The Lost Symbol By Dan Brown, Excerpt

The Lost Symbol By Dan Brown

Excerpt

To live in the world without becoming aware of the meaning of the world is like wandering about in a great library without touching the books. --The Secret Teachings of All Ages

Fact:

In 1991, a document was locked in the safe of the director of the CIA. The document is still there today. Its cryptic text includes references to an ancient portal and an unknown location underground. The document also contains the phrase "It's buried out there somewhere."

All organizations in this novel exist, including the Freemasons, the Invisible College, the Office of Security, the SMSC, and the Institute of Noetic Sciences.

All rituals, science, artwork, and monuments in this novel are real.

Prologue

House of the Temple
8:33 P.M.

The secret is how to die.

Since the beginning of time, the secret had always been how to die. The thirty-four-year-old initiate gazed down at the human skull cradled in his palms. The skull was hollow, like a bowl, filled with bloodred wine. Drink it, he told himself. You have nothing to fear.

As was tradition, he had begun this journey adorned in the ritualistic garb of a medieval heretic being led to the gallows, his loose-fitting shirt gaping open to reveal his pale chest, his left pant leg rolled up to the knee, and his right sleeve rolled up to the elbow. Around his neck hung a heavy rope noose—a "cable-tow" as the brethren called it. Tonight, however, like the brethren bearing witness, he was dressed as a master.

The assembly of brothers encircling him all were adorned in their full regalia of lambskin aprons, sashes, and white gloves. Around their necks hung ceremonial jewels that glistened like ghostly eyes in the muted light. Many of these men held powerful stations in life, and yet the initiate knew their worldly ranks meant nothing within these walls. Here all men were equals, sworn brothers sharing a mystical bond.

As he surveyed the daunting assembly, the initiate wondered who on the outside would ever believe that this collection of men would assemble in one place...much less this place. The room looked like a holy sanctuary from the ancient world.

The truth, however, was stranger still.

I am just blocks away from the White House.

This colossal edifice, located at 1733 Sixteenth Street NW in Washington, D.C., was a replica of a pre-Christian temple—the temple of King Mausolus, the original mausoleum...a place to be taken after death. Outside the main entrance, two seventeen-ton sphinxes guarded the bronze doors. The interior was an ornate labyrinth of ritualistic chambers, halls, sealed vaults, libraries, and even a hollow wall that held the remains of two human bodies. The initiate had been told every room in this building held a secret, and yet he knew no room held deeper secrets than the gigantic chamber in which he was currently kneeling with a skull cradled in his palms.

The Temple Room.

This room was a perfect square. And cavernous. The ceiling soared an astonishing one hundred feet overhead, supported by monolithic columns of green granite. A tiered gallery of dark Russian walnut seats with hand-tooled pigskin encircled the room. A thirty-three-foot-tall throne dominated the western wall, with a concealed pipe organ opposite it. The walls were a kaleidoscope of ancient symbols...Egyptian, Hebraic, astronomical, alchemical, and others yet unknown.

Tonight, the Temple Room was lit by a series of precisely arranged candles. Their dim glow was aided only by a pale shaft of moonlight that filtered down through the expansive oculus in the ceiling and illuminated the room's most startling feature—an enormous altar hewn from a solid block of polished Belgian black marble, situated dead center of the square chamber.

The secret is how to die, the initiate reminded himself.

"It is time," a voice whispered.

The initiate let his gaze climb the distinguished white-robed figure standing before him. The Supreme Worshipful Master. The man, in his late fifties, was an American icon, well loved, robust, and incalculably wealthy. His once-dark hair was turning silver, and his famous visage reflected a lifetime of power and a vigorous intellect.

"Take the oath," the Worshipful Master said, his voice soft like falling snow. "Complete your journey."

The initiate's journey, like all such journeys, had begun at the first degree. On that night, in a ritual similar to this one, the Worshipful Master had blindfolded him with a velvet hoodwink and pressed a ceremonial dagger to his bare chest, demanding: "Do you seriously declare on your honor, uninfluenced by mercenary or any other unworthy motive, that you freely and voluntarily offer yourself as a candidate for the mysteries and privileges of this brotherhood?"

"I do," the initiate had lied.

"Then let this be a sting to your consciousness," the master had warned him, "as well as instant death should you ever betray the secrets to be imparted to you."

At the time, the initiate had felt no fear. They will never know my true purpose here.

Tonight, however, he sensed a foreboding solemnity in the Temple Room, and his mind began replaying all the dire warnings he had been given on his journey, threats of terrible consequences if he ever shared the ancient secrets he was about to learn: Throat cut from ear to ear...tongue torn out by its roots...bowels taken out and burned...scattered to the four winds of heaven...heart plucked out and given to the beasts of the field"

"Brother," the gray-eyed master said, placing his left hand on the initiate's shoulder. "Take the final oath."

Steeling himself for the last step of his journey, the initiate shifted his muscular frame and turned his attention back to the skull cradled in his palms. The crimson wine looked almost black in the dim candlelight. The chamber had fallen deathly silent, and he could feel all of the witnesses watching him, waiting for him to take his final oath and join their elite ranks.

Tonight, he thought, something is taking place within these walls that has never before occurred in the history of this brotherhood. Not once, in centuries.

He knew it would be the spark...and it would give him unfathomable power. Energized, he drew a breath and spoke aloud the same words that countless men had spoken before him in countries all over the world.

"May this wine I now drink become a deadly poison to me...should I ever knowingly or willfully violate my oath."

His words echoed in the hollow space.

Then all was quiet.

Steadying his hands, the initiate raised the skull to his mouth and felt his lips touch the dry bone. He closed his eyes and tipped the skull toward his mouth, drinking the wine in long, deep swallows. When the last drop was gone, he lowered the skull.

For an instant, he thought he felt his lungs growing tight, and his heart began to pound wildly. My God, they know! Then, as quickly as it came, the feeling passed.

A pleasant warmth began to stream through his body. The initiate exhaled, smiling inwardly as he gazed up at the unsuspecting gray-eyed man who had foolishly admitted him into this brotherhood's most secretive ranks.

Soon you will lose everything you hold most dear.

Chapter 1

The Otis elevator climbing the south pillar of the Eiffel Tower was overflowing with tourists. Inside the cramped lift, an austere businessman in a pressed suit gazed down at the boy beside him. "You look pale, son. You should have stayed on the ground."

