Tag: white men

Catch and Kill Review

Huge trigger warning concerning this book, as it deals with Harvey Weinstein’s sexual assaults, and the widespread misogyny and sexual assaults found in the entertainment and news media industry.

This book gets 4.5 freaky surveillance cameras out of 5. This photo technically only has 4 cameras in it, but the implication being that they are everywhere, I’m going to say there is half a camera hiding in this photo somewhere.
[This photo is stylized with bisexual lighting (that means pink, purple and blue woo I’m cool I know things) and just shows 4 cameras on a variety of walls, watching your every move.]

This crazy COVID19 pandemic means that most of Ontario, Canada is shut down right now. If you can stay at home, please do. Perks of staying at home: lots of time to blog and lots of time to read which in turn leads to more blogging. So I’m going to be grateful for this pandemic-imposed isolation and let my creative and critical juices flow. I have no time-frame for posting now, but hopefully can crank out another post before going back to work!

  • Why did I pick this book up?

I picked this book up because a lot of people I know have been buzzing about this book. After months of hearing about this book, and being steeped in the reality of the events from the book unfolding in almost real-time in our newsfeeds, I decided, enough was enough. The Harvey Weinstein trial was just beginning, and even though I already believed him to be guilty based on a myriad of factors I won’t even begin to unpack here, I wanted to see the proof for myself. I expected Ronan Farrow’s Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators to be a fact-filled book that laid out Farrow’s investigative research into Weinstein and the accusations around him. I definitely did not expect Catch and Kill to be this and a thrilling and sometimes scary spy novel! There were many times reading this book that I kept thinking “no one could make this shit up, because no one would think this is realistic.” And that is what is wild about this book! Because it is real! He has so much proof!

  • Would I recommend why/why not?

It’s a resounding hell yeah I would recommend this book! Farrow’s writing is riveting, insightful, and the pace of the book is wound tight, keeping you on edge. Even when he has to go into some context, explain the makeup of some organization, detail some executive’s past, it all serves to show the insidious ways in which these predators infiltrate communities and prey on vulnerable people. And they all help each other in some way. Covertly or overtly, all these predators know on some level what the other predators are doing, and they know that they all have each others’ backs. They all value the same thing in life, and that is power and how that power makes them feel.

I would not recommend this book if you are an incel I guess, because this will not jive with your overall worldview, but also why are you reading my blog then? *Casts a banishing spell*

Ok, that’s better. Anyways, even though non-fiction can sometimes be dry and boring, that is definitely not the case! Even knowing in an overall sense ‘what happens next’ in the book did not take away from how exciting and suspenseful it was. If you only know the Weinstein sexual assault aspect of this case, and not the surveillance and overall societal/industry cover-up of these and other similar crimes, then you don’t know half the story! I thought I knew a lot, and turns out I was only seeing the tip of the iceberg!

  • Quick Synopsis  **SPOILER ALERT FROM HERE ON, DO I EVEN HAVE TO SAY IT?!**:

The book covers so much ground that I can’t even begin to hope to summarize it fully and properly. But basically we get a bit of Farrow’s backstory, how he is working for NBC and wants to be a tv journalist. He is doing a series of stories on Hollywood, and gets a lead on sexual assaults in the business. In the meantime, we also see the parallel investigation into the investigation into these sexual assaults that is being done by some scary, vaguely Russian men. This is all stuff that Farrow has obviously uncovered after his initial investigations, and seeing how Farrow goes from slightly paranoid to full on believing he is being followed, to actually having proof that he was being followed on a scale much crazier than he could have imagined, make this book feel like a spy novel. That’s basically what it is at its core, with sexual assault as the underpinning motive, and the fact that this is not a novel, it’s real life. Which makes it crazier than spy novel out there.

Essentially, Farrow’s leads grow from one, to two, to four, and exponentially from there, and all the victims have something, or rather someone, in common: Harvey Weinstein. While reporting, Farrow also comes up against a lot of resistance, and in some cases outright hostility and manipulation, from most of his superiors. People who are supposed to have journalistic integrity.

Eventually, Farrow’s investigation comes to have the significance and potential danger of a bomb, and he is fired from NBC. He takes his reporting to the New Yorker, and also discovers Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey’s own investigation into Weinstein. Along the way, we discover that basically 90% of Hollywood has heard or witnessed some crazy gross behaviour from this man, but no one really ever does anything. Except for the amazing and courageous women who come forward to denounce his actions.

