The Catcher in the Rye

In high school, I avoided reading most of the literature we were assigned.  I found a lot of it dull (somehow, I found MacBeth to be rather interesting) and the discussions we had in class about the books even duller.  Without spending a single cent on CliffsNotes (easily half of the high school used the study guides as replacements for doing the actual reading assignmetns), I managed As in my English classes and passed the AP exam, which helped me avoid having to take English classes in college.  Oddly, when I deiced studying Russian in addition to computer science was a good idea in college, I took a Russian literature (the books were English translations, though) class.  I remember that the non-AP English class had to read the Grapes of Wrath my senior year.  That sounded horrible, and I was glad I didn’t have to do that.

I am not sure if the Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger (ISBN: 978-0-316-76917-4) was assigned reading for the regular English class, but it certainly wasn’t for the AP English class, so I never had to read it in high school.  The main character in the book, Holden Caulfield, though, is in high school (well, technically, he’s just been expelled from yet another fancy boarding school), and is struggling with much of what teenagers often contend with, such as a fear of growing up, struggles with making or keeping friends, troubles with figuring out one’s identity, and depression.  The main character is the narrator of the story, which is really just a his train-of-consciousness re-telling of about three days of his life, starting with his having been kicked out of school right before Christmas break, and how he deals with that.  He introduces the reader to some of his teachers, his roommates and dormmates, his sister, a friend from back home, and a few other people he runs into as he tries to avoid going home before he’s supposed to show up at home for Christmas break.  He expresses a lot of negativity for the world and for the people he has contact with, usually because they come across to him as fake.  His rare moments of joy come from his little sister and from other little kids he runs into since they are still innocent and present to the world just who they are, not trying to hide anything or be something they’re not.  He tells his sister that his dream job would be to be a “catcher in the rye,” saving kids running in a rye field toward a cliff from falling off the edge, which is a metaphor for helping people preserve their innocence and lack of “phoniness” (one of his favorite words).

The book was an interesting one, although I would say I had to really push through the first third or so before I felt like had any sense at all of what this kid was about.  His rich, privileged background, combined with his emo outlook and New York street-tough bravado was foreign, complex, and rather off-putting.  Another reason I felt like the book was a slog at times was the insane amount of profane language, easily a dozen profanities per page.  There was also a healthy dose of vulgarity thrown in.  Were this a book a movie script in the 1980s or early 1990s, it would’ve got an R rating.  These days, it probably pulls off a PG-13.  There was also a lot of substance abuse and a handful of sexual references as well as other suggestive scenes.  All of this made me wonder why this book is so commonly assigned in high schools.  The protagonist is a high schooler, but Salinger himself noted that he wrote the novel for an adult audience, and the content is definitely only, as they say, “for mature audiences only.”  I thought the themes explored in the book were interesting, and were things, especially the one about phoniness, even I, now far removed from my teenage years, could relate to in one way or another, and I understand the kind of character the author wanted to portray, but I thought the final product was over the top and detracted from the message of the story.  Remembering my impressionable teenage years, it would’ve been very distracting, and I’m glad I wasn’t exposed to it then.

This work, including all text, photographs, and other original work, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License and is copyrighted © MMXXI John Pruess.

Tower of Secrets

I’m not a big movie watcher, so I’ve never seen a Bond movie and pulp fiction rarely interests me (admittedly, I’ve read the original Bourne books — and liked them better than the movies, of course), but I know that bad-guy Russians, usually affiliated with the KGB play a role in at least some of those movies and a lot of fictional spy thrillers.  It, of course, fits well with the Cold War that wasn’t so much a motif through the 1980s, but real life.  It’s an easy way to capture people’s imaginations and draw them into a story.  What has always been even more intriguing than those stories, though, is real life.  I remember Cuban and Eastern European athletes defecting during international competitions and thought that was brave of them.  Movies like Night Crossing regular people defecting had an even larger impact on me.  These people knew the value of freedom and were willing to risk their lives for it.

Tower of Secrets: A Real Life Spy Thriller by Victor Sheymov (ISBN: 978-0-9858930-4-0) is a story more in line with stories of regular people defecting than athletes, but Sheymov wasn’t exactly a regular guy.  He was an officer in one of the Soviet security agencies, the same KGB that was the subject of so much Western fiction.  The KGB he describes in the book often sounds much more like what one imagines working in the IRS or some other boring bureaucratic organization would be like, but he also talks about the things the KGB is more famous for.  Sheymov described his life abroad as an employee of the Soviet Union, working to protect the Soviets’ state secrets and he described his life at home in the Soviet Union.  I found both of them to be rather interesting portrayals of life.  He tells of both the good and the bad, lending an air of credibility to the work.  Eventually, Sheymov and his wife start to question the system they live in.  This is especially shocking to Sheymov himself because he works as part of the system and some of his initial resistance to going against that system is the result of the privilege it has afforded him and his family.  Finally, though, they come to the realization that whatever positives they get from the communist system don’t outweigh the negatives for themselves, their daughter, and for people around them.  The USSR was pretty locked down, though, especially for someone working for the government.  Sheymov and his wife cooked up a plan to get out, but had to make contact with a Western intelligence agency to make that work.  He chose the Americans and ran a risky operation by himself while on a business trip to Poland, where he disguised himself, hopped out a bathroom window, walked into the American embassy, and then returned to his comrades.  Sometime later, more disguises, a train journey, riding in a car with false spaces under the back seats, and smugglers all played a role in getting the Sheymovs to the West.

I enjoyed reading the book.  I found a few similarities to Next Stop Execution: some good descriptions of everyday Soviet life that grounded the book and made it interesting for those of us who weren’t there and some of the discussions about working for what was the world’s most feared intelligence service were neat to read.  I also found the authors’ egoism to be similar.  This book also suffers from being self-published, so there are more than a handful of typos, which can be kind of distracting.  The story of getting that first contact with the Americans set up and then the plan to get the Sheymovs out of the USSR, though, was gripping stuff and well worth the read.  Just like the book’s subtitle promises, it was just like a good story and less like a memoir.  Sheymov’s discussion of his ideological change was also very interesting and it involved various aspects of life.  He accurately noted that communism promised security and justice, but did so at a great price: freedom, both economic and intellectual.  He also grappled with the knowledge that communism has killed many thousands of people, oddly, in the name of equality.  Socialism, in the end, is built for preventing others from succeeding instead of helping people achieve.  These accurate criticisms of socialism and communism are extremely relevant today and serve as the most powerful of Sheymov’s fun and educational book.

   

This work, including all text, photographs, and other original work, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives 3.0 License and is copyrighted © MMXIV John Pruess.