Zamyatin and Kellerman you know

This has been a tiring week. We got a call about our other house, the one my father inherited from his grandmother. Apparently a pipe burst due to a combination of unfortunate events and flooded the place with three feet of water, ruining the floors and ceilings and pulling cabinets away from walls. I'm not so much upset about the structure itself; if the insurance company actually does it's damn job we can get the money to rebuild. It's the stuff inside that's probably ruined that hurts.

My great-grandparents bought this house in 1952, the year it was built, as a retirement home. It's a five minute drive from the beach in a small, quiet town. This house became a repository for a lot of old family things, a number of them over 100 years old. My great-grandfather died in this house. My great-grandmother and my grandmother lived there until their deaths in 1980 (they died only a few months apart). I never met my grandparents, both were gone before I was born, but staying in this house on weekends and during the summer and winter vacations surrounded by their lives made me feel as if they were with me. My father would tell me stories about all of them when I would ask him about various books and photographs and other objects. With all these things probably destroyed it feels like they've died all over again. It's felt like grieving. And then I feel bad because there are so many others who are going through much worse and lost much more right now but I can't help it.

Anyway, the above picture is a rocking horse from that house. It was my father's. He used to play on it when he went to visit his grandparents. My sister and I played on it when we were little as well.

Eleemosynary:

a. Charitable, pertaining to alms.

b. Dependant on alms.

c. Done as an act of charity.

The OED makes it pretty clear that this word means just about anything to do with almsgiving from the donations to the institutions set up by donations to those receiving them.

I borrowed a copy of We by Yevgeny Zamyatin from a co-worker on Tuesday and finished it yesterday. It was written in 1921 in Soviet Russia at about the time when writers were beginning to be forced to write only in approved ways. We was not published there and Zamyatin was forced into exile several times during his life. It was finally published in Russia in 1988.

It's a story about a future time in which the One State controls just about every aspect of the people's lives. They live in a city surrounded by a glass wall to keep out the uncontrolled greenery of nature. In fact, just about everything is made of glass so no one can hide what they are doing. The only time they can lower shades over their rooms is when they have sex. Citizens have a Table of Hours that lays out what they should be doing at all times. They have two personal hours a day to read, write or redeem pink coupons for intercourse. They are assigned work, participate in farce elections for their Great Benefactor, chew each mouthful of food the regulation 50 times, and attend lectures that mock the disordered ways of the ancients and glorify the logical civilization that they live in.

The novel is the journal of number D-503, an engineer and mathematician working on a spaceship meant to bring the One State way of life to other planets. He is eventually seduced by I-330, a woman who is part of a revolutionary force trying to bring down the wall and break free of the state's oppressive control. It's a decent read. The story is more about the control of the One State (I think we can all guess who Zamyatin was talking about and what he was trying to say) and how a logical way of living implemented for the benefit of the majority crushes the will and individuality of the one. D-503 is diagnosed as ill, having developed a 'soul'. This causes him great anguish as he starts to distinguish the difference between himself as a complacent automaton living according to the rules and the individual he is becoming, one who has wants he can only satisfy by breaking those rules that formerly kept him happy and safe.

The writing is poetic which is a little problematic considering the writer is supposed to D-503, a person who admits he is no poet and has little imagination. He's not supposed to be very experienced at describing things and yet he does, quite beautifully. I think the novel would have been stronger if his writing had started out humdrum and eventually moved towards being luminous and fey. The "love" part of the story (which seems more like lust to me but so many writers get the two confused so pfft I guess) is not very original; his friendship with R and his companionship with his regular lover O is disrupted by the temptress I. D experiences confusion about what is happening to him and what he should do to resolve things one way or the other.

I have a few problems with the book but nothing majorly off-putting. Gendered roles and stereotypes seem to have persisted a thousand years into the future in this 'egalitarian' society but it was written in the late teens. I don't understand why a controlling state would allow its citizens to decide for themselves who they want to have sex with rather than just assigning them regular partners. It doesn't matter I suppose. It was a good read.

Now I'm finishing up Jonathan Kellerman's first Alex Delaware novel When the Bough Breaks. Like all of his books there is much that could have been edited out; scenes of the main character receiving directions to locations or phoning his girlfriend to tell her he has to make a short out of town trip. The reader doesn't need several paragraphs describing these rather boring phone conversations. The author can tell us in a couple of sentences that it happened. We don't need to know how to get to the university. "If you're coming from downtown take I-5 to 520 which turns into the Evergreen Point Floating Bridge. Drive all the way across the bridge to the east shore, turn south at Fairweather and continue along the coastline." I'm not going to go there. There are many instances like this and all they serve to do is break up the narration. Nor do we need to listen to Robin and Alex debate about whether she should accompany him on his trip or not. Alex himself is a rather boring character and the amount of interest he attracts from women in this book and throughout the entire series has always baffled me. Robin's characterization bounces between needy and supportive depending on what will make Alex look best in any given scene. Characters are often portrayed by stereotypes. The entire book reads like a barely veiled diatribe at the way society as a whole treats children. And yet despite the many flaws of Kellerman's writing style and characterization I keep reading his books. What can I say? The man knows how to create interesting plots.