Monday 24 July 2017

WHITE APPLES - JONATHAN CARROLL


A white apple is a very potent type of Ecstasy.

Jonathan Carroll is the author of :   White Apples, Bathing the Lion, Crows Dinner, Bones of the Moon, The Ghost in Love, Glass Soup, The Wooden Sea, The Marriage of Sticks, Kissing The Beehive, From the Teeth of Angels, After Silence, Outside the Dog Museum, A Child Across the Sky, Sleeping in Flame, and more.

Jonathan Samuel Carroll is an American fiction writer primarily known for novels that may be labeled magic realism, slipstream or contemporary fantasy.  He has lived in Austria since the 1970s.



                      













       



Jonathan Carroll is a living legend of American origin.  His works are very popular in America and the rest of the world as well.   We can expect more great works  from him.






White Apples tells the story of Vincent Ettrich, who is dead and brought back to life again. Ettrich slowly learns that he is brought back by his wife Isabelle and he is back to save his unborn son. Ettrich's unborn son will eventually save the universe if Ettrich can protect him from evil forces. This is a work of metaphysics and surrealism.

Vincent Ettrich, a genial philanderer, discovers he has died and come back to life, but he has no idea why, or what the experience was like. Gradually, he discovers he was brought back by his true love, Isabelle, because she is pregnant with their child—a child who, if raised correctly, will play a crucial role in saving the universe.
But to be brought up right, the child must learn what Vincent learned on the other side—if only Vincent can remember it. On a father's love and struggle may depend the future of everything that is.
By turns quirky, romantic, awesome, and irresistible,  White Apples is a tale of love, fatherhood, death, and life that will leave you seeing the world with new eyes.



                       
















Carroll at a reading in Stacey's Bookstore,
San Francisco, in 2008



Carroll was born in New York City to Sidney Carroll, a film writer whose credits included The Hustler, and June Carroll (née Sillman), an actress and lyricist who appeared in numerous Broadway shows and two films. He is the half brother of composer Steve Reich and nephew of Broadway producer Leonard Sillman. His parents were Jewish, but Carroll was raised in the Christian Science religion. A self-described "troubled teenager," he finished primary education at the Loomis School in Connecticut and graduated with honors from Rutgers University in 1971, marrying artist Beverly Schreiner in the same year. He relocated to Vienna, Austria a few years later and began teaching literature at the American International School, and has made his home in Austria ever since.
His first novel, The Land of Laughs (1980), is indicative of his general style and subject matter. Told through realistic first person narration, the novel concerns a young schoolteacher, Thomas Abbey, researching the life of a favorite children's book author of his youth, which involves meeting the author's daughter in her and her late father's seemingly idyllic home town of Galen, Missouri. Everything seems fine until a dog in Galen begins talking to Abbey. The line gradually blurs between the fantasy world created by Abbey's research subject and the life of the people in Galen, while the reader begins to wonder just how much trust can be placed in this narrator. Subsequent novels would expand on these themes, but often contain unreliable narrators in a world where magic is viewed as natural. (One commentator claimed in The Times that "if he were a Latin American writer with a three-part name, his books would be described as magical-realist".)

There are several brainy quotes by Jonathan Carrol.  One of his famous quotes is about dogs.

“Dogs are minor angels, and I don't mean that facetiously. They love unconditionally, forgive immediately, are the truest of friends, willing to do anything that makes us happy, etcetera. If we attributed some of those qualities to a person we would say they are special. If they had ALL of funny but little more. However when you think about it, what are the things that we most like in another human being? Many times those qualities are seen in our dogs every single day-- we're just so used to them that we pay no attention.”
― Jonathan Carroll


I would like to present here below some of his famous titles.

 


                      
                                                                            

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



He won many awards during his career as a writer so far :


Carroll's short story, "Friend's Best Man", won the World Fantasy Award. His novel, Outside the Dog Museum won the British Fantasy Award and his collection of short stories won the Bram Stoker Award. The short story "Uh-Oh City" won the French Grand Prix de l'Imaginaire. His short story "Home on the Rain" was chosen as one of the best stories of the year by the Pushcart Prize committee. Carroll has been a runner-up for other World Fantasy Awards, the Hugo, and British Fantasy Awards.

Bibliography

Novels

·  The Land of Laughs (1980)
·  Voice of Our Shadow (1983)
·  The Answered Prayers Sextet
·  The Crane's View Trilogy
·          

Novellas and short novels

Short story collections
















We learn from him that high-quality journalism is essential intellectual nourishment.

