Steven03tx's 2013 Challenge

Welcome to my 20/13 challenge.


("The Book Worm" by Carl Spitzweg)

Thirteen seems like a lot of categories for a year's reading. Yet, ambitious as always, I couldn't come up to that number without going over. So, taking advantage of the invitation to be flexible this year, my goal this time will be to complete a step challenge of 13 categories out of a possible 20, making this a "20/13" challenge.

In other words, there are 20 categories here. I want to read 13 books from one of them, 12 from another, 11 from another, and so on. Seven of the 20 categories won't count, and I won't commit ahead of time how far I'll go in any given category. Flexibility and fun are the bywords. To make it even easier, the challenge starts now (October) instead of waiting for the first of the year.

The first four categories are special themes I'm pursuing on my own:

1. The works of Émile Zola
2. London in Fiction and Fact
3. The Red Flag: Communism
4. Translated from the Spanish

Next are group themes here on LT and elsewhere:

5. Reading Globally
6. Author Themed Reads
7. 1001 Books to Read Before You Die
8. Other Group Selections and ER Books

Here are some long term personal reading goals:

9. Books in Progress
10. Sequels and Series
11. Classics from the Reading Rat
12. Nobel Prize Winners
13. Award-Winners and Shortlists
14. New (to me) Authors

Some broad areas and genres I'd like to read more in:

15. Science Fiction and Fantasy
16. Decadence, Gothic and Surrealism
17. In the Slipstream: Experimental Fiction
18. Literary Centennials (actually belongs in the group category)
19. History

And my former "TBD" category is now:

20. England, Scotland and Wales (minus London)

There are plenty of books that could count for more than one category, but I'll only count each one once in whatever category seems the most appropriate (or needs the help).

All of the artwork shown in my category listings comes from WikiPaintings.org or Wikipedia and is in the public domain.

Category 1: The Works of Émile Zola


("Portrait of Émile Zola" by Edouard Manet, 1868)

Zola's Germinal has been by far my favorite of all the books I've read in the past year, so I'm embarking on a project to read all of Zola's work that is available in modern English translation. (The 19th century translations were all heavily censored.)

1. Therese Raquin
2. The Fortune of the Rougons
3. The Kill
4. La Reve (The Dream)
5. Pot Luck
6. The Ladies' Paradise
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.

Candidates:

(All but Therese Raquin are part of Zola's Rougon-Macquart cycle, and this is the order in which he recommended reading them.)

The Sin of Father Mouret
The Belly of Paris
L'Assommoir
The Masterpiece
The Beast Within
Nana
The Earth
The Debacle

Category 2: London in Fiction and Fact


("Houses of Parliament, London, Sun Breaking Through" by Claude Monet, 1904)

If my wife and I are able to take an overseas vacation in 2013 it will probably be to England will definitely include London. (Update: We have now booked an educational tour that starts in London and ends in Edinburgh. See my new Category 20 for reading pertaining to the non-London parts of the itinerary.)

1. Up the Junction by Nell Dunn
2. Tipping the Velvet by Sarah Waters
3. Hawksmoor by Peter Ackroyd
4. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
5. London: The Biography by Peter Ackroyd
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.

Candidates:

Fiction

The Lambs of London by Peter Ackroyd
London Fields by Martin Amis
Slaves of Solitude by Patrick Hamilton
The Lonely Londoners by Sam Selvon
The London Novels by Colin MacInnes
Bleeding London by Geoff Nicholson
253 by Geoff Ryman
Mother London by Michael Moorcock
Red London by Stewart Home
Skin Lane by Neil Bartlett
The Heat of the Day by Elizabeth Bowen
and many more, this is just a sample

Non-fiction

London: A Social History by Roy Porter

Category 3: The Red Flag: Communism


("First Appearance of Lenin at a Meeting in Smolny..." by Konstantin Yuon, 1927)

This is to better understand why Communism failed to live up to its promise and to clarify my own political views. Books here will include political theory, history, and relevant fiction.

1. Animal Farm by George Orwell
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.

Candidates:

The Red Flag: A History of Communism by David Priestland
Essential Works of Lenin
The Communist Manifesto by Marx & Engels
Capital by Karl Marx
To the Finland Station by Edmund Wilson
Ten Days that Shook the World by John Reed
Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life by John Lee Anderson
Conquered City by Victor Serge
What Is to Be Done? by Nikolai Chernyshevsky
Mother by Maxim Gorky

Category 4: Translated from the Spanish


("The Day of the Dead" by Diego Rivera, 1924)

Latino culture heavily influences my life, yet a recent sampling showed that Spanish-speaking authors were actually under-represented in my reading.

1. You're Cows, We're Pigs by Carmen Boullosa (Mexico)
2. The Fear of Losing Eurydice by Julieta Campos (Mexico)
3. The Tunnel by Ernesto Sábato (Argentina)
4. Recollections of Things to Come by Elena Garro (Mexico)
5. Firefly by Severo Sarduy (Cuba)
6. The Gaucho Martín Fierro by José Hernández (Argentina)
7. Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel (Mexico)
8. Lazarillo de Tormes (Spain)
9. The Lost Steps by Alejo Carpentier
10.
11.
12.
13.

Candidates:

Spain

La Celestina by Fernando de Rojas
La Regenta by Leopoldo Alas
Locos: A Comedy of Gestures by Felipe Alfau
The Hive by Camilo José Cela

Mexico

The Underdogs by Mariano Azuela
The Death of Artemio Cruz by Carlos Fuentes

Chile

The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende
The Obscene Bird of Night by José Donoso

Argentina

On Elegance While Sleeping by Emilio Lascano Tegui

Uruguay

The Shipyard by Juan Carlos Onetti

Category 5: Reading Globally


("Map" by Ion Bitzan)

The Reading Globally group has quarterly reading themes, and in addition I have a personal challenge to read at least one book representing 80 different countries.

1. To Live by Yu Hua
2. Serve the People! by Yan Lianke
3. The Butcher's Wife and Other Stories by Li Ang
4. Mierla Domesticita: Blackbird Once Wild, Now Tame by Nicolae Dabija
5. The Song of Everlasting Sorrow by Wang Anyi
6. A Day in Spring by Ciril Kosmac
7. Ferdydurke by Witold Gombrowicz
8. Paradise of the Blind by Duong Thu Huong
9. So Long a Letter by Mariama Bâ
10.
11.
12.
13.

The 2013 themes in Reading Globally (with some early reading ideas) will be:

Jan-Mar: Eastern and Central Europe

Apr-Jun: Southeast Asia

Jul-Sep: Francophone Literature, Especially from West Africa

Guinea
The Dark Child by Camara Laye

Senegal
God's Bits of Wood by Sembene Ousmane

Morocco
This Blinding Absence of Light by Tahar Ben Jelloun

Guadeloupe
I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem by Maryse Condé

Quebec
The First Garden by Anne Hébert
The Tin Flute by Gabrielle Roy

Oct-Dec: South America

Argentina
On Elegance While Sleeping by Emilio Lascano Tegui
Martin Fierro by José Hernandez
The Witness by Juan José Saer

Brazil
Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon by Jorge Amado
The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas by Machade de Assis
The Passion According to G. H. by Clarice Lispector

Colombia
Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez
Our Lady of the Assassins by Fernando Vallejo

Chile
The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende
The Obscene Bird of Night by José Donoso

Guyana
Disappearance by David Dabydeen

Peru
A World for Julius by Alfredo Bryce Echenique
Deep Rivers by José María Arguedas

Uruguay
The Shipyard by Juan Carlos Onetti
Memory of Fire by Eduardo Galeano

(above lists only the countries for which I have books to read, not all countries in the selected region)

Category 6: Author Themes


("Portrait of a Man Writing in His Study"by Gustave Caillebotte, 1885)

The Author Theme Reads group picks one year-long author and four quarterly authors each year. In both 2012 and 2013 the selected authors each year are all of the same nationality (Japanese and French, respectively), and reading of any author of that nationality is included.

1. Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto
2. Scandal by Shusaku Endo
3. The Toilers of the Sea by Victor Hugo
4. A Harlot High and Low by Honoré de Balzac
5. Eugenie Grandet by Honoré de Balzac
6. The Girl with the Golden Eyes by Honoré de Balzac
7. Une Vie (A Woman's Life) by Guy de Maupassant
8. Bel-Ami by Guy de Maupassant
9. Pierre et Jean by Guy de Maupassant
10. The Sea Wall by Marguerite Duras
11. Hiroshima Mon Amour by Marguerite Duras
12. The Sailor from Gibraltar by Marguerite Duras
13. India Song by Marguerite Duras

Category complete.

Category 7: 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die


("The Death of Marat" by Jacques-Louis David, 1793)

The 1001 Books group reads anything from any of the four editions of 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die (1305 books total). This category includes not only group reads but those books I read on my own from this list.

1. Villette by Charlotte Brontë
2. Evelina by Fanny Burney
3. The Memoirs of Martin Scriblerus by Alexander Pope and others
4. Correction by Thomas Bernhard
5. House on the Borderland by William Hope Hodgson
6. Monica by Saunders Lewis
7. Thomas of Reading by Thomas Deloney
8. Pointed Roofs by Dorothy Richardson
9. The Water-Babies by Charles Kingsley
10. Backwater by Dorothy M. Richardson
11. Tarr by Wyndham Lewis
12. The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia by Samuel Johnson
13. Honeycomb by Dorothy M. Richardson

Category complete.

Category 8: Other Group Selections and ER Books


("The Hope Family of Sydenham Kent" by Benjamin West, 1802)

This category holds whatever I'm reading for any other group in LT or elsewhere, as well as Early Reviewer selections. There are also books I read on my own in preparation for group reads (e.g. earlier works by the same author).

1. The Prague Cemetery by Umberto Eco
2. The Vital Needs of the Dead by Igor Sakhnovsky (ER)
3. Coming Through Slaughter by Michael Ondaatje
4. Njál's Saga
5. Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life by Elizabeth Gaskell
6. Under Western Eyes by Joseph Conrad
7. Skios by Michael Frayn
8. Hi, This is Conchita and Other Stories by Santiago Roncagliolo
9. The Cat's Table by Michael Ondaatje
10. Omon Ra by Victor Pelevin
11. Hard Times by Charles Dickens
12. Freedom by Jonathan Franzen
13. 419 by Will Ferguson

Category complete

Category 9: Books in Progress


("Tahitians at Rest" by Paul Gauguin, unfinished ca. 1891)

For those collections of short stories, plays, essays, etc. that I keep promising myself I will finish.

1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
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13.

Candidates:

Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway
Collected Writings of Ambrose Bierce
Plays by George Bernard Shaw
Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol
The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard
Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges
Collected Stories of Amy Hempel

Category 10: Sequels and Series


("Color Numeral Series" by Jasper Johns, 1969)

Being a completist, if I read the first book in a series for a group or other reason, I want to finish that series eventually.

1. Blue Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson
2. Iron Council by China Miéville
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.

Candidates:

Cat and Mouse by Günter Grass
Tropic of Capricorn by Henry Miller
Endymion by Dan Simmons
The Last Empress by Anchee Min
Claudius the God by Robert Graves
Count Zero by William Gibson
Legs by William Kennedy
The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood
Close Quarters by William Golding
Wonderland by Joyce Carol Oates
Death on the Installment Plan by Louis Ferdinand Céline
The Kindness of Women by J. G. Ballard

Category 11: Classics from the Reading Rat


("Two Rats" by Vincent van Gogh, 1884)

This probably should be my highest priority. I want to do a systematic reading of important works of literature and philosophy in roughly chronological order. The list on the Reading Rat website is a good guideline, as it incorporates a variety of authorities and includes both Western and non-Western classics. I won't be reading every work there--just the ones I already own or that are readily available. I'll also be re-reading books that I first read more than 20 years ago.

1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
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12.
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Candidates

The Upanishads
The Odes of Pindar
The Histories by Herodotus (re-read)
Rhesus by Euripides
Orestes by Euripides
The Suppliant Women by Euripides
The Peloponnesian War by Thucydides
The Art of War by Sun-Tzu
Some works of Plato and Aristotle TBD
The Book of Mencius

Category 12: Nobel Prize Winners


("Apollo Crowning a Poet and Giving Him a Spouse" by Tintoretto)

The focus here will be on the most recent winner, Mo Yan, as well as any book by a Nobel winner whose work I haven't read yet. But any book by any Nobel laureate will count.

1. The Vivisector by Patrick White
2. Life & Times of Michael K by J. M. Coetzee
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.

Candidates:

By Mo Yan

The Garlic Ballads
The Republic of Wine
Big Breasts and Wide Hips
Shifu, You'll Do Anything for a Laugh

By Nobelists I've never read

The Piano Teacher by Elfriede Jelinek
Billiards at Half Past Nine by Heinrich Böll
One, None, and a Hundred Thousand by Luigi Pirandello
Gosta Berling's Saga by Selma Lagerlöf
The Flanders Road by Claude Simon
The Prospector by Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio

Category 13: Award Winners and Shortlists


("Still Life with Books and Candle" by Henri Matisse, 1890)

Any book that has won or been shortlisted for a major literary award. I'll try to focus on books that have won multiple awards.

1. Doctor Copernicus by John Banville (James Tait Black Award)
2. The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje (Booker & Gov. Gen.)
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.

Candidates:

G by John Berger (Black & Booker)
Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich (LA Times & NBCC)
The Shipping News by Annie Proulx (NBCC & Pulitzer)
A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (LA Times, NBCC & Pulitzer)

Category 14: New (to me) Authors


("Birth" by Marc Chagall, 1910)

I tend to collect books that come highly recommended, have appeared on important lists, or have won major awards. Sometimes this means I have bought several books by an author before even reading one. So this goal is to start reading those authors whose books I've collected but not yet read.

1. The Collected Works of Billy the Kid by Michael Ondaatje
2. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell
3. Death Sentence by Maurice Blanchot
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
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Candidates:

(Just showing author's names in alphabetical order for now... will need to decide later which works to read first. Some will get read under other categories.)

Isabel Allende
John Crowley
Stanley Elkin
Ian Fleming
Alberto Moravia
Alice Munro
Richard Powers
Anne Rice
Will Self
Iaac Bashevis Singer
Neal Stephenson
Robert Stone
Gore Vidal

Category 15: Science Fiction


("At Cosmos Bank" by Jacek Yerka, 2004)

I won't make time for "fun" reading in my schedule unless I make it a goal as well.

1. Doomsday Book by Connie Willis
2. The Slynx by Tatyana Tolstaya
3. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle
4. Earth Abides by George R. Stewart
5. The Time Machine by H. G. Wells
6. A Journey to the Centre of the Earth by Jules Verne
7. The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells
8. The Time Ships by Stephen Baxter
9. Maiden by Aishling Morgan
10. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket by Edgar Allan Poe
11.
12.
13.

Candidates:

The Crystal World by J. G. Ballard
American Gods by Neil Gaiman
The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin
Vurt by Jeff Noon
City by Clifford Simak
The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe
The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester
The Forever War by Joe Haldeman
Little, Big by John Crowley
More than Human by Theodore Sturgeon
Nightwings by Robert Silverberg

Category 16: Decadence, Gothic and Surrealism


("Dream" by Wilhelm Kotarbinski)

These related movements in literature have always appealed to the darker side of my reading tastes.

1. Opium and Other Stories by Géza Csáth
2. The Road to Darkness by Paul Leppin
3. The Dark Domain by Stefan Grabinski
4. Lieutenant Gustl by Arthur Schnitzler
5. Sadopaideia by anonymous
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.

Candidates:

Mademoiselle de Maupin by Theóphile Gautier
Aurelia and Other Writings by Gerard de Nerval
Paris Spleen by Charles Baudelaire
Les Diaboliques by Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly
Senso and Other Stories by Camillo Boito
Monsieur Venus by Rachilde
The Complete Works of Arthur Rimbaud
The Great God Pan by Arthur Machen
Aphrodite by Pierre Louÿs
The Ubu Plays by Alfred Jarry
Petty Demon by Fyodor Sologub
The Fiery Angel by Valery Bruisov

Category 17: In the Slipstream: Experimental Fiction


("The Invention of Life" by Rene Magritte, 1928)

These are works that test the boundaries of convention, not just in what they say, but in how they say it.

1. The Castle of Communion by Bernard Noël
2. Out of Oneself by András Pályi
3. Terror by Marcus van Heller
4. The Rake by Aishling Morgan
5. Paradoxia: A Predator's Diary by Lydia Lunch
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.

Candidates:

Textermination by Christine Brooke-Rose
Lanark by Alasdair Gray
Ice by Anna Kavan
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
Chimera by John Barth
Sixty Stories by Donald Barthelme
Engine Summer by John Crowley
The Tartar Steppe by Dino Buzzati
Arc d'X by Steve Erickson

(lots more to add here, these are just some examples)

Category 18: Literary Centennials



This was previously another topic, then "TBD" for a while. I recently started a new group called "Literary Centennials" which celebrates the 100th, 200th, etc. birthdays of noted authors and the centenaries of landmark works of literature.

1. The Nun by Denis Diderot
2. The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays by Albert Camus
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
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Candidates

Celebrating Albert Camus's 100th birthday:
The Plague (re-read)
The Fall
The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt
Exile and the Kingdom

Celebrating Robertson Davies's 100th birthday:
The Cornish Trilogy

Celebrating Denis Diderot's 300th birthday:
Rameau's Nephew
The Indiscreet Jewels

Category 19: History


("Rome: Ruins of the Forum" by Canaletto, 1742)

This subject used to be the bulk of my reading, and I'd like to get back into it as time permits.

1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
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13.

In Progress:

The Reformation by Will Durant

Candidates:

Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution by Simon Schama
The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy by Jacob Burckhardt
The End of History and the Last Man by Francis Fukuyama
The Armada by Garrett Mattingly
Flesh in the Age of Reason by Roy Porter
A Distant Mirror by Barbara Tuchman
The Naked Heart by Peter Gay
Millennium by Felipe Fernandez-Arnesto
Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond
From Dawn to Decadence by Jacques Barzun

Category 20 (formerly TBD): England, Scotland and Wales
(minus London which is Category 2)


("Rivaulx Abbey, Yorkshire" by William Turner, c. 1825)

My 2013 vacation is now booked: a 3-week educational tour from London to Edinburgh via various sights and stops in England, Wales and Scotland. This category is for general reading on English and Scottish history, as well as fiction set in the various localities we will visit.

1. Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome
2. The Isles: A History by Norman Davies
3. The Oxford History of Britain edited by Kenneth O. Morgan
4. Rob Roy by Sir Walter Scott
5. Cider with Rosie by Laurie Lee
6. The Wars of the Roses: England's First Civil War by Trevor Royle
7. Divorced, Beheaded, Died... by Kevin Flude
8. Shirley by Charlotte Brontë
9. The Man of Feeling by Henry Mackenzie
10.
11.
12.
13.

Candidates, non-fiction:

Scotland: A New History by Michael Lynch
The War of the Roses by Alison Weir
A Brief History of the English Civil Wars by John Miller

Candidates, fiction:

England, England by Julian Barnes (England)
Restoration by Rose Tremain (England)
All Souls by Javier Marías (Oxford)
Thursbitch by Alan Garner (Cheshire)
The Fall by Simon Mawer (Wales)
Behind the Scenes at the Museum by Kate Atkinson (Yorkshire)
Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh (Edinburgh)

Good to see you over here! That's an excellent use of the fact that it's a "2013" challenge! I lived in London in my proverbially sweet youth and am still ridiculously fond of the city, so I'll be interested to see what you read for this category, but I can sense a lot of bookbullets originating from this thread in the other categories as well!

Second Eva's comment above and your approach to the 2013 challenge.

Excellent setup! Like Eva, I'll be particularly interested in your London category, and the history category too. :)

Fantastic idea & lots of books I will be interested in hearing about. Have you tried Iain Sinclair for your London category? He is an acquired taste but he does fiction/non-fiction set in London

#25 - Yes, Iain Sinclair is on my London reading list as well. I have 2 or 3 of his books. I was just sort of picking titles at random to put on the candidate list for starters.

Impressive array of books! I will follow your comments with interest.

Love the pictures and the candidates. I'm looking forward to following your thread again this year!

Beautiful pictures! I was unfamiliar with that Matisse painting - I'm going to have to look it up now. And "The Book Worm" is one of my absolute favourite paintings ever.

Category 8: Other Group Selections

The Prague Cemetery by Umberto Eco
First published in Italian 2010
English translation by Richard Dixon 2010


("The Satanic. Satan Sowing Tares" by Felicien Rops, 1882)

Simone Simonini, a lawyer by training, is a professional forger of documents. In 1897 he begins a diary, hoping that it will help him recover from an apparent and mysterious partial memory loss. We learn that he is a solitary man, of Italian birth but living in Paris. A misogynist, he takes his pleasures only at the dinner table. And, as a result of his grandfather's teaching, Simonini is bitterly anti-Semitic.

Not long after he begins his diary, Simonini makes an amazing discovery. Someone else--a man identifying himself as the Abbé Dalla Piccola--has been making entries in his diary while Simonini slept. This Dalla Piccola claims to remember more of Simonini's past than the forger himself, but can't explain his own origins. The two men immediately suspect that they are, in fact, the same person. They carry on a dialogue, reconstructing and interpreting their past.

Simonini, it seems, has been a major player in many of the great events and scandals of the late 19th century, from Italy's wars of unification to the Franco-Prussian War, to the Dreyfus affair, and more. But his rôle is always behind the scenes, recruited by various espionage agencies. Through Simonini and Dalla Piccola we explore many of the undercurrents of European history, as well as its current fads and sensations, along the way meeting a variety of historical figures from Garibaldi to Freud. In fact, Eco explains in an author's note that the only major character in the novel who is entirely fictional is Simonini himself.

With deception and duplicity underlying every motive and cause, Eco appears to be telling us that truth has multiple faces, just as people often have multiple personalities. No explanation is ever final, as there is always another layer of mystery and motivation lying beneath the surface, and likewise there are always hidden links like Simone Simonini that make it impossible to isolate one cause from another.

Having someone who is not only an unprincipled criminal but a vicious anti-Semite as the primary narrator is a bold move on Eco's part that may be disturbing to some readers. Of course the author makes sure that we see that everything Simonini accuses the Jews of being--ruthless, devious, manipulative and greedy--is true of no one more than Simonini himself. On the whole, The Prague Cemetery is an entertaining, intriguing and informative novel that, while not one of Eco's best, is still well worth reading.

Intriguing indeed! Thanks for your review.

Sounds very interesting. What would you recommend as one of Eco's best works? I've never read any of his books so was curious.

I would recommend The Name of the Rose as Eco's best novel, and I think most critics would agree with that. The second best is Foucault's Pendulum.

I've always been scared of reading something by Eco. I don't know what it is but I always back away from his books.

Great categories, and great artwork of course.

Category 12: Nobel Prize Winners

The Vivisector by Patrick White
First published 1970


("Head" by Francis Bacon, 1948)

Patrick White explores the nature of art and the mind of the artist in his searing novel The Vivisector. The fictional subject is Hurtle Duffield, an Australian born circa 1900 into a large and poor family. It is obvious to all that Hurtle is a prodigy, teaching himself to read by age five. It is less obvious to his parents that Hurtle's special talent is the unique, often cold way in which he sees the world as manifested in his passion for "droring."

Hurtle's mother works as a laundress for a wealthy family, the Courtneys, and is eager to expose her son to the cultured life to which he might aspire. By chance Hurtle meets Mrs. Courtney, and the fashionable young matron is immediately endeared to the brilliant and attractive child--all the more so for the contrast between Hurtle and her own offspring, a dwarfish and hunchbacked daughter named Rhoda. Mrs. Courtney easily prevails upon her husband to consider adopting Hurtle into the family, and his natural parents agree to surrender their brilliant child in return for a large beneficence. Thus Hurtle is sold from poverty into privilege, and before long begins his formal training as an artist.

The narrative leaps ahead by years, and occasionally by decades, focusing on the key episodes in Hurtle's life. They are characterized by his relationship with women and the way in which these relationships drive his art. Hurtle's affairs are twisted and often destructive, as Art pushes everything else to the side. Creation and destruction are united in the metaphor of the creator as a vivisector, cruelly dissecting the living to find the truths hidden within. As a child, Hurtle found compelling beauty in the entrails of freshly slaughtered sheep. As an artist he finds beauty in revealed truth, no matter how cruel and devastating to the subject.

"God the Vivisector. God the Artist." This refrain is echoed throughout the novel. The implication being: "The Artist as Vivisector. The Artist as Creator. The Artist as God." Indeed, in Hurtle's final relationship with a woman--a teenage girl, in fact--he no longer vivisects the woman's soul as a subject for his art. Instead Hurtle attempts to make her his creation, a living work of art. Ultimately, though, in his final years Hurtle comes to the realization that it is himself he must vivisect that he may recreate himself through his art.

The details of Hurtle Duffield's life do not closely parallel those of Patrick White's, but it is obvious that White has transposed his feelings as a writer into those of the painter. This is an intense novel, often brutal. White's writing style is amorphous, shifting from first, to third, and even second person. It flows from stream of consciousness to dialogue, from terse prose to florid expansiveness. The author's insight and descriptive powers are enormous and often disarming--clearly matching the changeable but always eviscerating painting styles of his subject.

The Vivisector is, in my opinion, as good if not better than White's more celebrated novel, Voss. White's writing in general should appeal to anyone who likes Henry James or D. H. Lawrence, two writers whom he resembles both in writing style and penetration.

Category 8: Group Selections and ER Books

The Vital Needs of the Dead by Igor Sakhnovsky
First published in Russian 1999
English translation by Julia Kent 2012
An Early Reviewer selection


("Adam and Eve" by Jury Annenkov)

The Vital Needs of the Dead is a coming-of-age novel, probably autobiographical, set during the final years of the USSR and Russia's subsequent transition to capitalism and gangsterism.

Gosha Sidelnikov lives in a city in the Urals, mostly with his grandmother Rosa who is the guiding force in his life. After her death, as Sidelnikov finishes school and goes away to college to study literature, Rosa remains a voice in his head and in his dreams, attempting to guide him out of harm's way. She is only partly successful, as Sidelnikov gets involved in a prolonged love affair with an older woman, several quickie romances, and spends a wild and tempting night with a group of black marketeers.

The dingy atmosphere of decay, apathy and corruption as the Soviet Union nears its collapse is memorably depicted, and is this short novel's chief attraction. Sidelnikov himself isn't particularly appealing or interesting, and our introduction to Rosa, the grandmother, before her demise is too cursory to explain why her memory has such mystical importance for her grandson. Rosa's appearances in Sidelnikov's dreams border on magical realism (the only non-Russian author mentioned, albeit misspelled, is Gabriel García Márquez), but are out of place in an otherwise bleak, existential story.

Perhaps the point of the novel is to ask what it is that guides our actions and shapes our decisions: chance, fate, or the "needs" of the dead--those "needs" being the sense of place, propriety and purpose that we derive from our upbringing. But this novel is too short, fragmented and uneven to carry such a weighty theme with any success. (An unpolished translation may be to blame for some of this.) For the most part it is just vignettes of drinking, sex and adolescent angst in various dirty and dilapidated tenements. It is the settings themselves which make The Vital Needs of the Dead worth reading for someone interested in a realistic picture of life in a typical Soviet city during the 1980s.

I admire your ambition in tackling 20 categories! I'm particularly interested in seeing what you read for your London category. I lived there for a few years in my early 20s and I still miss it.

Category 13: Award Winners and Shortlists
A winner of the James Tait Black Award

Doctor Copernicus by John Banville
First published 1976


("Copernicus in the Tower at Frombork" by Jan Matejko, 1872.)

John Banville's biographical novel about one of history's most important astronomers is unusual in that it says very little about astronomy. It is more concerned with the personality of Copernicus, the world in which he lived, and the medieval concepts of science and truth.

Nicolas Koppernigk was raised in ethnically German surroundings in a part of Prussia that had only recently given its allegiance to the King of Poland. Though his Polish father was only a tradesman, Nicolas was related on his Prussian mother's side to a powerful clergyman, his uncle, who undertook to raise Nicolas and his three siblings when their parents died. Nicolas was, therefore, destined for the clergy, but this also meant an opportunity for the brilliant youth to obtain a university education in Italy.

Nicolas was intoxicated by the liberal intellectual atmosphere of Renaissance Italy, but repulsed by the sensuality and moral laxity of the Italian clergy. Taking his degree and the title of "Doctor Copernicus," it was with few regrets that he returned to the colder, sterner climate of the Baltic to assume his duties as a church canon. His native land was still very much medieval in its mores, its social structures, and its values.

As canon, Copernicus was not an ordained priest, but was required to live and work where and as directed by his chapter. He was also required to follow the same rule of celibacy as a priest. His assignments reflected the breadth of his university education, and included everything from providing medical care to administering a city during time of war.

