The Jungle is Neutral, by F. Spencer Chapman The memoir of a British lieutenant in WWII Malaya who conducts guerilla warfare against the Japanese. It’s not a very gripping story. All the successful guerrilla work takes place in the first quarter of the book, and from there on it is one long anticlimax of malaria, […]
Tag Archives: literature
Ailanthus in the Underworld
Ailanthus shows up in Don DeLillo’s book Underworld. It is a very bleak chapter, describing two nuns distributing alms in a bombed-out area of the South Bronx filled with abandoned cars, cripples, utter desolation. The landscape and the people who live in it are vividly described through the eyes of the senior nun, Sister Edgar. […]
Novel Ideas
I’d had this static in my head for some time. I don’t know if it is the fasting or the need of a vacation or what. Fasting doesn’t normally affect me that way. Whatever the reason, I’d had it for a while now, a distractedness, a listlessness. Only when I found myself out shopping with […]