7th Decade Thoughts

The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides

2012-01-12T10:55:00.003-06:00

Not sure this is a review so much as " thoughts on" the novel. If you don't want spoilers, don't read past the ****

I finished this one last night and am still not sure how to evaluate it. I didn't respond as positively as I did to Middlesex but I initially liked it much more than I liked it later. The characters, however, were very well done--believable and recognizable and their issues were not only real but often quite touching. One reviewer, comparing the novel to Franzen's Freedom, found this one "sweeter, kinder, with a more generous heart".

The "marriage plot" refers to a course in 19th century novel the main character, Madeleine (think of the Ludwig Bemelmans' heroine with whom she identified as a child) Hanna takes at Brown. The marriage plot, in which novels end with the suitable marriage of the heroine (a la Jane Austen) or later in which the heroine marries, is unhappy but has to stay married (a la Henry James) is posited as the raison d'être for the novel itself and the question is whether the novel can survive its loss. The theory is that the "marriage plot" was essentially the definition of a novel until social conditions between men and women changed and marriage was no longer the defining moment in the life of a woman. Did the novel languishes without the marriage plot? Madeleine writes a senior thesis on the marriage plot and Jeffrey Eugenides adapts a marriage plot to the late 20th century.

The novel takes place in the late seventies/early eighties when Madeleine goes to Brown. Her background is important to the novel: her father was president of a small college in New Jersey and her mother the epitome of upper middle class East Coast society. Financial and social security was important to both of them. Madeleine is the typical Ivy Leaguer. And while many of Maddy's friends at Brown come from a similar background, the two men who figure as main characters do not. Leonard comes from the west coast and from an arty but fractious family: both parents drink, the father is an antique dealer and eventually leaves his wife to go live with a former client in Europe. Mitchell comes from Detroit, also not from the comfortable middle class. He half identifies with the Greek side of his family (we remember the Greek society in Detroit from Middlesex and there's a bit of that in Mitchell's background--and in Eugenidies').

I'm a generation (or close to a generation) older than the characters (and the author) but was finishing an advanced degree and becoming an asst prof during the time period--in an English department--so I was fascinated by the introduction of deconstruction theories into the literary department conversation. Like most of Madeleine's profs I was schooled in the New Criticism but fascinated by semiotics and structuralism (and deconstruction)--Barthes, Derrida, etc. and with the whole idea of "literary theory" as a discipline (before that there were schools/fashions of literary criticism but nothing so formal as a theory, with philosophical and sociological underpinnings). All three of the main characters study these ideas though Leonard is a biology major and Mitchell in religious studies and they both take it more seriously than does Madeleine who decided eventually on a Victorian lit focus. But it's these ideas that "invalidate" (if that's what you want to call it) the very idea of the marriage plot--or any other plot for that matter. Eugenidies doesn't take it further than that except that clearly he's trying to write a novel with a marriage plot in a time when that plot would seem superannuated. Mitchell has a half-baked theory (discussed with others at Brown) that you can divide people up into first stage (married early, right out of college), married after establishing a career, and others....

The novel is told mostly from Madeleine's point of view, though the two male characters' back stories and aspirations as well as current experiences take the forefront some of the time, Mitchell (clearly a stand-in for the author) gets more center stage than Leonard. Madeleine impulsively invites friend Mitchell home with her for Thanksgiving freshman year. He's in love with her; she considers him a friend. There's an opportunity for a sexual encounter which both in their way back away from. Madeleine meets Leonard in the literary theory class and falls hard. Mitchell (like Knightly in Emma) remains in the background, supporting her when he can and suffering in silence. The perfect marriage plot. And not nearly as different from Emma or The Portrait of a Lady as one might expect, despite Madeleine's grad school plans, her prenup and the possibility of easy divorce, none of which were available to the 19th century heroines.

****

Maddy falls for Leonard, has a whirlwind affair with him till he breaks it off. She's devastated and Leonard seems to drop off the map--not coming to the class where they met and she doesn't see him anywhere else either. On graduation day, she discovers he's in the psych ward--he hadn't been taking the medicine for his bipolar condition. She misses graduation and rushes to rescue him. Mitchell, still in love with Madeleine, goes off to India as planned with Larry (who deserts him for male lover in Athens) and continues to explore his spirituality, volunteering for Mother Theresa and traveling to Indian shrines. He writes a long letter to Madeleine which he concludes with a plea that she not marry Leonard. She of course does. (This may be the rescue plot rather than the marriage plot--or the marriage as rescue plot.) Her parents are supportive but WASP-conventional when Leonard, experimenting with his meds, goes off the deep end. Mitchell appears out of nowhere to be a support to Madeleine. There is no Jane Austen ending, but the marriage plot seems to have worked quite as well as it did in the 19th century, even with quite a different ending. Or at least that's how I saw it. The novel isn't dead because women have alternatives they didn't have in Jane Austen's time. The marriage plot isn't entirely dead either--it's just different because marriage isn't "final" for the woman either. Whether or not she stays in the marriage, her options are much broader than those in Austen or James

1Q84 by Haruki Murakami

2011-12-09T13:12:00.001-06:00

1Q84 s a book about parallel universes. Not in the SCIFI sense so much as in the moral and a human sense (though there are SCIFI elements). A book about what happens to people (in this case, Aomame and also Tengo) who get off the track in their lives and have to go through some scary stuff in order to get back. It starts with Aomame in a taxi on a freeway in a traffic jam (listening to Janacek's Sinfonetta--which becomes a theme) choosing to get out of the cab and climb down an emergency access stairs to the surface. When she leaves, the cab driver tells her to remember that appearances to the contrary there is just one reality.

But soon it appears that's not true and the world she climbs down into seems different. Her first clue is that the police have different uniforms and are carrying heavier fire power than she remembers. Eventually the icon of the "alternative world" dubbed 1Q84 instead of 1984 (references to Orwell intended) is the second moon in the sky, smaller than the "real" moon, slightly lopsided and green.

Aomame is a serial killer ... of sorts. She happened into that line of work though an elderly rich woman who becomes a client (Aomame is a physical therapist and trainer). Together they target men whose crimes (often but not always crimes against women) that seem not likely to be addressed by the legal system. Aomame's work with the body has put her on to a spot on the back of the neck where she can kill someone instantly leaving no marks. Her job often calls her out to use her skills to help busy people relax which gives her opportunity. She's devised a weapon--a thin needle she keeps in a pouch in her purse. The Dowager identifies the targets and arranges access. Aomame is convinced once the Dowager coaxes her that the men they target deserve to die.

Tengo was a math prodigy in school but has lost interest in math and is playing around with being a writer. He's not published anything yet, but he writes on his days off from the cram school where he teaches math, though on one day a week he frolics with his married lover. He as no friends and few others he sees or talks to. He lives in a old, slightly run down apartment building, cooks for himself and writes in his spare time. When the novel opens, he has been working with Komatsu, the literary editor of a periodical that awards a prize for young and new writers. Tengo has contributed in the past and impressed Komatsu but has never won a prize. This time Komatsu shows Tengo an unusual manuscript which has caught his attention and which he thinks might win not only this prize but a bigger, more prestigious award if it's edited some (actually re-written). The author is a 17-year old girl. Komatsu wants to make into a "star" out of her which will bring money to his publishing house--and to himself and Tengo. Tengo is more that a little skeptical--after all it will be fraud--but he's a relatively passive young man and Komatsu is compelling. Besides Tengo is fascinated by the manuscript of Air Chrysalis.

So we have two basically decent 30-year-olds who have been drifting and two determined and manipulative adults who influence them. It's important that neither Komatsu nor the Dowager is particularly evil. Each has a strong sense of morality and a determination to take matters into their own hands. Both demand (and in most ways deserve) loyalty. Both are loyal in return.

Finally, there's a religious cult called Sakigaki that professes just to be a farming community in the countryside. No one knows much about them, but we learn from Professor Ebbesuno, who's informal guardian to the girl who wrote the manuscript, that she evidently ran away from Sakigaki at age 10 and came to live with the professor who was a friend to her parents. She will not talk about Sakigaki or her parents who have never tried to contact her.

The major portion of the novel consists of sections devoted to Aomame and Tengo alternately. Not exactly first person narratives, mostly third person with the first person (thoughts mainly) printed in italics. We assume after the early chapters that there's some connection between the two but it's a long way into the novel before we learn that Tengo once held her hand when Aomame was a 10-year old girl ostracized in school because her family was associated with a strict religious group. Neither has ever forgotten that. Both somehow assume that the other (if they can find the person after 20 years) is the only person they can be close too, can love. And we learn that Aomame left her parents and their strict Seven-Day-Adventist-type religion at age 10. Tengo believes his strict father is not his real father and has only one enigmatic memory of his mother.

Both eventually discover that they are living in an alternative world, one with two moons and a few others things askew. What happens in this alternative world (in 1Q84) can be impossible in the reality that we know and that they have known. Aomame first and then Tengo seem to recognize that they must meet in the present before either can escape back to the "real world".

It's a multi-layered story which is at once a page turner and a story to contemplate.

Thunder at Twilight: Vienna 1913/1914 by Frederick Morton

2011-11-19T12:20:00.001-06:00

My budding interest in the Habsburgs comes from two friends, one I went to grad school with and writes me about her investigations--also suggesting that we go to Vienna which I'd love to do--and one whose mother was Austrian and is trying to capture that side of her heritage.

Two things really struck me while reading this book:
(1) How little I know of European history outside of the UK and Russia (which I know pretty well) and Germany and France (about which I know something) and Sweden and Norway (about which I learned some doing genealogical research). I have Norman Davies 1135-page Europe: A History and maybe it's time to start reading it.
(2) How little I knew about Archduke Franz Ferdinand whose assassination is commonly believed to have started WWI. I didn't even realize he was the heir to the Habsburg emperor. I think I thought he was an obscure Archduke of no real significance and that fact made the role usually assigned to his assassination particularly pathetic.

I must say here that I grew up a monarchist. Not only did I have all the princess fantasies that my granddaughters now enjoy, but my interests focused pretty squarely on the British royal family way beyond princess fantasies--and later on the Russians. There's no doubt that Queen Elizabeth (the first one, of course) was my hero and role model--vain and sexy but also a scholar and most importantly, a woman who thrived in a man's world. These days my politics are liberal and egalitarian, but that's the real world of today. I'm still fascinated by the royals of the past. I just don't know why I never paid much attention to the Habsburgs before. I even speak German--or did years ago and I don't think it would take much practice to get back to it. I have read some about the Prussian monarchs, but never had much interest.

Morton's book is fascinating because (1) he accepts the judgment that in the late 19th and early 20th century Vienna was splendid, aristocratic, artificial, decadent--the very essence of fin de siècle--and narrates the events leading up the the assassination and to the World War in that context and (2) because he doesn't focus exclusively on the major players, but builds a wider picture of the Vienna where Freud, Trotsky, and Hitler lived at the time and he sets the scene with the artists and musicians of the day (among whom were Koskoska and Schöneberg). He also puts the reader in touch with the "people" who had they had our sensibilities would have been establishing Occupy Vienna and Occupy Budapest movements.

Morton's focus on the major characters is grand. Franz Ferdinand who always scowled and wasn't at all popular but who cared about the people in a modern sense and, ironically, wanted to give the Serbs a greater role in the Empire. Emperor Franz Joseph, the longest reigning monarch in Europe, who was in his 80ies and somehow controlled some of the more off-the-wall of his advisors. (It was an age after all when monarchs were beginning to reign but did not rule, but that transition was not complete.) General Conrad, the army chief of staff, whose main goal was to punish Serbia (even though personally he was glad to see Franz Ferdinand gone since he knew the Archduke would dismiss him when he succeeded the Emperor). The Kaiser (Wilhelm II), characterized beautifully as vain and self-centered and foolish if still powerful and to be appeased since Germany was Austria's main ally. Ditto, the minor characters from Freud and Hitler to the ministers of Britain and France and Russia whose fate hung in the balance as well. There are a lot of minor characters, many of whom are quite memorable in this book.

Morton sets up the assassination that almost fizzled dramatically, with bathos as he describes Franz Ferdinand (with is interest in the "people" and his championship of Serbs which the assassins did not know of) and his wife (a whole other story is connected with his marriage to an "inappropriate" countess with no royal blood who always had to walk behind him), with the sense of how nearly the plotters failed and how successful they were, at least in the short run, at disguising the involvement of The Black Hand, which financed them from within the Serb government.

This is a popular history but is very well researched and well documented, with notes on each chapter and an extensive biography. Morton is always reaching for rhetorical highs, which I both love and hate. There's no doubt that he's over-dramatic, but it's a dramatic story he's telling and I'm not after all one who insists that history be dry or boring or unappealing to anyone not an academic historian. I suppose what I don't like is how heavily he depends on rhetorical flourishes and how predictable they become. I searched for an example, but some go on for pages, as when he sets up a set of parallels which end in an ironic "Hurrah!" and go one for pages and pages.

For me it was a great introduction to an era, a family and a place I want to read more about.

The Girl Who Fell from the Sky by Heidi W. Durrow

2011-11-19T10:40:00.001-06:00

I found this book fascinating though I'd probably label it as a book intended for teens or young adults. I read it and immediately sent it to my teen-aged granddaughter. I suppose you'd call it a coming of age story. Not that those can't be great novels.

What's good about this novel is first of all its point of view. Sections focus on different characters and the reader pieces together the plot by accretion. Early on Rachel talks about herself as a "new girl". She's the daughter of a black GI serving in Europe and a Danish woman she calls Mor (Danish for "mother") whom she loved and who is now gone, evidently due to some tragedy, one that left Rachel injured and in the hospital. Recovering at the beginning of the book, she is going to live with her grandmother--her father's mother--in Portland and is determined to put the past behind her and be a "new girl".

The grandmother is pretty traditional: living in a black neighborhood and going to a black church which is a huge part of her life and philosophy. She clearly hates the very idea of Rachel's mother and wants her to forget. What happened to her and to her parents only becomes clear in bits and pieces as the reader gets more into Rachel's experience as well as the experiences of others around her in the past and in the present. She's never been asked to choose which heritage she'll follow, but conventional ideas of race and class demand that she do so now.

But even though Rachel determines to embrace a new life, it's not that clear what direction she should take and how to get there. And so much is beyond her control. She

has trouble at school. Her experience doesn't fit her for a US school. The white girls consider her black and the black girls think she behaves like a white girl. Rachel herself is dark skinned with startlingly blue eyes, advertising not only the fact that she's biracial but that her experience and world view don't fit her for either group.

This book won the Bellweather prize in 2010, a prize started by Barbara Kingsolver and which rewards writers who handle issues of social justice. I suppose I don't quite approve of this kind of a prize, disliking the ideal of fiction (any are really) subordinated to or used primarily as a tool for ideas. Kingsolver is a talented novelist, and if I look at her oeuvre I can see the theme of social justice, but she always made her way in the amazingly competitive world of fiction as a "serious novelist" not as an advocate for social causes.

Watership Down by Richard Adams

2011-11-07T14:33:00.001-06:00

This was a reread and I listened to it. Surprised again how good a story it is. Bought copies for my kids to read to their kids. I'd forgotten how the rabbits made friends with other animals, particularly the gull who speaks with a Scandinavian accent. Rabbit behavior is pretty accurate I think--he uses a book on rabbit behavior as a reference-- and human psychology is not only good but uplifting.

Hazel is the self-abnegating hero, the popular "chief rabbit" on the new warren on Watership Down (a real place in Hampshire--don't think I knew that before) and Fiver is the prophet/seer/Cassandra-type character whom Hazel learns to trust. Bigwig is the muscle, not as smart as the leaders but a warrior with a heart. Woundwort is the rabbit scared from his upbringing who knows nothing about controlling rabbits except force.

The plot is an heroic one. Fiver predicts disaster for their current warren but the leaders don't listen so they leave. Gradually Hazel grows in his leadership position. They find a warren that welcomes them but it's "unnatural" in that they survive on the leftover veggies a farmer leaves. They find a good place to build but then need to get some does--warren won't last with no babies. But then they come up against Efrafa, a huge warren that is run almost like a prison camp by General Woundwort. Knowing Efrafa has too many does, a party goes to request immigrants from among the females. Of course, that's not allowed. Trickery ensues. Rabbits are after all traditionally tricksters and at night in the warren a favorite pastime is telling and listening to trickster stories.

Kehaar, the gull. plays an important role in their escape from Efrafa, but the rabbits save themselves when a battle party from Efrafa comes to their new warren, led by Woundwart and bent on destruction. There's a lovely chapter near the end where a little girl on the nearby farm rescues Hazel who's nearly killed by the cat and he's returned home in the hrududu (motor vehicle). Woundwort is shown as clearly mad and disappears, assumed dead.

Strange, but the only character I remember clearly from my first reading was Woundwort.

In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror and an American Family in Berlin by Erik Larson

2011-10-12T10:11:00.000-05:00

I just finished this one and continue to think that Larson hasn't ever come up to his first book (Isaac's Storm). I enjoyed the one about Chicago and the Columbian Exhibition but didn't think the big subject (Columbian Exhibition) and the little one (murder) were well integrated. In Isaac's Storm, the larger issue (1900 Galveston hurricane) and the smaller issue (the weatherman who didn't predict the storm) were inextricable since Isaac himself had harrowing experiences in the storm. But in all of his other books (I'm not sure I read the one before this one) he struggles with the two stories he's trying to tell, this big historical one and the small one about individuals.

On this one I thought initially that Martha Dodd was the major focus. I looked her up on Wiki and found she was supposed to have been a Soviet spy and indeed spent her last years outside the US. So I expected a spy story and perhaps an embarrassed father. But it turns out that really Dodd is the "hero" of the the book, recognizing early that Hitler's regime is dangerous and also rebelling against aristocratic tendencies in the US State Department. There's an epilogue on what happened to Martha, which give less credence to her spying than did the Wiki article. But I found her relatively unlikable and certainly not credible as an effective spy or even as thinker about political realities.

Larson's documentation of the growing threat of the Hitler regime, though, is well drawn as Larson follows Dodd's willingness to give the Germans the benefit of the doubt at first (he's gone to school in Germany and was initially predisposed to like the people and support its government) to his gradual realization of the brutality and inhumanity of the Nazi regime. One question I had was what happened to the Jewish owner of the house on Tiergarten Strasse which the Dodd's rented. The owner lived on the 4th floor of the house, evidently thinking he'd be safer living upstairs from the US Ambassador, but the last we hear of him is when he brings more of his family to live with him and it gets noisy. Dodd has second thoughts. That's still relatively early, 1934 or so, but Larson never mentions him again. I would have assumed he'd follow that through and at least say so if no information was available.

I listened to this book on Audible. The reader is a good one but impossible at foreign pronunciation. He got the German right in short common phrases, but over and over again he blasted through passages in German he couldn't handle at all. He was no better with the Russian.

Aside: One of the things I really hate about recorded books is readers who get the pronunciation wrong. There's a reader of Dickens novels who's great at dialects and really performs the novels superbly, but he can't pronounce English place names. On the other hand it adds a great deal when a reader knows the language of the original or of the place that's the focus of the book. I listened to Bolaño's 2666 and also The Savage Detectives and loved that the reader (readers? not sure if they were the same) was clearly also a Spanish speaker.

Berlin 1961: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and the Most Dangerous Place on Earth by Frederick Kempe

2011-07-28T09:09:00.000-05:00

Finished this one last night. I read it because I was in Berlin--the only time I've been there--in the summer of 1961. I was a student in a summer program for foreign students in Bonn and the week-long trip was part of a program where the Federal Republic wanted to influence foreign students to care about reunification. As I understand they paid for the trip. Makes sense though as I read this book.They particularly wanted the US to be for reunification and after being fed all the propaganda including lunch with Willi Brandt at the Rathaus Schöneberg where we each got to shake his hand, we generally did. I don't remember what Brandt said, but I liked him and believed him right. The trip was the last week in July 1961, two weeks before the wall. I remember getting up on the morning of August 13 and reading about "die Mauer" in the paper. Kempe says that no one called it "the Wall" until several weeks later but I remember distinctly that the word was used in that morning's Bonn paper. And somehow I got the impression it was a brick wall and struggled to make sense of what seemed so stupid in the nuclear age, a brick wall to keep people in. Of course, we knew about the flight of the East German population. That had been evident everywhere that July. We had people come up to us and ask if they could trade East Marks for West Marks. We usually did. A bit of help for the refugees since their currency was worth far less than the East German exchange rate--might not even have been convertible. But also gave us currency to use when we visited East Berlin as we did every chance we got. At 19, I was excited seeing "real" Russian soldiers (with their knee high black boots and slick gray uniforms, they were far more impressive than the wrinkled Volkspolitzei). There was a Russian memorial just outside the Brandenburg Gate, on the West Berlin side actually, and the crowds of tourists (mostly American I think) harassed the soldiers guarding it. Americans at the height of the Cold War were excited to see the "great enemy" up close.

The book paints a pretty dim picture of Kennedy in the tilt with Khrushchev and suggests that had he taken a stand against the wall, we might have been able to end the Cold War earlier. After all, Khrushchev had responded to Kennedy's election by printing his uncensored inaugural address in the Russian papers sending his a personal letter. Kempe is pretty down on Kennedy, though he does credit him with learning enough about dealing with Khrushchev to weather the subsequent Missle Crisis--though he suggests that that wasn't really the scary confrontation the public thought it was. (I remember being too worried about a History test and my need to show that prof I wasn't a dolt to worry much about getting blown up.)

It also shows how little I understood about politics and world affairs at the time. I thought getting even close to the Communists was great fun. I came home with stories about the bridge where they exchanged prisoners, about headlines routinely in red type in East Berlin, about the dearth of goods in the GUM department store (and how it contrasted with the lavish display windows--including some glass stands out on the sidewalks--on the Kurfürstendamm), about the people who would get on our bus as we toured the East and regale us with stories--and then politely ask to be left off at the border crosssings. There were crossings then where you had to show papers (anyone with an allied country passport was not hassled) but no wall. Often you could cross without being stopped. The East German border was more dramatic (we traveled by bus), with the searchlights and plowed strip just like in the spy movies.

But I didn't understand anything at all about the politics and saw both the refuge problem and the border closing as mainly concerning the people of the East. I didn't expect the US to do anything. I suppose I thought we could do something if we wanted to. I didn't even think about why we'd want to. I understood that our trip was financed by the Federal Republic so we'd support Wiedervereinigung (reunification) but did support it so didn't think much about it. The college that sponsored our summer abroad forbade us to go back after the Wall and I, with my friends, pooh-poohed the danger, but I didn't have the spending money to go back anyway.

This book is worth reading, though if you see Kennedy as a hero, somewhat painful, but I doubt that it's completely wrong-headed, though maybe his speculations about ending the Cold War earlier weren't entirely realistic and he acknowledged the logic of Kennedy's rationale: "A wall is better than a war." The real issue was how likely Khrushchev would be to jump to a nuclear war. Then our assumptions (at least mine and I think most of the public's) were the Russia had superior military might and possibly more nuclear weapons. They certainly had more fighting power in and near Berlin. But Khrushchev seemed a real person, not just a cardboard bad man, scruffier but just as bad as Nazis in the movies--as all the other Russian leaders seemed.

In retrospect Khrushchev was not at all anxious for war, but most of us didn't know that. Still Kennedy did pretty much know that. He had a private correspondence (through RFK and a Russian spy), but Khrushchev also seemed impulsive, the sort who might start a war because he was mad. And Kennedy was haunted by the thought that he'd be the President who unleased a nuclear war.

The introduction to the book was written by Brent Scowcroft for what that's worth.

Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes by Tamim Ansary

2011-07-02T14:54:00.000-05:00

A good friend actually turned me on to this book, six months ago or more. I bought it but in spite of liking the intro, put it down for other things. So I nominated it for the nonfiction group I'm in and when it was chosen started reading it seriously.

I really liked this book and I think I'd like the author. He's lived in the US for a long time and understands American history, politics and public opinion. He's not religious himself and has a great command of English as well as a considerable sense of proportion--and of humor.

He divides the world into 3 parts: The West (Western Europe and the Americas), the East (Asia and the Pacific Islands) and what he calls "The Middle World", the part of the world that includes the what we'd call the middle east, north Africa, the southwestern ex-Soviet republics, to India (under the Moghuls).

The first part of the book is a history of the Muslim world (the Middle World), from Mohammed through the Khalifates and beyond. It focuses almost exclusively on that part of the world, but beginning with the Crusades, Ansary incorporates incorporates the interface between the Middle World and the West (only though when Europe becomes reasonably civilized since initially it was just a huge expanse of barbarian territories). And when West meets Middle, he reports history from the Middle (Muslim) point of view. The book culminates with the three great Muslim Empires which coexisted and lasted (at least one of them did) until WWI: the Ottoman, the Safavid (Persian) and Moghul (Indian). Increasingly as the book comes closer to our own time--he stops basically at 911--he articulates the attitudes, opinions and prejudices of the Muslims, but the fact that he understandsIran the corresponding attitudes, opinions and prejudices of the West is critical. He's particularly interested in the various secular modernist reformers, seeing in their efforts a desire to incorporate industrialiam and the industrial goods of the West without considering the role of the social structure of Western Europe in the technology they created.

The various schisms of Islam are explained. (I finally understood who the Pakistani pilgrims were with whom we shared a small hotel in the Khan al Khaili area of Cairo. They were Shi'ite pilgrims to the Hussein Mosque and Hussein was the grandson of Ali (the 4th Khalif) who was descended from Mohammed's "favorite wife" Fatima. The difference between Sunnis and Shi'ites became clearer and it also became clear that there were many varieties of each. There were interesting tidbits like the Sikhs whose religion was originally an attempt to amalgamate Islam and Hinduism and the various Sufi sects that were offshoots of Shi'ism. The rise of Wahibism was interesting too--the first Ibn Saud embraced Wahibism in the 18th century, long before the family became powerful and organized the Arabian peninsula as Saudi Arabia.