The great thing about reading this book when I did was that I happened to read this just as the trial was unfolding, and got to see the tangible results of these journalists’ work. More on that below.

On a typical weekday, the parking lot behind the book in this photo would be totally full. We are on lockdown. Stay healthy people!
[There are only a few cars in the parking lot. The book cover has a drawing of a hand zipping a mouth shut. The title is spread across the black cover in huge, intimidating white font.]
  • Overall brain gushings :

This book proves that not only is Ronan Farrow a brave and excellent researcher and interviewer, he is a great writer.

One of the most terrifying aspects of this book was the ways in which so many people who seemed to be allies, or seemed to believe victims, proved to be abusers and their various actors. I’d like to give Lisa Bloom a special garbage human shout-out for being the fucking most despicable example of someone who purported to be a victim advocate using their own privilege to undermine and benefit from victims’ abuse. Fuck that lady. Also all the NBC executives who tried – and failed I’d like to point out snarkily – to make it impossible for Farrow to do his job.

The second scariest thing about Catch and Kill was to see the ways in which the dystopian surveillance state apparatus we imagine in worlds like 1984 and Neuromancer are actually being deployed by wealthy and influential individuals. Spy agencies and PR agencies work in tandem to protect the powerful, and to help abusers find and suppress victims. Jesus it is scary. I could go on for a million years about this book, but basically, read it because it is interesting and covers way more than what any media surrounding the trials has covered. Also, if you know me in real life, we can talk about this for as long as you like.

  • What does it mean?

It means Harvey Weinstein is fucking guilty. In a beautiful fashion, I finished reading Catch and Kill, vindicated in my opinion of his guilt, reeling at the sheer volume of proof against him, knowing that no argument would lessen his guilt in my mind. Farrow brought receipts! Stacks of em! And then, just a few days later, a jury of his peers found him guilty! For once! Then, to further emphasize the real concrete impact this book has had, Weinstein was sentenced to 23 years in prison.

Catch and Kill means that maybe, for some men who have been abusing their power for so long, thinking that they would get away with their behaviour forever, because they had been getting away with it forever, well… Time’s up, baby.

  • Favourite passages :

O. M. G. I almost died the first time Matt Lauer made an appearance in this book. Firstly because it is one of the first examples we have of how far-reaching and insidious this behaviour is, but secondly, because of how it ends:

As I reached the door, he said wryly, ‘Don’t let us down. I’ll be watching.’

‘You want this closed?’ I asked.

‘I’ve got it,’ he said. He pushed a button on his desk. The door swung shut.

Farrow, pg 23.

This is some spy communication that Farrow gets access to when one of the Russian spies decides to become a double agent and give him a bunch of files; I could not make this up if I tried. Also, this passage is where we see the beginning of Lisa Bloom’s fucking shady game, making me say “I don’t buy your shitty apology, bitch”.

It observed that I was ‘a fan’ of Lisa Bloom, appearing to assess her level of access to me. And it described my attempts to get in touch with Judd, Sciorra, and Arquette. The email analyzed the likelihood that each of them would talk. It flagged any public statements the women had made about sexual violence as a warning sign.

pg 85.

Here we see just how little we all really know about Weinstein. I’m telling you, this guy is the new Cosby, but without the drugs to incapacitate women. Instead, Weinstein used professional power and credibility to silence and manipulate these women. I ain’t even going to get started on anything his lawyer said during his trial, because that lady is the shittiest of all the shitty ladies.

She took out an iPhone and navigated to a sentence she’d jotted down in her Notes app a few years earlier. It was something Weinstein whispered – to himself, as far as she could tell – after one of his many shouting sprees. It so unnerved her that she pulled our her phone and tapped it into a memo, word for word: ‘There are things I’ve done that nobody knows.’

pg 110.

Here is a passage that really drove home that we as a society are missing out on the most important aspect of this whole situation; the victims’ emotional pain and trauma.

The renderings of these stories that were ultimately published in The New Yorker were precise and legalistic. They made no attempt at communicating the true, bleak ugliness of listening to a recollection of violent rape like Sciorra’s. Her voice caught. The memory erupted in ragged sobs. You heard Annabella Sciora struggle to tell her story once, and it stayed inside you forever.

pg 303.
  • If you liked this (or my review), consider reading :

I haven’t read it yet, but I’m sure She Said by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey is also incredibly excellent and informative on this topic, as they are the two female journalists who broke the story for the NYT mentioned by Farrow many times in this book.

