Cancer Ward

Cancer Ward

By Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Cancer Ward examines the relationship of a group of people in the cancer ward of a provincial Soviet hospital in 1955, two years after Stalin's death. We see them under normal circumstances, and also reexamined at the eleventh hour of illness. Together they represent a remarkable cross-section of contemporary Russian characters and attitudes. The experiences of the central character, Oleg Kostoglotov, closely reflect the author's own: Solzhenitsyn himself became a patient in a cancer ward in the mid-1950s, on his release from a labor camp, and later recovered.

Wooo, finally finished!  This one I knew would take a while, but that's what happens when you choose a Russian Great as the alternative to a romance with a fish-man.  Since the prompt was "book with a zodiac or astrology term in the title" I felt pretty much out of luck, since the only books I was coming up with astrology terms involved either "read the stars" guides, books about fucking various astrologically based men, and books that are, sadly, very out of print.  So when Cancer Ward popped up, I jumped on it.  Not only would a book by a Nobel winner hopefully give me impressive bonafides, but also, I was personally interested to read about the treatment of cancer in the Soviet Union forty years ago.  Little did I know that the entire book was more or less an allegory about the cancer of the Soviet Union.  It's a metaphor!!!!!!!

Despite all that, and despite my difficulty in remembering characters from one chapter to another, particularly when they'll be referred to either by two first names, or by a last name, and then also occasionally by a nickname, this was a relatively enjoyable read, despite not really having a plot. Basically, we enter the cancer ward with a hard-line party person (that's the Communist party, not, like, LMFAO) Rusanov, and we gradually get introduced the other residents of the ward and the doctors and nurses, get biographies and listen to conversations amongst the various characters.  We end up spending the most time with an exile, Kostoglotov, who winds up being "cured", has romances with both nurses, and, in the final chapter of the book, wanders around town before getting back on a train to the edge of nowhere.  

The overarching theme of the book (and you can tell it's by a really fancy author, because this book has themes and metaphors and probably other literary devices I was not paying attention to) is basically, a critique of the Soviet exile system and the ways in which the Russian people essentially became two halves of a dystopic whole: one half was sentenced to prison or exile for crimes built on wisps of air and gossip, the other half was commended and applauded for doing the sentencing.  There's a particularly relevant conversation between Kostoglotov and another patient in the ward where the other patient tells him that although he was exiled, at least he was permitted to tell the truth, keep his honor.  Rusanov, who embraced the idea of it, rose high in the party only to become paranoid when he hears that one of the people he denounced unjustly has been released.

This wasn't hard to read, exactly, it just requires you to pay attention.  Also it's a long book about a Soviet cancer ward, so the action is not exactly hoppin'.  But Solzhenitsyn is an artist - his descriptions and characters are excellent, and he draws you into their lives, making each of them a living being.

Because of the idea of cancer as metaphor there's somewhat less focus on the process itself, although Solzhenitsyn does not gloss over the daily procedures and treatments the patients undergo.  Instead though, we spend more time on the hospital's habit of releasing patients it can't cure, so as not to bring down their excellent statistics; of a nurse's glossing over of treatment options because it's easier to tell a patient what they'll be doing than to explain why this method is the best - particularly when the staff themselves aren't even sure. 

It's not really a pessimistic book (although after this one and the next one I found myself needing a definite change of pace) but it's a heavy book.  You do feel weighted down by all the burdens - mental, physical, emotional - these people are carrying.  The book's final chapter is Kostoglotov's walk through town, including a last minute decision to walk through the zoo (something another patient on the ward is literally almost dying to do) and he finds an empty cage for a monkey which died because a man threw pepper into its eyes.  We end the book on this image, I suppose because the act of senseless cruelty is meant to be akin to the cruelty imposed by Russians on their own citizens and neighbors. But in fact, the cancer has equalized them - party liner and exile alike suffer through the same indignities.  So in the end, the gulag system worked!  Haha, no, I don't think that's what we're supposed to take away from Cancer Ward.  But that's the danger with metaphors - if you take them as they lay, sometimes you wind up going backwards on your unicycle.  You see? Now this metaphor has gone too far.



33: A Book With A Zodiac Sign Or Astrology Term In The Title

Tiny Beautiful Things

Tiny Beautiful Things:Advice on love and life from Dear Sugar

By Cheryl Strayed

Life can be hard: your lover cheats on you; you lose a family member; you can’t pay the bills—and it can be great: you’ve had the hottest sex of your life; you get that plum job; you muster the courage to write your novel. Sugar—the once-anonymous online columnist at The Rumpus, now revealed as Cheryl Strayed, author of the bestselling memoir Wild—is the person thousands turn to for advice.

Tiny Beautiful Things brings the best of Dear Sugar together in one place and includes never-before-published columns and a new introduction by Steve Almond.  Rich with humor, insight, compassion - and absolute honesty - this book is a balm for everything life throws our way.

