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saraentz 's review for:
Sometimes a Great Notion
by Ken Kesey
I didn’t finish this, but I also can’t seem to log my reflections thus far without rating and reviewing (argh!), so I’ll submit to a passive 3 stars and write accordingly:
I am putting this book down at page 216 with a sorry admission to my own literary inadequacy. It’s simply too difficult a read and the subject matter too unrelatable to endure another 400 pages. Hopefully I can pick this back up once my frontal lobe shapes up.
This book is reminiscent of Steinbeck’s East of Eden: a generational tale of fraternal conflict with great wisdom woven into each line. Where Steinbeck writes of his impoverished characters with a sort of humility and plain severity, Kesey writes with such detailed complexity and nuance that I simply cannot process it all. Kesey’s prose is probably awesome for a worthy reader, but little old me will stick with Steinbeck.
Can I review this without mentioning the racist and sexist tones throughout the novel? Accurate and revealing as it may be to these 20th century rural folk, I can’t help but agree with the several criticisms of Kesey’s reinforcement of discriminatory social roles.
My favorite passages:
Pg 1: “Metallic at first, seen from the highway down through the trees, like an aluminum rainbow, like a slice of alloy moon. Closer, becoming organic, a vast smile of water with broken and rotting pilings jagged along both gums, foam clinging to the lips. Closer still, it flattens into a river, flat as a street, cement-gray with a texture of rain. Flat as a rain-textured street even during flood season because of a channel so deep and a bed so smooth: no shallows to set up buckwater rapids, no rocks to rile the surface… nothing to indicate movement except the swirling clots of yellow foam skimming seaward with the wind, and the thrusting groove of a flooded bam, bent taut and trembling by the pull of silent, dark momentum.
A river smooth and seeming calm, hiding the cruel file-edge of its current beneath a smooth and calm-seeming surface.”
Pg 98: “‘Man will do away with anything that threatens him with loneliness—even himself.’”
Pg 117-178: “When the tree creaks and tips and goes whooshing down I glance over to check the boy and see he’s impressed by it. That makes me feel better. I’d begun to wonder if it’s possible at all to talk with him; I’d begun to wonder if maybe what a man learns over twelve years in a world so different is like a foreign language that uses some of the words from our world but not enough to be familiar to us, not enough so we can talk. But when I see him watch that tree come down I think, There’s that; just like any man I ever knew, he likes to see a tree felled. There is that, by Christ.”
Pg 200: “Time overlaps itself. A breath breathed from a passing breeze is not the whole wind, neither is it just the last of what has passed and the first of what will come, but is more—let me see—more like a single point plucked on a single strand of a vast spider web of winds, setting the whole scene atingle. That way; it overlaps…. As pre-historic ferns grow from bath tub planters. As a shiny new ax, taking a swing at somebody’s next year’s split-level pinewood pad, bites all the way to the Civil War. As proposed highways break down through the stacked strata of centuries.”
Page 210-211: “I was beginning to care for them. And as that cancerous emotion swelled within my heart so did my poor heart’s fear. Swollen heart. This is an insidious malady chiefly common in that mythical organ that pumps life through the veins of the ego: care, coronary care, complicated by galloping fear. The go-away-closer disease. Starving for contact and calling it poison when it is offered. We learn young to be leery of contact: Never open up, we learn… you want somebody running their dirty old fingers over your soul’s private? Never accept candy from strangers. Or from friends. Sneak off a sack of gumdrops when nobody’s looking if you can, but don’t accept, never accept.. you want somebody taking advantage? And above all, never care. Never never never care. Because it is caring that lulls you into letting down your guard and leaving up your shades… you want some fink knowing what you are really like down inside?”
Pg 213: “‘I really wisht there’d been something I could have done.’ Meaning: Was there?
‘I don’t know, Hank.’ Meaning: You did enough.
‘I always worried about her.’ Meaning: Was I partially to blame?
‘Yeah.’ Meaning: We were all to blame.
‘Yeah, well,’—looking down at the destroyed thumbnail, wanting to say more, ask more, hear more, unable to—‘I guess I’ll hit the hay.’