If you want to read another big-deal non-fiction book about women facing sexual harassment in the workplace, then Anita Hills 1997 Speaking Truth to Power is a good read.

If instead, you are looking for fiction that deals with the topic of sexual assault and the twisted ways in which our loyalties can be pulled, then I would recommend Zoe Whittall’s The Best Kind of People. Although not set in Canada explicitly, it does feel like it could be happening in the suburbs of Toronto, and Whittall is Canadian! Always managing to squeeze in a shoutout for my compatriots! Another great recommendation in terms of books that deal with sexual assault (what a weird category to be commenting on, seriously) also happens to be my favourite book, which is the controversial Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov. I could and am usually expected to defend this choice, but if you can’t understand the subtleties of the book and the fact that me saying I think it is one of the best books every does not mean I am endorsing paedophilia or even agree that Lolita is a love story, then what even is the point of wasting my time. But seriously, you should real it because it is good and uncomfortable in a way that courageous art should be.

Stay tuned for my next review, Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng. This book was part of Reese Witherspoon’s book club, and she raved that it ‘made her cry’. Will it make me cry? I can be a big crybaby, so read on to find out!

The Road Review

This book gets 2 creepy human skulls out of 5.
[The caption speaks for itself: there is a dyptich of a skull, old and brown, reminding us of our mortality and why it’s so weird to be obsessed with post-apocalyptic narratives.]
  • Why did I pick this book up?

Now, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road has been on my radar for quite some time. I have taken a few dystopian/post-apocalyptic literature courses in my academic career, and this novel comes up a lot in discussion and theory.

I thought I would really like it. It’s a ‘seminal’ text. Alas, as with a lot of canonical literature, I was disappointed. It’s prize winning. Pulitzer Prize winning, and my copy has praise that says “it might very well be the best book of the year”. So some people really fucking loved this book. I will not be counted amongst them.

But I picked it up because I am starting to run out of books that I have not read in my collection, and am finding myself too cheap to go buy books, and too lazy to go to the library (also I owe them money, which factors into the too cheap category as well, ha). Also, again, did not know I would be disappointed in this book.

  • Would I recommend why/why not?

Although I personally did not really find this book to be amazing, some people who have either read no post-apocalyptic literature, or who are super fans of the genre (two opposing categories, I know) may really enjoy this novel.

If you like really sad stories about people that you are pretty sure from the start are doomed, you should read this text. I found it to be a bit too depressing, and I also knew what the stakes were: these people are not going to have very many good moments in this book.

It does have some good descriptions of a post-apocalyptic wasteland, and this could also be a reason to read this book. However, I found these descriptions to eventually get overly repetitive, and by the end I was just ready for the book to end, for the misery and monotony to come to a close, and for me to see if there would be any kind of climactic or super significant ending that could perhaps change my opinion of the book.

Alas, it did not do this for me. More on that further down.

  • Quick Synopsis  **SPOILER ALERT FROM HERE ON, DO I EVEN HAVE TO SAY IT?!**:

The book begins some years after a world-ending environmental catastrophe of some sort. Everything is grey and ashy, there are no living plants or animals to be found, and most people are dead. The ones who are still living are probably the unlucky ones; we follow a man and his unnamed son (very Birdbox haha), two of the ‘good guys’ (the ‘bad guys’ being depraved people who are resorting to cannibalism and insanely gruesome murders to survive) as they try and get further South (for a not-totally clear reason) and literally not get eaten by crazies.

We find out that the boy has lived his whole life in this post-apocalypse and that his mother committed suicide at some point before, tasking the husband with protecting the boy but also maybe killing him should it come down to it? Like she doesn’t want the boy to be left alone, so if the dad is in danger he should kill the boy so they both die? Both of those requests are super fucked up for someone to ask of their partner. Like, jesus.

Anyways, they basically just go through miserable day after miserable day of travelling by foot through a wasteland, starving and searching for food, getting sicker with every day, and being set upon/followed by cannibals and other even more desperate and less scrupulous survivors?

  • Overall brain gushings :

Ok. Here are the reasons why I don’t like this book, even though it’s a best-seller, a classic, and apparently something I shouldn’t like.

It’s basically torture porn. You are reading about a father and his son who are starving and running away from cannibals, vaguely going South. And they do this day after day. With no actual hope. And they have been doing this for years. Literally that little boy’s whole life. And the dad has a bloody cough from the beginning of the novel.

