Purgatorio- Dante  (1321) 
Having finished the Inferno, I’m starting into Purgatorio. While Heaven and Hell are attested to in the Bible, there isn’t really anything about Purgatory. There is one passage in the Bible that could perhaps be taken to refer to something like purgatory, and that’s found in 1 Corinthians 3 

“By the grace God has given me, I laid a foundation as a wise builder, and someone else is building on it. But each one should build with care. 11 For no one can lay any foundation other than the one already laid, which is Jesus Christ. 12 If anyone builds on this foundation using gold, silver, costly stones, wood, hay or straw, 13 their work will be shown for what it is, because the Day will bring it to light. It will be revealed with fire, and the fire will test the quality of each person’s work. 14 If what has been built survives, the builder will receive a reward. 15 If it is burned up, the builder will suffer loss but yet will be saved—even though only as one escaping through the flames.” 

Having been taught in another tradition, I had understood this passage as being symbolic: you works will be tested and shown for what they are. If the work is burned up, the Christian would suffer loss, but the he would still be saved, as one escaping through flames.  
I suppose it would be possible to understand this as a longer process that the believer would have to pass through, but admittedly, it’s a very thin bit of evidence on which to build a doctrine. 
Interestingly enough, historically, the Catholic church didn’t officially include Purgatory into their doctrine until 1274, less than fifty years before Dante wrote his book. So theologically, he has no restrictions on his creativity as to how to portray this new doctrine. 

But while the souls here in purgatory are undergoing trials to purify themselves for heaven, there is all the difference in the world between the first book and this one. There is no chance of change in Hell. The souls there are condemned and there is nothing that can be done. But in Purgatory, the souls are ultimately saved and will be in heaven, so the trials they undergo are purification, not just punishment.  

Canto 1  
Dante and Virgil, having climbed out of Hell find themselves back on the surface of the earth, rejoicing in the view of the daylight and the stars. They are greeted by Cato of Utica (Cato the Younger) who questions how they managed to escape from hell. Virgil explains that Dante is not dead, and he, Virgil, was not condemned to hell proper, but to limbo. He was charged by Beatrice with rescuing Dante from his being lost in life. He attempts to bargain with Cato by mentioning Cato’s wife Martia, who is in Limbo with Virgil. But here we see the first sign of a new paradigm: Cato is not moved by attachments which he held in life; he must now heed the heavenly. This also signals that Virgil, while still Dante’s guide, is out of his depth. Virgil was a resident of hell, and had traveled to its lowest depth one other time. But he has not been to purgatory, nor is he saved. What he knows will not profit him here.  

Cato sends Dante down to the shore to be girded with a reed, as a symbol of humility, and to wash himself of the grime of hell. This is done, and the canto ends. 

Canto 2 
The canto leads off with an elaborate constellation-based way of telling us it was around 6 in the morning, when Virgil and Dante notice a boat quickly approaching the shore. It arrives with an angel as the helmsman and over a hundred newly arrived souls. The souls get on to shore and the boat leaves, stranding the new arrivals. Seeing Dante and Virgil, they ask what to do at that point, and Virgil explains that they too are pilgrims, and unaware of how to proceed. 

Then one of the new arrivals recognizes Dante. Dante’s musician friend Casella. Dante, knowing he had been dead for several months, asks how he has just arrived, and we are given a hint that he wasn’t chosen by the angel right away to cross over. 

Then Dante, explaining he is weary from his journey, asks Casella to sing him a song, since Casella’s singing always refreshed him in life. Casella obliges, and all are standing around listening when Cato rebukes them for delaying their journey. He calls them lazy and tells them to get to the mountain and remove the obstacles that keep the Lord from being revealed to them. At this point, they all head out as quickly as possible, Virgil and Dante included. 

Canto 3 
Anti-Purgatory- the excommunicated 

I should explain that anti- doesn’t mean against, but before here. So there are two groups of souls that Virgil and Dante meet before they enter purgatory proper. 