As the history becomes more modern Ansary focuses on 20th century history from the point of view, for example, of Iran (the US overthrow of Mosadeq and restoration of the Shah), of Egypt (Suez Canal crisis) and of Palestine (Israel emergence as a state)--to name a few instances. In the early part of the book we were learning the history of the Muslim world, isolated as it was, but as the story progresses we're beginning to understand our own history as seen in the Middle World.

This is a very readable book. I recommend it highly.

The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

2011-05-04T10:09:00.001-05:00

I highly recommend this book, though mine is a probably a very superficial review. I'm not highly knowledgeable about statistics or models, though I've had my experiences and have always been suspicious of predictions based on them. And of course I recognize that the "really big things" seem to come out of the blue.

The main idea is relatively simple, that when we consider the universe of possibilities, we tend to focus on models and statistics that define the limits of the possible and to ignore the outliers. His initial example was from the point of view of the pig, which every morning for 1000 days, got a big breakfast and was left to wallow, and so defined reality in terms of its experience--until suddenly one morning it's slaughtered for bacon. He likens the pig's surprise with our surprise at the stock market crash of 1986 or 911. (The book was written before the current financial crisis and before the Japanese earthquake/tsunami.) And he talks about the danger of discounting those events that lie outside of our mathematical models and normal ways of planning for the future.

Amazon's description of the book is better than mine: "A black swan is an event, positive or negative, that is deemed improbable yet causes massive consequences."

I like it because I can't help but notice that everyone who predicts the future (including me) is wrong--maybe not completely wrong but they usually miss the really big things--and yet we don't really consider the range of what might happen, only what seems likely to happen. We tend to be like the pig who was totally blindsided by his ultimate fate. The discussion of how to build nuclear plants in the wake of Fukishima seems a case in point. In any one location, it's not all that hard to consider a range of possible events to protect against, but protecting against the really big event? In the wake of current tornadoes, I hear planning to prevent future damage as if it really were possible to contain the tornado (or other weather) danger. Clearly what we usually do, is plan for a range of possibilities and assign the others to the realm of the nearly impossible. Taleb is arguing that we do ourself a huge disservice by discounting the outlying possibilities.

Taleb himself is definitely present in the book which one doesn't expect. We learn a lot about him personally and his origins in a small village in Lebanon. His jokes are not always funny. You sometimes feel embarrassed by his combination of arrogance and transparency. But he didn't totally turn me off because I think he's made a career of not fitting in because he's attuned to truths that others don't even consider. He's particularly hard on the financial world.

The Great Railway Bazaar by Paul Theroux

2011-05-04T09:23:00.003-05:00

First of all it's old and it takes some adjustment to get back into the mindset of 1975. When Theroux traveled to Vietnam the war wasn't over (he was horrified to discover entrepreneurs setting up battlefield tours) and when he went from the Soviet Far East to Moscow, it was still the USSR. In fact, that last part of the trip, when he traveled from northern Japan to the USSR in the winter, was the worst part of the book and not only because it was an old story politically. Theroux was also tired of the trip and irritable. I began to wonder (because I think he did) why he'd planned this trip. I'd also recently read Ian Frazier's excellent Travels in Siberia which gave me far more insights into this area than did Theroux who never even got off the train. Of course he'd not have been free to travel in Siberia in the 1970ies as Frazier was in the early 2000s. Still he came off as sick of the trip and not in the least interested in where he was. No associations at all with places and Russian history, for example, not even Yekaterinburg where the Tsar died.

The book seems to have been written as he went because he arrived in London with six notebooks full of text. It does read as if he was writing “in the moment”. The journey—and the book—begins at Waterloo Station in London and he began talking about what he was seeing and the people he was traveling with right then—to underline the fact that English travelers were as odd and noteworthy as the Malays or Burmese. He traveled to Paris and then to Istanbul on what was left of the Oriental Express (not very luxurious at that time). The idea was to travel the great trains of Asia and of those he found the Indian trains the most comfortable for travel—clean sheets and good food. Frankly, I became a little bored with the details of the accommodations. I suppose I was more interested in the destinations while Theroux’s fascination was with the journey itself.

While I share Theroux's fascination with trains which he attributes to growing up near the tracks of a major train in Massachusetts (my fascination came from the train that passed right near my grandparents in Duluth—zillions of hoppers full of red iron ore and engineers who always waved at me), I don't really like books that are primarily train journeys where the writer just passes through and notes all the exotic stuff. I didn't much like The Old Patagonian Express either--in both cases because I wanted to know more than the odd tidbits. I also read Dark Star Safari (more of less the route of the Cape to Cairo railway that was the dream of Cecil Rhodes). The through railway didn't actually exist so he spent more time in the countries and he went back to Malawi where he's been a Peace Corps volunteer years before.

In short I don't know why I keep reading Theroux because he's not a favorite. I guess it's the places that interest me and I never get enough because when he arrives he’s soon off on the next train.

The Prime Minister by Anthony Trollope

2011-04-17T15:19:00.001-05:00

I'm slowly making my way through the political novels Trollope (the Palliser novels) and now have only one to go. These last two are not the most famous, but I ended up liking The Prime Minister.

There are two themes: politics and the position of women. Politics hasn't changed much (I underlined a bunch of passages that could have come out of current political debates) but the position of women has and the novel is interesting on both subjects.

The political situation is this: there's a crisis, a coalition government is needed and Plantagenet Palliser, who's been at loose ends ever since he became the Duke of Omnium and had to leave the lower house of Parliament where he'd really made his career. He's not terribly successful as a political leader, though he holds the Liberal Party together and gets the country beyond the coalition phase. He's not successful because he's too honest and forthright and doesn't have time, patience or guts for the game, but also because he's too thin-skinned and too anti-social. Glencora (also seeking to find her feet at the Duchess of Ominum instead of just Lady Glen) resolves to be the hostess with the mostess and to support her husband by entertaining an almost continuous string of political lights at Gatherum Castle all during the recess of Parliament. She gets her husband's agreement to spending the money so they can entertain scores of bedrooms full of guests in style at one time, but not his cooperation in sociability--he hates Gatherum Castle, crowds and small talk. There's a minor disaster when one politician inappropriately petitions the Duke who responds by ordering him to leave. Things get worse though when Glencore takes under her wing a Mr. Lopez (about whom she knows little but that he's young and charming) for the parliamentary seat at Silverbridge, traditionally under the control of the Palliser family. And she does it at exactly the time the Duke announces that he will in future keep hands off and let the Silverbridge electors elect whom they choose. Subsequently, the political rag latches on to the Duke's dishonesty in only pretending to take his hands off the political strings but secretly supporting a candidate for Silverbridge. Unlike most politicians who ignore the rag, the Duke is hurt deeply, broods at length but feels his hands are tied (remember he's fundamentally honest and decent) because he can't blame his wife for disobeying him.

The other thread of the novel focuses on Emily Warden, the daughter of a wealthy attorney, who meets that same Lopez at her relatively foolish aunt's house--and falls in love with him. Mr. Warden disapproves and tells her so but kind parent that he is (there's no mother in the picture) he eventually gives in because she insists she'll never be happy without him. Lopez, it's clear from the outset, wants a fashionable wife and her father's money, but of course Emily doesn't see that--until they are married and he enlists her help to get her father's money. Emily is quickly disillusioned but trapped. He's her husband and she must do as he says, live as he wants, etc. Even when her father promises to do everything he can to help her even if it means taking her abroad to avoid the courts which would order her back to her husband, she refuses, feeling she has disgraced herself and must pay the price. There's also an old love in the background who actually is elected member for Silverbridge.

There isn't much contact between Glencora and Emily, but it's easy to see they're in a similar situation--tied to a husband they don't agree with but powerless to act on their own. Glencora is older and wiser of course and Palliser is the exact opposite of Emily's outrageous lying husband. Though the ending is predictable, you'll still read it eagerly to see how it all plays out.

The Moral Landscape by Sam Harris

2011-04-17T15:17:00.000-05:00

I liked this one even though I think I'd really have to read it again to follow all of the scientific arguments he makes. Harris' thesis is that, contrary of a popular belief, morality can and does exist in the absence of adherence to a religion and, in fact, perhaps as a side benefit, one avoids outdated moral pronouncements (like maybe "women should keep quiet in the churches" as well as injunctions to kill nonbelievers). Harris is a neuroscientists and wants to put forward the nation that science has much to contribute to morality. I don't disagree with that at all, but I have to say that the functional MRI studies he sites (and which he seems to be involved in conducting) were the least interesting material in this book.

I suppose I am somewhere between atheist and agnostic these days, and while I appreciate many of the arguments against religion made by Dawkins and Harris and Hitchens (I haven't read the latter's book but there's some of his argument in Hitch 22), I'm most interested in facilitating an environment where one can talk about religion in something other than hushed tones and where current opinion doesn't force one to take seriously anything anyone says in the name of religion. It may be wise in many circumstances to abjure discussion of religion and politics, still with politics most of us feel pretty free expressing our opinions. I may have turned off the TV this morning when Christiane Amanpour was interviewing four new tea party Congress men and women, but I don't hesitate to disagree loudly and publicly and I don't fear the PC police telling me I can't disparage their politics.

Hitch-22 by Christopher Hitchens

2011-04-17T15:16:00.000-05:00

I loved this autobiographical book. I listened to a full length copy read by the author who not only has a lovely reading voice but soft and intimate tones. The book itself is revelatory and personal of course, but his manner of reading was charming as well as intimate. (I'm usually not wild about authors reading their own books, but in this case I can't imagine anyone could have done it better.)

I don't review what he said since most of you have read it. I hadn't read anything by Hitchens except Why Orwell Matters (Orwell is also a hero of mine) which I absolutely loved. I will definitely read more. I realize many people hate Hitchens for flip-flopping (which has never seemed to me necessarily bad--I remember Emerson's " a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds" ) from a leftist to a supporter of the Iraq war and a supporter of Paul Wolfowitz. But he accounts for his change in this memoir and it makes sense to me, (though I'd have a hard time really changing my mind about Paul Wolfowitz). I intend to read more of Hitchens...

Travels in Siberia by Ian Frazier

2011-03-09T14:55:00.000-06:00

Just finished it and ended up really liking it, though I started out less then enthusiastic. I was listening to it and am usually less than thrilled when an author reads his own book. It also seemed to me he was mispronouncing Russian works, but then what do I know--just a little Russian though my sister who coached me was very particular about pronunciation.

It also took me awhile to realize that the travels of the title was really was meant to be plural--he writes about a total of 5 trips to Siberia. By the time they reached the Pacific Ocean on the long overland trip, I assumed he's wrap up the book.Then I discovered there were two more trips to Siberia.

I like this kind of book, which is organized loosely by chronology, but otherwise by no particular principle other than what's on the author's mind at the moment, with digressions obviously taking us further than what he observed on his trips. I loved the digressions, whether on the Decemberists (his favorite) or on Genghis Khan (to whom I don't think he did justice) or prison camps or the mineral wealth of Siberia. But whether or not I like this kind of book depends on whether I like the author. I guess it took me awhile to decide that I did in this case. If he did mispronounce Russian, it's also clear that he devoted considerable energy to learning the language and was able to converse normally with a wide range of people. I liked that he never claimed to be 100% authoritative, was in "learning mode" most of the time. I liked that he was interested in people--more so than in sights--and look them seriously. I liked that he made Russian friends whom he contacted on subsequent trips. I liked that he put up with things like garbage and lack of safety precautions rather than complaining. I loved it that he eventually decided that Serge really could fix anything that when wrong with that van. I liked it that he really loved Russia...and especially Siberia.

The Cold War: A New History by John Lewis Gaddis

2010-12-30T10:40:00.003-06:00

I listened to this one and I think I need to listen to it twice. I found it extremely engaging, but it's not your typical "narrative" history. He organizes his materials more or less chronologically, but focuses on idea and concepts and people more than chronology. Most fascinating was the chapter called "Actors" which he means both literally and figuratively, i.e., the world personalities involved whom he saw as capable actors on the world stage, with a clearly articulated and easily understandable message about the rivalry that dominated the last half of the 20th century. And of course he notes that there was a professional among them, (i.e., Reagan). This is a very conservative view of the world--not my usual fare, but a very interesting thesis nonetheless. The actors were Reagan, Thatcher, Deng Xiaoping, Lech Walęsa, Pope John Paul II ( whom he refers to as Karol Wojtyla throughout) Vąclav Havel, "even Boris Yeltsin" (whom Gaddis doesn't exactly like) who cut through policies and procedures and spoke directly to the people about change. But not Mikhail Gorbachev (my own hero) who did so much to change the USSR but had no vision of what would replace it.

Interesting that those of us who hated Reagan and Thatcher focus on domestic affairs mostly. Both seemed to me way too simplistic in foreign affairs, but that's what Gaddis liked, that they HAD a vision and spoke it clearly so that everyone--the people--at home and abroad could hear it: as in."Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!". Still he had a fit tribute to Gorbie, "And so, in the end, he gave up an ideology, an empire and his own country, in preference to using force. He chose love over fear, violating Machiavelli's advice for princes and thereby ensuring that he ceased to be one. It made little sense in traditional geopolitical terms. But it did make him the most deserving recipient of the Novel Peace Prize." I suspect there's more cynicism in that statement which I tend to take seriously.

You'll see from that quote, too, that Gaddis is an excellent writer and stylist.

I give it 8/10. If I were more of a conservative, I think I'd give it a 10

All Clear by Connie Willis

2010-12-07T13:03:00.002-06:00

This book is the rest of what Willis calls a Double Decker novel. Blackout was the first part. This one continues the story. There's a forward by Willis (to the audio version at least) that tells you to go back to Blackout if you haven't already read it/listened to it. But I don't see the sense in publishing them separately. As a serialized magazine novel, maybe, with All Clear having 2 or 3 parts itself, but with the intention that it would eventually be published as one novel. All this format is likely to do is irritate readers who expect each volume to have individual integrity.

That said, I read it because I am fascinated both by the idea of time travel and by London during the Blitz, so I couldn't not read this one, but I probably wouldn't recommend it to someone who didn't have one or the other peculiar interest. Willis used the Mass Observation Project documents to get the details right--and my guess is she amassed so many details that she didn't discipline herself to select those likely to make a tightly organized novel. Mass Observation was a sociological study in Britain, starting in the 30ies in which ordinary citizens kept diaries of their everyday life. I think they were paid to do so--probably compelling in the 30ies. I'm not sure there was a clearcut objective, but the result was a huge mass of material and it continued through the war. Only now are sociologists and historians and writers of fiction mining the documents--which are archived at Sussex University as I remember. (More info: http://www.massobs.org.uk/index.htm)

Willis also interviewed a number of older women who had had "war work" in WWII and who had a reunion at the Imperial War Museum in 1995. Quite fortuitously, Willis was there to doing research for the novel. She uses the reunion as an event in the novel.

So the book is fascinating because of the detail of life during the Blitz. The main action takes place between September 1940 and Spring 1941, though it begins with Dunkirk and there is some action during the V1 and V2 rocket attacks and on VE Day in May of 1945. The basic plot focuses on 3 "historians", i.e. time travelers from 2060 who go back in time to study history from the front lines. But they are unexpectedly trapped in the past when their "drops" (locations where they go to be "beamed up" as it were) unexpectedly and mysteriously close. They speculate that they've done something to change history--a no no in time travel speculation--and as a result their ability to travel in time is shut down, whether temporarily or permanently they don't know. They fear what they've done has changed the outcome of the war. They fear that the Oxford of 2060 (home to them) has been destroyed.

The plot if VERY convoluted and there's lots of sentimentality and lots of stock characters and melodramatic situations, but it's compelling enough to finish just to know what happens, though the title clearly gives you a clue. I could never recommend this as great literature. Probably those fascinated by London during the Blitz will like this better than science fiction types who love time travel. Willis never claims to construct a viable theory of time travel, but she doesn't even resolve all the questions and contradictions her "theory" raises.

Freedom Summer: The Savage Season That Made Mississippi Burn and Made America a Democracy by Bruce Watson

2010-12-01T13:10:00.003-06:00

I remember the summer of 1964 very well--I watched most of it on the TV evening news where I gathered with fellow Peace Corps trainees in the evenings at Indiana University (and for two weeks at Indiana State in Terra Haute). We had classes all day: history of Africa and Sierra Leone, public health lectures, phys ed, Krio language, etc. etc. It was really like going to summer school except that we all lived together in Quonset huts left over from WWII and stuck together because we never had a free minute from 7 in the morning till 9 or 10 at night.

Before 1964, I had never been particularly tuned in to Civil Rights. I don't even remember hearing about the murder of Emmit Till until many years later, but 1964 was the summer when SNCC volunteers--mostly college students from the north--went to Mississippi to run "Freedom Schools" and help the blacks register to vote (often having to convince them first that they deserved to take the same role as the whites in a democracy). And it was the summer when 3 Civil Rights workers were murdered by a bunch (18-19) of racists and KKK members who got a backhoe and buried them under a dam being built. It took all summer for the FBI to find informants who eventually led them to the bodies. It was the summer when the country was really shocked to discover that white Mississippi would stoop to beatings and murder to "preserve their way of life", i.e., to keep blacks in their "place". It was also the summer where the Freedom Democrats tried (unsuccessfully) to get seated at the Democratic convention to supplement or replace the illegally chosen white Democrats.

And I felt twinges of guilt all summer. I was going to Africa to help blacks--and not going to Mississippi--because I wanted to see the world, other cultures, etc. When at the airport in NY a man laughed at us and said, "IF you want to help blacks, I can just take you to Harlem and you can work there. You don't have to go to Africa", I felt another twinge. I was tuned into JFK's "Ask Not" message, but from the first tuned into the Peace Corps as the chance of a lifetime to see the world no one else saw (in those days, ordinary people who went abroad went to Europe and that's about all).

Bruce Watson's book is a worthwhile read, especially for those who don't know much about the Civil Rights movement and about this experiment by America's young liberals. It will be an eye opener. Although Watson slides into some "purplish prose" every once in awhile--which I didn't mind because I shared his views--this is an excellent history of Freedom Summer. As well as profiling the leaders and providing an excellent overview of Mississippi history since the Civil War, it focuses on four of the volunteers--who they were, why they joined, what happened to them in Mississippi--even where they are now.

The murder of Chaney, Goodwin and Schwerner is a story that's told piece by piece since, though the murder happened on the first day of Freedom Summer--June 21st--it reverberated through the whole period as the mystery of their disappearance was gradually unraveled in all its sordidness. And in the end, Mississippi refused to prosecute anyone and the only trial was when the Federal government brought suit for Civil Rights violations, which the defendants laughed at. And while that murder was undoubtedly the worst thing that happened during Freedom Summer, it was certainly not the only violence. Watson even tells the story of an insurance agent who defended the the work of Freedom Summer and, as a result, his business was ruined, his family harassed and they were eventually forced to move out of the state. Violence was meted out to blacks who dared to want to register as well as to the "uppity Northerners, Jews and Communists" who presumed to challenge Mississippi ways and help them. And if you wonder "why Mississippi?" more than any other southern state, Watson tackles that question too.

The final chapters of the book focus on the impact of Freedom Summer, particularly on the heart-breaking defeat at the Democratic Convention. A mealy-mouth compromise was reached--and Humbert Humphrey cried too when he proposed it. Lyndon Johnson knew he couldn't seat the Freedom Democrats without taking the very great risk that Goldwater would be elected when the entire Southern delegation left the Democrats as they threatened. He tasked Humphrey with seeing that the delegation wasn't seated. Politics trumped conscience on that one. But Watson also chronicles how Mississippi changed--and changed relatively quickly--after the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and after the awful publicity from Freedom Summer (business and tourism were affected seriously). Many citizens who had been afraid to speak out when the voices of hate ruled began to make themselves heard. Mississippi, with a majority of black citizens, began to let blacks register and win some elections....

Not all of the blowback from Freedom Summer was benign. SNCC became increasingly divided over the issue of nonviolence. Stokley Carmichael and others moved to "black power" and discouraged the participation of whites in Civil Rights issues. Violence broke out in Northern cities, proving that racist and bigotry were not exclusively Southern phenomena.

Blackout by Connie Willis

2010-11-24T10:31:00.002-06:00

I'm not a fan of scifi, but I am fascinated by time travel. Not much interest in the future, but very interested in anything to do with time travel to the past. Years ago I read Connie Willis' Doomsday Book, about a history department at Oxford that does research by sending people to the past.

I recently read her long short story The Winds of Marble Arch which for some reason isn't available in book form (I suppose it's a collection of stories) except at exhorbitant prices.They did have it at Audible. Not nearly as good as I expected--good thing I didn't shell out for an expensive used copy--and not really about time travel, just about "leftovers" from the past in the tube stations.

So then I got Blackout, the first in a two-book series about sending people to research London during the Blitz--from the same time and history faculty as Doomsday Book. Really well researched, though she makes a few mistakes in British culture--but not significant enough even to remember. Three time travelers go to different parts of Britain in the summer and fall of 1940, one to Dover (to study "heroes" in the Dunkirk evacuation), one to Warwickshire (to study children who'd been evacuated) and one to London (to study initial reactions of ordinary people to the Blitz). There are a couple of others, like one woman sent to the time of the first V1 rockets who seems to drop out of the book. The three have adventures but all discover that they can't get home, though whether because the "drop zone" was inaccessible (one was on the beach south of Dover and had an antiaircraft gun on it) or not working was not clear, though by the end of the novel it is clear that something is really wrong in the time travel world. Each suspects they've inadvertently done something to "change history" and screwed up the balance of a chaotic system and maybe caused the allies to lose the war.

But this novel just ends. Adventures, character development, plot element but absolutely no resolution at the end. Just tune in to the next book for the resolution. That makes me furious and seems pure commercialism. Harry Potter books all had individual plots and individual integrity as novels. So I think do all those series books kids reads. Frankly though The Lord of the Rings was a little shaky in that category. I felt a little anger at the end of Ghosh's A Sea of Poppies, which is also a first in a series. But the whole idea of a series is that each book has an individual plot which has some resolution and internal integrity. Blackout has NO RESOLUTION AT ALL. On the audiobook, the reader blatantly said to get the next book to find out what happens.

The next book is called All Clear and I'm sure I'll read it because I want to know what happened and did get interested in the characters. BUT I DO NOT APPROVE.

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

2010-10-23T09:51:00.000-05:00

This is one book I've known about--and known the plot of--for years but never read. The proposition seems to come right out of a Gothic novel: a moral tale translated into something literal. Dorian recognizes his own perfection of beauty and innocence in the portrait painted by his friend Basil--when Basil's friend Lord Henry calls attention to it. And when he hears Lord Henry lament that it's all downhill from there, Dorian utters a wish that the portrait would age and he'd stay the way he is in the portrait. It's like when the troll in a fairy tale gives you a wish and you toss off a comment in the form of a wish and he makes it true.

Lord Henry is rich, idle and curious and amuses himself by trying to corrupt the beautiful boy, Dorian. He is successful beyond his dreams because Dorian embraces his lifestyle--far more seriously than does Lord Henry himself so that in the end when Dorian asks him what he'd say if he told him he'd killed Basil (whose mysterious disappearance has been the talk of London society), Lord Henry replies that he wouldn't believe it, because only the lower classes actually commit crimes.

In fact Dorian did kill Basil after showing him the portrait which after many years shows not only age but the dissipation and cruelty into which Dorian has fallen. Basil's horror causes Dorian to kill him and then to bribe an acquaintance to get rid of the body. What the bribe was we never know but the man killed himself rather than live with what he had done. As had an innocent girl many years before whom Dorian wooed and then cruelly left. We're to assume there were many more such betrayals in between.

Early in their relationship Lord Henry had given Dorian an 'immoral book' the contents of which we can only imagine. Dorian seems to have taken it as a guidebook. One imagines that Lord Henry found it primarily amusing and was amusing himself to see its affect on Dorian. And Wilde, of course, is playing with the idea of whether or not a book can be immoral as critics of the time pondered the idea of whether a book written by an immoral man could be a good book.

Today when Wilde is taken seriously as an artist and his homosexuality seems quite irrelevant, these issues of morality in art or in human conduct are still as perplexing as they were when the novel was written.

The dialog in this novel, quite apart from the heavy Gothic plot, is quite as delightful as The Importance of Being Ernest or Lady Windermere's Fan.

Citizens of London: The Americans Who Stood with Britain in its Darkest Finest Hour by Lynne Olson

2010-10-15T09:46:00.000-05:00

The focus of this book is the relationship between Britain and the US as allies in WWII, a close alliance which a recent history of the war by Andrew Roberts credits in large part with winning the war. That’s not a new insight but as we move away from the “greatest generation” myth and begin to examine the reasons why this alliance might have failed, those most dedicated to its success demand close attention and that’s what Olson does.

The main characters are John Gilbert Winant, who took over as US Ambassador from Joseph Kennedy—who’d advised Roosevelt that Britain was doomed and help would not be effective, Edward R. Murrow who matured as a major force in broadcast news, bringing the plight of the British people to Americans by his broadcasting during the Blitz early in the war and then becoming the major interpreter of the European war for the ordinary American, and finally, Averill Harriman, who went to London as the administrator of Lend Lease but involved himself in many other aspects of the relationships.

Other Americans focused on were Eisenhower and Thomas Hitchcock, a playboy who'd been in the Lafayette Escadrille in WWI and acted as an advisor to the Air Force in England. He was responsible for getting the US to adopt the P-51 Mustang fighter, which allowed US bombers to have a reasonable chance of getting away after bombing German cities. (http://www.acepilots.com/planes/p51_mustang.html).

