Category: Books

Somehow, I forgot to post this after I wrote it 2 months ago…

I had to resort to interlibrary loan to get my hands on an English translation of Argentine writer Adolfo Bioy Casares’ 1940 novella The Invention of Morel. The book I received also included six short stories from La Trama Celeste, a few of which I enjoyed more than the novella.

The Invention of Morel is about a man stranded on a bizarre island quarantined due to some mysterious disease. He has fled to this island to escape prosecution, and believes he has found the perfect hideout. There are strange machines on the island along with a chapel, museum and a swimming pool. There are also people who seem unaware of presence as if they occupy a reality all their own.

As the tale progresses, the narrator comes to understand that the people on the island are reproductions coming from a projector that one of them, a man named Morel has invented. His invention records every aspect of a person even, possibly, his soul and then replays that person over and over throughout eternity.

Morel had invited his closest friends and the woman he loved, Faustine, to spend a perfect week on the island. He recorded their perfect week so that it would run in an endless loop for all eternity. Since the machine also captures soul, it effectively made those who were recorded immortal.

The side effect, of course, is the problem. Once recorded, the subject suffers dissolution and death. Morel thought that this was a fair price for his immortality, and the strange deaths would create the illusion of disease that would keep people away from the island so his machines could run along happily forever.

It takes a while (and the appearance of two suns in the sky) for the narrator to understand that the people on the island are not really alive, but rather, that he is witnessing the superimposition of Morel’s recordings on his reality. In this time, though, he too has come to love Faustine.

By the end of the story, the narrator chooses to record himself so he can live forever with Faustine in the perfect eternity of Morel’s recording, knowing full well that he will die, but by recording himself he will also have everlasting life.

The other stories in the collection are equally interesting. They tend to involve elements of the supernatural, particularly temporal paradoxes, dreams and visions, and alternate realities, “The Idol” and “The Celestial Plot” being particularly good. I’ll definitely read more by Adolfo Bioy Casares.

On to Lost. Sawyer is seen reading The Invention of Morel in the Season 4 episode “Eggtown.”

“Eggtown” is a Kate-centric episode. Like the narrator in The Invention of Morel, Kate is a fugitive from justice trapped on a strange island. I didn’t notice much in this episode that directly relates to The Invention of Morel, but it does provide hints about the island.

After reading The Invention of Morel, I began to wonder if the visions of the dead (and from the past) that we see on (and now off) the island are really projections that, like those projected from Morel’s machines, appear real in every way and even appear to have souls. The island, of course, does not need to record the person while he or she is living as it can possibly extract things from people’s memories. Thus we have Christian, Charlie, Libby, Dave, Yemi, Kate’s horse, Sayid’s cat, Ben’s mother and the others (lowercase o).

These projections are not hallucinations; they can be seen by more than one person, and they can slap people upside the head as Charlie and Dave have both done to Hurley to verify their reality. This also explains why Richard Alpert doesn’t age. He’s not immortal. He’s dead. The island projects him for reasons yet unknown.

Since we know the island can project a Charlie that can be seen by others, it’s logical to assume that it can project Richard into the off-island world to recruit people like Juliet who would never have any reason to suspect that Richard died long ago. It also explains why Jack still sees his father in the Season 3 finale.

I also suspect that the voices occasionally heard in the jungle have to do with the superimposition of one reality (the projected one) over the real reality that our survivors experience.

The Invention of Morel leaves me wondering if the island’s strange properties are not so much supernatural as they are the result of some technology. Of course, sufficiently advanced technology would appear as magic to those who do not understand it.

* * *

Now that Season 4 has concluded with the excellent three-part finale “There’s No Place Like Home,” I am more convinced than ever that Alpert is dead. I think the appearances of Claire and Horace Goodspeed in “Cabin Fever” are further proof of the island’s ability to project the dead.

It was especially interesting watching Goodspeed repeatedly chop down the same tree. Even if it was only a dream, the repetition and circular nature of the scene was very much like The Invention of Morel as well as another Lost book from way back in Season 2: The Third Policeman, in which the characters are all dead and in Hell where everything repeats (“Hell goes round and round. In shape it is circular and by nature it is interminable, repetitive and very nearly unbearable.”)

Of course, what do I know? I was way the hell off on my analysis and theorizing after last year’s season finale. I suppose I was sort of right about the time travel thing, but not in the way I thought. Of course, being wrong makes it all the more fun because everything is more surprising than it would be if I had it all figured out.

Here’s a throwaway prediction based on Morel. Locke chooses to die so he can have the “immortality” of being resurrected by the island. Like they sang in Jesus Christ Superstar, “To conquer death you only have to die.”

For more, visit Heather for her thoughts on the Lost Season 4 finale. She was right about who was in the coffin.

Click here for my thoughts on the other Lost books.

