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For a variety of reasons, not the least of which is my middle daughter graduating high school yesterday and us leaving today for her to register for college in Nebraska, I seem to have been hearing a lot about purpose lately. For me, purpose is shorthand for “What do you really want to be when you grow up?” I’ve told my kids for years that I still don’t know the answer to that question. And that’s far more true than one might believe.
But trying to answer that question seems more difficult as time goes on. One of the things I think makes it difficult is passion, or a lack of it. It seems that some or all passions have a tendency to burn themselves out. At least that’s been my experience and I preume/hope that it is more common than unique.
When I first started writing for newspapers a few decades ago, it was in sports. I truly had a passion for it. My greatest desire was to be a sportswriter or sports editor. Today, sports largely bore me, except for girls volleyball and hockey, two sports to which my first exposure came in the last decade.
After several years writing sports, a college compatriot I admired led me to a passion for political and government affairs reporting. I grew to love it and wanted nothing more than to be a political reporter. I accomplished that goal and ending up covering presidential campaign appearances, the state legislature and political campaigns. Today, I largely abhor politics and the state of political discourse.
Political/public affairs reporting did, though, lead me to an interest in the law, a field with which I unquestionably have a love-hate relationship. I’ve had the opportunity to practice in areas I enjoyed and had a strong and caring group of partners for support. Yet nearly 21 years into the profession, the flame of passion has greatly diminished for certain practice areas and for a variety of reasons.
But what’s a 50-year-old guy with one kid in college, one starting in the fall and another starting in three years going to do? While it would be tempting to follow other passions, that tain’t necessarily feasible. I certainly don’t think I can survive writing book reviews. In fact, if you note, even though that combines two of my favorite things — reading books and writing — some of that desire has burned out a bit. Reading a book you’re going to review just isn’t the same as reading a book for the pure joy of it.
Still, consistent with my avowed new attitude, I am pursuing what I hope becomes a new passion. Late last year, our law firm decided to develop a practice in a field of law in which we have never really been involved. I volunteered to be the point man and learn what I am finding to be an arcane, extremely broad and highly complex specialty. Is it courage, foolishness or simply part of a search for passion? Still, there aren’t very many places where someone can strike off on and explore an entirely new direction after 20 years on the job and be supported in doing so.
I think I’m learning that if passion starts to fade, you can’t sit and bemoan that, something I have had a tendency to do. I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up — but I’m also starting to think a flame of passion is being ignited in this new endeavor. So, it certainly doesn’t bother me when my kids say they haven’t figured out their vocation or purpose. I think the underlying message is to do what you love — until you find something you love more.
“Maturity,” Bokonon tells us, “is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter can be said to remedy anything.”
Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle
Writers, like other artists, do not create in a vacuum. Rather, creation often comes by accretion, building on ideas of others to strike out in new or different directions. Ian McDonald’s Brasyl is a marvelous example of such synthesis.
Each chapter contains three storylines set in past, present and future Brazils. Not only does McDonald give us a flavor for life in each period, he links them in unexpected and striking ways. Here, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness meets The Matrix, shamanistic perception meets quantum physics, and historical fiction meets cyberpunk.
The story begins in May 2006 with Marcelina Hoffman, a reality show producer for a Brazilian national television network. Her latest idea is to create a television trial for Brazil’s goalie who let in the winning goal when the Brazilian national soccer team lost the 1950 World Cup final in Rio de Janeiro. In our reality, the goalie, Barbosa, died in 2000, having been reviled by many Brazilians since the loss of that game. In Hoffman’s Brazil, Barbosa is still alive and her search for him leads her on a frightening and fantastic journey into the multiverses of quantum mechanics.
There is more of a cyberpunk edge to the second concomitant story. It is set in a Brazil of 2032, a world in which radio frequency ID tags and surveillance are omnipresent. The cyberpunk feel comes from a group of “quantumeiros,” hackers who combat government surveillance and are on the run with their own quantum computers. Edson Jesus Oliveira de Freitas is the bisexual owner of a second-rate talent agency who seeks respectability but still has plenty of street smarts and contacts with some of the extralegal elements of São Paulo. He falls in love with Fia, a quantum physicist who is part of the quantumeiros. When what looks to be Fia reappears after Edson sees her dead following a government attack on the hackers’ truck, he, too, is led into the rabbit hole of multiverses.
The third story focuses on Father Luis Quinn, an Irish-born Jesuit sent to Brazil in 1732 as an admonitory from Portugal. His task is to go up the Rio Negro in the northern interior of the country, the world’s largest blackwater river, in search of Father Diego Gonçalves. Gonçalves is a Jesuit who has begun to set up his own empire among the natives, one that may also be spreading its own form of religion. Much like Captain Willard in Apocalypse Now, Father Quinn’s task is to locate Gonçalves and “restore him to the discipline of the Order.” Quinn is given “full executive authority” in his assignment, a phrase that would include, in today’s parlance, terminating Gonçalves with extreme prejudice. His more mystical immersion in the multiverses also resonates in the other timelines.
