But first please click on and read I Sing the Body Electric. No, you don't have to read the whole book. It's a collection of short fiction. And this link takes you to just the first part of the first short story "The Kilimanjaro Device," but you'll get-it. This reminds me all over again why I am such a Ray Bradbury fan.
If you read this review first, you will miss the joy of discovery, the ah has, and the satisfaction of getting-it.
Much of Bradbury's fiction has been adapted for the screen -- both great and small. "The Kilimanjaro Device" was an episode on the old Twilight Zone television series. You can find it on Netflix or Amazon Prime, but beware. Twilight Zone is one of those series you can lose a whole evening binge watching. Though I think that watching this story as opposed to reading it, could deprive you of one of its most important facets.
If you've read it before, read it again just for the enjoyment. And then, if you're a writer, read it again analytically.
If I'd read Body Electric before, it was a long time ago and I'd forgotten it. And if it was a long time ago, it was before I had classes with William Bernhardt, so it's safe to say that I did not read it analytically. I may not even have "got-it."
My husband is a voracious reader and watches Barnes and Nobles' Nook sales religiously. He likes free and cheap. Yesterday B&N had I Sing the Body Electric on sale for 99 cents and he told me I should buy it. He knows that I read short fiction as resource material for improving my own writing, and who better to teach me how to write short fiction than Ray Bradbury?
I was just finishing Career of Evil, the third in J. K. Rowling's crime novels written under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith so I put Body Electric on the back burner. I'll soon have a review on Ms. Rowling's Cormoran Strike series.
And finish it I did. Then I had no book to take to bed with me. A good book helps me to go to sleep. (Or keep me awake, as the case may be.) So I turned to Bradbury's I Sing the Body Electric.
** SPOILER ALERT! **
He opens the book with a quote from Walt Whitman. Be still my heart. That is a sure method of hooking me. And the first short story is "The Kilimanjaro Device."
Now, I do not usually read reviews before I read a book, so I was not aware this was a time-machine story. Not that that would have kept me away, it's just that having read The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger, I am automatically prejudiced against anyone's attempt to write time travel. They couldn't possibly come up to her high standards.
(Yes, I know I have lots of irrational prejudices. But isn't that the definition of 'prejudice?' And I know it, so that's why I don't read reviews before I read the story. Think how many good stories I'd miss.)
What was immediately apparent, however, is that "The Kilimanjaro Device" is written in the first person. Another of my prejudices.
Using simplistic, unadorned language, the narrator recounts arriving in the area of Ketchum and Sun Valley, Idaho, after a long road trip. At this point, I was disappointed. This was not the Ray Bradbury I loved.
And then, and then!
The narrator talks about being a 'reader' not a reporter. He's looking for an 'old man.' The old man who wrote 'Michigan stories' and the 'Spanish stories.' The stories about fishing and bull fighting. But he is adamantly not looking for the grave.
Okay, here's the twist. He's looking for Hemingway, who is dead and buried.
And there's another twist as he talks about 'right deaths' and 'wrong deaths.' 'Right graves' and 'wrong graves.'
What he does not say in the story but I know is that in the summer of 1961, Hemingway shot himself to death at his home in Ketchum, Idaho, and was buried there. I was a young teen and I did not yet know that famous writers committed suicide. I'd never heard of Ketchum, Idaho. A 'wrong death' and a 'wrong grave.'
And then Bradbury gives us the surprise.
"At your service," I said.
"And when you get where you're going," said the old man, putting his hand on the door and leaning and then, seeing what he had done, taking his hand away and standing taller to speak to me, "where will you be?"
"January 10, 1954."
"January 10, 1954."
"That's quite a date," he said.
The old truck that our narrator is driving is a time machine.
There is a mountain in Africa named Kilimanjaro, I thought. And on the western slope
of that mountain was once found the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard. No one
has ever explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude.
of that mountain was once found the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard. No one
has ever explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude.
We will put you up on that same slope, I thought, on Kilimanjaro, near the leopard, and
write your name and under it say nobody knew what he was doing here so high, but
here he is. And write the date born and died, and go away down toward the hot summer
grass and let mainly dark warriors and white hunters and swift okapis know the grave.
write your name and under it say nobody knew what he was doing here so high, but
here he is. And write the date born and died, and go away down toward the hot summer
grass and let mainly dark warriors and white hunters and swift okapis know the grave.
Tote up all the "I saids" and "he saids" and the thoughts that we can see and feel and we have Bradbury's best inside joke. He's writing Hemingway!
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