Close Call With Kitchen Floor Gives Me Pause

 Early in the Morning od Jun e 11th, on which my late mother would be turning 86, while chasing down a roach before heading to the back of the house,, I lost my balance and collided, nose-first, with the hard kitchen floor. At first I was convinced that a tooth had been broken, but the effect was to violenty twist the cartilage of my nose, bringing on some scary, acute nosebleed before the needed clotting set in. Melissa quickly drove my sorry ass down to the UFHealh Emergency room on  NW 39th Avenue.    After my session there, I returned home and slept off the rest o the morning, grateful to God for His divine protection during that time of my personal foolishness that I hope I learned something important from.  The rest of the day saw me being much more careful with my movements while honoring my wonderful mother's memory..Now onward to June 12th..    

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Considering Fitness and Brain Cancer this Very Early Morning

 Praise the Lord and Melissa, since last October when she insisted I go to tht NW 39th Avenue UF Health emergency roombecause of headaches and incoherent behavior, resulting in emergency extensive brain surgery leading to an aggressive brain cancer diagnosis, chemotherapy and radiation. I've been enthusiastic and prompt about accepting my oncologists' prescribed treatment plans. T o be sure, there have been some side effects from all this, including a lowered level o cardiovascular physical fitness that has limited my endurance in general life, especially with regard to Saturday morning Parkrun 5K events. Last Saturday morning I finished walking my first full 5k since January 10th, and This coming event, come rain or shine, promises to be another successful finish.  I like to keep an optimistic perspective on my health and fitness...yet I feel that a  bomb was randomly dropped on me just to thoroughly disrupt my life and hopes for a future self,alive and thriving on this Earth at my ageof 69.  I've heard from doctors and a nurse practitioner doleful predictions of just a few months more life expectancy for myself due to past rapidly growing gbm malignant tumors...will they start up again, escalating to another crisis?  This spring and summer, if I am assiduous in my training and careful about hydration and recovery, promises me a lot of progress with running strength and walking power and endurance, enough to successfully handle upcoming long distance races... including those run by the Florida Track Club, not just the Parkrun organization.  I know that, going through the tragedy of my son Will's passing in 2024, i was then in sound physical shape if you account for my cancer alarms starting to go off.  I know that glioblastoma can come back, and my UF Health physicians need some close consulting in case they decide to embark on a path of further treatments, which could well entail more surgery.. the idea is to fight this scourge and not just survive, but to thrive.  Well, it looks like the back yard is calling me out to run like Martinus Evans.  Gradually  building back up my time spent running (slowly) sounds like a good idea...This morning I arose between 3:30 and 4, and I ran-in-place in the living room for some 16 minutes...then I brewed some coffee and wrote this.  Look like I'll be returning to theback of the house soon, agitating my sweet Peewee Daisy in the process...

Support Groups, Fight Club and Grief

When I was nine, I was going to a brand-new public school: Nova Blanche Forman Elementary School, known then more commonly and simply as Nova Elementary.  Over time I made a few friends out there in Davie, cowboy country in south Florida.  One day a few of us got together and informally established our own fight club, transforming into a sport and ritual an activity usually reserved for bullies and angry kids.  Surprisingly, it lasted longer than you might think, although with my ribs poking through my chest...making me look like a concentration camp survivor...I quickly got tired of the good-natured blows that naturally would come my way.  So I totally got the meaning behind the concept of an adult fight club, presented with such force in that 1999 same-titled movie. My son Will revealed, though, that this movie went down into a rabbit hole of plot twists and deeper meaning, so one evening I began to watch it...from the beginning.  Presented in the first person, the narrator...played by Edward Norton...is suffering from extreme insomnia stemming from his depression about his mundane, boring life.  He hits upon the strategy of participating in support groups to cure his insomnia, even though he usually doesn't have any connection with the groups' themes.  So my exposure to support groups, along with the way they go around in a circle during discussion time with the members spilling their hearts out, began in full earnest with this movie.  Earlier this evening I attended a "grief care" support group presented at a local church...Melissa suggested it.  I'm not sure what I see myself getting from it, but there I am, within this group.  We're committed to anonymity about the people in it as well as the specific stories told. Had I still been working and not retired like I did, I'd have the perfect excuse for avoiding it...I just DON'T LIKE support groups.  Earlier I mentioned that Will was the one who told me about the movie Fight Club: his recent passing is the core reason behind this support group having me "in" it.  Like the protagonist Jake Epping in Stephen King's wonderful novel 11/22/63, I am not a crying man by nature...although the tears are often simmering just under the surface.  I just never thought of life as being endless: it's mortal, with our life spans on Earth bracketed between the year of our birth and that of our deaths.  This mortal physical body that goes by the name William "Bill" "Billy" Irwin belongs to the life span begun in 1956, and the end year has yet to reveal itself.  I am dead to the year 1856, and most likely won't extend to the year 2200 as well (unless Putin's dubious immortality vaccine comes to the rescue).  I'm also dead to wherever my body isn't...I'm looking out the window and my life isn't there: it's here, seated at this keyboard writing this.  The HERE AND NOW, in essence, defines me in a subjective sense and cannot be quantified by physical science in any objective manner. My eventual experience of dying will, of necessity, be conceptually very different from what others experience about my death from their viewpoints.  It's a great quandary, this gulf between subjective awareness and objective observation, and since time marches on without regard to how I feel about anything, I might as well relax and entertain a sense of inner peace about it all, tedious support group or not.  Either I'll survive others or they'll survive me...

