Beauty and the Beast
The Gargoyle has been a most pleasant surprise. A surprise because the book was given to me with little advance press, it being a galley copy made available to librarians and book sellers prior to hitting the shelves. A surprise because this is a first time author and a Canadian one, to boot. Mostly, it is a surprise because, for all intents and purposes, it is a love story that men can enjoy right out there in full view. You don’t have to worry about being drummed out of the union because you’ve been caught at a matinee of He’s Just Not That Into You.
The Gargoyle, published by Doubleday, is the first effort by Andrew Davidson. And it is an extraordinary one. This is a book that successfully slips and slides between realities and magically transcends time. Of course, it is the acceptance of time as non-linear that enables you to define what is and what is not reality.
In other words, if you can suspend disbelief, as the principal character does when Marianne Engel, a beguiling schizophrenic, transports him to a past they supposedly shared together, you will be open to the paradoxes and parallels that run throughout.
In their previous, fourteenth century lives, he was a mercenary felled by a flaming arrow who became a stonemason. She was a novice in the Engelthal monastery; her talents for language found their fullest expression in the stifling Scriptorium. He is now the ex-porn star whose budding career was cut short by a car accident in which he was horribly burned; he becomes a writer telling of a sculptor/temptress whose madness and mastery over stone bring gargoyles to life.
“I absorb the dreams of the stone, and the gargoyles inside tell me what I need to do to free them. They reveal their faces and show me what I must take away to make them whole…It’s like I’m digging a survivor out from underneath the avalanche of time …They’ve been hibernating in the winter of the stone and the spring is in my chisel. If I can carve away the right pieces, the gargoyle comes forth like a flower out of a rocky embankment.”
Of course, she also brings him back to life, subtly but relentlessly chipping away at a cynical and contemptuous veneer.
There is always the story behind the story, the underlying message, the over-arching theme that ties a string of apparently disparate tales together. Characters, at least the main ones, are fully developed. And yet they remain inscrutable. They are hardened, yet vulnerable. They are intertwined, yet separate. They are all gargoyles.
In short, this is a book with a remarkable depth.
Parental Guidance: Unless you are into burn victim physiology and psychology, you might find the book a bit of a struggle for the first 60 pages or so. Just a warning.
Size Matters
Last time, I wrote about two-letter words. I subsequently came across this interesting entry, published back in June 2007 at Amazing Posts, which focused on words considerably longer. In fact the spotlight was on the longest words in the English language.
The longest word ever to appear in the English dictionary is pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis at 45 letters long. This disease, an inflammation of the lungs caused by the inhalation of very fine silica dust, is also known by its shorter name, silicosis.
It is easy to imagine why no one remembers the longest word in second place.
Admittedly, once you get past pneumonoceteracetera, everything else is somewhat anticlimactic. But, for those who enjoy word play, there are a number of other interesting words to pull out on an exceedingly slow night when the only other option is reading Henry James.
Everyone knows that ‘e’ is the letter that appears most often in the English language. Simply because it is there, a number of authors have taken on the challenge of writing entire novels without using the letter ‘e’. The earliest, Gadsby, was penned by Ernest Vincent Wright back in 1939. In 1995, Gilbert Adair published A Void, a translation of George Perec’s French-language mystery, La Disparition. Neither the French nor English version contains the letter ‘e’.
So, down to the bite-sized, the longest English word that does not contain the letter ‘e’ is floccinaucinihilipilification. This one, meaning “the action or habit of estimating as worthless”, weighs in at a welterweight 29 letters.
If, by the way, you think you cannot do much with words like this, you are wrong. Take out a couple of affixes, then add in a couple of new ones and you get new, wonderfully evocative words: floccinaucical (”inconsiderable, trifling”) and floccinaucity (”a matter of small consequence”). You will note that neither contains the letter ‘e’.
Not quite the same challenge, but interesting still are dermatoglyphics, misconjugatedly and uncopyrightable, each 15 letters long, tied for the longest words in which no letter appears more than once.
Aegilops is the longest word with its letters arranged in alphabetical order. Spoonfed is the longest word with its letters arranged in reverse alphabetical order.
Esophagographers, 16 letter long, is the longest word in which each of its letters occurs twice.