“Sometimes the appropriate response to reality is to go insane.”
-Philip K Dick, VALIS

Sound like certain members of the Oceanic 6?

I can’t even begin to say how thrilled I was to see the book that Locke pulled off Ben’s shelf to serve with his breakfast in last week’s episode of Lost, “Eggtown.” That book, VALIS by Philip K Dick, is one of my favorite novels.

Truth be told, I’ve been wondering when Dick would make an appearance on Lost. I even speculated in my post on the Season 3 finale that come Season 4, we’d see Jack reading Dick. He had, after all, turned into a bearded drug-addled nut, a description often attached to Dick, the brilliant writer responsible for the books and stories that gave us Blade Runner, A Scanner Darkly, Total Recall, and Minority Report. A man who apparently had trouble distinguishing between reality and fantasy. A man who was convinced that They (with a capital T) were watching him.

VALIS tells the tale of Horselover Fat and his attempts to understand a possibly spiritual experience he has had. Dick shifts between first and third person narration “to gain much needed objectivity” while Fat remains mostly unaware that he is, in fact, the narrator. They argue their way through Gnostic Christianity, paranoid conspiracy theories, philosophy and everything else Dick can think of in this novel that attempts to make sense of the notion of God. It is at once sad, troubling and hysterically funny. Dick’s answer is found in the title: Vast Active Living Intelligence System. A paranoid science fiction writer’s vision of God as revealed to him by a pink laser.

At the end of the book, there is an appendix containing Fat’s journal entries and his conlusions. I’ve included a few of the shorter ones that pertain to themes on Lost and make me think especially about Jacob:

1. One Mind there is; but under it two principles contend.

3. He causes things to look different so it would appear time has passed.

9. He lived long ago, but he is still alive.

Okay, enough about VALIS. It’s great. Brilliant. Read it. Not just because I say so either. The Lost writers have suggested we bone up on Dick’s VALIS trilogy (h/t Brian), which also includes The Divine Invasion (okay) and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (beautiful) as well as what is sort-of a first working out of the ideas in VALIS, a posthumous little book called Radio Free Albemuth, less heady, but somehow warmer than VALIS.

So why is VALIS on Lost?

Season 4 has delved deeper into themes of madness and the fluid nature of time and VALIS is certainly a book about these things. More importantly, though, VALIS is a “theological detective story, in which God is both a missing person and the perpetrator of the ultimate crime” (according to the cover copy). Considering the seeming omniscience of the island and its ability to reach out to the characters even after they’ve left the island, I can’t help but think that VALIS – Vast Active Living Intelligence System – is the perfect way to understand the island. I think it’s that simple. The writers are telling us what the island is.

And, as with Horselover Fat, perhaps madness is the price of knowing it. Madness is another of Dick’s great themes and when I think of madness and Lost, I always come back to Hurley and his tenuous grip on reality. Perhaps someone should point out to him that, as Dick wrote in “How to Build a Universe that Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later” and (I think) reformulated in VALIS:

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.

In the Season 3 finale Jack talked about seeing his father. That led me onto the alternate futures theory track, but after the first few episodes of Season 4, I realize that’s not the case. As to Christian Shepard… Jack has been seeing his dead father just as Hurley has been seeing dead Charley. It’s driving him crazy, and I suspect when he realizes that it’s real, he’ll get his act together and find his way back to the island. Believing in the reality of the island is the key to salvation. Jack, Hurley, Kate, and Sayid never really believed. Never showed any faith in the island. Is that why they are 2/3s of the Oceanic 6? Is that why they are back in the “real world,” a place Dick describes in VALIS as “the black iron prison?”

Go here for a list of the rest of my Lost book posts.

I now realize I even posted a quick blurb about VALIS back in October 2005 in this blog’s first month.

And, finally, some other bloggers’ thoughts on “Eggtown”:

• Kulturblog where you’ll find lots of interesting observations
• BB’s Fantabulous Life where BB throughly explores “Eggtown”
• For the Record where I am reminded that there was a second book in “Eggtown” – The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares

From Aldous Huxley’s Island:

“In those days, Pala was still completely off the map. The idea of turning it into an oasis of freedom and happiness made sense. So long as it remains out of touch with the rest of the world, an ideal society can be a viable society.

[…]

Meanwhile, the outside world has been closing in on this little island of freedom and happiness. Closing in steadily and inexorably, coming nearer and nearer. What was once a viable ideal is now no longer viable.”

Finally, I’ve reached the end of the Lost Book Club, at least until more books crop up in Season 4, which starts tomorrow. The last one was Huxley’s Island, a book that was never seen, but was referenced in the Season 2 episodes “?” and “Live Together, Die Alone.” The reference is in the name of the pier where Jack, Kate, and Sawyer are taken prisoner by the Others. It’s called the Pala Ferry, and Pala is the setting of Island, a book Huxley wrote as a counterpoint to Brave New World.