The book covers all aspects of the lives of these men. With Winant, the focus was on his relationship with the British people and particularly how popular he was in Britain—recognized on the street and loved by ordinary people. I don't think I'd ever heard of him and probably he's better known in the UK than in the US. With Eisenhower there's a recap of Operation Torch (North Africa) since that was his baptism of fire as well as much discussion of how Ike balanced the needs and the egos of British and American generals. With Harriman the focus was on how he competed with Winant as the principal American influence in Britain and on his affair with Churchill's daughter-in-law, Pamela. In fact the love life of top figures representing both the US and Britain was a major issue in this book. It seems that the movies were not really wrong in portraying wartime London as a venue for love and sex. Murrow also had an affair with Pamela Churchill and Winant, with Sarah Churchill. Pamela has multiple affairs with influential men simultaneously.

If the book has a flaw it's that the author is emotionally attached to the protagonists and one wonders about her objectivity. She almost idolizes Winant, pretty much likes Murrow but doesn't like Harriman very much at all. Curiously while Churchill had a great relationship with Winant, he liked Harriman more. He was more of a rake, a sportsman and hard drinking man and Churchill preferred the hard working/hard playing type.

Olson dealt with issues like the influx of American servicemen into England. One thing I didn't know was that the American Red Cross set up service centers but refused to admit any British or other Allied servicemen, which policy Winant and others thought discouraged good relationships with the British. When asked by American officials to make changes the Red Cross conceded only that British officers who were invited by Americans could eat there but that's all. No British woman were allowed to work for the American Red Cross either. The book also dealt with the issue of race which has been examined at some length recently in books and movies. The British, not surprisingly, were horrified at how Americans treated black soldiers; the Americans didn't want to make big social changes in the middle of a war.

There's an interesting section on the relationship between Churchill and Roosevelt, especially toward the end of the war when the US began flexing its muscles and making decisions without involving the British. Olson sees the relationship as cooling considerably and believes that Churchill's decision not to go to Roosevelt's funeral reflects that changed relationship. After a number of recent books exalting that relationship, her point of view made me rethink some of the mythology of the relationship.

The Unknown Terrorist by Richard Flanagan

2010-09-13T13:28:00.001-05:00

Flanagan states the thesis of this novel--for it is a novel in service of an idea--right up front: "The idea that love is not enough is a particularly painful one. In the face of its truth, humanity has for centuries tried to discover in itself evidence that love is the greatest force on earth."

I thought The Unknown Terrorist was terrific, but not at first. It was more than just well-written. Flanagan is a dynamite writer, but it seemed to me it was all set up perfectly and it was clear what would happen. True enough. Then about half way through, having left the book idle for weeks on the bedstand, I picked it up again and suddenly couldn't stop. True enough it played out as I expected (and it turns out Flanagan says he took the plot from The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum by Heinrich Böll) but the text and the commentary on trust and truth and love in our culture was phenomenal. Far more powerful than any political tract.

The main character is "the Doll" or "Krystal", a pole dancer at a gentleman's club called The Chairman's Lounge in Sydney. Her real name is Gina Davies. She's in her 20ies, living a completely materialistic life dressed in designer clothes, eschewing banks and stashing cash to the amount of nearly $50,000 for a down payment on a apartment. She's chosen to exploit her body because she can make real money and buy some respect--more than she got of either at a call center. One night she meets the handsome Tariq at a Carnival and spends an passionate night with him.

At the same time Richard Cody, aging TV anchorman in danger of being eclipsed, recognizes her in a surveillance photo with Tariq who's become a suspect in a failed stadium bombing that has scared the population and made it necessary for the perpetrator to be caught and punished. Cody recognizes her because she snubbed him outside The Chairman's Lounge. As security and news and government personnel seek to find the would-be terrorist, they latch onto Tariq largely because he's disappeared, though they later find he's been in and out of Pakistan (where he has relatives and where he's gone to collect drugs). Richard Cody identifies Gina in the photo and decides to consider her an "accomplice" to the "terrorist". As the authorities pull out all the stops to find her, Cody plans a TV exclusive that will show the government at work to catch the dangerous terrorists--and fast. He ignores the possibility that Gina--and even Tariq--might be innocent.

When Tariq's body turns up in a trunk, Gina becomes "the terrorist" and a likely murderer as well. By that time the government, the security services, and Cody and his TV network have too much at stake to care about the truth. After all a programmer cum low-level drug dealer and a pole dancer are just the sorts you want to accuse of being "homegrown terrorists" if you have to accuse anyone--and of course they do in order to ally public fears and remain in control.

As she flees, the reader learns more and more about Gina, both why her background makes her the perfect "fall guy" and why she is afraid to try and clear her name by going to the police.

I've read two others by Flanagan: Gould's Book of Fish and Wanting, both of which I liked and both of which were rich in the kind of cultural observation that really makes sense to me, but neither with the sheer power and single-mindedness of this one. I'm not saying that makes it a better novel, but it makes it maybe the best political argument I've read in a long time. I will recommend that everyone read it.

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami

2010-09-13T12:50:00.001-05:00

I enjoyed this short book even though I've not much interested in running or racing (or swimming or biking competitively for that matter). I thought it was honest and certainly not overblown. I felt like I got to know the person a bit more and since I've liked everything by him I've read--some of it among the best contemporary novels I've read--I liked learning more about the person.

This book doesn't by any means give a total picture of his life. For example, he mentions a "wife" fairly often and occasionally gives the reader tidbits about her, but we don't know her name or much about her at all: she came from a family with business sense, she encourages him in all his races, she had a swimming coach whom he subsequently used and liked. I presume it's been the same wife all along.

I does tell me about how he decided to become a novelist and how he works, without, though, ever discussing his work. The only titles he even mentions are early novels and Blink Willow Sleeping Woman and that only in the context of having to write an intro for the collection of stories. Still I know more about the man writing that I do about most writers through memoirs.

Running--the way he goes about training and "performing"--becomes a metaphor for his writing process. I also liked that his priorities were clear. If a race that might take even more prep presents itself he may decline on the basis that his reason for running was to be healthy and fit enough to write novels into his old age.

I like that he's stubborn and persistent and private and doesn't try much to be anything else.

I'd rate it 9/10 as memoirs go.

Phineas Redux by Anthony Trollope

2010-08-25T10:45:00.000-05:00

I'm slowly rereading Trollope's political novels and just finished #4, Phineas Redux. In the first Phineas book the likeable (maybe one of Trollope's most likeable characters) Irishman wins a seat in Parliament and makes his way quickly into the homes and political circles of the Liberal Party. He falls in love--almost immediately--with Laura Standish who's the daughter of an Earl. She should have been male--she's that interested in politics and undertakes to make Phineas' career, but she marries an elderly rich man, Robert Kennedy (a calculated move because she didn't love him). Phineas is heart-broken but immediately finds another woman to love (who also marries someone else). He gets involved in a political issue, though, where he has to act on his conscience which means he has to leave the government and he can't afford to be only an MP (no salary). So he goes back to Ireland and marries his childhood sweetheart who rather quickly dies in childbirth.

Phineas Redux is about his second foray into politics. Likeable as ever, he still have limited means and, though, elected to Parliament, has to have a government post to make enough money to survive. But the gods are against him. Laura Kennedy has left her husband--who's tormenting her with his extreme religious practices--and he blames Phineas Finn whom Laura has discovered she really loves. Phineas is over that but kind and compassionate and mets her whenever she requests to give the support and advice of a friend. But the salacious press gets wind of the story when Robert Kennedy makes public his efforts to "get his wife back" and blames Phineas Finn for her leaving, implying an affair. Laura has to leave the country with her father to avoid the law compelling her to go back to her husband. Phineas, the good friend as ever, acts as go between and is attacked by friend and foe, even to the extent that the leaders of the Party avoid picking him for government office.

The political insights in this book, apart from the somewhat dated prose, could be written by today's political pundits. It's both amusing and horrifying to realize that very little has changed.... Amusing too that Plantagenet Palliser (sort of the central character--well his wife is maybe more central) is angling all the time to convince Parliament to adopt a decimal currency--Trollope never knew it would ever be accomplished--in fact the first time I went to London counted out 10 pennies for some tourist attraction that cost a shilling, the ticket taker just glared at me and held out his hand until I sheepishly remembered there were 12 pennies in a shilling.....

Phineas quarrels with one of the party hacks who's most critical (on moral grounds) of his supposed affair with Lady Laura and the next thing we know Phineas is in Newgate accused of murder and in danger of being hung with only circumstantial evidence against him. (Very frustrating--one wants finger prints, blood types, DNA....) And I haven't even mentioned Madam Goesler (rich, dark-haired, young and somewhat mysterious Viennese widow) who's taken up by Glencora Palliser and becomes a fixture in Liberal political circles...who is Phineas' friend and had even proposed to him in the first book, though he'd refused, not wanting to be seen as a poor man angling for a rich wife.

Trollope's world is simple compared to ours but his analysis is far from simple. It's psychologically convincing. His political insights are perfect. And Phineas is a most delightful character.

The Passage by Justin Cronin

2010-07-04T09:56:00.000-05:00

I heard the author on the radio--he's an English prof from Rice--and was interested even though this is not my kind of book. I don't generally like sci fi and I really don't like distopian novels.

That said this novel definitely held my attention and there was no chance that I wouldn't finish it. At the end, I'd have picked up the next book had it been available, but I'm not sure that I'll really go looking for it when it does become available.

It's well written, "literary" in the sense that each section begins with a quote, usually from Shakespeare. It's imaginatively plotted but gets sort of predictable. Particularly annoying is the fact that I would always predict where a chapter would end (I was listening to it on audible). There would be a dangerous situation. The tension would build and then the chapter would end with a suggestive section such as "He took three steps...." and the next chapter would switch to another set of characters. Effective in maintaining tension but it got tiring and predictable. In fact the book ended that way, so it's no wonder I'd have grabbed the next in the series had it been available.
There were some good but not great characters. Exactly who was the central character wasn't clear. That way at least you never knew who might get killed. There's a lot of violence and death. I'm sure this will make a popular film, but not one I'll go to.

There are some pertinent themes. This is not a mindless adventure novel. I wondered if the author had read The World Without Us because he deals with the remnants of our own civilization. The themes are at least not pretentious as in Cormac MacCarthy's The Road

The Immortal Cells of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

2010-06-11T11:43:00.002-05:00

In 1951 a woman died in Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore of cervical cancer. The cancer had been “particularly virulent”, and though she was treated with the latest protocols for cervical cancer, she never had much of a chance. A surgeon at Hopkins took samples of her tumor and put the cells in a petri dish for researchers trying to cultivate human cells in the laboratory. These cells grew and reproduced as no other before and few since had done and they have been used by researchers ever since. They came along just in time to provide the medium for testing the first polio vaccine and have been “workhorse” cells ever since, used in research on herpes, leukemia, influenza, hemophilia, Parkinson’s, lactose intolerance, sexually transmitted diseases , and much more—even the effect on human cells of working in sewers.

The woman was Henrietta Lacks. She was black and poor, the descendent of slaves and sharecroppers who grew tobacco in Maryland and Virginia. Her cells, according to conventions of the time, were called HeLa (first two letters of first and last name). The researchers at Hopkins shared the cells with colleagues at other institutions and those researchers shared or sold them further. They survived just fine sent in the mail it was discovered. Soon HeLa cells were used all over the world and far more HeLa cells existed than Henrietta Lacks had ever had. It was years before the discovery that her tumor was HPV, the fast growing cervical cancer which young girls are advised to get a vaccine for now, and that that accounted for their "immortality".

Rebecca Skloot heard this story in a college class and found a passion as she attempted to understand how it happened that so much medical research depended on the cells of a single woman but also who this woman was, how she had lived and what descendents she had left. She was not the first researcher interested in HeLa and the woman who was the tissue donor—though of course “donor” is probably not the correct term since Henrietta Lacks was never consulted. And many of those who wrote about HeLa also tried to find Henrietta’s family with the result that the Lacks, who grew up on stories of the Tuskegee Institute syphilis research[1] and rumors that Hopkins—founded as a charity hospital— kidnapped black people at night and subjected them to hideous medical experiments, suspected on the one hand that Henrietta might have been tortured or even killed and on the other resented the fact that others had made money off her cells and they had got nothing. So they either refused to talk to reporters or researchers or they ranted about the commercialization of their relative’s cells which had benefitted everyone but them.

Rebecca set her sights on Deborah Lacks, Henrietta’s daughter, and spent 10 years getting to know her and the family Henrietta had left and attempting to help them get recognition for a relative who had provided so much to medical science. The result is a fascinating book in which Skloot tells the story of the Lacks family as well as the story of the HeLa cells and their role in medical research and the evolving medical ethics story surrounding the use of human tissue in research. The relationship Skloot developed with the Lacks was extraordinary: she overcame endless suspicions of white people, reporters, researchers, profiteers, etc. to become a real friend to Deborah and her family. She tells their story in their own voices—and clearly it was not easy to both explain their ideas and feelings and clearly communicate their values to the audience, nor was it easy to gain their trust and cooperation. I can’t imagine many writers going to the lengths Skloot went to get a story that nevertheless honors and doesn’t exploit those whose story it is. Winning over the Lacks klan required more than most writers would be willing to give of themselves.

In addition Skloot provides lively and engaging narrative, full of interesting personalities, that results from her extensive research on the use of human cells in medical research and the ethical issues surrounding that use. I couldn’t put the book down—and before reading this I’d never have said I was very interested in either cell research or medical ethics.

Most readers will probably be surprised to learn that while medical ethics, especially protecting the privacy of patents has come a long way since Henrietta Lacks’ cells first appeared on the scene, it is still not illegal for human tissue to be used without the informed consent of the patient. It’s an ongoing debate on which Skloot presents a variety of positions so that the readers understand the complexity of the issues involved.

For a nonfiction book on a significant current topic, this one can’t be beat. It’s a page turner, full of human interest but never at the expense of the facts or the issues.

[1] The Tuskegee Syphilis Study is one of the most horrendous examples of research carried out in disregard of basic ethical principles of conduct. The publicity surrounding the study was one of the major influences leading to the codification of protection for human subjects. [From the Tuskegee Institute website, http://www.tuskegee.edu/global/story.asp?s=1207598]

A Partisan's Daughter by Louis de Bernières

2010-06-09T17:19:00.002-05:00

Good but not great book. Not as good as other de Bernières books. A 40-year-old man stops for what he thinks is a prostitute. Turns out to be a young woman from Yugoslavia (whose father was a partisan during the war) whom he subsequently visits over a considerable time. He's unhappily married to the "white lump" and visits Rosa frequently thereafter in the run down flat where she pays rent in the name of an old tenant. She serves him tea and tells him stories of her life. Gradually he falls seriously in love, though he's too afraid to tell her so or make an advance. One disastrous night ends the possibilities. She leaves. He never sees her again, but tells the story in his old age when he discloses her last message making it clear that she too loved him.

The Storm of War by Andrew Roberts

2010-06-01T11:29:00.000-05:00

This is the first one-volume history of World War II that I’d really place in a category of reevaluation by an author who views the war from a comfortable distance in time, but then I’m not expert, not even, really, an amateur aficionado even though I’ve read a lot about the war, including biographies of the personalities and memoirs by the participants.

Roberts’ thesis is that the Allies did not so much win the war as Hitler lost it, in large part by making independent judgments based on intuition and ideology. He was not a military strategist and didn’t trust anyone who was. The smarter his generals, the more likely he was to fire them, as he did von Rundstedt and Guderian more than once, or ignore them when he didn’t like their advice as he often did von Manstein who was maybe his best strategist.

According to Roberts, Hitler’s biggest misjudgment was invading Russia in June of 1941 thereby forcing Germany to fight thereafter on two fronts. He had already made a major error in not pursuing the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) who made the historic evacuation from Dunkirk—which the German army could had prevented had Hitler not called them off. He had not invaded England, having lost the air war of 1940 (The Battle of Britain). He had not beefed up his Navy—especially the submarines which tied up Atlantic shipping until 1943 but thereafter hadn’t the wherewith all (submarines mainly) to continue—or his Air Force whose fighter planes were clearly inferior to Britain’s. (He didn’t halt airplane design or manufacturing but did force a new fighter to be made into a bomber which left him vulnerable in Russia.) He left all that hanging and went after the USSR, seeking “lebensraum” for the German people and success where Napoleon had failed.

Hitler’s second biggest error according to Roberts was declaring war on the United States in December 1941 in the wake of Pearl Harbor. He was not under treaty obligations to Japan to do so and probably would not have felt bound by the treaty had he been so. But declaring war allowed Roosevelt to marshal the enormous (comparatively speaking) resources of the US (war materiel, oil, manufacturing capability) to aid the Western Allies as had not been possible before due to widespread isolationist feeling in the US. Roosevelt had maneuvered some deals already to aid Britain and the Allies, but had no trouble putting the might of the industrial US behind the Allies once Hitler had declared war.

Another major error was Hitler’s campaign to rid the continent of Europe of its Jews. Here was a clear case of ideology trumping strategy. Laying aside all moral issues, Hitler tied up resources and wasted valuable personnel, loyal citizens who could have been badly needed soldiers and workers. Roberts tackles the Holocaust head on in this book, and not only in practical terms.

In fact, Roberts doesn’t skirt moral issues at all in this book, though he finds that some of the conventional moral outrage in the years following 1945 has been misplaced, namely the dropping of the atomic bomb which undoubtedly saved many Allied lives and shorted by war by years. He also questions the condemnation of the fire bombing of Dresden, pointing out legitimate ways in which the city was a military target and asserting that more recent estimates of the number of casualties suggest far fewer were killed than, for instance, Vonnegut assumed in Slaughterhouse Five.

One of the more interesting moral issues he raises is that of the policy of saturation bombing which resulted in far more destruction of German cities than the the Germans inflicted on London or Antwerp. He found little disagreement with the policy at the time, either in the military or among allied populations. Roberts believes that it was only mass destruction of German cities and complete disruption of civil life that ultimately erased the Prussian military tradition which led Germany to start major wars twice in half a century and replaced it with a profoundly non-military-oriented society which hesitates even to participate in NATO missions today.

Generally too Andrews reassesses the ongoing debate on the effectiveness of bombing generally and decides that the post-war analysis which found the bombing relatively ineffective to be somewhat short-sighted.

Another major thread in this book is the role of the USSR. The book is full of the kind of statistics that can only be accumulated and analyzed objectively long after the war, but the statistics show what everyone now recognizes but rarely talks about in this world war, that the major destruction and death occurred in Russia. I have not read Beevor’s Stalingrad (which has been on my list for awhile) but I was impressed by Roberts’ coverage of the decisive battles of Stalingrad and Kursk in 1943. In assessing major errors of decision makers, Roberts, like most others, judges Stalin's major error to have been trusting Hitler, pointing out that Stalin otherwise never trusted anyone.

An interesting point that Roberts makes throughout this book is that of the cooperation among the Allies which, painful as it was in many ways, was a key to their success. Not only did the Axis not have that kind of cooperation, there was not even the free expression of ideas among the German decision makers since Hitler made all decisions and always punished his generals when they made independent decisions. "Strategic Retreat" was just not in his vocabulary. His closest generals, Keitel and Jodl, were among the least effective thinkers and strategists. Interestingly as tenuous as was the negotiations among Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin, Roberts found that Stalin listened to his generals and oversaw far more productive cooperation with his advisors than did Hitler.

But speaking of alliances, Roberts writes extensively on British and American cooperation—and the seething egos which often underlay cooperative decisions. There were a bunch of egos among the Allies: effective strategists like Montgomery and Paton who usually had to be forced to share and who competed rigorously with each other and generals like Mark Clark who were also self-aggrandizing but less effective. Roberts acknowledges MacArthur as another ego, but actually says relatively little about him. I wasn’t entirely happy with his treatment of Stillwell—or indeed of the whole China situation. In the Far East, Andrews focuses mostly on General William Slim, about whom I knew little, seeing him as one of the underappreciated heroes of the war.

I recommend this book whole-heartedly as a one-volume history of WWII which reassesses the war from a distance in time not achieved by those who actually participated or grew up in its wake revering "The Greatest Generation". It is told from a British perspective and as such possibly minimizes the war in the Pacific some, but he brings to the fore the strategic “Germany first” decision which the US and Britain agreed upon. Of course that was made possible also by Hitler’s strategic mistake in declaring war on the US in 1941.

Brooklyn by Colm Tóibín

2010-05-09T12:20:00.000-05:00

I have liked all the books I've read by Tóibín. Not as enthusiastic as most about The Master (I suppose I think an emphasis on homosexual tendencies detracts from Henry James' accomplishments. I liked David Lodge's novel about James better--though I think absolutely nobody agreed with me.) I loved Blackwater Lightship. Tóibín's take on the psychology of all the characters is perfect in this novel about a family crisis when the mother, grandmother and sister of a young man come to terms with his homosexuality and ultimately his final days with AIDS. That emotional authenticity I found also in Brooklyn: A Novel.

Eilis Lacey is the main character and it just occurs to me that Tóibín handles this point of view with a technique "the master" called Centre of Consciousness, meaning it's a third person narrative but one that sees the world only from the character's point of view. James described it as looking through a hole in the head of the character so you see the world as that person sees it.

It's the 1950ies in a small town of Enniscorthy in Country Wexford, Ireland. Eilis lives with her mother and older sister, Rose. She's shy and awkward and feels insecure because she's not been able to get a job. Rose on the other hand has a responsible job, dresses well, is socially assured and plays golf every weekend. She advises Eilis on clothes and boy friends and jobs. Eilis looks up to her so when Rose talks to a priest from Brooklyn about job possibilities for her, Eilis goes along and before she knows it she's on the ship in third class and sick as a dog in the worst storm of the season.

Eilis' story must be a typical one from a single woman coming from Ireland, supported by an Irish priest in an Irish parish where "strangers" are mostly those from different parts of Ireland. It's a narrow world, but not as narrow as the small town in Ireland for she meets Jews and Italians and other immigrants. The priest finds her an Irish landlady and a job as a shopgirl. Initially Eilis is nearly overcome with loneliness and home sickness until the priest enrolls her at Brooklyn College learning bookkeeping and commercial law. She's bright and does well and her studies provide the interest she hadn't initially had.

At a parish dance, Eilis, still shy and gawky, meets Tony, born in Brooklyn of Italian parents. He's gentle and respectful and obviously in love with her, though there are hints that what Tony has in mind for the future (marriage, a house and construction business on Long Island, raising Dodgers fans) might not be enough for Eilis who's got more intelligence and more curiosity than Tony.

When Eilis returns to Ireland after a family tragedy, Tony persuades her to marry him secretly before she leaves. But back home, no longer so shy or unsure of herself, with American clothes and a tan, Eilis, who hasn't told her mother about her relationship with Tony, is a social success, courted by the very man who'd ignored her before. Now she is in danger of really falling in love and a role for her at home in Enniscorthy lies open before her. She doesn't open Tony's letters. Until a gossip who's been on the phone with her landlady threatens to spill the beans.

The emotional truth of this novel is perfect. It's what I've come to expect with Tóibín.

The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver

2010-05-05T11:45:00.001-05:00

This book didn't get great reviews, but I've liked every one of Kingsolver's books since I started reading them with The Poisonwood Bible. I haven't read her earlier works. And I liked this one a lot, though not unreservedly.

This one is the story of a lonely boy who grows up to be a lonely man. He is imaginative and kind and he becomes an historical novelist, picking up on the subjects that fascinated him as a child. He ends up in Ashville, North Carolina, more or less by accident, and he is different from the average citizen of that or really any American city and he's persecuted for being different.

Harrison Shepherd is his name. He was born of a Mexican mother and an American father working for the US government in Washington. He was self educated because after his mother took him back to Mexico when he was 12, he never went to school—unless you count two cheap but totally inappropriate schools in Mexico City and in Washington. (We really know nothing of his life before he was 12—Kingsolver doesn’t characterize his life before that and there’s no retrospective on his early childhood. His father as a personality is virtually unknown, even though he figures briefly in the novel.)

The novel opens in 1929 with the diary of the young boy living in isolation on Isla Pixol with his mother, Salomé, and, some of the time, her married lover, a Mexican businessman always negotiating with American oil companies. He doesn’t go to school and for awhile the only thing he has to read is an Agatha Christie novel he reads over and over. He swims and with the village children’s searches for “the lacuna” the occasional cave in the rocks along the shore where one can get trapped by an incoming tide. One can survive by waiting out the tides, but only Shepherd has the nerve to do it. His only friend on the island is a cook who teaches him how to make the dough for “pan dulce” a skill that gets him a job when he and his mother leave the island and hit harder times in Mexico City. The job is mixing the plaster for a famous painter and eventually the boy prepares plaster, cooks and acts as secretary in the house of Diego Riveria and Frida Kahlo.

It is there he meets Lev Davidovitch Trotsky, whom he admires and loves, and acts as his secretary and general factotum until the house is attacked and Trotsky killed with an icepick wielded by an agent of Stalin’s. The Mexican police arrest everyone in the house, at least temporarily, and confiscate everything, including all the boy’s journals.

It is 1940. The boy, in his early twenties, has nothing of his own and with Diego and Frida leaving, he decides to go back to the US and find his father. Frida commissions him officially to deliver crated paintings to a gallery in NY. She also specifies one crate which is a gift to him—a gift which he doesn't open for two years and which turns out to be the push he needs to get him started on his vocation.

At this point the novel changes directions drastically and one Violet Brown takes over the narration. She is a marvelous creation. A woman in her late 30ies, Violet comes from what we now call Appalachia and speaks an antique sort of English that sets her apart from the rest of the people in Ashville. She’s a widow whose husband died in a flood after less than a year of marriage, a woman who lives in a boarding house and does secretarial/bookkeeping work for the city of Ashville, one of those incredibly efficient woman who seem to most to have “no life”. But Mrs. Brown had left her restrictive life in the hills with dreams of education and travel and finding a broader world. A woman open to new possibilities, she stands in stark contrast to Harrison Shepherd’s fun-loving but selfish and irresponsible mother. When he ends up in Ashville writing historical novels about ancient Mexico, Violet Brown comes to work as his secretary.