This canto begins with Virgil being very distraught over Cato’s rebuke. But as the travelers arrive at the base of the mountain, they can see no way up. Then a group of sheep-like souls comes into view. Among them is Manfred, King of Sicily, who had been excommunicated. As he had been mortally wounded in battle, he repented as he lay dying, and was therefore not sentenced to hell, but was among the redeemed. But this group of souls, we infer, are those excommunicated, where we are told they must wait at the base of the mountain for thirty times the length of however long they were excommunicated, unless that time is shortened by prayers of the living.  

There is also a short discussion earlier about the nature of the bodies that the ‘shades’ have, since they don’t cast shadows, and Dante’s hands passed right through them, how is it that they feel anything in this state? Virgil only answers that humans can’t know these things.  

Canto 4 
Anti-Purgatory- the negligent 

This is a confusing and complicated canto, perhaps Dante meant it to be so as to be symbolic with the climb Virgil and Dante were going to have to make. The canto starts off with 12 lines debunking the Platonic theory of three souls. Then he moves to another convoluted description of the sun and constellations in order to tell us the time. 
At this point, the travelers are making their way up the difficult mountain when they take a rest to discuss some of the aforementioned subjects. As Virgil encourages Dante that this climb is most difficult at the beginning, getting easier as they ascend, he encourages Dante to keep going. But then he hears another suggestion that they could sit some more before they move on. They are taken aback by this, but find, on the other side of a rock, a group of the negligent, who waited until late in life to repent. 

The picture painted is of a group of lazy bums, but in fact, it would be pointless for these negligent to attempt to enter before the time allotted, which is apparently as long as each of these waited in life to repent. 

To the Lighthouse- Virginia Woolf  (1927) 
 We’ve all been in group conversations where someone beside yourself is speaking to the group, and your mind is wandering off- perhaps thinking about what you’ll say, perhaps questioning why the speaker is saying what he is saying, perhaps thinking about what someone else is thinking…. perhaps thinking something completely unrelated, or maybe only tangentially related, to the conversation at hand. Well if you were to write down what speaker is saying, and then write down what various others in the group, such as yourself, are thinking, you’d have the first part of this book.  

The first section of the book covers the Ramsay family (mom, dad and 8 kids) in their summer home on the Isle of Skye. They are joined by several friends and there is a dinner party where the aforementioned conversations occur. 

There is very little in the way of a plot, and to be honest, I found myself thinking that if a meteor suddenly hit the lighthouse, killed them all, and then… the end… I would have been happy enough. I didn’t really care about the characters or find much to invest in about their lives. 

The second part is shorter and deals with the changes over the passing of time as several characters die, and the family drifts off. 

The third section sees the guests in the first section regroup ten years later. 

The wikipedia page says the novel investigates the means of perception, attempting to understand people in the act of looking; and examines the context of human relationships and the tumultuous emotional spaces crossed to truly reach another human being. 

The writing is said to be a key example of multiple focalization, and I suppose there is something interesting in the observation that people are constantly dialoging separately within themselves even as they are part of a larger group, but I didn’t find this all that interesting.  