So we know he is going to die. And leave this little boy alone, or have to kill him too. So that’s nice. I understand that a lot of the novel is about ‘the miracle of goodness’ but there isn’t that much goodness in this book. To me this book says that our obsession with post-apocalyptic narratives is foolish, because the stories that exist after the end of the world are fucking terrifying, and again, literally just waiting for these characters to die. There is no hope that the world will come back or improve in McCarthy’s apocalypse.

As mentioned, I literally wanted the book to end. I wanted the dad to die, because I knew it had to happen at some point, and unlike this man and little boy, didn’t want to keep being tortured by this story. My favourite post-apocalyptic text – Station Eleven – uses a quote from Star Trek as its guiding motto, and I need my post-apocalyptic texts to hold to it in some way; “Survival is insufficient”. There has to be some hope. Although The Road does have some love, even the love is so full of fear and pain, that nothing in this book really made me feel good.

Here is a picture of The Road in front of a road. Unlike the roads in The Road, this road is pretty and welcoming, and also flaunts the great fall colours happening in Ottawa right now.
[A hand holds a book in front of a road. There is a massive tree behind it, full of vibrant yellow, orange, and green leaves. The Road is just a black book with its title splashed across the center in all caps, white font.]
  • What does it mean?

I have touched on what this book means and is about a decent amount in my synopsis of the book, and also I will touch on its themes a bit in the ‘favourite passages’ section below. The book’s Wikipedia page (which when too lazy to do research on a text and its meaning is a great source) basically says that people loved this book because it was ‘heartbreaking’ and ‘stark’ and it was those things, but I still don’t think it was a ‘good’ book. It was ok. Honestly, I was tempted to give it a 1 or 1.5 rating, but then thought that based on its critical response and importance to the genre bumped it up a bit.

Other things the book is concerned with (but in my opinion does not offer a ton of insight or concrete opinions on): the meaning of life, whether mankind is fundamentally good or evil, and the inexplicably strong yet painful bonds between parents and their children.

  • Favourite passages :

Alright, so there weren’t a ton of dog-eared pages in this book, which reflects me not feeling it. Also, all the passages mimic McCarthy’s punctuation and spelling, such as his misspelling of “don’t” to “dont”. There are some interesting statements on trauma and memory:

A corpse in a doorway dried to leather. Grimacing at the day. He pulled the boy closer. Just remember that the things you put into your head are there forever, he said. You might want to think about that.

You forget some things, dont you?

Yes. You forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget.

Cormac McCarthy, pg 12

After they leave a man to starve, against the boy’s wishes:

He was just hungry, Papa. He’s going to die.

He’s going to die anyways.

He’s so scared, Papa.

The man squatted and looked at him. I’m scared, he said. Do you understand? I’m scared… You’re not the one who has to worry about everything…

Yes I am, he said. I am the one.

pg 259

Then, a passage on stories and living in the post-apocalypse:

Real life is pretty bad? [the man asks]

What do you think?

Well, I think we’re still here. A lot of bad things have happened but we’re still here.

Yeah.

You dont think that’s so great.

It’s okay.

pg 269

Also, I agree with the little boy! At what point is life worth it? This is an existential question that I do not have the answer for, but goddamn!!

  • If you liked this (or my review), consider reading :

If you want to read what I think is better post-apocalyptic/dystopian literature check out Octavia Butler’s The Parable of the Sower. It has a lot in common with The Road; both are very graphic and sad in their portrayal of humanity gone depraved, but Parable has a more exciting narrative. It also has more interesting themes of afro-futurism and is more explicitly sci-fi, so that may either be a bonus or a deterrent to you.

For another tale of familial love and the ties that bind us (and a definite tear-jerker of a read) check out Cordelia Strube’s On the Shores of Darkness, There Is Light which is one of the best books I’ve ever read, about a girl and her younger brother.

Stay tuned for my next review, Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, a book about living in Nigeria and the gender dynamics of a family affected by wealth and religion.

The Catcher in the Rye Review

This book gets 2 fancy drinks out of 5; which is infinitesimally fewer drinks than Holden Caulfield consumes in the novel. I think the drinking is making me generous when it comes to scoring.
[The same picture is repeated in a sort of diptych; a fancy stemmed glass, covered in condensation, sits on a table. There is a tantalizing slice of orange (or is it grapefruit, who knows?) in the glass and the word “Tanqueray” scrolls across the glass. Yummy.]

  • Why did I pick this book up?

Now, unlike most people, I did not read The Catcher in the Rye in school. So why, you may ask, did I choose to read it now? Much like a high school student, I did not have much of a choice.