After Mexico, the narrative is mostly Violet’s, with her quiet efficiency, open- yet tough-mindedness, and interest in art and in the world beyond Ashville. And her quaint and charming method of talking. It’s clear that Harrison Shepherd is dead and that she’s left this manuscript to be published after her death—and that the narrative includes some diaries written by Shepherd. That she loved him is clear. It’s also clear that she feels a need to “set the record straight” though, at first, about what is not at all clear.

The weakest part of the novel, I think, is actually the subject—how the life and work of a gentle, thoughtful, generous and open-minded man is turned into the worst kind of menace and degradation by his association with “known Communists” in his youth. Kingsolver also makes Shepherd homosexual—basically to provide a “psychological” excuse for his not having been drafted in the war—and also to cause him to isolate himself even more—and make him even more suspicious to the FBI investigators for the House Un-American Activities Committee. The reviews of his books are taken out of context. Statements made by characters in his books are attributed to Shepherd talking about the leaders of the US. The fact that Trotsky was killed by Stalin having spent the last part of his life trying to rescue Russia from what Stalin had done to Communism is not something the FBI understood so Shepherd’s respect and sadness at Trotsky's death is seen as proof that he advocates the violent overthrow of the government of the United States. Even though Shepherd is completely apolitical, never even having exercised his right to vote.

Kingsolver makes the evidence against Shepherd completely absurd: because a reviewer said his books were so popular they were probably being read in China, he’s accused to consoreting with the Chinese Communists. Not that absurdities like those dreamed up against Shepherd didn’t occur. Not that innocent and productive citizens were not ruined by the Communist scares of the late 40ies and early 50ies. Imprisoned and driven to suicide. But for the reader, the building up of phony evidence gets boring and predictable.

What’s not predictable and therefore thoroughly enjoyable is the ending.

The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters

2010-04-03T18:17:00.000-05:00

I just finished the book this afternoon--it left me in a weird mood. It was a very disturbing book. If you’re hooked on the psychological novel and don’t want spoilers, stop here till you’ve read the book.

I've never been enamored of Waters. I liked Night Watch, maybe largely because London during the Blitz has always fascinated me, but I generally don't like novels that work primarily via some kind of psychological intensity. Or I don't like them as much as I like novels that are more cerebral, more aware of themselves as fiction. I liked Pamuk’s The Museum of Innocence much better at the end, when "the narrator" turns the material over to "the author" and we are brought face to face with the fact that this is a fiction.

I suppose one could say that something similar happens here since Dr. Faraday is so obviously a naive narrator who reveals himself far more to the reader/listener than he realizes. He thinks himself in control of the tale, while the reader sees quite clearly that "the author" is pulling the strings.

The situation is this: Dr. Faraday narrates the entire book. The time is the immediate post WWII period in Britain. Faraday is a doctor in a small town in Warwickshire. He’s conscious of his own working class origins; he’s belatedly aware of how hard his parents worked and how much they sacrificed for his education. He’s called out one night to the Hundreds, a nearby estate, to attend the only servant, fifteen-year old Betty, who turns out to be faking illness because she’s afraid of ghosts. There he meets the family: the widow Ayres and her grown children—Roderick who’s physically and probably psychologically damaged by the war and Caroline who had some independence during the war but has come home to support mother and brother. Faraday narrates his first experience at “the manor” when as a child the good lady of the manor presented him with a medal and his mother took him to the servants’ hall to reminisce with her former co-workers. Coming back as “the doctor” is significant for him.

But as a doctor, he is not predisposed to believe in the supernatural. When at a drinks party, the child of some up-and-comers who come dressed casually to a do even the doctor recognizes requires evening dress is disfigured by the bite of the family dog, Faraday sees only a tragic accident, though he acknowledges the dog is a friendly one. He “saves the day” by sewing up the wound on the kitchen table.

He soon makes himself indispensible by convincing Roderick he can treat his leg with electricity for free, that it will be a favor because he needs data for a paper he’s writing. He comes weekly and gradually makes himself indispensible to the two women, especially when Roderick begins to act more and more erratically and finally burns up his room. Roderick is afraid of whomever or whatever started the fire, a possibility the doctor (rational creature that he is) doesn’t entertain for a moment. In fact that claim causes him to bundle the brother off to a rest home, making the women even more dependent on him.

Even though at first he describes Caroline as big, awkward and unattractive, he’s thrown together with her often, and when he takes her to a medical ball, a courtship between them begins which progresses to an engagement.

Dr. Faraday cares for Caroline but I don't think he’s very self aware and while he recognizes some class-consciousness in himself, he doesn’t realize the extent to which it permeates his thinking—and feeling. He never forgets that medal he got as the child of a former servant and the idea that he could rise to be the lord of the manor is attractive, even compelling to him—something he never acknowledges—not even in his despair when Caroline throws him over—maybe especially not then. He acknowledges that it's embarrassing that the wedding is called off and that people will say it's because he was "not of her class" but that's as far as he goes. Caroline, by contrast, seems to be thinking quite clearly: it’s time to give up Hundreds and leave, maybe even leave the country.

Before Caroline makes up her mind to break off the engagement she asks him how he expects they will live at the manor; she says he's talking as if when they are married there will be all kinds of money to do what needs to be done. He doesn't answer her but he also doesn't question himself. At some level he's so fixated on living as the lord of the manor that he's thinking much less realistically than Caroline.

I find Faraday tedious, full of prejudices men used typically to have about women, particularly if they found themselves in some position of authority. Today I don't hesitate to disagree with my doctor and to tell him I'm not going to follow his advice on something, but 60 years ago, I doubt many, especially women, did that. At many points in the novel I found myself furious at the way he dealt with women and sick people, as if being a doctor gave him some general moral authority. Throughout the novel he used that moral authority (which he himself doesn’t question either) to manipulate everyone at the Hundreds: Roderick because of his war injuries, Betty because she was a child, Mrs. Ayres because she was elderly and then sick or disturbed, and finally Caroline also. He doesn't see it as manipulation—he sees that as his responsibility—but the author standing behind him certainly does.

What fascinated me most about this novel was Water’s ability to link the possibility of the supernatural with the idea of class and with the social changes taking place in Britain at that time. Faraday, doctor or not, is permanently marked, in his own eyes and to some extent in those of others, as the child of the servant. The Ayers family are gentry who no longer have a place because they no longer have the wealth to maintain the estate but also because Britain is broke in the post-war period, governed by Labour who have raised taxes even though it may tax a whole class out of existence and leave many a manor like Hundreds to waste away or possibly to find new life as an hotel or a school. The Ayres really are being attacked. A way of life is being attacked and one that affects the whole society, from professionals like Dr. Faraday who have an exaggerated respect for the gentry to young girls like Betty who would at one time have had no other alternative for work than “service”. Is it so hard to believe that all the psychic energy caught up in these changes could manifest itself in some way that might be called ghostly or supernatural?

I cannot answer the question of whether the events at the Hundreds were the work of a poltergeist or some such, the malevolence of a long-dead child, or the “unsound minds” of the Ayres. Nor does Waters, wisely, attempt to, though she allows many possibilities.

In the end, there’s the inquest into the death of Caroline where Dr. Faraday is encouraged to label her death “suicide while of unsound mind”. As the family doctor, only he can verify that. Betty’s testimony about ghosts is not taken even remotely seriously, but if the Ayres actually believed any of “the nonsense” then the coroner has an out and can label them all nuts, preserving the rest of society from having to deal with their experiences. Dr. Faraday does so because, rational man that he is, he always thought the ghost talk was nonsense. Less charitably also, maybe because he’ll be seen as having made a “lucky escape” rather than being jilted by the gentry.

The Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent by Eduardo Galeano. Translator: Cedric Belfrage

2010-03-29T09:53:00.001-05:00

I read this book out of curiosity—and interest in Latin America. I was advised that it was just rant or left-wing rant, but decided to see for myself. I came away with this as the main idea: “in Latin America, free enterprise is incompatible with civil liberties” as Galeano says in his commentary on the book in an afterward. The book catalogues the exploitation of “the people” —usually the indigenous people—by South American oligarchies and by their European and North American affiliates.

It’s certainly been a controversial book. First published in 1971 and often condemned and frequently banned in Latin America, I doubt it’s been on the radar in North American very long. The current edition was published in 1997 with a foreward by Isabel Allende. It’s been in the news recently when President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela gave a copy to Obama and then when commentators speculated on whether or not he would read it. Actually, I hope he did. (http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1892801,00.html)

My first impression was that Galeano’s detractors were right, the book was just rant. Galeano is a journalist and he knows how to use words to move readers. My impression was that every sentence in the first chapter had emotionally-loaded words. If his ideas hadn’t piqued my curiosity I might have put it down. Ensuing chapters might come to emotionally-loaded conclusions, but the presentation of evidence was impressive. I can’t endorse the ideas completely because I don’t know enough to evaluate everything he says, but I was impressed.

Galeano’s thesis is that the first the European conquerors (Spain and Portugal), later European business interests—mainly the British—and finally the US (government and business) have promised developmental assistance but delivered subservience largely by economic means—by keeping production costs low using raw materials and cheap labor from Latin American and then selling products for large profits, even selling them back to Latin American countries at the same time as they prevent them from producing their own products. In what seemed to me a telling comparison he contrasts conquistadors arriving in Latin American with the expectation of taking riches home to Europe with settlers in New England fleeing Europe and determined to grow their food and make the products they need for themselves—and to stay, not seek treasure to bring home. In what turned out to be an advantage for North America, there was no gold or silver, not even promising farms land so the British, in comparison to the Iberians, tended to ignore the colonies rather than plunder them.

In this idea, Galeano reminds me of Fareed Zakaria’s thesis in The Future of Freedom where he explains that wealth in the form of natural resources is actually a deterrent to democracy because it leads to a ruling class that appropriates the resources and uses them to develop the country (or to line their own pockets) rather the depending on the population to supply funds for the government in the form of taxes. Elections don’t mean much if the people doing the electing have no power. And clearly immigration to America took a far different path in the North than in the South. The result was the development of a growing middle class of local producers in North America--something that didn't happen in most Latin American countries which developed local oligarchies who themselves continued to be exploited by powerful patrons.

Galeano’s text is colorful and impressive, even for someone like me for whom the names and historical events are not familiar. He’s a master of the powerful and memorable phrases than sum up (probably somewhat simplistically but I ended up thinking often right nonetheless) the problem. “Underdevelopment in South America is a result of development elsewhere”, “ a Volkswagen Republic is much like a banana republic”, “nationalization doesn’t necessarily redistribute wealth”. Over and over again he talks about the wealth concentrated among an oligarchy and the widespread poverty at the bottom that has characterized many Latin American countries for centuries, making it clear over and over again that “the outposts pay the price for the wealth of the centers”. The centers were usually the ports that grew up to serve the Europeans and later North Americans who needed to ship the gold, the silver, the meat, the rubber, the bananas or whatever.

It’s easy for a US citizen to agree with all the details about exploitation by Europeans, harder to deal with exploitation by North Americans. Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA by Tim Weiner (20070 confirms US involvement in supporting the oligarchies that support the US companies. It struck me reading about the maneuverings of American companies that, whether needing bananas or rubber or petroleum, they were operating not all that differently from how we’re discovering they operate at home and it’s abundantly clear at this point that the US is moving toward something like the Latin American republics with wealth increasingly concentrated among the few while the middle class which enabled the US to be different from its Latin American neighbors is dwindling. Power in the US is increasingly in the hands of corporations—often multi-nationals with loyalties primarily to their own interests which may or may not be the people of the United States. But perhaps I push this too far.

I have to note that Galeano, as many other Latin Americans, deplores the fact that the US has even co-opted the name “America”. (I had a hard time avoiding it in this review.)

Bottom line: This is a highly emotional book, but the logic and the evidence is quite definitely not lacking. I tend to compare him to Michael Moore, who goes after public attention with emotionally charged rhetoric, but backs it up with facts and details that prove the need for drawing attention to the issue. I cannot evaluate the detail and no doubt Galeano exaggerates and rants but it’s still a compelling book that’s worth the attention of a thinking person.

Maps of places I've been -- sort of fun

2010-03-26T10:27:00.000-05:00

visited 37 states (74%)
Create your own visited map of The United States

visited 24 states (10.6%)
Create your own visited map of The World

The Children's Book by AS Byatt

2010-03-15T10:59:00.002-05:00

Some background:

I've been a Byatt fan since I started reading her about 1990--I heard about Possession when it won the Booker I think and am always fascinated by novels that attempt to reconstruct the past from documents and bits and pieces picked up in research. But even in Britain it was still only in hardcover so I bought a few paperbacks of earlier novels on a trip to London: The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life and The Game. Read them in quick succession and was hooked.

Last spring I was in London and one of the first things I read in the newspaper was about the publication of a new Byatt novel. Off to the Waterstone's near the University of London for a copy. Later found a signed copy in Hatchard's on Picadilly and bought that too. I'm not an autograph collector, but for me Byatt is special.

My review:
I admire Byatt's ability to pick a period (in this case the end of the Victorian period and the run up to WWI), to pick a theme or collection of related themes (in this case liberal social thinking--Fabians, feminists, advocates of free love, a whole range of social reformers) who sought to extend the Victorian theme of a world getting better and better to human interactions and worked for personal freedoms and personal development) and to pick a place (in this case Kent--earlier Byatt books have focused on York where she grew up or London) and then to concoct characters and story lines that completely subsume all the ideas and the research that in so many novels these days stick out like sore appendages, into her story.

Her title rings many bells. First, the main character, Olive Wellwood, writes children's stories. A case can be made that children's stories (a la Peter Pan and Kim and The Railway Children) was Britain's main contribution to literature in this period. Olive also writes an individual story book for each of her seven children, adding to the stories often as she has her tea in bed everyone morning. For her it becomes a kind of mothering, one that works differently (and not all successfully with each child.) It's an age in which childhood comes to be seen as a separate, formative, stage of life that merits adult attention--and initially at least, Olive and her husband Humphrey in their big house in the woods, Todfright, with her sister Violet as organizer and child minder, seem to have created an ideal childhood for Tom, Dorothy, Phyllis, Hedda, Florian, Robin and Harry.

The novel abounds with children: in addition to the Wellwood children there are Julian and Florence, the children of Prosper Cain, an administrator at the V&A in London who's an advisor to Olive when she needs historical background for her stories; Charles and Griselda, the children of Humphrey's banker brother Basil and his rich German wife Katharina; Geraint, Imogen and Pomona, the children of neighbor and genius potter, Benedict Fludd and his wife Seraphita (really Sarah-Jane) who'd been a model for pre-Raphaelites painters; Philip Warren, a dirty runaway whom Tom Wellwood and Julian Cain find breaking into the museum to sketch beautiful things, and whom Olive, herself an escapee from the North where her father was a coal miner, takes home to "do something for". Eventually we have Philip's sister Elsie too who makes her way from the potteries where their mother died from lead poisoning as she worked painting dishes. Philip begins to work with Fludd (who needs an apprentice and organizer and who recognizes Phillip's talent) and Elsie becomes housekeeper at Dungeness where Seraphita is disorganized and mentally absent most of the time, managing only to clothe her daughters in loose flowing but dirty and badly made dresses, while totally neglecting her less artistic but more practical son.

The Humphrey Wellwoods host a Midsummer party every year to which all these children and their parents come as do as all the artists and do-gooders and liberal thinkers for miles around--and this was a back-to-the-land movement so many many had moved, like the Wellwoods, to the countryside in Kent. It's a costume party with some acting of Shakespeare's play. Idyllic, at least on the surface.

A subplot of the novel involves a family of German puppeteers from Munich--and their children--who, with Katharina Wellwood, give some insight into artists and liberal thinkers in Germany.

The basic canvas of the book is this Midsummer party of 1895 with its huge cast of characters, many of whom are children supposedly being raised in freedom and love with encouragement to discover their passions in life. In reality, the canvas is more complex and far darker than it appears and these children will become part of the great children's crusade which was World War I, lurking in the background to snap up their youth and their innocence and ending the Victorian certainty of a world ever improving.

The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon by David Grann

2010-03-15T09:24:00.002-05:00

Interesting book, partly historical, partly about the author's trip to the Amazon--all in search of the lost city of Z (or El Dorado or at least evidence that a well-developed civilization which once existed in the Amazon). The central focus of the book is Percy Fawcett, a British explorer who, after many expeditions into the Amazon where he proved his ability to survive in the jungle and to deal gently and effectively with Indians he met, put together an expedition in the 1920ies consisting of only himself, his 21-year old son and his son's friend. They vanished and were not heard of again--not all that unusual for Amazon expeditions, but everyone who knew anything about Fawcett didn't expect that. Many lives were lost in the ensuing years in a search for the Fawcett party. An artifact or two would show up but stories about their graves and which Indians killed them usually proved mistaken. The author decided to go too and his well-equipped contemporary trip is chronicled alongside that of Fawcett and other Amazon explorers like American Dr. Alexander Hamilton Rice. Fawcett's entire history as explorer is woven in as well.
I read with fascination Charles C Mann's 1491 about civilization in the Americas before the arrival of Columbus and this book plays right into those ideas, though it's more an adventure tale than an idea book. A quick read and worth the time.

The Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk

2010-03-11T09:31:00.002-06:00

The intrusion of the real-life author into a novel is a mark of post-modernism designed force the reader to step back and look at the novel as a fiction (something created by humans rather than inherent in the natural world) and one way writers have been doing that for 50 years has been to intrude themselves into the novel.(Of course this intrusion of the writer was also rebellion against H James' insistence that the fabric of the fiction be inviolable, allowing none of the "dear reader" stuff of preceding fictions.) Sort of like Hitchcock makes tidbit appearances in his films, a face in the crowd, a man on the bus, etc. It reminds us that this world we're been participating in is not real, that the story and its focus is "made up" by one person. (I always saw Hitchcock as egotistical in his obsession to appear in his film, but all creators have big egos--otherwise how could they sustain their work which is done absolutely alone with bare-minimum tools and depends entirely on their own ability to "make up stuff"?)

In this novel it's like Pamuk, in using himself as character (you must think of the Pamuk in the novel as a character as well of course) creates sort of an after-the-fact frame for his tale. And indeed, the minute we recognize Pamuk is telling the tale, its significance broadens and we see clearly that this is not just a tale of one man's obsession with a woman but a sociological study of a man who's love puts him on the outside to observe the society he is (or was) a part of. A society changing as it grows in wealth and experience of the outside world. As Fusun is the focus of Kemal's museum, so Kemal is the focus of Pamuk's.

Of course, when we run into the Pamuk family early in the story and when Orhan attends the engagement party we must be expecting something like this. That was a little more blatant than Hitchcock waiting for a bus in whatever film that was.

I thought it was a bit arbitrary to kill off Kemal, but it makes it much easier to turn his story into an archeological/sociological one.

I'm curious too how this story became a meditation on museums, what they're for and how they come about. We go from an admittedly nutty man who saves the salt shakers from the table where he eats with his beloved to challenging the notion of what a museum is, what it means to society and how it's used. (There I see some commonality with Byatt's The Children's Book where there's a minor but significant focus on the V&A and how it developed, what role it was intended to fill, etc.)

The Hawk and the Dove by Nicholas Thompson

2010-02-19T10:22:00.002-06:00

The Hawk and the Dove was a subject that interested me--the Cold War and George Kennan whom I always liked. I had negative view of Paul Nitze and looked forward to the contrast between him and Kennan.

The book was much more complex than the title would suggest. It's an excellent history. Because Baker is Nitze's grandson, he had access to papers who one else had seen. Some from family sources. Then, at the end of the book, Baker recounts going to visit the school Nitze founded (Paul H Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins) on a Saturday. He mentioned Nitze's papers to a janitor and the janitor said "Follow me." He expected to be taken to the 6th floor where the papers were stored, but they got off on the 4th floor where the janitor showed him a store of about 50 old dusty boxes in a closet. They were indeed Nitze papers which evidently no one else but the janitor knew about.

Thompson presents both Nitze and Kennas as extremely complex people who responded differently sometimes and the same sometimes to current issues. Kennan was the intellectual; Nitze, the man of action, both obviously extremely intelligent and totally dedicated to service to their country. They were within a couple of years of each other in age and both lived approximately 100 years, Nitze a bit less and Kennan lived to be 101!

Anyone with interest in the Cold War shouldn't miss this book.

The Red and the Black by Stendhal

2010-01-12T00:10:00.002-06:00

I read a Kindle version which seemed a very old translation. I have a Modern Library Edition, also old and an audible.com version. All are different. Wonder which is better. I read this once many years ago, but didn't remember much more than the main character's name.

The Red and the Black is often considered the 'first' realistic novel because it focuses on a person of the "people" rather than the aristocracy and because it attempts psychological understanding of the characters. A poor young man of superior intelligence attempts to make his way in a sophisticated world but is ultimately betrayed by his own passions. It reminds me of Dreiser's An American Tragedy in many respects--often classified as "naturalistic" (extremely realistic) in American literature, but was written nearly a century before--1830 versus 1925.

It's also politically interesting--though I'm sure I miss many details since I'm not versed in French history. The aristocrats are once again on top (the Bourbon restoration period is the setting) but they seem relatively weak and vulnerable--at least from the inside--and are always worrying about what will happen to them when the lower classes rise again. Julien Sorel, the brilliant son of a carpenter who hates him because he's physically weak and unable to contribute to the family business like his brothers, gets his education from the clergy (his only outlet) and becomes a tutor in the home of the town's mayor. The mayor hires him primarily as a social status symbol. But his "betters" also feel threatened by Julien who strikes them as just the sort of leader likely to bring about the next revolution. Julien, for his part, idolizes Napoleon.

Eventually Julien goes to Paris to become a secretary to a rich aristocrat, the Marquis de la Mole. He falls in love with the Marquis' daughter--as he fell in love with the mayor's wife--and those love affairs are his undoing. Neither is very believable psychologically, but the focus was specifically on the character's psychology which was revolutionary at the time.

2666 by Roberto Bolaño

2009-10-15T09:55:00.003-05:00

My reaction to finishing 2666 was to start over and read the early sections with the later ones in mind.... I could have read even more than its 900 pages. It didn't seem finished, but I'd have been disappointed if it had all been be tied up in the end. The "theory" of mystery stories is that you begin with the world in order (a green world), then the crime shakes it all up and there is no orderm and in the end, the crime is solved and order returns--the green world. Reinforces the reader's sense of well-being, belief that the world makes sense, etc. Bolaño is looking for a reader who's been frustrated because order is not really returned. Who can't just happily put the book down and move on.

It would be interesting to list all the unknowns at the end of this book. Why does Archimboldi take off for Mexico when he learned that Klaus his nephew is in prison accused of the murders? Does he "just want to help" or does he know something? Is Klaus guilty? if so of one murder or many? Is he spouting conspiracy theories and does he really know something? What happened to him in prison? What happened to Kelly? [I was really into the old congresswoman's story.] What happened to Juan De Dios Martinez?--he was the policeman who captured my imagination. But it seemed likely that many policemen were bent--or just lazy. And a million other questions.....

The novel begins with four international literary critics who specialize in a German author named Archimboldi whom no one seems to have met and who doesn't interact with the literary world. I almost gave up on this book in that first part because the critics were fairly unattractive characters, though their doings were interesting. It seemed to me Bolaño was seeing literary criticism as relatively disconnected with reality. It's in fact an advantage for these four that Archimboldi is a big mystery. I couldn't help but wonder how "good" a novelist Archimboldi is. Maybe the critics latched on to a mysterious character about whom they can speculate and build theories without actually confronting an author who might foil their theories. (Though most critics would probably love not to be troubled with the real-life person who wrote the books.) The critics travel together (to make sure no one gets a leg up on anyone else?) to Mexico--Santa Teresa--where rumor has it Archimboldi has been sighted. While they are there the reader gets a preview of the mysterious deaths of women in that city which will become the focus of the novel in Part Four.

The second part focuses on Almalfitano a Chilian academic who'd lived in Barcelona but is now living in Santa Teresa with his daughter. The reader met him as he interacted with the critics in the previous section and, because the killings of women in the city has been mentioned, the reader's focus is particularly on the daughter. Part Three traces a black American journalist, Fate, who goes to Santa Teresa to cover a boxing match. He doesn't know much about boxing but does get interested in the killings of women.

In the longest section of the novel, called The Part about the Crimes, Bolaño chronicles the cores of scrime victims, mostly poor women, prostitutes, workers in the factories of northern Mexico, many of them immigrants from poorer provinces or other Latin countries, many on their way to the US. This is the longest and the most emotionally powerful part of the novel. Interspersed among the "crime reports" are interesting stories like the affair between the policeman and the director of an insane asylum and the story of an aristocratic congresswoman whose best friend from childhood has disappeared.

Only in the last part of this novel do we learn who Archimboldi is, a young Prussian who experienced WWII in the German Army and used a pseudonym to publish his first novel because he'd killed an degenerate officer and assumed someone might be looking for him. The violence that he experienced, both in the war and its aftermath, is as detailed as the war on women in Santa Teresa. The novel ends as Archimboldi sets out for Mexico--so the critics are right that he was there--but we never know more.

One cannot help but look at the two sections that bracket this novel: the literary critics and the author they explicate. There may be a comparison between what the critics put their energy into (basically theoretical thinking which we have no way of evaluating: either Archimboldi's novels or the critics' evaluations of them--and the evil in the world that we see in Santa Teresa. Bolaño may be saying that as a novelist he (and maybe Archimboldi--I'm not sure about that) is dealing with real evil in the real world while the critics are insular and self-absorbed, in their work and in their play (i.e. sex).

