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It’s the Genes

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Clarissa

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Klara went to the school book fair and out of all the books on offer chose N’s favorite childhood novel The Last of the Mohicans by Fenimore Cooper. We read a lot of Fenimore Cooper in the USSR.

It’s the genes, people. He never mentioned the book to her. When N saw the purchase

When N saw the purchase, he was touched to tears. It is a powerful feeling to have a little mini-me discover the same books you liked as a child.

N immediately decided to buy all books in the series but when he went on Amazon, he saw this cover for the first instalment:

The novel is set in 1740, so we laughed for an hour.

11 responses to “It’s the Genes”

  1. methylethyl Avatar
    methylethyl

    “Frontier Protagonist Grapples With Morality”

    Please say this cover is AI generated.

    Liked by 2 people

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      I’d like to think that but it was released before the AI. AI would have probably done a black female frontiersperson with they/them pronouns.

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  2. Avatar
    Anonymous

    Klara definitely won’t be a Twain fan then by the properties of neo-Lamarckism. 🙂

    The cover is real. Everyone has the right amount of ears and fingers; and maybe the bears are a metaphor for morality? I haven’t read the Cliff Notes. Did the AI mess up the guns?

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      Yes, the novel is about a century before cowboy types with rifles.

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  3. Avatar
    Anonymous

    Are they frankenrifles that can’t fire, as well?

    Maybe just a period appropriate gun or taxidermy deer head would be more accurate, but would Klara have picked up the book to buy it with either?

    https://www.poulinauctions.com/rare-english-doglock-colonial-trade-gun-circa-1740/

    AI’s getting better.

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  4. Avatar
    Anonymous

    Why would the Soviet Union have found Cooper to be acceptable? Like Twain, he is part of the macho individualist in American writing. Is it because the evil British and French and wiping out noble Native Americans? :p

    To be fair, from reading House of Government, I do get the sense that the Soviet Union tended to turn a blind eye to classic literature.

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      Pretty much everything before modernism was acceptable. I remember first discovering modernism when I came to Canada. I was beyond stunned. I had no idea this kind of thing existed. It was incomprehensible that what people has been calling literature for a century was… not what I thought was literature. I read Miguel de Unamuno’s “Niebla” and Juan Rulfo’s “Pedro Páramo” – my first books in Spanish. And I just couldn’t get over it. I was like those people in Siberia who hadn’t had human contact in 50 years and then discovered that polyethylene had been invented. Airplanes, the flight to the Moon – nothing got to them like polyethylene. They just sat and laughed. That was me, discovering literature after Emile Zola.

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    2. Avatar
      Anonymous

      —Is it because the evil British and French and wiping out noble Native Americans?

      Maybe, but then they do not understand how child psychology works. For me, since the Mohicans were the good guys and were associated with the British, the British became the good guys too.

      v07

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      1. methylethyl Avatar
        methylethyl

        Reminds me of the old joke: The movie Grapes of Wrath was made about the plight of migrant workers during the Great Depression, and was shown in USSR because “Capitalism = Misery”. But what people took away from it was “In America, even the poor people have cars”. 

        No idea if there was any truth to it. Sounds propaganda-y to me, and clearly a dig at commie moviemakers of the era. Who knows. But, you know, sometimes the message isn’t what you think it is.

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        1. Clarissa Avatar
          Clarissa

          Absolutely true. People laughed, “that’s poverty? Let us tell you what actual poverty is.” The movie isn’t supposed to be a comedy but we perceived it as such.

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  5. Post Alley Crackpot Avatar
    Post Alley Crackpot

    Looking forward to the cover of “Fahrenheit 451” that depicts Jacobin firemen setting books of insufficient extremes on fire to a backdrop of Thermidorian dramas carried out behind “screens” of backlit rice paper. :-)

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A conservative literary critic and college professor

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