I remember two occasions when I couldn’t stifle my emotions while reading a book in public. On one of them I was in the cafe at Indigo, before it merged with Chapters. At the time, people could take books from the store into the cafe and read them, then return them to the shelves. I picked up a copy of Bill Bryson’s Neither Here Nor There: Travels in Europe. I started giggling whilst reading the section describing Bryson’s exchange with a hotel clerk in Copenhagen about the multitude of pricey incidentals on his bill. My giggles gradually escalated to cachinnating and I had to cease drinking my coffee, for fear I would spray it everywhere. I finally had to stop reading the book when my cachinnations escalated to full-blown hysterical snorting, for fear I would be escorted from the premises. (Some time after this incident, Indigo ended its policy of allowing customers to take unpurchased books into the cafe. This change was probably due to the high volume of Bill Bryson books that were being damaged.)
The second occasion was on the shinkansen, as I was whisked at high speed to somewhere in Japan. I was reading The Sea and Poison, by Shusaku Endo. I don’t know if there can be said to have been a hierarchy in the horrors of World War II, but if there can, the medical experiments have to be somewhere near the top. Whilst reading a description of the vivisection of an American POW in The Sea and Poison, which involved removing small parts of the man’s lungs over a period of time to discover how much lung tissue could be lost before death ensues, I started crying. The book is fiction, but is based on actual experiments that were done on American soldiers at a hospital in Japan.
I have no problem believing that we are all capable of murder, under certain circumstances. (This week, for example, I have been trying to design a death ray that will silently blast to smithereens any vehicle whose sound system is audible within the walls of my house after 10 p.m.) But abusing and torturing seem like entirely different entities, and I really, really hope we are not all capable of those acts, under any circumstances.
Wow. Powerful, and funny, and disturbing all at once. I hope you are right, but I wonder all the same. So many "normal" people do astonishingly evil things.
ReplyDelete1. I obviously need more Bill Bryson in my life.
ReplyDelete2. I don't think I could read that. I could barely read your depiction. I don't know what brings people to the point at which calculated torture and using living creatures as experimental subjects sounds like a good plan, but I...I just can't. I can't even think of an end of that sentence.
I feel that.
DeleteI think I've only read one Bill Bryson. Need a book that makes me laugh out loud.
ReplyDeleteI am forever haunted by something I read decades ago about the Japanese torturing by ... no, I won't go into it. I'll spare you that. But every so often I am reminded of it. And can't understand how people can do these things to other people.
I don't know Bill, but it's time I introduced him to me. I recently sent Amy Schumer's The Girl With the Lower Back Tattoo to my granddaughter, but I don't know how funny it is yet.
ReplyDeleteI saw a video about a Jewish woman whose family was killed in a WWII concentration camp. She and her identical twin survived because subjects were needed for the Nazi experiments on twins. She and her sister survived to adulthood, but her sister died, probably from something related to the experiments. The thrust of the video was that the woman came to forgive the doctors who did these things to her and her sister. She felt being able to forgive was a good thing, healthy for her, and she was probably right. But I'm fairly certain I wouldn't be able to forgive them. I think some things are unforgivable.
Susan, I read the Schumer book, liked it, but don't remember it well. Her comedy, though, is magnificent.
DeleteI'm glad to hear you liked it. Then Lizzie probably will too.
DeleteBill Bryson does that to me too, but I need to take him in small doses. David Sedaris had me guffawing on an airplane last year. (the audio version of When you are Engulfed in Flames)
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