"I"m okay..." the boy answered, struggling to control his anxiety. "I'll get out on the next level." I can't breathe.

The man leaned closer. "I thought by now you would have gotten over this." He brushed the child's cheek affectionately.

The boy felt ashamed to disappoint his father, but he could barely hear through the ringing in his ears. I can't breathe. I've got to get out of this box!

The elevator operator was saying something reassuring about the lift's articulated pistons and puddled-iron construction. Far beneath them, the streets of Paris stretched out in all directions.

Almost there, the boy told himself, craning his neck and looking up at the unloading platform. Just hold on.

As the lift angled steeply toward the upper viewing deck, the shaft began to narrow, its massive struts contracting into a tight, vertical tunnel. "Dad, I don't think—

Suddenly a staccato crack echoed overhead. The carriage jerked, swaying awkwardly to one side. Frayed cables began whipping around the carriage, thrashing like snakes. The boy reached out for his father.

"Dad!"

Their eyes locked for one terrifying second.

Then the bottom dropped out.

Robert Langdon jolted upright in his soft leather seat, startling out of the semiconscious daydream. He was sitting all alone in the enormous cabin of a Falcon 2000EX corporate jet as it bounced its way through turbulence. In the background, the dual Pratt and Whitney engines hummed evenly.

"Mr. Langdon?" The intercom crackled overhead. "We're on final approach."

Langdon sat up straight and slid his lecture notes back into his leather daybag. He'd been halfway through reviewing Masonic symbology when his mind had drifted. The daydream about his late father, Langdon suspected, had been stirred by this morning's unexpected invitation from Langdon's longtime mentor, Peter Solomon.

The other man I never want to disappoint.

The fifty-eight-year-old philanthropist, historian, and scientist had taken Langdon under his wing nearly thirty years ago, in many ways filling the void left by Langdon's father's death. Despite the man's influential family dynasty and massive wealth, Langdon had found humility and warmth in Solomon's soft gray eyes.

Outside the window the sun had set, but Langdon could still make out the slender silhouette of the world's largest obelisk, rising on the horizon like the spire of an ancient gnomon. The 555-foot marble-faced obelisk marked this nation's heart. All around the spire, the meticulous geometry of streets and monuments radiated outward.

Even from the air, Washington, D.C., exuded an almost mystical power.

Langdon loved this city, and as the jet touched down, he felt a rising excitement about what lay ahead. The jet taxied to a private terminal somewhere in the vast expanse of Dulles International Airport and came to a stop.

Langdon gathered his things, thanked the pilots, and stepped out of the jet's luxurious interior onto the foldout staircase. The cold January air felt liberating.

Breathe, Robert, he thought, appreciating the wide-open spaces.

A blanket of white fog crept across the runway, and Langdon had the sensation he was stepping into a marsh as he descended onto the misty tarmac.

"Hello! Hello!" a singsong British voice shouted from across the tarmac. "Professor Langdon?"

Langdon looked up to see a middle-aged woman with a badge and clipboard hurrying toward him, waving happily as he approached. Curly blond hair protruded from under a stylish knit wool hat.

"Welcome to Washington, sir!"

Langdon smiled. "Thank you."

"My name is Pam, from passenger services." The woman spoke with an exuberance that was almost unsettling. "If you'll come with me, sir, your car is waiting."

Langdon followed her across the runway toward the Signature terminal, which was surrounded by glistening private jets. A taxi stand for the rich and famous.

"I hate to embarrass you, Professor," the woman said, sounding sheepish, "but you are the Robert Langdon who writes books about symbols and religion, aren't you?"

Langdon hesitated and then nodded.

"I thought so!" she said, beaming. "My book group read your book about the sacred feminine and the church! What a delicious scandal that one caused! You do enjoy putting the fox in the henhouse!"

Langdon smiled. "Scandal wasn't really my intention."

The woman seemed to sense Langdon was not in the mood to discuss his work.

"I'm sorry. Listen to me rattling on. I know you probably get tired of being recognized...but it's your own fault." She playfully motioned to his clothing. "Your uniform gave you away."

My uniform" Langdon glanced down at his attire. He was wearing his usual charcoal turtleneck, Harris Tweed jacket, khakis, and collegiate cordovan loafers...his standard attire for the classroom, lecture circuit, author photos, and social events.

The woman laughed. "Those turtlenecks you wear are so dated. You'd look much sharper in a tie!"

No chance, Langdon thought. Little nooses.

Neckties had been required six days a week when Langdon attended Phillips Exeter Academy, and despite the headmaster's romantic claims that the origin of the cravat went back to the silk fascalia worn by Roman orators to warm their vocal cords, Langdon knew that, etymologically, cravat actually derived from a ruthless band of "Croat" mercenaries who donned knotted neckerchiefs before they stormed into battle. To this day, this ancient battle garb was donned by modern office warriors hoping to intimidate their enemies in daily boardroom battles.

"Thanks for the advice," Langdon said with a chuckle. "I'll consider a tie in the future."

Mercifully, a professional-looking man in a dark suit got out of a sleek Lincoln Town Car parked near the terminal and held up his finger. "Mr. Langdon? I'm Charles with Beltway Limousine." He opened the passenger door. "Good evening, sir. Welcome to Washington."

Langdon tipped Pam for her hospitality and then climbed into the plush interior of the Town Car. The driver showed him the temperature controls, the bottled water, and the basket of hot muffins. Seconds later, Langdon was speeding away on a private access road. So this is how the other half lives.

As the driver gunned the car up Windsock Drive, he consulted his passenger manifest and placed a quick call. "This is Beltway Limousine," the driver said with professional efficiency. "I was asked to confirm once my passenger had landed." He paused. "Yes, sir. Your guest, Mr. Langdon, has arrived, and I will deliver him to the Capitol Building by seven P.M. You're welcome, sir." He hung up.

Langdon had to smile. No stone left unturned. Peter Solomon's attention to detail was one of his most potent assets, allowing him to manage his substantial power with apparent ease. A few billion dollars in the bank doesn't hurt either.

