Author: allen0997

The Death of Ivan Ilyich ~ A Capsule Book Review

The Death of Ivan Ilyich ~ A Capsule Book Review by Allen Kopp

The Death of Ivan Ilyich, written by Russian master Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) in 1886, is a character study and a somber contemplation of death. Ivan Ilyich is a magistrate with a wife and two children, a grown daughter of marriageable age and a schoolboy son. He is ambitious and rises through the ranks of his profession. He and his wife enjoy their place in society afforded by his success.

The thing about Ivan is that, as a magistrate deciding cases in court, he isn’t always as human as he might be. He is incapable of deep feeling or self-contemplation. He has no inner life. To him, duty is more important than feeling, compassion and sympathy. Would you want to be tried by this bastard in court?

In young middle-age, Ivan is seeing to all the details of furnishing and decorating a new home when he falls off a ladder and sustains a blow to his side. He thinks little of it at the time, but this is the beginning of an illness that results in his death. Whether the blow he receives to the side has anything to do with his illness is never established.

Ivan becomes ill and believes at first he will recover. As time progresses, however, he becomes sicker and sicker, until he realizes at last that he is coasting toward a premature death. Doctors, even “celebrated” ones, are ineffectual at finding what’s wrong with him or in finding ways to make him better. All they can do is make him believe he will recover, but after a while he sees this as a lie.

In the state of illness he’s in, Ivan takes a look back on his life. Is he being punished with a horrible illness that will claim his life because he’s been bad? Wait a minute, though; he has done all the things he was supposed to do, so what might he have done differently that would have spared him his undeserved fate?

Instead of accepting what is happening to him and seeking peace within himself, Ivan rails against it. Why has God forsaken him? His mental anguish becomes as great as his physical anguish. He doesn’t get the sympathy he thinks he deserves from his wife, family and friends. They only want to be rid of him so they can get on with his lives. Only his ten-year-old son and a kindly servant named Gerasim seem truly sad to see him in the state he’s in. After a terrible illness, death claims Ivan Ilyich at the age of forty-five. There is no beauty, dignity, or redemption in his death.

The Death of Ivan Ilyich is death from the point of view of the dying man. He isn’t able to find relief, comfort or sympathy in his illness as he sinks toward his inevitable fate. He is unable to look back on his life and say it’s been a life of success and fulfilment, even though it’s being cut short. It’s a simple story, universal because death touches everybody. Although set in nineteenth century Russia, it might be any place at any time.

Copyright © 2018 by Allen Kopp    

by allen0997

A Faithful Son ~ A Capsule Book Review

A Faithful Son ~ A Capsule Book Review by Allen Kopp

A Faithful Son is a novel by a writer named Michael Scott Garvin. It begins in the late 1950s with the character Zach Nance as an adolescent boy. (Zach is narrating the story in his own voice.) He lives in a small Colorado town with his parents and two sisters. They are a religious, traditional, conservative family.

Zach and his two sisters, Katie and Laura, have an idyllic childhood, doing all the things that kids of this period love to do. They climb mountains and hike in the woods and play and catch the bus every morning to go to school. They have what almost seems to be a perfect life until tragedy strikes. Zach’s younger sister, Katie, is killed in an automobile accident in which the father is driving. In his grief, he turns to the bottle and becomes an irresponsible alcoholic.

Eventually the father drifts out of the family, leaving Zach and his remaining sister Laura and their mother to fend for themselves. Zach grows up the way all boys do, but he has a secret that he knows his mother, sister and the people of his community will never understand: he is gay.

He grows to adulthood, keeping his secret to himself. He works and begins drinking a lot, just as his father and grandfather did (it’s in his genes). He has clandestine dalliances with some of the local boys (one of them serious) but they always drift away and Zach ends up alone. He dates girls but, of course, this is only for show and will never work out.

Finally Zach leaves home and ends up in Los Angeles. He becomes a professional landscaper/gardener, starting out small at first and then growing into a real business where he employs other workers. At a gay bar, he meets a handsome boy named Doug. They seem to hit it off and begin a “relationship.” All the time Zach feels insecure, though, in his sexuality, believing that Doug will find somebody he likes better and leave. In the meantime, Zach’s drunken father has died back in Colorado and his mother develops cancer. It’s just one thing after another.

A Faithful Son is a breezy novel, so easy to read you’ll almost feel like you’re not reading at all. It’s a so-so story, nothing new, a story that has been told many times before. For this reason, I was a little surprised to see the list of awards it has won. The writing contains lots of misplaced (or dangling) modifiers, and it makes you wonder why the publisher didn’t employ an editor to fix these. Since it’s told in the first-person voice of Zach Nance, I suppose the feeling is that misplaced modifiers are just part of colloquial language and are acceptable. Also, there are some troubling anachronisms in the story concerning cell phones, microwave ovens and phone answering machines. I don’t know the age of the writer, Michael Scott Garvin, but I’m guessing that a lot of young people don’t remember a time when there weren’t cell phones, microwave ovens and phone answering machines and assume those things have always been around, like electricity. It is my fervent belief that there were no microwave ovens or answering machines until the 1980s, and cell phones weren’t in widespread use until the 1990s. But, then again, what do I know?

Copyright © 2018 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997