It is not often that one reads autobiographies of living people–or at least it seems that it takes death to make people who have written an autobiography worthy of having written something that is notable. Mike Lindell of MyPillow fame, however, is not such a case because his book stands as, perhaps, the most bizarre and sincere work simultaneously that one could endeavor to read in the modern world.
Mr. Lindell does not hide the fact that he was once a crack cocaine addict. He was also a gambling addict, and probably also an adrenaline addict. As can be imagined, this gets Mr. Lindell into some serious scrapes up to and including having a drug dealer that belongs to some Mexican cartel holding a machete at his throat in some seedy area of Mexico. This, as one might imagine, is about as bad as it sounds, and it is here that Mr. Lindell begins his exposition which, in terms of grabbing the reader’s attention, does so. Shortly after the machete is applied to Mr. Lindell, his cover story to these dangerous people is in peril of being exposed as an outright fabrication although the cause of this fabrication is that Mr. Lindell forgot or overlooked the small packet of coke that threated to make itself known due to a cigarette being pulled out of his shirt pocket. They say smoking is hazardous to your health, after all.
From here, we are taken back into Mr. Lindell’s life through the twists and turns and ups and downs that his existence has entailed. We learn that he was a bar owner who really was more concerned with having a family than a bar. The family were the customers who came to the bar. Unfortunately, this often meant that Mr. Lindell overlooked his actual family, which is a theme throughout the book. Eventually, this overlooking winds up costing him his wife, and in no small way, one feels that it probably also alienated his children who, after awhile, are no longer in his custody as his spiral into cocaine madness continues.
At the same time, Mr. Lindell keeps receiving premonitions and messages which, as his life attests to, tend to come true. Mr. Lindell attributes these messages to God and while that is not unusual for most of those who use cocaine, what is unusual is that Mr. Lindell’s messages seem to come into reality into fulfillments. The biggest theme is that one day, Mr. Lindell would have an important “platform” that was also important to God. The phrase “the son of man had no place to rest his head”, comes to mind as perhaps an ironic commentary on a business which is founded on nothing other than pillows. Maybe God has a sense of humor, or perhaps He simply wanted a lot of people through Mike Lindell to have a place to rest their head for their specific dreams.
The majority of the narrative involves Mike Lindell receiving messages from God in some serious, totally improbable way, and then Mr. Lindell more or less somewhat discarding those messages until a series of absolutely insane events transpire. MyPillow is a success, in no small way, according to Mr. Lindell’s exposition, because God was threatening to kill him if he did not stop doing crack and get to work.
At the very least, this book discusses the divergence and confluence of fate and free will and where divine intervention lies and the patience of God in such matters. Mr. Lindell eventually finds “Jesus” and feels that he has a moment where he truly releases much of his traumatic past as he begins to realize that Jesus was there all along. The only thing Mr. Lindell does not realize is that the relationship he seeks to have with a love interest in part because of her relationship with Jesus is unusual in the sense that his experiences which he attributes to Jesus and his relationship therewith is, in fact, all ready extraordinary. On some level, Mr. Lindell must view all the things that have happened in his life as being somehow “not tight with Jesus” except that it is clear through reading the exposition about the only entities capable of slowing Mr. Lindell down would have to be supernatural. Of course, love is one of those gifts that we all have trouble seeing when it comes to ourselves perhaps because though we may be compassionate in a thousand ways to others, we are not so when it comes to our own self.
Mr. Lindell is eventually led on a path that leads to Donald Trump and his run for presidency, and the outcome of this meeting is transformative for him as we can see now, looking back, that perhaps the platform God was speaking of had something to do with voting and the United States and Christianity as a religion in the country during trying times. During a time of “Great Awakening”, a pillow salesman might seem to be the exact opposite of what one might want since sleep is usually the antithesis to awake, but the line becomes quite blurry throughout Mr. Lindell’s book–and world history in the past five years is equally as smeared with vaseline.
Mr. Lindell also has all the pictures to back up his stories which is a plus, since some of them are so crazy sounding one wonders whether or not he is making some parts of it up to make his life stories sound “bigger” than they actually are. One concludes, after awhile, that no, Mr. Lindell is nothing if not genuine. This genuineness is, perhaps, what allows him to sell pillows when other people would be able to sell nothing at all. Mr. Lindell actually cares about his customers, his God, his country, and ultimately, his President. Even when he is a “crackhead” he still cares about people in ways that the “selfish drug” usually does not allow from testimonies of others who have used it. Yes, Mr. Lindell blows through money like a fiend. Yes, Mr. Lindell allows the drug life and business success to take his focus off his family. However, there are plenty of people who have lived through the early beginnings of the 21st century and latter half of the 20th century who were not “crackheads” who were just as bad if not worse when it came to addictions they fed. Whatever anyone wants to say about Mr. Lindell, they can only admit that when he finds something he believes in, he “goes hard”.