Cheryl Strayed is a heck of a memorialist, but I can only say that if I had actually written in to her for advice, I would definitely have been sitting there with her answer, crumpling the paper, screaming, "Get to the point!" She takes each letter and starts off basically with a "let me tell you about a seemingly (and in fact sometimes actually) unrelated event that happened to me, and after several pages of that I will analogize it to your problem".  I was so struck by this method, I'll attempt to recreate it for this review:

I read, regularly, certain advice columns.  This has not always been the same column, as it depends on those that I can most easily access, but for the last few years, it has included Dear Prudence, which used to be written by various other people, and then was written by Emily Yoffe, and then, most recently and dramatically, it was taken over by Daniel Mallory Ortberg (formerly Mallory Ortberg of The Toast).  Words cannot express how inadequate the advice given at the beginning of Ortberg's reign was.  It was so uniformly awful that there the site moderators had to tell people (repeatedly!  They left this as a message at the top of comments for weeks!) not to make derogatory comments about Ortberg's skills as an advice columnist and ask for Yoffe to come back.  It truly was a rocky road.  (Note that Dear Prudence's overlords at Slate seem to think "terrible advice column" is a successful business strategy,  as they are employing it once again with a sex column answered by two people, who, in one now infamous example, told an older heterosexual man who was having trouble connecting with his wife to "try a glory hole".  And yes, that is how "try a glory hole!" has become shorthand acknowledgement of shitty advice on one small corner of the internet.  I think broadly speaking though, that's going to be shitty advice 99.9% of the time, so feel free to expand its reach.)

As the wheel turns, gradually Ortberg became better at the job, being less sarcastic, and has mostly stopped uniformly recommending that people having communication problems with their significant others simply break up with them (I suppose as an alternative to having a difficult conversation, but I don't think we should encourage breaking up, since it's already such a tempting way out).  He's still hot on lengthy speeches for people to give, although we're hoping to wean him off those eventually too.  When he first started he was short and snappy and kinda fun, albeit somewhat too snappy in some cases.  I think the backlash from the appearance of flippancy has made him backpedal into the quagmire of five minute explanations of why you need space from your friend, when really, all you have to (and in most cases, should) say is: "I need some space."

All of this is to say that there's definitely some columnists who set the bar low, and give you confidence that you could easily do this job yourself.  Strayed (and Dear Sugar) is not one of them.  She is empathetic, sympathetic, warm, funny, and insightful.  Now, you do have to wade through a ten year history of Strayed's life to get there, but there is a great place to be. 

I did think it was kind of hilarious early on when she does a list of FAQs (sidebar: why do we say FAQs? It's always plural. Never has anyone typed FAQ and meant "Frequently Asked Question".  And yet, I feel compelled to make it clear this is a plural situation going on here. Society's mores are killing creativity!) and one of the questions is: "Are the letters you publish really sent in by anonymous people? Most are so well written that it seems you or The Rumpus writers must be creating them." Her answer (basically, she has so many that she can choose the most well written, and yes, aren't they all lovely) is a delightful eliding over the fact that the letters all kind of sound the same, too.  "I'm not smart, but I know what love is" and "please be honest, blunt, and give me a new perspective on my multifaceted problem" and "how do I reconnect with him in a genuine way?"

I have to say that it seemed unlikely to me, too, that all these people writing in were so erudite and clear in their desperation, but it doesn't detract from my enjoyment of her answers.  Her responses are such that I found myself on the edge of tears more than once. It's not only that she gives good advice - though she does, frequently telling them not what to do, but how to decide it - but that she allows the reader to view their problems with the same compassion and generosity of spirit that Strayed sees them. What infinite patience Strayed has for the person who overheard their friends talking about them behind their back, for the woman who likes kinky sex, for the person whose father is telling them things they don't want to hear, for the high schooler whose friends are messy. 

Or for the person who is afraid to say the word love:

"We're all going to die, Johnny. Hit the iron bell like it's dinnertime."




Footnote: I don't mean to be unduly harsh on Ortberg - he really was just awful when he started, but he's gotten a lot better since!  There's very few columns now where he strikes out more than once.

10: A Book With "Pop" "Sugar" Or "Challenge" In The Title

Pride

Pride

By Ibi Zoboi

Zuri Benitez has pride. Brooklyn pride, family pride, and pride in her Afro-Latino roots. But pride might not be enough to save her rapidly gentrifying neighborhood from becoming unrecognizable.

When the wealthy Darcy family moves in across the street, Zuri wants nothing to do with their two teenage sons, even as her older sister, Janae, starts to fall for the charming Ainsley. She especially can’t stand the judgmental and arrogant Darius. Yet as Zuri and Darius are forced to find common ground, their initial dislike shifts into an unexpected understanding.

But with four wild sisters pulling her in different directions, cute boy Warren vying for her attention, and college applications hovering on the horizon, Zuri fights to find her place in Bushwick’s changing landscape, or lose it all.

It is a truth universally known that Jane Austen adaptations - particularly those of Pride of Prejudice -  are a booming business.  Pride is a P&P "remix" which places the action in and around Bushwick, in Brooklyn, NYC, and centers the action on Zuri, one of five Haitian-Dominican sisters with working class parents.  Interestingly enough, although most modern adaptations age them up, in Pride, the sisters' ages are pretty close to the original Bennett sisters, although their concerns are college and social media, rather than marriage and, well, despoilation for marriage.