My Dear Sister-in-Law Krista Passes Away

My dearly beloved sister-in-law Krista Bailey sadly passed away yesterday evening at 10:47 due to complications arising from an aggressive form of leukemia.  She had been staying at the ET York Hospice, Care Center off Northwest 39th Avenue here in Gainesville.  Krista was a beautiful person and a blessing to Melissa as her little sister.  She had such a wonderful, refreshing sense of humor, a direct way of communicating and in her own way was quite brilliant.  Her husband James, her true soul mate, had tragically died four years ago, and she moved back to Gainesville from Kentucky less than a year ago.  Krista is survived by Melissa and her brother Keith, as well as her daughter Amy and granddaughter Tabitha.  For me the month of July is becoming a rather dark month, with Krista's recent passing and my son Will's accidental death on the 18th last year.  May all who knew Krista derive comfort and peace from God in this time of mourning.  I am truly saddened by her absence.  Once again I'm a "survivor"...and it brings more grief...

A Final Jeopardy! Answer, and Lifespans

The final Jeopardy! answer on tonight's episode of that long-lasting game show series concerned a topic I had no reason to be knowledgeable about: who is buried in England's Westminster Abbey.  It is where British royalty has historically been interred, but there is a place within, called "Poet's Corner", where standouts in the arts, most notably literary, have also been accorded burial spots.  I'm not sure exactly what the wording was in the Jeopardy! answer, but it did include the year of burial as being 1991...and I came up with the correct solution: "Who was Laurence Olivier?"  In case you didn't already know, he is widely acknowledged as being one of the greatest actors of all time...although, I'm sure to my own loss, the only movies I remember seeing him in were Marathon Man and The Boys from Brazil.  Yet in only those two films his performance was dazzling, especially in the former.  Being a dweller of the year 2025 as I write this, I was convinced that Olivier had already passed away...but was a little surprised that he died sometime in 1989, some 36 years ago.  As each of us passes, riding the "now" moment, through our own individual lifespans, we can only perceive the subjective reality of the years we remember being alive through our own experience and realities, depending on others' records and memories of those times preceding our births.  I don't know how long I will remain on Earth, but I'm confident that 36 years after my passing I will in no way be weighing in on the passage of time in that as-yet unknown, but inevitable year.  For each of us individually, as far as our own subjected perception is concerned, there is only one time, and it is now.  The nearly universal biography statistic of lifespan...the birth year, a hyphen, and the year of dying...is one of objective perception from outsiders.  Each of us can play a little at this and see ourselves as our birth years, a hyphen...and nothing, but never with that final year.  We belong to our lifespans, and that will always be real, as it has always been for every biological entity that has ever been.  The big mystery, which religion and philosophy tend to address, is what happens to that personally-experienced "now" at death.  If I say that I am defined for myself as being the "here and now", then not only does that mean that your "here" is by nature different from mine, but also that your "now" is different as well in spite of it seeming the same.  So my "now" doesn't depend on you or others or the so-called objective reality that trudges on ahead through time.  But enough of this metaphysical speculation, time to go get another coffee...