A few weeks ago I was in Toronto visiting my partner’s family. I had neglected to bring a book with me for some reason. My partner suggested I raid her parents’ library for a nice poolside read. This proved to be more challenging than I had anticipated. Apparently when my partner was a teen, she only liked to read depressing things. So the library consisted of the following; it is 1945, and a woman accused of taking a Nazi as a lover is humiliated and punished, she marries, and conflict continues; a collection of narratives by Nigerian child-soldiers; a memoir on eating disorders; the best-selling, but heavy and intense, Book of Negroes; and this classic, the John Lennon murdering (my favourite joke to make about this book) Catcher in the Rye.

I figured that out of all these choices, The Catcher in the Rye would be the most enjoyable and pool-side appropriate. I think I may have been wrong.

  • Would I recommend why/why not?

Well, this book killed John Lennon – I will never stop saying this – so make of that what you will. I mean, John Lennon is himself a controversial figure, so maybe for you this is a bonus? So if it is, I recommend this book because it killed him! Otherwise, I don’t recommend this book because it killed him!

No but honestly, I don’t think I would recommend this book. If you have not caught on by this review (what, #5?), the score of the book is a direct reflection of whether or not I would recommend it. It barely gets a passing grade. And this is only due to the latter half of the book, where Holden Caulfield grows a bit less insufferable, and a bit more sympathetic. Heads up: this doesn’t last very long.

  • Quick Synopsis  **SPOILER ALERT FROM HERE ON, DO I EVEN HAVE TO SAY IT?!**:

The Catcher in the Rye manages to be a book where almost nothing happens, and yet when you try and describe it, it sounds like a lot of stuff has gone down. The novel opens with Holden Caulfield being kicked out of yet another prep school. Because this is back when people communicated via letter, Holden knows that his parents are in the dark about his expulsion. He decides that he is too cowardly to tell them himself, so he decides to go bum around New York for a couple days until he is ready to go home.

What happens? He fights his roommate, he cries, he calls everyone a phony maybe a million times, tells us about his dead brother who is so smart, tells us he hates Hollywood, most writing, and most people. He lies a lot, compulsively it seems, about stuff that is unimportant and bizarre for someone who seems to think everyone else is a fake. Seriously: I’d be intrigued to see how many times he uses a variation of that term. One thing is for sure and it’s that Holden doesn’t seem to own a thesaurus or a metaphorical mirror for his personality.

He drinks, tries to get with various women in a bar, has bad luck, drinks some more. Eventually he hires a prostitute because he is depressed, but finds that too depressing (no shit Sherlock), so he pays her without having sex with her. Then her pimp shows up and they mug him for more money. Basically a bunch of other random stuff happens; he goes on a date with a girl he knows: it goes poorly; Holden has a weird but cute interaction with his little sister; he goes to see an old teacher in the middle of the night for somewhere to stay, the teacher gives him a stern talking to about his life and work ethic, and then proceeds to try and molest him (maybe. This is up for debate, as Holden wakes up to him caressing his hair, which is creepy but not necessarily sexual? Who knows); Holden gets really drunk and catches hypothermia wandering around Central Park wondering where the ducks have gone, and then the story ends, with him seemingly in some sort of convalescent home trying to recover from his illness (there was definitely some hints that it is not just a physical illness he is suffering from). Ya that’s about it. Also, he talks a lot about committing suicide or killing other people (mostly in jest maybe?) so I can see how it might make you a little weird and murderous.

I wanted to get a picture of this book in front of some rye, but I live in the city, so too bad. Here are some pretty flowers to make up for this book’s murderous infamy.
[A hand holds a book in front of some yellow flowers: a leaf caresses the upper right corner of the book. The bottom half of the cover is white, and the top half is reddish: the red creates an intense drawing of a horse, and the white half has a crude outline of a city skyline. “the CATCHER in the RYE” is scrawled across the top in yellow lettering.]
  • Overall brain gushings :

The book annoyed me. But then, interestingly, towards the end of the book, Holden seems less of an annoying young man, and more of a depressed lost soul worthy of sympathy. There was a moment where I thought, “Ok, Holden is annoying, but he’s just a depressed teenager who is having a hard time fitting in, and who hasn’t felt like that?”

Then Holden continues to be his annoying self, and instead of a meaningful and inspiring bildungsroman we get just a weird narrative about an immature guy who doesn’t change or grow at all in the course of the novel, or it seems in the year that follows it.