Banville is surprisingly obscure on when, how, and why young Nicolas came to question the idea of an Earth-centered universe. Even before he goes to Italy, there is mention of his bold ideas about astronomy, but not precisely what those ideas were or how they came to him. While Nicolas was still a teenager, his contemporaries knew he was developing a theory that the Earth and planets revolved around the sun. Yet his book on the subject was not published until the year of his death, at age 70, in 1543--and even then apparently against his will. Copernicus's lifelong reticence was based in part on his overpowering modesty, but also on his fear of offending the Church and provoking a vengeful reaction. Apparently it was safe for his ideas to travel Europe as rumor, but it could be fatal to put them in print.

What emerges literally from the astronomer's deathbed is the distinction between truth and reality. Copernicus believed his theory to be true insofar as it was a mechanism that made it possible to predict the future motions of the planets and to develop a more accurate calendar. But whether it represented reality was something he did not claim and seriously doubted.

In rich prose, John Banville gives us a sympathetic portrait of a a man and his time--though both the man and the time are unattractively severe. One segment of the novel is a narration by Georg Joachim Rheticus, a young student who forced himself upon the aging Copernicus and eventually coaxed his master into releasing his manuscript for publication. Rheticus's pompous, spiteful, and obviously unreliable narrative not only provides some welcome levity, but underscores the treacherous nature of the historical record. Whether Banville's interpretation of Copernicus is accurate is something we will never know, but there is much to appreciate in his depiction of a scientist's mind struggling in a world dominated by faith and tradition.

#38 - Thanks, cbl_tn, do you have any recommendations for good novels (or other books) that give a true picture of London?

I gravitate toward historical mysteries or golden age mysteries, so I'm afraid I haven't read too many modern novels set in London. P.D. James's The Murder Room is the only one that comes to mind. It's set in a part of London that's familiar to me.

For a historical London setting, I really like C.J. Sansom's Tudor era Matthew Shardlake series, starting with Dissolution (although a good part of the book takes place outside of London). I also like Bruce Alexander's Sir John Fielding series set in 18th century London. Blind Justice is the first book in that series.

Category 14: New (to me) Authors

The Collected Works of Billy the Kid by Michael Ondaatje
First published 1970


("Adobes and Shed, New Mexico" by Edward Hopper, 1925)

I'm not very much at home with modern poetry or stories of the Old West, so I won't attempt to review this one. It is a strange montage of prose, verse and photography giving impressions more than telling the story of William "Billy the Kid" Bonney, his associates and enemies. Someone more familiar than I with the history and legend of Billy the Kid would probably find it fascinating. I'm not sure why I had this book--it may have been for a group project that didn't pan out--but I had never read anything before by Ondaatje. Next year my reading group is doing The Cat's Table, so I decided to read the other works of his I had on the shelf first, and The Collected Works of Billy the Kid was the earliest published, so I started there. There are some memorable images in this book, but there were also parts that made no sense to me because I wasn't familiar with the story.

Your sample illustration looks interesting though.

Ondaatje writing modern poetry or stories of the Old West seems at odds with my 'unread' understanding of his works. The English Patient and Anil's Ghost are his more well known works.... I stumble over those books all the time during my usual 2nd hand book store visits. I was rather surprised to see that The Collected Works of Billy the Kid has been adapted for the stage/theatre production. I am curious: would this one work better in a theatre environment? An odd question to ask, I know, but some works do seem more suited for one presentation format over another and this one seems to be one of his earlier works.

For London category I recently picked up Capital that would fit! Mieville did a chapbook recently on London but its name escapes me and you could read any Iain Sinclair but especially hackney that rose red empire also medical london

Category 14: New (to me) Authors

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell
First published 2010


("Dutchment with Courtesans, Nagasaki," anonymous Japanese, ca. 1800)

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is an enormously entertaining and informative historical novel set in Nagasaki, Japan, at the turn of the 19th century. The Empire of Japan was still a closed society. The only contact permitted with the outside world was at the port of Nagasaki, where the Chinese and Dutch were each permitted a small trading outpost. The Dutch outpost was an artificial island named Dejima, where a handful of Dutch were permitted to remain under close supervision. The only Japanese allowed on Dejima were the official interpreters, some prostitutes, and a small group of medical students.

The novel follows Jacob de Zoet, a clerk who arrives at Dejima in 1799 in the company of a new Chief of the trading post. Jacob's job is to unravel the records after years of corruption. He is deep in this unpleasant and unpopular task when he has a chance meeting with a Japanese woman named Aibagawa Orito.

Orito is the daughter of a prominent scholar. A badly burned face has made her unmarriageable, so she has taken up the profession of midwife. She is one of the medical students permitted to study under the Dutch doctor at Dejima. Jacob is smitten with Orito, and risks his career, if not his life, to seek further contact with this scarred but intriguing beauty. This will lead to his becoming involved in a deadly power struggle between the local magistrate at Nagasaki and the leader of a mystical cult into whose clutches Orito soon falls.

David Mitchell draws an unforgettable portrait of the meeting and occasional clash of cultures from opposite sides of the world. Nagasaki is the port where Portuguese missionaries first introduced Christianity to Japan, leading to civil unrest which led the Japanese to ban the religion and severely constrain all outside contact by Japanese. The Dutch themselves are in a period of transition, for the French will soon conquer the Netherlands and, unbeknownst to its inhabitants, Dejima will become, at one point, the only place on the globe flying the Dutch tricolor. The English will soon enter the picture, and their attempt to force their way onto Dejima will become Jacob's greatest challenge.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is highly recommended for anyone who likes good historical fiction or just enjoys a well-told story.

I ditto that recommendation!

>47 StevenTX: Great review! I recently got a copy and am looking forward to diving in.

The Thousand Autumns is definitely on the WL! Sounds very different from Cloud Atlas.

Category 1: The Works of Émile Zola

Therese Raquin by Émile Zola
First published in French 1867
English translation by Robin Buss 2004


("Head of a Drowned Man" by Theodore Gericault, 1819)

Therese Raquin is a harrowing story of lust, murder, terror, and madness.

A French officer brings his black-haired love child, the daughter of his North African mistress, to his sister in France, a Mme Raquin. He returns to Africa where he is soon reported killed. Mme Raquin, a widow, is only too happy to raise her orphaned niece as a companion to her sickly son Camille. Young Thérèse, full of healthful vitality, is forced to endure the claustrophobic life of her sick cousin. Seeing nothing of the world, she becomes a silent introvert, suppressing her natural desires. When she reaches adulthood, Thérèse apathetically complies when Mme Raquin insists that she marry Camille so she can continue to be his caretaker.

Thérèse gradually comes to loathe her banal, sickly husband, but continues to repress her feelings and desires. This comes to an end when she meets Laurent, Camille's virile, self-indulgent friend. The two begin a passionate affair behind the backs of the unsuspecting mother and husband. When circumstances make it impossible for them to continue their clandestine meetings, sexual frustration drives them to plot to murder Camille so they can eventually marry. The plot is successful, but each is tormented by the fear of detection, and instead of the bliss they expected, their lives become a living hell.

The novel created a sensation when it was first published in 1867, for its violence, its sexual candor, and most of all for its amorality. This is a tale devoid of religious content or social message. Zola's defended his novel, saying his purpose was "to study temperament, not character." He contrasts the sanguine nature of Laurent with the nervous constitution of Thérèse, and treats their romance and its tragic end as something as inevitable as a chemical reaction. Zola's psychological analysis may seem primitive and simplistic, but it was a bold venture for its time. The characters and their mental states are always believable even though modern psychologists would explain them in more sophisticated terms.

Therese Raquin has none of the social criticism for which Zola's later novels are known. Instead it bears a strong resemblance to some of the short stories of Edgar Allan Poe, whose writings probably influenced Zola. It does, however, convey a sense of the lives, institutions, and surroundings of mid-19th century Paris. It is an intense and memorable novel, highly recommended.

Hey Steven,

Really nice reviews.

I'll be back to check out the new ones even though I'm reading more history and philosophy than literature for this challenge.

For your The Red Flag: Communism category you may want to take a look at The Main Currents of Marxism by Leszek Kolakowski. It was originally published in three volumes: The Founders, The Golden Age, and The Breakdown. I have not read all of it myself so I can't give an overall impression, but it may fit the why it failed take.

I'm tempted by Therese Raquin. I usually like Zola.

#52 - Thanks for the recommendation. I may not be that ambitious (1312 pages) but I've put it on the wishlist for today's trip to the book store.

Category 5: Reading Globally

To Live by Yu Hua
First published in Chinese 1992
English translation by Michael Berry 2003


("A Peasant with a Rake" by Qi Baishi, 1940.)

The American folk song "Old Black Joe" was the unlikely inspiration for this excellent modern Chinese novel. It begins with a narration by a carefree young student wandering the Chinese countryside in the 1970s collecting folk music for a culture study. He meets an old man working his rice field with an equally aged ox. While man and beast take a break, the researcher starts up a conversation. Over the course of the day, the old man tells the student his life story.

Xu Fugui was born to an old family of prosperous landowners in the southern part of China. He begins his story in the 1930s, during the Japanese occupation of China, and admits to having been a spoiled young man. He was carried everywhere on the back of a servant and learned nothing of work and responsibility. Instead he took to gambling and whoring, and continued even after his marriage to the beautiful and patient Jiazhen. Eventually Fugui gambles away not only all his cash, but his family's land as well. They must face the disgrace of moving out of their beautiful home and into the thatched roof shack of a common peasant. Fugui and Jiazhen must learn to labor for meager wages in the rice fields he formerly owned. Not long after this--in 1945 after the Japanese surrender--Fugui is pressed into service in the Nationalist army. He is unable even to let his wife know what has happened; for all Jiazhen knows, Fugui has abandoned her and their two children.

Fugui's experiences include the Chinese Civil War, the famine years of the Great Leap Forward, and the chaos of the Cultural Revolution. He survives all of this, but other family members are not so lucky. One by one, Fugui must bury those he loves most. He owes his survival to his unpretentious simplicity as well as blind luck. Had he not gambled away his inheritance he would have been executed in the purge of landlords in the wake of the Communist victory. He eventually develops a simple philosophy, devoid of ideology: to live.

Yu Hua vividly portrays the consequences of war, economic failure, and social upheaval, but does not dwell on them. This is more a personal story than a political one. The simple villagers are largely unaware of the goings on at the national level. Their concerns are centered on providing food and clothing for themselves and their children. To Live is an engrossing, poignant, and often heartrending tale of love, loss, and patient endurance.

Sorry, meant to respond on the Reading Globally thread.

Your use of "the Death of Marat" for category #7 is clever!

Oh my - I saw the movie version of To Live. Beautiful but unrelentingly depressing. It sounds like the book was a little less unrelenting.

Category 7: 1001 Books to Read Before You Die

Villette by Charlotte Brontë
First published 1853


("Leaving School" by Honoré Daumier, 1848)

Charlotte Brontë's Villette is a romance with Gothic elements. It is also a partly autobiographical novel and, if not anti-Catholic, at least a staunch defense of Protestant values and temperaments.

The narrator is the aptly named Lucy Snowe. She is cold, secretive and, for most of the book, unlovable. We first meet Lucy as a teenager spending a few months at the home of her godmother, Mrs. Bretton. Even at that age, Lucy's character is puritanical, reclusive, and cautious. She seldom speaks, and never discloses her feelings to others. Nonetheless, she develops a fond attachment for Mrs. Bretton, her son Graham, and another guest, a younger girl named Paulina.

Lucy's family situation is troubled, but she never discloses the cause. She resumes her narrative years later when, as a young woman, she is forced out into the world almost penniless to earn her own living. After a short stint as companion to a dying woman, she decides to escape to France (though not speaking a word of French), and eventually comes to the city of Villette where she applies for a position as an English teacher in a girls' school.

Villette, though described as a French city, is actually based on Brussels, Belgium, where Brontë and her sister Emily were employed in a situation not dissimilar to Lucy's.

Lucy's employer, Madame Beck, is the novel's most memorable character. Though genial in appearance, she maintains a strict rein on her teachers as well as her students by gathering all the information she can--spying on their every move, reading their mail, and exploring their belongings. Brontë uses Madame Beck and others to contrast the French temperament with the English and the Catholic mentality with the Protestant.

She has much to say, in fact, about Catholicism, some of it quite bitter. Of the school's educational goals, Lucy says "There, as elsewhere, the CHURCH strove to bring up her children robust in body, feeble in soul, fat, ruddy, hale, joyous, ignorant, unthinking, unquestioning." Later: "For man's good little was done; for God's glory, less." Lucy concludes, "the more I saw of Popery the closer I clung to Protestantism." Yet she does not condemn Catholics as individuals, just the church and its hierarchy.

In Villette, Lucy suffers the ordeals anyone would who finds herself alone and friendless in a foreign land, and she is severely tested by an unsympathetic headmistress and by rebellious students. Her solitary ways and self-reliance are the armor that protect her, but eventually she begins to change and develop as she learns more about herself. She finally experiences the joys of friendship and even dares to entertain romantic feelings. At the same time, however, she is both troubled and mystified by encounters with an apparition said to be a ghost haunting the grounds of the school.

The plot of Villette is unremarkable, and it takes most of the novel before we can begin to warm up to its chilly narrator, but Villette is rewarding as a study in character and for its portrayal of the attitudes and conventions of the time. The writing is quite beautiful as well, with many powerful and inventive descriptive passages and clever sarcasms.

Yours is a really well done review--you really captured all the main points. One thing that I noticed in Villette is all the surveillance--everyone was always watching everyone else. and then quickly judging and condemning them. Jane Eyre has that too.

Nice review of Villete! As a Catholic, I was quite annoyed by some parts of the book, but I was able to enjoy it overall. I find English attitudes toward Catholicism at various points in history very fascinating.

A lot of people talk about Bronte's anti-Catholicism, but when I read the novel, I saw that she took it even further, and was quite disparaging to Europeans in general.

Very interesting review of Villete, as well as the comments here. Not sure if I would pick this one up to read, but you have intrigued me.

I just remembered something I meant to mention as a postscript to my review of Villette but entirely forgot. There are a large number of untranslated passages in French throughout the novel. Many of these are key to the story, and their meaning cannot readily be inferred from the surrounding text. Obviously Brontë expected her readers to speak French even though her heroine (initially) did not.

I'm sure most current editions of the novel from major publishers have these passages translated in footnotes. I was reading from a free ebook that did not. Fortunately my Kindle has a built-in translator that gave me the gist of those passages where I couldn't figure it out on my own. But if you're reading a bargain edition or have an e-reader without translation capability, you should be forewarned that you will encounter a lot of untranslated French.

Yes, there is a huge amount of French in that book, for an English novel. I listened to it on audio book, so didn't have the translation either. As a typical Canadian, my cereal box French is excellent (that means I can pick out quite a bit when I read), but my understanding of spoken French is significantly less. Thus, I missed out on a lot of what was said in those parts.

Category 4: Translated from the Spanish

They're Cows, We're Pigs by Carmen Boullosa
First published in Spanish 1991
English translation by Leland H. Chambers 1997


(An illustration of François l'Olonnais from a 1684 edition of The History of the Buccaneers of America.)

In 1666 a young man named Smeeks took ship from France for the New World as an indentured servant. By a strange chain of events, he first acquired valuable medical knowledge and then, upon obtaining his freedom, fell in league with a notorious band of pirates known as the Brethren of the Coast. Twelve years later he published an account of his exploits under the name "Alexander Olivier Exquemeling." The book was titled De Americaenesche Zeerover (The Buccaneers of America).

Smeeks/Exquelmeling's book was soon translated into other languages, but each time changing in ways that reflected the national character and prejudices of the translator. With no two editions alike, and the narrator's identity and veracity questionable to begin with, the history of the story is as intriguing as the story itself. This is the impetus for Carmen Boullosa's novel They're Cows, We're Pigs.

Boullosa divides her novel into two parts. In the first half we are given the story of Smeeks's arrival at Tortuga, an island off the coast of Haiti and the base of operations for French pirates preying upon the Spaniards. We see how Smeeks comes to learn herbal medicine from a slave, then surgery from his master. When his master dies, Smeeks takes his place as chief surgeon to the Brethren of the Coast. But this is not a straightforward narrative. Some episodes are told twice and differently, while others are admitted to be questionable. In this metafictional manner, the author represents the uncertainty of the historical record and how its interpretation varies with perspective.

For the second half of the novel the narrator announces that he is switching from the horizontal to the vertical, that is from a narrative that moves across different versions to one that is strictly chronological. It is an account of Smeeks's expeditions and travails with the pirates under their bloodthirsty leader, François l'Olonnais. These chapters center around the sack of Maracaibo, Venezuela, by 600 pirates under l'Olonnais in 1667. The treachery, slaughter, and rapine are horrific. The Brethren are taught to believe that the Spaniards as well as the natives are simply cows, born to be slaughtered, while the pirates are the pigs, born to be predators and gorge themselves on whatever they can find.

Boullosa makes the Brethren of the Coast into an interesting study in utopian philosophy and gender. The Brethren had a credo that everything was to be shared equally. While ashore they lived in communal housing and shared food and supplies. There was no private property. Most importantly, there were no women. The pirates believed that their social order would break down if they took wives, for it is women who are possessive. For their sexual needs the pirates made regular trips to the whorehouses of Port Royal, Jamaica, or simply turned to each other.

This is a short novel that leaves you wanting to know more about the cruel but fascinating world of the Brethren of the Coast. The first half was a little confusing until I realized that it was meant to be so. The second half, though, was a completing engrossing story of conflict and survival.

Utopian philosophy and gender??? So when is this going to become a movie? Starring Johnny Depp. It's going on the WL. Sounds quite bizarre.

>66 by @steven03tx, Wow, that sounds quite interesting, I'm intrigued!

Sounds fascinating!

->67 cammykitty:
I'd watch it! :)

Category 2: London in Fiction and Fact

Up the Junction by Nell Dunn
First published 1963


("Cecil Ct London WC2" by R. B. Kitaj)

Up the Junction is a collection of loosely linked short stories portraying life among the poor working class in the district of Battersea, London, in the early 1960s. Nell Dunn, though wealthy and well educated, chose to live and work in Battersea when she was in her early 20s, and she puts herself into several stories as the "Chelsea heiress."

The stories are simple vignettes showing conditions and attitudes more than action. They consist largely of unattributed dialogue with little or no distinction between the characters. Most of the characters are young, white women living in squalor and relying on menial jobs or petty crime for their income. Yet they cling to the aspirations their culture has sanctioned via popular culture. They'll break the law if they think they can get away with it, but there's no sense of rebellion or clamor against injustice. They accept that the only way out of poverty is through their own efforts or good fortune. Only rarely is there a hint of despair:

'Are you frightened of dying, Sylvie?'
'No, you can't get hurt when yer dead.'

Their thoughts often turn to sex, which to them is something to be enjoyed, but also a commodity to be bartered for money, gifts, or a good meal.

Sylvie pisses in the road. 'Quick Sylv, there's a car comin' in ter park!' The headlamps beam. 'Pull yer drawers up!'
'It's all right.' She jumps to her feet. 'I don't wear no drawers Friday nights--it's 'andy...'

Back street abortions are commonplace and resorted to without qualms or regret.

Much of Battersea was, at the time, still devastated from wartime bombing, and its people are in no better condition. Crime, alcoholism and debt are rampant. "Here, look at that old bloke laying in the gutter. We'd better turn him over in case it's me dad," says one of the girls matter-of-factly. In another scene we see a man buying a dozen tins of cat food. "My Gawd," the clerk asks, "however many cats you got?" "I ain't got no cats, lady," he answers. "I've got six kids."

The stories in Up the Junction present a portrait of a time and place. They don't explain, they don't question, and they don't call for action--they just describe what the author saw and heard, letting the reader react as he or she chooses.

Category 5: Reading Globally

Serve the People! by Yan Lianke
First published in Chinese 2005.
English translation by Julia Lovell 2007.


("Mao" by Andy Warhol.)

Wu Dawang has made a successful career for himself in the People's Liberation Army by remembering the Army's three most important rules: Don't say what you shouldn't say, Don't ask what you shouldn't ask, Don't do what you shouldn't do. He also knows that to serve the Army is to Serve the People. Promoted to Sergeant of the Catering Squad, he has now been assigned as personal orderly to the Division Commander. To serve the Division Commander is to Serve the People, so he joyfully and diligently tends the Division Commander's garden, cleans the Division Commander's house, and prepare's meals for the Division Commander and his wife. And when the Division Commander is absent for weeks at a time, his superiors remind Wu that to serve the Division Commander's wife is to Serve the People.

But the Division Commander's wife, the young, beautiful, neglected, bored and lonely Liu Lian, wants to be served in a manner that shocks poor Wu Dawang. At first he refuses, but a bit of pressure from Liu Lian convinces Wu that his Army career is at stake. Before long the two are enjoying a passionate secret romance straight out of the pages of Lady Chatterley's Lover.

Serve the People satirizes the institutions and propaganda of Mao's China, showing that behind all the patriotic slogans the Chinese are no different than anyone else. Everyone wants a little more than he has. The soldiers want to be officers, the officers want promotions, the farmers want jobs in the cities, the low-ranking officials want to be high-ranking officials, and behind every ambitious man is a wife who wants better food and nicer clothes. The dedication to Mao and the slogans of self-sacrifice are a game everyone plays to get ahead but no one eventually believes in.

This is an enjoyable, bittersweet romance. Notwithstanding the satirical purpose of the work, the characters are believable, and their volatile relationship offers scenes that are insightful, moving, and heartrending.

Great categories and reviews, I'm doing a year of reading Zola with the Author Reads group next year so I may have some cross over books with you. I look forward to seeing what you say about these books

Category 8: Other Group Reads and ER Books
(I read this for background to a future group selection by the same author)

Coming Through Slaughter by Michael Ondaatje
First published 1976


(The Bolden Band, ca. 1905. Bolden is the second from left, back row.)

Coming Through Slaughter is the imagined life story of the early jazz musician, Charles "Buddy" Bolden. Bolden was born around 1876 in New Orleans. He played they coronet, led his own band, and developed a musical style that blended ragtime and gospel music into an early form of improvisational jazz. In 1907 Bolden went insane from alcohol poisoning and was institutionalized for the rest of his life.

Ondaatje's unorthodox novel presents Bolden's story from several perspectives, with short blocks of text alternating narrators, occasionally in first person, and occasionally with documentary interjections. Near the end of the novel the author summarizes what little is actually known about Bolden's life and career, revealing that much of what we have read is Ondaatje's invention.

The Bolden of the novel is eccentric, erratic, usually drunk and occasionally violent. But he is also sensitive and compassionate, especially with women. Most of the women in Bolden's life are prostitutes, and they are part of a vivid picture the author provides of turn-of-the-century New Orleans.

Coming Through Slaughter would probably appeal most to those interested in jazz pioneers. Not having any background in that musical genre, I was interested chiefly in the place and time, but found the narrative too fragmented to develop much interest in Bolden or the other characters.

Hmmm - I might be interested in Coming Through Slaughter. I don't know much about Bolden, but I know I've seen that photo before. I believe what I heard about it factually was that the band is mostly made up of brothers, and that the Bolden household was rather a rough one - crossing the line into abusive. Was that the background Ondaatje was using? A lot of the early jazz musicians had wild beginnings - they were working for prostitutes or sons of prostitutes etc etc.

There isn't much said about Bolden's background and childhood or what led him to drink so heavily. Nor is there anything about his beginnings as a musician. The novel begins with a description of Bolden as barber by day, musician by night, and then goes into his decline and insanity.

The Wikipedia article on Bolden says rather caustically that Coming Through Slaughter "features a 'Buddy Bolden' character who in some ways resembles Bolden, but in other ways is deliberately contrary to what is known about him."

Oh!? deliberately contrary to what is known about him That's very odd. I wonder if it was caused by a lack of research, a difference of opinion over "what is known", or poetic license. That makes me far less interested in reading the book. I'm always afraid of mixing up details from historic fiction with historic information. If an author is going to take that many liberties, they should change the names and move on. That was the main reason I disliked an ER book I received Gathering of Waters. It used the killing of Emmett Till as a major part of the plot, but McFadden changed so many details of the killing - she even kind of white washed it - that I spent a lot of energy rebutting her in my head. If she'd just made up a similar lynching I still may not have liked the book, but I wouldn't have hated it.

I agree with you on that. Authors writing historical fiction should be free to add to the historical record and make their own interpretation of personalities and events, but to deliberately change or contradict what is known about the past, yet write it in such a way that it appears to be based on fact, is a disservice to the serious reader.

I couldn't have sad it better.

Category 4: Translated from the Spanish

The Fear of Losing Eurydice by Julieta Campos
First published in Spanish 1979
English translation by Leland H. Chambers 1993


("The Island of Life" by Arnold Böcklin, 1888)

The Fear of Losing Eurydice is a lyrical examination of literary metaphors and the longings they represent. The chief idea is that of the island.

Island: The sum of all improbabilities; intoxicating improbability of fiction. Island: image of desire. Archipelago: proliferation of desire. All the islands formulated by human beings and all islands appearing on maps comprise a single imaginary archipelago--the archipelago of desire... Every text, everything ever written up to the moment I write these words, outlines the image of that cartography of desire. Every text is an island.

There are two levels of narrative in the novel, distinguished by indentation. In what we might call the outer level, a teacher of French, Monsieur N, is sitting in a café devising a translation exercise for his students. It involves the Jules Verne novel Two Years' Vacation, a story of a group of schoolboys stranded for two years on a deserted island. As he is pondering the notion of the island, Monsieur N is observing a pair of lovers who have rendezvoused at the café and are drinking cocktails. His thoughts turn to the notion of love as a form of island.

The inner narrative is the story of the couple, but in many forms and places. It is a theme with variations, but always with the idea of the island as central, even though the island can be a metaphor for paradise, for love, for death, for despair, for solitude, for eternity, for a labyrinth, for a dream, and for the author alone with her creation. The idea of the text as an island in a dream is always present. "And I write as if I were dreaming. Or dream as if I were writing... The story of love is a dream that is writing me." And the characters live in the dream which is the text: "Expelled from paradise, the couple wanders in the limbo of unformulated words, of expressions scarcely roughed in, until they emigrate from one dream to another. Or, with their desire, they beget that other dream, which is an island."

In the margins of the inner narrative there are quotations from dozens of literary works illustrating the use of the island as a symbol or evocation. The narrative itself incorporates numerous references to historical events and literary landmarks, traveling from the islands visited by Odysseus and Aeneas to the island cities of Venice and New York. The text morphs continually from one story to another. Cortez's first glimpse of the Aztec island city of Tenochtitlan interweaves with elements of the Labyrinth of Minos on the island of Crete to become a scene of lovers watching swans on a lake, then strolling the coast of a tropical island--all within a single paragraph.

"I feel you in my flesh with fingers that are yours because they once felt you." With sumptuous prose poetry like this, Julieta Campos brings us to her conclusion that "To give up telling a love story is to give up telling any story at all, because telling about anything whatever is already to tell a love story: desire begets the tale." The Fear of Losing Eurydice is a work of experimental fiction that won't appeal to those who insist on conventional plots and characters, but it is an exquisite treat for those who enjoy authors like Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges.

Category 5: Reading Globally

The Butcher's Wife and Other Stories by Li Ang
Novella and stories first published in the 1980s
Translated from Chinese by Howard Goldblatt


("Hamlet in the Autumn Mist" by Shitao, 1690)

This collection consists of a short novel and five stories, all set in Taiwan and dealing with the complexities of gender issues.

The Butcher's Wife begins with the end of the story: Lin Shi murders her husband, the pig butcher Chen Jiangshui, with his own butcher knife. Despite knowing that Chen brutalized his wife, neighbors and authorities automatically assume that Lin Shi had an adulterous relationship and condemn her.

The story is set in a Taiwanese fishing and farming community at an unspecified time, probably mid-20th century. Lin Shi is a painfully shy girl who has known nothing but abuse and neglect since her mother was taken away on similar charges of presumed adultery. Her uncle gives her in marriage to Chen Jiangshui, the butcher. Chen is a man who can only be sexually aroused by women who scream in pain as the pigs do when he slits their throats. But this, ironically, isn't Lin Shi's greatest woe. She suffers even more from the pain of rejection by the vicious women of her village who support the patriarchal system with even more fervor than their husbands.

Aside from being a painful story of domestic abuse and social pressure, The Butcher's Wife contains a vivid, if gloomy depiction of impoverished village lives dominated by fear, fatalism and superstition.

The five short stories are all set in modern Taiwan. In "Flower Season" a young woman is so dominated by her fear of male sexual aggression that she can't recognize a simple act of generosity for what it is.

In "Wedding Ritual" a young man is taking a gift from his grandmother to a woman he doesn't know named Auntie Cai. He goes through a Kafkaesque ordeal in just finding Auntie Cai, only to discover that even stranger things are about to happen to him.

"Curvaceous Dolls" is the bizarre tale of a young woman suffering from strange and increasingly sinister dreams that reawaken in her the yearning she felt as a girl for the comforting touch of the breasts of the mother she never knew. She becomes obsessed--in an entirely asexual way--with breasts.

The final two stories, "Test of Love" and "A Love Letter Never Sent," are both about unrequited love and, in very different forms, demonstrate the frustrating complexities of relationships involving conflicting demands of romantic love, morality, sexuality, devotion and domesticity.