Island is the story of a journalist named Will Farnaby who is shipwrecked on the island of Pala where an ideal society flourishes. Palan culture is a perfect blend of Eastern spirituality and Western science created through an alliance between a nineteenth century Scottish surgeon who came to the island to save its Raja’s life. The two developed an ideal for living laid out by the old Raja in Notes on What’s What, a book within the book. In short, it is a healthy combination of Buddhism, modern psychiatry, psychedelic drugs, limited industrialization, Enlightenment style reasoning, and free love.

Will arrives on the island as an agent of a major oil concern that wants to take over Pala, industrialize it and exploit its abundant natural resources. The inhabitants of Pala fear this as it will lead to the kind of overpopulation, militarization, and systemic poverty (both material and spiritual) so rampant in the outside world. Over the course of the novel, Will comes to love the island and its inhabitants even as the dictator of a nearby island plans his invasion so he can auction the island’s resources off for cash to fight his wars.

It’s a good and heady read that falls in nicely with certain other “ideal society” books that have shown up on Lost particularly Stranger in a Strange Land.

What most gets me is how it provided a possible framework for thinking about the Others. The Pala Ferry references came at the end of Season 2, a time before we met the others. It would have been fun to have read this one before Season 3 as it contains some clues as to what to expect about the Others.

The Connections:

1. In Island, the secular surgeon, Dr Andrew, is brought to Pala to operate on Pala’s leader, who is suffering from a horrific tumor. This is precisely why Jack was taken in Season 2: to save Ben, the Others’ leader, from a tumor.

2. Pala, like Lost Island, is a place that is essentially hidden and off-limits to the outside world, but as with Pala, there are people who want to come to the island, and the Others, like the Palans, fear this above anything else. They believe it will be the end of their way of life. We won’t know for sure until Season 4 gets underway tomorrow, whether the outsiders on Not Penny’s Boat have good or ill intentions, but the title of the Season 4 opener, “The Beginning of the End,” suggests Ben’s fears may be well founded.

3. Both islands have a temple. We haven’t seen Lost’s temple, but Ben did mention it. This hints at a society with roots that go far back, perhaps as far back as four-toed beings? Who knows. Also, both the Others and the Palanese wear white muslin outfits for their ceremonies.

4. At the end of Season 2, we didn’t know that the Dharma Initaitive and the Others were not one and the same. We did know, however, that Dharma like Palanese society, was a fusion of sorts between Buddhism and western science.

5. As on Lost, Pala has scientific research stations scattered around the island geared toward discovering saner ways to live.

But unlike with Pala, something has gone wrong. The Others carry guns and kidnap people. They con and torture. Theirs is a corrupted island, a twisted version of Pala, that must be healed and made whole again. Perhaps, that is what John Locke must do, and what Jack seems to have realized in the Season 3 finale only too late.

The world of the Others is nothing like the perfect society of Pala, but to the Others it is. It is perfect, and it is in danger, especially now that it has been found. Their ideal society is threatened, and the survivors of Oceanic 815 are going to have to decide between protecting the island and going home to a world that might not be the one they left.

Season 4 starts tomorrow with “The Beginning of the End.” In the meantime, go here for a list of all the Lost books I’ve reviewed.

Agatha Christie’s Evil Under the Sun is a Hercule Poirot mystery in which the intrepid detective finds himself working a murder on a resort island off the English coast. There is a large cast of potential suspects and one body, that of a promiscuous actress who had been blatantly carrying on with a married man. In short: murder, most foul.

It wasn’t as good as the only other Christie novel I’ve read (Murder on the Orient Express) but I did enjoy it, although I started to have a sense of how the murder had occured before Poirot figured it out.

Sawyer is seen reading Evil Under the Sun in Season 3 of Lost in the Nikki and Paolo episode “Expose,” an episode that is essentially a muder mystery.

Like Lost, Evil Under the Sun has a large cast and takes place on an island. There aren’t any big clues about Lost’s mythology hidden in the pages either, which seemes appropriate as “Expose” represents a break from reveals about the island, serving mostly as just good, albeit twisted, entertainment. Kind of like Christie’s novels: nothing earth shattering, but loads of fun.

There is, however, a clue in the book that hints at the way the episode plays out. In Evil Under the Sun, (watch out, here come spoilers) the actress’s corpse is found on the beach. Her lover goes to try to save her, while the woman who discovers the body with him runs off for help. Eventually, we learn that the “body” was a ruse; it was the murderer’s female accomplice. Now he can murder his lover, the actress, while the woman who went off for help can vouch that he was with her the whole time.