Holden also treats women like garbage, and gives me the vibes of what we might call an incel today. So that’s nice. I seriously am having a hard time understanding A) How this book came to be considered a classic and B) What kind of teachers think this is a good/interesting book for teens to read and study. I probably would not like literature as much if I’d had to read this in high school instead of 1984.

  • What does it mean?

Wikipedia tells me that this book is about teenage rebellion, superficiality, and themes of belonging and identity. I would agree, but I do not think that Catcher says anything particularly interesting or revolutionary about these things, and it also doesn’t say these things well or in a manner that I found enjoyable to read. I’m not holding my punches with this damn book. Wikipedia says that Catcher demonstrates Holden losing his innocence, and yet I find that we begin the narrative with a cynical and apathetic Holden, and I wonder at what point it is that he really lost his childlike wonder and likeability. Maybe when his younger brother dies – this is the only time where Holden’s emotional reactions seem to make any sense. And yet, it happens before the events of the novel, and does not seem as central as the banal and pedestrian events that get covered in the narrative.

To me, this book represents the ways in which white men are just allowed to write anything. Like, this book doesn’t have anything exciting happen in it. And it’s not written particularly well. And yet, it is popular and hailed a classic. Like Kafka and The Trial, I see this as an example of books that get too much credit. Besides, can anybody even name another of Salinger’s works? No! You can’t! This I firmly believe. Sure, maybe that’s because he wrote a lot of short stories and short story writers get screwed by the hierarchy of literature, but I can name a ton of famous short stories and Salinger’s is not one of them! I’m so over this book, honestly.

  • Favourite passages :

I did not have many favourite passages, but there were a few that either made me laugh, or that somehow humanized Holden and allowed me to make it to the end of the book, unlike The Trial.

The Navy guy and I told each other we were glad to’ve met each other. Which always kills me. I’m always saying “Glad to’ve met you” to somebody I’m not at all glad I met. If you want to stay alive, you have to say that stuff, though… People are always ruining things for you.

Salinger, pg 114

He was a very nice kid, and I liked him, but I could never see eye to eye with him on a lot of stuff in the Bible, especially the Disciples. He kept telling me if I didn’t like the Disciples, then I didn’t like Jesus and all. He said that because Jesus picked the Disciples, you were supposed to like them. I said I knew He picked them, but that He picked them at random. I said He didn’t have time to go around analyzing everybody. I said I wasn’t blaming Jesus or anything.

Salinger, pg 130-131

“I think that one of these days,” he said, “you’re going to have to find out where you want to go. And then you’ve got to start going there.”

Salinger, pg 245
  • Things that made me go “ugh” :

Most of the book made my face twist up all ugly-like. Holden is insufferable and I did not find Salinger to be a good writer. Also there is a lot of creepy misogynistic shit in the novel, and Holden is a huge hypocrite.

Also, there is a passage that addresses the title of the book. I thought maybe it would be exciting. Or insightful or something. This is where the title comes from:

“You know what I’d like to be? … I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around – nobody big, I mean – except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff – I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I’d do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it’s crazy”.

Salinger, pg 224-225

What the hell is this?! So yeah. Not super rewarding in my opinion. I’m sure some people would analyze this passage for symbolism or whatever, arguing that Holden’s dream is about saving people when he can’t even save himself, or something like that. But I found this lame.

  • If you liked this (or my review), consider reading :

If you want to read a good and satisfying bildungsroman read Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson! Didn’t think that would come up when talking about The Catcher in the Rye eh? But seriously. Wikipedia tells me that Washington Black by Esi Edugyan (which I’ve read and is damn excellent and definitely a coming of age story) is a bildungsroman and you should read that because it is written by a Canadian women! Yass!

If you want to read a classic that is actually good and from a similar era, read Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov. Yes, I know, controversial suggestion, but it happens to be one of my favourite books because of how beautifully written it is, and how ethically challenging the narrative and unreliable narration of Humbert Humbert are. You could also read James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room which is a wonderful novel about jazz, homosexuality, and Paris in the post-WWII era.

If you want to read a book that made a splash in the 50s, read D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover which is super sexy, which Holden Caulfield decidedly is not.

Stay tuned for my next review, Wasted: A Memoir by Marya Hornbacher. *MASSIVE TRIGGER WARNING* : This is a memoir about eating disorders. Because of the subject matter, the review will be notably short.

The Trial Review

This book gets 1 out of 5 culturally significant rebels. Also this photo is terrifying.
[A Guy Fawkes Mask is hidden in some foliage. It smiles at you like it knows something you don’t. It gives you the creeps.]