The Butcher's Wife and Other Stories is recommended as both entertainment and for a balanced and insightful look at gender in traditional and modern Asian cultures.

Category 6: Author Themed Reads

Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto
Novellas first published in Japanese 1986 & 1988
English translation by Megan Backus 1993


("Grandma's Kitchen" by Jacek Yerka)

Two novellas titled "Kitchen" and "Moonlight Shadow" comprise the book also titled Kitchen. Both stories are about loss, grief, and recovery. Each is narrated by a young woman, and in each case she has a younger male friend who has also suffered a devastating loss.

In "Kitchen" the narrator, Mikage, is a college student living in Tokyo with her only remaining relative, her grandmother. When her grandmother dies, she realizes "I was tied by blood to no creature in this world. I could go anywhere, do anything. It was dizzying." But, of course, this very freedom, along with loneliness and grief, threaten to devastate her. She is rescued, at least from her loneliness, by a family she doesn't even know which offers to take her into their house on the basis of the teenage son's casual friendship with Mikage's grandmother.

Mikage finds a refuge from her grief and purposelessness in the kitchen. She develops her love of cooking into a career and calling that gives her a basis of strength to call up on when she, in turn, is needed to give strength to someone who has lost his last family member and is now alone in the world.

In "Moonlight Shadow" the narrator, Satsuki, and her young male friend, Hiiragi, suffer their losses simultaneously when Satsuki's boyfriend (who is Hiiragi's older brother) is killed in a car wreck along with Hiiragi's girlfriend whom the brother was giving a lift home. Both Satsuki and Hiiragi develop behavioral obsessions that only sink them deeper into their grief. They can see this in each other, but not in themselves. The events which allow them to recover and get on with their lives involve the supernatural, which you can chose to read as allegory, spirituality or magical realism.

Both stories are very well written in a style that is neither flippant nor sentimental. Yoshimoto's handling of the theme of managing grief is perceptive without being preachy. There's nothing profound here, but just some good, quick and comfortable reading.

You got me with your very interesting review of The Fear of Losing Eurydice. I just recently finished Kitchen and I agree with your assessment of the stories. I was happy to discover my local library has a number of Yoshimoto's books. I have brought Lizard home to see if Yoshimoto continues to charm me with her writing.

Category 10: Sequels and Series

Blue Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson
First published 1996


("The Big Blue Sea in Antibes" by Claude Monet, 1888)

Blue Mars is a novel I often found easier to admire than to enjoy, but it was worthwhile in the end. The conclusion to Robinson's Mars Trilogy begins with the terraforming of the planet Mars essentially complete in the late 22nd century. Mars has recently asserted its independence from Earth's governments and Earth's corporations, but it doesn't yet have a government of its own. Forming that government is the chief concern of the first half of the novel. In the second half the principal issue is how much immigration to allow, and how fast. Along the way, however, their are numerous side trips into other political, social and scientific issues.

The novel is structured just like its predecessors, in long chapters each from the perspective of one of several principal characters. Thanks to the longevity treatments, these characters are essentially the same as the cast of Red Mars and Green Mars, only they are now around 200 years old. There is only one new major character introduced, late in the novel, and in my opinion this was the book's best chapter.

There are long discourses on such subjects as political science, economics, aging, the study of memory, weather, and, of course, geology (or, more properly, areology). There are also some lengthy chapters featuring solitary ramblings in the wilderness, flying, boating, or other forms of recreation. Like a Wagner opera, this is a work that will not be rushed, and it's best to sit back and sink into the mood of the piece without worrying that nothing much is going to happen for a long while.

Blue Mars offers an appealing vision on where our species might be headed, socially and technologically. There are also some thought-provoking debates on issues relevant to our own time. It could easily have been about 200 pages shorter, though. Because of frequent references back to events in the previous volumes, I would recommend that if you are going to read the trilogy, you treat it as a three-volume novel and not let your memory of the earlier volumes get stale.

The Tunnel by Ernesto Sábato
First published in Spanish 1948
English translation by Margaret Sayers Peden 1988


("Jealousy" by Edvard Munch, 1895)

"I was suffering the tortures of the damned in my personal hell of analyzing and imagining." The narrator of this short novel finally realizes the truth about himself only after he has murdered the woman he loves. From his prison cell he tells us how it happened.

Juan Pablo Castel is a successful artist in Buenos Aires, but despises the very critics who praise his work because they praise it for the wrong reasons. One day at a showing he sees a young woman gazing intently at a detail in one of his paintings--the one detail in all his work that, in Castel's mind, has meaning. It is a a detail all other have overlooked or ridiculed. Castel later obsesses about this woman. She understands him! They are meant for each other! He must find her! Finally he does find her. He learns that her name is María Iribarne. She is the woman he will murder.

Ernesto Sábato gives us a remarkable portrait of a disturbed mind, but one that never ceases analyzing itself. "Before the words were out of my mouth," he recalls, "I was slightly repentant. Behind the person who wanted the perverse satisfaction of saying them, stood a purer and more compassionate person ready to take charge." Repeatedly he acts on a cruel and selfish impulse, then abjectly begs forgiveness, only to repeat the cycle minutes later.

Castel sees himself imprisoned in a tunnel through which he travels from birth to death, unable to veer from its "dark and solitary" course. Other people he sees as being free to relish life, make choices, party and be happy, but not himself. His only hope is to find another troubled soul in a her personal tunnel somehow parallel to his own. But having found the woman of his dreams, he is consumed by an irrational jealousy that destroys them both.

The Tunnel is a grim but captivating study of the darker side of human behavior. Highly recommended.

Nice categories. I personally found Villette tedious; you were a lot kinder to it than I would have been.

I'm reading a book right now you might want to consider for your Communism category: The captive mind by Czeslaw Milosz. (If you haven't already read it; everyone here on LT is so erudite.) Milosz (who defected from Poland in the 50's) wrote about the Communist mindset, described how the Eastern bloc intellectual accommodated to survive and explained why the West didn't get it. I'm finding it slow going but very interesting.

Thanks for the recommendation, Bjace. I have put The Captive Mind on the wishlist.

I've been avoiding Villette. Slap me for a reading rebel, but the first description I ever read of it sounded tedious, and I usually enjoy the Brontes.

The Tunnel is going on the WL. It'll be perfect for 2017 ;) when I finally work my way down to the southern tip of the Americas.

You're booked up until 2017? You're almost as bad as me.

Category 4: Translated from the Spanish

Recollections of Things to Come by Elena Garro
First published in Spanish 1963
English translation by Ruth L. C. Simms


("Soldiers" by José Clemente Orozco, 1926)

Two worlds: the world of reality in which we live, and the world of illusion which we create. Two memories: the past and the future. These are the themes and the experience of reading Recollections of Things to Come.

The setting is the fictional town of Ixtepec in southern Mexico. Ixtepec itself is also the narrator, the "I" and "we," of the novel. "I am only memory and the memory that one has of me," says the town, contemplating its own existence. The time is the mid-1920s after the end of the Mexican Revolution. Ixtepec is occupied by a military garrison under the command of General Francisco Rosas, the central character in the novel. An uneasy peace prevails. The town's principal families live on in the shadow of their former splendor, while in the countryside the corrupt administration of President Plutarco Elías Calles is subtly undoing the very reforms that the Revolution had promised. Every few weeks, Indian peasants are executed on spurious charges, their lands confiscated. An air of fear and suspicion pervades the town.

The novel is divided into two parts. In the first half the story centers on General Rosas's mistress Julia. All the officers live in the same hotel with mistresses they have brought from other parts of the country. They walk the streets openly and proudly. Each of the women is beautiful, but none more so than Julia. She has captured the town's imagination just as she has captured the General's heart. But Julia herself is almost silent, listless and melancholic. She gives the impression of living on bittersweet memories, heedless of the present or the future. This remoteness stokes a constant, simmering jealousy in General Rosas, which bursts into an irrational flame when a stranger enters town and dares to speak to Julia.

In 1926 President Calles began a systematic persecution and dismantling of the Catholic church. Counter-revolutionaries known as "Cristeros" fought back, beginning a four-year conflict known as the Cristero War. Its impact on the people of Ixtepec is the subject of the second half of the novel. (The Cristero War is also depicted in Graham Greene's famous novel The Power and the Glory.) General Rosas closes the town's church, destroys the religious artifacts, and converts the building to his headquarters. The parish priest disappears, and the sacristan is hunted down on the streets of Ixtepec and murdered by a group of soldiers. But when they return to take away the sacristan's body, it has disappeared. The hunt for the body brings the town's leading families under suspicion, including the Moncada familiy, whom we met at the beginning of the novel. The decision to submit or resist is especially difficult for the Moncada's daughter Isabel who has developed a secret fascination for General Rosas and the life he represents.

The author, Elena Garro, uses magical realism to depict the duality of reality and illusion. Martín Moncada, Isabel's father, orders the clocks in his house stopped every night at 9:00 PM so that he may retreat into a world in which he is not a failure and his son's don't have to work in the mines to support him. "He did not understand the opacity of a world that had money for the sun in the sky." Illusion and memories of the past protect us from that other kind of memory: the memory of what is to come. A grim and fatalistic Isabel explains to the general, "We have two memories. I used to live in both of them, and now I only live in the one that gives me the memory of what is going to happen." And what is going to happen is that...

One generation follows another, and each repeats the acts of the one before it. Only an instant before dying, they discover that it was possible to dream and to create the world their own way, to awaken then and begin a new creation.... For several seconds they return to the hours that guard their childhood and the smell of grass, but it is already late and they have to say goodbye, and they discover that in a corner their life is waiting for them, and their eyes open to the dark panorama of their disputes and their crimes, and they go away astonished at the creation they made of their years. And other generations come to repeat their same gestures and their same astonishment at the end. And thus I shall go on seeing the generations, throughout the centuries, until the day when I am not even a mound of dust, and the men who pass this way will not even remember that I was Ixtepec.

Elena Garro was a maverick among left-wing Mexican intellectuals. She left her husband, Nobelist Octavio Paz, for self-exile in Paris where she lived in seclusion with her cats. Recollections of Things to Come reflects her unique and dark vision, with its disillusionment, its mixed sympathies, and its pessimistic outlook. But to balance the harsh realities it depicts, the novel offers us the magical and uplifting world of childhood memories, dreams, and the beauty of language.

Yi! You're reminding me how bloody Mexico's history is. Often not a good place to be indio. I've already got this on my "possibles" for this year. Sounds like a good choice. I didn't realize she was Paz's wife.

Category 6: Author Themed Reads

Scandal by Shusaku Endo
First published in Japanese 1986
English translation by Van C. Gessel 1988


("The Double Secret" by René Magritte, 1927)

At age 65 a Japanese novelist known for his rigid Christian values must confront the fact that even he has a dark inner self. Suguro is at a reception following an award ceremony in his honor when a strange woman confronts him. She accuses him of hypocrisy, saying she knows him to be a frequent visitor to peep shows and other sex businesses. Suguro is stunned, assuming she has confused him with someone else. But an ambitious and unprincipled reporter has heard the exchange and is now out to prove that Suguro isn't the faithful husband he claims to be.

Suguro's attempt to clear his name brings him into contact with a side of life--and a side of himself--he did not suspect existed. He explores such phenomena as masochism, sadism, schizophrenia, racial memory, reincarnation, out of body experiences, and astral projection. But the mystery of his red light district impostor, or double, or alternate self, only deepens.

That we all carry within us a secret, evil inner self is the inevitable conclusion of Scandal. In some people this dark side is self-destructive. In others it is sadistic, seeking to destroy that which is most beautiful and which we love the most. Endo's view is rather harshly puritanical, as he appears to equate sexual desire--indeed any form of sensuality--with this dark and evil corner of the human heart. It is also enigmatic that Endo, whose Catholicism dominates much of his writing, steers away from a spiritual interpretation of evil in favor of Freudian language.

Overall I found that Scandal offers only superficial answers to some profound questions. Much of it reads like a catalog of pop psychology ideas and paranormal phenomena. The most convincing part of the novel is the way in which age and failing health have caused Suguro to become introspective, to lose his self-confidence, and to begin to question the assumptions that have shaped his life. I would chiefly recommend this book to those who are already familiar with Endo and want to see a different facet of his writing.

Great review of Scandal but I think I'll pass on the book.

Category 1: The works of Émile Zola

The Fortune of the Rougons by Émile Zola
First published in French 1871
English translation by Brian Nelson 2012


("Near Aix-en-Provence" by Paul Cezanne, c1867)

The Fortune of the Rougons was both the first book written and the first in internal chronology of Zola's 20-volume Rougon-Macquart cycle. It tells of the origins of the Rougon and Macquart families, as well as the beginnings of France's Second Empire in 1851.

The novel begins with the late-night secret rendezvous of two teenage lovers in a secluded cemetery. Silvère, a 17-year-old apprentice coachmaker, has come to take a final stroll with 13-year-old Miette before he leaves to join the insurgents who are protesting the coup d'état in which Louis Napoleon has overthrown the French republic and proclaimed himself emperor. Zola uses their languorous and reluctant walk in the winter moonlight to describe at length the town of Plassans, its people and its surroundings. (Plassans is based on Aix-en-Provence.) Much to their surprise and delight, when they have strayed several miles from Plassans, the two children encounter the very column of republicans whom Silvère has planned to join. Armed with scythes, pitchforks and a few ancient muskets, they march together, singing the Marseilles, into Plassans.

Zola now digresses to give a lengthy history of the family of Adélaïde Fouque, a woman given to strange attacks of the nerves and to unconventional behavior. Inheriting her father's substantial farm, Adélaïde suprises Plassans by marrying a simple peasant named Rougon. She gives him one son, Pierre, before Rougon dies. Adélaïde then begins an affair with a smuggler named Macquart and gives birth to two illegitimate children before Macquart is killed. This sets up a conflict between the two lines: the Rougons: legitimate but somewhat tainted, grasping for wealth and bourgeois respectability; and the Macquarts: passionate and impulsive, nursing a bitterness not only against the legitimate Rougons but against all authority. They and their descendants will people all twenty of the Rougon-Macquart novels, a series which chronicles in parallel the crimes and foibles of the Second Empire.

Returning to the present we find the Rougons and the Macquarts on opposite sides of the political divide. Pierre Rougon has sided with the reactionaries and is scheming to use the uprising to serve his personal ambitions. Silvère, a descendant of the Macquart line, has, of course, joined the peasants and laborers who will strive in vain to restore the Republic. The contrast between the two leaves no doubt where Zola's sympathies lay.

But Zola's stated purpose in writing The Fortune of the Rougons and its sequels is to study human personality and behavior as it is shaped by two factors: heredity and environment. He doesn't describe his characters as "good" or "evil," but rather as the inevitable end result of the factors that went into their making. Zola's notions of human psychology and heredity are both archaic and simplistic by modern standards, but this detracts very little from the value of the novel.

"For a moment he thought he could see, in a flash, the future of the Rougon-Macquart family, a pack of wild, satiated appetites in the midst of a blaze of gold and blood." With this teaser, Zola gives us a foretaste of the Rougon-Macquart novels he had yet to write. The Fortune of the Rougons serves as both a standalone novel and as an introduction to what is to come. Zola does introduce a number of characters who will become significant only in later volumes, and his true masterpieces were yet to come, but The Fortune of the Rougons is worthwhile on its own.

Category 2: London in Fiction and Fact

Tipping the Velvet by Sarah Waters
First published 1998


("In Bed, the Kiss" by Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, 1892)

Tipping the Velvet is a lesbian love story set in the boisterous London of the 1880-90s. The narrator is Nancy Astley, the daughter of a restaurateur in Whitstable, a town famous for its oysters. Nancy grows up with a passion for the musical variety shows that were the most popular form of stage entertainment for the lower classes. Many of these shows featured male impersonators, young women performing song and dance routines in trousers that showed off their figures. Nancy becomes infatuated with one such performer, a girl only a few years older named Kitty Butler. She attends every one of Kitty's shows, not, of course, without attracting Kitty's notice. Before long the two become acquainted, and Kitty hires Nancy to be her dresser. When Kitty receives an offer to take her show to London, Nancy goes with her. Eventually Nancy's singing talent is discovered, and she becomes part of the act herself. Finally, as Nancy has been hoping all along, the two become lovers.

But her success with Kitty is only the beginning of Nancy's tumultuous life in London. Her experiences will range from abject poverty to luxurious opulence and from prostitution to social work. She will learn that the lesbian women of London have their own working class bars and their own exclusive clubs, and that they are prominent in high society as well as socialist political causes.

Sarah Waters makes Nancy's lesbianism as much a part of the novel--no more and no less--than the heterosexuality of any other 19th century heroine or hero. Though she knows she must conceal her orientation, Nancy Astley neither questions why she is a lesbian nor feels any shame or guilt. It is as natural to her as having two eyes. Religion, it should be noted, is entirely absent from the novel.

Much of the appeal of Tipping the Velvet is in the novel's convincing picture of the English seaside and London circa 1890, especially the working class neighborhoods and the theater scene. There is attention to the smallest detail, from the food on the table, to the clothes, to the furnishings of a room, to the sights and sounds of everyday street scenes. One can read this as a lesbian novel set in the late Victorian era, or as an historical novel that just happens to feature a lesbian character; either way it is a most entertaining book.

Category 17: Experimental Fiction

The Castle of Communion by Bernard Noël
First published in French 1969
Current version published 1990
English translation by Paul Buck and Glenda George 1993


("The Evening Gown" by René Magritte, 1954)

The Castle of Communion is a protest against what Noël calls "sensureship." The bourgeois establishment, he says, has impoverished language of its meanings and power of imagination as a subtle form of brainwashing. The novel, much of which was written in response to the Algerian War, is also a more direct protest against colonialism and racism. Noël explained his motivations in a 1975 essay entitled "The Outrage Against Words" which is appended to the novel in the Atlas Press edition.

The novel itself begins in folkloric fashion with the unnamed narrator setting out across the desert interior of a large, fictional island. Eventually he comes to a village on the other shore. The natives are at first very wary of him, as they conduct elaborate nocturnal rituals in apparent worship of the moon. Gradually he gains their trust, and is finally invited to participate. He finds himself the focus of the strange rite, in which he is both punished and pleasured. He also gets his first glimpse of an amazingly beautiful woman who appears at the head of a procession clad only in her flowing red hair.

After the ceremony, the narrator inquires after the mysterious beauty. He learns that she is known as the "Countess," and that she lives in a castle on an island off the shore. It is she who invents and directs the rites in which he has participated. Aside from her monthly appearance, it is forbidden to see or approach her. Naturally, our narrator wastes no time in setting out for the forbidden island.

With his arrival on the island, the narrator's experiences move from the exotic into the surreal. Strange and dreamlike visions alternate or coincide with extreme violence and bizarre sexual experiences as though the narrator is being tested in a series of ordeals. Eventually he concludes "What the world shows me is not there. What I see emerges barely from the edge of habit. What I see myself in the process of seeing is actually what I create and that is all that exists." Eventually he begins to take control of the situation by controlling his pain and fear, overcoming his prejudices and assumptions, and replacing the meanings projected upon him with meanings and images of his own choosing.

Much of The Castle of Communion is confusing. It is a labyrinth of mythic landscapes and geometric constructs that probably stand for nothing at all and are only a protest against the convention that says everything must have a definition and a purpose. The novel also has passages that are deliberately and shockingly obscene, again as a protest against the "sensureship" of language. It is recommended for those who appreciate literature that is unconventional, challenging, and transgressive.

Category 15: Science Fiction and Fantasy

Doomsday Book by Connie Willis
First published 1992


("The Dance of Death")

Doomsday Book is a suspenseful and moving story of sacrifice and devotion. It is also an artful blend of science fiction and historical fiction.

The novel begins in 2054 in Oxford, England, where university researchers are using a time machine to send historians back into the past. A young woman named Kivrin is about to be sent back to the year 1320 to report on village life in the vicinity of Oxford. But this is not a routine mission. Missions to the Middle Ages are considered too dangerous for human explorers, but with the faculty head away on Christmas vacation, an ambitious department head has authorized the mission in his stead and rushed carelessly through the preparations. Kivrin's mentor, Mr. Dunworthy, can only offer a helpless protest as his favorite student vanishes into the distant and alien past where she will be alone and out of touch for weeks until her retrieval.

Dunworthy's fears are only too well-founded, but in ways that he couldn't possibly have imagined. Kivrin no sooner arrives in the Middle Ages than she is stricken with disease that renders her delirious and helpless. And disease strikes 21st century Oxford as well, incapacitating hundreds and raising doubts whether they will be able to bring Kivrin back even if she is able to return to the drop point. But the worst is yet to come, for Kivrin is neither where nor when she is supposed to be, and she is about to be plunged into one of humankind's darkest hours.

Connie Willis writes science fiction with a bare minimum of science. Except for the existence of time travel, her 2050s are no different from the 1990s. Doomsday Book is more about the past than the future, but it is even more about the timeless question of what binds one human being to another or to a community, even to the point of sacrificing ourselves. It is no coincidence that the novel takes place at Christmastime. Anguishing over Kivrin's unknown fate, Dunworthy wonders how God could ever have sent His son knowingly into a cruel world and to a crueler end. And Kivrin, surrounded by infinite suffering, questions how people can possibly continue to believe in a God that would bring such misery and destruction down upon the innocent. Yet each finds a form of sanctity in the love and devotion of those who persevere on behalf of others in the face of all adversity.

What could have been an unbearably grim story is lightened by a surprising amount of humor, largely directed at academia but also poking fun at Americans, overprotective mothers and religious zealots. This is a science fiction novel to recommend to those who don't particularly care for the genre, because with it's vivid picture of life and death in the 14th century it reads more like historical fiction. I found it unputdownable and highly rewarding.

Glad to read your review of the Willis. I read To say nothing of the dog in 2012 and it was very good, though quite lighthearted. I'm going to put the The Doomsday book on my Wishlist.

So glad you liked Doomsday Book! I enjoyed it too...actually, it depressed me horribly, but it was definitely a good book! I have to say, I prefer To Say Nothing of the Dog and Bellwether, as they're a bit more lighthearted!

Category 16: Decadence, Gothic and Surrealism

Opium and Other Stories by Géza Csáth
Stories written in Hungarian 1908 to 1912
English translation by Jascha Kessler and Charlotte Rogers 1980


("The Opium Smoker's Dream" by Lajos Gulácsy, 1918)

Géza Csáth, born 1887, was an upper middle class Hungarian who showed considerable talent as an artist, writer, musician and composer before deciding of his own volition to enter medical school. He devoted his early career to researching the origins of mental disorders, a fascination which carries over to the short stories he was writing at the time. At the same time, however, Csáth became addicted to opium. During the First World War he began his own descent into insanity. In 1919 he killed his wife, was institutionalized, escaped, and then killed himself.

Csáth's short stories are a mixture of the tragic, the absurd, the macabre and the fantastic. The author's mother died when he was a young child, leading evidently to a sense of betrayal that caused him to depict mothers as uncaring. Children are often the principal subjects of his stories, and they are typically angry and sadistic, wreaking violence and death on their pets, their siblings, and especially their mothers. In other stories young men are tantalized with the prospect of sexual pleasures, only to be thwarted by indifferent females, by their own inhibitions, or by waking at the wrong moment to find it was all a dream.

Csáth is not entirely misogynistic, however. In "Festal Slaughter" he presents a remarkably sensitive portrait of a servant girl who must rise in the freezing dawn to prepare for the slaughter of a sow by a visiting butcher. Along with her employer's family she works to exhaustion that day processing the carcass, making sausages, etc., only to be casually raped by the butcher before he leaves. She is just as much a piece of meat to her culture as the sow.

In the title story, "Opium," Csáth praises his favorite drug. Sure it shortens your life, he argues, but it slows time and extends the pleasures of each day. You may live, at most, for ten years, but in those ten years you will experience twenty million years of bliss before letting "your head fall on the icy pillow of eternal annihilation." Other stories present perhaps a more cautionary picture of addiction, such as one in which the narrator is plagued by dreams of a giant, fearsome toad in his kitchen.

There is a bit of black comedy in the collection as well, such as in the story "Father, Son" where a young man returns to Hungary from America to retrieve his father's skeleton from a medical college where it has just been put on display in a classroom. There is social satire too, such as the story "Musicians" wherein the players in a civic orchestra discover that it their politics, not their performance, that will win them new instruments.

I would characterize Géza Csáth as "Poe + Freud," as his macabre, drug-fueled visions are informed by a professional's knowledge and clinical experience with mental illness. His writings also reflect the final convulsions of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a dream world of sorts itself. These are not great stories, but many are quite good and would appeal to anyone with an interest in the literature of the period or of drug addiction.

Thanks for such a wonderful review! This is definitely going toward the top of my wishlist....

Category 5: Reading Globally

Mierla Domesticita: Blackbird Once Wild, Now Tame by Nicolae Dabija
Poems first published in Romanian 1992
English translation by John Michael Flynn 2012


("All Lanes of Lilac Evening" by Max Ernst, 1975)

Prior to its independence in 1991, Moldova was one of the constituent republics of the USSR. Though it's people traditionally spoke a dialect of Romanian, Russian was the official language in Soviet Moldova, and many people grew up speaking only Russian. Nicolae Dabija, as a politician, newspaper editor and poet, was one of the Moldovan's working to preserve the native language and culture. Barely a year after Moldova's independence, he published this collection of poems in Romanian.

But rather than celebrating his country's new identity and the restoration of its traditional language and alphabet, Dabija's poetry is an accusing cry of despair at how easily the people succumbed to foreign influence:

"I hear how in this world walk
Peoples without a language their gods tossed into a cart.

"Peoples who have no country.
What are they looking for? What do they want?...

"And if only to awaken after a time, dumb
and to learn the barbarian conquerors have finally left."

In the title poem of the collection, "Blackbird once wild, now tame," Dabija compares his people to a bird that voluntarily gives up its freedom:

"See this bird, once wild, now raised on grain
long ago it forgot how to fly.
See how the humble wind startles
her greasy, lethargic wings.
And in her eyes how the sky perishes....

"this voiceless aviator
who renounced a boundless horizon
for a feeder full of grain."

The first half of the collection consists of political poems such as these, some featuring scenes from folk life, others using mythological allegories.

The second half of the collection is mostly poems dedicated to a lost or recalcitrant lover. I found these to be substantially inferior to the political works, and almost painfully sophomoric at times. In one poem the writer declares that a millennium from now he will be nothing but a handful of clay that "shudders when touched by the clay you've become." And the shortest poem in the collection says only:

"I miss you
the way a wall misses a window."

However, one must give the author the benefit of the doubt and assume that much of the beauty of language was lost in translation. The translator states, in fact, that he had to forego all rhyming in order to preserve the literal meaning. The text is bilingual, and you can see that every poem rhymes in the original Romanian, while none of them does in English translation.

There are several really good poems in this short collection. (My favorite is one titled "The Cat.") But it will be read chiefly because it is one of the few specimens of Moldovan literature available in English translation.

Just dropping by to say how much I love your selection of pictures to go with each book. They all seem to complement their book wonderfully.

#102 - Thank you. I do have a lot of fun selecting the art work.

Category 13: Award-Winners and Shortlists

The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje
First published 1992


("Destroyed House in Kehl" by Arnold Böcklin, 1870)

At the end of World War II, four people come together at a partially destroyed villa near Florence. There is Hana, the Canadian nurse. After her father's recent death, she has detached herself from all humanity except for the patient she is treating. Her patient, a man burned beyond recognition and claiming to have forgotten even his own name and nationality, is known only as the "English patient." He is too weak to be moved, Hana claims, so she and he have been left behind when the rest of the field hospital moved on.

But soon Hana is joined by an old friend of her father's, David Caravaggio, a thief turned spy until he was captured by the Germans and mutilated. Now he clings to Hana for companionship and for the morphine he steals from her supplies. Finally there is Kirpal Singh, "Kip," a young Indian Sikh in the British army. Kip is a sapper, highly trained in bomb disposal, and he is billeted alone at the villa to clear the area of unexploded bombs, mines and booby traps.

Much of the novel consists in non-sequential flashbacks telling the past of each of the characters, but especially of the English patient. Though he won't reveal his identity, he tantalizes Hana and her companions with tales of his life as an explorer and archaeologist in the Sahara and of his tragic love affair with his friend's wife, Katherine.

The English Patient is a beautifully told story of four complex characters. It is rich both in humanity and historical insight, as it portrays a time when the future was a bleak unknown for those who had been maimed, physically or emotionally, and cast adrift by war.

Hi. I saw your review of Doomsday Book on the home page. Doomsday Book is on my Top Ten Books list, despite it's many flaws. I just wanted to say how much I enjoyed your excellent review.

Lovely review of The English Patient and choice of art work to go with it. I read this book many years ago, at that time one of the few books I'd read that wasn't science fiction or fantasy, and I loved it. It was like the four people had found themselves a quite restful place outside of time, a step away from reality for a bit, and it was wonderful just to pause with them and find out more about them. Thanks for reminding me of it. I definitely plan to reread this someday.

I'm glad The English Patient is part of my challenge this year!