The book ends on a to be continued note. The work is interesting enough that one looks forward to the next installment if for no other reason than to see if Mr. Lindell eventually “mellows” or has some other “crazy” adventure. The odds are against any one of the events outlined in this book for any average human being. While it is clear that many average human beings get themselves into such messes, it is unusual they find themselves “back out” of those same messes. I suspect Mr. Lindell’s guardian angels are probably due some serious overtime/hazard pay. What a testimony, though!
In this story is some World War II history that is not commonly told. The fact that the Captain of the submarine, Joseph F. Enright, is telling the story makes it all the much better. The fact that Captain Enright has been given full permission to tell his tale complete with references to certain “Secret information” adds an interesting element to the narrative that probably took place aboard many other ships than his own. While it is commonly thought that war is a decision against the enemy with the ally, there are other considerations that have to be weighed. Like a poker game, certain actions or movements allow your opponent to know what it is you think you know. If you know too well, the most likely assumption is that you have access to some of their secrets which means that either you have broken their codes, or you have spies in their ranks. Either one of those scenarios means that immediate action is necessary on the part of the compromised to ferret out any potential moles or bad actors.
This book gives you plenty of considerations along those lines in regard to if you were the Captain of the Archer-Fish, how would you have parsed the scenario given the variables that Captain Enright delineates?
What Captain Enright does in this book is to give his vanquished foes a voice. In a sense, his fame is directly attributable and entangled with all the men who went down on the Shinano which was the largest aircraft carrier built in World War II. The entire project was secretive, and originally the ship had aspirations to be a battleship but was instead converted to an aircraft carrier to attempt to turn the tides of the war back in Japan’s favor.
The problem, of course, is that the Japanese decision makers are in a hurry and act in haste and in pride. Though their engineering is novel the ship sets sail without being properly tested and outfitted. This puts the entire crew at a disadvantage and the decisions aboard the Shinano continually reflect a kind of arrogant thinking on the part of the Japanese. For one thing, they conclude that the Americans are “stupid” because they keep “pinging them” with radar noise, and the only logical explanation as far as Captain Toshio Abe is concerned is that the Americans must be hunting their new warship with a wolfpack of submarines. This is how the Japanese fought in the skies, and certainly there is evidence of the tactic at sea and so the Japanese project what must be true of their fighting style into the battlefield as opposed to considering that with decisive, aggressive action and superior firepower that they can simply defeat a lone sub that is stalking them.
Really, Captain Abe throughout the story, is portrayed as simply wanting to get the ship where it was going as quickly as possible. He, of course, pays the price for this dedicated focus by becoming a sacrifice along with the many other men on the ship that would go down with her after being impacted by four torpedoes that left gaping holes in the vessel.
The entire read is riveting, and horrifying. One can sympathize with both Captains to the point that one can forget that Japan is allied with Nazis from time to time which is, without a doubt, an evil that had to be quashed. Still, between the respective Captains, one begins to understand how each Captain is shouldering a lot of burden under the banner of “duty” and really neither of them especially want to be where they are. Captain Enright, it seems, has more of a delayed reaction but in his telling of this book, there is a definitive “needing to understand the enemy and the conditions and stories of the men” whom he played a key role in killing in naval combat.
The battle could have just as easily gone the other direction, had different decisions and orders and risk-taking been different within the personalities of the Captains. The aspect of how Japan handled the aftermath of all of this action at sea is just as interesting if not as reflective of a most evident hubris. The administration decides that those most worthy of blame, it seems, were the crew. The crew of the Shinano might have been the ultimate losers in the sense that even those who survived lived long enough to hate those who had issued the orders to dispatch them aboard their ill-fated vessel in the first place. Even the Destroyer escorts were of no immediate help, hog-tied by the orders of Abe who in turn was bound by Japanese military command. One cannot help but feel like just as the men in Pearl Harbor were sent to their deaths by a series of either errors or coordinated indifference, certainly the crew of the Shinano was another such sacrifice that need not have been.
The book left me disturbed by my own reactions to the story that was told but disturbed in a somewhat good way. The conclusion is that war is hell, which is a cliche, but that the absolute waste of human life and resources must border on something close to being unforgiveable. If you are a student of history, this book is well worth the read. Pick it up, and do not give it a second thought. You will have plenty of time for second thoughts when you finish the contents of the book.
This book was one in a stack of books received as a “bargain”. A hardback for around fifty cents, the quick explanation of the work being about an “alternate earth” seemed interesting enough to warrant two quarters. Upon reading the book after approximately 40 or so pages, it was evident that there was an un-advertised large amount of sex in this book–we are taking epic levels. Not only was this sex a present theme, but it was FORBIDDEN, torrid, incestuous sex. It was then that the relevance of the author struck me–Vladimir Nabokov. Oh yeah, that was the guy who wrote Lolita.