On This Memorial Day 2025

On this Memorial Day 2025 I respect and appreciate all of the brave American soldiers who served our country both in times of peace and war and honor those who made the ultimate sacrifice of their own lives for our sake during times of conflict.  God bless all of them, and may He protect us from anyone's attempts to overthrow the freedoms and rule of law that they made such sacrifices to protect...a danger that I fear may be ongoing at the highest levels in my own beloved country...

Biden's Cancer, and Surviving While Aging

It's been announced that former president Joe Biden has just been diagnosed with stage four prostate cancer, metastatic and into his bones, after an examination revealed a growth in his prostate.  This is bad news, of course, but it seems that his cancer may be effectively treated with hormone therapy.  Apparently, Biden did not have the advantage of a PSA blood test to forewarn anyone of the possibility of malignancy...I've even read that beyond a certain age, medical authorities often didn't even encourage patients to get one.  I'm a cancer survivor as is Melissa, and her sister is undergoing some serious struggles with her own.  Growing older has some really good aspects to it, but keeping your health is a big, top priority and that can become an adventure, to say the least.  And as you age you're bound to see yourself as a survivor, not only of the different physical afflictions you've had to overcome to get to where you are, but also over those close to you who have already passed from this world into death.  I look at the calendar and sometimes it's hard to fathom that we're in the year 2025.  Yet time marches on, and why not.  Right now my record has my birth year, followed by a hyphen...followed by a blank.  On some mysterious, unknown day that blank will change to a numbered year, but I won't be around to notice...

Looking Back on 2024 in My Life

As 2024 draws to a close, I look back in my life on both the good and the bad, the miraculous and the tragic.  In May, Melissa had her breast cancer diagnosis and quick surgery to remove the malignant lump...this followed by chemotherapy (her body suffered a bad reaction to it) and then radiation therapy, ending this fall.  By all measures, the cancer has been removed from her body, thank God.  But after pulling up into our driveway on July 18th following the second round of that chemo, the police were there to notify us that our beloved 34 year old son Will had died.  This would overshadow all of the good that 2024 had produced for us, and we're left with a big hole in our lives.  He was (is) such a compassionate and responsible young man...what a terrible loss for us and the world he graced with his presence for too short a time span.  Rebecca, my 29-year old daughter, lives in town and makes me proud with her commitment to her job as well as her close relationships with us and her partner. My own health seems to be going in opposite directions: in one direction I am gradually becoming fitter and more athletic while in the other I have just been diagnosed with localized prostate cancer, the treatment for which looms ahead of me in early 2025.  I do feel blessed to be in such an environment where it can be effectively treated and I am confident of the successful outcome.  And when I clocked out at 10 pm on Friday, November 29th, my retirement began after working for 37 years at the Gainesville Post Office.  I'm grateful that I had the opportunity to work there and have many good memories of my colleagues as well as the work itself...I am no disgruntled postal worker!  And I have enjoyed not having to deal with the traffic while driving to and from work since then.  For 2024, Will's passing dwarfs everything else, but in life sometimes you have to take the bad with the good, and that can be difficult...

Quote of the Week...from Bob Dylan

Well, the future for me is already a thing of the past.                 ---Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan, Minnesota's great poet/songwriter/performer, turns 83 today...he is a part of that cluster of famous musicians born in the early 1940: he's 15 years older than me.  So for 15 years of his life I wasn't alive...should I be despondent over my death, or non-existence, during that period?  After I die...whenever that happens...should he likewise be despondent should he outlive me?  You see, I'm taking a little of ol' Bob's above quote and working with it, for I think we two just might have overlapping views about the passage of time and the concepts of past, future, and the now.  Not that the "The Bard" was referring to any of this with his quote, other than emphasizing that both future and past are indistinct and essentially unreal while only the now, the very moment we are currently both living through, is truly all that is real.  It's indeed a great mystery, not any less than what happens after death from our own perspective, about what we were before we existed in the first place.  Yet unless you believe in reincarnation, and that would only be a conjecture on your part, time itself seems to be an illusion, a construct that living organisms have used to perpetuate themselves...