Langdon settled into the plush leather seat and closed his eyes as the noise of the airport faded behind him. The U.S. Capitol was a half hour away, and he appreciated the time alone to gather his thoughts. Everything had happened so quickly today that Langdon only now had begun to think in earnest about the incredible evening that lay ahead.

Arriving under a veil of secrecy, Langdon thought, amused by the prospect.

Ten miles from the Capitol Building, a lone figure was eagerly preparing for Robert Langdon's arrival.

Copyright 2009 by Dan Brown. All rights reserved.

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The Year of the Flood By Margaret Atwood, excerpt

Excerpt from:

The Year of the Flood By Margaret Atwood

1. Toby. Year Twenty-five, the Year of the Flood.

In the early morning Toby climbs up to the rooftop to watch the sunrise. She uses a mop handle for balance: the elevator stopped working some time ago and the back stairs are slick with damp, so if she slips and topples there won't be anyone to pick her up.

As the first heat hits, mist rises from among the swathe of trees between her and the derelict city. The air smells faintly of burning, a smell of caramel and tar and rancid barbecues, and the ashy but greasy smell of a garbage-dump fire after it's been raining. The abandoned towers in the distance are like the coral of an ancient reef--bleached and colourless, devoid of life.

There still is life, however. Birds chirp; sparrows, they must be. Their small voices are clear and sharp, nails on glass: there's no longer any sound of traffic to drown them out. Do they notice that quietness, the absence of motors? If so, are they happier? Toby has no idea. Unlike some of the other Gardeners--the more wild-eyed or possibly overdosed ones--she has never been under the illusion that she can converse with birds.

The sun brightens in the east, reddening the blue-grey haze that marks the distant ocean. The vultures roosting on hydro poles fan out their wings to dry them, opening themselves like black umbrellas. One and then another lifts off on the thermals and spirals upwards. If they plummet suddenly, it means they've spotted carrion.

Vultures are our friends, the Gardeners used to teach. They purify the earth. They are God's necessary dark Angels of bodily dissolution. Imagine how terrible it would be if there were no death!

Do I still believe this? Toby wonders.

Everything is different up close.

--

The rooftop has some planters, their ornamental running wild; it has a few fake-wood benches. It used to have a sun canopy for cocktail hour, but that's been blown away. Toby sits on one of the benches to survey the grounds. She lifts her binoculars, scanning from left to right. The driveway, with its lumirose borders, untidy now as as frayed hairbrushes, their purple glow fading in the strengthening light. The western entrance, done in pink adobe-style solarskin, the snarl of tangled cars outside the gate.

The flowerbeds, choked with sow thistle and burdock, enormous aqua kudzu moths fluttering above them. The fountains, their scallop-shell basins filled with stagnant rainwater. The parking lot with a pink golf cart and two pink AnooYoo minibuses, each with its winking-eye logo. There's a fourth minibus further along the drive, crashed into a tree: there used to be an arm hanging out of the window, but it's gone now.

The wide lawns have grown up, tall weeds. There are low irregular mounds beneath the milkweed and fleabane and sorrel, with here and there a swatch of fabric, a glint of bone. That's where the people fell, the ones who'd been running or staggering across the lawn. Toby had watched from the roof, crouched behind one of the planters, but she hadn't watched for long. Some of those people had called for help, as if they'd known she was there. But how could she have helped?

The swimming pool has a mottled blanket of algae. Already there are frogs. The herons and the egrets and the peagrets hunt them, at the shallow end. For a while Toby tried to scoop out the small animals that had blundered in and drowned. The luminous green rabbits, the rats, the rakunks, with their striped tails and racoon bandit masks. But now she leaves them alone. Maybe they'll attract fish, somehow.

Is she thinking of eating these future fish? Surely not.

Surely not yet.

She turns to the dark encircling wall of trees and vines and fronds and shrubby undergrowth, probing it with her binoculars. It's surely from there that any danger might come. But what kind of danger? She can't imagine.

--

In the night there are the usual noises: the faraway barking of dogs, the tittering of mice, the water-pipe notes of the crickets, the occasional grumph of a frog. The blood rushing in her ears: katoush, katoush, katoush. A heavy broom sweeping dry leaves.

"Go to sleep," she says out loud. But she never sleeps well, not since she's been alone in this building. Sometimes she hears voices--human voices, calling to her in pain. Or the voices of women, the women who used to work here, the anxious women who used to come, for rest and rejuvenation. Splashing in the pool, strolling on the lawns. All the pink voices, soothed and soothing.

Or the voices of the Gardeners, murmuring or singing; or the children laughing together, up on the Edencliff Garden. Adam One, and Nuala, and Burt. Old Pilar, surrounded by her bees. And Zeb. If any one of them is still alive, it must be Zeb. Surely is he on his way, any day now he'll come walking along the roadway or appear from among the trees.

But he must be dead by now. It's better to think so. Not to waste hope.

There must be someone else left, though; she can't be the only one on the planet. There must be others. But friends or foes? If she sees one, how to tell?

She's prepared. The doors are locked, the windows barred. But even such barriers are no guarantee: every hollow space invites invasion.

Even when she sleeps, she's listening, as animals do--for a break in the pattern, for an unknown sound, for a silence opening like a crack in rock.

When the small creatures hush their singing, said Adam One, it's because they're afraid. You must listen for the sound of their fear.

2. Ren. Year Twenty-five, the year of the Flood.

Beware of words. Be careful what you write. Leave no trails.

This is what the Gardeners taught us, when I was a child among them. They taught us to depend on memory, because nothing written down could be relied on. The Spirit travels from mouth to mouth, not from thing to thing: books could be burnt, paper crumble away, computers could be destroyed. Only the Spirit lives forever, and the Spirit isn't a thing.

As for writing, it was dangerous, said the Adams and the Eves, because your enemies could trace you through it, and hunt you down, and use your words to condemn you.

But now that the Waterless Flood has swept over us, any writing I might do is safe enough, because those who might have used it against me are surely dead. So I can write down anything I want.

What I write is my name, Ren, with an eyebrow pencil, on the wall beside the mirror. I've written it a lot of times. Renrenren, like a song. You can forget who you are if you're alone too much. Amanda told me that.

I can't see out the window, it's glass brick. I can't get out the door, it's locked on the outside. I still have air though, and water, as long as the solar doesn't quit. I still have food.