An American Tragedy- Theodore Dreiser  (1925) 
This novel was based on the real-life murder of Grace Brown in 1906. It tells the story of Clyde Griffiths. The story starts with Clyde as a youth of around 14, living with his itinerate preaching family in Kansas City. The father came from a pretty good family, but decided to follow his calling as a preacher. This resulted in moving around a lot, a poor education for the children, and poverty. At 15, Clyde decides he doesn’t want to live this life anymore, and looks for a job in KC. He works in a few places before landing a job as a bellhop in a swanky KC hotel, which exposes him to a different class of people than he had ever been with, and earns him a fair living in tips. But at around 17, while chasing female companionship, he falls for a girl who he believes is above his financial status, but who strings him along for all she can get out of him. Being strung along, he begins to understand that she is using him, but he can’t bring himself to move on. He ends up riding along on a local trip with some other youths, and when the girl comes with, but then shows interest in another guy, he finally understands she isn’t interested. On the way home though, the driver hits and kills a young girl. Clyde flees the scene and has to leave KC. He bounces around a few towns and ends up in Chicago, working at another hotel, where he, purely by chance, meets an uncle from upstate NY who owns a factory and has done pretty well for himself. The uncle, impressed by Clyde’s demeanor and good looks, invites him to a low position at the company. Clyde arrives with every intention to work his way up, but the NY Griffiths aren’t particularly wanting to associate with this poor relation from out west. In particular, the eldest son, Gilbert, roughly the same age, and heir to the business, doesn’t like Clyde at all. It also doesn’t help that Clyde looks a lot like Gilbert, only better looking, and not as arrogant, so having a less abrasive personality.  
At the same time, Clyde’s name lends itself in the minds of other people around the town and in the factory to their imagining that he is more important than he is, and they show him a deference that begins to work on him. He aspires to a much more important role, and at some point, his uncle upgrades him to the position of overseer of a department of ladies. He is told that any relations between himself and one of the girls would be cause for immediate dismissal, but sooner or later, one of them, Roberta Alden, catches his eye. Since most of the girls are convinced that he, being a Griffith, would be a good catch, there is a lot of attention cast his way, and Roberta too becomes enamored. They strike up a relationship, both doing their best to hide things so that neither loses their position. Clyde, being a young man, continues to want more of Roberta, and pressures her to give in to sex. She resists for a while, but as Clyde gets frustrated and starts to question whether he should even stay if he isn’t getting what he wants, Roberta, now fully in love, doesn’t want to lose him and gives in.  

Right about this time, a beautiful society girl, Sondra, who is friends with Bella Griffiths, one of Clyde’s cousins, meets Clyde and, taken by his looks, although knowing he isn’t as rich as the rest of the family, decides to invite Clyde to some of the society parties to get to know others in that circle. Sondra is also motivated a little by her own aversion to Clyde’s cousin, Gilbert, since he is arrogant and won’t acknowledge Sondra. She decides it would be fun to include Clyde in the society circles to tweak Gilbert’s pride. 

But now Clyde is smitten by Sondra, and no longer interested in Roberta. At this point, you can probably guess what happens: Roberta gets pregnant. Clyde tries to find some way of aborting the baby, but medicines he procures don’t work, and he can find no doctor willing to help. He is increasingly distant to Roberta, who begins to understand he is no longer interested, but she is increasingly desperate to avoid the stigma that would come from being an unwed mother.  

Clyde tries to put her off, convince her to go elsewhere to have the baby, but she insists on marriage, and at around 4 months pregnant, lays down an ultimatum that either he wed her, or she will expose him to the town. 

In the meantime, he has fully integrated into Sondra’s circle of friends, and Sondra, the rich, beautiful society girl, falls for him too. He has visions of escaping his own relative poverty and being pulled into the upper echelons of society.  

Clyde then, faced with having to own up to his responsibilities, marry a poor girl, and give up on his dreams of a life in a better society, or find some way to get out of it, no matter how morally reprehensible, lures Roberta up to a lake, and knowing she can’t swim, has every intention of seeing her drown. At the last moment, he struggles with actually doing it, when she upsets the boat they are in and falls in the lake. Clyde could save her, but decides that he will not, since her death would set him free from this situation, and allow him to pursue Sondra freely. 

Of course, this all goes horribly wrong, Roberta’s body is found, Clyde is traced, and charged with murder. At this point, political machinations play a part, with powerful sides having their reasons for prosecuting, or defending, Clyde. But he is eventually sentenced to death and is executed. 

Beyond being a crime story, the cover says it’s a “devastating commentary on the American dream”. Perhaps I have a different take on what that means, but I do guess for a lot of people, the American dream is a single family home with a white picket fence, two kids and a dog, etc. In other words, it’s essentially a materialistic expectation about what life in America will provide for us. Clyde’s desire is for material improvement. He wants to divest himself of the poverty his family experienced as preachers, recognizing it would not provide him with material benefits that others had, and seeing no benefits with it at all. His work as a bellhop introduced him to possibilities, if he could somehow manage to get into that world. And his uncle, and the name Griffith that was powerful in his NY branch of the family, gave him a way in to a place where material benefits would happen.  

