The Smartest Book in the World

by Greg Proops

  The Master and Margarita

  Manuscripts don’t burn.

  —Mikhail Bulgakov (1891–1940)

  * * *

  Moscow goes crazy when the devil appears with a talking cat.

  * * *

  Bulgakov was first a doctor who was horribly injured in WWI and became a morphine addict. He joined the White Army but was forced to be a physician for all sides in the Communist Revolution. He then became a journalist, later moving to Moscow, and finally a dissident playwright. His plays were popular, but the Communist powers were always banning him. Except, most extraordinarily, the dictator and genocidal strongman Josef Stalin. Stalin loved his work and said of him that he was above labels like left and right. The secret police interrogated him and confiscated his work. Desperate and broke and unable to get his plays produced, he wrote Stalin and begged, “Let me out of the Soviet Union, or restore my work at the theaters.” Stalin actually phoned him, which must have been startling, and got him a job at a small theater. Bulgakov married his third wife, Yelena Shilovskaya, and she is the inspiration for Margarita in the novel. In the novel, Margarita makes a deal with the devil to be with her beloved, the Master, who is in an institution where he believes his lengthy book has been burned. In the end, we find out a truth about manuscripts. Originally written before Bulgakov’s early death in 1940, the book was finally released in two parts in the ’60s. Marianne Faithfull got hip to it and gave it to her boyfriend, Mick Jagger, who ran out and wrote “Sympathy for the Devil” after reading it. This may be the most popular Russian novel of all time.

  After Claude

  There are times when I’d rather converse with a crazed mugger than reason with myself.

  —Iris Owens (1929–2008)

  * * *

  Starts with the line, “I left Claude, the French rat.” Then we are off to the madhouse. Snarking jacket required.

  * * *

  Iris Owens went to Barnard and then moved to Paris, where she took up with Scottish Beat writer Alexander Trocchi. She wrote kinky art porn under the name Harriet Daimler. She had loads of admirers, such as Beckett, as she was witty and sexy, but outside of erotica, she simply could not be bothered to write. Prodded to pen this frenzied short novel, she hated her publisher and only wrote one other book. She said about herself, “I was very involved in being an elegant failure.”

  Heart of Darkness

  There is a taint of death, a flavor of mortality in lies—which is exactly what I hate and detest in the world—what I want to forget.

  —Joseph Conrad (1857–1924)

  * * *

  Mayhem in colonial Africa ensues when a corporate underling is sent up a steamy jungle river to stop a crazed boss.

  * * *

  Joseph Conrad was born into a Polish family when Russia was dominating Poland. His dissident parents were forced into exile in frosty Russia, where they subsequently died. Conrad was then raised from twelve by his kindly uncle, who had him tutored in Latin, Greek, geography, and such. Young Joseph was an impatient student who vowed to sail the world and see Africa. His uncle approved of him becoming a seaman, as it would help him avoid being pressed into the Russian service. He sailed with the French, was a smuggler and gunrunner, and tried to kill himself rather than face a gambling debt he could not pay. He later joined the British merchant service, where he changed his name to Joseph Conrad. Plagued with depression and gout, he steered a paddle steamboat down the Congo for the Belgians and saw firsthand what the colonial powers were doing away from the judgmental prying eyes of “civilization.” This novel is disturbing and haunting and controversial well after Conrad’s day. The book was published in 1899. In 1975, Chinua Achebe, the noted Nigerian novelist and educator, gave a lecture at the University of Massachusetts called “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness” in which he called Conrad “a thoroughgoing racist.” Achebe says Conrad is a good writer, but “Although he’s writing good sentences, he’s also writing about a people, and their life. And he says about these people that they are rudimentary souls. . . . The Africans are the rudimentaries, and then on top are the good whites. Now I don’t accept that, as a basis for . . . as a basis for anything.” You make up your own mind. The trip down the river to find unhinged corporate despot and jungle kingpin Mr. Kurtz is unique. You will remember Conrad’s evocation of lonely madness.

  The Feverhead

  Unfortunately your letter crossed with mine.

  —Wolfgang Bauer (1941–2005)

  * * *

  Hilariously absurd convoluted novel about something or nothing.

  * * *

  Bauer was an Austrian playwright and a young one. At twenty, he had his first play, Der Schweinetransport, or The Pig Transport, produced. Bauer drank like a fish and smoked like a wildfire and wrote loads of plays. It is he who coined the term Theater of the Absurd. Bauer deals in the surreal and makes little to no effort to help you along. His first hit was Magic Afternoon, the tale of bored kids who go wild with violence to alleviate their boredom. The conservative Austrians were not loving him and labeled him an enfant terrible and later an experimental playwright. Bauer would have none of it and did his own thing. The Feverhead is his only novel. Good luck. By the way, it is laugh-out-loud funny.

  The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll

  When I’m on land, I suffer a kind of restlessness, a frustrating sense of limitation verging on asphyxia. It disappears, though, as soon as I walk up the gangplank of the ship that will take me on one of those extraordinary voyages where life lies in wait like a hungry she-wolf.