I'm lucky. I'm really very lucky. Count your luck, Amanda used to say. So I do. First, I was lucky to be working here at Scales when the Flood hit. Second, it was even luckier that I was shut up this way in the Sticky Zone, because it kept me safe. I got a rip in my Biofilm Bodyglove--a client got carried away and bit me, right through the green sequins and I was waiting for my test results. It wasn't a wet rip with secretions and membranes involved, it was a dry rip near the elbow, so I wasn't that worried. Still, they checked everything, here at Scales. They had a reputation to keep up: we were known as the cleanest dirty girls in town.

Scales took care of you, they really did. If you were talent, that is. Good food, a doctor if you needed one, and the tips were great, because the men from the top Corps came here. It was well run, though it was in a seedy area--all the clubs were. That was a matter of image, Mordis would say: seedy was good for business, because unless there's an edge--something lurid or tawdry, a whiff of sleaze--what separated our brand from the run-of-the-mill product the guy could get at home, with the face cream and the white cotton panties?

Mordis believed in plain speaking. He'd been in the business ever since he was a kid, and when they outlawed the pimps and the street trade--for public health and the safety of women, they said--and rolled everything into SeksMart under CorpSeCorps control, Mordis made the jump, because of his experience. "It's who you know," he used to say. "And what you know about them." Then he'd grin, and pat you on the bum--just a friendly pat though, he never took freebies from us. He had ethics.

He was a wiry guy with a shaved head and black, shiny, alert eyes like the heads of ants, and he was easy as long as everything was cool. But he'd stand up for us if the clients got violent. "Nobody hurts my best girls," he'd say. It was a point of honour with him.

Also he didn't like waste: we were a valuable asset, he'd say. The cream of the crop. After the SeksMart roll-in, anyone left outside the system was not only illegal but pathetic. A few wrecked, diseased old women wandering the alleyways, practically begging. No man with even a fraction of his brain left would go anywhere near them. "Hazardous waste," we Scales girls used to call them. We shouldn't have been so scornful; we should have had compassion. But compassion takes work, and we were young.

--

That night when the Waterless Flood began, I was waiting for my test results: they kept you locked in the Sticky Zone for weeks, in case you had something contagious. The food came in through the safety-sealed hatchway, plus there was the mini-fridge with snacks, and the water was filtered, coming in and out both. You had everything you needed, but it got boring in there. You could exercise on the machines, and I did a lot of that, because a trapeze dancer needs to keep in practice.

You could watch TV or old movies, play your music, talk on the phone. Or you could visit the other rooms in Scales on the intercom video. Sometimes when we doing plank work we'd wink at the cameras in mid-moan for the benefit of whoever was stuck in the Sticky Zone. We knew where the cameras were hidden, in the snakeskin or featherwork on the ceilings. It was one big family, at Scales, so even when you were in the Sticky Zone, Mordis liked you to feel you were still participating.

Mordis made me feel so secure. I knew if I was in big trouble I could go to him. There were only a few people in my life like that. Amanda, most of the time. Zeb, sometimes. And Toby. You wouldn't think it would be Toby--she was so tough and hard--but if you're drowning, a soft squashy thing is no good to hold onto. You need something more solid.

--

CREATION DAY
Year Five. Of the Creation, and of the Naming of the Animals.
Spoken by Adam One.

Dear Friends, dear fellow Creatures, dear fellow Mammals:

On Creation Day five years ago, this Edencliff Rooftop Garden of ours was a sizzling wasteland, hemmed in by festering city slums and dens of wickedness; but now it has blossomed as the rose.

By covering such barren rooftops with greenery we are doing our small part in the redemption of God's Creation from the decay and sterility that lies all around us, and feeding ourselves with unpolluted food into the bargain. Some would term our efforts futile, but if all were to follow our example, what a change would be wrought on our beloved Planet! Much hard work still lies before us, but fear not, my Friends; for we shall move forward undaunted.
I am glad we have all remembered our sunhats.

--

Now let us turn our minds to our annual Creation Day Devotion.

The Human Words of God speak of the Creation in terms that could be understood by the men of old. There is no talk of galaxies or genes, for such terms would have confused them greatly! But must we therefore take as scientific fact the story that the world was created in six days, thus making a nonsense of observable data? God cannot be held to the narrowness of literal and materialistic interpretations, nor measured by Human measurements, for His days are eons, and a thousand ages of our time are like an evening to Him. Unlike some other religions, we have never felt it served a higher purpose to lie to children about geology.

Remember the first sentences of those Human Words of God: the Earth is without form, and void, and then God speaks Light into being. This is the moment that Science terms "The Big Bang," as if it were a sex orgy. Yet both accounts concur in their essence: Darkness; then, in an instant, Light. But surely the Creation is ongoing, for are not new stars being formed at every moment? God's Days are not consecutive, my Friends; they run concurrently, the first with the third, the fourth with the sixth. As we are told, "Thou sendeth forth thy Spirit, they are created; and Thou renewest the face of the Earth."

We are told that, on the fifth day of God's Creating activities, the waters brought forth Creatures, and on the sixth day the dry land was populated with Animals, and with plants and Trees; and all were blessed, and told to multiply; and finally Adam--that is to say, Mankind--was created. According to Science, this is the same order in which the species did in fact appear on the planet, Man last of all. Or more or less the same order. Or close enough.

What happens next? God brings the Animals before Man, "to see what he would call them." But why didn't God already know what names Adam would choose? The answer can only be that God has given Adam free will, and therefore Adam may do things that God Himself cannot anticipate in advance. Think of that the next time you are tempted by meat-eating or material wealth! Even God may not always know what you are going to do next!

God must have caused the Animals to assemble by speaking to them directly, but what language did He use? It was not Hebrew, my Friends. It was not Latin or Greek, or English, or French, or Spanish, or Arabic, or Chinese. No: He called the Animals in their own languages. To the Reindeer He spoke Reindeer, to the Spider, Spider; to the Elephant He spoke Elephant, to the Flea He spoke Flea, to the Centipede He spoke Centipede, and to the Ant, Ant. So must it have been.