Category 5: Reading Globally

The Song of Everlasting Sorrow by Wang Anyi
First published in Chinese 1995
English translation by Michael Berry and Susan Chan Egan 2008


(The entrance to a typical Shanghai longtang.)

The Song of Everlasting Sorrow is a novel equally about a woman and a city. The city is Shanghai, and the story opens in its last days of decadent opulence in the 1940s. The woman is Wang Qiyao, as a teenager a striking young beauty who has been raised on Hollywood movies and a mix of Chinese and Western fashions. Her life is that of a typical Shanghai girl until, with the help of a friend, Wang Qiyao gets a glimpse at the world of her dreams backstage at a Shanghai film studio. This leads to her being noticed by an amateur photographer who makes her his lifetime obsession. His photos of Wang Qiyao catapult her to local fame and a place in the 1946 "Miss Shanghai" beauty pageant.

Wang Qiyao's feminine world is echoed in the author's descriptions of Shanghai itself:

"Shanghai's splendor is actually a kind of feminine grace; the scent carried by the wind is a woman's perfume.... The shadows of the French parasol trees seem to carry a womanly aura, as do the oleanders and the lilacs in the courtyard--the most feminine of flowers. The humid breeze during the rainy season is a woman's little temper tantrum, the murmuring sound of Shanghainese is custom-made for women's most intimate gossip. The city is like one big goddess, wearing clothes plumed with rainbows, scattering silver and gold across the sky."

Wang Qiyao lives in a "longtang," the traditional Shanghai residential block consisting of a group of connected houses fronting a single narrow alley. There are detailed descriptions of the longtang and changes that both it and Wang Qiyao undergo over time as history sweeps across Shanghai.

But the tumultuous events of Chinese history from the 1940s to the 1980s are seen only indirectly. The name of Mao Zedong is never mentioned, nor that of any other public figure. Instead what we see through Wang's eyes are the changes in fashions, in music, and in the menus of restaurants. We see the city slowly darken and decay, then burst back into life again in 1976, but only in a cheap imitation of its former glory. Observing the sudden explosion of gaudy but poorly made and ill-fitting clothes, Wang Qiyao observes that "nothing could escape the prevailing crudeness and mediocrity in the general rush to produce instant results."

Wang herself has friendships with a number of women and affairs with several men, but never commits herself emotionally. Always seeking to recapture the glory of her youth when all of Shanghai was her admirer, she keeps others at arm's length. She is a creature of a Shanghai of the past, but when that Shanghai finally tries to recreate itself, Wang Qiyao discovers that "her world had returned, but she was now only an observer."

The characters in most of the Chinese fiction I have read are notably plain-spoken, thick skinned, and wear their emotions for all to see. The Song of Everlasting Sorrow is quite different. The language is lyrical, poetic, and at times almost magical. The characters are complex and subtle, reluctant to show their true feelings or to take action. Emotions are suggested by a single tear or a sharp turn of the head. In the same way, sweeping historical and social changes are only hinted at by the accumulation of dust on a window sill or the gradual fading of a treasured but never worn silk dress.

This is a beautifully written and intimate novel with subtle patterns and ironies. It offers a unique urban and domestic perspective on modern China that both contrasts and complements the more masculine perspective of most Chinese novelists.

Wow, that painting you chose for the review of The English Patient is eerily similar to how I pictured the villa in the book. Excellent choice and great review too!

Category 17: In the Slipstream

Out of Oneself by András Pályi
Two novellas published in Hungarian in 1996 and 2001
English translation by Imre Goldstein 2005


("Death and the Maiden" by Egon Schiele, 1915)

Out of Oneself is a collection that consists of a pair of novellas that explore erotic desire as a force that is both redemptive and destructive.

"Beyond," the first piece, begins with a priest describing his own funeral. He has killed himself but is being given a church funeral because the provost (his uncle) managed to have him declared insane. Now he is a specter not only looking back on the events that led to his demise, but in some strange way reliving them, even making different choices, but seeing them lead over and over to the same end.

His story begins in 1936 when he has just celebrated his first mass and was approached by a beautiful young actress. In private the woman tells him about being troubled by memories of her childhood, but it is obvious that she is strongly attracted to him. He can't deny that the attraction is mutual, and before long they are having an affair. The priest can't find it in himself to believe that their love is wrong, yet each time he relives it, the end is the same. In his mind this endless destruction and resurrection takes on religious symbolism.

The second story, titled "At the End of the World," is set in Budapest in the 1980s. The principal female character is, again, an actress. On the set of a movie she finds herself attracted to the screenwriter. They are both still in their teens, and they have both left the homes of their foster or step-parents feeling as though they were cast out alone and in the rain. The girl has further anxieties from having been sexually molested by her stepfather since she was a small child.

Their attraction for each other is immediately and intensely physical. "Love is like God, we create it and believe in it. The pure moment is something else. Screaming, fear, pleasure, abandon." But the passion which redeems them from their sense of abandonment turns quickly into something they cannot control. "They had gone from slavery to freedom and then back to slavery. How could that have happened?"

The two stories both explore sexual psychology, but with their repetitive cycles of passion and despair they may also be historical allegories as well. The first instance depicting fascism with its antisemitism, the second communism with its class conflict. The male protagonist in each novella has his own prejudices to blame, in part, for his fate.

Earlier authors such as Georges Bataille have explored the linkage between eroticism, death and religion. These novellas are much in the same vein, and Out of Oneself will appeal to anyone who has enjoyed Bataille's work.

Category 4: Translated from the Spanish

Firefly by Severo Sarduy
First published in Spanish 1990
English translation by Mark Fried 2013
An Early Reviewer book


("Self Portrait" by Rufino Tamayo)

Firefly is a fanciful and bitter composite portrait of Havana, past and present, as seen through the eyes and dreams of a mentally deficient youth named "Firefly," who is described as "melon-headed" and "Chinese-eyed" and begins the story sitting on a chamber pot.

Firefly's adventures are a series of encounters, embarrassments, revelations and escapes, many of them so surreal that Firefly convinces himself they are dreams or hallucinations. But the same bizarre and sordid characters keep turning up, leading him to conclude that he is surrounded by a diabolical conspiracy that is turning the city into a cesspit of vice.

Sarduy's language is ornate, colorful, and often playfully contradictory. A woman's shoes "looked like a frightened lizard had wrapped itself around her feet." Fresh air reeks, and a surface glimmers with the sheen of tarnished metal. The novel is also alarmingly adrift in time: People ride in carriages and use chamber pots, but they also listen to the radio and use hair spray. Later a sailing ship arrives in Havana and unloads a cargo of African slaves, but as the slaves were being auctioned on the dock, in the background "a pulley gave way and a big-screen television shattered against a mast."

Firefly himself muses on the relationship between literature and reality:

"'What they call writing,' he said to himself, 'must be just that: to be able to make some order out of things and their reflections.... If I could write,' he continued, 'I could make things appear and disappear as they really are instead of the jumbled way they look in the window, all mixed up with their reflections."

So Sarduy's purpose in giving us this anachronistic, paranoid and hallucinatory vision of his native city is to "make things appear and disappear as they really are." Firefly is a wild ride through the places and times of Havana--from boarding school to bordello, from gardens to slums, and from monastery to slave market. It is irreverent, raunchy and darkly comic and entertains though it doesn't always make sense. It is recommended for those who enjoy magical realism and experimental fiction.

Category 15: Science Fiction and Fantasy

The Slynx by Tatyana Tolstaya
First published in Russian 2000
English translation by Jamey Gambrell 2003


("Invention of the Monsters" by Salvador Dali, 1937)

Two hundred years after "The Blast" life goes on in a nameless Russian community. Benedikt is a typical Golubchik, a free member of the working class. By day he works copying the works of his great leader, Fyodor Kuzmich, on sheets of bark. After work he catches a few mice for his supper (mice being almost the only creatures left that are safe to eat), and by night he occasionally has nightmares about the Slynx, the deadly and invisible monster that lives in the woods.

Though Benedikt isn't a member of the privileged Murza class, at least he seems to be free of the Consequences (mutations) that have deformed many of his fellow Golubchiks. And he is certainly better off than the Serfs who wait on the Murzas or the sub-human Degenerators who go about on all fours and pull the Murza's sleds.

The first half of The Slynx is a detailed picture of Benedikt's life, his community, and its social structure. There isn't much in the way of plot; instead it is an obvious satire of Russian culture, both before and after the collapse of the USSR. One might call it a post-apocalyptic Animal Farm.

In the second half of the novel, Benedikt marries into the Murza class. He becomes a Saniturion, an agent whose job it is to seize pre-Blast books that the Golubchiks are hoarding. The purpose is not to destroy the books, but to preserve them. The ignorant Golubchiks, after all, are likely to use them just to light fires or wipe their bums. But are the Murzas any less ignorant? Does it do any good to respect our cultural heritage if we refuse to learn from it?

In the end The Slynx becomes a sort of reverse Fahrenheit 451, painting an even gloomier portrait of a species doomed to repeat endlessly the mistakes of its past, just as post-Communist Russia is reinventing many of the evils of the USSR. As a reading experience, The Slynx is rather uneven. Parts of it are hilarious, and parts are prophetic, but the first half of the novel often seems to be going nowhere. It requires a little patience to get to the midpoint, at which point the plot and themes finally begin to emerge.

Category 4: Translated from the Spanish

The Gaucho Martín Fierro by José Hernández
First published in Spanish 1872
English translation by Frank G. Carrino, Alberto J. Carlos, and Norman Mangouni 1974


("Posta de San Luis" by Juan León Pallière, 1858)

Considered Argentina's national epic, The Gaucho Martín Fierro is not a story of historic events, heroic deeds, or noble sacrifice. Instead it is the tale of a typical gaucho who struggles to maintain his traditional lifestyle in the face of tyranny and corruption.

The gauchos were the South American equivalent of the North American cowboys: independent, unlettered, hard drinking, often nomadic, and frequently violent. Martín Fierro is one such gaucho, but he lives under a government which disapproves of his freedom. Martín is pressed into military service, ostensibly to defend against bands of raiding natives. But instead he is put to work doing backbreaking labor for his commander and local landowners. He is fed poorly, and the promised pay never seems to arrive. Finally Martín deserts and becomes an outlaw, living by his wits and his prowess with a knife.

The poem is told in simple, homespun language appropriate to its subject. The translators did not attempt to preserve the meter or the rhyme from the original Spanish. Instead, they produced a line-by-line literal translation in free verse. The result is a poem that is extremely easy to read and that can be consumed in a single sitting. But whatever beauty there may have been in the original Spanish verse has been lost.

Category 6: Author Themed Reads

The Toilers of the Sea by Victor Hugo
First published in French 1866.
English translation by James Hogarth 2002


("Octopus" by Victor Hugo)

The Toilers of the Sea is part travelogue, part love story, and part crime thriller. But above all it is an exciting and inspiring story of a man's lonely and desperate struggle for survival and success against the implacable forces of nature.

The principal setting is the island of Guernsey, one of the Channel Isles off the French coast but belonging to England. Victor Hugo spent fifteen years in exile there, and wrote his novel while living on Guernsey. The first part of the novel is a detailed description of the islands with their unique history, culture, customs and myths.

Most Guernseymen make their living from the sea, and the characters in the novel are no exception. Gilliatt is a man of many trades and talents, but principally a fisherman. He is a loner, not welcomed eagerly into Guernsey society not only because of his uncertain background, but also because he lives in a house believed to be haunted. Mess Lethierry, on the other hand, is a prosperous and respected merchant. The "Mess" is a local honorific denoting his high place in society. His livelihood comes from his ship, the Durande, the first--and still the only--steam-powered vessel based in the Channel Islands. Lastly there is Mess Lethierry's niece Déruchette who lives with him as his daughter. Beautiful and capricious, Déruchette is many a young man's object of adoration, but none more so than Gilliatt.

From the introduction of the setting and the characters we move to a tale of intrigue surrounding a large sum of money once stolen from Mess Lethierry. A chain of events involving smugglers, murder, and betrayal leads to the climactic episode: a solitary man's protracted battle against the sea and its denizens.

Victor Hugo writes with loving attention to every detail so that each scene comes alive. His prose is vibrant and passionate; the pages of background information he gives us are always fascinating and never boring. His most thrilling descriptions are of the sea itself, which becomes a metaphor for man's fate--neither good nor evil, but implacable, unpredictable, and inscrutable. This is a great novel that any fan of 19th century literature should enjoy.

Category 16: Decadence, Gothic and Surrealism

The Road to Darkness by Paul Leppin
A collection of two short novels and a story, published in German 1905, 1914 and 1915
English translation by Mike Mitchell 1997


("Danse Macabre" by Frantisek Kupka, 1896)

Paul Leppin was a German-speaking postal clerk from Prague. His writings were heavily influenced by those of Gustav Meyrink, an older writer associated with Prague, and they show a strong similarity with those of Joris-Karl Huysmans, the most famous novelist of the Decadent movement.

The Road to Darkness is a collection containing three works: Daniel Jesus, a novella first published in 1905, Severin's Road to Darkness, a short novel first published 1914, and "The Ghost of the Jewish Ghetto," a story first published 1914 or 1915. Each of these works is set in Prague and provides a sumptuously detailed look at the city during the waning hours of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy.

In Daniel Jesus the title character is a wealthy, embittered hunchback who delights in corrupting people with his money and his strange seductive power. He breaks up relationships, destroys marriages, and shatters people's religious faith. Those who don't succumb to him are driven to suicide. The climactic scene is a masked ball (masks being the only thing worn) where it becomes obvious that Daniel Jesus is none other than Satan himself.

Severin's Road to Darkness is probably autobiographical to some extent. Severin is a young clerk who finds his thoughts driven--for reasons he can never understand--in an ever darker direction towards despair, murder and suicide. This despite the fact that he is so attractive that he can have almost any woman he wants. He dumps each girlfriend in succession for one more exotic and dangerous than the last, only to become sated, bored, and depressed. Severin haunts the smoke-filled Bohemian cafés where others live a dissolute and purposeless nocturnal existence. When he finally encounters a woman who doesn't bore him, he finds himself treated by her as he has treated others.

"The Ghost of the Jewish Ghetto" is a brief depiction of the government's destruction of Prague's Jewish ghetto around 1900 as seen through the despairing eyes of a syphilitic prostitute. (Leppin himself would die of syphilis in 1945.)

Daniel Jesus has the most entertaining plot of the three pieces, but all three of these works are most notable for their depiction of a unique place and time.

Great review of The Road to Darkness. I'll have to look into it.

Category 20: England, Scotland and Wales

Three Men in a Boat (to say nothing of the dog) by Jerome K. Jerome
First published 1889



Three Men in a Boat is the funniest book I have read in years. It is also a pleasant look at 19th century recreation and a travelogue of the sites between London and Oxford and their histories.

Three young men, all loungers and hypochondriacs, resolve to take a boat trip up the Thames for the sake of their health. From their preparations to the journey's end, it is one zany episode after another. Much of the humor is slapstick: erecting a tent, running aground, and coping with the elements. Other episodes are parodies of human nature: fishermen's tall tales, girls towing a boat, and the "etiquette" of the river.

On the somewhat more serious side, we do learn a lot about what young men (and women) in the 1880s did for recreation. It was a time when fresh water boating had ceased to become a means of transportation (thanks to the railroad) and was becoming, as it is today, a major leisure industry.

Jerome also gives us some mini-lectures on the history of the towns and villages through which the trio pass. He provides a vivid, and devoutly serious, description of what it must have looked like the day the Magna Carta was signed at Runnymede. He is less serious when he describes an artifact at a riverside church:

'There is an iron “scold’s bridle” in Walton Church. They used these things in ancient days for curbing women’s tongues. They have given up the attempt now. I suppose iron was getting scarce, and nothing else would be strong enough.'

Jerome's mock-serious tone of self-parody closely resembles that of Mark Twain. Three Men in a Boat is simply great fun. But this is a book to avoid reading in churches, libraries, funeral parlors, or any other place where silence and solemnity must be maintained. You are liable to injure yourself in the attempt.

Glad you enjoyed Three Men in a Boat. Jerome is usually good for a laugh.

Category 8: Other Group Selections and ER Books

Njál's Saga
Anonymous 13th century Icelander
English translation by Carl F. Bayerschmidt and Lee M. Hollander


("Lava Gorge at Thingvellir, Autumn" by Asgrimur Jonsson, 1947)

Njál's Saga, also known as the Saga of Burnt Njál, describes events in Iceland and elsewhere around the year 1000. The saga is basically the story of a feud and the two generations of men and women who take part in it. It is unknown how much, if any, of the saga is based on real events.

Medieval Iceland had no king. It was governed instead by a very strict and elaborate set of laws enforced by chieftains who acted as judges. All matters of law were decided by civil suit at the annual Assembly. If you killed a man, you owed his family a sum in compensation known as "weregeld." It didn't matter whether you ambushed him and murdered him in cold blood or you killed him in self-defense: you still owed compensation. Unless, of course, his family or friends killed someone in return. Then you were even. This notion of human life as a commodity of exchange, with minimal consideration for motive or morality, is so totally alien to our modern way of thinking that it takes some time to adjust to it.

The story begins with a young woman named Hallgerd. When her uncle meets Hallgerd as a young girl, he says "Beautiful this maiden certainly is, and many are likely to suffer for it." This turns out to be a dramatic understatement, for Hallgerd's beauty is the death of three husbands and dozens more besides. Even after her death, men will be dying from the feud she will soon begin.

Njál, the central character, is, ironically, one of the few men in the saga who never lifts a sword in combat. He is a prosperous farmer, knowledgeable in the law, and blessed with a second sight that lets him see the future. Njál advises his friend and neighbor, Gunnar, when Gunnar marries Hallgerd and is drawn into a series of conflicts by her. Unlike Njál, Gunnar is a mighty warrior, and his prowess in battle is almost superhuman.

Gunnar is also the first of several major characters who will journey away from Iceland back to the ancestral homelands in Norway. There will also be visits by Gunnar and others to Sweden, the Baltic shores, and the British Isles. Late in the story two adversaries actually make pilgrimages to Rome, but these journeys, unfortunately, are not described in any detail. They do this because, around 1000, Iceland converts to Christianity. This is described in the saga, although the Christianization of its inhabitants has remarkably little impact on Iceland's legal system and its custom of prolonged blood feuds.

The saga is lively enough to read, notwithstanding the long legal battles over compensation for the slain. Some of the scenes of battles and sea voyages are quite stirring, but the chief attraction of Njál's Saga has to be its depiction of a unique society and its valiant, but brutal, code of conduct.

I really wanted to like that one and tried twice, but I couldn't get past the violence and dry style.

Category 6: Author Themed Reads

A Harlot High and Low by Honoré de Balzac
Originally published in four volumes, 1838 to 1847,
as Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes
English translation by Rayner Heppenstall 1970


("The Grande Odalisque" by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, 1814. This is the original of which a detail appears on the cover of the Penguin edition of the novel.)

Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes, a title rendered somewhat crudely in this English edition as A Harlot High and Low, is one of the last completed novels in Balzac's monumental cycle La Comédie humaine. Several of its characters make appearances in earlier novels, but it may most handily be considered a sequel of Lost Illusions. Together the two large novels chronicle the career of the ambitious and amorous young poet, Lucien Chardon de Rubempré.

Lucien is the novel's central character, but he disappears from its pages for long stretches. The dominant personality is that of Father Carlos Herrera, the Spanish priest who rescues Lucien from financial and moral destitution. Who is this mysterious cleric, and why does he rescue a complete stranger from the brink of suicide and set him up as one of Paris's most prominent young men of fashion? Herrera, as Lucien's sponsor and mentor, tries to maneuver the poet into a profitable marriage, but he cannot prevent the lad from falling in love with Esther Gobseck, a ravishing young prostitute. But Herrera works to turn this to his advantage, controlling not only Lucien but Esther as puppets on a string with the aid of his two extraordinary henchwomen, nicknamed "Europe" and "Asia."

The novel takes place almost entirely in Paris from 1824 to 1830, a period that coincides with the reign of Charles X, France's last Bourbon king. Balzac depicts a society dominated by a corrupt and dissolute aristocracy. The titled and the rich marry for power and position, then openly take mistresses and lovers, often with their spouse's active assistance. Lucien, with a cynicism typical of the time, is courting the hand of a duke's daughter while publicly being the lover of a married countess and secretly living with a prostitute.

Balzac's novels focus on different aspects of French life and culture. In this case he documents the workings of the police and courts system. We see that there were two rival police agencies, the Judicial Police and the Political Police, rarely cooperating and often working at cross purposes. Some agents had managed to maintain their power base and network of spies through several successive regimes, and were as capable of working against the law as on its behalf. The prison and courts system are also described in some detail, and it is no surprise to learn that justice is dispensed as often on the basis of political influence as on guilt or innocence.

A Harlot High and Low is a remarkable novel for several reasons, one of which is the absence of a dominant or sympathetic character. (Esther, the "Harlot," is the novel's most likable character, but she exits the story about midway through the novel.) Also notable is Balzac's frankness in depicting such things as prostitution, promiscuity, corruption and homosexuality. The Penguin edition is nicely translated and introduced by Rayner Heppenstall (though I would have chosen a more elegant title), but surprisingly has no footnotes or endnotes to explain the occasional now-obscure reference to contemporary culture.

I would recommend that you read at least Lost Illusions first. If you enjoy it, and you want to see what becomes of Lucien and learn what the mysterious Spanish priest is up to, then you will find A Harlot High and Low quite rewarding.

Category 20: England, Scotland and Wales

The Isles: A History by Norman Davies
First published 1999


("Stonehenge" by William Turner, c. 1828)

The Isles: A History is a history of the British Isles focusing on two key issues: first, the evolution and interrelationships of its constituent parts, England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland, and, second, the relationship between the Isles as a whole and the rest of Europe. It is a revisionist approach to the extent that Davies tries to undo the anglocentric bias of previous historians.

The author begins with a lecture on terminology. You should not say "England" when you mean "Britain," or "Great Britain" when you mean "The United Kingdom." Nor should you use labels before their time. There was no England until the Anglo-Saxons came. There was no Scotland before the Scots. He goes to the extent of inventing his own names for places rather than use a common term anachronistically. Pre-Celtic Wales, for example, is called "The Afternoon Country."

The work is divided chronologically into ten chapters. Each chapter is further subdivided into three sections. The first section sets the theme for the chapter by giving us a detailed look at some event or issue, usually from an outsider's perspective. We see, for example, events in Denmark leading up to the Norse invasions of the Isles. The middle section of each chapter is the meat of the book, discussing the history of that period in an approach that is more thematic than chronological. Each chapter then concludes with an essay on the historiography of the period, showing how interpretations of the period have evolved over time.

Davies appears to presume that the reader will have at least a basic knowledge of British history beforehand. He spends relatively little time chronicling people and events, focusing instead on institutions, ideas and attitudes. This is especially true from the Tudor period onward. He doesn't bother much with Henry VIII and his wives, but has a lot to say about the Acts of Union in 1707 which joined the Kingdom of Scotland and the Kingdom of England, forming the Kingdom of Great Britain. Similarly there is very little said about the Napoleonic Wars, but much about The Acts of Union in 1800 which created the United Kingdom.

The institutions which receive the most attention are those that have a bearing on Britons' self-image and relationships with Europe. There are, for example, extended treatments of organized athletics and the implementation of the metric system. Relatively little attention is given, by comparison, to such topics as education and health care.

Davies was writing in 1999 at a time when Britain was facing questions fundamental to its identity. Scotland had just been granted its own Parliament, and Wales its own Assembly, leading to the possible (and inevitable, according the the author) breakup of the United Kingdom into four independent nations. The UK was also torn between adopting the Euro and a tighter integration with Europe (both inevitable and desirable per Davies) on the one hand, and continuing its Atlantic partnership as the USA's sidekick on the other. Davies concludes that the United Kingdom is not a nation-state, but rather a dynastic assemblage of nations dominated by its largest member the way (in a far less gentle fashion) Russia dominated the USSR or Serbia dominated Yugoslavia.

The Isles: A History is very well written, often captivating, and full of fascinating detail and valuable insight. It is worth reading even if the author's focus on national identity and European integration isn't to your liking. His intended audience is a person who already has a basic knowledge of British history, so if the topic is entirely new to you some supplementary reading might be advisable.

The Isles sounds really interesting -- sounds like it focuses on issues I've always been curious about.

That does sound interesting - I have noted that even some people who should know better use GB when they should say UK and vice versa (Great Britian being the main island consisting of England, Scotland and Wales and the UK also including NI) - does it have any discussions of the various protectorates and how they fit in? such as Isle of Man & Jersey and Guernsey or the 14 overseas territories? (that include the troublesome Falklands and Gibraltar)? I've been looking for a book on these lesser known parts for a while

does it have any discussions of the various protectorates and how they fit in? such as Isle of Man & Jersey and Guernsey or the 14 overseas territories? (that include the troublesome Falklands and Gibraltar)?

Not as much as I expected, given the author's emphasis on the non-English part of the UK. The Isle of Man gets prominent mention during the early medieval period, but not much afterward. I don't recall his mentioning the Channel Islands except in the introduction. The overseas territories get only a brief reference with respect to their ambiguous citizenship.

Category 2: London in Fiction and Fact

Hawksmoor by Peter Ackroyd
First published 1985


(Christ Church Spitalfields, Nicholas Hawskmoor, 1714-29)

Hawksmoor is the story of two lives, eerily synchronized though they are 270 years apart. The stories are told in alternating chapters, starting with that of Nicholas Dyer, a London architect and assistant to Sir Christopher Wren in the early 18th century. His modern counterpart is Nicholas Hawksmoor, a police detective.

Nicholas Dyer is actually loosely based on a real person named Nicholas Hawksmoor who designed and built six churches in London between 1713 and 1733. The Nicholas Dyer of the novel designs the same six churches (plus one more), but his personality is pure invention. As a boy, Dyer survives the two cataclysms that wrack London in 1666: the Great Plague and the Great Fire. He owes his survival to the leader of a satanic cult, whose follower he becomes. Later it becomes his obsession to consecrate the churches he builds to Satan by entombing a murder victim beneath them. The Dyer chapters are narrated in first person using the archaic and irregular spelling and capitalization typical of the time.

Nicholas Hawksmoor, the modern detective, doesn't actually appear until midway through the book. First we are witness to a series of murders, then Hawksmoor comes on the scene to attempt to solve them. In many details his life echoes or parallels the life of Nicholas Dyer. Each has an assistant named Walter. They live in similar circumstances. They experience the same incidents on the streets of London. They hear children singing the same songs. And they visit the same locales, for the murders that Hawksmoor is trying to solve have been committed on the grounds of Dyer's churches.

Nicholas Dyer is a mystic and fatalist at the dawn of the Age of Reason and Enlightenment. When Christopher Wren proudly shows off the newest developments in science, Dyer counters with his belief that mankind is in fatal decline. "And are you acquainted with the Science of Opticks?," Wren asks. "Do I see Visions, sir?" is Dyer's disarming reply. Wren later insists, "But, Nick, our Age can at least take up the Rubbidge and lay the Foundacions: that is why we must study the principles of Nature, for they are out best Draught." But Dyer argues, "No, sir, you must study the Humours and Natures of Men: they are corrupt, and therefore your best Guides to understand Corrupcion."

This same sort of debate occurs internally as Nicholas Hawksmoor searches in vain for clues to the identity of the serial killer. His police work is meticulous and state-of-the-art. But as it avails him nothing, he starts to search for feelings and instincts. Before long his frustration and self-doubt develop into fear and wild imaginings. He goes into a physical decline and even begins to question his perception of reality: "...could it be that the world sprang up around him only as he invented it second by second and that, like a dream, it faded into the darkness from which it had come as soon as he moved forward?"

Our understanding of time and reality and the age-old conflict between the rational and the spiritual are the principal themes in this unusual and captivating novel. Hawksmoor has the attributes of both a mystery novel and historical fiction, but in the end it is neither. It is unique and highly recommended.

>125 StevenTX: - I may still check it out

I have a non-fiction book about the real Hawksmoor on my shelf, having visited a couple of his churches after the references to him in from hell & I've been contemplating Ackroyd's Chatterton so good to see that you enjoyed this one as if chatterton is good I'll probably get this too

Category 1: The Works of Émile Zola

The Kill by Émile Zola
First published 1872
English translation by Brian Nelson 2004


("Vanity" by Auguste Toulmouche, 1890)

The Kill is the second novel in Émile Zola's Rougon-Macquart series, but it stands perfectly well on its own. It's French title, which doesn't translate directly into English, is La Curée, which means the portion of a hunter's kill given as a reward to his dogs. It is a novel about materialism, vanity, sensuality and unprincipled ambition--all of which were characteristics, according to Zola, of Parisian society during the Second Empire (1852-70).