This book gets 1 Archibald Tuttle out of 5. (Skip to end for Brazil reference).

Yes, I know, I’m mixing my metaphors; I’ve got Brazil, I’ve got V for Vendetta, and I even considered somehow referencing 1984 right in my opening, but it just wasn’t happening. Now, without further ado, let’s talk about Kafka.

  • Why did I pick this book up? 

Nearly seven years ago (I know this because it somehow popped into my Facebook memories recently) I went on a used-book buying spree. As a 19 year old, I decided that my collection would be incomplete if it didn’t include any Franz Kafka. After all, he has a whole word to himself, and I knew “Metamorphosis” was hailed as a great classic. Luckily for me, the bookstore had both a collection of his short works, and The Trial. 

These books have sat on my shelf, daring me to open them ever since. I even once brought the short works on holiday, and never made it to them. So, on my latest holiday, I decided I would read The Trial. I figured it would be as good a time as any to read about bureaucracy, especially since I was in the process of applying for government jobs. You can never have too much bureaucracy, right? Intrepid reader that I was, I carried this book to the beach all summer. I managed to make it 167 pages in. That is approximately ⅔ of the way in. I thought I could push through and finish it, but it turns out the real trial is the act of reading this goddamn book.

  • Would I recommend why/why not?

As you can perhaps tell by the fact that I didn’t finish this book, I personally would not recommend it. I would not recommend it because reading it seems to be as tedious an experience as being the protagonist of this book. Of course, the book is great at demonstrating the folly and sheer annoyance of bureaucracy, but there are so many better ways to satirize judicial and administrative insanity. 

The foreword of my copy of The Trial had an introduction that contextualized Kafka’s writing. This is where I learned that during his life, Kafka did not publish the majority of his work. By the time of his death, he only had a few stories (Metamorphosis being one of them) published, and had apparently instructed his friend Max to destroy all his unpublished works. This guy Max, an idiot in my opinion, obviously decided that even though Kafka wasn’t a good writer he was a white man with ideas, and those ideas had to see the light of day. Max is the reason that most of Kafka’s work is published, and all I can say is that Max should’ve listened to Kafka. But I suppose a white man must always fail up, and heaven forbid he not be hailed as a genius. 

This is not my copy of The Trial as my copy got left on the Sunshine Coast. This copy looks more interesting than mine.
[A thumb fake-holds a book; really it is just held in front of an image on a computer screen. It is a copy of The Trial. The cover is orange and covered with cartoon eyes looking at you. Above the book, my computer webcam also peers at you.]
  • Quick Synopsis  **SPOILER ALERT FROM HERE ON, DO I EVEN HAVE TO SAY IT?!**:

The Trial tells the story of Mr K (K, like KAFKA, GET IT?! Wowie wow), who one morning is informed that he is under arrest, and that a trial will be underway shortly. Now, I made it to page 167 and had yet to figure out why K was under arrest/or what he stood accused of. Instead, K is given the run around, forced to talk to all sorts of low-level judges and administrators, all of which do not know any details about his case, yet always have a very logical explanation as to why no one has the authority to clarify the matter. 

Apparently (I garnered this yet again from the dustjacket and introduction to the book) Mr. K is eventually told that he must prove his own existence. Unfortunately, I did not make it to this point, and from the dustjacket expected this existential conundrum to be more central to the story and to the intellectual exercises that the bureaucratic Catch-22s make your brain do. 

  • Overall brain gushings :

This book was bad. Just a great wall of text – often a character would speak for pages on end – that had a tendency to repeat the same argument and thought experiment. It was tedious. Perhaps it has to do with the fact that all Kafka is translated, and that maybe it would sound less tedious in German? I feel doubtful. Also the main character has a super weird habit of grabbing and kissing random women, so there’s also that going on. Who knew that Kafka would be so good at predicting President Trump and his near-totalitarian regime?

  • What does it mean?

Well, I think The Trial is a meditation on state control and state surveillance. An interesting precursor to Fascism and the surveillance state of today, The Trial is noteworthy for its ability to predict the increase in collection of data (or knowledge in this case) and the difficulty that the everyday citizen has navigating a technological and bureaucratic society. 