And for Adam himself, the Names of the Animals were the first words he spoke--the first moment of Human language. In this cosmic instant, Adam claims his Human soul. To Name is--we hope--to greet; to draw another towards one's self. Let us imagine Adam calling out the Names of the Animals in fondness and joy, as if to say--There you are, my dearest! Welcome! Adam's first act towards the Animals was thus one of loving-kindness and kinship, for Man in his unfallen state was not yet a carnivore. The Animals knew this, and did not run away. So it must have been on that unrepeatable Day--a peaceful gathering at which every living entity on the Earth was embraced by Man.

How much have we lost, dear fellow Mammals and fellow Mortals! How much have we wilfully destroyed! How much do we need to restore, within ourselves!

The time of the Naming is not over, my Friends. In His sight, we may still be living in the sixth day. As your Meditation, imagine yourself rocked in that sheltering moment. Stretch out your hand towards those gentle eyes that regard you with such trust--a trust that has not yet been violated by bloodshed and gluttony and pride and disdain.

Say their Names.

Let us sing.

End of excerpt.

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Ken Kesey's "Cuckoo" and "Notion" By Richard Rayner

Aging gracefully: Ken Kesey's "Cuckoo" and "Notion"

Plus: The short list of paperbacks you won't want to miss

By Richard Rayner

latimes.com

PAPERBACK WRITERS

December 9, 2007

"He had the build of a plunging halfback, with big shoulders and a neck like the stump of a Douglas fir," wrote Malcolm Cowley, who taught Ken Kesey in a writing class at Stanford in 1960. "Chapters of a novel were read aloud in a writing class and they aroused a mixed but generally admiring response." The novel was "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" (Penguin Classics Deluxe: 320 pp., $15), and among the other students were Peter S. Beagle, Wendell Berry, Ernest Gaines and Larry McMurtry. That must have been some writing class. "Cuckoo's Nest" was published in 1962, to a response that was more than somewhat "generally admiring" -- the book was turned into a Broadway play and, later, the Milos Forman movie with Jack Nicholson.
A much bigger, and greater, novel, "Sometimes a Great Notion" (Penguin: 736 pp.,$16), followed with amazing speed, in 1964. Kesey must have thought he could fly. Or perhaps he already sensed that he'd never do anything so good again. His friend, the novelist Robert Stone, reckons that Kesey was a natural performer, always requiring an audience, with little liking for the writer's lonely life. For whatever reason, Kesey became a test case in the nature of American celebrity. He got hold of an old bus, painted it in Day-Glo colors, gathered some friends, and set off on the cross-country road trip that was recorded by Tom Wolfe in "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test." Kesey became famous for being an acid-head, for being jailed, for being Kesey and, though he later published more books, was never quite the same writer again. He passed into part of that doomed legend, the Sixties. He died, much mourned, in 2001, and the odd and wonderful thing is, those first two novels not only hold up -- they seem better than ever.
The journals that Kesey kept while composing those books detail how serious he was about the craft of writing, and how good. He poured every chaotic impulse and vision he had into "Cuckoo's Nest" and "Notion" but found ways to keep the basic storylines clear and simple. In "Cuckoo's Nest," the "wild goose" renegade Randle P. McMurphy rolls into the mental ward like Shane coming to town and is at once set in opposition to Big Nurse Ratched who, if not exactly the villain of the fable, is certainly the representative of society's cruel and oppressive forces. In "Notion," our first clue about the logger Hank Stamper is given by an arm that Stamper has affixed to a pole in his yard, a dead man's arm with defiant middle finger sticking upward. Both books are set in Kesey's native Oregon, and both have the same blunt plot motor that served Ayn Rand in "The Fountainhead": the guy who just refuses to give in.
Rand uses the device to tell her favored story about the triumph of the individual will, while Kesey takes it in a diametrically opposed direction. The resistance of McMurphy and Hank Stamper is glorious but destroys them and brings death to others. Thus a dilemma is raised: Does America want brute individualism or the comfort and suffocation of social order? Kesey's life tells us which side he came down on, but in his fiction he didn't answer the question; instead, he explored its ambiguities in dramatic and shattering ways.
Kesey's subject was "the great wild American hollow, which is scarier than hell." Each of these books tackles the theme, though in tones that are very different, largely because of technique. "Cuckoo's Nest" is narrated solely by Chief Bromden, a schizophrenic Indian who pretends to be deaf and dumb. That's his way of surviving, and the Chief tells his story in a style that is everyday yet hallucinated, flashing with electricity and dangerous hot metal. Here he describes Big Nurse: "She's swelling up, swells till her back's splitting out the white uniform and she's let her arms section out long enough to wrap around the three of them five, six times. . . . She blows up bigger and bigger, so big I can smell the machinery inside the way you smell a motor pulling too big a load."
The Chief is the enlightened witness who both brings us the awful news and is liberated by it, as novelist Chuck Palahniuk notes in his foreword to this new edition featuring jacket and flap art by graphic novelist Joe Sacco. But the Chief is paranoid too, and his voice tingles with dread of "the Combine," the malign and skewed democracy for which Big Nurse is a ruthless enforcer. "I see her sit in the center of this web of wires like a watchful robot, tend her network with mechanical insect skill, know every second which wire runs where and what current to send up to get the results she wants," says the Chief, and we shiver with his fear.
"Notion," on the other hand, sweeps across history and is told through an intricate chain of changing points of view. To compensate, the prose itself always sits closer to what it describes. The superb opening pages establish a Western landscape that dwarfs and intimidates the men and woman that live within it. A river doesn't serve the loggers, but threatens to devour them. The forests tower with sun-blotting trees and drip with fog. So powerful and effective is the writing that these pages seem moist as you turn them. "This bounteous land, where plants grew overnight, where Jonas had watched a mushroom push through the carcass of a drowned beaver and in a few gliding hours swell to the size of a hat -- this bounteous land was saturated with moist and terrible dying," Kesey writes. Stamper and his half-brother Lee match wills and egos over Hank's wife, Viv. They both lose, but the river rolls on, eating away at everything.
It's staggering that Kesey published these two novels before he was 30. They're extraordinary in their drive, their capaciousness, their poetry, their human sympathy, and their laughter, which is always joined, in a Whitmaneseque way, by their feeling for death. Excesses may sometimes abound, but here are two American masterpieces. Dive in. Or, as Viv says to the crew-cut union organizer in "Notion": "Come on, it's fun. Look."

Richard Rayner's Paperback Writers column appears monthly.