The bottom line on this novel is that it looks at incredible violence in the world which is pretty much accepted as everyday reality. I guarantee you if you read it you will not forget it.

The White Rhino Hotel by Bartle Bull

2009-09-09T14:55:00.001-05:00

My initial assessment of this one was too sexist and too violent, but I ended up listening compulsively. (It was a sexist and violent time and place.) It's a great historical adventure tale that takes place in British East Africa right after WWI.

The characters are wonderful: an English aristocrat who's gradually sold all his land in England to finance his unsuccessful farms in Kenya. He owns the White Rhino. His barman and manager is a Goan dwarf with great ambitions and a lifetime of resentments against those who've not taken him seriously. The "hero" is a Brit who's mother took him to live with the gypsies (he doesn't know who his father was but his father-figure was the gypsy). He needs space and forest so he takes a job on a ship, jumps ship and goes to Kenya and is well on his way to becoming a "great white hunter". There's a German who fought for the Kaiser in Africa, lives to see German East Africa turned over to the British and his farm confiscated. There's Gwen who travels from Wales to meet her husband, who won a farm in Kenya as the result of auctionan favoring British soliders, but he's been injured and seems unlikely to survive in tough environment. Gwen, on the other hand, wants to succeed in Africa. There are assorted Africans, mainly Kikuyu who will help the outsiders understand the land and their enemies, the Masai. There are assorted dirt bags as well: an Indian who finance the farms for Europeans they expect to fail, a Portuguese "poseur", also out to scam the disabled soldiers, brutish Irish brothers who dispense violence and take what they want, an American hunter. This is not great lit, but it is great adventure. There are two more books which take up this story with some of the same characters, one taking place in Cairo in the 30ies and another in the desert with Rommel and Montgomery in WWII. The author seems to have begun a similar series on China too, covering the early twentieth century time period I've been reading about lately so I'm interested in those too.

Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin

2009-09-09T14:50:00.001-05:00

Subtitle is: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace . . . One School at a Time. I loved it. Reminded me of Mountains Beyond Mountains about another compulsive do-gooder, Paul Farmer, in that case in Haiti. Not sure why Mortenson is listed as author since clearly his co-writer did the writing and Mortenson is referred to in the 3rd person throughout. He undoubtedly told the stories and provided the content.

It's the tale of how Mortenson, who grew up in Tanzania as the son of missionaries, went from mountaineer trying for K2 in the Karakoram (and going home to work as a nurse in trauma centers to make enough money to go back) to humanitarian focusing on building schools for children, especially girls, in the mountains of Pakistan. When has to give up on K2, he's separated from his group and ends up in the small village or Korphe where he's taken in by the headman and becomes like a son to the family in the weeks he stays there. He takes in the culture and ends up promising to help them build a school. At home he goes looking for donations and finally finds a backer, also a mountaineer who's been active in the early stages of the semiconductor industry. Mortenson slowly learns how to work effectively in Pakistan, aided primarily by his willingness to learn the ways of the culture, to respect Islam, to dress like the people, and to make friends and keep his promises, and to seek local allies. The one time he didn't follow the advice of his original sponsor in Pakistan--who told him never to go "cold" to a new area but to get the backing of the headman, visiting his home and taking tea with him--he ends up imprisoned by terrorists of some kind in Waziristan.

Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-1945

2009-08-25T10:33:00.004-05:00

I was not surprised to discover that Tuchman won her second Pulitzer for this book. A biography of General Joseph Stilwell as well as a chronicle of official American interaction with China, focused primarily on WWII. It's a very complex story which Tuchman makes extremely readable and interesting, and which sheds light on the military and political problems of our own time in Iraq and Afghanistan. First, the US always wants to promote democracy but ends up supporting regimes which cannot sustain democracy--in the name of stability. Secondly, the US, when lead to support a foreign power that is weak but critically important for some reason, gets itself entwined trying to change basic cultural assumptions not likely to be changed by foreigners and, in any case, likely to take a long time to change. China's revolution of 1911 had ended the Manchu dynasty and the long line of emperors who had ruled China for centuries. Sun Yat-sen who promised to bring a liberal Western-type democracy, became president and Nanking, the capital, though Yuan Shih-kai, supporting the old regime, ruled separately at Peking (Beijing now). In 1912 Dr. Sun retired and Yuan became president and moved the capital to Peking. Without a strong revolutionary leader or support from the public, the new Chinese republic was anything but promising.

Stilwell was the US General rated by Marshall (Chief of Staff at the beginning of the WWI) as his top field commander, who, were it not for his extensive knowledge of and experience in China, might have been one of the great (and well-known) US generals of WWII in Europe. (Stilwell was first slated to command a landing in French West Africa.) He had first visited China in the year of the revolution when, on duty in Manila, he and his wife traveled first to Japan and then to China--and Stilwell began learning the language. His idea of a "vacation" was to travel everywhere--dangerous in the chaotic China of the time--to observe and talk to people. He was independent, egalitarian, irascible, plain spoken and extremely loyal. After serving in WWI, he accepted the army's offer to learn Chinese and in 1920--after an unsatisfactory course of language study at Berkeley--set sail with his family for China. Once there, they found themselves in a fluid situation--bullets though the dining room once-- and Stilwell took every opportunity to get away from the diplomatic community (he hated stuffed shirts) to "see China", taking long walking holidays alone and once volunteering for a job building a road. He came to love China and the Chinese people and to understand them better than just about any other American. And he had little interest in or sympathy with other foreigners in China--especially with the British and other "treaty powers" whose goal he saw as merely to protect the economic interests they'd gained from treaties with emporers of the past. He also had little sympathy with the missionaries.

Flash forward from the twenties to 1941. Generalissimo ("the G-mo") Chiang Kai-shek (also "Peanut") head of the Kuomintang (Chinese Nationalist Party)--with no experience (philosophically or personally) of the West as had Sun Yet-sen--ruled China from Chungking (where they'd moved after the Japanese took Nanking in 1937). Stilwell was sent to China as a military attache and administrator for Lend Lease. WWII from Stilwell's position was more grim and certainly less rewarding than had he been a commander in the European theatre. Early on Chiang Kai-shek preached an old Chinese proverb to the effect that if you have a problem the best thing to do is nothing and it will solve itself. That's what Chiang did. He needed the US, primarily for the supplies he could get through Lend Lease and the international support that allowed China to emerge from the war as a "great power", though he always refused to fight, even when Stilwell trained his armies and commanded himself. (The men loved him because he didn't leave them to bleed to death on the battle field and actually fed them, which the Chinese did not do. Once men were airlifted "over the hump" to join a division about to go into action, but were made to fly naked because they'd need new uniforms when they arrived. Many died of the cold. One general told Stilwell that he didn't think 6000 dead in a small battle was significant--soldiers came from the worst class anyway--and that he wouldn't get concerned until combat deaths reached 50 million!). Stillwell was a hands-on commander who was familiar to all his men--he once led the remnant of a army out of Burma into India on foot and most men--Chinese and American--credited him personally with saving their lives, not the least with his personal example.

Chiang always refused to fight for fear of losing--when he'd then be vulnerable to takeover by the Communists in the north or replacement by some ambitious commander in his own army. The US needed China in the short term to control the Japanese who were coming from Manchuria to take over Burma aiming ultimately at India but also it envisioned China as an staging ground for the ultimate invasion of the Japanese home islands. The latter was not necessary, though whether the island-hopping approach to Japan replaced the China strategy as "better" or just "necessary" because of Chiang's refusal to fight is not clear. In any case, late in the war, millions of dollars of American war materiel was found cached in caves in southern China, weapons that American pilots had suffered and died to fly in.

But Stilwell was indiscreet. He was also truthful which at least he saw as by definition not diplomatic. Much of his frustration came out in his diaries, which Tuchman uses liberally in this book, but he always assumed if he could put the case as clearly as possible to Chiang he could get him to move decisively. In the end, the best course seemed to be to make common cause with the Communists (until after the war, communism was not the bugaboo it became afterwards). Chiang agreed but set impossible conditions. Chiang never did act on Stilwell's advice and eventually started agitating for his removal. Stilwell was protected by Marshall who knew of no other American officer as fitted for the China job. Roosevelt was not as understanding (FDR had initially been charmed by the Chiangs during their visit to the US but disillusioned by Chiang's indecision at the Cairo conference) and eventually Stillwell was removed, but not until nearly the end of the war. Those who replaced him did no better.

After the war, several American diplomats were hounded out of the State Department, accused of Communist sympathies for their part in trying to put together an alliance between Chiang and the communists in the North. Stilwell was also charged--by columnist Joseph Alsop who spent much of the war in China supporting General Chennault (a long story)--based on a misinterpreted public comment after the war. Stilwell died in 1946, before the full impact of the "communist scare".

I loved this book though knew so little of China's history that I'm determined to remedy that now. I liked Stilwell too, essentially a selfless man who was never out for his own glory or advancement, but possibly as a result, was not well equipped to deal with those who were.

Possession by AS Byatt

2009-08-08T17:22:00.004-05:00

This is my second reading and I enjoyed it soooo much more than the first time when I was impatient at all the pseudo-19th century poetry. I think I liked it better because I paid more (not less) attention to the poetry and was blown away that Byatt could do that—could not only make up two 19th century poets as characters but could write their poetry for them. I also didn’t take the book all that seriously the first time—finding it fun but “unserious”. I obviously didn’t notice that she prefaced it by those great lines about “romance” from Hawthorne’s introduction to The House of the Seven Gables: “When a writer calls his work a Romance, it need hardly be observed that he wishes to claim a certain latitude, both as to its fashion and material, which he would not have felt himself entitled to had he professed to be writing a novel.” A distinction generally lost in our time, but an important one and one that fits this work perfectly; it does not aim at fidelity to the possible or to the probable, but it does aim at the “truth of the human heart”.

I have always been fascinated by the author who builds a novel (or a romance) out of diverse documents which the characters come across, in this case not only the poems of the two poets, but their letters, a few stories retold from parents, journals of those closely involved—his wife and her lover, critical analysis and biography by scholars, etc. Even some fanciful sections where the author imagines events and feelings on the part of 19th century characters that could not have been known, even through the serendipity of finding the documents that were found. Having read a great deal more of Byatt than when I first read this novel, I see this tendency to weave documents into the story as characteristic of her as a writer, used most effectively in her most recent novel, The Children’s Book.

Possession is about two young academics in the 1980s who form a partnership based on a common interest in the two poets whose romance is discovered accidentally in a letter found in a old book, owned by one of the poets, and currently residing in the London Library. It’s a mystery, with clues that lead to a cache of letters in the turret on a dilapidated estate, to Brittany, back England and a metal box buried by the wife of one of the lovers. The story is a “romance” in both senses of the word: a story about love and passion and a book that’s full of coincidence and improbability in everything except its human joy and tragedy and redemption. And of course the two young academics fall in love too, slowly and as believably as their 19th century counterparts. It’s a tale of academic rivalry too, as the scholars jockey for position around "the find" the original pair can’t keep hidden—academic rivalry that rises to high comedy and even farce.

Someone Knows My Name by Lawrence Hill

2009-08-02T10:33:00.002-05:00

This was a good story, but not an interesting novel—if that makes any sense. Let me explain: I find that I resent an author who gives me a novel designed primarily to raise my consciousness about a current issue or about an historical period it currently makes sense to understand. The assumption is that I’m too lazy to bother with the issue unless I’m seduced by a good story. I had an extremely bad reaction to A Thousand Splendid Suns because it seemed to me that the author started out with a list of all the bad things that could happen to a woman in Afghanistan and then constructed a story around them, with the primary goal of making readers understand the position of women in Afghanistan. In the same way this novel seems to me to be written primarily to inform readers about the hard lives of Africans who were captured and sent to work as slaves on American plantations, as well as explore the return of some freed slaves to Africa in the 19th century. The latter task was accomplished more honestly by historian Simon Shama in his book Rough Crossings: The Slaves, the British, and the American Revolution as well as in other nonfiction works.

I’m discovering that I want to read novels that do something unique and excellent as novels rather than just read a good story. Books like this one are often advertised with comments like “everyone should read this book”, meaning that everyone will benefit from the lessons it teaches. I for one am more interested in fiction as art than fiction that teaches. Underscoring my perception that this book’s purpose was didactic is the fact that its name was changed for American audiences, the marketers among publishers deciding that Americans would not read something called The Book of Negroes, its original Canadian title. (The “N” word now includes the original descriptive word from which the racial slur derives.) How could anyone possibly learn a lesson from a book that uses the N word, they seem to assume.

I’m sure there’s a place for novels that teach and for the assumption that some readers will not explore a subject in any other way. But I’m not the intended reader and I find them at least mildly insulting. Particularly if the historical material plays into contemporary issues, particularly if the writer seems to imply reading this book will be “good for me”, I’m likely to rebel. On the other hand, I don’t hate all historical novels, though I frequently find them lacking in interest as novels. But again my least favorite are those historical novels that want to teach me a lesson.

Fateless (or Fatelessness) by Imre Kertész

2009-07-30T16:47:00.002-05:00

Title is sort of hard to figure out, in either translation. This is a holocaust story narrated by a young boy who's taken from Budapest . He's a non-practicing Jew with no knowledge of Yiddish and few connections to Jewish traditions. He's an acute observer and attempts to make readers understand what life in the camps was like. without bothering about issues of politics or religion. He knew some German from school and learned more but could not communicate with many of his fellows who spoke Czech, Slovak, Polish, a gypsy dialect, etc. His tone is detached and reportorial. He concentrates on what happens to him and how he feels. He seems isolated with the crowds of prisoners who, in additional to the language barrier, were often in competition with each other and who disappeared frequently. His goal is to adjust and survive. He accepts his isolation even when he goes home, where neither those who ignore him nor those who are horrified at what happened to him and want to publicize his story are able to understand his experience.

I rated it 8/10. The beginning particularly is riveting. Near the end the boy's ambivalence about what happens to him and maybe the translation (the version I read is supposed to be a poor translation) result in a less than clear message, though maybe that's the point. I liked this book particularly because it doesn't rave and rant about politics or religion or atrocities, but instead seeks to recreate an experience.

The Mulberry Empire by Philip Hensher

2009-07-30T16:44:00.002-05:00

This is an historical novel about Afghanistan (though not a traditional historical novel since, among other departures from tradition, what seems like a romantic thread comes to a climax, produces an illegal child, but doesn't end happily or even decisively). Another departure is that the writer is British but his title character is not Alexander Burnes, the Englishman, but Dost Mohammed Khan, the Afghan.
Most of the characters are real, including both Burnes and Dost Mohammed, and there's a list of books he consulted in writing it, including Peter Hopkirk's The Great Game, one of my favorite nonfiction reads of the last 10 years.

The sympathy is not with the British in the First Afghan War--where the British were soundly defeated and mostly all killed--but with the Afghans who were extraordinarily violent. It's a very 21st century view of a 19th century war, though at the time there were participants who recognized British treachery in driving out Dost Mohammed Khan in favor of a decadent ex-emperor whom the Indian Governor thought might protect Britain from a Russian invasion of India. In the beginning of the novel, we see Alexander Burnes as the toast of London for having been the first Englishman received in Kabul, but the social events at which he's feted read very much like social events in later Dickens novels--the focus is on the hollowness of both the characters involved and the events and the social amenities they practice. Amazing that's done without detracting from the complexity and humanity of the main characters who attend the events.

While the novel is more or less chronological, it doesn't feel like it while reading since Hensher jumps from one character and locale to another and seems to focus on parochial and local events rather than on a step in the historical timeline. You may not even recognize at first that the novel is historical, especially if you do not know about the first Afghan war. On the other hand, you'll not miss Hensher's reimagining of the British Empire. An author who can both make local characters and events real AND convey an overarching evaluation--and criticism--of a past era is an author to take seriously.

This is a serious novelist, imitating familiar novelistic techniques in a new context, engaging ideas both historical and artistic. He warns us in the Afterward not to expect historical exactness, that even the characters of some historical figures are changed. I found it impressive as a novel and thought provoking as a view of history.

I should say that I found this novel in AS Byatt's answer to an interviewer's question about who she reading among younger writers. And there's a sentence in the "Errors and Obligations" section at the end acknowledging her advice. The book also has a glossary, though most of the terms used are clear in the context or actually defined in the text--and a cast of characters. One imagines an editor suggesting the latter for a book which involves so very many characters, but this cast is at the end--where you may not see it until you're nearly finished. And the characters are only named, not described or put in any context.

Death of Venice by Thomas Mann

2009-07-30T16:42:00.002-05:00

This was a reread, partly for the Venetian setting and partly because it’s one of those stories that is referred to all the time and I’d forgotten the details. I liked it a lot, though in the beginning I found a lot of infelicitous English translations. (Translator was Helen Tracey Lowe-Porter--don't know if there's a newer one.) Once I got into the story though, I didn’t notice them.

Seems like I’ve experienced several works these days about older men who’ve eschewed human contact more and more as they’ve aged but who go through some experience which opens them up to human contact and to love. The last one, before this, was Ingmar Bergman’s film Wild Strawberries where an elderly man takes his daughter-in-law with him as he drives to Lund where he’s to be given an honorary degree. He stops near the home in the country where his large family used to spend summers and the combination of summer with its wild strawberries and the location causes him to “dream” of the past and as a result to soften his approach to his son and daughter-in-law as well as some traveling students they gave a ride to on the way.
That’s not exactly like Death in Venice—and has a much happier ending—but in the way that the doctor’s dreams of love in his youth softens and awakens his human sensibilities so does Aschenbach’s intense experience with the Polish boy awaken a part of himself that's long been buried. Aschenbach sees young Tadzio on the beach and is struck by his beauty—he’s sort of pre-teen I’m assuming, no hair in his armpits but clearly an awakening sexuality as evidenced by the other children who flock to him and in his own growing awareness of Aschenbach’s attention. Aschenbach, the intellectual, though processing his experience through the frame of Socrates’ dialogue with Phaedrus. The resurrection that occurs for the doctor in Bergman’s film, though, is not the result for Aschenbach who ignores warnings of plague in Venice and ultimately succumbs on the beach, dying of the renewal of his feelings of love.

1968: The Year that Rocked the World by Mark Kurlansky

2009-07-30T16:39:00.002-05:00

It was purely by accident that I chose to read this one just after the two Byatt novels that deal with the 60ies, especially A Whistling Woman, which deal with student unrest. Obviously student unrest played a big part in this one, in the US, France, Spain, Brazil and other places, though unrest at art schools in Britain was mentioned. The TET offensive, the My Lai massacre, assassination of ML King and Robert Kennedy, And Civil Rights and Democratic Convention violence. It's curious to read a retrospective on a period you lived through. Already married with a child, I was hardly a hippie in 1968, but I was teaching at a junior college in Delaware that was a "flunk out" school for expensive Eastern schools and the students were politically aware. Many on the faculty were, like me, recent grads and grad students and many were themselves active student protesters so that section of the book played best for me. I didn't watch TV much in those days so I don't remember the war on TV all that graphically, but I did watch the violence at the Democratic Convention and I kept up with the Civil Rights movements. An interesting book, but of necessity, painted with a broad brush.

Europe's Last Summer: Who Started the Great War in 1914 by David Fromkin

2009-07-30T16:37:00.001-05:00

(He's the one who wrote The Peace to End all Peace about the Middle East, the end of the Ottoman Empire and the emergence of the Middle East as we know it.)
He says the best way to understand this question--and Barbara Tuchman in The Guns of August didn't have enough data to do so--is to realize there were two wars. Austria/Hungry wanted to get rid of Serbia who was a threat and so blamed the death of Arch Duke Franz Ferdinand on Serbia (the assassination occurred in Sarajevo) and declared war. That was one war. Germany wanted to go to war to establish its position as a major European power and especially von Moltke, the head of the army, had determined that sooner was better before Russia, France and England became too strong. So Germany encouraged its ally Austria in its war. Austria's war with Serbia met with defeat but soon von Moltke manoevered (because Kaiser Wilhelm was actually against war) Germany into war with Russia and its ally France. Britain joined when the Germans attacked Belgium but also because it was concerned the Germany would overpower its ally France. The second war, started by Germany, overwhelmed the first one. (If my explanation seems confusing, read the book. It's very complex and I'm not sure I have it straight, but the answer is that Germany started WWI.

A Whistling Woman by A. S. Byatt

2009-07-30T16:33:00.003-05:00

The fourth in the Quartet. Byatt continues her trend of including texts within texts. There's a partial text of Babbletower in the previous volume and in this one there's a partial text of the story that Agatha was reading to Saskia (her daughter) and Leo (Frederica's son). It's a fantasy story and Agatha's story is sort of like JK Rowling's--a single woman with a child reaches fame and fortune telling children's tales. Since Possession was also based on texts which Byatt invented and wrote herself and since the main character in The Children's Book is a woman who writes stories for each of her children, one of which is included in large chunks in the book, I have to see this text within text technique as important to Byatt (and if I were writing a dissertation on Byatt I'd start investigating that as a topic, if it's not already been done). A Whistling Woman also includes student rebellion of the 60ies in art schools and at the University of North Yorkshire (which I think Byatt made up--that's the one that the estate where the play about Elizabeth in The Virgin in the Garden took place, before it was deeded to the new university.). There's also a commune which attracts some of the intellectuals in the book as well as some of the more emotional religious types.

Babel Tower by A. S. Byatt

2009-07-30T16:13:00.003-05:00

This one is the third of Byatt's Quartet. Frederica leaves her husband after he goes after her with an axe (which the divorce court doesn't believe because he's rich and charming and has good lawyers while she's that unnatural thing, a mother who wants to work, to learn , to live in a working class neighborhood, to send her son to a public--in the American sense--school and whose friends are all men). She reviews books for a publisher and in that capacity comes across an anti-utopian novel, Babbletower about a society that attempts absolute freedom--especially sexual freedom--and ends up ugly and violent--a short of Lord of the Flies for grownups, by a smell and unkempt man in a blue velvet coat. She recommends its publication. The author and publisher are sued for obscenity and that trial and Frederica's divorce "trial" allow Byatt lots of opportunity to characterize the "establishment" that even serious scholars, writers and artists who were not even remotely hippies were contending with. In that sense it's a great picture of the 60ies as experienced by an academically inclined woman. Frederica becomes a TV interviewer which allows Byatt to explore the new media and it's effect on public opinion as well as on art and scholarship. The characters from the first two novels continue: Daniel left his children with their grandparents because he couldn't function in his grief over Stephanie; he works in an old church as someone who answers a help line for emotionally distressed people, including Jude who wrote Babbletower. Bill (Frederica's father) has mellowed after his elder daughter's death, and becomes a model father for the children. Several of Frederica's friends from Cambridge make their way in London at the same time.

I liked this one but maybe not as much as the others in the Quarter.

Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh

2009-06-24T09:59:00.003-05:00

This one disappointed me somewhat at the end. It seemed just to end and I was definitely not ready to leave the characters: an orphaned French girl, Paulette, who'd lived her entire life in India and who, to escape her conventional British benefactor, was determined to emulate a female relative who'd passed herself off as a man and another woman, Deeti, whose addicted husband died and whose poppy crop was forfeit to wealthy landlords and money lenders--one of the victims of China's attempt to stop the opium trade. There was also Zachary Reid, who'd sailed on the IBIS from Baltimore as a ship's carpenter and ended up an officer. He was the son of a quadroon mother and a father who made sure he was free--this was the 1830s--but who's taken in India not only for a white man but a wealthy, land-owning one as well. Then there's the Raja whose extravagant ways resulted in his disgrace and imprisonment--not at all fairly though lawfully by Paulette's benefactor, Burnham who owns the IBIS as well as the finest plantation in the area, Bethel (he's a proselytizing Christian as well as ruthless businessman).

Initially, the book reminded me of Dickens--slightly memorable but somewhat improbable characters and extraordinary coincidence all in the service of social criticism. Though the "social criticism" isn't like Dickens in that Ghosh's novel is historical and if it's social criticism, it's designed to remind us of "drug wars" of the past, of China trying to stop the opium trade and ruining those in India who'd been persuaded to grown poppies instead of vegetables, and of the Opium Wars that resulted when Britain used force to sustain their export of opium to China from India--against Chinese law.

The orphaned French girl, the bankrupted Bengali farm woman, the mulatto American sailor, the disgraced Raja end up together on the IBIS which, because of the slack in the opium trade, has been refitted to move coolies (all but slaves) to Mauritius--along with a number of other colorful characters.

I didn't like this one as well as The Hungry Tide. Ghosh is skillful at handling the many characters and plot lines that converge, but Sea of Poppies doesn't bring it all together quite as skillfully. I think, also, that I expected the novel to go in the other direction--literally east toward China and the opium wars, not west toward Mauritius. I expected more of an expose of the opium trade that lead to 19th century drug wars--perhaps because of the title. Perhaps because one cannot help but consider today's "opium wars".

Still Life by A S Byatt

2009-06-12T10:14:00.010-05:00

This is a story about brothers and sisters: Stephanie and Frederica Potter who are very alike and very different and, on another level, Vincent and Theo van Gogh who are the subject of Frederica's friend Alexander's latest verse drama. I'm fascinated, like most Byatt fanciers, by the uncomfortable relationship between Byatt and her sister (Margaret Drabble) in real life and certainly note that sisters occur again and again in her novels, even as twins recur in the novels of John Barth, himself a twin.

I just read it a second time. After rereading The Virgin in the Garden for a book group, I vowed to read the whole quartet again. This one I think I liked more than the first reading.

It continues the story centered on the Potter family in the 1950ies. Stephanie has married the clergyman, Daniel, and is soon pregnant. She's acutely aware as she goes through her pregnancy of how much what is expected of her has shifted. She was a brilliant student, got a good Cambridge degree even though she'd chosen to go home to Yorkshire to teach at her old school, but now she's called "Mother" by all the nurses in the clinic and subjected to the physical and emotional indignities all women recognize as going along with institutions that oversee reproduction. For her first delivery she yearns for her Wordsworth which is in her bag and the nurses are too busy to get it for her; for her second delivery, she's smart enough to ensure she gets her books into the labor room.