But this desire led to a ruthlessness, a callousness with regard to Roberta. She, of course, saw him as a way out of her own poverty, while he came to see her as a drag on his own prospects. It never seemed to dawn on him that his own attachment to Sondra might be seen the same way by those “above” him. And of course, her family had warned her against attachment with him. When the trial broke, she was nowhere to be found, and even though the novel tells us she felt bad for him, she couldn’t risk her or her family’s honor to be associated with such disgrace.  

I certainly don’t believe this longing for social upgrade is particularly “American”, so that it would be an indictment of the “American” dream per se. What is unsaid is that at least in America, social upward mobility is a distinct possibility. It’s not easy, and likely not even probable in most cases, but it is certainly available with hard work and luck.  

Stalin: Waiting For Hitler 1929-1941- Stephen Kotkin  (2017) 
This the second volume of a three volume set on the life of Stalin. But because of the absolutely immense role he played in the first decades of the Soviet Union and their implementation of communism, this bio is an in-depth look at how communism itself worked. 

The earlier part of the book is concerned with the famine that arose out of Stalin’s insistence on forced collectivization. This insistence on realizing Marx’s goal of abolishing private property didn’t go without a fight. Stalin was committed to it though since it was the goal of socialism. In doing so, he forced the peasants into slave labor. The promise the Bolsheviks gave to the peasants was that in overthrowing the Tsar, they would confiscate the land from the Kulaks (landowners), and the peasants would get the land. That wasn’t exactly true… what the Bolsheviks meant was that the state would get the land, and then the state would organize the labor, 

Eventually, they caved and accepted their enslavement, but not before the process had ushered about widespread famine that killed tens of millions 

Then the Red Terror, the mass murder campaign Stalin invoked in the name of rooting out right deviations, Trotskyites, and ‘wreckers’, basically anyone who contradicted him. Amazingly, he managed to murder over a million people between 1937-38, just absolutely decimating the leadership of the Soviet Union across every sector. It’s kind of amazing that they survived at all, but it had an adverse effect on the society at large, rendering them much less productive than they would have been if they were working for their own advancement rather than the claimed advancement of society at large.  

The last part of the book deals with the buildup to WWII. Stalin attempted to understand the geopolitical forces at play in Germany, Spain, China and Japan, Britain and France. Sometimes he blundered badly, other times he outmaneuvered his opponents.  

Stalin saw everything through a Marxist-Leninist lens though. He thought of political relationships in terms of the advancement of socialism, or the opposition and attempted encirclement of the USSR by the capitalists. He threw himself in with the Nazis, supposedly his mortal enemies, in an attempt to obtain much needed technological development for arms and industrialization, in exchange for grain and supplies to the voracious Nazi war machine. But this will end in the inevitable betrayal. 

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter: Carson McCullers  (1940) 
This novel covers the inhabitants of a mid-sized Georgia town in the 1930s, who open up about their lives to a deaf-mute named John Singer.  There are four main characters the book focuses on: Spiros Antonapoulos, another deaf-mute with whom Singer shares a room, until Spiros is institutionalized after a mental breakdown. Singer visits Antonapoulos in the asylum, bringing him nice presents, but Antonapoulos himself is only interested in eating. He is intensely fat and only concerned about feeding himself. 

Margaret “Mick” Kelly, a young teenage tomboy girl who wants to think of herself as an individualist who stands apart. Mick wants to study music, but doesn’t have the means. 
Biff Brannon, the owner of a bar-restaurant. Biff sympathizes with the other characters, who he knows, but fails to really understand them. 

Dr. Benedict Mady Copeland, a black physician who is isolated from his family because of his desire to see them improve themselves, though they show no interest in it at all. He harbors an intense resentment against the white society around him. 

Jake Blount, an alcoholic wannabe labor agitator disgusted with his inability to stir people to action. 

The novel is said to explore themes of loneliness and isolation, and people’s attempts to find their place in society. McCullers herself said that she wanted to give her characters a scenario, found through their communication with the deaf-mute Singer, where they would reveal their innermost secrets.  

Some people see the characters are symbolizing segments of society, and in so doing, speaking to political problems in American society. I don’t know that the author intended that.