The Short List: Also New in Paperback

"The Gift" by Lewis Hyde (Vintage)
A 25th anniversary edition of Lewis Hyde's brilliant and unclassifiable exploration of the nature, and value, of creativity. "All cultures and all artists have felt the tension between gift exchange and the market, between the self-forgetfulness of art and the self-aggrandizement of the merchant, and how that tension is to be resolved has been a subject of debate since before Aristotle," Hyde writes. He muses on where creativity comes from, and why it might be worth more than commerce tends to think. Which makes this book sound heavier than it is: "The Gift" is an inspiring dance around the subject of what the artist can expect.

"Black Hole" by Charles Burns (Pantheon)
A sexually transmitted disease, causing hideous transformations, plagues teenagers in the suburbs of Seattle, circa 1974. Charles Burns' graphic novel, parts of which were hailed as the "Ulysses" of the genre when they appeared serially, utilizes the conventions of shlock-horror while deftly upending them. Teenagers smoke weed, drink beer, exchange bodily fluids -- and grow weird appendages. In Burns' drawings, sex means physical horror; blackness dominates the pages, but real emotion too. This edition, with witty and ghoulish endpapers, is artwork in itself.

"Oil!" by Upton Sinclair (Penguin)
When Sinclair wrote his muckraking novel about the booming Los Angeles of the 1920s, he called it, not "Motion Picture!" but "Oil!" L.A. was still an oil town back then, thanks to strikes made by Edward L. Doheny in the 1880s and 1890s and later discoveries around Signal Hill in Long Beach, where forests of oil derricks sprang up in people's backyards. The whole city went, in the words of the Saturday Evening Post, "stark, staring, oil mad." Sinclair seized on this milieu, and the real-life, oil-driven political scandals of the 1920s, to depict an utterly corrupt world that spreads all the way to the White House. This magnetic and under-explored book is now the basis for a new movie by Paul Thomas Anderson.

"Delano" by John Gregory Dunne (University of California)
Dunne, who died four years ago, was both a sumptuous stylist and an incisive, sensitive reporter. Here he examines the impact of the California grape strike of the mid-1960s, the dispute that catapulted Cesar Chavez to prominence. "One day Chavez and a Catholic priest from Sacramento flew over the vineyards trying to make contact, via a bullhorn, with workers out of range of roadside pickets; they were both arrested for violating the grower's airspace," writes Dunne, chronicling a key moment in both Latino/American politics and the process of his own education about the state of California. His first book, and still, in some ways, his best.

"The Poems of Catullus" translated by Peter Green (University of California)
In one of his autobiographies, novelist Anthony Burgess wrote about his friend Peter Green retiring to a Greek island "to translate Juvenal at retsina-lubricated leisure." A nice picture. Green still sojourns in Greece but teaches in Texas too and, having finished with Juvenal, moved onto Catullus, a Roman poet who speaks even more clearly to the modern ear. "My friend Varus saw me lounging in the Forum,/dragged me off with him to meet his girlfriend./'Little scrubber' was my first impression/Not unsmart, though. Not entirely witless." Catullus wrote lots about sex, a subject that he treated sometimes with tenderness, other times with obscene venom. Green catches all that in his jazzy translations and erudite notes.

"Collected & New Stories" by Alan Sillitoe (Carroll & Graf)
Sillitoe shot to fame in the early 1960s when two of his early works -- the novel "Saturday Night and Sunday Morning" and the long story "The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner" (included here)-- were filmed with Albert Finney and Tom Courtenay, respectively, part of the British New Wave. Sillitoe was working class and came from Nottingham, meaning he was automatically compared to D.H. Lawrence. Another story, "The Match," in which a guy goes to see a crappy football (soccer) game, returns home and rows with his wife, who then leaves him, might more properly be compared to Raymond Carver. It has the same exact prose and the low-key, seemingly effortless style. Sillitoe is still writing, after 50 years -- a distinct British voice.

"The Complete Persepolis" by Marjane Satrapi (Pantheon)
Another landmark graphic novel, Satrapi's "Persepolis" tells of her childhood and coming of age during the Iranian revolution, when, as a little girl more interested in listening to Kim Wilde and buying jeans than wearing a veil, she witnessed the overthrow of the shah and the arrival of the Islamic republic. The clear simplicity of Satrapi's art mingles the personal and the political with a daring that can shock and move too. Thus a huge story becomes close and intimate, like Spiegelman's "Maus," which Satrapi must have taken into her blood somewhere along the way. A film, co-written and co-directed by Satrapi herself, is soon to be released.

"The Sylph" by Georgiana, duchess of Devonshire (Northwestern)
Georgiana, the subject of an excellent recent biography by Amanda Foreman, lived a scandalous life in the highest echelons of the British aristocracy in the late 18th century. She also wrote, and published, a fact that her social standing precluded her from acknowledging in her own lifetime. "The Sylph," her novel in letters, which tells of a young beauty's marriage to a man she discovers to be a rake, sits somewhere between Jane Austen and Laclos' "Les Liaisons Dangereuses." The cool-headed wit of the writing, and Georgiana's adroit handling of gambling and sex, and of how women were treated as commodities, make this feel very contemporary.

"Wolves of the Crescent Moon" by Yousef Al Mohaimeed (Penguin)
A one-eared Bedouin tribesman, sick of humiliation, quits his job as a low-level civil servant in the big city and goes to the bus station planning to flee. But he doesn't know where to go, so while he waits, other voices, other stories of loss and alienation are woven into the narrative. People run away from misfortune to find themselves facing new tragedies, and Yousef Al-Mohaimeed, in this tight novel, his first to be published in English, draws a bleak but clear and gripping picture of a Saudi society terribly divided between old and new, rich and poor. The book was banned in Saudi Arabia.

"Memoirs of an Anti-Semite" by Gregor von Rezzori ( New York Review Books)
"It was at this time I learned we had done Mr. Malik an injustice by calling him a Jew. On the contrary he was a man of high moral standards," writes one of Von Rezzori's shocking and capering Nabokovian narrators, telling the story of his life in prewar Vienna, complete with unexamined and unquestioned anti-Semitism. The effect, like a slap in the face at first, becomes funny, then bitter and sad, and has the effect of taking us afresh into a terrible historical period. Von Rezzori caused a massive stir when the work was first published in the New Yorker, and his book, newly introduced by Deborah Eisenberg, has lost none of its haunting power. *

Richard Rayner is the author of many books, including "The Associates" and "The Devil's Wind: A Novel." Paperback Writers appears monthly at www.latimes.com/books.