Her marriage is complicated by her brother Marcus--after his breakdown in the previous novel and need to get away from his father, he comes to live with Stephanie, as does her husband's selfish, lazy and critical mother.

In the meantime Frederica has gone to Cambridge (having successfully managed to lose her virginity beforehand) where she's anxious to be taken seriously as a scholar in an atmosphere where women are in a distinct minority--and assumed to be less than serious scholars. All of her friends are men, and sometimes her emotional or sexual needs take her in silly directions, but by and large she has a very successful university career without really understanding where she will go from there. She assumes, nonetheless, that it's about time for her to get married, without understanding how marriage and a career will work, even without understanding what kind of a husband she wants. It's not Frederica only who's confused; in the 1950ies, the way forward for an academically inclined woman is anything but clear. Women scholars in the university don't seem much like women to Frederica--living restricted and isolated lives. But Stephanie's choices scare Frederica. Her mother's life, as the ineffective peacemaker to her volatile father, is also to be avoided.

As Byatt focuses on the contradictions plaguing academic women in the Fifties, there's a parallel drama focused on the artist van Gogh. Interestingly, the novel begins in a museum where Andrew Wedderburn (with whom the schoolgirl Frederica was in love) is celebrating his latest play, "The Yellow Room", the story of van Gogh (named for a brother who died) and his brother Theo who strives to keep him sane. The Virgin in the Garden, began in the National Portrait Gallery many years after the action in the book, where Wedderburn attends an event focused on a portrait of the first Queen Elizabeth about whom he wrote a successful verse drama at the time of the coronation of the second Elizabeth. The failure of the second Elizabethan age is an theme in that novel.

Then Stephanie dies in a freak accident at home, which companions more canny that her odious mother-in-law and disturbed brother might have been able to save her from. (I can't get out of my head, a comment Byatt has made in more than one interview, that belatedly she recognizes that the characters she's killed off in her fiction are those who represent herself.) Frederica reacts badly and surrenders to a suitor outside of the academic world, one with money and a country house and considerable sex appeal. She seems, like Stephanie, to have opened a door to sexual involvement and at the same time closed the door on the life of the mind without thinking much about it.

It's the portrait of a woman for whom education is everything, but who still expects (and is expected to expect) marriage and family that attracts me to this series of novels. Less than a decade younger than Byatt's characters, I too lived with those contradictions.

PS I can't find a book cover like the one on my copy. It's a UK early Penguin paperback with a picture of Frederica as she's described going to a party and Stephanie and Daniel.... I don't approve of those with fruits and vegetables.... Maybe I'll scan mine.

The Children's Book by AS Byatt

2009-06-03T11:36:00.002-05:00

I reread Byatt’s The Virgin in the Garden recently for a book group and absolutely loved it. I’d forgotten how much I liked her and vowed to reread the others in that tetralogy (including the last one which I haven’t read). Then on a trip to London, I saw in the newspaper ad in Timeout that she had a new book out so I set off for Waterstones to buy it. Then a few days later, I bought a second copy in Hatchard's—because it was signed by the author…and I’m not one for collecting signed editions.

I was not disappointed. It’s by far the best new novel I've read in years. Mature. Complex. Provocative. Thoughtful. It's about a loose collection of families and friends who are affiliated with Fabians or socialists or just liberal thinking. Some live in London (where Prosper Cain is the curator of precious metals at the new V&A and one of the brothers Wellwood (Basil) is important "in the City". The rest live in the country—in Kent. Basil Wellwood's brother, Humphrey, is married to Olive who writes stories for children (I heard she's based on E Nesbitt) and who also keeps an ongoing story for each of her many children—hence the title. There's also Benedict Fludd and his tribe. He's a brilliant but erratic potter; his wife, Seraphita, was a model for the Pre-Raphaelites and appears to have no personality except for the flowing gowns she wears and the needlework she's always set up to do sitting outside. There’s an assortment of liberal thinkers who are single: academics, vicars, woman teachers and do-gooders. Olive Wellwood (the children's author) and her sister "escaped" from the coal fields of Yorkshire where they were raised. There are also assorted artists, writers and lecturers, including some German artisans involved with puppets and marionettes and active in the Bohemian life of Schwabing in Munich. There are MANY children.

The book opens in 1895 when Cain's son Julian and Tom Wellwood (son of Olive and Humphrey) discover a dirty boy living surreptitiously in the basements of the V&A. Turns out Phillip ran away from "the potteries" where his mother, a painter of china, was slowly dying of lead poisoning. He wants make pots and is taken to work with Fludd. The back-to-nature and the arts and crafts movements and the social issues of the waning Victorian period—as well as of the hedonistic Edwardian period—are explored: "free love" being one of those issues which impacts all of these families as the children gradually learn who their "real" parents are. Education and work (not just the right to work, but "the right to know") for women is another issue. So is the "Woman question", the suffrage issue. The novel goes through the end of WWI—when all these children are young adults thrown into a world their parents had not prepared them for.

Netherland by Joseph O'Neill

2009-06-03T11:33:00.002-05:00

Netherland is a book that didn’t quite work for me, though there’s much to admire in it. The writing is exceptional—clean and fresh and not smacking of MFA writing programs as are so many “well-written” novels these days. The narrative structure is brilliant; it’s a first person narrative, in which the narrator, Hans van den Broek, roams back and forth in time, but always orients the reader with the slightest nod. Hans has a touch of the naïve narrator—well handled too—in that he observes so much more than he understands—or at least deals with. He’s an interesting character: raised in Holland, educated in England and then transferred to New York where he and his family experience the 911 attacks so close to their neighborhood that they have to move out to an hotel.

It’s the 911 experience that disorients Hans and his family, and eventually his wife insists on taking the child and going back to the UK to live with her family rather than stay in the Chelsea Hotel (which I note from biographical material is where O’Neill himself lives).

The run up to the Iraq war further tears the family apart and wife, Rachel, blames Hans for staying in a country that would illegally invade Iraq. Hans, an energy analyst, collapses emotionally in the face of her criticism and becomes increasingly isolated from his surroundings. In between his trips to London to visit his family, he spends his spare time playing cricket which is how he meets Chuck Ramkissoon, transplanted from Trinidad and determined to bring cricket back to the US…has the site for his cricket stadium all picked out. He’s clearly a “mover and shaker”—in fact for the Russian mob, but Hans isn’t really paying attention.

The 911 connection fades completely for me as the book goes on, though clearly Hans is stuck in its afterglow. Ramkisson is fascinating, and the reader picks up the cues about his life that Hans does not. The marriage difficulties are not very interesting. Rachel is not particularly likeable and Hans is unable to make a decision about anything in his life and certainly not about his marriage. Cricket becomes a “safe subject” for him, though he hasn’t Chuck’s passion to bring the game to the US.

The novel ends plows on to end with a whimper. This is a tremendously talented writer who hasn't really been able to focus his talents in this novel. In the end I was bored.

Phineas Finn by Anthony Trollope

2009-05-25T13:24:00.002-05:00

In the second volume of Trollope’s political series. Phineas Finn, the son of an Irish doctor, intended to become a barrister after studying law at Trinity College, but becomes an MP instead and moves into London political society—those in the Liberal party at least. He’s handsome, personable, and does real work. He just can’t afford to be an MP (no salary) except by letting his father support him. In Parliament, he overcomes his initial fear of speaking after a disastrous first attempt and then does his job so well that he’s tapped to be an undersecretary on the Treasury Bench. That means a salary and Phineas seems to be set.

It’s the time of the Reform Bills. The Liberals are pushing but want to move slowly and sensibly. One measure they’re not ready for is Irish tenant rights. Phineas takes a stand that’s different from his party and honor forces him to resign which means no salary and the necessity to go back to Ireland and make some money.
During his time in London he loses his seat twice and is helped to another by political friends. He falls in love with three rich women, marrying one of whom would solve his problems, but he believes in love, not in using a woman’s wealth for personal advantage.

It’s hard to describe what’s so great about Trollope. There are always some good characters, but never without faults that cause them serious problems and complicate the plots. There are some real bad ones too, generally people who aren’t very aware of themselves and their impact on society. Trollope understands political maneuvering—I liked this novel better the second time having read Roy Jenkins’ biography of Gladstone which gave me some background on the politics of the time.

As to Phineas Finn, I’ve read this series before and know he’ll be back.

Humboldt's Gift by Saul Bellow

2009-05-25T13:19:00.002-05:00

I read this book, probably when it came out in the 70ies, and because I didn’t remember it at all, decided to read it again. It was certainly about a 70ies world—no cell phones and predatory divorce lawyers seemed a new phenomenon—but the basic theme is much older, and if anything more relevant today. Struck me that it had a lot in common with Peter Cary’s Theft which I read recently, namely, the position of the artist in a grossly materialistic society.

The main character—and narrator (Bellow created some great narrators didn’t he?) is Charlie Citrine who, as a kid out of college went to New York to meet and serve his “master”, Von Humboldt Fleisher, the well-known poet (said to be Delmore Schwartz who was an early success as a poet but ended in alcoholism and mental illness and died, like Humboldt in a seedy hotel. Like Humboldt his work was philosophical, meditative and Jewish) who really stands for the prototypical late 20th century serious poet-and what the modern “real world” does to that poet.

Humboldt gets Charlie a job at Princeton but becomes a schemer who can no longer write, while Charlie wins a Pulitzer for his play and becomes a Chevalier of France. Humboldt had earlier insisted that they exchange signed checks with each other, for emergencies, a sign of their brotherhood. But when Charlie is up and Humboldt down, the poet writes a big check on his “brother’s” account. The first of those who raid Charlie’s wealth by scheming. Humboldt and Charlie drift apart, though Charlie keeps track of his friend and feels guilty when Humboldt is found dead in the hotel room.
In the atmosphere of this modern industrial world, represented by the Chicago that is the milieu of the modern artist, Charlie, fascinated by gangsters, investment schemes, violence, fast women, hangs on to his belief that there’s an afterlife and builds on Humboldt’s philosophy. His car is trashed on the street by a gangster; his wife divorces him and her lawyer knows all the tricks to leave him skinned. His mistress absconds, leaving Charlie to babysit her kid while she goes on her honeymoon—marries a Chicago undertaker rich from his chain of funeral homes. Charlie is left with nothing in a pension in Madrid until he’s “rescued” by one of his scheming friends who’s discovered a film made from a scenario Charlie had told him about: one he and Humboldt dreamed up at Princeton, wrote down and documented. And which Humboldt had will to Charlie and his uncle. Charlie reluctantly agrees to prosecute but doesn’t go back to Chicago with his modest gain.

If anything the forces of materialism and greed that defeated the artist in the 70ies are greater now than then.

The Bitter Road to Freedom: A New History of the Liberation of Europe by William I. Hitchcock

2009-04-30T10:32:00.002-05:00

Although I had a number of gripes about this book, I ended up deciding that it was a pretty important book. First the gripes:

1. In the preface he suggests that the reason European nations chose not to participate with the US in the “coalition of the willing” in Iraq was that, having experienced WWII on their own soil and recognizing the terrible price paid by those liberated (as well as the difficulty of the liberators), European countries had a more realistic (and “dark”) understanding of the task of regime change; they saw it as bigger and uglier than did the US. An intriguing thesis, but it was not in fact a thesis and the idea was never developed after its mention in the preface.

2. This may be inevitable in a book with such a subject, but Hitchcock narrates a truly endless tale of cruelty, neglect and, degradation, so much so that readers may be tempted to give it up and go on to something else in the same way they might choose not to watch films with endless violence. That would be a mistake because there’s an important message here, but I think Hitchcock could have organized more wisely and avoided this particular criticism.

OK. That’s out of the way. The message of this book—never explicitly stated until the conclusion—is that the “good war” wasn’t really so good and that the winners might have gone overboard not so much in making heroes and villains but in perpetrating the idea that some wars have clear outcomes and clean motives and even clean execution (except of course where the bad guys forced them into dirtier practices). In the US lately it’s been the “greatest generation” myth—when in fact American troops raped and pillaged and ran roughshod over civilians too. Earlier it was the “resistance myth” (particularly in France) when in fact, with the possible exception of Yugoslavia and Greece, resistance was materially ineffective.

Hitchcock starts in France and focuses on the sufferings of civilians through the Normandy invasions and the push into Germany and then moves on to Belgium and Holland focusing primarily on interactions between the military and the civilian population. It is odd that no one has as replayed these scenes; they are alarmingly reminiscent of the invasion of Iraq. Policies at the time forbad journalists to focusing heavily on civilian suffering, especially when it might cast doubt on the behavior of Allied troops and the decisions of Allied command. Since then, writers on the war have been busy building up the story of the “good war”, focusing on the military and its exploits, not on the civilians whose land they trampled.

In the process of rebalancing the view of WWII, Hitchcock sort of evens the score with respect to the behavior of British and American troops and those of the USSR. The latter are not whitewashed by any means, but troops on the Western front don’t sound like superhuman heroes either.

When Allied troops move into Germany itself, Hitchcock deals with fraternization issues. Initially US troops were forbidden to fraternize with German civilians, but ironically, they liked the German civilians more than those in France, Belgium and Holland. Even more ironically, but maybe not surprisingly, they identified with German civilians more than with those degraded humans they released from the concentration camps.

The real revelations of the book, as far as I was concerned, came when Hitchcock dealt with the problems of displaced persons immediately after the war: Jews—and others—liberated from the camps as well as civilians fleeing west to escape the Russians, plus prisoners of war or those transported to Germany to work were, in many cases, at loose ends as well. There were no plans in place to deal with them, the numbers were staggering and the problems almost insurmountable. Even defining who was entitled to what was problematic. Were Jews fleeing the Russians in the east (some bringing possessions and wealth with them) as entitled to help as those released from the camps? An early priority was returning people to their homes, but some had no homes and others didn’t want to go back to what was now the Russian zone. Soviet soldiers were returned to the USSR—where most ended up dead or in the Gulag (the result of a probably unwise agreement at Yalta), but there were civilians too. There was no solution except more camps, some without any more resources available to prisoners than had been the case in the German camps. DP camps--often built on the grounds of infamous death camps--housed “liberated” prisoners in a sort of limbo a year after the end of the war.

Other issues focused on the rescued Jews many of whom seemed hardly human after surviving the camps, most of whom were destitute, stateless and often debilitated. The liberators basically came from anti-Semitic environments and decried concentration camps and extermination, but didn’t want Jews living next door. Jews wanted to preserve memories of what happened to ensure the holocaust (it was not yet a capital letter issue) was never repeated; Western administrators wanted them to put the past behind them and move on. Large numbers of Jews with no home or families to return to wanted to start again in a Jewish homeland. Britain opposed letting Jews into Palestine, fearing clashes with Arabs they’d not have the ability to control. Other countries—including the US—didn’t want to take in large numbers of stateless, destitute, often debilitated, people.

Hitchcock doesn’t work through the problems to the end. His narrative, the theme of which is what happens to civilians in war, stops with the recognition that many of the liberated were still in camps 6 to 12 months after the end of the war. His conclusion—that we need to reevaluate our mythology about the “good war” and look at the disastrous effect of WWII on the European population—strikes me as a much-needed reevaluation. I do remember hearing about DPs and DP camps when I was a kid in the late 40s and 50s, but these days there has not been much focus on civilians (with the possible exceptions of those affected by the bombing in London which was not nearly as destructive as the wrath unleased on German cities at the end of the war).

The Virgin in the Garden by AS Byatt

2009-04-25T10:43:00.003-05:00

If the test of a great novel is that you want to read it again, or pick up the next one (this is the first of a quartet) then this is a good novel. If Still Life—the next title in the quartet—had been right here on the shelf I'd have started it right after I reread the Prologue.

The present time of the novel is 1953, the year of the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II and, in the world of the novel, of a verse drama about the first Queen Elizabeth enacted on the grounds of an old and elegant estate in Yorkshire. The story is that of a Yorkshire family: father Bill Potter who’s reputed to be a magnetic teacher at Blesford Ride, a public school, but we see him primarily as a dogmatic liberal who terrorizes his family while promoting his ideas on education (he’s for it) and religion (he’s against it). Winifred, his wife, caters and defers, of necessity becoming exactly the kind of woman he deplores and whose life her daughters (Stephanie and Frederica) seek to escape. Marcus, the youngest and his mother’s favorite, is inner-directed, even spiritual, awkward with just about everyone, observant of phenomena of his world--and becomes prey for a disturbed science teacher.

The novel, which in general is slow moving and highly allusive has a surprisingly dramatic closing sequence for a writer who says she didn’t think she could tell stories. I had to laugh, though, at the very end: the scene is between Daniel, the fat, unkempt priest who marries the elder Potter daughter against the wishes of her parents, and Frederica in the small flat where the pregnant Stephanie is comforting the very disturbed Marcus.

Here's the last paragraph: "Waiting and patience, of this inactive kind, did not come easily to him. Or to Frederica, he decided, without much sympathy for her. He gave her a cup of tea and the two of them sat together in uncommunicative silence, considering the still and passive pair on the sofa. That was not the end, but since it went on for a considerable time, is as good a place to stop as any."

I loved that ending and asked myself why:

1. It caused me to consider the title of the second book in the quartet, Still Life. Stephanie and Marcus were "still" in their way but that was not true of Frederica and Daniel about whom "stillness" is almost the last word that would occur in any description of their characters.

2. It sent me immediately back to reread the prologue where I rediscovered that Daniel was one of the guests at the celebration in the Portrait Gallery in 1968---long after the New Elizabethan Age furor is over. Alexander Wedderburn, who wrote the 1953 verse play as a budding writer teaching at Blesford Ride, is also there, signaling perhaps that these two, and Frederica who invited them are of most interest in the novel.

3. The implication that there's more to the history of these characters made me want to continue immediately with the next book. And that reminds me that I absolutely loved the way Byatt handled time in the novel, the constant references to what different characters would do or think in the future, often with a date attached, usually in the 1970s. So you know the story goes on beyond the 1968 prologue. That's not an end to the story. AND that Byatt must have had the sequence fairly well planned out.

4. It reminded me that I liked the third person omniscient narrator which since Henry James has been used less frequently in serious fiction. I think Byatt uses it brilliantly and this ending paragraph is an example. SHE knows what happens to them all and will tell you if you're patient. The ostensible third person narrative showcases the author’s extraordinary insight into so many different characters. Before the novel is over, we know all the Potters well, and even have some insights into the extraordinarily bad father. And 4 or 5 additional characters as well.

There is a narrator, though, in this novel and one who gradually makes us realize that Frederica is the main character. Some readers see Frederica as the narrator, and that is possible if one assumes a Frederica observing at some point in the future and if one assumes, as I do, that Frederica is capable of considerable detachment. But I prefer to think it's Byatt's re-incarnation of the 19th century 3rd person omniscient narrator who, as the novel goes on, focuses on the awkward, studious 17-year old ready to catapult herself into "real life". In addition, it's this narrator--definitely female--who provides the considerable humor in the novel.

My argument that the narrative is essentially (if not strictly) third person centers around the intimate (and convincing) inside view of so many different characters. What makes this a strong novel it seems to me is that Frederica is NOT Byatt thinly disguised, even though the family does seem quite similar (but then it also seems similar to the Bröntes, a point of view some in the novel espouse). In the "real" family she was the eldest and she even says that killing off Stephanie (which happens in another novel) seems, in retrospect, killing off herself. But she also says that she was shy and uncommunicative as a child, with interests in science—and that Marcus is in many ways a portrait of herself.

Four Freedoms by John Crowley

2009-04-07T09:24:00.002-05:00

John Crowley’s Four Freedom’s takes its title from FDR’s speech to Congress in January 1941 in which he says, “In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms:
• “The first is freedom of speech and expression -- everywhere in the world.
• “The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way....
• “The third is freedom from want....
• “The fourth is freedom from fear….”
Crowley’s use of the term, however, doesn’t focus on a world made secure after winning the world war, but on specific segments of the US population for whom the war—and specifically the need to mobilize all available workers—brought access to freedoms they’d never known before: to women, to the handicapped, to minorities and to other marginalized citizens.

The nameless narrator begins the story with his childhood memory of playing in a derelict airplane near the Ponca City, Oklahoma, airport. (That got my attention because I played in a deteriorating WWII plane while my father was taking his flying lessons. It was parked at our small town airport, and the instructor’s son, who had made it his playhouse, wasn’t above inviting a girl to join in.) The narrator, who never really intrudes into the story, seems to be a Ponca City native “documenting” his city’s role in the war effort. He infuses the story with a certain enthusiasm and love of place that’s attractive.

Crowley creates a fictional aircraft plant—Van Damme Aero—building a fictional plane—the B30 Pax—outside Ponca City. The Van Damme brothers were early flying enthusiasts and Henry in particular had visions of building a “city of the hill” out of his factory, a self-sufficient town which came to be called Henryville where the workers who flocked to Ponca City for “war work” could live and work and be entertained. Everything was organized and ritualized, but Henry was no “big brother”, no profiteer bent on profiting from the government’s needs, but rather an aircraft enthusiast, interested in involving his employees in the great task entrusted to them.

Crowley obviously researched the WWII homefront—particularly “war work”—in great detail, and yet the novel doesn’t read like an historical novel pieced together out of tidbits of history. That’s largely because of the compelling characters who march through the novel, with the focus falling on several characters in different situations, rather than focusing exclusively on one set of characters. It starts out with the Van Dammes but the bulk of the novel focuses on Al and Sal Maas who are midgets, on Vi Harbison, who left a deteriorating ranch and had her moment of fame at Van Damme Aero using her softball skills, on Pancho Notzring, an idealist always planning the perfection of human society, on Bunce, who left his wife up North to get “war work” that would keep him out of the war but then found another woman to keep him company in Henryville, and on Connie his wife, who felt her way to independence and competence—first getting a job in a plant at home and then when that firm folded, following Bunce to Ponca City where she finds her way on her own skills.

If there is a “main character”, it’s Prosper Olander, whose spinal fusion operation as a kid left him completely unable to walk without braces and crutches. (The similarity of his disability—though not caused by polio—was extraordinarily like the President’s, though Crowley, rightly so, doesn’t push that.) Prosper’s father left when he was a child, partly because he couldn’t cope with a handicapped child, and his mother died while he was in the hospital. He’d been living a very restricted life with two aunts when the war brought possibilities for self sufficiency he’d never dreamed of. And possibilities for love (and sex) most people assumed he was incapable of. Damaged himself, he’s a healer for others, never sentimentalized though.

Speaking of which, the real danger of a novel like this would be falling into sentimentality, but it never does. Crowley’s characters have individuality and dignity where a less skillful writer might have created “typical examples” out of tidbits of history. In the end they’re all out of jobs, but not out of life or love or loyalty.

Finally, Crowley is an enormously talented writer, whose prose is dense and evocative with concrete details as well as ideas and concepts that widen the focus of even minor incidents and characters. Here’s one example that takes the reader right into the room with the big band:

That amazing rolling thunder a big band could make when it started a song with the thudding of the bass drum all alone, like a fast train suddenly coming around a bend and into your ear: a kind of awed moan would take over the crowd when they did that, and then all the growling brass would stand and come in, like the same train picking up speed and rushing closer, and the couples would pour onto the floor, the drumming of their feet audible in the more bon ton nightclub downstairs, where the crooner raised his eyes to the trembling chandelier in delight or dismay.

The War of Don Emmanuel's Nether Parts by Louis de Bernières

2009-02-20T09:44:00.002-06:00

This is de Bernières’ first novel I think and it’s interesting to see how his later style is developing, with different sections devoted to very different characters and story types and with other sections devoted to history, politics, local traditions, and other typically “nonfiction” topics. I can see the writer of Corelli’s Mandolin developing here.

The influences behind this novel are clear: (1) de Bernières spent time teaching English in Colombia and that is clearly the unnamed republic in the book and (2) he must also have spent time reading Latin American authors, specifically Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The novel seems to combine the typical hot steamy novel set in an hopelessly unruly banana republic with the rollicking fun and magical realism of One Hundred Years of Solitude. There’s a good jolt of political satire with a point of view on history that’s different from both the banana republic novels and from Latin American magical realism. It is not quite its author’s own voice—more a trying on and modification of other author’s voices—and I suspect readers of de Bernières’ mature novels will initially be a bit disappointed.

Still once the story gets going, readers will marvel at the author’s humor and inventiveness and rush on to finish it. Starting with the spoiled lady who wants to divert a river to fill her swimming pool and the fat, stupid, brutal army officer the novel progresses through giant cats and laughing plagues, political disappearances a lá Argentina, and the founding of Cochadebajo de los Gatos (“a city of cats beneath a lake”) which figures in the de Bernières’ continuation of the saga—The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman.

Onitsha by JMG LeClezio (translated by Alison Anderson)

2009-01-27T12:54:00.005-06:00

It wasn’t until the end of the novel that I really connected this novel with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel, Half of a Yellow Sun which was based on the Biafran War in the 1960ies where the eastern part of Nigeria, primarily represented by the Igbo people, were hounded into succession and an attempt to found their own state. Or that I began to wonder why so much of the literary output of Nigeria (besided Adichie, Chinua Achebe in the previous generation and Chris Abani more recently)—at least that which has got attention in the West—comes from this area of the country.

LeClezio’s novel spans the time frame of Achebe and of Adichie, with the novel beginning in 1948 when its main character, Fintan, first travels to Africa and 1969 when Fintan travels to France where his father is dying and from there, one speculates—since he resigned his teaching job—to Nigeria.