Aristide Rougon comes to Paris with no particular talent but a consuming desire for easy money and penchant for scheming and risk-taking. Under the tutelage of his brother--a government minister--Rougon enters the world of land speculation, buying up properties that are in the way of the new boulevards being planned for Paris. But first his brother insists that Aristide change his surname so that the fall of one doesn't bring down the other by association. Taking a variant of his wife's name, Aristide Rougon becomes Aristide Saccard. The wife soon dies, and Saccard uses his marriageability to raise more cash. He becomes engaged, sight unseen, to a teenage girl who is "in trouble." In return for a tidy sum provided surreptitiously by the girl's aunt, Saccard agrees to take responsibility for the unborn child, which soon miscarries anyway.

Saccard's bride, Renée, becomes the central character of the novel. She has a craving for sensual experiences that matches her husband's lust for wealth. As they become wealthier, Renée becomes ever more extravagant, spending a fortune on gowns and jewelry and displaying her beautiful body more daringly on each occasion. Both husband and wife are openly promiscuous, even to the point of advising each other on their sexual affairs.

Meanwhile Saccard's son by his first wife comes into the picture. Maxime is attractive in a girlish way. He is as dissolute as Aristide, but has none of his father's drive to success. Renée, in her thirst for ever more lascivious entertainments, falls in love with her stepson. The question becomes which house of cards will come crashing down first: Aristide's shaky investments or Renée's incestuous affair.

Zola defines his approach to literature, which he called Naturalism, as a scientific approach to the study of human behavior which looks at a character's heredity and upbringing in a non-judgmental way. In this case, however, he see's Aristide, Renée and Maxime not so much as the products of their individual heritage as the instant creations of a dysfunctional society in general. "In the maddened world in which they lived, their sin had sprouted as on a dunghill oozing with strange juices; it had developed with strange refinements amid special conditions of perversion."

For all his condemnation of the trio's "sins," "crimes," and "monstrous perversions," Zola's prose itself is so erotically charged that it would be easy to accuse the author of hypocrisy. While there is nothing explicit, Zola describes Renée and everything around her with remarkable sensuality. His description of the plants in a hothouse, for example, becomes an analogue for Renée's body with its curves, textures, scents and secretions. Nor does he steer away from references to homosexuality, both male and female. There are even hints that Renée's passion for the effeminate Maxime is evidence of a repressed lesbianism.

Zola's remarkable descriptive powers are the chief attraction in The Kill. He is too savage in his condemnation of the corruption and decadence of the Second Empire to give us a balanced or especially insightful look at the psychology of his characters. Saccard's financial machinations are usually too confusing to follow, and there are long narratives of background information that could have been woven into plot and dialogue. This is not Zola's best work, but it is still well worth reading as an experience in sensory overload.

Category 6: Author Themed Reads

Eugénie Grandet by Honoré de Balzac
First published 1833
English translation by Marion Ayton Crawford 1955


("Money" by Rembrandt)

Avarice is the subject this early novel by Balzac. The story takes place in the town of Saumur on the Loire River and begins in 1819. We are introduced first to the house of Monsieur Grandet. Though it is in the most respectable part of town, it is drab, even shabby. No one would guess that its owner is the wealthiest man in the region. Monsieur Grandet, a former cooper turned vintner and speculator, lives here in a state of fanatical frugality with his meek and long-suffering wife, his pious and attractive 23-year-old daughter, and his secret hoard of gold. The two men who have more than an inkling of old man Grandet's true wealth are his banker and his notary. They pay particular attention to their client because each has a son of marriageable age and Grandet's unattached daughter, Eugénie, is his only heir.

Eugénie is a simple girl who has grown up in plain surroundings and in complete ignorance of her father's vast wealth. She finds nothing peculiar or shameful in her shabby dress, the meager rations her father doles out each day, or the fact that the entire household must share a single candle. She is all but oblivious to her two provincial courtiers, but is devoted to her parents and her faith. Poor Eugénie is in for a shock when her cousin Charles, a Parisian dandy, comes for a surprise visit. She has never seen anything so fine and beautiful in her life as this young man. Eugénie falls head over heels in love with Charles, setting up a clash with her miserly father that tears the family apart. Her love deepens into devotion when Charles soon learns that the reason he was sent to his uncle's was that his father was about to commit suicide.

Midway through the novel, Balzac states its theme: "Misers hold no belief in a life beyond the grave, the present is all in all to them. This thought throws a pitilessly clear light upon the irreligious times in which we life, for today more than in any previous era money is the force behind the law, politically and socially. Books and institutions, the actions of men and their doctrines, all combine to undermine the belief in a future life upon which the fabric of society has been built for eighteen hundred years."

Though Monsieur Grandet, the miser, is the villain of the story, he is so delightfully eccentric and single-minded that he is almost impossible to hate. He manages to squeeze money out of almost every situation convincing others (and perhaps himself) that he is cash poor. He gives his wife and daughter each the most meager of allowances, then takes it back by leaving them to pay for things he has purchased. Every candle and loaf of bread is accounted for, and woe unto her who wastes as much as a crumb! He won't buy what he can borrow or get one of his tenants to give to him.

Eugénie's character isn't as fully developed as that of her father. She is a young woman with only a child's experiences and a child's trusting view of the world. Even after a series of tragedies disillusions her, she is incapable of engaging fully with life. She is like one of her father's gold pieces, locked up forever and out of circulation. Regarding her impulsive devotion to her popinjay cousin, Balzac says "Quite often the things that human beings do appear literally incredible although in fact they have done them.... The very fact that her life had been so untroubled made feminine pity, that most insidious emotion, take possession of her heart more overwhelmingly."

Eugénie Grandet is a wonderful novel, both simpler and shorter than most of Balzac's works. It would be a great place to start reading this author.

Very good review of Eugenie Grandet I love Balzac and need to think about reading more of his books. Cousine Bette is one of my favorites of all time.

Category 6: Author Themed Reads

The Girl with Golden Eyes by Honoré de Balzac
A novella first published 1835 as La Fille aux yeux d'or
in a series of short works titled History of the Thirteen
English translation by Charlotte Mandel, 2007


("The Kiss of the Sphinx" by Franz Stuck)

Balzac begins his brutal little novel about sexual obsession and power in a rather strange fashion--with an embittered portrait of the population of Paris. "One of the most appalling spectacles that exists is undoubtedly the general appearance of the Parisian population, a people horrible to see, gaunt, sallow, weather-beaten." From there he takes us class by class, profession by profession, from the artists and aristocrats to the workmen and the prostitutes, detailing their unwholesome appearance, their flawed character, and their obsessive passions. "In Paris the Petty, the Average, and the Great all run, jump, and caper about, whipped by the pitiless goddess Need: need for money, fame, or fun."

But the Parisians excel in craftiness, dissimulation, and arrogance. We meet a young man who exemplifies these values. Henri de Marsay is the love child of an English lord and a French lady who found an aged nobleman willing to take her as his wife and Henri as his son in exchange for a sum of English gold. Henri's father, we learn, makes a regular habit of pawning off his children and mistresses this way, never giving them a second thought. Henri himself has inherited the most attractive physical characteristics of both nations. With his blue English eyes and his black French hair, he is irresistible and knows it. But finally he encounters a sight even he can't resist: the Girl with the Golden Eyes.

The mysterious tiger-eyed maiden makes only brief appearances in the garden of the Tuileries, strolling with her fiercely protective duenna. She is a dark, exotic beauty with features that suggest both the primitive savagery of the tropics and the decadence of the seraglio. The young men of fashion gather daily just in hopes of catching her eye, but she casts her golden glance at none of them... until she spots Henri. The two feel an instant passion for each other that they know is both imperative and dangerous.

It is days before Henri can penetrate the defensive wall around the Girl with the Golden Eyes enough to learn that her name is Paquita Valdés, that she is from Havana and lives in the home of a Spanish emigre. Eventually it is she, however, who arranges their secret rendezvous. Henri's indomitable ego is about to be engulfed in a fiery passion he can't understand or control. From here the story becomes ever more mysterious, dark, violent and twisted until Paquita's shocking secret is revealed.

For 1835 this is an incredibly frank and daring story of sexual obsession and the affinity between death, power and eroticism. The author's introductory material on the physiognomy and psychology of Paris and Parisians seems overdone, given the narrow focus of what follows, but this is perhaps because Balzac published his novella as part of a larger collection called The History of the Thirteen, so his portrait of Paris may have been meant to relate to other stories as well. The ensuing story of Henri and Paquita is all the more memorable because it starts out like any other 19th century love story, with little warning of what we are about to undergo.

Why would Balzac write a story like this? One hint may be in the numerous references he makes in The Girl with the Golden Eyes to popular 18th century writers and their novels, all dealing with sexual conquest: Samuel Richardson's Pamela and Clarissa, Choderlos de Laclos's Les Liasons Dangereuses, and the Gothic romances of Ann Radcliffe. Perhaps he wanted to cap them all with his short but intense novel of lust and power.

I read the 2007 English translation by Charlotte Mandel, which is highly readable but lacks any feel of the 19th century due to its very modern word choices. I compared select passages with the 100-year-old translation by Ellen Marriage, and found that the two differed only in word choice. Marriage's translation is not the least bit bowdlerized, and those who like the language to have the flavor of the period might actually prefer it over the modern translation.

Category 8: Other Group Selections and ER Books

Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life by Elizabeth Gaskell
First published 1848


("Manchester from Kersal Moore" by William Wylde, 1857)

Elizabeth Gaskell's first novel focuses on the extreme poverty of textile workers in Manchester in the 1830s and 40s and the desperation to which some of them were driven. The author follows two families, the Bartons and the Wilsons, as they descend through various stages of destitution and suffer one tragedy after another. The central character is the Bartons' daughter, Mary, who comes of age during the novel. First Mary's mother dies in childbirth, then her father, John Barton, begins a long moral and physical decline. As hard times beset the textile industry, Barton first has his work hours cut back, then loses his job altogether. Dependent on his daughter's earnings as an apprentice dressmaker, and facing starvation, he spends his few pennies on opium instead of food.

Mary, however, sees hope on the horizon because her beautiful face has caught the attention of the factory owner's privileged son, Harry Carson. Mary Barton naively dreams of a life of riches and comforts as Carson's wife and spurns the attentions of Jem Wilson who is desperately in love with her. John Barton, meanwhile, becomes involved in an organized labor movement, but his depression deepens when their complaints are ridiculed by the factory owners, young Carson among them. A strike fails to bring the owners around, and with the mills shut down the idle workers have almost nothing to feed their families. Disease and malnutrition take a heavy toll while tempers rise. But when Harry Carson is found murdered, the blame is cast on Jem Wilson, Mary's jealous lover.

Gaskell provides a moving description of urban poverty in Manchester. She shows how the poor are treated with callous indifference by their employers and government. But she clearly abhors violent emotions and actions. Instead, the downtrodden are to rely on their Christian faith. "Shall toil and famine, hopeless, still be borne?," the author asks. "No! God will yet arise and help the poor!" (It's worth noting that the poor are to turn to God, but not to the Church. There is no mention of a clergyman in the entire novel.) Gaskell has much in common with her contemporary Harriet Beecher Stowe who, in Uncle Tom's Cabin, advises American slaves to refrain from resistance and violence and, instead, pray themselves out of oppression. And Gaskell makes it clear that her only goal is ameliorate poverty, not to achieve equality or social mobility.

In the love story between the beautiful and pious Mary and the brave and noble Jem, Gaskell gives us the standard elements of 19th century romance: near-tragic misunderstandings caused by her unwillingness to express her true feelings and his jumping to the wrong conclusions. They are, of course, lovable characters, but where I think Gaskell is at her best is in showing us how their friends and relatives, loving and honorable though they may be, still have their individual moments of selfishness, jealousy, and doubt. The minor characters are deeper and more human than the two principals.

From the sappy poems used as chapter epigraphs to the author's pious sermonizing, there is much to find fault with in Mary Barton: A Manchester Tale. The novel's strength is obviously its depiction of a place and time that is not only interesting in itself but important in the evolution of the English working class and its treatment. It never hurts to remind ourselves how things were not so very long ago and why labor laws are needed. The plot, which seems to simply go from one tragedy to another in the first half of the novel, becomes considerably more interesting after the murder and even somewhat suspenseful; a bit of perseverance on the reader's part will pay off in the end. As fiction, Mary Barton doesn't stack up against the works of Austen, Eliot and Dickens, and I found Gaskell's later novel Cranford to be much better, but it's still worth a look, especially for those interested in the setting and subject matter.

@ 132 -- Interesting review of Mary Barton. Have you read North and South by the same author? Based on your review, it sounds like the two books cover similar themes, but North and South does so in a more sophisticated, nuanced way.

Category 18: Literary Centennials

The Nun by Denis Diderot
Written in 1760, revised later and first published posthumously in 1796
English translation by Francis Birrell 1928

 

The Nun was actually first conceived and written as a hoax played by Diderot and a friend of his upon their friend the Marquis de Croismare. The Marquis had sojourned to his estate in Normandy and, finding country life much to his liking, was reluctant to return to Paris and the company of his friends. Diderot recalled that the Marquis had once taken a strong interest in a case where a nun who had been forced by her family to enter a convent against her will had filed a lawsuit to be allowed to renounce her vows. Diderot concocted a series of letters from this nun to the Marquis recounting how, after years of oppression and temptation, she had escaped from the convent and was now in hiding in Paris imploring his aid. Diderot later reworked the letters into a novel, which was published after his death.

The nun, Susan Simonin, was one of three daughters of a middle class couple. Though she was the most attractive and talented, she was the least favored because she was actually the offspring of Mme. Simonin and an unnamed lover. To avoid an expensive dowry, her parents coerced her into entering a convent. Though she is a devout believer, modest, chaste and dutiful, Susan has no taste for conventual life. Susan's complaints and appeals make her hateful to her Superior, who sees that she is punished and ostracized. Even her friends can offer her little hope. "If you are relieved of your vows," one asks, "what will happen to you? What will you do in the world? You have good looks, intelligence, and talents. But I am told that is all useless for a woman who remains virtuous, and virtuous I know you will always be."

Sister Susan is transferred from one convent to another. In one institution a particularly noxious Superior nearly kills the girl by having her flogged, confining her in a dungeon, and feeding her only scraps of food tainted with filth. In another convent her Superior falls hopelessly in love with Susan and won't relent in her kisses and caresses. Susan remains completely innocent of sexual matters and finds the other nun's attentions only somewhat embarrassing. When the Superior has an orgasm, Susan tries to run off to summon medical aid.

Denis Diderot was an atheist, but The Nun is not anti-religious or anti-Catholic. He is attacking only the idea of monasticism. He maintains that most monks and nuns were either forced or coaxed into taking vows before they were old enough to understand what they were doing, and that the vast majority would leave their cloister if allowed. "Are convents then so necessary to the constitution of a state? Did Jesus Christ institute monks and nuns? Can the Church not possibly get on without them? What need has the Bridegroom of so many foolish virgins? Or the human race of so many victims?... Are all the regulation prayers one repeats there worth one obol given in pity to the poor? Does God, Who made man a social animal, approve of his barring himself from the world?"

As a literary work, The Nun is a bridge between the 18th century novels about female abduction by Samuel Richardson (whom Diderot highly admired) and the subsequent Gothic movement. M. G. Lewis, author of The Monk, and Charles Robert Maturin, in Melmoth the Wanderer, may have lifted scenes directly from Diderot's novel.

That sounds rather interesting :)

I'm not reading your review of the Nun because I just bought it about a week ago! I'll be reading it in a couple months. & as for Three Men in a Boat, it's going on the WL. I was curious after Connie Willis's To Say Nothing of the Dog. Nice that she changed the church artifact to a bird stump instead of an iron muzzle.

Category 8: Other Group Selections and ER Books

Under Western Eyes by Joseph Conrad
First published 1911



Joseph Conrad’s purpose in Under Western Eyes is to show to the West that Czarist Russia is a land too harsh and alien to be understood without accounting for the debilitating effect of autocracy on everyone, no matter what their political views. It is to show “the gigantic shadow of Russian life, deepening… like the darkness of an advancing night.”

The novel begins in St. Petersburg with the assassination by anarchists of a state minister. We then meet a university student, an orphan, named Razumov as he returns to his lonely apartment one afternoon. He discovers hiding in his apartment a fellow student, an acquaintance but not a close one, named Haldin. Haldin is the assassin, and he wants Razumov to help arrange his escape.

Razumov has only ill-formed political ideas, but his dilemma is more than a moral one. If he helps Haldin he’s likely to be caught and executed. If he turns him in, the question will immediately arise: Why did the assassin think you would help him? Even under the most optimistic outcome, he will still be under police surveillance for the rest of his days. Razumov vacillates, rationalizes, and finally decides to betray Haldin. This leads, as he knew it would, to hours of tense interrogation and nights of lonely fear.

For reasons not immediately given, Razumov then journeys to Geneva, Switzerland, where he makes contact with a group of Russian revolutionaries in exile. Among them are Haldin’s mother and sister. Knowing only that Haldin praised Razumov in his letters, the pair cling to him for news of their loved one’s last words and deeds. He is treated as a hero by the very people he has hurt the most, and it only adds to his inner turmoil that Razumov can’t help loving Haldin’s sister.

The novel is narrated by an Englishman, a language teacher in Geneva, who consults Razumov’s diary to complete the story. He comes to realize that Russia cannot be understood on the basis of English standards. “I think sometimes that the psychological secret of the profound difference of that people consists in this, that they detest life, the irremediable life of the earth as it is, whereas we westerners cherish it with perhaps an equal exaggeration of its sentimental value.” And regarding the prospects for successful reform: “…at this moment there yawns a chasm between the past and the future. It can never be bridged by foreign liberalism.”

Under Western Eyes is a dark and tense psychological drama with political observations that seem only too prophetic in light of subsequent events that kept Russia under the heel of autocracy.

Category 15: Science Fiction and Fantasy

A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle
First published 1962

 

This one is rather far out of my normal reading zone, so I won’t attempt to review it. I was too old to have read this novel in my childhood, but I’ve heard it mentioned reverently by everyone from a younger sibling down to grandchildren. I was surprised, though, when I read it to see that it had such a serious and symbolic religious theme, placing it in the same category as The Chronicles of Narnia and His Dark Materials. What do children make of these apocalyptic visions? How much do they understand?

Category 7: 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die

The House on the Borderland by William Hope Hodgson
First published 1908

 

The House on the Borderland starts like a conventional horror story. Two men take a fishing trip to a remote region of western Ireland. They enter an area that the locals avoid. There they come upon a vast pit in the ground into which an underground river appears to flow. On the edge of the pit are the crumbled ruins of a building of some sort. Among the debris they find a manuscript. It is damaged but mostly readable. They retire to their tent and spend the entire night reading an incredible tale.

The manuscript is the work of a Recluse who built an estate in this wild and forbidding region to which he might retire with his spinster sister. The Recluse first tells of a strange vision in which he is taken on a journey to the stars. Then he begins to live the events of his vision, only in much greater and more frightening detail. What begins as an earthly battle against a horde of terrifying creatures eventually turns into a cosmic journey to the very end of time and space itself.

What are we to make of all of this? What is the connection between the creatures that swarm up from the pit and the Recluse’s ultimate vision of the deaths of worlds? There may be a deeper meaning to all this, or it may be just mind-stretching entertainment.

Category 5: Reading Globally

A Day in Spring by Ciril Kosmac
Originally published in Slovenian 1954
English translation by Fanny S. Copeland 1959

 

A Day in Spring is a story in which the cycles of love and war mirror the cycles of the seasons. It takes place on the Istrian peninsula, a region formerly part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire which was ceded to Italy after the First World War despite having a population that was mostly Slavic (Croat and Slovene). This was the author, Ciril Kosmac’s, home. As a young man he joined a Slovene anti-Fascist group. He was arrested by Mussolini’s police, imprisoned, released, and went into exile in Yugoslavia. After the Allied victory in World War II, he returned home. This is also the life story of the unnamed narrator of A Day in Spring.

Homecoming after a forced absence of fifteen years is a bittersweet time of reunion and grief. There are the dead—including the narrator’s beloved father, murdered in a German concentration camp—the embittered, and the lost. The sight of his now almost empty family home takes the narrator back to happier times and to his final parting from his father on the Yugoslav border. There is one person especially whom he wants to meet again, a girl nicknamed “Kadetka.”

Born during the First World War, Kadetka was the daughter of an Istrian village girl and her lover, a Czech cadet (ensign) in the Austrian army. Orphaned in her infancy, Kadetka, a beautiful and free-spirited girl, was raised in the narrator’s household. She became the narrator’s favorite, like a baby sister, and the two would spend many days exploring the rugged and beautiful countryside. When the narrator is finally reunited with Kadetka he finds in her story that the cycle of war and death is accompanied by an equally indomitable cycle of life, hope and renewal.

In this beautiful and moving novel, Kosmac gives us stirring images of his homeland on the banks of the Idrijca River. He also tells us something about the unique sentiment of patriots from small countries and how it is expressed in their art: “Yes, it seems to me that we small nations love our land more dearly than great ones do or at least in a manner different from theirs. Our native land is small, and as we cannot sing of its greatness, we celebrate and sing of its details which are full of beauty. Because beauty is like truth. Truth does not require bulky tomes to make herself plain, nor does Beauty need a wide, boundless space herein to unfold herself, to thrive and blossom. Let Expanse thunder forth its mighty song, true beauty glows in silence. We know our country as we know our mother’s face.”

Category 16: Decadence, Gothic and Surrealism

The Dark Domain by Stefan Grabinski
Stories first published in Polish 1918-1922
English translation by Miroslaw Lipinski 1993

 

The Dark Domain is a collection of Stefan Grabinski’s short stories. There is quite a bit of variety here: some are macabre, some surrealistic, some ironic and some erotic. Grabinski was particularly fascinated by trains and their symbolic properties. In one story a man draws his life-force from high-speed train travel, gaining or losing energy as the train speeds and slows. Another story features a ghost train that haunts the rails of eastern Europe. Trains are places for strange encounters and bold seductions where we commit acts we would never conceive on solid ground. Other stories are more abstract and allegorical. A man’s beautiful but silent and secretive mistress stands for the act of masturbation, and an aged clockmaker represents Time itself. I didn’t find anything exceptional in this collections, but these are all good stories and worth a look if you have a taste for the bizarre.

Category 7: 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die

Monica by Saunders Lewis
First published in Welsh 1930
English translation by Meic Stephens 1997

 

Monica is set in the suburbs of Swansea in the 1920s and is a taut story of the meaningless life of the suburban housewife. Monica Sheriff grows up in Cardiff all but chained to the bedside of her consumptive mother. With increasing jealousy she watches her younger sister enjoy the freedom and social pleasures that Monica is denied because of her responsibilities as caregiver. But when the opportunity appears, Monica steals her sister’s boyfriend and—after her mother’s death—marries him. Monica’s character is warped because all she knows of life are envy and death. Sensuous but incapable of affection, naïve but uninhibited, she turns her body and her life into weapons of revenge.

In its depiction of Monica’s neighbors, the novel is a bitter picture of the life of middle-class wives. They thrive on gossip and relentlessly play games of one-upmanship against one another. The banker’s wife who might act kindly to Monica in private won’t be caught speaking to her in public. Most marriages eventually decay into extramarital affairs and alcoholism. The wives’ lives are especially empty because they have no career or education to fall back on.

Saunders Lewis was a Welsh nationalist and wrote Monicain the Welsh language. It is ironic, then, that there is nothing particularly Welsh about it. The setting could be just about any European or American city, and the novel’s literary antecedents are chiefly French works such as Madame Bovary.

Category 4: Translated from the Spanish

Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel
First published in Spanish 1989
English translation by Carol Christensen and Thomas Christensen 1992

 

In Like Water for Chocolate, food magically becomes a medium like art and music for sharing joys and sorrows. Each chapter is introduced with a recipe, and the cooking instructions blend with the story itself. The cooking is being done by Tita, the youngest of three girls on a ranch outside of Piedras Negras, Coahuila, Mexico. The story takes place in the waning years of the Mexican Revolution.

Because Tita is the youngest daughter, family tradition holds that she must stay at home to take care of her mother, Elena, until Elena dies. This doesn’t prevent Tita from falling in love with a young man named Pedro, but Elena is hard-hearted and will not listen to Tita’s pleas that she be allowed to marry him. Elena instead offers Pedro her oldest daughter, Rosaura. Pedro accepts, but solely because this will allow him to be close to Tita.

Tita’s emotions are transmitted through the food she prepares. A teardrop in the batter sends diners into a pit of misery. Another time her joy from Pedro’s presence becomes an aphrodisiac which turns a dinner party into an orgy. Things are complicated with an American doctor falls in love with Tita, and their lives turn tragic when bandits plunder the ranch.

Like Water for Chocolate is a charming, lustful and colorful novel, easily read in a day and guaranteed to stimulate the appetites.

Category 1: The Works of Émile Zola

La Reve (The Dream) by Émile Zola
First published in French 1888
English translation by Michael Glencross 2005

 

Zola’s Rougon-Macquart novel cycle purports to show how the forces of heredity and environment shape the members of a single family during France’s Second Empire. In The Dream he takes a little girl named Anglelique, the abandoned daughter of one of the Rougons, and has her raised in almost monastic seclusion as the adopted child of a patient and loving couple, the Huberts. They live in a cathedral town in a house that actually shares a wall with the cathedral itself, and they make their living embroidering ecclesiastical garments and furnishings. Because the young waif is violent and unpredictable, they educate her themselves, training her to become an embroidress.

Her rough edges soon smoothed over, Angelique becomes a pious and dutiful, if dreamy, young woman. Her only knowledge of the world comes from the environs of the cathedral, and her only reading is a book of the lives of saints, a book she reads over and over again until she comes to see the miraculous as commonplace. Angelique expects life to be like a fairy tale, complete with a prince who will sweep her away to a life of comfort and riches. Her fantasies seem only too likely to come true when the young workman she admires turns out to be a rich nobleman in disguise.

Where is Zola the atheist and reformer in this romantic, idealistic story filled with so much religious piety and pageantry? It doesn’t even seem to belong in the 19th century at all, having an almost medieval flavor. Of course his panorama of French life would be incomplete without a study of traditional attitudes toward religion and its role in the lives and imagination of common people, and that is what we have here. As for the absence of the author’s usually critical eye, perhaps it is to be found in the closing sentences. When he says “All is but a dream,” is he speaking of Angelique’s romantic ideals, or perhaps of religion itself?

Emile Zola’s powers of description are no less on display here than in his other novels, but in most other respects I found The Dream to be less engaging and less satisfying than the other Zola novels I have read.

Category 7: 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die

The Water-Babies by Charles Kingsley
First published 1863

 

The Water-Babies is a fairy tale. As the author tells us, “There must be fairies; for this is a fairy tale: and how can one have a fairy tale if there are no fairies?” But the main character isn’t a fairy, he’s a young, ill-treated chimney sweep named Tom who falls into the river and becomes a water-baby.

Being a water-baby, being exactly and only 3.87902 inches long, and being invisible to normal folk, Tom sees his new watery world in ways we can’t. There are observations on the evolution of sea life and on what people should do to protect the aquatic and marine environment. We are told to deplore those cases “where men are wasteful and dirty, and let sewers run into the sea instead of putting the stuff on the fields like thrifty reasonable souls.”

Tom meets other water-babies and finds that, like him, they are children who have “come to grief by ill-usage or ignorance or neglect.” He continues his journey out into the ocean, meeting strange and wonderful denizens of the sea floor. His guides and mentors are two fairies, Mrs. Bedonebyasyoudid, and Mrs. Doasyouwouldbedoneby. Everywhere he gains new ideas about the land he left behind. He learns, sadly, that there are too many doctors “who still fancy that a baby’s inside is much like a Scotch grenadier’s.” He also discovers how much education has been improved, “for in the stupid old time, you must understand, children were taught to know one thing, and to know it well; but in these enlightened new times they are taught to know a little about everything, and to know it all ill; which is a great deal pleasanter and easier and therefore quite right.”

The Water-Babies is a remarkable little novel, beautifully descriptive of the natural world, that speaks moral lessons to children and social reform to adults. Part fairy tale and part satire in the mold of Gulliver’s Travels, it is Christian but progressive, supporting Darwin and various social movements. Kingsley seems not to have had much faith in democracy, though, parodying American government as an assembly of crows, and there are other slurs of ethnic and national groups that may have cost this book its place among children’s classics. But it’s still a delight and a surprise to read.

Category 7: 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die

Correction by Thomas Bernhard
First published in German 1975
English translation by Sophie Wilkins 1979

 

A troubled Austrian intellectual named Roithamer has killed himself, leaving his papers as a legacy to his lifetime friend, who also holds a position at Cambridge. The friend—never named—is the narrator of the novel. He goes to another friend’s house in an Austria forest where Roithamer had use of the garret as his apartment and study. The narrator moves into the garret where he finds Roithamer’s papers everywhere and in complete disarray.

Roithamer was the middle son of a wealthy and deeply divided family. He grew up hating his home, his country, his mother, and his two brothers. His only allies were his father and his sister. His father died years ago, leaving the family property to Roithamer, knowing that he hated it and would sell it. Roithamer does so, and decides to invest the proceeds—along with several years of his life—into a fantastic house known as the “Cone” where his sister would spend the rest of her days alone and in perfect happiness.