Copyright © 2009, The Los Angeles Times.

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The magical and the elemental, from Halldór Laxness By Richard Rayner

The magical and the elemental, from Halldór Laxness
The mesmerizing power of the Icelandic novelist (and Nobelist) is in full view in a reissue of 'The Fish Can Sing.' By Richard Rayner

latimes.com PAPERBACK WRITERS January 6, 2008

"Summer up here in the north is beautiful," my Finnish father-in-law once said. "Last year it was on a Thursday." The great Icelandic novelist Halldór Laxness develops this idea in his masterwork, "Independent People": "They stood in bogs and pools, in water and in mud, the close-packed clouds about them interminable, the wet grass whistling drearily under the scythe. The scythe grew heavier and heavier, the hours refused to pass, the moments seemed to stick to them as soggily as their sodden garments; midsummer."
Life is bleak and wild up there by the Arctic Circle. Mere survival constitutes a tough proposition, and such survival entails more than the endless battle against the cruelties of a climate, which can at least be witnessed, observed, prepared for. Iceland, like Finland, is a proud and tiny nation that struggled long for independence and whose fate has been squeezed, pummeled and decided by empires. Individual citizens find themselves and their country powerless in the face of unseen world forces that shape or torture their lives. Hence, in "Independent People" (1934), poor crofters ghoulishly hope for more slaughter in the trenches of France during World War I so that army uniforms will go on being made and the price of the wool they shear from their sheep will continue to rise. A global disaster that has turned briefly to their advantage doesn't last, though, and the grind of uncertainty soon returns. Having no other choice, they live stoically, a condition that is in their DNA -- and one that would be an unthinkable affront to most Americans, accustomed as America is to the luxury of calling its own shots.
Laxness is often described as a writer who reinterpreted the classic Icelandic sagas of the 12th and 13th centuries. This doesn't tell the whole story. Of course he was influenced by his country's extraordinary contribution to world culture. How could he not be? From the sagas he drew a laconic, matter-of-fact tone, characters who talk little but brood lots before launching into sometimes catastrophic action, as well as plots whose big moments might be recognized only retrospectively. In such novels as the "Iceland's Bell" trilogy (1943-46) and "Under the Glacier" (1968), he rarely hits the narrative nail on the head but sidles around that nail, observing it wryly, saving the hammer for later. But as novelist Jane Smiley, herself a scholar of the sagas and one of Laxness' foremost American champions, rightly observes, there's much more to his stuff than faux medievalism.
Laxness was born in 1902 in the capital city of Reykjavik, then a tiny fishing port "where people still wore the same kind of home-made moccasins which peasants in Europe used to wear a thousand years ago when towns did not exist and therefore not cobblers either." From this backwater, he launched a determined journey into modernity. He came to the United States in the 1920s and tried to make it in Hollywood, befriending Upton Sinclair, one of his literary idols. Suspected of being a socialist -- not a good idea in America at the time -- Laxness faced deportation in 1929 until Sinclair and Stephen Crane's daughter, Helen, intervened.
Back in Iceland, Laxness translated Hemingway -- and Sinclair too. As another war loomed in Europe, his books were banned by the Nazis. Meanwhile, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover tried to stop Laxness from getting his U.S. royalties, which were considerable once "Independent People" became a Book of the Month Club selection and sold 450,000 hardcover copies. Hoover feared that those greenbacks would fall into red Icelandic hands. In 1948, Laxness wrote his polemical novel, "The Atom Station," revolving around the U.S. military's presence in Iceland and its plans to build a nuclear base. The following year, he won the Stalin Peace Prize. He denounced Stalin and won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1955. He died in 1998, having published more than 60 works. This was a man who engaged with, and in some way conquered, the world.
The allure and ultimate desirability of such engagement is the subject of "The Fish Can Sing" (Vintage: 272 pp., $14), the latest Laxness work to be reissued and with an introduction by Smiley. This 1957 novel is narrated by the orphan Alfgrimur Hansson, who tells, in a meandering way, of his relationship with the mysterious Gardar Holm, who has left Reykjavik and achieved worldwide fame as an opera singer. "We were born and bred each on his own side of the same churchyard and have always been called close kinsmen, and many people have confused us and some have even taken the one for the other," Alfgrimur observes. Throughout the novel, Laxness dangles the possibility that Gardar might be Alfgrimur's phantasm, a double who is by turns glamorous, brilliant and fraudulent. "In his suitcases, which were of good quality and fairly new, were found bricks wrapped in straw and nothing else."
That image, like many in the novel, is quietly haunting and visionary; Laxness habitually combines the magical and the mundane, writing with grace and a quiet humor that takes awhile to notice but, once detected, feels ever present. Alfgrimur can't quite decide whether he really wants to leave Iceland and become a star like Gardar or stay at home and be a lump fisherman. Only for the truly Northern soul would this seem a dilemma.
"The word 'love' was never heard in our house, except if some inebriate or a particularly stupid maidservant from the country happened to recite a verse by a modern poet," notes Alfgrimur in a chapter in which Laxness delves deeply into his people's mistrust of show and all things verbal. "If the person under discussion was more dead than alive, one said: 'Oh, he's a bit low.' If someone was dying of old age, one said, 'Yes, he's off his food these days.' About someone who was on his deathbed, it was said: 'Yes, he's packing his bags now, poor fellow.' "
"The Fish Can Sing" doesn't aim for the grand sweep of "Independent People." It's a more intimate book in which Laxness seems to reflect on his roots and the troubling nature of his celebrity. But, like all his narratives, it has a strange and mesmerizing power, moving almost imperceptibly at first, then with glacial force. "The world is a song, but we do not know whether it is a good song because we have nothing to compare it with," Laxness writes. His sometimes-demented mixture of laughter and sobbing isn't for everyone, but those readers who come to know his world and tone will find him unforgettable.

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Richard Rayner's Paperback Writers column appears monthly.