Zoboi also focuses a lot of Pride on gentrification.  Zuri's initial impression of Darius (her Darcy figure) is of a renovated brownstone, formerly boarded over, now bougie.  I mean, he's associated with the brownstone, not that he is a brownstone.

This book does convey the class stratification better than most adaptations do, and I think the choice of setting was a good one to set off the themes of the original (even though it is a little more aggressive in its approach to those themes).  The actions of the characters only felt a little shoehorned into the plot, and mostly that centers around Darius' interactions with Zuri.Which had to be done because unlike the original, people didn't conveniently camp out for months at a time at a relative's house who happens to be conveniently nearby your best friend's new man's house.

Okay, I will be very honest: I read this like four weeks ago, and have been meandering my way through Cancer Ward ever since.  I started this review as soon as I finished it but it's been so long I have forgotten all my opinions about it, if I ever had any.  Frankly there's also been a lot of upheaval in my life since then, and sometimes, books are just secondary characters.  At least, this one is.  Look, I love Pride and Prejudice, I think it's amazing, it's witty, touching, and sensible.  Do we really need to repeat it endlessly in different iterations? No, but it's not harming anyone.  It's a classic story, and entertaining enough to support all the later weight of these loving knock-offs.  I think Zoboi does yeoman's work in making her version snappy, appropriate and generally logical.

People have been asking for years why Pride and Prejudice has inspired this kind of following, while, say Little Women, though beloved, has not.  I think that's pretty clear, but I will answer it for you anyway: people definitely see themselves in Elizabeth Bennet, and I think we're all pretty well agreed that Jo blew it with Laurie, and Professor Bhaer is not every young lady's dream guy.  What was Alcott thinking?? If you want to be immortalized, you gotta pick a sexy man who pisses off his mean aunt to be with you, not a shlubby teacher twenty years older than you. 

15: A Retelling Of A Classic

Provenance

Provenance: How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of  Modern Art

By Laney Salisbury and Aly Sujo

It is the astonishing narrative of one of the most far-reaching and elaborate cons in the history of art forgery. Stretching from London to Paris to New York, investigative reporters Laney Salisbury and Aly Sujo recount the tale of infamous con man and unforgettable villain John Drewe and his accomplice, the affable artist John Myatt. Together they exploited the archives of British art institutions to irrevocably legitimize the hundreds of pieces they forged, many of which are still considered genuine and hang in prominent museums and private collections today.

I really enjoyed this book.  I have a semi-jaundiced eye towards art collecting to begin with, and this only proves my point: if the value of art is no longer based on the piece itself but some other extrinsic factor, then it is no longer art, but commodity.  The artist/forger Myatt makes the point (as do several others): the painting has not changed, only the name of the producer.  Why then does the price drop by the order of several hundred thousand?  Apparently the answer to Shakespeare's famous question is: no, a rose would not smell as sweet by any other name. Nor would a Giacometti.

Provenance is a really interesting book about a very specific fraud on the art world, but also about greater questions in personal responsibility, confidence, and the many cracks and seams that are available to be exploited by people without care for collateral damage, both in general terms in our modern society and also very specifically in the fine art forum.

Just this week as I'm reading it, the New York Times had two articles about long lost or newly discovered art pieces of great artists, an unearthed Caravaggio, found in an attic, and some purported Rembrandts, discovered in a collection held for six generations.  Honestly, both made me barking mad, since it seems like each loses sight of the forest for the trees. Look, all of this rush to decide whether this painting or that is painted by a "master" - authorship is more fluid than that (at least in paintings).  Stop attaching such importance to an unimportant feature.  In Provenance, they kinda wrap up the whole escapade by talking about art fraud via a broader lens, and mention that Picasso (and possibly other artists as well) would sign works done by other artists.

I've also been watching Fake or Fortune on Netflix, which is a fascinating look as the show people take paintings and try to authenticate them. It shows some of the avenues that people would use to support the provenance. It all seems to me like a giant guessing game, but there are definitely people out there who dedicate their lives to art, and in some cases, specific artists, so closely that they "know" immediately if something is off or not.  That sixth sense there is almost like a superpower.  What's interesting about this fraud perpetrated here is that it was able to succeed despite multiple people finding the forgeries lacking, because the provenance allayed all doubts.  That was the true con (obviously, otherwise they wouldn't have called the book Provenance). 

All of my aggravation about provenance aside, I am absolutely appalled at the utter gall of Drewe to callously upend historical archives for his own personal agenda and pleasure.  I am definitely a black and white seer, a rules follower, and no matter how silly I think it is to search for value in a trail of owners, I am utterly disgusted at his behavior.  Obviously, not only in this regard, but also in his refusal to acknowledge what it is. Just admit you did it for personal gain!  You're a piece of shit, John Drewe, have the self awareness to admit it.

48: Two Books That Share The Same Title