By Alphabet

In which your humble narrator describes a project designed solely to amuse himself in an inexpensive fashion and further comments on Edward Abbey, Reinaldo Arenas and Fidel Castro.

This summer, casting about for something to read, too poor to buy a book I wanted, too lazy to walk three blocks to the library, I picked up the first book from our alphabetized living room shelves. It happened to be Edward Abbey's "Hayduke Lives." I must have gotten it nearly free when I worked at the used bookstore. Boy was it a stinker. It turns out my complete disinterest in the American West that Abbey loved made it a pretty dull read. I have a low tolerance for the moral superiority that people who live in "beautiful" places show toward the rest of us. The literature of the West is streaked through with the assumption that the grandeur of the landscape somehow how reflects the character of its inhabitants. Horse pucky. Go eat at a Perkins in Wyoming and try to tell me about the noble character of the locals.

Thoroughly annoyed with myself for owning such a dull, pedantic book I started to wonder what other turd blossoms lurked on my shelves. So I kept reading, alphabetically any book that I'd never before read. I didn't stop reading other things (I usually have 4-5 books "going" at any given time). This brings me to last night. The Wife was using the computer preventing me from playing a dumb game on Facebook so I was forced to entertain  myself with reading a book. I grabbed the next alphabetical candidate from the shelf: Reinaldo Arena's "The Assault."

Wowee! If I were to describe this charming little tome in one word, I would choose: "scatological." And I'm pretty sure it was even filthier in the original Spanish. Arenas, who fled the Castro regime for Miami presents a horrible totalitarian/collectivist dystopia with a healthy dose of oedipal complex. Narrated by an agent of the regime, an inhuman, merciless man, the novel follows his travels through the countryside in search of his hated mother whom he suspects of being a "whisperer," or enemy of the state. Long story short: lots of traveling,  torture and executions, and then it finally turns out that his mother is the head of the regime so the narrator kills her with his penis. Fun, huh?

Frankly, it was pretty hysterical. I'm certainly not an apologist for Castro. I have no use for the certain type of comfortable, American liberal who idealizes the regime in Cuba. Castro has never been a benevolent dictator. That said, I'm not sure what use Arenas' over-the-top, exaggerated, dystopic horror film, in book form, really serves.