Islands in the Stream by Hemingway

So keeping with my Hemingway rotation (one book a year, alternating between one I have read and one I haven't, knowing that eventually, they will all have to be repeats), I pulled this one off my shelf a few months ago.  This one is the the first of the posthumously published Hemingway books, released in 1970, nine years after his death.   There has been so much stuff going on this fall it seems to have taken me a ridiculously long time to finish it.  This is my second time reading it.  The first time was maybe in 2009, and even though I wasn't a parent then, I knew it was a powerful story about being a father.  But I wanted to go back and read it now, knowing what I know and see if I saw the same things on my first read.  Of course, I saw even more.  

SYNOPSIS/POSSIBLE SPOILERS:

The book is divided into three parts.  The first part is shows a relatively famous painter, Thomas Hudson (which is of course Hemingway, just like he is the primary male character, protagonist, in every one of his novels) spending a summer on an island in the Bahamas with his three sons (one from his first wife, two from his second).  The second part follows a day where he goes to a bar in Havana and meets his first ex-wife.  All of his sons have been killed by this point.  The last part is him commanding a boat on a covert U-boat hunting operation in the Caribbean in WWII. 

The plot is not fast moving, but like in all Hemingway books, the slower the pace the more real and true the content.  I have a lot of favorite scenes, but probably the best when his sons are spear fishing in the clear water of the gulf stream (that is the stream in title) and Thomas is standing on the bridge of his boat with a rifle, a .256 Mannlicher, looking for sharks because he knows they love the conditions that they are in.  Hemingway always writes well about guns.  Thomas sees a long hammerhead coming slowly in towards his boys.  He shoots at it and misses, three times, and just as he is taking the last shot he has, his alcoholic, aged deckhand/cook opens up with a Thompson sub machine gun, raking the shark from head to tail, riddling it with so many .45 holes that it rolls on its belly and sinks.  Thomas couldn't stop the danger from reaching his children, instead relying on a random happenstance(an old drunk with a gun that he wasn't even suppose to have) to save them. A month after his boys leave he gets a telegram saying that the two youngest were killed in a car wreck in Paris, with their mother.

One of my favorite lines come when Thomas and his crew are very close to the Germans.  They have captured their boat and and are trying to find them in this string of mangrove keys.  After one of his crew goes off to sweep an island alone, another crew member is talking to Thomas about him:

"I'm sorry we haven't been friends."

"Everybody is friends when things are bad enough."

"I'm going to be friends from now on."

"We're all going to do a lot of things from now on," Thomas Hudson said. "I wish from now on would start." 

So what is this book about?  The islands in the stream are the characters.  Like the keys in the gulf stream they stand together, but somehow alone too.  As fear and pain and tragedy rush around them they always stand.  They meet others and love and are loved, but still they stand by themselves.  I think in a lot of ways this is the truth about our own lives.  The last line is a good one.  Thomas is shot and dying on his boat.  Willie, a  older crew member who fights well but is a little unstable and gets picked on, is kneeling beside him.  

"Tommy," Willie said. "I love you, you son of a bitch, and don't die."

Thomas Hudson looked at him without moving his head.

"Try and understand if it isn't too hard."

Thomas Hudson looked at him.  He felt far away now and there were no problems at all.  He felt the ship gathering her speed and lovely throb of her engines against his shoulders blades which rested hard against the boards.  He looked up and there was the sky that he had always loved and he looked across the great lagoon that he was quite sure, now, he would never paint and he eased his position a little to lessen the pain.  The engines were around three thousand now, he thought, and they came through the deck and into him.

"I think I understand, Willie," he said.

"Oh shit," Willie said.  "You never understand anybody that loves you."

Next to Last Ever Breaking Bad blog!

So unless something unusual derails me from the 11:00pm encore showing tomorrow night (I will be on the road during the first show), tonight is the last night of Breaking Bad questions.  By Monday, everything will be answered.  It is a great story, but I think what has made it so exceptional is that it has always kept me guessing.  I am not sure that ever quite knew where it was going and it always kept me coming back to see.  I remember back in 2009 when I was flipping through the channel on our 13 inch "dorm room" TV upstairs and I caught a piece a re-run from the first season.  It was the part where Jesse tries to melt the drug dealer body in the tub instead of the plastic container that Walt told him to use and the half acid melted body falls through the ceiling.  I was hooked from there on.  I remember the episodes that kept me up for hours just trying to absorb what happened.  My favorite of these were Hank's shootout with Tucco, the bomb on the turtle, and Hank's shootout with the brothers.  I remember watching the end of the fourth season and seeing the "lilly of the valley" plant by Walt's pool at the end and the hair actually standing up on the back of my neck.  All this past week I have been occasionally watching the past episodes as they have aired them in order (I was finally able to see the one pivotal episode I somehow missed, which was Walt watching Jane die) and I could not be struck by how everyone's life has been completed ruined.  It started with the nice janitor that got fired in the second or third episode and it has progressed through the entire cast.  No one has escaped it.

 

But now it is over.  And by the way this last part of the fifth season has gone, I am ready.  The story needs to conclude.  It has gotten just too dark and hopeless now for any kind real plot turns to be left.  After Andrea was killed like that last week, there is just not much hope left.  They don't even show stuff like that in movies.  What happens tomorrow night is just going to be the epilogue.  No one is "getting away" with anything now.  Everyone (including me) hopes for Jesse to be saved somehow, but I am not sure it will happen.  If Walt does save him, it will be by accident, I don't think there is anything left to be redeemed. We'll find out soon enough.  I guess the show really has followed through, I am still guessing, all the way to the end.  But I do stand by my ricin prediction (let the record show it was made like two years ago).....somebody's gonna get it!   