Fintan is 12 when he travels with his mother on the Holland Africa steamer from France to Nigeria. Mother and son are unusually close and both write on the ship—the mother (Maou, short for Maria Louisa), bits of evocative poetry and Fintan, a chronicle called “A Long Voyage”. On the ship with them is the new British DO (District Officer) at Onitsha—where they are headed—giving the reader a preview of the racial and cultural disconnect they’ll encounter at their destination.

In addition, we have the strange circumstances of their own voyage. In the 30ies Maou had married Geoffroy, an Englishman, in her home country, Italy. Shortly after their marriage he goes off, presumably to Africa, promising to send for her which he does only after his child is 12 years old!

Fintan resents the father he’s never met and doesn’t like him in person and we’re at first on his side as his father seems to be as insensitive as the other British functionaries in the local colonial government—including the DO met on the ship. Gradually, though, as Fintan toughens up his feet and runs with a local boy, learning the ways of the forest and the river, we learn of Geoffroy’s passion for the ancient myths and legends of the people who first settled on an island in the Niger. His interest borders on obsession, is deemed inappropriate by local whites. When Maou speaks up about British mistreatment of the people at the British club, she’s ostracized and the powers that be decide they have to go.

The point of view shifts almost imperceptibly between Maou and Fintan. LeClezio excels in characterizing the place, through descriptions of the sights and sounds of the forest and the river and the love of the land and the people that grows in mother and son. The sections that represent Geoffroy’s thoughts are printed in a different font to indicate a shift; at first they seem irrelevant to the contemporary world, though gradually people and events from the past seem to merge with those in the present. Readers hardly experience Geoffroy except through his research into the mists of history, though his sections communicate his intense emotional involvement with that past. Gradually, though, as Fintan comes to acknowledge and respect his father's understanding of the past, we see the small family of three standing implacably against the colonial establishment in what is a powerful, because understated, indictment of colonialism.

The Defining Moment: FDR's Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope by Jonathon Alter

2009-01-27T10:03:00.002-06:00

I admit to reading this one because Obama was reading it and because so many pundits have been citing similarities between the Depression in the 30ies and Roosevelt’s first 100 days of New Deal legislation and the situation currently faced by our new president. I ended up seeing more differences than similarities between the two presidents and between the two situations—which doesn’t mean the book isn’t not only interesting but timely. By the way, I agree with the author that this time around 100 days won’t do it. And even with Roosevelt, as Alter says, his most significant legislation, Social Security, passed later in his Presidency.

While the book tends to zero in on the 100 days, the author obviously found that, writing to a general audience, he had to give considerable background on Roosevelt—which he does in a series of short chapters which I found fun to read even though I’m fairly well read on Roosevelt the person and the president and have recently read a good complete biography (Edwards, FDR). In most chapters there was an anecdote or fact that I’d not heard before so I couldn’t accuse Alter of just regurgitating what other writers have written.

Alter makes much of the comment by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes that Roosevelt’s primary asset was not his mind but his “first class temperament”—that the title of the first book I read about Roosevelt (by Geoffrey Ward). However, Alter does honor the suggestion, made by Edwards among others, that it’s not clear whether Justice Holmes was talking about FDR or about Teddy Roosevelt. But temperament is an important issue in the book and timely because so many have noted that one of Obama’s greatest assets is what most call, these days, his “unflappability”. In temperament they may not be all that similar, but for both Obama and Roosevelt, likability is an important part of the appeal and the ability to talk to “the people” (not just the politicians) in a way that clarifies complex issues and involves the listener in solutions is of critical importance.

Alter gives considerable space to Eleanor in this book too: her despair at giving up her privacy to become first lady, her discovery of a new and historically significant role for the first lady, and her function in keeping FDR in touch. Because of his paralysis, the extent of which the American people did not know, Roosevelt was more vulnerable to what we now call the “bubble” the President exists in. In the 30ies Eleanor began traveling the country and the world, going down in coal mines—and eventually into war zones—to talk to “ordinary Americans” and bringing her insights back to the President. From the first, Roosevelt recognized the danger that the President grow “out of touch”, reminding us that Obama’s fight to keep his Blackberry isn’t just his technology fix, but his recognition that Presidents can easily become bubble-dwellers.

The Post-American World by Fareed Zakaria

2009-01-15T11:26:00.003-06:00

I read Zakaria’s last book, The Future of Freedom, which focused on what it takes to make what we call a “liberal democracy”. First and foremost it takes a population with enough money to be taxed, because only if the government depends on votes from a population with a real stake, does the government have to be responsive to the people and pay attention to other pillars of liberal democracy like the rule of law, the separation of church and state, public opinion, the market economy etc. So countries in the grip of poverty don’t have a chance until a market economy provides a reasonable per capital income for citizens. A corollary is that rich countries where the wealth comes totally from minerals (like Saudi Arabia) are not democracies and the rules do not serve at the will of the people.

So I was interested in this one. I hear Zakaria frequently on the political talk shows and mostly he makes sense to me. My only question about this one is whether his views have changed in the light of developments in the American economy since the book was published last May.

Zakaria’s thesis is that the future will not determined by solely by the one remaining superpower, the US, but also that the US will not sink into obscurity and lose all influence. What’s critical is “the rise of the rest”. In other words, far from seeing China taking over the superpower spot, Zakaria sees the rise of a significant number of powerful countries in the future: China, India, Brazil, Russia, Mexico and others. The US will continue to be enormously influential, but there are some traps it needs to avoid. Zakaria compares the fall in influence of Britain and discusses how the situation with the US is different. But mostly he warns that the US will have to welcome “the rest”, learn more about them and pay attention to their interests in their decision making.

I suspect the book, is among other things, advice to the new American administration—even though Zakaria didn’t know who would be president when he wrote it. I did see a picture of Obama, though, getting on a plane with this book in his hand.

The House on Sugar Beach by Helene Cooper

2009-01-15T09:30:00.002-06:00

I spent the summer of 1965 in Monrovia, Liberia. My daughter was born there in August. The Peace Corps had sent me in June because the maternity hospital in Sierra Leone had had problems with childbed fever. I worked in the Peace Corps office as office assistant to the doctor and nurse. In the Sinkor section of Monrovia, I went to Cooper’s Clinic. The doctor was a short, middle aged man who came to check on my daughter and me one morning in the wee hours dressed, in a cutaway coat, striped pants and top hat. He was a member of Liberia’s upper class, the Americo-Liberians, descendants of the freed slaves who originally settled what was, before the 1950ies, the only independent republic in West Africa. Sierra Leone had a similar class, called Krios, who descended from freed slaves brought from British America, but because Sierra Leone had been a British colony, the Krios hadn’t run the country, only worked in administrative positions under the British. They’d found themselves in the minority, though, with independence in 1961, and the largest tribe, the Mende, held the presidency and other important offices.

I was intrigued when I first heard of Cooper's book. She's an Americo-Liberian, driven from her home by the civil war in Liberia, who's now a reporter for the New York Times. It's easy to find email addresses of Times' reporters so I wrote to her and discovered that she is from "that Cooper family", that she too was delivered by Dr. Cooper in his Sinkor clinic, some months after my daughter.

I read her book almost in one sitting, fascinated. I had this picture in my mind of Monrovia in 1965, sort of like a run down Southern town. With stop lights! (Freetown at the time had only one stoplight). In the back of my mind was a garden party I'd seen once where the guests were all dressed like they stepped off the set of Gone with the Wind--Scarlett O'Hara gowns and cutaway coats. Then there was the scandal that summer, a ritual murder with the latest investigation news every morning in the newspaper until one day President Taubman walked in the closed it all down. Rumor had it that the VP was involved. Sierra Leone seemed to me much safer and more civilized in those days, newly embarked on representative democracy as it was.

Cooper's book took me back to the place, but from an entirely different point of view, that of an upper class girl, from the "Congo people" (In Freetown there's a "Congo River" so named because some of the freed slaves came from the Congo; it was generally assumed, evidently, in both places that all the freed slaves from the western hemisphere had originally come from Congo.) All the rest of the people--those I'd heard Americo-Liberians in a restaurant once refer to as aboriginals--were "country people". Cooper characterizes life in the big house on Sugar Beach as privileged. Like the majority of aristocrats everywhere they had servants and treated them well. The children depended on him and loved them. They recognized that "country people" didn't have their advantages. They didn't have forebearers who'd come over on the equivalent of the Mayflower; they didn't have relatives in the top echelon of the government. A unique advantage Cooper recognized was that she grew up black and privileged, with no taint of either slavery or colonial domination in her past. Not only did she escape the discrimination experienced by blacks in the US, but there wasn't any colonial past which had burnt into the people that white people were superior.

Cooper's idyllic childhood was interrupted when Samuel Doe, a renegade army officer, raided the Presidential Palace, killed the president (he who had been the VP remembered as being silently accused of involvement in ritual murder) and took over the government. Within days, Cooper saw her cousin, the foreign minister, executed on television along with other high government officials. Soldiers came to Sugar Beach where she was living with her mother and siblings, and threatened them (earlier she'd explained that "rogues" often came to steal from the house, but they weren't called "thieves" because that word was reserved for government officials who stole). Now the soldiers were on a drunken rampage and Congo people no longer had the upper hand. Cooper's mother went to the basement with them if they agreed not to rape her daughters. In no time at all, they were all on a plane to America. Where life was not nearly as easy and where everyone asked her where she was from and then "Where's that?" Money was short. The daughters lived alternately with mother and father (now divorced) while one or the other went back to Liberia to see family or salvage what they could from land and houses that had not been confiscated.

Finally after a frightening accident during the invasion of Iraq, where she was embedded with American soldiers on their way from Kuwait to Baghdad, Cooper decided it was time to go back to Liberia. "If I'm gong to die in a war," she thought trapped in a Humvee, "it should be in my own country."

I really connected with this book, partly because I had had some experience in Liberia and partly because Cooper tells her story very well. I was even interested in her childhood fears (of heartmen who'd chase you down and cut your heart out) and her adolescent crushes in a Liberian public school and her attempts to fade into the woodwork in successive American schools.

The Riders by Tim Winton

2009-01-08T12:44:00.002-06:00

I’ve liked what I’ve read of Winton (Cloudstreet and Dirt Music) and this one is no exception. The main character, Scully, is from Freemantle in Western Australia. He’s a big, unattractive guy, a laborer whose skills are currently put to use renovating an old Irish farmhouse which had taken his wife’s fancy on a visit to Ireland. His wife, Jennifer, who’s pregnant with their second child, is in Australia with their 7 year-old daughter, Billie, typing loose ends for their planned move to Ireland.

On the day—shortly before Christmas—when his family is supposed to arrive at Shannon, Billie is alone on the plane, scared enough that she can’t even talk to tell her father what happened to Jennifer. The airline shows Jennifer arrived at Heathrow but didn’t continue on to Shannon. Scully, panicked and not thinking clearly, takes off after her, Billie in tow, and they end up on a frantic trip to London, a Greek island where they’d lived happily before Ireland, Paris, and Amsterdam. The third person narrative shifts occasionally from Scully to Billie’s point of view, particularly as the former gets more and more out of control (he’s accused of murder (wrongly) in Greece but runs anyway and in Amsterdam he’s arrested, drunk and dirty. At one point—after he’s stolen money from Irma, a good-hearted but screwy woman who’s clearly attracted to him and wants to help, Billie practically takes control, appropriating the money. Scully gets more and more desperate, chasing women on the street who look like Jennifer, while Billie, devoted to her father, doesn’t particularly want her mother back.

Gradually, partly through Billie’s point of view, the reader gets a picture of Jennifer, as a woman, more educated than Scully, with a yen to be an artist, but evidently without the talent. Whether she ever loved Scully is unclear, but during what he sees as a romantic period of living in Europe, with Scully working on house renovations with other illegals to get them money, Jennifer’s been seeking out more sophisticated friends, artists and writers and wannabes like herself. The child she carries may not be Scully’s; in fact, there may not even be a child….

Two somewhat blatant associations clarify the meaning of Scully’s desperation. The first is the poem, “On Raglan Road” by Australian Patrick Kavanagh which is quoted in the text. The poem is about a man who “loved too much” and “wooed not as I should a creature made of clay”. An angel who loved like that would lose his wings, concludes the poem. The second reference is to “the riders”, a group of gypsies in Ireland—travelers, that Scully sees and is attracted by early in the novel and then again at the very end when, on New Year’s night he follows Billie out into the snow to the ruined castle near their Irish farmhouse. There some riders have paused, but this time Scully rejects the itinerate life they lead—and presumably the traveling he’s been doing himself.

West with the Night by Beryl Markham

2009-01-08T12:16:00.005-06:00

Like the man who “rediscovered” this memoir and was instrumental in having it republished in 1983, I was impressed with the quotation by Hemingway on the cover to the effect that she “can write rings around all of us who consider ourselves as writers”. There’s a breathless quality to the writing: there are delightful and original figures of speech and there’s wisdom gained from a childhood where mentors are as much the elders of the African tribes she grows up with as that of her own father.

A herd of elephant, as seen from a plane, has a quality of an hallucination. The proportions are wrong—they are like those of a child’s drawing of a field mouse in which the whole landscape, complete with barns and windmills, is dwarfed beneath the whiskers of the mighty rodent who looks both able and willing to devour everything, including the thumb-tack that holds the work against the schoolroom wall.

Safaris come and safaris go, but Makula goes on forever. I suspect at times that he is one of the wisest men I have known—so wise that, realizing the scarcity of wisdom, he has never cast a scrap of it away, though I still remember a remark he made to an overzealous newcomer to his profession: ‘White men pay for danger—we poor ones cannot afford it. Find your elephant and then vanish, so that you can live to find another.’

Markham grew up on a coffee farm in British East Africa (later Kenya) where her father also kept horses, as gradually training race horses captured his [and her] interest full time. There was no mother (you have to read elsewhere to discover that her mother and elder sibling left Africa early on and returned to Britain). Her playmates were Africans and so were her mentors. One child she played with ended up her principal servant and companion in adult hood—and called her “Memsahib”. Her childhood influences were probably more African than British. When she was nearly 18, her father’s farm failed and he went to try his luck in Peru. She decided to stay and became a successful horse trainer herself until she met Tom Black who inspired her to learn to fly, though her eventual inspiration to take up flying seriously was the death of hunter and flyer Denys Finch Hatton in his plane. By the mid-thirties, she was flying passengers and the mail, rescuing the injured and taking them to safety. Eventually, with Baron Blixen (husband of Karen—Isak Dinesen) she joined the “big white hunters” on safaris, scouting for elephant by plane, though to her credit, even then she hated to see the elephants killed. She never mentions husbands, lovers or child. Nor does she mention Karen Blixen. Only her love for Africa and her work with horses and with planes.
Once I finished the book—which I enjoyed very much—I looked up Beryl Markham on the net, primarily because I was interested in her life and in the information she left out (what happened to her mother… the men in her life…) and discovered there is at least one biographer who says she didn’t write it, but that it was written by her third husband, Raoul Schumacher. Her other biographer stoutly denies the charge.
I can’t arbitrate that controversy, but I thoroughly enjoyed the book. Beryl Markham lived until 1986 in Kenya; she’s been living in obscurity and near poverty until the revival of the book brought her some notice and some money.

Gulliver's Travels by Jonathon Swift

2009-01-08T12:09:00.001-06:00

I don’t think I read this as a kid, or if I did I only read the Lilliput part, though I did remember that Gulliver also met big people who treated him like a little doll. Those were parts 1 and 2. In part 3, he visits a number of different places trying to get home. He encounters people whose dedication to science makes them incapable of doing anything practical and some humans who never die but continue to age, being “written off” by their culture when their contemporaries die so that the live a painful and miserable death. Finally, in part 4, he lands in the land of the Houyhnhnms who are rational horses who don’t even have words for lie, deceit, murder, etc. There are also Yahoos, and they look just like Gulliver but are assumed to be completely irrational because all they do is scrap and fight. Gulliver is finally forced to leave because he appears to be a Yahoo—even though he’s made friends among the Houyhnnms. He makes his way back to England and turns in revulsion from his wife and children and all other humans, being so traumatized by the Yahoos and his own sense that he’s really one of them.
The satire is funny, even when you don’t track down all the specific references to Swift’s contemporary world, but the last part where Gulliver is revolted by the Yahoos and their behavior is no longer so funny. The reader is tempted, like Gulliver, to revile one’s own kind who, even 300 years later, are still busy lying, cheating and making war.

The Shadow of the Sun by Ryszard Kapuściński

2008-12-30T13:03:00.001-06:00

Kapuściński was a Polish journalist who died in 2007, and who spent time in Africa between the late 1950ies and the 1990ies. Africa was not his only beat, but when he spent time there he spent time with the people and shared their lives when he could. He was the first Polish foreign correspondent to cover Africa and he was always seriously underfunded compared with those representing the big European and American publications and agencies. What he lacked in funds he made up in ingenuity and a willingness to share in the lives of Africans with the result that he got the big stories (a coup in Zanzibar is the subject of one piece) but also the stories about the little people. He went to visit friends in remote villages where there wasn't enough to eat. He traveled in war zones. He met the dictators and sadists who were independent Africa's first rulers. Once traveling with Greek correspondent in the region of Lake Victoria, he took refuge in a hut where he collapsed, exhausted, into a bunk only to discover a huge Egyptian cobra coiled underneath. He and the Greek threw their weight behind a huge metal container (their only weapon) and tried to crush it. The canister did not cut into the snake and they had to wrestle it to death. He got cerebral malaria, nearly died, and lived with the after affects for years.
The pieces in this book are beautifully written, undoubtedly due in part of the translator. Not like journalistic pieces one usually reads, with their pyramid structure and journalistic phrases and short cuts. Kapuściński's scope was broader, from the latest war or coup to serious attempts to characterize African people. He put himself on the line in every piece—it was personal, heartfelt and wise. He engaged seriously with people, didn't just watch from afar or "interview the participants".
One learns a great deal about the history of Africa—and why in a sense there was no history until the Europeans started to divide Africa up into colonies and zones of interest. Why there'd never be a history because there were no documents at all, only the oral stories the people told. The chapter on Rwanda is worth the purchase of the book alone: Kapuściński put the genocide in a context which none of the several books I read on the subject of the Rwandan genocide was able to do. Similarly, another long chapter on a visit to Liberia developed a context for the awful civil wars which began when an army sergeant took charge and carved up the President in his bed—without even a plan for what he'd do when he became leader—and was eventually carved up himself. That essay ends when Kapuściński is allowed to travel up country and meet the tribal people (which the ruling Americo-Liberians called aboriginals when I visited in 1965). They are coming into Monrovia across a bridge and Kapuściński sees a naked man with a Kalashnikov, the others carefully stepping out of his way. "A madman with a Kalashnikov" is how he, quite appropriately, ends the essay.
Kapuściński's focus in this book is mostly East Africa and the Sahara and Sanhel, a few mentions of West Africa, not much of Southern Africa. Not much about the more "civilized" parts of Northern Africa.

The City of Falling Angels by John Berendt

2008-12-30T13:01:00.001-06:00

Venice is the city of falling angels—literally carvings falling off of buildings, possibly on your head if you weren’t careful. The main focus of the book is the fire that burned the Fenice opera house, the reactions of Venetians and those from outsiders like the Americans in Save Venice, the non-profit organization that raised funds for restoration of Venetian art and architecture, as well as the following investigations, legal battles and eventual restoration. The author functions as a sort of informal detective—since the cause of the fire was first judged to be carelessness and then arson—but he can’t do what Venice itself can’t do, determine the cause and assign blame, make a restoration plan. Since the author was living in Venice much of the time between the fire and the restoration (1996-2003) he comes to know the place and the people increasingly well and the book is not strictly that of the fire, the quest to assign blame and the restoration, but about Venetian history and life now.
I got bored with the American socialites who jockeyed for power and acceptance by Venetian society, but the story of the theater itself was interesting, the legal battle to assign blame frustrating, and many of the other stories, particularly that of Ezra Pound and his companion of 50 years, Olga Rudge, and their “hidden nook”, fascinating.

The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga

2008-12-22T11:46:00.005-06:00

I enjoyed this book without finding it a masterpiece. Perhaps because of the Booker Prize, I was expecting too much. The novel is a first person narrative by Balram Halwai who was a poor kid from “the Darkness” (rural, undeveloped parts of India) who wangled a job as driver in Dehli for one of the landlord class from his village. He’s supposedly writing memos to the Premier of China, Wen Jiabao, who, it’s been reported in the Bangelore (where Balram currently lives) newspaper, will shortly visit India. Balram writes to “advise” on things Indian and to express his solidarity with an important leader of the yellow and brown peoples who are destined next to run the world. The Chinese premier never replies.
Apparently, sir, you Chinese are far ahead of us in every respect, except that you don’t have entrepreneurs. And our nation though it has no drinking water, electricity, sewage system, public transportation, sense of hygiene, discipline, courtesy or punctuality, does have entrepreneurs.
Balram is clever and amusing and calls himself an entrepreneur. He always write his memors in the middle of the night. The reader suspects he’s running some company that provides technical or customer support for US companies in the middle of the night in Bangelore. Which is correct, but not exactly what the reader is initially led to believe. Relatively uneducated, from a school where the teacher embezzles the money for uniforms, food and books, Balram was supposed to be the son who lifts the family out of the darkness into the light. His skipping school seems to put an end to that. He’s put to work, with his brother, in the tea shop. There, though, he uses the ambiance provided by the customers to begin understanding the “light” world (that of the educated Indians living in cities) and finagling a job for himself as a driver for the son of a land owner who has just returned from the US. Throughout, Balram refers to Indians from the poverty-stricken rural places as from the “darkness” and those middle class Indians from the city as from the “light”. The dichotomy is frequently also expressed in terms of those with big bellies and those with small bellies. Social mobility does exist for the fortunate—or ruthless enough—few and Balram not only yearns, but feels it his duty to his dead father (who died in a government hospital waiting for a doctor who didn’t come), to move up.
Balram’s is a sordid tale, as becomes apparent even before we learn that he’s killed his former boss, but his charm—and his social criticism—keeps us reading and reassures us that author and narrator are not the same. In Balram’s world, servants lie, cheat and steal to get and keep jobs and to assert themselves, however pathetically, in the face of appalling condescension on the part of their employers, and the employers are involved in bribery and corruption the like of which Ashok, Balram’s boss who returned to India with his American wife, finds distasteful and degrading—at least at first.
The problem with the novel is that while the charming tone is sustained to the last, Balram leads us into some pretty dicey situations. He’s proud of the wanted poster on which he appears looking like just about every other Indian and about the fact that it’s unlikely he’ll ever be caught, but evidently 17 members of his family have been killed in retaliation and he muses that he may eventually have to kill the nephew who lives with him—when he finds out. There’s a limit to how much violence his charm will allow us to swallow, even when we know his social criticism is justified.

Jan 5th:
I had a hard time with the book because although I sympathized with Balram initially and even managed to hang on through his confession that he killed Ashok, by the time he described how he actually did it and certainly when he told us (indirectly) that 17 members of his family were killed for what he did and that he may have to kill his nephew, I've turned against him. I felt the author couldn't sustain sympathy to the end, but as I've mulled it over in my mind, I'm thinking that my reaction is just what Adiga wanted. HIS goal is to highlight the corruption that runs India and show how it perpetuates itself.

The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry

2008-12-22T11:41:00.002-06:00

Barry’s last book, A Long Long Way, was initially impressive—largely because of his skill with language—but I lost interest and put it down. This one might have met the same fate had I not agreed to discuss it with a book group. It’s beautifully written, but frankly I’m tired of skillful Irish narratives about the plight of the poor in Ireland, the abuse of women by the Church, and the consequences of “the troubles”. It’s as if, each in his or her own way, generations of Irish novelists have walked in Joyce’s footsteps without long enough legs to climb out on their own territory.

The best thing about this book is Rosanne’s narrative. The book consists of two intertwined narratives: the story of her life that Rosanne, a 100 year old inmate of a mental institution in Roscommon, writes and hides under a floorboard and that of Dr Grene, the hospital’s psychiatrist, who has to determine which inmates could be released to the outside world. Grene, is Irish, but grew up in England and has an English accent. He’s 65 years old, recently widowed from a wife from whom he’d been estranged even as they lived most of their lives together. He visits Rosanne’s room frequently, drawn to her and suddenly, after 30 years, interested in her story—how and why she ended up in an asylum. Rosanne is not forthcoming to him, but she is to the “unknown reader” who will find her manuscript.

Rosanne was raised a Protestant. She adored her father who was always suspect in Sligo because of his religion, who may or may not have been police under English rule and who was relegated to jobs like cemetery keeper and rat catcher (she tells a harrowing tale of how he eliminated rats in an orphanage with something that was flammable and how a rat, coming down a chimney into a fire, fled burning, igniting a fire in which 20-some young girls were killed). Her father is eventually killed by his enemies and Rosanne is left alone with her mentally ill mother. She takes a job in a tea shop to support them both. Because she’s a beautiful girl, the local priest wants to find her a husband—to marry her to a Catholic and render her, and the community, “safe”. She refuses and eventually marries Tom McNulty who doesn’t care that she’s protestant. His mother does—it’s an old story—and connives with the priest to have the marriage annulled. Years later, Rosanne bears a child out of wedlock after spending one night with her husband’s errant brother (hero of an earlier novel). She appeals to Mrs. McNulty for help, is turned down and bears her child on the beach in a storm. An ambulance materializes to rescue her but not the child and she’s committed with her mother to the Sligo Asylum (and eventually moved to Roscommon).

It’s an old story—that of the priest so frightened of a young woman’s beauty that he has to do her in, acting in concert with an oh-so-pious mother, but it’s been told again and again. This one has a completely unbelievable twist at the end that’s all the more unforgivable because the discerning reader figures it out before the end.

Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson

2008-12-06T13:14:00.001-06:00

Compelling. I had to read it to the end, though I’m not sure I actually made sense of it. The main character is Skip Sands, a good American boy who follows his dead father’s brother (“the Colonel, Francis Xavier Sands) into the CIA and into PsyOps. After getting his feet wet in southeast Asia with the Colonel’s operations in the Philippines, Skip, something of a linguist, goes to Monterrey to learn Vietnamese in preparation for going to Vietnam. But he’s not the CIA type. He’s more of a scholar who tackles new languages with gusto and, stationed in the home of a dead French eye doctor, spends his time reading and studying in his library. Neither action nor deception come naturally to him. He’s, moreover, idealistic, hooked on the idea of “serving his country” as did his father who died at Pearl Harbor and his uncle. He always wants to “know the truth” and doesn’t take naturally to the Colonel’s sense that loyalty (to one’s buddies, one’s unit, one’s leader) is the primary virtue.

The Colonel is a CIA operative turned rogue. His plan (named “tree of smoke” from several Old Testament passages) is to run a double agent back into North Vietnam, convincing the leadership that the US plans a nuclear attack. One review was entitled “Bright Shining Lie” and while it didn’t reference Neil Sheehan’s famous book, my first thought when I met “the Colonel” of Johnson’s novel was Sheehan’s version of Lieutenant Colonel John Paul Van, an outspoken army field adviser who criticized the way the war was being waged, ignored his superiors and leaked his pessimistic assessments to the U.S. press corps in Saigon.

In Viet Nam, Johnson’s Colonel Sands dies before his plan becomes operational, dies but no one ever knows definitively how or why. Many assume he’s still alive in hiding somewhere; others assume the CIA killed him off. From the first when a priest is assassinated in the Philippines, it’s clear that Skip is not the man to deal with the Colonel’s PsyOps programs. The Colonel has supposedly chosen him because he’s family and will be loyal. He doesn’t understand Skip any more than Skip understands the Colonel. There’s a girl too. Kathy Jones. A Canadian who comes to southeast Asia with her Seventh Day Adventist husband who dies in the Philippines, she stays on as a nurse and then in programs to adopt children out of the area. Overworked with practically no support she’s alternatively ultra religious and ultra skeptical. She and Skip have a brief affair. She writes to him at the language school and he ignores her letters; in the end he writes to her and says he loved her and missed his chance.

Two other Americans are the Houston brothers, Bill and James, a sailor and a soldier who seem to represent the kind of recruits who didn’t die in southeast Asia, but who learned how to become savage. There seems no redemption for them; they return home to end up rootless, in and out of jail. Kathy barely survives a plane crash (with a load of orphans) and ends up crippled in mind and body. Skip's fate is the worst.

The plot of this novel is elliptical and tortured. Critics see an analogy between it and the labyrinthine Viet Cong tunnels that figured prominently in that war. The writing is occasionally brilliant and moving, but mostly not.

Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri

2008-12-01T11:23:00.002-06:00

I was indifferent when I read Lahiri’s The Namesake, but I really liked this book. Possibly she’s better at short fiction—I note her new book is short fiction again.

The stories focus on Indian-Americans, primarily those like the author who are second generation, who have become Americans in ways their parents have not. In the title story, the main character is a taxi driver/tour guide, trained as a linguist and translater whose other job is interpreting for a physician who doesn’t speak all the languages of India. The patients tell him their symptoms and stories and he translates for the doctor. In the story he’s taking an Indian American family to see some monuments. They are visiting parents and feel compelled, by custom rather than personal interest in their origins or in the monuments themselves, to see the sights. The family is well dressed and presumably economically successfully. The boys have braces on their teeth—something which seems unfamiliar to the interpreter of maladies. The parents bicker; the children fuss—they’re relatively unattractive as people, almost the stereotype of Americans abroad—herded through ancient monuments they knew nothing about, carrying their ubiquitous cameras and plastic bottles of water. They ARE Americans of course and the fact that they have Indian parents seems to count much less than their lives “back home” in New Jersey. Meanwhile the interpreter of maladies fanaticizes that Mrs. Das will fall in love with him and enable him to be magically lifted out of his hum drum and difficult world into hers.

In another story a little girl speculates on the visitor to her home who stayed a year. It was in the 1950ies and he’s on a research grant from his country, but from the part of Pakistan that was at war and then broke off to become Bangladesh. He worries about his family in Dacca with whom he’s lost contact. He’s in a difficult position, on a grant from a country he no longer belongs to. Lilia, the girl, reports his behavior without understanding the political situation. In another story I liked a lot, an eleven-year-old boy goes to a babysitter’s after school. Mrs. Sen is an Indian woman who’s not really accommodated herself to New York—she can’t drive, despite lots of lessons—and calls her husband at work when she needs something though he tries hard to make her more self sufficient. But she and Elliot, the boy, who lives with a divorced and dispirited mother, form a significant bond and when Elliot is taken away after Mrs. Sen finally drives to the fish market with him and has a minor accident, both lose out to the more conventional ones—Mrs. Sen’s husband and Elliot’s mother.

In most of the stories at least one character seems out of step and Lahiri zeroes in with a great deal of feeling and absolutely no sentimentality.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

2008-11-23T12:49:00.003-06:00

This was a reread for me and I was initially a bit disappointed. I’d been saying it’s my favorite Murakami but when I finished it I was unsatisfied with the ending. The issue in this book seems to me how you read the “fantastic” bits: how can Creta Kano have sex with Toru in their imagination so that they both remember it but it didn’t actually happen? how can Toru think himself from the well to a hotel room where he must do battle with a beast and then back into the well? How do you account for the “other worlds” ? If you assume it’s all Toru’s imagination, then the ending of the novel falls flat and you feel let down.

The story is both simple and complex. It’s about a young man, a lawyer, Toru Okada, who hasn’t yet passed the bar and doesn’t think he wants to, who quits his job and drifts, trying to discover where he fits in the world. Then the cat disappears and then his wife disappears. He doesn’t believe his wife just found another man, as he’s told by her brother, Norobu Waytaya, a brilliant academic turned increasingly influential politician, whom neither Toru nor Kumiko likes or trusts. He interacts with a number of other characters, some of whom seem to belong or have access to other worlds, all of whom have mysterious connections to Kumiko’s family in some way. Some of his greatest insights come after hours and days of deprivation at the bottom of a well. In the end Kumiko comes back.

I've heard readers tentatively call Murakami’s works "magical realism" though most feel somewhat self-conscious about the label because it doesn't really fit. A recent review of the novel and of a book on the Japanese psyche as seen in traditional Japanese tales explains why. Murakami is coming from a very different cultural background. There's no Christianity overlaid on natural gods, for example, as we associate with Latin American magical realists. In fact, far from borrowing from more "primitive" peoples, Murakami's is a fairly sophisticated intellectual tradition: you can think yourself into another world if you're willing to endure the deprivation and anxiety it takes to do so. And in that “other world” you may find answers you can’t find in the “real” world. That I see as the meaning of Toru Okada's sojourns in the well.

I also feel more comfortable with the ending of the novel in the light of what this article says about traditional Japanese tales. The "point" here is that Toru understands Kumiko in the end, which makes it possible for their relationship to continue, though that understanding is never spelled out neatly for the reader who only understands because she has traveled with Toru on the journey. The point is not that the tension in the plot is resolved (i.e., Toru finds his wife) which seems anti-climactic after all he's been through. The point is the journey, the process of understanding. And understanding Kumiko involves understanding the family dynamics which caused her to be "in thrall" to Norobu Waytaya as well as the possibility that her family is responsible (and wants to cover up) its involvement in Japanese atrocities in Manchuria. On another level it's about contemporary Japan discovering its own past, including a past it has wanted to forget. So every bit of what Toru goes through is "necessary" to that understanding he craves—and fears early in the novel that he doesn't have—of this person he loves and wants to spend his life with. One assumes that “understanding Kumiko” also means understanding himself and will help him find his place in the world, but that “conclusion” is not necessary and would indeed seem to simplify the novel.

Something which puzzled me in the book the first time and this time too is why Toru and Kumiko would name the cat Norobu Waytaya in the first place, given that neither of them liked her brother and that both were, frankly, afraid of him. I'm thinking now that it's an attempt to "tame the beast", make a dangerous man into a pussy cat and therefore take him out of the equation of their lives. Unfortunately, it's not that easy and the disappearance of the cat named Norbu Waytaya is the first sign of "trouble". I also think the first sign of resolution is the return of the cat and Toru's unhesitating decision to rename it. Mackerel is just a cat, not an untamed beast.

Divisadero by Michael Ondaatje

2008-11-16T10:56:00.003-06:00

This book is either a failure or presents the reader with a new and unfamiliar structure. I prefer to see it as the latter, though like other readers, I was initially disappointed not to know any more about the initial set of characters.

The story begins with a father whose wife dies in childbirth and when he takes his baby daughter home, he also takes home another baby girl whose mother also died but who had no family to take her in. The two girls, Anna and Claire, are raised together. A third child, Coop, also joins the family when his parents are murdered and he escapes by hiding. He’s somewhat older than the girls. Predictably, there’s a teenage affair between Coop and one of the girls—Anna, the natural daughter. They’re making love in a cabin on the farm near Petaluma when a huge storm arises and the father comes to warn Coop. His anger at the violation of his daughter knows no bounds; he almost kills Coop until Anna saves him by taking a shard to glass to her father. She runs away. Claire saves Coop and he too leaves.

The reader expects some reconciliation, but the novel is not about reconciliation but about how the past affects the present. Coop becomes a cool gambler in Nevada and accidentally meets Claire who’s an investigator for a California lawyer. She saves him when he gets mixed up with some lowlifes he can’t control. But mostly the second half of the novel focuses on a French writer of the WWI generation, the subject of Anna’s academic research. She goes to the isolated French countryside where he resided and pieces together his life, having an affair with Rafael, the descendant of peasants on Lucian Segura’s land, who actually knew Segura as an old man.
The point is not that Anna achieves peace, love and reconciliation finally, but that as her life has been shaped by that one monstrous night on the California farm, so is Segura’s life shaped by the monstrous events in his life, including his experiences in WWI. The parallels and echoes reverberate far beyond the lives of Anna and Segura so that the novel is ultimately more about the intrusions of the past into the present than about specific characters. And yet the characters are unique and memorable.

The prose is lovely. Usually I hate so-called "poetic” novels. That term is usually used for novels with smarmy descriptions that may or may not fit the novel. Ondaatje is just a master stylist, comfortable writing both prose and poems and certainly not someone who decorates a novel with unnecessary flourishes.

People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks

2008-10-26T12:42:00.001-05:00

Hannah, an Australian specialist in preserving old manuscripts is invited to Sarajevo in 1996 to advise on an old Jewish manuscript with Christian-like illustrations which had been preserved by Muslims. The manuscript was seen as a symbol of collaboration and good relationships among the "people of the book". The novel not only tells Hanna's story but imagines a history for the manuscript itself, "explaining" every mystery she encounters with a human situations from the past.

I was nevertheless somewhat disappointed by this book. Brooks did a whale of a job of research so that, though the book is fiction, all of the periods of history in the past of the Sarajevo Haggadah were recreated in authentic and believable detail. But there’s more to fiction than research and believable historical detail and I felt that Brooks sacrificed human truths in favor of historical truths. Hannah’s story is complex, but somehow bloodless. I understood what happened to her, but didn’t feel it. The many many historical contributors to the manuscript were also believable, but most existed only in one dimension, in one chapter of the book. Characters rarely “live” with that little exposure.

With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa by E. B. Sledge

2008-10-24T12:10:00.005-05:00

This is a great memoir if you want to understand what it was like to fight in the Pacific in WWII. It affected me very much as my reading of Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead did when I first read that. I could feel the pain—the dirt or worse yet on Peleliu the coral one couldn’t dig into—the bad food and dirty water, dirty and wet clothes, the fear. It’s painful to read, though, and if you won’t want to know the gory details faced by young men barely out of school and inexperienced with the world, then you don’t want to read this book.

I hate war, but I feel compelled to know what it’s like so I don’t take for granted what we asked young people to experience in war. Eugene Sledge (who became Sledgehammer to his buddies) had had one year of college when he joined up—as did most of his generation (few in fact staying to finish college which is one reason why we needed the GI Bill). He joined the Marines (the “old breed” of the title).

This book is different from other memoirs because of the detail. It’s not brilliantly written or “literary”. That’s its genius says Paul Fussell who reviewed it for a 1990 edition (Fussell has written about both WWI and WWII and was a soldier in the Pacific himself). Sledge explains how comradeship worked with soldiers to form lifelong bonds. He talks about officers they admired and those they hated and feared. He details the hardships and how hatred of the Japanese developed and hardened even the most sensitive among them. He explains how everything worked or happened, from the human waste in foxholes they couldn’t leave, to stripping a Japanese corpse for souvenirs, to descriptions of wounds and dead Americans lying covered up on the battlefield until they could be retrieved, to water that was dirty because those in the rear had put it in insufficiently cleaned oil drums, to how the mortar he used worked and the problems placing it in the muddy ground of Okinawa. He explains how ammunition was delivered (or not in some cases) which the movies never show. He explains how everyone was afraid and how some handled it differently from others. He explains how Japanese soldiers who spoke English tried to move in on their foxholes at night and how occasionally a buddy was mistakenly shot for an enemy.

Sledge never romanticizes war. The only good was the friendship and interdependency men developed, but he doesn’t romanticize that either.

China Road: A Journey into the Future of a Rising Power by Rob Gifford

2008-10-24T11:41:00.001-05:00

Rob Gifford has a degree in Asian Studies and speaks Chinese. He lived in China for years, most recently as NPR Asian correspondent. When he was planning to leave China to work for a London-based post with NPR, he decided to take a road trip along the main highway going West from Shanghai to Kazakhstan—highway 312—and to write a book based on his experiences.

Like most memoirs of the road, Gifford’s book meanders from the road to broader experiences with China and the Chinese people. He takes the “old road” as the truckers do, the latter to avoid high tolls on China’s newest highways while Gifford wants to talk to as many Chinese people in as many places and situations as possible. He visits with truckers, taxi drivers, farmers, factory workers—people he meets in cafes and on the street. One conversation, on a bus, with a doctor who performed forced abortion, was especially interesting. The woman felt she was being patriotic to force abortions and even destroy late term fetuses born alive. She had no doubts.

Gifford also talks about the lack of firm morality in China today. He says for years the Chinese have lived by Marxist/Maoist standards and as that erodes, nothing has yet taken its place—and most Chinese have no strong religious affiliation. The result is capitalism unbound, at least among the urban and relatively educated. I find that analysis disturbing, with its assumption that it’s religion that keeps societies moral…. Must think about that. But clearly there’s been a loosening of the moral standards associated with Chinese Communism—though not in all cases. Gifford attributes the recent scandals with tainted food supplies to that rampant capitalism. Would like to hear his opinion on the recent move of the Chinese government to take partial responsibility for the tainted milk scandal.

Toward the end of his journey he travels the northern route of the old Silk Road, pretty much the same route as Peter Fleming described in News from Tartary in the 1930s. He also covers the territory of Peter Hopkirk’s book, Foreign Devils on the Silk Road, which deals with the Westerns explorers and archeologists who discovered (and then appropriated) ancient manuscripts and artifacts preserved in caves near Dunwang in what used to be called Chinese Turkestan and is now Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.

After Dark by Haruki Murakami

2008-10-08T10:17:00.002-05:00

I found this one really compelling--I find Murakami generally fascinating. His odd slant on contemporary culture--both Japanese and American, or maybe really world culture--is fascinating, unsettling and strangely satisfying.

It begins with an encounter in Denny’s (Murakami is fascinated with American pop culture) between two college students, a girl who’s quietly reading in order to avoid going home and a guy who’s off to practice with the band where he plans trombone—in a old warehouse they can use only at night. They begin talking about chicken salad—his favorite at Denny’s. She’s skeptical—chickens are abused and full of hormones; he’s surprised at her health concerns since she’s smoking. These two—Mari and Takahashi--are the focus of the narrator’s commentary at different times during the night, basically between midnight and dawn in Tokyo.

We learn that Mari is studying Chinese, has a scholarship to study in China, and that her beautiful sister—with whom she’s been compared unfavorably all her life—has been sleeping for weeks, apparently healthy but avoiding the world. Takahashi loves music, but has decided to concentrate seriously on his law studies so that he can get a pretty good job at a pretty good company and live in a pretty good house with a pretty good family in a—well you get the idea. They encounter each other and talk several times during the night, getting to know one another and relating to each other with increasing authenticity.

In the meantime we encounter a Chinese prostitute who’s been raped and beaten in the Alphaville “love hotel”, and the seemingly respectable computer expert (who lives in a pretty good neighborhood with a pretty good family) who’s responsible, and we meet those who work at Alphaville at night.

It’s a simple story really—increasingly real people navigating an increasingly unreal world.

The Great Man by Kate Christensen

2008-08-25T14:38:00.001-05:00

The novel begins with the newspaper obit of Oscar Feldman, an influential painter whose work consisted entirely of female nudes, and it ends with a newspaper review of two just-published biographies of Feldman. Most of the action in the novel takes place five years after Feldman’s death, with detours into the past and the future.

Feldman had a wife, Abigail, and a retarded son to whom she was devoted and whom Oscar pretty much ignored. They lived in an apartment on Riverside Drive purchased by her wealthy parents when they married. He also had a long-term mistress, Claire (Teddy) St. Cloud, who lived in Brooklyn and with whom he had twin daughters, Ruby and Samantha. The other major player in the novel is his elder sister, Maxine, an abstract painter who’s got far less attention from the art world than Oscar. Abigail and Teddy have never met, though both know a great deal about the other. Maxine—a formidable elderly lesbian in her 80ies—supports Abigail but doesn’t like her and thoroughly disapproves of Teddy. Enter the two biographers to interview all these women: Henry, a college professor with a busy wife and infant son, who’s obviously not getting enough attention from his wife. Ralph is black and gay, but not “out”. There’s also a long-kept secret, known to the women, that will come out and make a splash in the art world.

The biographers’ questions and the secret they don’t really care to keep bring the women together and move them to deal finally with Oscar’s death. Teddy and her best friend Lila, both in their seventies, start affairs, Ruby has an affair with one of the biographers, and Abigail develops a different relationship with the other. Maxine’s career gets a boost when the secret comes out and she reconnects with a lover she let pass her by. One of the author’s stated aims for the book was to write about love and relationships among older women, one of those subjects novelists usually ignore—sex over seventy.

Christensen writes well and I laughed in a number of places, especially as Maxine characterizes (satirizes) a young woman who explains her work in contemporary art world terms. I liked it too that Maxine comes later to like and admire that same young woman. I laughed "review" of the two biographies at the end, but won't tell you why.

Theft by Peter Carey

2008-08-12T13:08:00.002-05:00

Michael Boone, alias Butcher Bones, is a once celebrated Australian artist who’s just got out of jail for various crimes that resulted from his divorce and what he sees as the appropriation of his work as marital property. His reputation is in the toilet and he’s broke. His only benefactor, a collector named Jean-Paul, provides a rundown rural house in the far north of New South Wales and, there being no alternative, Michael and his retarded brother Hugh (for whom he’s legal guardian) light out for the territory to become caretakers. Once there Michael leverages Jean Paul’s property and credit to provide himself with minimal art supplies and begins to paint.

The novel is narrated by Michael—and sometimes by Hugh—and those voices are almost as great an achievement for Carey as was that of Ned Kelly. Michael and Hugh are both big men, violent and crude and funny. If you start the novel disliking them, chances are the further you read, the bigger fans you’ll become. Michael is a careless guardian but staunch defender of Hugh. Hugh, whom Michael frequently calls an Idiot Savant, provides commentary, often moral commentary, on Michael’s activities as well as carrying out his own shenanigans, which include the need to carry a chair with him at all times. They come from a pretty violent working class family (father a butcher; mother hid the knives at night) and haven’t modified their attitudes or behaviors much since entering the “art world” which seems artificial and anemic in comparison.

One rainy night a sleek sophisticated New Yorker (as Michael assumes) Marlene Liebowitz turns up looking for a neighbor’s house which is virtually inaccessible across a flooded creek. Captivated, Michael manages to get her there with Jean Paul’s mowing tractor. Turns out she’s come to authenticate a genuine Liebowitz owned by the neighbor. From there the plot twists are truly gargantuan. Marlene is not a New Yorker but an Aussie girl who burned down the high school after she was expelled and married the son of the famous painter in New York where she influenced him to use his droit moral (hereditary right to authenticate his deceased father’s work) to financial advantage. The Liebowitz owned by the neighbor is stolen that very night and because Michael’s current canvas turned out to be the exact same size, he’s soon raided by the art police who confiscate his work on the assumption that he’s hidden the valuable work underneath. And that’s only Act 1.

The major theme is the value of art and how value is determined. A difficult enough question in itself but complicated immensely by the fact that the entire art world in this novel is out to maximize profits and schemes to do so are perpetrated, usually at the expense of the artist. Marlene is clearly one of the thieves, but she’s a refreshingly candid one, and Michael’s obsessed with her—until she goes too far.

Black Dogs by Ian McEwan

2008-08-07T15:43:00.002-05:00

I have always been somewhat suspicious of Ian McEwan. I first read Amsterdam which I disliked intensely since it was obvious to me what would happen very early in the novel and I didn’t particularly enjoy seeing it work out just as I predicted. Since then I’ve read a good chunk of his fiction and I’ve had this complaint: that he comes off as a more-than-usually-sophisticated thriller writer who focuses on the intrusion of gratuitous violence into the lives of the characters and watches how they deal with it.

Recently I read On Chesil Beach which I saw as very well put together and moving away from the usual formula (to which he returned, disappointingly in Saturday after attempting much more in Atonement) in that there was no physical violence and the dramatic plot development where the lovers separate on their wedding night never to see each other again grew out of their own psychology; it was not a crisis imposed from without.

Then I went back and read Black Dogs (published in 1992) and found it not nearly as “accomplished” especially in writing style as any of his last three, but not “just a sophisticated thriller” either. The narrator’s parents were killed in an accident when he was 8 and he grows up in the chaotic and unsupportive home of his elder sister. He makes a habit of interacting with the parents of his friends even as his friends rebel against them. Then he marries Jenny Tremaine and takes over the relationship with her parents, June and Bernard. As the novel starts, June and Bernard are elderly and the narrator, Jeremy, is interviewing June for a memoir he plans to write. The couple—both lapsed Communists—have lived their lives mostly apart, not because they don’t love each other, but because they disagree ideologically, June believing in both good and evil and in the possibility of unseen powers while Bernard remains the complete scientist/rationalist. Jeremy focuses on their philosophical differences and wonders if he’s better or worse because he has no philosophical passions.

June lived most of her life in a bergerie in France where she sought a spiritual life while Bernard was an active scientist, writer, journalist and politician in England. The event that marked their irreconcilable difference occurred on their honeymoon in France when June, wandering ahead of Bernard who stopped to examine an unusual caterpillar, encountered two large and vicious black dogs and during the confrontation experienced what seemed to her absolute evil (in the black dogs) as well as a visitation (evidenced by an unusual light event) from God who allowed her to survive.

The novel is set against the background of WWII. The “black dogs”, who turn out, appropriately, to be remnants of those trained by the Nazis during the occupation, are what separate June and Bernard. Bernard is proud that she defended herself with a knife and survived; June is sure she was allowed to survive in order to explore the spirituality inherent in human life. June believes in good and evil; Bernard believes in the infinite perfectibility of humans. Jeremy starts out feeling superior to both of them because he has no beliefs.

Crossing the River by Caryl Phillips

2008-08-04T15:51:00.002-05:00

What a powerful novel! I’d never even heard of this one till it was picked for an online bookgroup I belong to. I couldn't put it down. Really a well conceived and imagined novel.

The novel begins with a father explaining how the crops failed and in desperation he sold his three children—Nash, Martha, and Travis—to a slave trader. The four sections that make up the center of the novel focus on each of the children as well as one a young ship’s captain on his first trip to bring slaves from Africa to America—the one who picks up the “2 strong man-boys and a proud girl” from their father. The focus of each section and its language is completely different and appropriate to the content. There is tragedy but also triumph in each life. Nash is conceived as an educated American Negro whose master sent him back to Africa in the 1820s—to the new nation of Liberia—to educate his people and to teach them Christianity. We read his letters to the master, increasingly despairing because he doesn’t hear back (his master’s wife has intercepted and destroyed the letters). Martha is a slave, sold away from her husband and daughter when the master of a Virginia plantation dies, who goes first to pre-Civil War Kansas which is not a slave state and then, when her owner intends selling her across the river (into Missouri which is a slave state) she runs away and joins a wagon train of free blacks going to California, but dies on the way, in Colorado. Travis is an American GI in WWII, stationed in England who carries on a delicate courtship with an Englishwoman, fathers a child, comes back to marry her, and then is killed on the beach in Italy. Nash’s and Martha’s voices are appropriate to their time and place; their thoughts are on freedom and on love. Travis is seen through the eyes of June who loves him though she’s never really known love before. There’s also a section focused on the captain of the American slave ship—consisting of excerpts from a ship’s log and letters to his wife.

Phillips doesn't handle each section the same way, nor are the voices exclusively those of the African disapora. Captain Hamilton's view point is important because he's not a hardened slave trader, though possibly his father, who captained the ship before him, was. But making the last section from Joyce's point of view was brilliant. Had he made it from Travis's, we might have gone over territory that had already been covered, but that of the woman who loved him brought something new.

I loved how Phillips tied it up at the end, in the voice of the distraught father who sold his children, quoting from each of the voices and relating their stories to black soldiers in Vietnam who "had no quarrel with the VietCong”, to Toussaint L'Overature, to those struggling with Papa Doc and other dictators, to Jazz and dance and James Baldwin (who in Paris wrote Nobody Knows My Name) and Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech.