The Book Was Better, and Other Half-Truths
3 Body Prob Redux, a pair of coincidences, and maybe even a book review or two!
In December of 2022, my family and I were excitedly planning for our twice-postponed and long overdue visit to Chile. It would be the first time for our kids, as well as K and I’s first return since our honeymoon in December of 2011. I was wrapping up my second semester after going back to college at 40, and was really looking forward to having a bit of a vacation, as well as, of course, seeing my family after a decade. In 2021, as a stay-at-home dad, Doordashing and doing freelance portrait photography, I challenged myself to start reading books again. Not just some books, a lot of books…a shit-ton, shall we say.
But it didn’t start out that way. Actually, around the end of 2020, I started to think about the fact that it had been years since I finished more than maybe one or two books every year, even though in my youth I was always an eager and voracious reader. The biggest reason for this was just plain laziness, though I liked to characterize it as, ever since becoming a father, not having “enough time”. Obviously, this is a bullshit excuse, especially since in 2020, time was something that we ALL had a surplus of, whether we liked it or not. It was a fleeting reference to an obscure book, and my procurement of it, that started me on this journey: “The Train of Ice and Fire” by Ramón Chao (translated by Ann Wright).
This book tells the incredible story of Mano Negra’s (Manu Chao’s French band, before he went solo) ill-fated, and ultimately final, tour through the dense jungle villages of Colombia by train. But not just ANY train, a repurposed circus train that, in addition to bringing the band to the remotest corners of the country, would also house fire breathers, circus acts, enormous metal automata, and a cast of colorful characters, the likes of whom had surely never been seen by the villagers. The route of the journey itself was inspired by the writings of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, particularly “100 Years of Solitude” which takes place in the fictional town of Macondo, far away from any discernibly beaten path. As a fan of both Mano Negra AND (obviously, to beat a dead horse…) Márquez, this book was right up my alley. And then, the next logical step was, of course, to reread (or re-re-reread) the aforementioned Márquez tome, being that it has been, for all of my adult life, my favorite book.
There is so much to be said about rereading your favorite books at crucial stages of your lives! For example, when I was 13, “The Catcher in the Rye” was the greatest thing I had ever read (only partially because it contained the word “FUCK”, and I knew I had graduated from The Hardy Boys for good…), but at 27 I couldn’t stand it. Yet, somehow, on the brink of turning 40 and rereading it in 2021, I again thought it was a masterpiece, but for completely different reasons than those I may have offered as a boy in 1994. And so it was with “100 Years of Solitude”, though I have loved it from cover to cover each time I have revisited it, I found that as an older, wiser adult (and most importantly, PARENT), the passages that moved me profoundly had a renewed impact, and on multiple occasions I was moved to tears.
So it was that I decided that 2021 would be the “Year of the Book” for me, and I was determined that, in addition to reading NEW books (or rather, OLD books I had put off…), I would also dedicate some time to revisiting many more old favorites. A few weeks later, as I was checking into the YMCA for my daily workout, I overheard the ladies at the front desk talking about pledging to read x amount of books for the year, and this was how I discovered Goodreads and their annual reading challenge. Being the metrics guy that I am, and also looking for a bit of accountability, I decided I could easily read 25 books that year…two a month didn’t seem too daunting a task, and I already had 4 or 5 done at the time. Well…
…yeah, I ended up reading 100. Ironically, this would be the kick in the ass I needed to go back to college at age 40 and get some kind of degree. Somewhere around book #60 or so, I thought “Jesus, what am I gonna do with all this new knowledge floating around up there?”. And so it was decided. School was great, I guess, but being an “Elder Millennial” (who is really on the cusp of Gen-X anyways…) and taking classes with Gen-Z….eccentrics…kinda really sucks. But I digress, the point is that once I started school, I was back to my old routine of eschewing reading for lack of time (though really, it was pretty justified this time around). In 2022, I didn’t even hit my goal.