Despite its relatively short length (less than 350 pages for the story itself), McDonald does not give short shrift to any of his ideas. Moreover, he takes his time revealing the quantum connection among the three timelines. This is not wasted time. Instead, the British author creates a real sense of place for each tale, one that may not be fundamental to the premise but which creates the structural frame for it. And the ultimate premise is one that blurs the lines between mysticism and science and between reality and nonexistence.
While McDonald does a good job explaining the quantum mechanics that beget the ultimate premise, that doesn’t mean a reader doesn’t have to do a bit of work. Brasyl uses a variety of Brazilian terms, slang and ideas that will send any attentive reader to the Internet to research, particularly those of us who evidently are not attentive enough to find the glossary in the back of the book until we got to that page. Even then, there’s a variety of terms and concepts the glossary does not cover. (McDonald also displays the role of music in the novel by including a playlist of 20 songs by Brazilian artists.) While some may be critical of an approach that might send the reader outside the four corners of the written page, the language is essential to creating the sense of person and place in each of the timelines. Besides, who ever said you shouldn’t actually learn about another culture in reading a science fiction novel?
McDonald’s last novel, River of Gods, portrayed Indian society in 2047. It earned nominations for both the 2005 Hugo Award and the 2005 Arthur C. Clarke Award, given for the best science fiction novel published in the United Kingdom. Not only should his deft touch and vision of multiverses earn Brasyl those nominations again, no one should be surprised if it earns him the awards themselves.
Humankind cannot stand too much reality.
Ian McDonald, Brasyl
- I’m not sure who comes up with these things but since today is Bob Dylan’s birthday is is also apparently Talk Like Bob Dylan Day. (Via.)
- Does anyone else find it somewhat disheartening that more bachelor’s degrees are awarded every year in Parks, Recreation, Leisure, and Fitness Studies than in all foreign languages and literatures combined? (Via.)
- I’m curious. Given the fact the Bush Administration is backing it, what is it about the immigration reform bill that leads John Thune to oppose it? I’m not saying he’s wrong, I just find it an interesting issue to lead him to break rank.
- On a semi-political note, it looks like Microsoft, Google and the government contribute to the reason why Philip K. Dick’s writing, recently described as visions of “paranoia, fear and psychological imprisonment,” remain relevant today.
- The NHL and NBC pulled a “Heidi” last Saturday afternoon. The Buffalo Sabres and Ottawa Senators were playing in the fifth game of the Eastern Conference finals. An Ottawa win would send it to the Stanley Cup finals. The game goes into overtime. Does NBC show the overtime? No, it goes to an hour or more of PRE-race coverage of the Preakness. The overtime was over long before the horse race started. I’ve e-mailed the NHL, NBC and KDLT about my displeasure, although fortunately Versus carried the overtime and I was lucky enough to check there when I realized NBC had given hockey fans the middle finger.
In a total war we have to keep people under constant surveillance.
“Breakfast at Twilight,” Philip K. Dick,
We Can Remember It for You Wholesale
Today is my 26th wedding anniversary. As I’ve indicated before, I would not survive were it not for the woman who has been the best part of my life. And while perhaps it’s becoming too routinized, she will once again today receive a shipment of tropical flowers from her “happy place” (Hawaii) and we will go out for dinner sans children and likely make a stop at the local bookseller. It may sound boring but I personally think it speaks volumes when a couple still finds great pleasure in just being together.
Yet today’s celebration is tinged with sadness. We received confirmation last evening that our 12-year-old chocolate lab, Maggie, has lymphoma. Untreated, life expectancy is a few weeks and, at best, we can give her maybe 12 months with a 12+ week chemotherapy program. While we certainly won’t leave her totally untreated, we, as a family, are trying to weight the benefits, risks and quality of life issues associated with putting a dog that age through twice weekly trips to the vet for treatment, some of which will require day-long stays for IV infusion of the chemo drugs. Although I’ve had labs most of my life, Maggie has been with us for the vast majority of our children’s lives and for a quarter of mine and my wife’s. Thus, this will be a very difficult family decision.
I’m guessing Maggie will be getting “take out” from our anniversary dinner.
There are three faithful friends — an old wife, an old dog, and ready money.
Ben Franklin
Richard Schickel, film critic for Time magazine and “a frequent book reviewer” for the L.A. Times, uses that newspaper’s op-ed pages to launch the latest salvo in the apparently escalating war between print book reviewers and those, like me, who review online. Here’s the part I find most offensive:
Let me put this bluntly, in language even a busy blogger can understand: Criticism — and its humble cousin, reviewing — is not a democratic activity. It is, or should be, an elite enterprise, ideally undertaken by individuals who bring something to the party beyond their hasty, instinctive opinions of a book (or any other cultural object).
Ooh, “an elite enterprise.” Sorry, I don’t think you have to be a critic for a newspaper or magazine or a member of the literati to “bring something to the party.” To quote a blogger for Britain’s The Guardian, “It is daft to pit print against blog when it is what is said and the quality of thought that matters.”
There’s so much else wrong with the op-ed piece but for now I am going to defer to Scott Esposito’s excellent deconstruction of it.
I don’t believe in elitism. I don’t think the audience is this dumb person lower than me. I am the audience.
Quentin Tarantino, New York Times Magazine, Nov. 16, 1997
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