                                                                                                                                                
Jonathan Carroll keeps getting better. Considering where he started (The Land of Laughs, 1975), that's pretty amazing.  An American resident in Vienna for more than 25 years, Carroll has a unique and sophisticated vision.  In the US he is now a literary bestseller. Carroll's modern morality tales take for granted a metaphysical dimension to our lives and have most in common with the work of Alan Wall or Peter Ackroyd.  Whether or not they contain supernatural themes, his books always deal with the petty, corrosive crimes we commit against one another.

Like many Carroll novels, White Apples is a love story. Here his lovers are the resurrected Vincent Ettrich, recently dead of cancer, and Isabelle Neukor, the woman for whom he left his wife and children. An obsessively skilled seducer, Vincent finally renounced all others for Isabelle, only for her to get cold feet about living with him. Now he wants to know how and why he was resurrected, to continue living and functioning in his familiar world. She seems to have more of the answers than he does.

Isabelle, we learn, played Or-pheus, bringing Vincent back from Purgatory, thus attracting the fury of Chaos, determined to thwart an upcoming rebirth in the nature of the universe. That rebirth will destroy Chaos's newly acquired consciousness. The fate of existence now hangs on the life of their unborn child, Anjo, who must be taught all his father has learned of death, much of which Vincent can't seem to recall.

Attacking memory and identity, using fear, uncertainty and illusion as its initial weapons, Chaos adopts various human and animal disguises. Attempting to preserve life and mutability, the forces of law are represented by guardian angel Coco Hallis, a woman Vincent meets and apparently seduces in a lingerie shop. She can help him but she's not omnipotent, especially against the increasing power of Chaos.

A beautifully realized notion of God as a mosaic consisting of and created by each of our lives, themselves also comprising a mosaic of memory, is reflected in the method Carroll uses in this book, which is itself something of a mosaic, moving back and forth in time and space to tell the story and produce its moving epiphany. Always a very subtle writer, Carroll quietly presents resolutions and revelations you could miss if you blink. I was impressed by the sureness of this particular structure; he uses no familiar genre tricks to maintain suspense, yet still communicates nail-biting concern for the well being of his central characters and a terrible fear for the fate of the universe.

This originality of structure confirms my opinion that Carroll is in no real sense a genre writer at all. There's a moving scene that in a cruder book would have functioned as a finale, but here appears about two-thirds of the way through. Chaos, disguised as innocent visitors, begins to attack the zoo animals who are the protagonists' protectors. The courageous self-sacrifice of these animals as they are horribly destroyed fighting a subtle and disgusting kind of evil serves to demonstrate the ferocious power of Chaos, which, endowed with sentience, will use any means to survive, even though the end result of its efforts is the corruption and death of creation itself.

Moving between the present and versions of their past, talking to their dead, Vincent and Isa-belle face the roots of their own moral cowardice and spiritual weaknesses, and by engaging with them they become strong enough to face Chaos's threat and learn how to defend themselves against it. But learning self-defence is only the first step in a struggle that, while never reliant on conventional theology, carries echoes of Charles Williams ( The Place of the Lion , 1931) at his very best.

A wise woman warns: "Never let your past salt your meat for you," helping Vincent and Isabelle gather strength as Chaos grows almost overwhelmingly powerful, adopting increasingly subtle manifestations in its efforts to destroy the child still in the womb.
Impressively, Carroll maintains his questions and tensions to the very last paragraph. Thanks to his clever balance of reality and metaphysics, we can't be entirely certain Chaos will be defeated, but we have at least come to believe it a thoroughly possible resolution.

In one of my earlier blog posts,  I have recommended you to read  the book "Shantaram" written by Australian  criminal turned author Gregory David Roberts published first in the year 2003.

It is interesting to note the praise of Jonathan Carroll about "Shantaram" as follows -

"Shantaram " is, quite simply, the Arabian Nights of the new century.  Anyone who loves to read has been looking for this book all their reading life.  Anyone who walks away from "Shantaram" untouched is either heartless or dead or both.  I haven't had such a wonderful time in years".


I hope that I will get another opportunity to write more about Jonathan Carroll in JOHNNY'S BLOG in the years to come and wish him all the best to write more interesting classics.


                                                           

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Tuesday 11 July 2017

BULFINCH'S MYTHOLOGY - THOMAS BULFINCH




        































When you discuss about mythology especially the Greek and Roman  one cannot  miss Bulfinch's Mythology.  The 19th century American writer and banker Thomas Bulfinch's classic is a brilliant work.   Bulfinch's Mythology was published combining three of his major works i.e.  The Age of Fable, The Age of Chivalry and The Legends of Charlemagne posthumously.


