Sometimes I read books
Went to the library and I got Closely Watched Trains (the very very short book by Bohumil Hrabal, not the movie made from it--every Czech-language film and sound recording at the library has been checked out consistently every time I have been there since 2007 at least), which I haven't started yet, and Karel Čapek's weird collection of crime-themed short stories Tales from Two Pockets. I also got a terrible over-produced Greek Cookbook and The Best of Croatian Cooking, the second cookbook in that series I've read. And also a book I'm unlikely to like, but which I ga ve a chance because I have never heard of it or the author: The Usurper's Crown by Sarah Zettel. I say I'm unlikely to like it because it's just not my kind of thing, I think: a fantasy in which a normal person is really royal in another dimension? Maybe? But I'm feeling generous with my attention.
Karel Čapek puzzles the hell out of me. He distributes so oddly, you know? Like--he's generally considered to be kind of left-wing because of whose side he seems to take in RUR and The War of the Newts. So that interests me. I can see some rolling eyes, like it's not legitimate for me to seek out writers who are left-wing. The hell with that. If somebody can be more interested in writers because they have an engineering background, or a military background, or they used to be a cowboy, I can me more interested in writers with a more generally left-wing world view.
But see the interesting thing to me is that if I read writers who are "left-wing" in some different political, economic, cultural and ethnic contexts--all the things that history brings to bear on a person (and I have reasons for listing cultural and thnic contexts as separate items)--I'm not coming up with a mass of homogeneous Party Line.Čapek, for example. Okay, first of all, he doesn't map well on the sexist-feminist axis. That's interesting. Because he's got these places where he's saying women get a raw deal and maybe ought to have more power over themselves, and these other places wherre he's hardly noticing that women are human at all .Sometimes in the same thought.
But it's the crime stories themselves that are the most puzzling. I was going to complain here about how he constructs his stories so that there's never any question that the suspect is guilty, that he deserves the rough treatment he gets from the police, etc. etc. But then when I tried to retell any of the stories I've read so far, I kept wondering about the corrolary: because the corollary doesn't add up the way you're expecting it to.
The corollary of "the criminals are all guilty and the police are always correct about who is the relevant criminal this time" would be, in a modern story, either "the police are heroes looking out for the good of the community" or "the police are also guilty and corrupt." But that's not it here. The police are not corrupt in these stories, in that they're not on the take and they're not persecuting innocent people. They're not heroes either. In these stories they're correct about their guesses because it's they're job to be, they're unkind because they don't have any special reason to be kind, and every damned thing I try to come up with to talk about them just falls away to smoke as I try to say it.These police are completely unlike the police in modern-day US. They're prejudiced, but their prejudice is on class lines and along the lines of behavior norms. A government official has decided that the secret documents in his possession were stolen byt the Jewish businessman down the street, but the policeman ignores his anti-Semitic tirade and goes about tracking down the habitual housebreaker he's pagged for the method of entry. But he doesn't challenge the man's prejudice: it's none of his business.
Time and again the break in the case comes from a moment of kindness from the cop of anxillary detective to the fugitive. It just makes him break and confess.Another thing that Čapek emphasizes is understanding. One of the stories has a man with a long criminal history die and arrived in heaven to be judged. This is done by three departed judges: they call God to be the one witness, because he sees and knows everything. God says he knows too much to judge. God relates the events of the fellow's life, and the judges sentence him to hell. Nope, you thought the story was going to be about how understanding leads to mercy and redemption, but no. God's just doing his job. That doesn't include reprieve.
These stories are almost a hundred years old and they follow a pattern of story telling that is qjuite different from modern stories. Some of them are set in Prague and I am anjoying recognizing names of places I have been to.
Karel Čapek puzzles the hell out of me. He distributes so oddly, you know? Like--he's generally considered to be kind of left-wing because of whose side he seems to take in RUR and The War of the Newts. So that interests me. I can see some rolling eyes, like it's not legitimate for me to seek out writers who are left-wing. The hell with that. If somebody can be more interested in writers because they have an engineering background, or a military background, or they used to be a cowboy, I can me more interested in writers with a more generally left-wing world view.
But see the interesting thing to me is that if I read writers who are "left-wing" in some different political, economic, cultural and ethnic contexts--all the things that history brings to bear on a person (and I have reasons for listing cultural and thnic contexts as separate items)--I'm not coming up with a mass of homogeneous Party Line.Čapek, for example. Okay, first of all, he doesn't map well on the sexist-feminist axis. That's interesting. Because he's got these places where he's saying women get a raw deal and maybe ought to have more power over themselves, and these other places wherre he's hardly noticing that women are human at all .Sometimes in the same thought.
But it's the crime stories themselves that are the most puzzling. I was going to complain here about how he constructs his stories so that there's never any question that the suspect is guilty, that he deserves the rough treatment he gets from the police, etc. etc. But then when I tried to retell any of the stories I've read so far, I kept wondering about the corrolary: because the corollary doesn't add up the way you're expecting it to.
The corollary of "the criminals are all guilty and the police are always correct about who is the relevant criminal this time" would be, in a modern story, either "the police are heroes looking out for the good of the community" or "the police are also guilty and corrupt." But that's not it here. The police are not corrupt in these stories, in that they're not on the take and they're not persecuting innocent people. They're not heroes either. In these stories they're correct about their guesses because it's they're job to be, they're unkind because they don't have any special reason to be kind, and every damned thing I try to come up with to talk about them just falls away to smoke as I try to say it.These police are completely unlike the police in modern-day US. They're prejudiced, but their prejudice is on class lines and along the lines of behavior norms. A government official has decided that the secret documents in his possession were stolen byt the Jewish businessman down the street, but the policeman ignores his anti-Semitic tirade and goes about tracking down the habitual housebreaker he's pagged for the method of entry. But he doesn't challenge the man's prejudice: it's none of his business.
Time and again the break in the case comes from a moment of kindness from the cop of anxillary detective to the fugitive. It just makes him break and confess.Another thing that Čapek emphasizes is understanding. One of the stories has a man with a long criminal history die and arrived in heaven to be judged. This is done by three departed judges: they call God to be the one witness, because he sees and knows everything. God says he knows too much to judge. God relates the events of the fellow's life, and the judges sentence him to hell. Nope, you thought the story was going to be about how understanding leads to mercy and redemption, but no. God's just doing his job. That doesn't include reprieve.
These stories are almost a hundred years old and they follow a pattern of story telling that is qjuite different from modern stories. Some of them are set in Prague and I am anjoying recognizing names of places I have been to.