Breaking Bad: You Should Tread Lightly

                      I'll take "Who is getting the ricin." for $100

 

 

If you haven't joined the other 6 million of us that watched Sunday, your DVR is calling you name.  Get on it! SPOILERS PRESENT!

 

Well, it happened.  And I am so glad it did.  The conversation/confrontation between Walt and Hank happened.  We knew it was going to eventually happen for the past four years (since the start of the second season) , and I have envisioned it countless times.  The main reason that I am glad that it happened in this episode was that I didn’t want to watch Walt and Hank play a cat and mouse game for the next three or four weeks.  I didn’t want to see a constant back and forth of “Is he going to find this?” or “Does Walt know?”, complete with crafty cliff hangers.  Now, it is all out in the open.  And where does the show go for the last seven weeks?  I have no freaking idea, and that is why Breaking Bad is the best thing ever on TV.

A few more observations:

1)      We already pretty much knew this from the first part of season five and most of season four, but Walt is a complete monster and you cannot believe anything he says to anybody.  Do we really know that he is “out” of the meth game?  Other than what he says, what proof do we have? (the same way he was clear of cancer for the first part of season five)  And he lies to everybody.  There is no character that he confides in or has an earnest conversation with.  Every single thing he says to anybody has some kind of manipulative pretext to it. 

2)      Nobody is safe.  In the first couple of seasons, the “bad drug dealers” were the ones in danger of Walt’s calculative murder methods.  Now, as Jesse has already figured out (he is the only one I think that truly knows it), nobody is safe from Walt, with the exception of Skylar and his kids.  Walt would kill Hank, Marie, Saul or anybody else in his way and not think twice about it.  I would like to think he would still not kill Jesse, but I don’t know. 

3)      The only way Walt is going down, ever, is either by cancer, or from somebody who does not underestimate him.  The entire series shows how a middle aged high school chemistry teacher builds a drug empire using one constant method;  no matter how ruthless he becomes, he still appears to others like a middle aged high  chemistry school teacher (even though the Aztec has been replaced by the Charger).   This has been happening since Walt killed the two “bad drug dealers” in the RV and he has been steadily working his way up the food chain. Walt took out Gus and Mike; a crazy successful drug lord and a crazy successful mercenary/hitman that always stayed one step ahead of their competitors, because they never understood how dangerous Walt really was.  I think by this point in the series, the only logical course of action for every remaining character is to catch the next Russian rocket to the International Space Station and wait for the show to end.  Of course, that would leave us just seven hours of watching Walt wander around a car wash, shot using cool camera angles.  But that would still be better than watching the 22nd season of the Kardashians.          

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (no spoliers)

 

 

I finally got through this one, for the second time.  Apparently I went through a period where I wrote the date that I finished the book on the back cover.  For Catch 22, it was March 12, 2003, just eight days before the Iraq war started.  Looking back, I think it definitely shaped the way I viewed the ensuing foolishness.  Catch- 22 is follows the tale of Yosarrian, a bombardier stationed in Italy in WWII.  He observes the inane nature of the world, not just life in the military, but everywhere else touched by the stupidity of man, except for Sweden (that is like the paradise of sanity Yosarrian aspires to reach)  It was as good as I remembered it, but I had forgotten how slow the plot goes.  In essence, out of 450 pages, the first 350 pages are sketches of the lives of a couple of dozen characters, with minimal focus on chronology.  It is hard to know what was past and what is present in reference with the other tracts of the other characters.  The last 100 pages really advance the story to its conclusion.  Despite it's humorous slant (kind of M*A*S*H like), there are some incredibly powerfully descriptive images of war; the fear before the raid on Bologna (everyone smelled of formaldehyde), Kid Sampson getting cut in two by a plane, Snowden spilling his secret on Yossarian (one reason why I thought that the NSA Snowden was made up) and Yosarrian's last trip through Rome.  The other cool thing about this book are the quotes.  There are a ton of really cool ones.  Here are some of my favorites:

"She was a crazy mathematics major from the Wharton School of Business who could not count to twenty-eight each month without getting into trouble."

 

"The country was in peril; he was jeopardizing his traditional rights of freedom and independence by daring to exercise them."

 

"Nately's mother, a descendant of the New England Thorntons, was a Daughter of the American Revolution.  His father was a Son of a Bitch."

 

"The night was filled with horrors, and he thought he knew how Christ must have felt as he walked through the world, like a psychiatrist through a ward full of nuts, like a victim through a prison full of thieves.  What a welcome sight a leper must have been!"

What is Catch-22?  It is the "catch" that explains how we deal with our problems through airtight anti logic.  Such as: Orr would be crazy to fly anymore missions and sane if he didn't; but if he was sane then he had to fly them.  If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to. 

Sound crazy right?  But this is exactly how our society argues every problem we encounter:

Why is everyone so poor?  Because unemployment is high.  Why is unemployment high?  Because everyone is so poor!

Why is health insurance so expensive?  Because enough people don't pay in.  Why don't enough people pay in?  Because it is so expensive!

Why is public education not good?  Because everyone that can afford it has put their kid in private school.  Why did they put their kids in private school?  Because public education is not good!

Why is crime so high?  Because there are no jobs and people are poor.  Why are there no jobs here?  Because the crime rate is so high!

 

We live in a world of Catch-22, where the solution to and cause of all problems are just another problem with the exact same attributes.  It results in a crappy society, but great cable news network ratings.  Kind of reminds me of what Yossarian and Doc Daneeka said about it.

"That is some catch, that Catch -22," he observed.

"It's the best there is," Doc Daneeka agreed.