Podcast Discusses Regret and How to Avoid It

Yesterday's Mindset Mentor podcast had host Rob Dial cover a topic he's covered before: don't be full of regret when approaching death.  Yes, this sounds like an inherently morbid topic, but it's also one of Stephen Covey's principles of highly effective people: begin with the end in mind, looking back from the grave after one's life is completed.  So, we're dying (or have died, looking back) and see our lives before us.  Dial says that to avoid regret, the first thing we need to have done is to kick the bad habit of having acceptance by others as a priority in our relationships and behavior.  He cited part of the Jim Carrey quote I discussed last June: "Your need for acceptance can make you invisible in this world."  Then he quoted a fellow podcaster on the same subject: "I don't need you to like me.  I want you to like me.  But I won't change myself for you to like me." Dial goes further to stress that it takes certain life skills to be able to break out of the mold of living just to please others when he cites his own late father, who in a letter written to Rob's sister said, "I hope you live your life with courage, love and laughter." Dial was so impressed that he had that tattooed on his arm.  One other point from this podcast: it's never too late in life to change direction in life and be true to oneself.  Much of our early life is involved with creating a false personality that "fits" with those around us in society...and then later in life shedding that and discovering our true selves and purposes...according to Rob Dial.  Of course, I would add that one person's purpose and true self might be another's drudgery and false face...so it's also important not to get "sideways" in trying to tell others how to live their lives: each of us has our own path to follow...

Quote of the Week...from Queen Elizabeth II

Football's a difficult business and aren't they prima donnas.  But it's a wonderful game.

                                                                    ---Queen Elizabeth II

Queen Elizabeth II of England passed away at her family's Scotland home yesterday at the age of 96, having one of the longest realms in the history of nobility at seventy years.  It was interesting reading and hearing of the outpouring of emotional tributes coming from some sources you might not automatically think of, like for example the Rolling Stones' Mick Jagger.  But most reasonable and mature people understand that she was born into ceremony and royal duty and had precious little actual political power...her life was one largely preprogrammed for her.  She still made the most of it with a lot of class and some refreshing candid humor, as the above quote about her country's (and most of the world's) chief sport of soccer.  I think the same about other sports, too...with the U.S. Open going on now, tennis comes to mind as player after prima donna player pitches fits on the court, breaking their rackets, bawling their eyes out and screaming epithets at the judges and spectators.  TV analyst John McEnroe has provided more humor by publicly castigating their excesses, although he himself was one of the worst offenders when he played...

I had the television on yesterday morning when the Weather Channel mentioned the Queen's deteriorating health and I switched to the three main cable news channels.  CNN and MSNBC had concentrated coverage of the gathering of her family and different aspects of her life and career, but FoxNews was completely ignoring this momentous story, instead focusing on key political races that "their" party, the Republicans, needed to win in November.  Apparently, boss Rupert Murdoch had given the order to snub her, but why? Well, maybe a clue is in another quote of hers, from nine years ago: "I don't like to badmouth people.  but I'm the head of a monarchy that began in the ninth century, and I'm apparently more modern than Chris Christie.  Look, I know he has to appeal to the crazy right-wingers in his party, but the fact is, he's not as forward-thinking as an eighty-seven-year-old lady who wears a crown on her head.  It's pathetic." Melissa later told me that Fox did finally start to cover Queen Elizabeth II's death, but their decisions yesterday morning were telling: "fair and balanced" my ass...

So now it's King Charles III in charge of things...I remember my mother telling me about him in the late 1960s and it's been a long wait, for sure.  I've never been one to care about the news within the English royal family or any others...dang it, didn't we shed all that when we declared independence in 1776?  Still, I always liked Elizabeth and, like many others, will miss her presence and often incisive and straight-forward humor...

Quote of the Week...from Bob Dole

I just consider myself a Republican, none of this hyphenated stuff.  I was a mainstream conservative Republican, and most people are in that category.                    ---Robert Dole

Robert Dole, former U.S. Senate Majority Leader and a vice-presidential and presidential candidate, died this past Sunday at the age of 98 from lung cancer, having survived prostate cancer from thirty years earlier after undergoing surgery to remove it from his body.  Earlier on I was a skeptic about the Kansas senator, thinking he was a bit snide and derisive as President Gerald Ford's running mate during his 1976 campaign against Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale.  But over the ensuing years I came to greatly respect this man, who was gravely injured during World War II for his bravery in combat in Italy.  By 1996, while Dole was leading the Senate during Bill Clinton's first term as president, his stature had risen to the point where he decided to run against the incumbent...and I supported him, very happy to vote for this decent and principled man.  Dole, sadly, lost...I wonder how American history would have unfolded had he won: no Bush vs. Gore, and the series of dynamics leading to 9/11 would most probably have drastically changed as well...but I acknowledge my hindsight reasoning here.  Bob Dole was an advocate for reaching across the aisle and making deals with the Democrats when he believed the country's better interests...and he was a patriot in the highest sense of the word...could be served this way.  And while at times he would take a stand and risk political gridlock, he didn't base his decisions primarily on how his party would gain or lose as the current Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell has repeatedly and cynically demonstrated.  It's a shame that Dole's legacy hasn't survived the Trump onslaught of recent years...to be a Republican as he described himself is no longer mainstream today, as his cherished party has devolved into one lamentably supporting fascism and a personality cult... 