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The Short List (also new in paperback):

"Bang Crunch: Stories" by Neil Smith (Vintage)
In his first story collection, Canadian writer Neil Smith takes visceral life and death subjects and boldly handles them in a style both impish and direct. In "The B9ers," members of a cancer recovery group take gleeful revenge on a con man. "Isolettes," which deals with a disaffected young mother's journey through the hell of a neonatal intensive care unit, recalls the intense irony and despair of Lorrie Moore's classic "People Like That Are the Only People Here." The title story, "Bang Crunch," tells of a disease that causes a young girl to live her life at tragically accelerated speed. Smith's writing has real spark and energy, and he also aims for the heart. It's a fizzing debut.

"At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches" by Susan Sontag (Picador)
In this, Susan Sontag's final collection of essays and speeches, the full text of her response to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks (originally published in part in the New Yorker) is seen in full in English for the first time. " 'Our country is strong,' we are told again and again," she writes. "I for one don't find this entirely consoling. Who doubts that America is strong? But that's not all America has to be." Also included is her piece on torture at Abu Ghraib and literary essays on Laxness, Boris Pasternak, Rainer Maria Rilke and Victor Serge. "She was interested in everything," her son, David Rieff, writes in the introduction, reminding us of how much we miss Sontag's avidity, her commitment to the life of the mind.

"The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick" by Peter Handke (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
In this reissue of Peter Handke's nearly 40-year-old tale of lonely madness, a failed soccer goalie-turned-construction worker meets a girl, a movie cashier, has a brief affair and murders her without knowing why. Or, rather, because he sees ants in the bottom of the teapot. The writing is cool, almost frozen, yet beneath the surface, the Austrian writer's first novel to be published in English all those years ago seethes with feeling. That's the trick. This is a terrifying and entirely believable record of a man's falling apart.

" John Osborne: The Many Lives of the Angry Young Man" by John Heilpern (Vintage)
"I see treachery everywhere," the English playwright John Osborne blithely replied when asked whether he was paranoid. "You should never forgive your enemies because they're probably the only thing you've got." John Heilpern's biography weaves reportage and archival research into a spellbinding portrait of a life that in the end recalls that of Oscar Wilde more than Harold Pinter. Osborne died -- much loved, much hated -- in 1994, leaving behind enormous debts. Heilpern, who previously had worked at the Observer in London with Osborne's fifth and last wife, Helen, uses the dramatist's previously unpublished journals and is excellent on his relationships with the various women he married and the barmaid mum he could never quite leave behind.

"Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity" by David Lynch (Tarcher)
"I don't necessarily love rotting bodies, but there's a texture to a rotting body that is unbelievable," filmmaker and artist David Lynch writes, pretty much confirming that, whatever else is going on, "Catching the Big Fish" isn't your average feel-good guide to creativity. "Have you ever seen a little rotted animal? You get in close and the textures are wonderful." Lynch writes about his experiences with transcendental meditation, offering snapshots of his career, his weird mind and his artistic process. It's a neat book.

"Wise Children" by Angela Carter (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
A welcome reissue of Angela Carter's last, and perhaps finest, novel, "Wise Children" is the story of Nora and Dora, bastard daughters of a Shakespearean actor who take to the stage themselves as dancers, "two girls pounding the boards." Dora says of her sister: "Nora was always free with it and threw her heart away as if it were a used bus ticket. Either she was head over heels in love or else she was broken-hearted. She had it off first with a pantomime goose, when we were Mother Goose's goslings." Carter was irreverent, hilarious, shocking, vibrant, a complete one-off, and this is a brilliant London novel, a brilliant novel about the theater, a brilliant novel -- period.

"Bad Faith: A Forgotten History of Family, Fatherland and Vichy France" by Carmen Callil (Vintage)
In this ferocious book, Carmen Callil, the Australian-born founder of the feminist publishing house Virago Press, tells the story of Louis Darquier, a petty thief and con man who collaborated with the Nazis and rose to power in Vichy France as "commissioner for Jewish affairs." While living high and posing as an aristocrat, Darquier not only served, but also expanded a system of mass persecution and murder, shipping countless victims to the camps. It's an ugly story, and Callil tells it with anger, having had a unique point of entry. In 1960s London, she attempted suicide; the troubled therapist who helped her recover a formidable zest for life was, she later learned, Darquier's daughter, abandoned by her father as an infant.

"Persian Girls" by Nahid Rachlin (Tarcher)
In this memoir, Nahid Rachlin tells her story and that of her sister, Pari. Both grow up in Iran, but when Rachlin comes to America to study, her sister stays behind and is forced into marriage to a rich but cruel husband. Rachlin's tone in "Persian Girls" is soft yet intense, and her sorrowful story gives perspective, not just on a changing Iran, but on the prejudice and aching difficulties she faced in the United States.

"Arabian Sands" and "The Marsh Arabs" by Wilfred Thesiger (Penguin)
The tweedy and aristocratic Wilfred Thesiger, a onetime special forces officer and war hero, spent years in the parched deserts of Arabia and the marshes of southern Iraq (where, by contrast, tribesmen lived completely water-dominated lives). He found some of the world's most remote, desolate and merciless environments and went there because they called in some way to his soul. "For this cruel land can cast a spell which no temperate clime can match," he writes at the beginning of "Arabian Sands." Thesiger's style is direct and down-to-earth, but the vivid episodes build into enthralling pictures of landscapes and people.

"The Street of Crocodiles" by Bruno Schulz (Penguin)
Bruno Schulz, a Polish Jew who was bringing home a loaf of bread when he was shot to death in the street by a Nazi officer in 1942, has been compared to Franz Kafka, though Schulz's writing is more sensual and present in the world. "The Street of Crocodiles," a collection of his early stories, magically transmogrifies life in a small town. "Dizzy with light, we dipped into that enormous book of holidays, its pages blazing with sunshine and scented with the sweet melting pulp of golden pears," writes Schulz, remembering a boyhood when his crazy father bred birds in the attic and treated tailors' dummies like people. Jonathan Safran Foer provides an introduction for this new edition, which includes some of the erotically charged drawings of this magical and unforgettable writer.

Richard Rayner is the author of many books, including "The Associates" and "The Devil's Wind: A Novel." Paperback Writers appears monthly at www.latimes.com/books.

Copyright © 2009, The Los Angeles Times.

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