  —Álvaro Mutis (1923–2013)

  * * *

  Heart of Darkness with drinking and ghosts and sex.

  * * *

  Mutis is surely within the Latin literature tradition, but he loved Proust and Dickens, and his identity is mixed in with his dreams and failures. He imagined the character when he was nineteen and finished the series in his sixties, when it was first published. Mutis was a rich kid who shuttled between Belgium and his grandfather’s plantation. He was a salesman of TV shows for Hollywood studios and did the voiceover for The Untouchables for all of Latin America. He spent years of his life working as the PR guy for Colombian Standard Oil, riding up rivers and ending up in Mexico where, over the misallotment of funds he claims he was using to help friends in danger from Rojas Pinilla’s military dictatorship, he was chucked in jail for more than a year. This, Mutis claimed, was the most important chapter of his life: “And there is one thing you learn in prison, and I passed it on to Maqroll, and that is you don’t judge, you don’t say, that guy committed a terrible crime against his family, so I can’t be his friend. No, in a place like that one coexists. The judging is done by the judges on the outside.”

  Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

  He who ruled scent ruled the hearts of men.

  —Patrick Süskind (1949–)

  * * *

  Super-creepy, demented perfumer wreaks havoc and homicide in Romantic eighteenth-century France.

  * * *

  Süskind is an odd sort of genius. He is a playwright, history student, linguist, TV writer, novelist, and would-be musician, but something was wrong with his hands. He moved to Paris, where he was supported by his parents, and studied in France, where he traveled through the perfume-making region gathering material for what would become Perfume. His first play, The Double Bass, is a monologue by the bass player, who is an ancillary player in the orchestra and in his own life. It was rejected for publication a bunch of times until it became a hit play. He then wrote Perfume, which was a worldwide smash bestseller and a strenuously mediocre movie. He started winning awards and just as quickly rejecting them. He went on to collaborate on two popular German TV shows but has not published a book in years. Personal and always an outsider, Süskind is funny and horrid and poignant.

  The Manuscript Found in Saragossa

  It is not science which leads to unbelief but rather ignorance. The ignorant man t
hinks he understands something provided that he sees it every day. The natural philosopher walks amid enigmas, always striving to understand and always half-understanding. He learns to believe what he does not understand, and that is a step on the road to faith.

  —Jan Potocki (1761–1815)

  * * *

  Hanged man spins a web of overlapping tales of sex and magic.

  * * *

  The themes in Saragossa reflect Potocki’s own ceaseless inquisitiveness. Sex, magic, revolution, secret societies, philosophy, and the supernatural. Count Potocki was raised wealthy and learned eight languages, traveled the world, and studied everyone and everywhere he went. He met and hired Osman, his valet, in Turkey and began wearing a fez. Potocki sailed with the Knights of Malta against the Barbary pirates and led expeditions for Tsar Alexander. A Freemason and cohort of the occultist Cagliostro, he was the first Polish person to fly in a balloon, where he was joined by Osman and his dog Lulu. Purported to have helped start the French Revolution while he was frequenting the salons and secret places in Paris. He married twice; the mother of his second wife, Princess Julia Lubomirska, founded the Łańcut vodka distillery, which is still distilling. He suffered from melancholia, which we call depression. He split for his castle in Poland. Convinced he was a werewolf, he had for years been filing a silver knob shaped like a strawberry on top of a sugar bowl his mother had given him into a bullet. He had the bullet blessed by the castle priest and shot himself in the head. It is exhausting simply reading about his adventurous world. His life is as unbelievable and outrageous as this fabulous testament to his deep knowledge and crazed imagination.

  Chéri

  Curious how people can go on doing the same thing day after day!

  —Colette (1873–1954)

  * * *

  In sexy Belle Époque Paris, a wise, aging courtesan and a young louche rake find sex, love, and bien sûr plenty of misery.

  * * *

  Colette’s life is a novel. In fact, she wrote many novels about her amazing life. From the nineteenth century to the age of television, Colette got it on and got it done. She is the antithesis of her famous line: “People who are perfectly sane and happy don’t make good literature, alas.” She is the first Woman to be given a state funeral in France. She discovered Audrey Hepburn and put her in Gigi. She turned her husband’s estate into a hospital in WWI and was awarded a Chevalier of the Légion d’honneur. She performed in music halls and did a scandalous act that had girl-girl kissing, which caused a riot that the police had to quell. Colette helped Jews during WWII and hid her Jewish husband in the attic. She was a noted bisexual, had an affair with her stepson, wrote an opera with Ravel, and was buried with honors amongst the geniuses at Père Lachaise Cemetery. She wrote spicy stories about people who had spicy sex, something she was a spicy expert on. Colette lived long enough to attend a documentary of her own life, where she quipped, “What a wonderful life I’ve had.” We should all experience the scope of love and lusts and war that Colette endured and persevered through. But we don’t have the energy.

  Nightwood

  And must I, perchance, like careful writers, guard myself against the conclusions of my readers?

  —Djuna Barnes (1892–1982)

  * * *

  You bloody tell me.