Soooooo, as I was saying way back at the top of this babbling screed, I was really excited to do some reading during my three-week vacation in Chile. I had heard so many good things about Liu Cixin’s “The Three-Body Problem”, but I could never get my hands on a digital copy from the library, so I went out and bought a physical copy (after book 5 or 6 in 2021 I bought a Kindle, and therefore saved a LOT of money that year, and every year since). “This super dense 500 page sci-fi epic ought to be enough for the trip”, I thought, but being that I had a week between the end of my semester and the start of our trip, I cracked it open one afternoon to read the first few pages. 48 hours later, I was so sucked into the world of TBP that I went out and bought parts two and three, ending up about halfway through the last book before we even left for Chile. The books bore the warning “Soon to be a major Netflix series”, so I had been waiting for the day when that project came to fruition, which turned out to be last week.
I won’t discuss TBP at length for the sake of “no spoilers”, but I do have to say that as a big fan of the books, I am quite pleased with the small-screen adaptation. The most notable difference is that the show (primarily) centers around a group of young, brilliant (and of course, good-looking…) physicists whose research and lives have all become inseparably tangled with that of…well…the titular problem. Liu Cixin’s books are incredibly STARK, beginning with the backdrop of China’s People’s Revolution, and continuing far into the future, with a line or two of humor or levity for every 200 pages of hard science-fiction. “Oh, they Westernized the story” I thought, with a touch of annoyance, but holy shit, by the end of the 8 episode run, I was definitely hungry for more.
“But, dude, you already read the books, so you know what happens” you might be thinking, and I know this because I was also thinking the same thing as the credits rolled on episode 8. The truth of the matter is that the Netflix adaptation put a very human and emotional spin on the issues which, in the book, are presented as grim realities. The general storyline has remained the same, but in the writers’ ability to create a core of protagonists for whom we genuinely empathize, they have not only made the story more accessible for the masses (and I am without comment on the good/bad of this…), they have created a situation where those who have not read the books can’t necessarily go out and read the series to find out what happens, at least not without the reader realizing that the characters whose arcs they want to follow just plain do not exist, at least not in the capacity that they do within the framework of the show. I’m sure this has happened on countless occasions with Netflix adaptations, but I don’t really watch much tv, so I was genuinely fascinated by this newfound conundrum.
So there you go, that was my absurdly circuitous way of telling you that you should read the “Remembrance of Earth’s Past” trilogy (it is often referred to as “Three Body Problem” but that is just the first book) IF (and this is a big if) you are a fan of HARD science fiction, with a boatload of technical mumbo-jumbo and speculative physics, LONG books with incredible world-building, a bit of a misanthropic bent, and lots of space violence. OR, watch the show and be AMAZED, but also bummed that you will have to wait a couple of years for the next installment, assuming (another big IF) Netflix renews it. OR, fly in the face of convention, damn the torpedoes, and do both.
“Sometimes they dreamed entire pieces of music. Paul McCartney dreamed ‘Yesterday’. He woke up with the tune in his head, sat down at the piano and played it from one end to the other. He was convinced he must have heard it somewhere before, and so he didn’t dare record it. He thought it wasn’t his. For months he went around whistling the tune to his friends, to try and find out who had come up with it, until he was finally convinced he really had found it in his dreams.”
— José Eduardo Agualusa - “The Society of Reluctant Dreamers” Translated from Portuguese by Daniel Hahn
I shared the above quote from this book, not because it was particularly profound, but rather for the absolute shock it gave me when I read it. As you all know, I am a huge fan of coincidences (and if you are new here, and don’t know, you can read more about that HERE), and for some reason they have been extra prevalent, or perhaps just more noticeable, since I came to Chile. I shared my thoughts on another Agualusa book last week, and mentioned that I would be reading this one, but in between as a palate cleanser I read Luis Sagasti’s “A Musical Offering” (translated by Fionn Petch). This slim volume was structured in the form of multiple, loosely connected vignettes regarding music throughout history, focusing primarily on Classical music, but with a few nods to contemporary rock as well. In one of these chapters, I learned that Paul McCartney had dreamt the melody and words to “Yesterday”, and that he was reluctant to record it until he was absolutely sure it was indeed his own. “That’s strange” I remember thinking, if there is one thing I am full of (and there are many, but IF there were one) it is useless facts about pop culture, particularly music. I love The Beatles…actually Paul MCCartney in Chile was my first “cool” concert as a kid, and I had even (I wrote about this too, at some point) accompanied my mother to her Rock and Roll History course at IU as a wee lad. But this memorable, and indeed rather fascinating fact about “Yesterday” (also a fav Beatles song…), I had never once heard.