No new edition of Bulfinch's Mythology can be considered complete without some notice of the American scholar to whose wide erudition and painstaking care it stands as a perpetual monument.


 

Thomas Bulfinch retold Greek and Roman Mythology with his own comments and illustrations.  This is similar to our own reigning  Mythological guru Devdutt Pattanaik whose retelling of Indian epics Ramayana and Mahabharata with his own illustrations and comments available currently in our book stores.

Bulfinch's Mythology is the classic retelling of Greek and Roman myths accompanied by the world's greatest paintings.

While Bulfinch tempered the stories, omitting excessive violence and overt sexual content, his readily accessible collections have provided a consistent narrative of and a broader understanding of the timeless stories and figures that are so intricately woven into our everyday life.

The three works, popularly known as Bulfinch's mythology, were originally written and published separately.  The Bulfinch's Mythology is the  classic collection of myths and legendary lore.

                                                                          
A brief biography -

Thomas Bulfinch (July 15, 1796 – May 27, 1867) was an American writer born in Newton, Massachusetts, United States best known for the book Bulfinch's Mythology.  

















                            


An image of Thomas Bulfinch.

Bulfinch belonged to a well educated Bostonian merchant family of modest means. His father was Charles Bulfinch, the architect of the Massachusetts State House in Boston and parts of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C.. Bulfinch supported himself through his position at the Merchants' Bank of Boston.

Thomas Bulfinch  wrote Bulfinch’s Mythology comprised of three volumes: The Age of Fable (1855) in which the myths of Greek and Roman Gods and Heroes Hercules, Orpheus, Pan, Zeus and many others from Ovid and Virgil are retold; The Age of Chivalry (1858) wherein Bulfinch collects the great Arthurian legends in England’s history surrounding King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table, Richard the Lion Hearted, Robin Hood and many others; and in Legends of Charlemagne (1863) one can read about Charlemagne, his knights the Paladins, Orlando, the Orcs, Ogier the Dane and many others in their exploits in France, Germany, Africa and beyond.
Adding his own commentary, Bulfinch aimed to impart wisdom by retelling these ancient classical and mythological legends of Celtic, Greek, Oriental, Roman, and Scandinavian origin and their relation to the literary world For Mythology is the handmaid of literature; and literature is one of the best allies of virtue and promoters of happiness. (from the Author’s Introduction to The Age of Fable). Bulfinch also wanted to provide entertainment to his Victorian era readers, young and old, and these popular works have been standard reference for decades since and still enjoyed today, over a century later.
Thomas Bulfinch was born on 15 July 1796 in the New England town of Newton, Massachusetts, United States of America, the sixth of the eleven children born to Hannah Apthorp (1768-1841) and Charles Bulfinch (1763-1844), public official and eminent architect of such buildings as Faneuil Hall in Boston, the Massachusetts State House, and in part, the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C. Charles’ twenty-five year career ended in financial ruin due to a bad investment around the time Thomas was born.
Lack of finances however did not diminish Thomas’ opportunities to attend the prestigious Boston Latin School and Phillips Exeter Academy before entering Harvard, graduating in 1814. His family was well-connected and he had a keen interest in the classics, amassing a large library over his lifetime. He shared the same philosophy as his father, intent to do good works for the public. He taught at the Latin School for a time before he obtained a position as clerk with the Merchant’s Bank of Boston in 1837, which he held until his death. While it was mundane work it gave him a stable source of income and he was able to focus on his writing in the evenings. Thomas lived a quiet life with his parents in Boston until their deaths; he then moved into a rooming house. He never married and regularly attended King’s Chapel where he read the Prayer Book which provided inspiration for his writing. He was a member of the Boston Society of Natural History of which he was secretary in the 1840s.

At the age of fifty-seven, Bulfinch’s first work was published, Hebrew Lyrical History (1853) in which the Psalms are presented in the context of Jewish history. It was followed by The Age of Fable (1855) wherein, similar to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Tanglewood Tales (1853) and Charles Kingsley’s The Heroes (1856), Bulfinch provides a contextual introduction and explanation of the Greek and Roman myths to make those allusions intelligible which one meets every day (Ch. 1). His next collection was The Age of Chivalry (1858);

In 1863 Whether we regard him as a warrior or as a legislator, as a patron of learning or as the civilizer of a barbarous nation, he is entitled to our warmest admiration…. Legends of Charlemagne was published. All three collections were issued under the title Bulfinch’s Mythology, first in 1881 with dozens of issues since to great success. Although Edith Hamilton’s Mythology has largely super ceded them, Bulfinch’s works have joined ranks with such other classic contributions to literature as John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book (1894), Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), Arabian Nights and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726).
Other works written by Bulfinch include The Boy Inventor (1860), Shakespeare Adapted for Reading Classes (1865) and Oregon and Eldorado or Romance of the Rivers (1866). Thomas Bulfinch died on 27 May 1867 in Boston, Massachusetts. He lies buried in the Mount Auburn Cemetery of Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S.A. The Life and Letters of Charles Bulfinch, Architect; with Other Family Papers, published in l896, was edited by Bulfinch’s niece Ellen Susan.