In “Expose”, Nikki, an actress who may or may not be promiscuous but is a murderer,� shows up seemingly dead on the beach. The episode revolves around finding out who killed her and her lover, Paolo. Only at the very end, do we learn that she wasn’t dead. Unfortunately for her, only the audience sees her eyes open as Hurley and Sawyer are busy shoveling sand on top her in the island graveyard.

In this case, the inclusion of a book served to signal the type of episode we’re seeing (murder mystery) and offer a possible clue. Perhaps if Sawyer had read it more carefully, he might have realized that while Nikki seemed dead, she might not really be dead, but as we learned with the whole Of Mice and Men incident, Sawyer doesn’t always read that carefully.

Season 4 of Lost starts on Thursday with “The Beginning of the End.” Sometime before then, I will post my thoughts on Aldous Huxley’s Island, the last of the Lost books on my list. In the meantime, Brian at Lost…and Gone Forever has a great preview with no spoilers and lots of good theorizin’.

An index of all my Lost Book Club posts is here.

Our Mutual Friend was my first forray into Dickens since reading (a probably abridged version of) A Tale of Two Cities back in 8th grade. It’s a weighty tome, but in a year of reading that included Don Quixote and The Brothers Karamazov, I figured my long-book mojo would see me through. And, besides, anything for Lost, right?

Once I got used to Dickens’s paid-by-the-word style, I began to enjoy it. It was uneven, but it left me wanting to read more of Dickens’s work.

Our Mutual Friend is about money, specifically the effects of John Harmon’s inheritance on a great many Londoners of all social classes. Unfortunately, the young Harmon died before he could collect his inheritance, and so the money went to his father’s servants, the Boffins, who haven’t seen John since he was a boy. The thing is, though, Harmon isn’t dead. He faked his death to escape his money and win the heart of Bella Wilfer on his own merits.

Now, the Boffins are newly rich, and John is newly poor. Adding to the complexity of the situation, Dickens presents us with a ponderous cast of con artists, thugs, scavengers, aristocratic lawyers, a psychotic schoolmaster, a dying orphan, members of parliament, a creepy taxidermist, and captains of industry all of whom have either a desire for (and schemes to match!) or opinions about the money and its inheritors.

There are also two love stories. The first is between the lower middle class Bella and the wealthy John. The other is between dirt-poor working class Lizzie Hexam and the young aristocratic lawyer Eugene Wrayburn. Neither is a relationship that should occur, particularly the latter, as they violate the rules of class. These class rules are at the heart of Our Mutual Friend as Dickens examines the effects of love and money on various segments of mid-nineteenth century London society.

Since it was originally a serial, the book has an episodic feel, and one gets the impression that Dickens may have been making some of it up as he was going along. It’s kind of like television. Kind of like Lost, too, in that it has large cast and most of the characters are connected in ways they often don’t ever see.

So how does Our Mutual Friend connect with Lost?

It appears several times in “Live Together, Die Alone,” the Season 2 finale. The episode is the first one to explore the pre-Island life of Desmond. As he is checking out of jail (after serving two years for what we don’t know) he gets his personals including a copy of Our Mutual Friend. He says he’s read every word Dickens wrote except for this, his last novel. Desmond says he checked it with his personal effects because he didn’t want to be tempted to read it in prison since he wants it to be the last book he reads before he dies. I hope he has a few weeks notice; it’s kind of long.

Because he didn’t read it in jail he never finds the letter that Penny Widmore, the love of his life, hid inside it telling him she loves him and that she always will. As we learn more about Penny and Desmond’s romance, both in “Live Together, Die Alone” and in Season 3 flashbacks, we learn that their relationship has always been haunted by her father’s disapproval. Desmond, is not from Penny’s social class, and as a result, her father frowns on his aristocratic daughter hitching her wagon to Desmond’s working class star.

His desire to prove himself worthy of her love is what drives Desmond on his attempt to sail around the world. Of course, he gets shipwrecked on the island and is presumed dead, much like Dickens’s John Harmon. And like the lovers in Our Mutual Friend, Penny’s love is too strong to give Desmond up for lost (har-har), and her defiance of her father and desire to find Desmond are what drives her on her search that may or may not have led that boat to the island (we’ll have to wait for Season 4 to know who’s in Not Penny’s Boat).

Given the relationship between Penny and Desmond is one that transcends social class, it is fitting that Our Mutual Friend, a story of love between classes, should be the book Desmond clings to. It’s also fitting that it should appear on Lost, since so many of the characters are connected in the flashbacks by mutual friends whose mutuality is unknown by the characters on the island. Indeed, Desmond is both Jack and Libby’s mutual friend.

Lostpedia has a pretty good write-up of Our Mutual Friend that takes a look at other connections with Lost including father-daughter relationships and scavenging/hoarding.

For a list of my other Lost Book Club posts click here.

And, with a hat-tip to Brian at Lost…and Gone Forever, here’s the preview for Season 4: