it’s the greatest story of all time, I will not pretend to know. It tells the tale of how the first superhero learns to be a human. Endowed with incredible strength and inexhaustible endurance, Gilgamesh begins the story as a monster of arrogance who confuses his invincibility with infallibility. Only after his egotism robs him of his best friend is he moved to vanquish death or die trying; a quest that doubles back on itself and supplants his strength with wisdom. In comic book terms, Gilgamesh is the story of the Hulk questing to become Bruce Banner. Or maybe just Thor. Here’s how it begins:
Surpassing all kings, powerful and tall
Beyond all others, violent, splendid,
A wild bull of a man, unvanquished leader,
Hero in the front lines, beloved by his soldiers-
“fortress” the called him, “protector of the people,”
“raging flood that destroys all defenses”-
Juxtapose this with Susanna Clarke’s description of her hero, Jonathan Strange:
In person he was rather tall and his figure was considered
good. Some people thought him handsome, but this was not
by any means the universal opinion. His face had two faults:
a long nose and an ironic expression. It is also true that his
hair had a reddish tinge and, as everybody knows, no one
with red hair can ever truly be said to be handsome.
When Aimee gave me Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell I realized that she had found precisely the book I’ve been pining away for without realizing it. I love this book because, quite simply, I love Jane Austen and I like adventure. There is an idiosyncratic quality to Austen’s tone of storytelling that never ceases to gladden and comfort me. It may be the marvel I feel that, on the cusp of achieving the greatest civilization of the modern era, the Brits produced an artist who gently teased all their (well, the upper-middle class, anyway) smallness in a manner that makes me love them all the more. What Patrick O’Brien and now Clark have done is to tell the kinds of adventure stories that appeal especially to silly people like me with this very tone of fond amusement.
Enough. There is something loathsome about one person’s enthusiasm for a subject that invariably inspires me to find some fault with it. If any of our readers are like me, then I’ve probably driven quite a few of you away from books that, if you happened upon them at a time and place of your own choosing, you’d quite enjoy. So please, pretend you never read any of this and do your best to stumble across them.
Posted by Joel at January 12, 2005 09:51 PM | TrackBack