What this bizarre novel comes down to is the notion of correction. “We’re constantly correcting, and correcting ourselves, most rigorously because we recognize at every moment that we did it all wrong (wrote it, thought it, made it all wrong), acted all wrong, how we acted all wrong, that everything to this point in time is a falsification, so we correct this falsification, and then we again correct the correction of this falsification and we correct the result of a correction of a correction andsoforth.” Everything goes back to our childhood and the corrections we have made to that world, and the corrections to the corrections, in the hope that we “can say at last, at the end of our life, that we have lived at least for a time in our own world and not in the given world of our parents.”

Bernhard eschews paragraphs, and some sentences go on for pages. The first half of the novel is the narrator’s stream of consciousness. There are many repetitions of ideas and phrases, so it isn’t as hard to read as it sounds. In the second half, the narrator begins to read from Roithamer’s various scraps of paper. Eventually the voice is all Roithamer. It’s hard in the end to know what to think of this novel. Its ideas are quite thought-provoking, but are they worth the effort of getting to them?

Category 5: Reading Globally

Ferdydurke by Witold Gombrowicz
First published in Polish 1937
English translation by Danuta Borchardt 2000

 

deebee1 wrote such an excellent review of this novel recently that I will spare myself the time of writing one and yourselves the time of reading it and just throw in a few of my own comments and quotes...

There are several themes, one of which, of course, is the celebration of immaturity: "For there is nothing that the Mature hate more, nothing that disgusts them more, than immaturity. They will tolerate the most rabid destructiveness as long as it happens within the confines of maturity..."

And the Mature, of course, are chained to the beliefs and values of convention: "And so, when a pianist bangs out Chopin in a concert hall, you say that the magic of Chopin's music, masterfully rendered by this master pianist, has thrilled the audience. Yet it's possible that actually no one in the audience has been thrilled." And later: "But in Reality matters stand as follows: a human being does not express himself forthrightly and in keeping with his nature but always in some well-defined form, and this form, this style, this manner of being is not of our making but thrust upon us from the outside..."

And, lastly, and more down to earth a scathing picture of the rural Polish gentry and their relationship to their servants. A patrician's actions are contrived, not for their own sake, but "ïn order to draw the line between himself and the servants, to preserve patrician custom. And everything, no matter what the gentry did, was done with regard to and in face of the servants, in relation to house servants and to farmhands.... It was the rabble that scared the gentry. It was the rabble that constrained them. The rabble had them in their pocket." I've read very similar stuff in relation to American slavery.

I suppose Gombrowicz would class me among the unbending "Mature," because, while I appreciate wit, I have little appetite for silliness. As is often the case with satires, I was ready for the book to be over long before the author was. His two short, and very serious, novels, Cosmos and Pornografia, were much more to my taste.

Category 8: Other Group Selections and ER Books

Skios by Michael Frayn
First published 2012

 

Skios is a madcap comedy in which one man's spur-of-the-moment decision to impersonate someone he's never heard of leads to a crazy series of mistaken identities, bedroom surprises, and strange alliances. Oliver Fox, arriving on the Greek island of Skios for a weekend of fun with a girlfriend of five-minutes' acquaintance, sees an attractive young lady at the airport holding up a sign saying "Dr. Norman Wilfred." When she flashes him a hopeful smile, he can't resist the temptation to become Dr. Norman Wilfred. Too late, Fox finds out that he is the guest of honor and keynote speaker at a major international conference, and that he will soon be embroiled in the plans of a shady Greek tycoon and a Russian gangster.

The author gives us a little lecture on how one person's actions may set off a completely unpredictable chain of reactions, and even plays around a bit with an alternate ending to make the point, but Skios is mostly just a fun, well-crafted and well-told, diversion. It's an entertaining novel and will no doubt make an equally entertaining movie some day.

This is a selection for my non-LT reading group. I'm sure everyone will enjoy reading it, but I'm not sure what there is to discuss about it unless one of the members needs an introduction to Chaos Theory.

Category 6: Author Themed Reads

A Life: The Humble Truth by Guy de Maupassant
First published in French 1883
English translation by Roger Pearson 1999

 

In 1819 a 17-year-old girl named Jeanne eagerly awaits her departure from the convent where she has been educated for the last five years. Her father, the Baron Le Perthuis de Vauds, has kept his beloved only child in peaceful and virginal seclusion as part of his plan to keep Jeanne innocent of the sins and cares of the world. He is now taking her to the family's estate on the Norman coast which is destined to be her home as soon as she marries.

Life on the coast of Normandy with her idle and free-spending parents continues to be a fairy tale dream for Jeanne. Almost on cue, she is introduced to a dashing young man, the Vicomte Julien de Lamare. After a story-book courtship, the two are married and and installed as master and mistress of the estate. But on Jeanne's wedding night, the fairy tale comes to an end. She is as innocent as possible of conjugal matters, and is shocked into tears at what Julien does to her. It is rather shocking for readers as well that the author of this heretofore chaste and idyllic tale takes us, not only into the bedroom, but between the sheets.

Jeanne eventually overcomes her sexual inhibitions, but also realizes "that there was nothing left for her to do, ever. Her whole childhood at the convent had been taken up with the future, and she had busied herself with fantasies." Her focus had always been on becoming, not on being, and once the honeymoon was over "...there was nothing left to do, today, tomorrow, ever again. And she sensed all this in some way as a kind of disillusion, as the collapse of her dreams."

But much more disillusionment is in store for Jeanne. Those whom she has idolized and idealized begin, one by one, to disappoint her. Her fairy-tale pure world begins to crumble, and she comes to rage and despair "at the cravenness of human beings, slaves to the foul procedures of carnal love that makes cowards of the heart as well as the body. Mankind seemed to her unclean when she thought of all the dirty secrets of the senses, the degrading caresses, and the dimly discerned mysteries of inseparable couplings." Religion ceases to be a consolation when even the parish priest nonchalantly advises her to accept the infidelities she sees around her with a "boys will be boys" attitude. In response, Jeanne "cursed God, whom she hitherto had considered just. She railed against the culpable favouritism of destiny, and the criminal lies of those who preach goodness and the straight path of virtue."

A Life is a very insular story, as the focus stays on Jeanne in her relative seclusion in rural Normandy. Almost thirty years of tumultuous French history go by without notice, even while the passage of the seasons of nature are closely followed. While many might view Jeanne as representative of the idle aristocracy living in its world of self-delusion, there is no overt social agenda to the novel. Nonetheless, one can't help but notice that the lower classes all seem to have happier, healthier and more balanced lives than the gentry who themselves serve no useful role in society. And when Jeanne is sunk deep in self-pity, her maid does finally lose her temper and exclaim: "And what would you say if you had to earn your daily bread, if you had to get up as six o'clock every morning and go and do a full day's work! Yet lots of women have to, and when they get too old, they die of poverty."

A Life was Maupassant's first novel. He started it when he was only 27, but took several years to complete and refine it. When it came out in 1883 it was an immediate and controversial bestseller and established Maupassant as a worthy compatriot of Flaubert and Zola. Though it's a bit uneven at times and circumscribed by the narrow horizons of Jeanne's little world, it is a captivating story, briskly told, and full of beautiful descriptions of the Norman landscape and people.

At one point in time I read a lot of de Maupassant's short stories. The novel sounds interesting.

Category 8: Other Group Selections and ER Books

Hi, This Is Conchita and Other Stories by Santiago Roncagliolo
First published in Spanish 2013
English translation by Edith Grossman 2013
An Early Reviewer selection

 

A meek and insecure office worker calls a phone sex line and almost immediately thinks he has established a special and permanent relationship with "Conchita." Another man has the all too common experience of calling "customer service" and, after enduring the endless hold music, receives nothing resembling service. A married man who wants to be rid of an overly possessive girlfriend places a call to a strangely reluctant contract killer. And finally a man with obvious mental problems leaves a long and bitter message on his ex-girlfriend's answering machine.

In the title novella of Hi, This Is Conchita and Other Stories, told entirely in phone dialog, these four sub-plots not only develop but begin to interconnect in subtle ways. The result is a poignant but often funny look at modern life where we are always talking but so seldom communicating. The novella is followed by three short stories.

In "Despoiler," set in Barcelona during Carnival, a middle-aged woman finds her childhood obsession with a stuffed animal suddenly revived. In "Butterflies Fastened with Pins," a story very reminiscent of the writing of Bret Easton Ellis, the narrator looks back on his drug-fueled youth which has seen one friend after another commit suicide. And in the macabre finale, "The Passenger Beside You," a young woman sits down next to a man on a bus, shows him the gaping bullet wound where her heart used to be, and tells him what it's like to be dead.

The only complaint I have about this collection of fast-paced, captivating, and unsettling stories is that there isn't more of it.

Category 5: Reading Globally

Paradise of the Blind by Duong Thu Huong
First published in Vietnamese 1988
English translation by Phan Huy Duong and Nina McPherson 1993

 

Paradise of the Blind tells the story of a Vietnamese woman named Hang growing up in Hanoi in the 1970s and 1980s. Her life reflects the painful conflicts between the deep-rooted traditions and family values of Vietnam's rural past and the harsh, often hypocritical policies and attitudes of its socialist present.

The novel opens with Hang, who is an "imported worker" at a textile plant somewhere in Russia, being summoned to the bedside of her ailing uncle in Moscow. Though Hang is herself quite ill, it is her duty to obey. On the long train journey she reflects back upon her childhood and youth.

Hang grew up the illegitimate and only child of her mother, Que, who works as a street vendor in Hanoi. They live a hand-to-mouth existence in a filthy slum under a leaky tar paper roof. Que lives a simple life "according to proverbs and duties." When her brother, Hang's uncle Chinh, a minor party official, demands money or food, Que obeys even if she and Hang must go hungry.

The other woman in Hang's life is the sister of the father she never knew, her Aunt Tam. Where Que is resigned and fatalistic, Tam is hopeful and defiant. She fights the system that has robbed her family of its former wealth and position, slowly battling her way back to prosperity for the sake of Hang, her only living relative. "It was through her," says Hang, "that I knew the tenderness of this world, and through her too that I was linked to the chains of my past, to the pain of existence." Hang is caught between her filial obligations to her mother, her emotional ties to Aunt Tam, and the demands of society represented by Uncle Chinh.

The novel was first published and sold in Vietnam, then banned. This suggests that the author's depiction of Vietnamese life is right on the borderline of what was considered tolerable at that time. She doesn't criticize the communist system itself, but shows the failures of its policies and the hypocrisy and corruption they engendered. Poverty, malnutrition and a lack of sanitation are everywhere evident, even (and this is most surprising) in the homes of party officials.

But there are bright moments in which we get a look at the traditions of Vietnamese folk life, especially the food. The preparation of everything from simple fare to elaborate feasts is described in considerable detail. Some of the dishes are mouth-watering and tempt the reader to try following the cooking instructions. Others are more daunting, such as Hang's favorite delicacy, a pudding made of congealed duck's blood topped with liver, garlic and peanuts. There is even a glossary of Vietnamese words that is devoted mostly to culinary terms.

Paradise of the Blind is a beautifully written account of life in modern Vietnam, as well as a moving story of the struggle we all face to balance the demands of family, self, and society.

Category 20: England, Scotland and Wales

The Oxford History of Britain edited by Kenneth O. Morgan
First published 1984
This edition last revised 1993

 

The Oxford History of Britain is a narrative in ten chapters, chronologically arranged, and each written by a different historian. Its scope is not strictly the history of Britain, but rather of England and Wales. The internal affairs of Scotland and Ireland are only mentioned--and that briefly--during those periods when they are politically united to England.

The story of Britain begins, rather surprisingly, with Julius Caesar's expedition to the island in 55 BCE. Most national histories would say something about the geography of the islands, the pre-historic movements of peoples, and the archaeological evidence of their culture and economy. But the editor insists that history is a written record, and Britain's early Celtic and pre-Celtic populations having been illiterate, their story is not a part of history. So we start with the Romans.

There are obvious advantages and disadvantages to a history written by multiple contributors. Each author is a specialist in his particular era, so there is the benefit of thorough knowledge and special insight. The drawbacks are that the treatment can be uneven at times, and that the authors may be so close to their subject that they presume background knowledge on the reader's part that isn't the case. I found, for example, the chapters on the late middle ages (by Ralph A. Griffiths), the Tudor age (by John Guy), and the Stuarts (by John Morrill) to be outstanding for their readability, information content, insight, and suitability to the general reader. They were followed, unfortunately, by a chapter on the eighteenth century by Paul Langford that was almost incomprehensible. It presumed far too much background on the reader's part, throwing out names like "Walpole" without explaining who they were or what they did, and read more like a scholarly commentary on specific themes than a basic history.

The finest chapter in the book, in my opinion, was "The Liberal Age (1851-1914)" by H. C. G. Matthew. It took a very complex era of political turmoil and evolution, radical social change, empire building, and shifting European alliances and made sense of it. More than anything I've read, this chapter helped me understand the ideological foundation of Britain's political parties and the dynamics and values of social class that underlie so much of modern English literature.

There are no illustrations in the book, but there are about twenty useful maps, a chronology, family trees of the royal families, and a list of prime ministers. There is also a nicely organized section on further reading. The edition I read, published 1993, is not current. There is a 2010 edition, but the only difference appears to be the additional material added by Kenneth O. Morgan (who wrote the last chapter) covering the period 1991 to 2010. Otherwise the contents are the same. Because of its unevenness, I wouldn't recommend The Oxford History of Britain as your first book on the subject, but it would make a good second book, and is the kind of work in which you can skip around to read just about the periods of history that interest you.

Category 8: Other Group Selections and ER Books

The Cat's Table by Michael Ondaatje
First published 2011

 

It is 1954 and an 11-year-old boy named Michael embarks alone on an ocean liner bound from Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) to England. A lady friend of the family is technically his guardian on the voyage, but she is a first class passenger and rarely sees him. Michael shares a tiny windowless cabin with a member of the crew. At meals he joins two other boys his age and several adults at the table farthest from the Captain's Table. It is traditionally known as the Cat's Table.

Michael comes of age during the 21-day voyage, partly due to the freedom he and the other boys experience and its sometimes serious consequences, partly due to the bizarre and dramatic events to which he is witness, but largely due to the adult acquaintances he makes at the Cat's Table. Michael learns that people are rarely what they seem, that his life "could be large with interesting strangers," and that "What is interesting and important happens mostly in secret in places where there is no power. Nothing much of lasting value ever happens at the head table, held together by familiar rhetoric."

Michael tells his story in the first person, with occasional leaps forward in time to his young adulthood and his maturity as a novelist living in Canada. The autobiographical aspect is obvious, though Ondaatje says in a postscript that the characters and events from the ocean voyage itself are fictional.

The novel is mostly about the forming and breaking of relationships--some rewarding, some painful, and some dangerous--the hidden truths about people to which we are blinded by our assumptions and expectations, and the lasting effects of those relationships. But it is also about art and how, as with our human relationships, we read meaning into it that we expect to see and often come away satisfied with a superficial understanding.

The Cat's Table is an entertaining story with moments of humor, mystery and suspense. As with The English Patient, Ondaatje brings together an assortment of colorful characters with troubled pasts, only this time we see it all through the eyes of a child. The machinations necessary to give us the backgrounds of adult characters whom the narrator meets only briefly as a child can be awkward at times, but overall I found this a very rewarding novel.

Category 20: England, Scotland and Wales

Rob Roy by Sir Walter Scott
First published 1817

 

Rob Roy is an historical novel set in 1715, a year when many Scots and some English rose up against England's Hanoverian king, George I, in an attempt to restore the Stuart monarchy. The narrator of the story, Frank Osbaldistone, is a young man unwittingly caught up in these events. The only son of a London merchant, Frank announces to his father's intense dismay that he would rather be a poet than a businessman. Frank is exiled to the home of his estranged uncle in the far north of England near the Scottish border. There he is to recruit one of his cousins to replace Frank as his father's assistant and heir.

In contrast to his stern, sober, Puritan father, Frank's uncle and family are fun-loving, hard drinking Catholics. They are also Jacobites--supporters of the Stuart Pretender, even though they are English. Frank finds rapport with only one member of the household, a more distant cousin named Diana Vernon. She is serious and studious and appreciates Frank's poetical talents. He falls in love with her, but she warns him off, saying she is obligated by her late father's will to either marry one of his Catholic cousins or enter a convent. One of those cousins, Rashleigh Osbaldistone, ugly, twisted and sinister, becomes both Frank's surrogate in the family business and his jealous rival for Diana's attention.

Through Rashleigh's machinations, Frank is accused of a crime and his father is robbed of his fortune. Frank is drawn into Scotland to restore both his name and his father's credit. There he meets Rob Roy MacGregor, an historical figure known as the Scottish Robin Hood, a remarkable man who is at the center of the intrigues that will soon break out into open warfare, though the motives and allegiances of Rob Roy himself are often ambiguous and mutable.

Aside from being an entertaining novel, what Rob Roy perhaps does best is to portray the complex pattern of loyalties and rivalries of the time. It wasn't just a case of Jacobite versus Hanoverian, but Catholic versus Protestant, Tory versus Whig, those favoring the Act of Union and those wanting to restore Scotland's independence, Scots Highlanders versus Lowlanders, and Highland clan against clan. Every possible combination of allegiances was possible, leading to a very fluid and unstable political situation. Many Scotsmen favored union with England and its Protestant monarch, especially the Presbyterian citizens of Glasgow who were thriving from new access to American markets. Walter Scott vividly contrasts the bustling prosperity of Glasgow with the severe poverty of the Highlands. But he also gives us a very sympathetic portrait of Highland culture, proud and independent, which was threatened by the imposition of English law, English taxes, and the English language. He also lovingly depicts the Scottish landscape, especially that of Loch Lomond, Rob Roy MacGregor's home and refuge.

The novel stays on the periphery of the major historical events, focusing on the fictional character of its narrator, Frank Osbaldistone, more than Rob Roy MacGregor himself. Of the latter we are given more of a personality study than a biographical treatment. There is plenty of humor and suspense, and even some Gothic elements. The most challenging thing about the novel is the extensive dialogue in Scots dialect, which the author has rendered differently in order to reflect the character's origins, education, and even his mood at the time. MacGregor's dialect changes, for example, depending on whom his is talking to, what he is talking about, and how much he has had to drink. But it's all comprehensible with a bit of work and practice.

This is a very good novel, a little slow in spots but filled with historical and cultural insight and some memorable scenes. It should appeal to anyone who likes historical fiction or is interested in Scotland and its history.

Good review of Rob Roy. I have Waverly on my TBR list and had a really good time with Ivanhoe last year.

Rob Roy is on the read-soon list. Great review!

Category 1: The Works of Émile Zola

Pot Luck by Émile Zola
First published 1882 in French as Pot-bouille
English translation by Brian Nelson 1999

 

Pot Luck examines the lives of the residents of a single apartment building in Paris during the 1860s. It is the height of France's Second Empire and a time of materialism, ambition, glamour and pretense. The building is clean, stylish and well-maintained on the outside. The entry and central staircase impress visitors with their opulent glitter. But a closer look shows that the gold is only gilding, the paint is already peeling, and the walls are beginning to crack. Go where only the servants go and you will find a central courtyard reeking with stench of rotting waste and ordure.

The building is a metaphor for the lives of its residents. The are all solid and respectable members of the bourgeois class: a judge, a silk merchant, an architect, and various clerks. To outsiders they conduct their lives with impeccable rectitude. But their lives are a cesspit of sexual infidelity and crass materialism. The judge maintains a mistress, and his wife approves for it keeps her from having to perform "that detestable act" herself. The architect's wife has syphilis, so he keeps her cousin as his mistress in the adjoining bedroom. A mother trains her dowry-less daughters in the arts of seduction and entrapment while her brother, a gluttonous drunkard, keeps a 13-year-old mistress.

Into this house of carnality and hypocrisy comes Octave Mouret, a member of the Rougon-Macquart family whose lives, representing a cross-section of French society, form the framework for Zola's series of 20 novels. Trained in the fabric business, Octave is talented and ambitious. One of his ambitions is to seduce as many married women as possible, and his new domicile offers many enticing targets. But even he is shocked at the number of intrigues that are already under way.

Zola contrasts the blind eye that is turned to the affairs of the bourgeoisie with their intolerance for similar behavior among the servant and working class. Maids and cooks are ruthlessly dismissed for activities that pale in comparison to those of their masters. An unmarried tradeswoman who rents an attic room is turned out for becoming pregnant. As she is being evicted, "Her belly seemed to cast a shadow over the frigid cleanliness of the courtyard, and even over the imitation marble and gilded zinc decorations of the hall. It seemed to bring disgrace to the whole building, tainting the very walls and, as it swelled, undermining the placid virtue of each apartment."

Zola indeed lays it on rather thick at times, but there's no mistaking his point about the hypocrisy of the middle class and the institutions such as the church and courts which were complicit in its deceptions. Pot Luck must have been shocking when first published in 1882 with its frankness about sex and venereal disease as well as a graphic description of childbirth. It's still rather disturbing, and a story that's not easily forgotten.

Category 20: England, Scotland and Wales

Cider with Rosie by Laurie Lee
First published 1959

 

Cider with Rosie is English poet Laurie Lee's story of his childhood in a small village in the Cotswolds. It begins in June 1918 when Lee was just three years old and his family had just moved to the countryside. There are seven in the household: Lee's mother, his three older half-sisters, and his two brothers, one older and one younger. Laurie's father is away at war, but even though he survives the war, he chooses to live apart the rest of his life and rarely sees his children.

Much of Lee's memoir is devoted to painting a portrait of the English village in its primitive and self-sufficient isolation, a way of life that will come to an end before young Laurie reaches adulthood. It was a time "when the village was the world and its happenings all I knew. The village in fact was like a deep-running cave still linked to its antic past, a cave whose shadows were cluttered by spirits and by laws still vaguely ancestral. This cave that we inhabited looked backwards through chambers that led to our ghostly beginnings; and had not, as yet, been tidied up, or scrubbed clean by the electric light, or suburbanized by a Victorian church, or papered by cinema screens."

Lee also gives us his poet's impression of the natural world and the passage of the seasons. He describes winter in his valley as, not a change of seasons, but of another place. "And somehow one never remembered the journey towards it; one arrived, and winter was here. The day came suddenly when all the details were different and the village had to be rediscovered."

Except for a chronic lung disease, young Laurie's life is typical for its time and place. There is the toddler's gradual realization that he is not the center of the universe, his first reluctant days in school, playground fights, secret escapades, holidays, church festivals, family outings, weird neighbors and relatives, village crimes and scandals, and a young man's first sexual experiences.

Regarding the latter, Lee has some interesting observations. "As for us boys, it is certain that most of us, at some stage or other of our growth, would have been rounded up under current law, and quite a few shoved into reform school.... It is not crime that has increased, but its definition. The modern city, for youth, is a police trap."

Cider with Rosie is a beautifully told, simple but revealing tale of English country life in the 1920s. It shows us a way of life forever destroyed, according to the author, by the coming of the automobile, bringing Bristol and London as close as the next town, and spelling the end of the cultural, social and religious traditions that defined the village.

got that one on the shelf, I read As I walked out one midsummer morning a while back not realising it was part of a trilogy. I still need to get round to reading it (as well as re-reading the 2nd and reading the 3rd) so am happy you've given it a nice review...

Category 10: Sequels and Series

Iron Council by China Miéville
First published 2004

 

Iron Council is the concluding work in Miéville's trilogy of novels set on a world named Bas-Lag. It is a world where the technology of our 19th century coexists with magic (called "thaumaturgy") and where humans coexist with a number of other intelligent and semi-intelligent species. Iron Council takes place perhaps decades after the two preceding novels in the series. While there is no direct connection in plot or characters with the other two novels, the setting is so elaborate that a reader would likely be bewildered without having first read at least Perdido Street Station for the necessary background.

Iron Council has three main protagonists, but they all come from the working classes in the city of New Crobuzon. They are all involved at some point in the conflict between that city's poor and its autocratic rulers. Affairs progress from strikes and protests, to mutiny, and to outright civil war. In flashbacks we also follow the construction of a transcontinental railroad. The atmosphere here is strongly reminiscent of the Old West, and the theme is the exploitation of labor by big business.

I didn't find Iron Council nearly as engrossing or entertaining as Perdido Street Station and The Scar. The characters aren't as engaging, and the fictional universe is too complex and unstable. It seems that a new creature or magical phenomenon is introduced every page or two, right up to the very end. It's hard to care about what's going on once you begin to realize that the outcome of every conflict will be decided by some previously unrevealed and therefore unpredictable factor. On the other hand, with its portrayal of the eternal conflict between the oppressed and the privileged, this is a novel with some social relevance. The prose is beautiful and inventive, and the author deserves some kudos for the fact that of his three protagonists, albeit all male, one is gay and one is bisexual.

Category 15: Science Fiction and Fantasy

Earth Abides by George R. Stewart
First published 1949

 

Isherwood Williams is doing ecological research in the Sierra Nevada Mountains when he is bitten by a rattlesnake. He makes it to his isolated cabin where he treats the wound with a snakebite kit. There is no phone, and he is in no shape to drive, so he waits out the effects of snakebite alone. A strange and unrelated illness also comes over him, but after two weeks he recovers quickly from both. Driving to the nearest town he finds the roads and streets strangely empty. Businesses are vacant, their doors unlocked. He finds a dead body in the street. On the radio there is nothing but static. Locating a newsstand he finds a paper’s thin, final edition describing the unknown global epidemic which is well on its way to wiping out virtually the entire human population.

Earth Abides was written and takes place in the late 1940s, but except for a few minor and inconsequential details it could be set in today’s world and be no less authentic and convincing. “Ish,” as he is called, concludes that the rattlesnake venom probably kept him from dying from the mysterious plague. He returns home to the San Francisco Bay area and, after days of searching, finds a few isolated survivors here and there. (The city isn’t named, but it is obviously Berkeley, the author’s home.) Most of them have been deranged by the experience or, unable to face the uncertain future, are slowly drinking themselves to death. Others are armed and hostile. Ish begins to despair himself, but as a professional geographer he finds a purpose in life: he will observe and document the evolution of the landscape, its flora and fauna, now that the hand of man has been removed. Ish eventually finds other survivors, male and female, who have found their own way of pulling through the emotional crisis. They form a small community which Ish hopes will be the nucleus of a reborn civilization.

There are several themes to this novel of ideas. One is biological. In the unstable environment, Ish observes successive explosions and massive die-offs of populations such as dogs, ants, rats, cattle, and mountain lions. These are operating by the same natural laws which led, over a much longer time scale, to humanity’s population explosion and collapse.

Another issue is sustainability. The survivors, much to Ish’s despair, continue to scavenge canned food rather than learning to grow crops or raise livestock. They also show no concern about the day when the last match has been used, when the last rifle cartridge has been fired, or when water ceases to flow into the still-functioning taps from the reservoir. The parallel is subtly made between these concerns and pre-plague civilization’s dependence upon fossil fuels and metal ores which must inevitably run out. (Yes, writing in the 1940s!)

As Ish’s tribe of survivors settles in and begins to raise families, some basic questions arise: Who makes decisions and on what basis? How can decisions be enforced? Do the forms and traditions of the civilization that has collapsed still apply? What should the next generation be taught? The theories of Plato, More, Rousseau and others suddenly become matters of vital immediacy for the group’s survival and cohesion.

As part of that philosophical discussion, Ish ponders the role of the intellectual in society. What is his responsibility towards those who cannot see the future as clearly as he can? He knows things need to be done, but he is neither strong enough to do them on his own nor persuasive enough to convince others to give up their leisure on his behalf. He compares his frustrating situation to that of other academics turned leaders such as Woodrow Wilson.

Finally there is the issue of civilization itself. Was it something Man created out of his dreams and ambitions, or was it something forced upon him by the pressures of a growing population and scarce resources? Is it desirable? Is the university professor better off in any meaningful way than the caveman? From this we must turn to the future and ask if civilization can be molded, steered, or—once destroyed—rebuilt by deliberate effort? Or are we just as much destined to let natural law take its course as lemmings or grasshoppers?

George R. Stewart was an historian, professor of English, and a man of many interests. He is credited, for example, with the idea of naming tropical storms after women. His book Ordeal by Hunger: The Story of the Donner Party was required reading when I was in high school. Earth Abides wouldn’t be a bad choice for required reading as well, and would be a fantastic choice for reading groups. Readers expecting action-packed escapism will be disappointed, for this is a novel that engages the reader in some of the vital issues of our time as well as the fundamental questions that have occupied humanity for millennia. Yet it is populated with believable, likable characters and never ceases to be entertaining. It is a brilliant, well-written novel that, if anything, is more relevant now than when it was written.

Category 8: Other Group Selections and ER Books

Omon Ra by Viktor Pelevin
First published in Russian 1992
English translation by Andrew Bromfield 1994

 

Omon Krivomazov has dreamt since childhood of becoming a pilot. Better yet, a cosmonaut. And, above all, of going to the moon. For Omon, as for most Russians, the Soviet space program is a source of pride and hope amid the shabbiness of daily life.