‘Yeah,’—wanting everything he wanted—‘me too.’”
I am putting this book down at page 216 with a sorry admission to my own literary inadequacy. It’s simply too difficult a read and the subject matter too unrelatable to endure another 400 pages. Hopefully I can pick this back up once my frontal lobe shapes up.
This book is reminiscent of Steinbeck’s East of Eden: a generational tale of fraternal conflict with great wisdom woven into each line. Where Steinbeck writes of his impoverished characters with a sort of humility and plain severity, Kesey writes with such detailed complexity and nuance that I simply cannot process it all. Kesey’s prose is probably awesome for a worthy reader, but little old me will stick with Steinbeck.
Can I review this without mentioning the racist and sexist tones throughout the novel? Accurate and revealing as it may be to these 20th century rural folk, I can’t help but agree with the several criticisms of Kesey’s reinforcement of discriminatory social roles.
My favorite passages:
Pg 1: “Metallic at first, seen from the highway down through the trees, like an aluminum rainbow, like a slice of alloy moon. Closer, becoming organic, a vast smile of water with broken and rotting pilings jagged along both gums, foam clinging to the lips. Closer still, it flattens into a river, flat as a street, cement-gray with a texture of rain. Flat as a rain-textured street even during flood season because of a channel so deep and a bed so smooth: no shallows to set up buckwater rapids, no rocks to rile the surface… nothing to indicate movement except the swirling clots of yellow foam skimming seaward with the wind, and the thrusting groove of a flooded bam, bent taut and trembling by the pull of silent, dark momentum.
A river smooth and seeming calm, hiding the cruel file-edge of its current beneath a smooth and calm-seeming surface.”
Pg 98: “‘Man will do away with anything that threatens him with loneliness—even himself.’”
Pg 117-178: “When the tree creaks and tips and goes whooshing down I glance over to check the boy and see he’s impressed by it. That makes me feel better. I’d begun to wonder if it’s possible at all to talk with him; I’d begun to wonder if maybe what a man learns over twelve years in a world so different is like a foreign language that uses some of the words from our world but not enough to be familiar to us, not enough so we can talk. But when I see him watch that tree come down I think, There’s that; just like any man I ever knew, he likes to see a tree felled. There is that, by Christ.”
Pg 200: “Time overlaps itself. A breath breathed from a passing breeze is not the whole wind, neither is it just the last of what has passed and the first of what will come, but is more—let me see—more like a single point plucked on a single strand of a vast spider web of winds, setting the whole scene atingle. That way; it overlaps…. As pre-historic ferns grow from bath tub planters. As a shiny new ax, taking a swing at somebody’s next year’s split-level pinewood pad, bites all the way to the Civil War. As proposed highways break down through the stacked strata of centuries.”
Page 210-211: “I was beginning to care for them. And as that cancerous emotion swelled within my heart so did my poor heart’s fear. Swollen heart. This is an insidious malady chiefly common in that mythical organ that pumps life through the veins of the ego: care, coronary care, complicated by galloping fear. The go-away-closer disease. Starving for contact and calling it poison when it is offered. We learn young to be leery of contact: Never open up, we learn… you want somebody running their dirty old fingers over your soul’s private? Never accept candy from strangers. Or from friends. Sneak off a sack of gumdrops when nobody’s looking if you can, but don’t accept, never accept.. you want somebody taking advantage? And above all, never care. Never never never care. Because it is caring that lulls you into letting down your guard and leaving up your shades… you want some fink knowing what you are really like down inside?”
Pg 213: “‘I really wisht there’d been something I could have done.’ Meaning: Was there?
‘I don’t know, Hank.’ Meaning: You did enough.
‘I always worried about her.’ Meaning: Was I partially to blame?
‘Yeah.’ Meaning: We were all to blame.
‘Yeah, well,’—looking down at the destroyed thumbnail, wanting to say more, ask more, hear more, unable to—‘I guess I’ll hit the hay.’
‘Yeah,’—wanting everything he wanted—‘me too.’”