The Great Charlie Watts, 1941-2021

I was saddened to hear about the recent passing of Charlie Watts, the acclaimed drummer for the Rolling Stones all these years.  He was 80.  Charlie was, at I see it, a stabilizing element for the band who refused to take sides in his bandmates' squabbles while always conducting himself in public with dignity and grace.  He was dedicated to his craft and humble enough to recognize his own limitations.  He was born in 1941, which brings to my mind all those bands back in the mid-1960s like the Stones and Beatles: they're all getting old...the ones who are still left, that is.  Watts' bandmates Bill Wyman, Mick Jagger, and Keith Richards were born in 1936, 1943, and 1943 respectively...Ringo Starr entered the world in 1940 and Paul McCartney in 1942.  It's going to be a sad time when all these great musicians of my childhood are gone...of course, over the last few years I've had to hear of the deaths of various artists I've followed: when you love many you also mourn many.  As for Charlie Watts, in an industry loaded with prima donnas and excessive living, here we had someone who kept to his own standards while respecting and working with others with vastly different lifestyles and attitudes: what a class act...

2020 Drags On With All Its Problems, As a Patriot Passes On

Late this morning I watched on TV as the horse-drawn caisson carrying John Lewis' flag-wrapped casket crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama for his last crossing at the place where in March, 1965, he suffered a fractured skull at the hands of state troopers attacking the peaceful demonstration march for civil rights as they were making their way to Montgomery, the state capital.  Only this past March, Lewis, a longtime U.S. representative for Atlanta, had walked over the bridge with several congressional colleagues...he seemed strong and fit although he knew then he was suffering from pancreatic cancer.  That was less than five months ago...wow, it seems like this year time has come to almost a grinding halt.  I remember "long, long ago" on February 16 stepping off our Caribbean cruise ship with Melissa at Port Everglades, with the coronavirus a concern for the U.S. west coast...who would have guessed how it would explode in scope, first in Europe and then New York and the rest of the country, during the ensuing weeks.  And the murder of George Floyd while in police custody in Minneapolis, preceded a few days by the killing of Ahmaud Armery in Brunswick while out jogging, and followed by weeks of nationwide protests that have yet to subside, seems to have happened so very long ago.  I liked John Lewis and am saddened at his passing...he was a brave, principled man and a patriot in the highest sense of the word.  But those protest marches he undertook with others like Martin Luther King, Jr. during those bygone years were deliberately and steadfastly peaceful...the violence which happened was perpetrated on them, not by them.  Sadly, I'm now seeing what generally started out as a peaceful, legitimate protest movement against police abuse degenerating into street violence, vandalism of public and private property, and an Orwellian type of attitude pushed about political correctness...not a good direction to go.  Unfortunately, I also see no light at the end of the tunnel for any of this...I guess I should at least be happy that live pro sports is finally coming back (at least for the time being)...