"...yes, it was true, perhaps the burrows in which our lives were spent really were dark and dirty, and perhaps we ourselves were well suited to these burrows, but in the blue sky above our heads, up among the thinly scattered stars, there were special, artificial points of gleaming light, creeping unhurriedly through the constellations, points created here in the land of Soviets, among the vomit, empty bottles, and stench of tobacco smoke, points built here out of steel, semiconductors and electricity, and now flying through space. And every one of us... had our own little embassy up there in the cold pure blueness."

Omon's dreams begin to come true. He is not only accepted for flight training, but is immediately chosen for the space program. But then the revelations begin to come. The Soviet space program isn't quite as sophisticated or advanced as the public believes. In fact, very little in the USSR is what it has been made out to be. Those nuclear tests, for example, that registered so impressively on Western seismographs... just two million political prisoners being ordered to jump up and down at the same time. Nonetheless there IS a space program, and Omon is proud, if somewhat befuddled, to be a part of it.

Layers of deceit, illusion and hypocrisy are peeled back one-by-one in Omon Ra like nested Russian dolls emerging one from inside the other. Eventually Omon begins to challenge reality itself. He decides that if he can imagine himself back in a happy moment of his childhood, riding his bicycle down the highway, then he really is back in his childhood.

Omon Ra is a vicious satire and an entertaining black comedy that will leave you wondering just whom and what you can trust and whether "reality" is a concept with any meaning at all.

Category 7: 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die

Evelina: or, The History of a Young Lady's Entrance into the World by Fanny Burney
First published 1778

 

Evelina Anville, a fresh and strikingly beautiful young woman of seventeen, has only recently learned her true history: Her French mother was disowned by her wealthy parents because of her elopement with an English lord, who then abandoned his pregnant wife and disavowed their marriage. Evelina's mother then died giving birth to her, but had already bequeathed her child to the care of her only friend, the Reverend Arthur Villars. The vicar raised Evelina as his daughter, giving her an excellent education but shielding her from knowledge of the world's evils. She is the legitimate heir to two fortunes and a title, but has little expectation of either. It is Mr. Villars opinion that "A youthful mind is seldom totally free from ambition; to curb that, is the first step to contentment, since to diminish expectation is to increase enjoyment."

Against Mr. Villars better judgment, he allows Evelina to accompany some friends on her first trip to London. Here she marvels at the theatre and the opera, but from ignorance of the rules and customs of society is constantly in danger of causing offense or creating a scandal. "I am new to the world," Evelina writes to Mr. Villars, "and unused to acting for myself;-my intentions are never willfully blameable, yet I err perpetually!" He cautions her in return: "Remember, my dear Evelina, nothing is so delicate as the reputation of a woman; it is at once the most beautiful and most brittle of all human things."

This is an epistolary novel, and Evelina herself is the chief letter-writer. In form and content there is much resemblance to Samuel Richardson's earlier novel Clarissa, in which an educated young woman also finds herself disowned by her parents and her virginity under siege by a clever libertine. But there is also much resemblance to the picaresque novels of Tobias Smollett. There are a number of outlandish characters, including a sea captain whose practical jokes inject much slapstick humor into the novel.

But Fanny Burney does more than just blend two styles of fiction. She creates characters and a story that are the direct forerunners of those of Jane Austen, where social satire and suspense are secondary to her principal character's growing self-awareness and self-command. Evelina's defining moment comes when she impulsively grabs a pistol to prevent an impoverished poet from killing himself; she is shocked at her own ability to take a decisive action. Burney passed herself as an anonymous male author when she wrote the novel, but her feminist sentiments are obvious when she has Mr. Villars write: "Though gentleness and modesty are the peculiar attributes of your sex, yet fortitude and firmness, when occasion demands them, are virtues as noble and as becoming in women as in men: the right line of conduct is the same for both sexes,..."

Evelina is a very entertaining novel that is, in turns, funny, suspenseful and touching. Much can be learned from it about the customs and entertainments of the day. The story is well-suited to the epistolary format. Like most novels of the time its plot relies overmuch on chance meetings and extraordinary coincidences, but, unlike most 18th century novels, it is quite moderate in length.


This portrait by Thomas Gainsborough was painted around 1777, exactly the time in which Evelina was written. It could easily be a portrait of Evelina herself, dressed for the opera and with her hair "frizzed," as she called it.

Category 7: 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die

The Pleasant History of Thomas of Reading by Thomas Deloney
Written and first published before 1600
Earliest extant edition 1612



Thomas of Reading is one of the earliest novels in the English language and an early example, too, of historical fiction. It was written during the reign of Elizabeth I at roughly the same time that Shakespeare was writing his first historical plays. English history was evidently in vogue at the time, perhaps in response to England's defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588. The setting for Thomas of Reading is the early 12th century during the reign of Henry I, one of the sons of William the Conqueror.

Thomas of Reading is a collection of episodes loosely woven together into a single narrative. The author begins by recounting a trip by King Henry I where he encounters a convoy of wagons heading to London. He marvels at the size and wealth of this wagon train and learns that it all belongs to just three clothiers from the west of England who are taking their goods to market in London. One of those merchants is Thomas Cole of Reading, and though he gives the novel his name, Thomas Cole is not an especially prominent character in it. It is the clothiers collectively whose prosperity and patriotism are put on display. Each of the chapters connects in some way to one of them, their wives, or servants.

The historical narrative, to which the author turns from time to time, tells how Henry I faces a challenge for the English throne from his older brother Robert, Duke of Normandy. Henry invades Normandy but finds himself short of supplies and cash. His new friends the clothiers step forward and generously contribute everything Henry needs, allowing him to defeat Robert's army and capture his brother. Robert is put in prison for the rest of his life. In an episode from later chapters that is presumably pure fiction, Robert is let out of his dungeon periodically to ride and hunt but manages to fall in love with a beautiful serving maid known as Margaret of the White Hands.

Intermixed with the historical scenes are stories from civil and domestic life similar to those found in the Canterbury Tales and the Decameron. In one chapter the clothiers' wives band together for an excursion to London while their husbands are at market and are dismayed to find that even the poorest tradesman's wife in London is dressed better than they are. Much domestic discord ensues. Another chapter tells how an innkeeper finds his wife and one of the clothiers consorting in a storeroom. When they try to convince him that they were just looking for a cheese, the innkeeper replies "Well, Huswife, qd. he, I will give you as much Credit as a Crocadile, but as for your Companion, I will teach him to come hither to looke Cheeses." The innkeeper then has his men tie the merchant up and hangs him up over the fire to be smoked like a cheese.

Other segments, grounded partially in fact, describe the ludicrous results of an attempt to use Flemish immigrants as catchpoles (assistant bailiffs) in London and the events leading up to the invention of the Halifax Gibbet, an early version of the guillotine.

The strangest chapter is the one midway through the novel describing the murder of Thomas of Reading. He is murdered for his money by an innkeeper and his wife who release a trapdoor that plunges the sleeping Thomas into a vat of boiling water. Deloney turns this into a comic episode by relating how rumors among the servant classes turned it into a horror story of cannibalism and talking horses. But for the most part Deloney's work extols the virtues of the hard-working, civic-minded merchant class.

Deloney's language is simple and straightforward, making him much easier to read than Shakespeare despite some unorthodox phonetic spellings. The dialog of educated people is in the alliterative style known as Euphuism, an example how how people spoke in the 1590s, not the 12th century in which the novel takes place. Thomas of Reading is a short book, so it's a quick and painless introduction to the prose fiction of the period, but as literature it pales in comparison to Elizabethan drama.

Category 7: 1001 Books to Read Before You Die

Pointed Roofs by Dorthy M. Richardson
Volume 1 of the Pilgrimage sequence
First published 1915

 

In the 19th century it was common for English ladies who were educated but impoverished to venture abroad to earn their keep as teachers and governesses. Charlotte Brontë did so, and her experiences formed the basis for two of her novels. About fifty years later, Dorothy Richardson, third of four daughters of a financially ruined gentleman, also went to the Continent to teach and turned her experiences into an autobiographical novel, Pointed Roofs. But Richardson continued to chronicle her life's experiences, eventually producing thirteen novels which she collectively called "Pilgrimage."

Richardson's fictional self is named Miriam Henderson. Leaving school at age seventeen, "she wondered and wondered. What was she going to do with her life after all these years at the good school?... It was there she belonged." Much to her surprise, Miriam's application for a teaching position at a school in Germany is accepted. She doesn't even know where she is going or what she will be expected to do. But on her arrival in Hanover, Germany, she is enchanted with the city and relieved to learn that she is expected only to tutor four German girls on English pronunciation and vocabulary at a finishing school where most of the students are English.

Miriam is entranced with the German girls, who seem to have every attribute she regretfully lacks. They were "placid and serene, secure in a kind of security Miriam had never met before." They played the piano and sang with an innate feeling for the spirit of the music that none of the English girls could match. And they were physically beautiful in a natural, artless way that Miriam "wished all the world could see."

Miriam's time in Germany is not free from conflict and sorrow, mostly the products of Miriam's own self-doubt and uncertain future. Her thoughts are recorded in what was then a new narrative technique: stream of consciousness. Pointed Roofs is, in fact, considered the first English-language novel to use stream of consciousness. But compared to other novels in this form, Pointed Roofs is not at all difficult to read. The language is simple and straightforward, and while sentences may be long, individual thoughts are clearly separated with ellipses.

Dorothy Richardson had the misfortune to publish a novel praising the German people and culture just as England was fighting a desperate war against Germany. This may be one reason why she isn't better known and more widely read. But Pointed Roofs is by no means just a novel about national characteristics--that is only a small part of it. It is chiefly a novel showing us a woman's view of life as she interacts with other women in a context free of masculine judgments, standards or measures. I'm looking forward to reading the rest of the series.

Category 15: Science Fiction and Fantasy

The Time Machine by H. G. Wells
First published 1895
(second reading)



In H. G. Wells's short but remarkable first novel a Time Traveler (thus called and never named) journeys from his Victorian London laboratory to the far distant future, then returns to tell his incredulous friends what he found.

On the initial test of his machine, the Time Traveler eschews the near future and leaps forward to the year 802,701. Here he finds a park-like landscape dotted with magnificent but crumbling edifices. Inhabiting these buildings are a people called the Eloi, diminutive and delicate in form, simple and child-like in manner. The Time Traveler is dismayed that humanity has regressed to such an extent in its decaying paradise. "It is a law of nature we overlook," he realizes, "that intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger and trouble." He sees a parallel in the decline of physical strength and mental capacity. "For after the battle comes Quiet. Humanity had been strong, energetic and intelligent, and had used all its abundant vitality to alter the conditions under which it lived. And now came the reaction of the altered conditions.... I grieved to think how brief the dream of the human intellect had been."

One characteristic of the Eloi is the absence of sexual differentiation. They are still male and female, they make love and have babies, but all physical secondary sex characteristics have disappeared, and there is no gender distinction in behavior or social roles. The Time Traveler muses that "where violence comes but rarely and off-spring are secure, there is less necessity--indeed there is no necessity--for an efficient family, and the specialization of the sexes with reference to the children's needs disappears." He notes the beginnings of this even in his own day, and I suspect that if the Time Traveler had made a stopover in our own time he would have seen plenty of evidence to confirm his theory that sexual differentiation was already on the wane, at least culturally if not biologically.

The Time Traveler finds it necessary to make some revisions to his theory of human decline when he discovers that there is a second species of hominids, the Morlocks, living underground in perpetual darkness. They are more intelligent than the Eloi--at least to the extent of being able to maintain the vast machines which ventilate their troglodytic haunts--but are just as devoid of any creative impulse or higher passion. The Time Traveler theorizes that they are descendants of the proletariat who, even in his own day, dwelt and labored increasingly in conditions of subterranean confinement and crepuscular gloom.

The Time Traveler does more than just ruminate on the course of human evolution--there is also romance and danger. He forms a warm attachment to an Eloi lady named Weena, but is then relentlessly set upon by the vicious and crafty Morlocks. Finally he escapes into his time machine where he resumes his journey into the distant future, racing through millions of years to witness the dying of the very Earth itself and the Sun it circles.

Why does H. G. Wells give us this last awesome and forlorn look at the Earth's gradual demise? I think chiefly it is to showcase the scientific knowledge of the day, which could now contemplate such immensities free of the restraints of religion. But it also serves to put our own existence doubly into perspective: just as the life of an individual is dwarfed into insignificance by the history of our species, so does humanity itself pale in comparison to the universe we so briefly inhabit.

Category 7: 1001 Books to Read Before You Die

Memoirs of the Extraordinary Life, Works and Discoveries of Martinus Scriblerus
by John Arbuthnot, Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, and perhaps others
Written ca. 1714, first published 1742 as part of Pope's collected works

   
(Arbuthnot, Pope and Swift)

John Arbuthnot (1667-1735) was physician to Britain's Queen Anne. He was also a talented satirist and humorist, but neither sought to preserve or take credit for his own works. He is considered to be the principle author, in collaboration with his friends Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift, of Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus. The authors were members of a group which called itself the "Scriblerians."

The authors' intent was to write an English novel comparable to Cervantes's Don Quixote. Unfortunately, it remained unfinished and somewhat roughly formed, but what there is of Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus is quite remarkable. It might have been the landmark novel that Laurence Sterne's Tristam Shandy was to be later in the century, and there are so many aspects and incidents in common between the two that it's quite likely Sterne was influenced by the Scriblerians.

The story begins with Cornelius Scriblerus, the father-to-be of Martinus. Cornelius is a scholar so obsessed with the writings of the ancient Greeks that he lives his life only by their beliefs and precepts (just as Don Quixote modeled his life on the romances of Chivalry). His goal in life is to beget and raise a son entirely on Greek principles and methods. He selects for his wife a maiden with the proper characteristics and pedigree, but their union remains childless for ten years despite "a constant and frequent compliance to the chief duty of conjugal life." Fortunately he finds a prescription for infertility in the writings of Galen and for a year feeds his poor wife nothing but goat's milk and honey. Furthermore, following Aristotle's advice, he "with-held the nuptial embrace when the wind was in any point of the South" to ensure that the sex of the child would be male. The couple is finally rewarded with the birth of young Martinus.

Martinus is raised, of course, strictly in accordance with the Ancients. He can have no food, no playthings, and no form of medical care that wasn't written down by the Greeks. For the reader this means a series of lively and often hilarious domestic and scholarly disputes. But the authors often venture aside to satirize writings and political issues of their time. At other times the writing is pure whimsy, such as this series of puns on the suffix "led":

"Our Noblemen and Drunkards are pimp-led, Physicians and Pulses fee-led, their Patients and Oranges pil-led, a New-married Man and an Ass are bride-led, and old-married Man and a Pack-horse sad-led, Cats and Dice are rat-led, Swine and Nobility are sty-led..."

There is only one complete chapter telling of Martinus's adult life, and it describes his bizarre marriage. Attending a display of curiosities--what we would call a freak show--he is entranced by a pair of conjoined twins. Two beautiful young women, each complete but for one detail, are joined such that they share a single "organ of generation." Lindamira and Indamora are their names. Martinus falls in love with Lindamira; later he steals her away from the show and secretly marries her. But Indamora is an unwilling partner to this, which lands Martinus in a court of law accused of both incest and rape. His defense is to claim that Lindamira and Indamora are but a single person because his previous scientific researches have proven that the seat of the human soul is in the genitals, and having only one such organ between the two of them, the sisters have only one soul.

The book concludes with a numbered list of Martins Scriblerus's other deeds and accomplishments, many of which were presumably intended to have been expanded into full chapters. Among other things, Martinus devised "a Computation of the Duration of the Sun, and how long it will last before it be burn'd out." He also calculated "how much the Inhabitants of the Moon eat for Supper, considering that they pass a night equal to fifteen of our natural days," and went on to draft a treaty by which the European powers would divide up the moon and its inhabitants once conquered.

We are also promised the story of Martinus's journeys around the globe in an attempt to experience every form of natural disaster, of which the earthquake was the only one he failed to observe. There is also mention of a series of voyages in which he discovers, first, "the Remains of the ancient Pygmaean Empire." Then he is "happily shipwreck'd on the Land of the Giants," and on his third voyage discovers a "whole Kingdom of Philosophers." These, of course, are what we now know as Gulliver's Travels. It was originally intended to be co-written by the Scriblerians with Martinus Scriblerus as the hero. But after their separation, Jonathan Swift wrote it on its own and made the traveler, Lemuel Gulliver, a physician modeled after Dr. Arbuthnot.

For its historical value alone Memoirs of the Extraordinary Life, Works, and Discoveries of Martinus Scriblerus would be worth reading, but it is also a very entertaining work on its own merits. It's a shame that it was never completed.

Category 20: England, Scotland and Wales

The Wars of the Roses: England's First Civil War by Trevor Royle
First published 2009 as The Road to Bosworth Field

 

The Wars of the Roses: England's First Civil War is a history that covers more than just the dynastic conflicts of the late 15th century. It starts in the late 14th century with the reign of Richard II, a king whose arrogance and poor management led to his being overthrown by Henry Bolingbroke, who had himself crowned Henry IV. Henry's dubious right to the throne led, in turn, to the multi-generational rivalry between two contending branches of the Plantagenet family: Henry's House of Lancaster and their enemies the House of York. Open warfare broke out two generations later under Henry's grandson, Henry VI, a man subject to periodic mental breakdowns. After years of strife the Yorkists took the throne, only to lose it again when Richard III, who himself had stolen the crown from his own nephew, was killed in battle. The saga ends when Henry Tudor, crowned Henry VII, takes the crown back for the Lancastrian side and eliminates the remaining Yorkist contenders, then marries a York daughter to unite the two bloodlines.

This was an extremely complex and fluid time, with ever-shifting loyalties and alliances. Loyalty rarely proved stronger than self-interest. One nobleman switched sides twice in a single battle in his quest to come out on the winning side. The fate of the losers in each conflict was unpredictable: some were forgiven and offered positions of power in exchange for their support; others were summarily executed and their heads put on display on the nearest city gate.

International affairs are part of the story as well. The English king was ruler over parts of modern-day France during this period, and the Lancaster/York conflict overlaps the off and on war with the French known as the Hundred Years War. Nor was France without its internal conflicts. There were battles in which there were English-speaking forces and French-speaking forces on both sides of the lines. At the same time, England was often at war with Scotland. Scottish troops fought in France under Joan of Arc against the English, just as the French would later fight in Scotland for the Scots.

Trevor Royle does a marvelous job of making sense of this tangled web of family squabbles, constant intermarriages, murders, abductions, betrayals and intrigues. He gives us just enough detail to tell the whole story without getting bogged down in minutiae. This is not a gossipy or sensationalist history--the reader spends more time on the battlefield than in the boudoir--but it does provide a good portrait of the principal actors. This includes some remarkable women, such as Margaret of Anjou who acted as monarch, field general and diplomat during her husband Henry VI's bouts of mental illness. Royle's treatment is balanced, looking at each king's strengths and weaknesses and avoiding moralistic judgment. Where men like Richard III have suffered from particularly bad reputations, Royle points out the biases of contemporary observers and early historians in an attempt to give these much-abused characters the benefit of the doubt.

This was a fun book to read, full of startling events and memorable personalities, and I highly recommend it as an introduction to 15th century English history.

The Wars of the Roses sounds really interesting! I don't know much more about the period than what I've gleaned from Shakespeare, but I'd love to learn more.

It's interesting to discover which events Shakespeare depicted accurately and what was invention or exaggeration. This is addressed from time to time in the book. In Henry VI Part Two, for example, he holds the future Richard III accountable for a murder that actually took place when Richard was only three years old.

Category 20: England, Scotland and Wales

Divorced, Beheaded, Died... The History of Britain's Kings and Queens in Bite-Sized Chunks by Kevin Flude
Published 2009

 

Divorced, Beheaded, Died... is simply a series of 1-2 page biographical sketches of the monarchs of Great Britain. It includes all of the kings and queens who ruled all or most of England, from the legendary King Brutus down to today's Queen Elizabeth II. This includes ancient Britons, the Roman Emperors who ruled from Britain, Saxons, and Vikings, as well as the customary lineage from William the Conqueror to the present. In separate sections there are biographies of selected Scottish and Welsh kings.

The biographies give basic information: dates and places of birth and death, marriages, children, predecessor, successor, etc. The key events of the reign are noted, and we learn something of the monarch's personality and reputation. There's not much more you can say in a maximum of two pages per subject. But even when it isn't historically significant, the author always makes note of the monarch's extramarital affairs and illegitimate children.

Each biography stands on its own, so you don't have to read the book from start to finish to make sense of it. It is suitable as a quick reference, but it would be even better if it had such things as pictures, maps, and family trees. Instead, the only supplementary material is a one-page list of further reading.

With online references so readily at hand, I'm not sure that there's much of a niche for a work like this, though at only 168 pages it does make for a nice quick review of British history and one that will give the reader a sense of the evolving nature of the monarchy.

Category 15: Science Fiction and Fantasy

A Journey to the Centre of the Earth by Jules Verne
First published in French 1864
English translation by F. A. Malleson 1877



A Journey to the Centre of the Earth is one of Jules Verne's earliest and most celebrated novels. It tells the story of a manic German professor, Otto Liedenbrock, and his reluctant nephew Axel who, together with a phlegmatic Icelander named Hans, attempt to follow the trail of a 16th century explorer who discovered a way to the center of the globe.

Most scientists believed then, as now, that the core of the Earth was molten. Axel believes this, but his uncle does not, leading to much debate as their journey begins. Along the way there is much said about geology, volcanic processes, and pre-historic fossils. (Some English translations abridge the scientific detail.) Their exploration of the Earth's crust becomes a trip into the distant past, as they discover not only fossils but living specimens.

This is a wonderful adventure story, and the wonder begins early with the explorers' journey to Iceland where their descent is to begin. Iceland was, at that time, a remote and exotic location for Europeans. It is fascinating to see how difficult it was 150 years ago to make what is now a routine journey.

Verne's science is probably shaky at best. At one point Axel says that the glyptodon, a mammal, is the ancestor of the modern tortoise, a reptile (though this might have been a deliberate error to show that the young geologist's knowledge of biology was rather shaky). But one thing we can certainly take away from the novel is the infectious, exuberant spirit of adventure and discovery which led explorers of that era to take risks most would now consider unconscionable.

Category 6: Author Themed Reads

Bel-Ami by Guy de Maupassant
First published in French 1885
English translation by Margaret Mauldon 2001

 

"Bel-Ami" is the nickname given to Georges Duroy, a young man of humble origins who arrives in Paris in 1880 after serving in the cavalry. Duroy is almost penniless, but he has ambition, charm, good looks, and is utterly without scruples. He makes friends with a newspaper reporter and, largely at the insistence of the reporter's young and lovely wife, is invited to submit an article on his experiences with the army in Algeria. The wife helps him write the article, just as she has ghostwritten all of her husband's articles, and soon Duroy finds himself employed as a reporter.

Maupassant's depiction of the Paris press is remarkably similar to that of Honoré de Balzac some fifty years earlier in his novel Lost Illusions. Reporters compose interviews with people they've never met and stories about things that never happened. They write reviews of plays they haven't seen. And newspapers are closely tied financially to the politicians they support, manipulating the news for their mutual gain.

Along with the materialism and absence of integrity comes sexual intrigue. Adultery is as common as prostitution, and Duroy takes full advantage of both. Women are the key to power, not only because they hold the reins of the social world, but because of the secrets they can pry from a husband and pass on to a lover (and vice-versa). Trading on his handsome face, Duroy seduces one woman after another, using them as rungs on his ladder to the top.

Bel-Ami comments on contemporary political events and personalities, substituting names and places in a way that would be transparent to the French reading public in 1885. Footnotes explain these references, but it isn't necessary to understand the political background to enjoy the novel. If anything, though, Bel-Ami is a bit on the shallow side for a nineteenth century novel, with a relatively simple and straightforward plot and a small cast of characters--attributes you might expect from a novelist who was primarily a writer of short stories.

Category 6: Author Themed Reads

Pierre et Jean by Guy de Maupassant
First published in installments, 1887-88
English translation by Julie Mead 2001

 

What can you do when you suspect that the person you love most in the world has been living a lie that threatens to destroy your family's happiness? This is the agonizing dilemma that faces Pierre in Guy de Maupassant's short novel Pierre et Jean.

Pierre and Jean Roland are brothers. Pierre has just finished medical school, and his younger brother Jean has completed his training as a lawyer. They have joined their parents in Le Havre, a seaport on the coast of Normandy, for a few weeks of relaxation before embarking on their careers. Their father, a simple man but with a lifetime love of the sea and ships, has retired there with his wife after many years as a jeweler in Paris. The two brothers are close, as is the whole family, but there is a stark contrast in their appearance and temperament. Pierre is dark, slender, ambitious, moody, and quick-witted. Jean is blond, tall, somewhat stout, easygoing, and indolent.

One day, when the family returns from an outing in their boat, they receive a visit from an attorney with the news that an old family friend from Paris has recently died and left his entire fortune to Jean. Pierre joins his parents in rejoicing in Jean's good fortune, but jealousy begins to gnaw at him, and he can't help wondering why only Jean was favored. Then a chance comment by a barmaid makes him suspect the shocking truth that was so obvious to an outsider: the deceased friend was Jean's father. Their mother is an adulteress! And the whole world will know it if Jean accepts the legacy.

Pierre's mental agony and the events which follow take place against the backdrop of a wonderfully evocative picture of the Norman coast where the author grew up. Ships blowing their horns in a dense fog while reaching blindly for a safe port... beach-goers retreating before the oncoming tide... these are vivid scenes that also symbolize Pierre's situation.

Pierre et Jean is an intense and compact psychological drama, quite different from the social realism of Maupassant's earlier novels. It reminds me more of the works of Scandinavian authors Ibsen, Strindberg and Soderberg than it does of Maupassant's mentors, Flaubert and Zola. And what makes this novel all the more poignant is that all the members of the Roland family are likable characters who love one another, yet they are about to be torn apart by an act of good will. Highly recommended.

Category 7: 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die

Backwater by Dorothy M. Richardson
The second novel in the Pilgrimage sequence
First published 1916

"Life was ugly and cruel." This is the conclusion that Miriam Henderson reaches. She is Dorothy Richardson's alter ego in the series of 13 autobiographical novels titled "Pilgrimage." Backwater is the second in the series. In the first volume, Pointed Roofs, Miriam, still a teenager, spends a term tutoring at an exclusive girl's school in Hanover, Germany. Now she is back home in London and has taken a teaching job at a not-so-exclusive school for girls in North London. First, though, she has several weeks' vacation, during which she has her first experience of the joys and sorrows of romance.

Miriam's problem, though, is that because of her family's sudden poverty, she can see nothing ahead of her but a lifetime as a teacher or governess, eventually becoming a lonely spinster. She deplores North London with it's noise, its accents, it shabbiness, and its plebeian values. Her new pupils have none of the refinement and sensibility of her German students. Instead she finds only "cold English pianos and dreadful English children--and trams going up and down the grey road outside." Miriam's depression leads to a decline in her health and mood so obvious that her employer tries to counsel her. The older lady recommends prayer. Miriam argues back, "How can people, ordinary people, be expected to be like Christ, as they say, when they think that Christ was supernatural? Of course, if He was supernatural, it was easy enough for Him to be as He was; if He was not supernatural, then there's nothing in the whole thing." She finally concludes,"Well. If God made people he is responsible and ought to save them."

Oddly, Miriam, in this novel, seems much younger and less mature than she did in the first volume. Perhaps being in a strange environment forced her to grow up a bit, but back home she lapses back into a late adolescence. She now comes across as petulant and snobbish, more self-centered and less an observer of others, and subject to the pangs of typical teenage angst. On the other hand, at times she is more relaxed and playful, and there are some delightful domestic scenes with her sisters, as well as some picturesque outings. And every once in a while there are those flashes of perception that show us she has the potential to be much more than she can imagine.

Category 8: Other Group Selections and ER Books

Hard Times by Charles Dickens
First published 1854

 

Hard Times is the shortest of Dickens's novels and the only one which doesn't use London as a setting. The story takes place in a fictional town named Coketown, a grim and smoky industrial city representative of Manchester and other mill towns of northwest England. It is a story of class conflict between the mill owners, financiers and politicians on the one hand, and the laborers on the other. But the class differences are expressed more in philosophic than economic terms.

Representing the bourgeois managing class there are two men: Thomas Gradgrind and Josiah Bounderby. Gradgrind, an educator-turned-politician, is a fanatical proponent of a utilitarian philosophy which demands nothing but "facts," and abjures all art and sentiment. He attempts to raise his children as heartless automata whose only goal is the amassing of wealth.

Josiah Bounderby is a banker and mill owner who has constructed around himself the myth of the "self-made man." Insisting that he was born in a ditch and abandoned to his own devices as a young child, Bounderby's clear message is "I made it without anyone else's help or compassion, so don't expect any from me."

Among the characters from the lower classes are Sissy Jupe, the abandoned daughter of a circus performer, and Stephen Blackpool, a mill worker who must bear the added burden of having an alcoholic vagrant for a wife. Both Jupe and Blackpool are rich in the traits that their social betters lack: compassion, charity, and self-sacrifice.