So, imagine my surprise when, the next night, I read the very same fact in a completely unrelated book by a completely different author. A book that has almost nothing whatsoever to do with music, or even pop culture for that matter, the only link between the two being the notion of dreaming. That shit is wild.
Apart from being an ace of a title, “The Society of Reluctant Dreamers” is an incredibly powerful book, with delicate but impactful prose of the highest quality. The story revolves around Portuguese/Angolan journalist Daniel Benhimol, living in Angola, who is going through an acrimonious divorce and dealing with the fallout from his daughter’s rebellion against the dictatorship. His best friend is an Angolan ex-commando with a violent and secretive history, who has a habit, through no effort of his own, of appearing in the dreams of those in close proximity to him. This “ability” has been both a blessing and a curse, and at one point even a highly sought after “weapon” by Cuban mercenaries hoping to use it to gather information.
Benchimol’s chance discovery of a lost digital camera containing surreal images of a woman, who often populates his own dreams, links him up with a group of artists and scientists from around the globe, doing their own research into the power of dreams. What I loved most about this book, (and likewise Agualusa’s “A General Theory of Oblivion”) was that its premise reeks of sci-fi and magical realism, but in reality it tells a very grounded, simple story of humanity and interconnectedness. There were many moments of wanting to sit with particular passages, such as:
“Have you noticed that the sun that gives pomegranates their color, or leaves a glow on the skin after an afternoon on the beach, is the same sun that yellows and erases the photos of our youth? The light strengthens the color of everything alive, and fades whatever is inanimate. The sun lights up the living and wipes out the dead”.
Good stuff, highly recommend checking out anything you can get your hands on by Agualusa. In addition to the Beatles coinkydink, there was also this:
“I finished eating, did the washing-up, and stretched out on the sofa with a book in my hands: Autumn of the Patriarch by Gabriel García Márquez, which I’d found yesterday hidden under the bed, in a cardboard box”. HA! You may remember my screed vis-a-vis this tedious tome last week.
And (once again) speaking of Gabo (and last week’s newsletter):
“Judging the book to be much better than we remembered it, another possibility occurred to us: that the fading faculties that kept him from finishing the book also kept him from realizing how good it was. In an act of betrayal, we decided to put his readers’ pleasure ahead of all other considerations.If they are delighted, it’s possible Gabo might forgive us. In that we trust.
— Rodrigo and Gonzalo García Barcha, Gabo’s sons, in the preface for Gabriel García Márquez’s posthumous “Until August” (Translated by Anne McLean)
Last week I pondered the appropriateness of Gabo’s kids publishing this book posthumously, and ostensibly against the author’s wishes. After receiving my copy way more quickly than anticipated from the library, I laid in bed and tore through the entirety of the novella’s 146 pages in one sitting. You can read this as a testament to the brilliance of the work, or my love for Gabo (which is well-documented even in this same damn post), or, a third-option, I have a lot of spare time. Truthfully the answer is “D: All of the above”. The preface from the author’s sons, as well as the epilogue by the editor of the original Spanish edition, left me with no doubts as to the right decision having been to share it with his fans.
Is it going to go down as his finest work? Absolutely not, but if you are a lifelong reader/lover of Márquez, it will definitely fill the void we have all collectively felt since his passing in 2014.
A quick tale about a happily married woman who nonetheless takes an annual ferry ride to her mother’s gravesite on a nearby, touristy island, and takes a lover. A meditation on fidelity, family, guilt, and suspicion, the story is quirky and captivating in a very Gabo way, and goes by all too quickly. It does, of course, mention hammocks, siestas, torrential rain, and all of the other staples of a well-rounded Gabo work. I don’t really need to say much more, because I feel that anyone who is already a reader of Gabo will definitely read this, and everyone else will just miss out haha.
See what happens when I drink a big cup of coffee before I sit down to write? I freakin ramble, and now you’re stuck with a lengthy post. If you made it this far, I commend you.
PS- Look Jim, I remembered to cite the translators. Progress not perfection!
See y’all next week!
Andrés