Honestly, this book was more of a struggle to read than it was a pleasure. Evidently, Nabokov wrote it at the age of 70 full of hot, forbidden desires, and an ample thesaurus mixed in with a lifetime of accruing phrases from other languages which are sprinkled liberally throughout the book. When the word “hot” here is used, what is meant is more like “temperature” and not “this is sexy”. Rather, most of the descriptions are disturbing in one way or another. It is not that they lack for being well-written. Indeed, the fact that the description are well-written are part of what adds to the disturbance because one must inquire, sooner or later, as to why one would write so floridly about coitus unless they had an agenda to try to also inspire some forbidden corridor of lust in the reader.
Indeed, if someone is looking for a lusty read, this book has it in spades. Somebody, somewhere, is gonna be jumping someone else’s bones between suicides, misfortune, taboo, and family upheaval. Incest is one of the biggest themes in the book.
It is a strange thing to say of such a book, but the parts I enjoyed most were the musings on time itself. You see, the book is written a little like a waking dream or a nightmare depending on how you want to view it, on a type of alternate Earth. Certainly this alternate Earth usually sounds Demonic on a good day. Fortunately, the main character’s father is nicknamed “Demon” and so one supposes it has the correct paternal lineage represented. Nearly the last section of the book enters this discourse on time and it is there that I think we best understand what Nabokov was trying to do with this work–he is trying to account for his own years and his aging and shows a deep understanding of what time implies and how to measure it and what, in fact, the measuring stick might be. When one is old, one cannot help but remember when one is young–and conversely when one is young one is most often enamored of becoming older. This thesis and antithesis is always at work in the process of living and it is upon this platform that we can see that Nabokov finally allows Van “Veen” who is related to the “De Vere” family to return to his first love at the age of 50 which just so happens to be “his sister”. “Return to your first love,” in the Biblical sense, is clearly not what is happening here, but at the same time it is evident that the passion that is fueled in this relationship creates by the end of this novel some unified kind of beast that destroys both individuals and quite often all those that are around them.
The book does eventually balance all this “forbidden desire” out as the two are eventually too old to worry anymore about the “passionate” aspects of their relationship and find what we hope, as readers, are simple joys. Of course, the entirety of the work is somewhat like a manuscript about the family that has a House of Leaves writing style present. Footnotes, memories. Time smears. Edits. The story is told from the perspective of Ada and Van, and we are never sure how much to trust what they have to say. They are clearly, after all, blinded by passions that they should not be indulging.
At some points of the book, one has to re-read to make sure they understood what the hell is happening. This is not a book that has a solid sentence structure such as “She jumped off a cliff.”. Rather, there are a myriad of phrases and expressions that hint at the eventual outcome and then those phrases conclude something that, if you were reading along and did not happen to translate the French, you might miss. Nabokov has something to prove with this work, and a large portion of what he has to prove is that he hopes to be in the halls of academia being analyzed as a great literature author. Part of what passes for this kind of literature is a certain amount of obtuseness. In other words, if you read Joyce, one had better be ready for all manner of language study along with words that are being used in curious ways. The same is true of Nabokov. While some may find such “Deep dives” rewarding, an average reader with average demands on their time will not find themselves able to fully immerse themselves in the meaning of the work. It is written this way purposefully, one concludes, since the treatise on time is itself meant to be a kind of meditation on passion and perhaps a confessional.
The book would have done as well without dwelling upon the incest theme and perhaps the work might have been more powerful for it since the eventual outcome would have been gained by uniting things that are not as “similar” as blood-related family. Part of the novel is about how this forbidden desire is what informs the love, although one wonders whether it is simply not all lust running its course.
When the backlog of the work is examined, it becomes clear that sex was a “big deal” to Nabokov, and most especially forbidden sex. While that is an easy road to make a career off of, (prostitutes do it all the time) it does feel as though the “easy button” is being hit. Humanity, generally, has desires, and not a few of those are forbidden. It does not, however, make those desires all the more desirable. It usually turns out that those desires have terrible consequence and we see a few of them in this book. The ending is often debated as to whether the two ultimately commit suicide, but I think this is wishful thinking. The worst punishment for the two of them in a way is unity, and that is where the book ends. It also loops in on itself describing itself as the memoir of Van that we are made privy to at the very beginning. Is it a happy ending? I suppose in the sense that the sensation of desire is present, one could describe it as happy. However, one cannot help feel a bit “dirty” and like there are many “unfinished karmic actions” these two have stirred up. At one point, the older Ada even mentions that if she were to go to hell, she would expect to find Van there as a kind of comfort. I suspect that hell might not function the way Ada has idealized. I suspect that the soul grows quite heavy that indulges its own forbidden desire–such as Van’s. Really, I suspect Nabokov knows this, and so hopes that a type of book that could be fictional is the best place to hide a confessional so that perhaps he can travel a little lighter. Of course, he still wants to be famous and no one can argue he has a gift with words. Nobody can say he does not have talent for crafting a story. What they can say, however, is, “Did you really need to write so much about incest?”