However, in the introduction to the text, I learned that Kafka was briefly engaged to a woman. Apparently, Kafka managed to cast doubts as to her desire for marriage, and made himself look like an unsuitable partner (he said he was boring and that life with him would be too sad. Based on his writing, I agree. Also, if a man tells you he isn’t good enough for you, can you blame the woman for believing it?). This led to an intervention of sorts, where the woman’s family ‘interrogated’ and ‘humiliated’ him. The engagement was broken off, and Kafka apparently set to writing The Trial right away. This came as no surprise to me, as the book seems very concerned with reputation, and the idea of a verbal altercation, or a battle of words. Kafka seems concerned with what makes a person’s reputation, and how to change someone’s mind once it is made up. All in all, The Trial seems like a bitter meditation on a failed love story, an attempt to justify his own role in the relationship’s end. Kafka sees himself as persecuted and powerless to stop the interrogation.  Also, it definitely seemed like the rantings of a spurned lover who has decided all women are manipulative and dishonest. 

*MAJOR SPOILER*

Lest you think that by not finishing the book I have robbed myself from truly experiencing and understanding The Trial, well guess what?! I committed the cardinal sin of not only not finishing a book – I also skipped to the end and read the last page, praying that maybe it would have a great and insightful ending that would convince me to keep reading. BUT NO!

The book ends with K being stabbed/executed quote ‘like a dog’. Nice. I basically scoffed when I read this. However, Wikipedia lets me know that apparently Kafka thought this book was funny. So either everyone is reading The Trial wrong, or Kafka had a fucked up sense of humour. Or actually maybe both?

  • Favourite passages : 

Hard to pick a favourite passage in a book that made me want to stab my eyes out, but there were a couple standouts from the muck. Also full disclosure: since I no longer have my copy of The Trial on my person, I totally raided GoodReads for whatever those readers have thought are the most memorable passages. Ya. That’s bad. But so is this book.

 “I had to arrange things as well as I could. That’s obviously a very bad place for the bed, in front of the door. For instance when the judge I’m painting at present comes he always comes through the door by the bed, and I’ve even given him a key to this door so that he can wait for me here in the studio when I’m not home. Although nowadays he usually comes early in the morning when I’m still asleep. And of course, it always wakes me up when I hear the door opened beside the bed, however fast asleep I am. If you could hear the way I curse him as he climbs over my bed in the morning you’d lose all respect for judges. I suppose I could take the key away from him but that’d only make things worse. It only takes a tiny effort to break any of the doors here off their hinges.” 

Franz Kafka, The Trial

“They’re talking about things of which they don’t have the slightest understanding, anyway. It’s only because of their stupidity that they’re able to be so sure of themselves.” 

Kafka, The Trial

“it is not necessary to accept everything as true, one must only accept it as necessary.’ ‘A melancholy conclusion,’ said K. ‘It turns lying into a universal principle.”

Kafka, The Trial.

So yeah. That is basically it. Only a few noteworthy quotes, as most of the text is full of variations of the above contradictions which while at first seem interesting and insightful, quickly turn tedious and boring.

  • Things that made me go “ugh” :

Everything. Every thing in this book made me want to cry. So many times I wanted to throw this book into the garbage (which is a big deal because I love books almost as much as food). Eventually my partner recommended I stop torturing myself, and that was the moment when my brain stopped turning to mush, and when every cell in my body stopped going “ugh Kafka sucks”.

  • If you liked this (or my review), consider reading :

No matter what you think of The Trial, if you want to see this concept done properly, I can’t suggest watching Terry Gilliam’s film Brazil enough. A disturbing and funny satire, Brazil does all the things that The Trial fails at: it is engaging, it accurately portrays the feeling of entrapment and heaviness tied to bureaucracy and surveillance, and it is a serious mind-fuck. So if you liked The Trial, you will love Brazil, and if you hated The Trial you will love Brazil! So do it, treat yourself to a weird movie that makes the novel version pale in comparison, something I don’t say often about literature/film pairings!

Now, as for books that I thought of when reading The Trial, a few came to mind; I would say read Catch-22 by Joseph Heller for a great satire, 1984 for ruminations on the surveillance state, and The Best Kind of People by Zoe Whittall for a good read on what it means to be accused, and what the judicial system does to victims, families, and the accused. 

Also, don’t let my review dissuade you from reading this book! Maybe you will enjoy it! Kafka apparently loved Russian lit and I hate it, so if you like that stuff Kafka is for you! Also, if you read the Wikipedia page for it, it does give some other possible insights into the text (although it also says that critics often try to fit the text into insightful frameworks more than the text itself indicates, so HAH) so maybe you will get more out of it than I did!

Stay tuned for my next review, There, There by Tommy Orange.