"The Age of Fable" (first published in 1855) or "Stories of Gods and Heroes"  has come to be ranked with older books like "Pilgrim's Progress," "Gulliver's Travels," "The Arabian Nights," "Robinson Crusoe," and five or six other productions of world-wide renown as a work with which everyone must claim some acquaintance before his education can be called really complete.
























"The Age of Chivalry" which contains King Arthur and His Knights, The Mabinogeon and The Knights of English History was published in 1858.



























Whereas "The Legend of Charlemagne" or "Romance of the Middle Ages” was published in  1863.

























The combined work of these three known as Bulfinch's Mythology was published after the death of Thomas Bulfinch in the year 1881.  Now in the public domain, multiple editions of the combined work are still in print more than 150 years after the three books were published.

 

It was "one of the most popular books ever published in the United States and the standard work on classical mythology for nearly a century," until the release of classicist Edith Hamilton's 1942 Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes.   

The Bulfinch's Mythology is a prose recounting of myths and stories from three eras: Greek and Roman mythology, King Arthur legends and medieval romances.  Bulfinch intersperses the stories with his own commentary, and with quotations from writings by his contemporaries that refer to the story under discussion. This combination of classical elements and modern literature was novel for his time.







His other works include -


          













“If no other knowledge deserves to be called useful but that which helps to enlarge our possessions or to raise our station in society, then Mythology has no claim to the appellation.”
―Thomas Bulfinch

“It was not till toward the end of the thirteenth century that the prose romances began to appear.”
―Thomas Bulfinch

"Age of Fable," First Edition, 1855; "The Age of Chivalry," 1858; "The Boy Inventor," 1860; "Legends of Charlemagne, or Romance of the Middle Ages," 1863; "Poetry of the Age of Fable," 1863; "Oregon and Eldorado, or Romance of the Rivers,"1860.
In this complete edition of his mythological and legendary lore "The Age of Fable," "The Age of Chivalry," and "Legends of Charlemagne" are included. Scrupulous care has been taken to follow the original text of Bulfinch, but attention should be called to some additional sections which have been inserted to add to the rounded completeness of the work, and which the publishers believe would meet with the sanction of the author himself, as in no way intruding upon his original plan but simply carrying it out in more complete detail.  The section on Northern Mythology has been enlarged by a retelling of the epic of the "Nibelungen Lied," together with a summary of Wagner's version of the legend in his series of music-dramas. Under the head of "Hero Myths of the British Race" have been included outlines of the stories of Beowulf, Cuchulain, Hereward the Wake, and Robin Hood. Of the verse extracts which occur throughout the text, thirty or more have been added from literature which has appeared since Bulfinch's time, extracts that he would have been likely to quote had he personally supervised the new edition.
Finally, the index has been thoroughly overhauled and, indeed, remade. All the proper names in the work have been entered, with references to the pages where they occur, and a concise explanation or definition of each has been given. Thus what was a mere list of names in the original has been enlarged into a small classical and mythological dictionary, which it is hoped will prove valuable for reference purposes not necessarily connected with "The Age of Fable."

Though there are interesting stories and  legends in Greek and Roman mythologies nobody in this world are worshipping these deities today.  This could have been at the best include in children's story book or Fables.  However, this branch of Greek and Roman Mythology is interesting read for young and old alike.

I would like to give  below a quote by the great American author Thomas Bulfinch himself- 

“Thus we hope to teach mythology not as a study, but as a relaxation from study; to give our work the charm of a story-book, yet by means of it to impart a knowledge of an important branch of education.”

Let me conclude this Blog post with a famous quote by Thomas Bulfinch -

“For Mythology is the handmaid of literature; and literature is one of the best allies of virtue and promoters of happiness.”
  

If the literature is the promoters of happiness, then the myths, legends and lore makes an interesting and satiating read.

My endeavor to post in JOHNNY'S BLOG with vivid subjects finds Bulfinch's Mythology an interesting episode.

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