  * * *

  Djuna Barnes’s lifetime spans the twentieth century. Born in the 1890s to decidedly weird parents and a grandmother, she is the ultimate bohemian. Wald, her father, believed in free love and polygamy. Djuna had to work to help her family make ends meet. They also abused her sexually. She split to Greenwich Village to study art. She walked into the offices of the Brooklyn Eagle and said, “I can draw and write, and you’d be a fool not to hire me.” They made her a reporter. Djuna did first-person reporting, features, news stories, interviews, theatrical reviews, and her own illustrations for every paper in New York. In 1914, she did an article with photographs for the New York World magazine called “How It Feels to Be Forcibly Fed” when lots of Women suffragettes were on hunger strikes and were being force-fed. Waterboarding, anyone? She moved to Paris and interviewed James Joyce; she wrote plays, had affairs with men and Women; she was the life of the biggest party in that most amazing of places, Paris, during the 1920s, of which Gertrude Stein said, “Paris was the place that suited us who were to create the twentieth century art and literature.” Djuna Barnes wrote Nightwood after breaking up with the American sculptor Thelma Wood. She was staying out in the country at a house the residents called “Hangover Hall” that was being rented by famous art patron Peggy Guggenheim. She finished the book, and the poet Emily Coleman gave it to T. S. Eliot, the eminent poet and editor who was running Faber and Faber. He championed the book and wrote the foreword, but it was never a hit. She was forced back to New York, where she lived for another forty years, drinking and writing her revenge play about her family, The Antiphon.

  SMARTEST BOOK BASEBALL TEAM III

  All-Time Controversial Team

  Owner: GEORGE STEINBRENNER (1930–2010)

  Steinbrenner was convicted of perjury and was fined and suspended. He was the most meddlesome owner of all time, second-guessed his managers, coaches, players, and the league. He hired and fired his perennial manager and sparring partner Billy Martin five times. Did everything but put on a uniform and run onto the field. He had winning teams but made paying the most for a team the standard, driving the small markets to distraction. No right-thinking human would root for him. That means you, Yankee fans.

  Manager: JOHN JOSEPH McGRAW (1873–1934)

  Muggsy was an asshole. To be fair, he lost his family to epidemics and his first wife to a ruptured appendix. He grew up rough and unloved. He did not seek out love later, especially from fans or the league. He cheated and baited umpires and regularly consorted with gamblers. As a player, he was the dirtiest in the league in a time when baseball was never more violent. Grabbing opposing players’ belts to keep them from running, stamping on umpires’ feet, swearing at the fans. As a manager, he screamed at players, fans, league officials, and had a special hatred for umpires and they for him. When he retired, his last act was to file a complaint with the league about a decision. “The main thing,” he said, “is to win.” Ten pennants in three decades. A zillion enemies. Tellingly, after his death, his wife found a list of black players he had wanted on his team.

  Third Base Coach: ALFRED “BILLY” MARTIN (1928–1989)

  Billy Martin was a country-music-loving maniac and manager of the Yankees five different times. Made every team win. Made every player leery. Made every reporter scared. He once rabbit-punched his own pitcher while managing the A’s. Died drunk in his pickup truck on an icy road. We think.

  Catcher: THURMAN MUNSON (1947–1979)

  Mustachioed and obstreperous, Munson was a main feature of the Bronx Zoo Yankees of the ’70s. He played old-time baseball, blocking the plate and spitting. The Yankees did not want him to fly his private plane, but he did anyway. He crashed. He is shouting “horseshit” from heaven.

  First Base: HAL CHASE (1883–1947)

  Chase was a tall, good-looking, talented hitter and a great fielder, but he spent all his time cheating and thinking of ways to make money doing it. He was allowed to stick around for years and went from team to team as a cancer. He was especially vile in his appraisal of honest players. He knew about the gamblers’ fix in the 1919 World Series and was finally chucked out when he was about done. He was unrepentant. A real black spot on the game. Even counting the owners.

  Backup First Base: STEVE GARVEY (1948–)

  Garvey had a junior high school named after him while he was active. No other player has enjoyed that honor. Handsome and Mr. All-American. Later turned out he had babies with more than eight Women, most of whom he was not married to. So the junior high came in handy.

  Second Base: ROGERS HORNSBY SR. (1896–1963)

  Hornsby refused to go to the movies ’cause it would hurt his batting eye. Which is bad enough, but he
was also a verified racist and hated by teammates and owners alike. Batted .400 three times, managed several teams, and was a supremely honest announcer, as he would openly say whom he did not like. Impossible man. Great hitter.

  Shortstop: LEO DUROCHER (1905–1991)

  When Durocher was a rookie on the Murderers’ Row Yankees, Ruth accused him of stealing his watch. He went on to the Gas House Gang Cardinals of the Depression, and on that team of miscreants was so abusive he earned his nickname “The Lip.” Suspended for consorting with criminals. He chased broads and traveled with several trunks of tailor-made clothes. A real old-fashioned loudmouth. “Nice guys finish last” is his baseball epitaph. He gave Willie Mays his chance and put down a racist insurrection when he managed Brooklyn. He did not finish last.