On the Day of John Lewis' Passing, Georgia Governor and Mayors Need to Negotiate

On this day in which the great civil rights advocate and long-time Atlanta congressman John Lewis died after a seven-month struggle against pancreatic cancer, his home state of Georgia...where I was born...is in the thick of a legal and political struggle concerning how the COVID-19 pandemic is handled there.  The governor, Brian Kemp, has proclaimed a statewide mandate that opens businesses and encourages (but doesn't require) masks in public settings...the recent sharp resurgence in cases has caused several local mayors to enact public face covering mandates in violation of Kemp's rule.  And now he is suing the mayor of Atlanta, Keisha Lance Bottoms, to rescind that locality's law.  The Georgia governor has been thoroughly trashed in the media for this policy of his in the middle of a public health emergency, but I think he has a point that most media pundits have conveniently chosen to overlook.  You see, these cities that are mandating masks are also considering shutting down their businesses again, like what happened earlier this spring across the country.  Kemp is making it clear in his speeches that he is determined to keep Georgia's economy running and feels that the mayors choosing to defy his policy about masks will...if not checked...then proceed to once again close their city's businesses.  This is what totally frustrates me about this political wrangling: many people at-large automatically associate mask wearing with economic shutdown while in actual policy the former, if universally practiced, will enable businesses to flourish at close to maximal capacity.  Governor Kemp wants Georgians to wear masks but he does not want his state to go into an economic depression with mass-ordered shutdowns...it seems that there should be room for negotiation here: grant the mayors and counties the right to impose and enforce mask mandates while they agree that they will not close down businesses.  Georgia businesses staying open and everybody wearing masks isn't going to make a lot of people happy but it's the obvious solution to this standoff...

Quote of the Week...from Barry Farber

There is no reward in life without risk.                   ---Barry Farber

Barry Farber...not the motivational expert but rather the older radio talk show host...died Wednesday at the age of 90...reminding me of the passing of Don Shula at the same age just days before.  In the early-to-mid 1970s I used to listen to his shows, which originated on New York City's WOR and were replayed later on Miami Beach's WKAT/1360 "The Talk of Miami", along with Jean Shepherd's monologue program from WOR.  Farber was an independent-thinking conservative who was well-versed in international affairs and history and staunchly anti-communist.  Since his youth he had a strong interest in foreign languages, teaching himself several to varying degrees of proficiency...reminds me a little of myself in that regard.  Barry stood out with his distinctly North Carolinian southern accent and, unlike the talk show hosts of today, about whom he complained of using the forum to extend their own egos, preferred to place himself in the background and allow his guests to express themselves openly. He didn't stack up his show only with people in alignment with his own political views, either...Farber loved rigorous on-the-air debate.  As for the above quote, I happen to agree with it but since Farber's heyday in the business was before the digital age, I'm afraid much of what he had to say has gone by the wayside, so to speak...otherwise I might have a greater selection of quotes to choose from.  As for learning foreign languages, I know it takes a great amount of humility to try to communicate with others when you already know you're probably going to sound pretty silly as you make one mistake after another...that's a sort of risk as well, to your own ego.  But Barry Farber knew that the reward was worth it, and he always came across to me as a class act, respectful of others but at the same time confident enough to assert himself when needed.  And he loved studying history and languages, just like me...

Just Finished Reading The High Mountains of Portugal by Yann Martel

Yann Martel is best known for his 2001 novel of Life of Pi...here is a link to my earlier review of it on this blog: [Life of Pi]. His 2016 work the The High Mountains of Portugal conveys a very different mood while continuing with the themes of animals, religion, cross-cultural encounters, mortality and grief...all present in that earlier work. It is divided into three separate tales, set in 1904, 1939, and 1981 with unifying elements of family, religious symbolism, and a small village in "mountainous" east Portugal (where the author points out that there are no true mountains). This book was much more difficult for me to get through than Life of Pi, especially that very confusing second story...but this is how Martel wrote it and I accept it, without necessarily liking it...

The first tale concerns grief-stricken young Tomás, whose beloved wife and their young son had recently died of illness, reacting by only walking backwards while becoming engrossed in a 17th century diary of an obscure Portuguese priest assigned to Angola and Sao Tome in Africa. Tomás embarks on a quest to find that priest's special, mysterious crucifix, hidden somewhere in an unknown rural eastern Portugal church.  The second story involves a Portuguese pathologist, his wife, and a visit from an elderly woman in grief.  And the third is about a burned-out Canadian politician who abandons his office to return to his ancestral roots in Portugal...with a very special companion...

It's often difficult for me to write a review without giving away too much...let me just say in the case of  The High Mountains of Portugal that I've read some of the reactions to it on the Goodreads website and discovered that readers usually either loved it or despised it.  That stands to reason as this novel of Yann Martel is in places difficult to follow as a literal, reality-based narrative and is full of all sorts of symbolism and allegory...seems like the kind of book that high school English teachers like to assign to their hapless students.  I also think a lot of readers were hoping for another story along the lines of Life of Pi and were put off by the descent into weirdness in the 1939 story, but as I had previously noted, the two works do have several overlapping themes.  I'm glad I read it, but I much, much preferred Life of Pi...