And so it goes. And goes and goes, with the longest word in alphabetic order, the longest palindromic word, the longest homophonic anagrams, and – to really stretch the point – the longest words that consist of only letters with ascenders, descenders and dots in lower case (lighttight and hillypilly).
Well, for now, that’s about the size of it.
Two for One
True Scrabble fans know enough legitimate two-letter words to really annoy the casual player. To even the odds ever so slightly, I will list a dozen or so twofers, with definitions.
Not surprisingly, many, like Ti, a woody plant native to the Pacific islands like Samoa and Tahiti, are not your English garden variety words but ones that emerge from the remote corners of our linguistically fertile planet. As you seed the board with these short but sweet exotica, you can show that you are both well-versed and well-traveled.
There are animals, running the full spectrum of the alphabet, from Ai, a South American three-toed sloth, to Zo, which is a Dr. Suess-like cross between a yak and a cow.
For the esoteric, Ba is the eternal spirit in Egyptian mythology. Qi (pronounced chee as in, but different than, tai chi) is the Chinese life force. Another mystical universal force is Od, sometimes manifesting itself in supernatural phenomena. (This, by the way, is not Odd, another universal force manifesting itself in the unnatural behaviour of various aunts on my mother’s side.)
Everyone knows an Em is a printer’s measure, but most don’t know that an En, also a printer’s measure, equals half an Em.
Yes, Fa is a perfume, but it’s also the fourth note in the diationic scale (do re mi fa so…) and perfectly acceptable Scrabble fare. As are Greek letters like Mu, Nu, and Xi. Xi should not be confused with Xu, a Vietnamese coin. Xu, by the way, is also the plural of Xu; you may get called on it.
Another weird one is Gu, a violin played in Shetland, an archipelago off the northeast coast of Scotland. It comes with a bonus: you can also spell it gue and gju.
It’s now time to finish off your frustrated foes. You can continue to bury them bit by bit with your Ko, a Maori digging stick, or cut directly to the chase with a Da, a Burmese knife that would make Crocodile Dundee proud.
When you’ve got dozens of two-letter words down, it’s your choice.
What’s On Your Bookshelf? - Part II
Okay, so you splurged on a library wall of gorgeous antique bookcases that transformed your den, giving it a touch of old world charm. Perhaps an Italian Renaissance-inspired design, made of solid wood in a dark chestnut finish, enriched with antiquing wax and gold painted border highlights. Some are open shelves and some covered by lead pane glass fronts. Oh yeah, and since they run 8 ft. high, you also got a ladder and installed ladder rails for easy sliding.
Displayed prominently on these bookcases are the literary classics. Your Dickens collection, the Russians and, of course, the Complete Works of William Shakespeare. They must be given their due and this means appropriate positioning. Especially those with proper leather binding, fading somewhat from evident use rather than from bleaching in the sun.
What, however, do you do with the weird books, the arcane and the obscure? Do you file Titania’s Book of White Magic alphabetically. Under what subject heading would you fit Browser’s Book of Endings? Where do you put your Tao of Pooh?
In my collection is the small but precious Bizarre Books, compiled by Russell Ash and Brian Lake and published by Pavilion Books (London, 1998). Any number of the titles listed would create havoc with your inner Dewey.
The specialty books are easy to file. It is easy to imagine a strip mall including The Care of Raw Hide Drop Box Loom Pickers; Wall Paintings by Snake Charmers in Tanganyika; European Spoons Before 1700; Locomotive Boiler Explosions (always engrossing, sometimes disturbing); A Toddler’s Guide to the Rubber Industry (Alice in Rubberland?); and the essential Umbrellas and Parts of Umbrellas Except Handles (a Report to the President of the United States).
In keeping with the interests of this blog’s readers, we do offer some madcap literary miscellanea: Selected Themes and Icons from Spanish Literature: Of Beards, Shoes, Cucumbers and Leprosy; Benedictine Maledictions: Liturgical Cursing in Romanesque France; A Compendium of the Biographical Literature on Deceased Entomologists; New Teeth for Old Jaws: Bookselling Spiritualized; An Irishman’s Difficulties with the Dutch Language; and, my favourite, So Your Wife Came Home Speaking in Tongues?
Now, be honest. Would you really try to keep these treasures under wraps or would you have them front and center, a full frontal trove of trivia and tripe for compulsive browsers?