Hard Times has the elements of a social reform novel, but that doesn't appear to be its purpose. We never set foot inside a mill, and there is no description of working conditions, harsh or otherwise. The efforts of the workers to unionize are even portrayed in a negative light. Instead of focusing on the symptoms of injustice, Dickens attacks what he must consider the cause: the flawed and hypocritical philosophy of utilitarianism which makes a virtue of selfishness and excuses callous indifference to the sufferings of others.

Hard Times is not without touches of humor, but on the whole it is darker than most of Dickens's works. There are the usual quirky and endearing characters, but a tone of tragedy predominates.

Category 15: Science Fiction and Fantasy

The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells
First published 1898

 

H. G. Wells's classic, thrilling story of alien invasion is a persistent examination of points of view. The unnamed narrator, a writer who happens to live in the village where the Martians first land, is constantly reminding himself to see things impartially. In fact, he claims a special penchant for doing so: "At times I suffer from the strangest sense of detachment from myself and the world about me; I seem to watch it all from the outside, from somewhere inconceivably remote, out of time, out of space, out of the stress and tragedy of it all."

Regarding the invasion itself, the narrator compares it to the European colonization of the less developed world and the extermination of aboriginal populations. "Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?" And with respect to the Martians' technology, he begins "to compare the things to human machines, to ask myself for the first time in my life how an ironclad or a steam engine would seem to an intelligent lower animal." And when he first witnesses the Martians' feeding habits, he points out that humans would appear as hideous monsters to an intelligent rabbit.

Another interesting theme emerges when the narrator, in his wandering through the bleak and blasted landscape under Martian occupation, encounters a man whom we would call a survivalist or social Darwinist. This man relishes the catastrophe as an opportunity to renew and advance the human species in its struggle for survival. "Life is real again," the man proclaims, "and the useless and cumbersome and mischievous have to die. They ought to die. They ought to be willing to die. It's a sort of disloyalty, after all, to live and taint the race." Wells dismisses this philosophy with ridicule rather than argument, showing the zealot to be nothing but a lazy, cowardly hypocrite.

Scientifically The War of the Worlds is a mixed bag. Wells perceptively shows how the Martians are affected by, and cope with, Earth's higher gravity, but he fails to see that their method of space travel--being shot out of a giant cannon--would have instantly pulverized their fragile bodies. Their machines and weapons, however, are quite realistic in their capabilities and limitations and anticipate some of the technological developments of our own time.

There is a scale and grandeur to the novel that filmmakers haven't yet captured--I highly recommend it.

Hard Times is lined up for my yearly Dickens read--probably in November. I think I have War of the Worlds in my TBR and your comments made me consider actually pulling it out. Thanks!

Category 4: Translated from the Spanish

Lazarillo de Tormes by an anonymous Spaniard
First published 1554
English translation by Michael Alpert 1969



In this short picaresque novel, the oldest known of its kind, Lázaro de Tormes narrates his life as a child and young man. Each of the seven chapters recounts his experiences as servant to a different master. The purpose of the story, stated somewhat tongue in cheek, is to get "people who are proud of being high born to realize how little this really means, as Fortune has smiled on them, and how much more worthy are those who have endured misfortune but have triumphed by dint of hard work and determination." I say "tongue in cheek" because to the extent Lázaro has triumphed it is largely because of guile and cleverness, not hard work.

Illegitimate and impoverished, Lázaro first leaves his mother to become a blind man's servant boy. The blind man is cruel and stingy, but Lázaro finds various ways to cheat him out of money and food in order to survive. Next he takes up with a priest who seems determined to starve the boy to death, so Lázaro must refine his talent for thievery into an art in order to survive.

With his third master Lázaro thinks at first he has had a stroke of fortune, as this man is a well-dressed and mannered gentleman. It turns out, however, that the gentleman is penniless but too proud to work, so he expects Lázaro to beg and steal for him.

In vignettes like these the anonymous author satirizes the pretense and hypocrisy of the time, with the sharpest barbs being directed at the clergy. As a novel Lazarillo de Tormes pales in comparison with Don Quixote, but it's worth reading to see how the picaresque form began and evolved.

Category 7: 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die

Tarr by Wyndham Lewis
First published 1916
Revised and expanded by the author 1928

 

Tarr is an assertive and sometimes brutal novel exploring the relationships of Life, Art, Sex and Death. Ezra Pound called it “the most vigorous and volcanic English novel of our time.” T. S. Eliot said Wyndham Lewis showed “the thought of the modern and the energy of the cave-man.”

Lewis was equally a painter and a novelist. His scathing satires of the art world alienated him from his contemporaries, and his legacy has been tarnished by negative portrayals of Jews and homosexuals in his novels. As Scott W. Klein writes in his superb introduction: “Tarr still snarls, as though through the bars of a cage, challenging approach by adventurous readers only.”

There are two very different versions of Tarr. In 1916 Lewis enlisted in the Royal Artillery and was sent to the front. Wanting to leave a literary legacy in case of his death in battle, with the help of friends Lewis rushed his first novel into print while portions were still in draft form and described as “placeholders.” After the war, the author leisurely revised and expanded the novel, republishing it in 1928. The 1928 version, as published by Oxford World’s Classics, is the version reviewed here, but the 1916 version, because it is in the public domain, is the one more widely available.

The novel takes place chiefly in Paris circa 1910. There are four principal characters whose interactions and conversations form the basis of the simple plot. Frederick Sorbert Tarr, a young English painter, is Wyndham Lewis’s alter ego, though the author explains that while Tarr’s ideas are his own, the events of the story are not the least autobiographical. Tarr is a self-assured modernist, scornful of the ideas and styles of the past. He claims himself to be a new sort of entity, one in whom the “emotionality normally absorbed by sex is so strong that it claims a newer and more exclusive field of deployment. Its first creation is the Artist himself. That is a new sort of person; the creative man.”

The person on whom Tarr’s carefully rationed sexual energies are expended is Bertha Lunken, a pretty German art student and model. Tarr describes his girlfriend as “a bourgeois-bohemian” and “a high-grade aryan bitch, in good condition, superbly made; of the succulent, obedient, clear peasant type.” Tarr, clearly a misogynist, enjoys her body even as he ridicules her attachment to outmoded German Romanticism.

The novel’s most distinctive and entertaining character is another German, Otto Kreisler, a middle-aged man still living on his father’s meager allowance and debts he can’t repay as he moves from city to city to keep ahead of his creditors. Kreisler considers himself an artist and a gentleman, but is neither. His drunken antics and brazen effrontery are the source of the novel’s dark humor, and his attempts at being serious invariably turn into the absurd.

Lastly there is Anastasya Vasek, the “Modern Girl” whose combination of intellect and sexuality send Tarr into confusion and Kreisler on the path of self-destruction. Describing herself, she says “My parents are russian. I was born in Berlin and brought up in America. We live in Vienna… I am a typical Russian therefore.” The term Lewis uses for her disarming sexual openness is “swagger sex.”

As some of the quotations above suggest, Lewis preferred his own rules of capitalization and punctuation, and even invented a few words. He felt, for example, that capitalizing adjectives of nationality placed too much emphasis on a person’s birthplace. The text is also sprinkled with enough French and German phrases and cultural references to make the editor’s footnotes very welcome.

The meat of the novel is found in Tarr’s conversations and pronouncements on the relationship and distinction between art and life, the nature of the artist, the role of sex in the life of the artist and, most disturbingly, what Tarr calls the “tragic theme of existence,” that “pleasure could take no form that did not include death and corruption.” He insists to Anastasya that “Death is the thing that differentiates art and life.”

Tarr is a novel of ideas peppered with enough action and humor to keep it fresh and entertaining throughout. It requires a reader to look past some potentially offensive opinions and characterizations, but has some thought-provoking notions on the nature of art from a man who was at the center of the art world for half a century.

Category 7: 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die

The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia by Samuel Johnson
First published 1759



The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia is a moral fable by one of England’s greatest thinkers that gives insight into the ideals and attitudes of the 18th century.

Rasselas and his royal siblings are confined by their father in a remote garden of ease and pleasure known as the Happy Valley. Here they are to remain safe from the cares and evils of the world. But Rasselas, learning something of the outside world from one of his tutors, becomes discontented and yearns to escape from paradise. He discovers that his favorite sister, Nekayah, shares his disquiet. Together with the tutor, Imlac, and Nekayah’s handmaiden Pekuah, they manage to escape from Happy Valley and make their way to Egypt.

Once they have overcome their astonishment at the scope and variety of the real world, they embark systematically on their quest to answer the simple question: How should one live? What is the secret to happiness, they wonder. Is it wealth? power? solitude? service? knowledge? Is the shepherd happier than the king? Is contentment found in monasticism or in family life? Yet each hopeful visit or interview ends in a degree of disillusionment. No state or occupation is without its conflicts, and no life is without regrets.

Yet along the way Rasselas and his sister pick up highly quotable gems of wisdom, usually from the lips of their tutor Imlac. Some examples:

“Great works are performed not by strength, but perseverance.”

“Nothing will ever be attempted if all possible objections must first be overcome.”

“The life that is devoted to knowledge passes silently away, and is very little diversified by events.”

“Be not too hasty to trust or to admire the teachers of morality: they discourse like angels, but they live like men.”

Modern readers will take delight in the fact that Dr. Johnson gives his female characters, Nekayah and Pekuah, every bit as much intelligence and boldness as Rasselas and allows them to use it. In the end the three learn that there is no one “right” answer to life, just wise decisions and worthy goals at each point along the way.

Category 15: Science Fiction and Fantasy

The Time Ships by Stephen Baxter
First published 1995

 

The Time Ships, a sequel to The Time Machine, was published 100 years after H. G. Wells's classic novel. The author, Stephen Baxter, copies Wells's style and tone, though the sequel is several times as long as the original and goes in a different direction thematically.

The story begins exactly where The Time Machine leaves off. The Time Traveler (whose name is still undisclosed) has returned from his journey to the distant future, has told his story to his unbelieving friends, and is about to disappear forever into the dimension of time. This time, however, he is speaking directly to the reader instead of through his amanuensis, the "Writer." His purpose in repeating his journey is to rescue the innocent Eloi woman Weena from the clutches of the evil Morlocks--her presumed fate after he lost track of her during his running battle with the Morlocks near the end of The Time Machine. Here, and not for the last time, we see the sensibilities of the 1990s intruding on a story based in the 1890s. To H. G. Wells's protagonist, Weena was little more than a semi-intelligent, adoring pet, and not the subject of romantic feelings.

After some hasty preparations, the Time Traveler once again sets forth into the the future. But he is soon dismayed to realize that the future into which he is traveling is not the world of the Eloi and Morlocks. It is a different future altogether, and it becomes more different the further he goes. He is left with the realization that his own actions in bringing back news of the distant future has changed the course of history itself. This leads, after more adventures in this new future, to an attempt to go back in time to keep himself from inventing the time machine in the first place and wreaking such havoc on history. But this attempt goes awry and leads to a further series of journeys forward and backward in time exploring the alternate pathways of Earth's history.

H. G. Wells used the original time machine to explore the idea that human society and the human organism were evolving together. He demonstrated how the division of the population into a leisure class and a working class could lead to the evolution of two incompatible cultures, and eventually two entirely different species. His novel also showcased recent scientific discoveries and theories about geological and stellar evolution, putting the history of mankind into the context of a larger, grander history of the universe itself.

Baxter's sequel does not develop Wells's social ideas, and he shows human evolution driven more by technology than economics. Instead the focus is more on the notion of causality and parallel realities. Any reader of science fiction is familiar with the paradox in which a traveler goes back in time and takes and action that prevents his own birth. Baxter's explanation is that this isn't a paradox at all, but the generation of new stream of reality that coexists with the old. So the tone of The Time Ships is much more technical than that of The Time Machine. There is also a bit of an anti-war theme, which it may have inherited from the 1960 movie in which Rod Taylor, as the Time Traveler, is dismayed to find a 20th century which seems perpetually at war. In one alternate history explored extensively in The Time Ships, World War I continues at least until the 1940s, and time travel itself becomes a weapon of war.

Though Baxter departs significantly from the predominate theme of The Time Machine, he does pay homage to H. G. Wells in one way. Throughout the The Time Ships the Time Traveler encounters mysterious apparitions of a being he calls "The Watcher." His physical description of this creature exactly matches that of the Martians in The War of the Worlds.

The Time Ships is an excellent and entertaining novel, but the focus on technology and scientific theories make it clearly part of the science fiction genre and of less interest to the general reader than H. G. Wells's The Time Machine. So while I would recommend it highly to any SF fan, it is not likely to interest those whose forays into SF are limited to the likes of Wells, Huxley and Orwell.

Category 7: 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die

Honeycomb by Dorothy Richardson
First published 1917
Third novel in the Pilgrimage sequence

 

"There was a life ahead that was going to enrich and change her as she had been enriched and changed by Hanover, but much more swiftly and intimately."

Miriam Henderson, the author's alter ego in her series of autobiographical novels, was raised a member of the gentry, but must seek employment because of her father's bankruptcy. After tutoring in Germany (which she loved) and teaching lower middle class girls in London (which she did not love), Miriam is now, in 1895, embarking on a career as a governess in a country home. It is an undemanding position with employers who are relaxed and companionable. But what is most important to Miriam, it is a life enriched by beautiful surroundings.

Aided by beauty (as she was by music in the first volume and books in the second), Miriam is finally able to transform herself from an insecure teenage girl to a mature, independent woman. "Beyond the horizon, gone away for ever into some outer darkness, were her old ideas of trouble, disease and death. Once they had always been quite near at hand, always ready to strike, laying cold hands on everything. They would return, but they would be changed. No need to fear them anymore."

Miriam's symbolic rite of passage into her independent adulthood--many modern readers will cringe at this--is when she first smokes a cigarette in front of others. It marks her not only as an adult, but as a woman of progressive, perhaps even radical, views. Indeed, Miriam is increasingly angered by the way the men around her treat women as their mental inferiors (and by the way the women acquiesce to it). Contemplating marriage, she says to herself:

"Men are all hard angry bones; always thinking something, only one thing at a time and unless that is agreed to, they murder. My husband shan't kill me . . . I'll shatter his conceited brow--make him see . . . two sides to every question . . . a million sides . . . no questions, only sides . . . always changing. Men argue, think they prove things; their foreheads recover--cool and calm. Damn them all--all men."

The ellipses in the above quote are in the original. Richardson uses them extensively in the stream of consciousness passages which are the bulk of the novel. Compared to the first two novels of Pilgrimage, Honeycomb is bolder in style, and the language is increasingly beautiful and rich in imagery. The themes of feminism and individuality are also more pronounced, making this Richardson's most rewarding and enjoyable novel yet.

Category 18: Literary Centennials

The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus
First published 1942
English translation by Justin O'Brien 1955



If there is no God--if life is finite, without meaning, and sometimes unbearable--why shouldn't we just commit suicide? This is the grim question with which Albert Camus begins his essay on the absurd. Camus rejects suicide, however, first by confronting the assumption "that refusing to grant a meaning to life necessarily leads to declaring that it is not worth living." A life that is acknowledged to be without meaning is, by his definition, an Absurd life. "Does the Absurd dictate death?" Camus argues that it does not.

The Absurd man knows that "seeking what is true is not seeking what is desirable," and will accept despair rather than "feed on the roses of illusion." He depends on his courage and his reasoning. He lives to experience life and to contemplate it free of the shackles of convention or guilt. Existence "is not a matter of explaining and solving, but of experiencing and describing." Life, the author says, "will be lived all the better if it has no meaning."

But does the Absurd man have the right "to behave badly without impunity?" Reassuringly, Camus answers that "The absurd does not liberate; it binds. It does not authorize all actions.... The absurd merely confers an equivalence on the consequences of those actions. It does not recommend crime, for that would be childish, but it restores to remorse its futility. Likewise, if all experiences are indifferent, that of duty is as legitimate as any other. One can be virtuous through a whim."

In making the above arguments, Camus draws on the work of other philosophers and novelists. He frequently cites Kierkegaard, Shestov and Nietzsche. Not having much background in philosophy, I found some of these passages hard to follow. But his references to the works of Dostoevsky and Kafka were very illuminating.

In his conclusion, Camus recounts the Greek myth of Sisyphus, the immortal who was condemned by the gods perpetually to roll a stone uphill, only to have it roll back just before reaching the summit. Sisyphus, he maintains, accepts that his position is hopeless, but scorns the gods by smiling as he retreats back down the hill to have another go at that rock. This revolt is his victory, for "there is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn." The Myth of Sisyphus is both profound and compelling. Even if it doesn't appeal to you as a personal philosophy, it wonderfully illuminates the literary works of Camus and many other modern writers.

Category 6: Author Themed Reads

The Sea Wall by Marguerite Duras
First published 1950 as Un barrage contre le Pacifique
English translation by Herma Briffault

 

The Sea Wall is the first of three autobiographical novels Marguerite Duras would write about her teenage years in Indochina. She lived both in Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam) and on a small coastal rice plantation in what is now Cambodia. The latter is the setting for this novel.

The author's alter ego is named Suzanne. She lives with her mother, referred to only as "Ma," and her older brother Joseph. Ma and her husband had immigrated to Indochina in 1899, lured by the government's promise of easy wealth. The husband had died soon after Suzanne's birth. Later Ma had applied for a land concession, and been granted 100 acres of supposedly prime rice land. Too late, she had discovered that all but five acres of it was inundated by the sea every monsoon season. Ma had gone deeply into debt building a sea wall to keep out the salt water, only to see it collapse the very first year.

The story takes place in the early 1920s when Suzanne is 17, her brother 20. The trio are subsisting on wild game, fish, and the little rice they can manage to grow while Ma staves off her creditors and nurtures the hope of somehow rebuilding the sea wall. She pins her hopes on Suzanne, whose beauty is bound to attract a rich husband some day. Their dreams seem about to be realized when Monsieur Jo, the spoiled son of a wealthy colonist, falls in love with Suzanne. But he has no intention of marrying her, and Suzanne makes no secret of the fact that all they are after is his money.

The Sea Wall is a bleak novel. Its unlovable characters are condemned to poverty, not for lack of energy or ambition, but for a lack of vision. Ma doggedly fixates on the sea wall as her only hope and on marketing her daughter's virginity as the key to realizing it. Her two children think only of escape, but are incapable of breaking with the daily routine to find a way out.

The first half of the novel is sharply focused on the family and the affair with Monsieur Jo. In the second half, however, Duras broadens the vision to include the native population of the cities and countryside. There are gut wrenching scenes of poverty, disease, and injustice with the youngest being the ones who suffer the most. In addition to a tense family drama, the novel becomes a bitter indictment of colonialism.

Duras re-told the story of her youth in her most famous novel, The Lover, but with substantial changes in both plot and style. The Sea Wall more closely resembles the writing of Louis-Ferdinand Céline with its hard-boiled, grim and nihilistic tone.

Category 6: Author Themed Reads

Hiroshima Mon Amour by Marguerite Duras
Screenplay with synopsis and notes by the author, as well as stills from the film
Filmed 1959, first published in book form 1960
Translated by Richard Seaver 1961

 

A French woman and a Japanese man meet in Hiroshima where the woman is playing a part in a film "about Peace." Though both are happily married, they fall in love with each other and spend the night together. In the morning she tells him she must leave Japan the following day, and they will never see one another again. "You saw nothing in Hiroshima. Nothing," he tells her. "I saw everything. Everything," she insists. Their conversation is interwoven with horrific images of the atomic bomb and its aftermath.

As the day passes and the filming ends, the man persists in seeing the woman and extracting the details of a personal history that has made her suddenly so melancholy. During World War II in her native city of Nevers, she fell in love with a German soldier. As the Allies advanced upon the city the soldier made plans for her to escape to Bavaria with him, but on the day they were to leave he was shot by a resistance fighter. He died in her arms. She was accused of collaboration and had her head shaved. Insane with grief, she was locked in a cellar for months.

What this script does is give us two powerful images of war and its impact: the very public horror of Hiroshima, and the intense private tragedy of the woman of Nevers.

The book gives us Marguerite Duras's instructions to the director and background sketches on the characters. Frequently she gives options for how a scene should be shot or alternative dialogue, and footnotes tell us which choices the director, Alain Resnais, made. The numerous photographs are well-chosen to illustrate how her directions were implemented and they give a good feel for the film overall.

Category 14: New (to me) Authors

Death Sentence by Maurice Blanchot
First published 1948 as L'Arrêt de Mort
English translation by Lydia Davis 1998

 

That the title of this novel is wonderfully, but differently, ambiguous in both French and English is highly indicative of its contents. "L'Arrêt de Mort" in French can mean both a legal judgment of death and the end of death. In English "Death Sentence" commonly also means a judgment of death, but it can also be construed to mean a written or spoken sentence that is about death. The fact that meaning is entirely dependent upon the interpretation of language, to the extent that our living and dying is dependent upon language, is interwoven throughout Blanchot's short novel.

The novel, written in the first person by an unnamed narrator, consists of two segments. In the first segment, taking place in 1938, the narrator tells of his relationship with a young woman named "J" who is dying of lung disease. J and the narrator discuss, among other things, her death, her suffering and her wish for suicide. At one point J's doctor insists on discontinuing her morphine shots because her condition is too frail. J screams at him, "If you don't kill me, you're a murderer." Ambiguous ideas about death and its meaning abound in this book. In reference to J's plea, the narrator says "Later I came across a similar phrase attributed to Kafka."

The second and longer segment of Death Sentence takes place in Paris during World War II, though the time and place may be of no significance. From the opening sentences, the narrator alerts us that the telling of the story is going to determine what the story is:

"I will go on with this story, but now I will take some precautions. I am not taking these precautions to cast a veil over the truth. The truth will be told, everything of importance that happened will be told. But not everything has yet happened....

"Even now, I am not sure that I am any more free than I was at the moment when I was not speaking. It may be that I am entirely mistaken. It may be that all these words are a curtain behind which what happened will never stop happening.... But a thought is not exactly a person, even if it lives and acts like one."

The events of this part of the novel, which involve encounters and conversations between the narrator and three different women, are dreamlike, discontinuous and enigmatic. The narrator's thoughts continue to be about death and suicide, but even more about language, silence and solitude. The language can be perplexing, but no less poetic: "...but this solitude has itself begun to speak, and I must in turn speak about this speaking solitude, not in derision, but because a greater solitude hovers above it, and above that solitude, another still greater, and each, taking the spoken word in order to smother and silence it, instead echoes it to infinity, and infinity becomes its echo."

I can't claim to understand everything Blanchot is saying in this novel, but it offers some intriguing interpretations. One is to consider it as metafiction with the narrator speaking, not as the author of a book, but as the book itself. For ideas live, change and develop in the mind, but as they are put into language and written down on paper their development ceases. In a manner of speaking, they die. Creation and death are the same, and language is what makes them so. In a postscript the author says, "These pages can end here, and . . . will remain until the very end. Whoever would obliterate it from me, in exchange for that end which I am searching for in vain, would himself become the beginning of my own story, and he would be my victim."

Category 16: Decadence, Gothic and Surrealism

Lieutenant Gustl by Arthur Schniztler
First published 1900 or 1901 (sources disagree) as Leutnant Gustl
English translation by Richard L. Simon 2003
Previously translated as None but the Brave

 

Told entirely as a stream of consciousness, this short (59 pages) novella puts us in the title character's head for a period of several hours. Gustl is an officer in the Austro-Hungarian army out for a night's recreation in Vienna around the turn of the 20th century. He is attending a concert for which a fellow officer has given him a free ticket. "How long is this thing going to last?" is his first thought. In between checking out the girls in the box seats, he thinks ahead to the duel he will be fighting the next morning. He isn't worried; this isn't his first. Gustl's mind also wanders to the problem of the Jews--there are too many of them in the Army, he thinks.

Waiting in line at the coat check after the concert, eager to find that girl he thinks was giving him the eye, Gustl makes an impatient remark to the large man in front of him. The man turns, grabs the hilt of Gustl's sword with a powerful hand to keep him from drawing it, and calls the young lieutenant a fathead. Gustl is too stunned (or frightened?) to react as the man walks away. But it's now too late. He has been publicly shamed and did not retaliate. There is no way to recover from such a disgrace. As he blunders out into the night, Gustl realizes that the only honorable option is to commit suicide.

Gustl's rambling thoughts give us a compact but vivid picture of aspects of fin de siècle Viennese culture. The novel satirizes the army in particular with its self-destructive honor code, its tolerance of social and sexual escapades, and its pervasive antisemitism. There is also a sense of the fragility of human fate where a single word can destroy a life or reprieve it. Schnitzler was a trained psychologist, and his portrait of this young man is both convincing and entertaining. The use of stream of consciousness was ground-breaking, yet it's delightfully easy to read.

Category 8: Other Group Selections and ER Books

Freedom by Jonathan Franzen
First published 2010

 

Freedom is the story of an American family from the 1970s to the writer's present day (2010). It is a novel thematically broad in scope and rich in insight.

The story opens with a portrait of the Bergman family of Minnesota. They seem almost too good to be true. Walter is an environmentalist working on important conservation projects. His wife Patty, a former college basketball star, appears to be the ideal happy homemaker and neighbor. Their two children, Joey and Jessica, are bright and successful. The Bergmans are an idealized example of liberal, socially and environmentally responsible, urban gentry.

But there are dark clouds looming. Joey will soon desert the family to move in with his girlfriend's redneck family next door. Patty is still haunted by her infatuation with Richard Katz, the rock musician who is Walter's best friend and whom Patty often wishes she had married, and Walter's idealism will soon be challenged by corruption and compromise.

The novel's narrative focus moves back and forth in time and from character to character. This allows the reader to see relationships and issues from multiple perspectives. On the large scale, Freedom chronicles the shift in American values from the bold, liberal idealism of the '70s to the cynical, materialistic conservatism of today. At the personal level we see individuals shaped by their environment and upbringing with children, more often than not, turning out to be the antitheses of their parents' personalities and values.

The theme of "freedom" is woven throughout the novel, but never pounded upon. It is represented in the yearning for independence by children and spouses. It is also a word used by opposing forces: the environmentalists wanting land free of exploitation, the corporate interests claiming the economic freedom to exploit. What is freedom to one person or group is all to often seen as a transgression by another.

The characters in the novel are, if not typical, at least convincing, and sufficiently complex that the reader can sympathize with, or be infuriated by, each of them. Like all of us they combine grand visions and pure ideals with petty prejudices and self-destructive behavior. Franzen's portrait of America over the last 40 years is written from the perspective of an embittered '70s liberal. Being one myself, I see it as ringing true. Conservatives will probably have a different opinion of the novel.

Category 20: England, Scotland and Wales

Shirley by Charlotte Brontë
First published 1849



"Pantheress! beautiful forest-born! wily, tameless, peerless nature! She gnaws her chain; I see the white teeth working at the steel! She has dreams of her wild woods and pinings after virgin freedom." With these words an admirer describes Shirley Keeldar, the co-heroine of the novel titled Shirley. She is the heiress of a substantial estate. Her parents wanted a boy, so they gave her a man's name and something of a man's independence and temperament. (That "Shirley" has been ever since a girl's name is due to the popularity of Charlotte Brontë's novel.)

The other co-heroine is Shirley's closest friend, Caroline Helstone. Raised by her uncle, the local rector, Caroline is more the typical Brontë heroine, hiding her passions, her intellect, and her opinions behind a quiet, devout and dutiful exterior. But in female company both she and Shirley express surprisingly strong views on the role of women in 19th century England.

"Men, I believe, fancy women's minds something like those of children. Now that is a mistake."

"...I feel there is something wrong somewhere. I believe single women should have more to do--better chances of interesting and profitable occupation than they possess now."

"Men of England! look at your poor girls, many of them fading around you, dropping off in consumption or decline; or, what is worse, degenerating... reduced to strive by scarce modest coquetry and debasing artifice, to gain that position and consideration by marriage which to celibacy is denied."

Nor was marriage always desirable; of one girl's prospects the author says that she, "...inverting the natural order of insect existence, would have fluttered through the honeymoon a bright, admired butterfly, and crawled the rest of her days a sordid, trampled worm."

Caroline Helstone and Shirley Keeldar live in a small Yorkshire community named Briarfield (perhaps modeled on the Brontë home of Haworth) which boasts a fabric mill as its sole industry. But times are hard. It is 1811 and the war with Napoleon has resulted in a trade embargo that is now extended to America, crippling the English economy. The mill's manager, Robert Moore, is undaunted. An immigrant from Belgium, half French and half English, Robert is a distant cousin of Caroline's and a man who will figure in the love lives of both women. To cut labor costs in an attempt to stay afloat, Robert imports machinery to automate his mill. But this eliminates precious jobs, and there are riots. The machinery is destroyed. Robert rebuilds and battles on, in a scene the author says is being played out all over England.

Brontë is even-handed in her treatment of labor-management disputes, showing sympathy with both positions. She is unequivocal, however, in regard to the idea that some can claim superiority by birth over others. The aristocracy is seldom mentioned in the novel, but satirized viciously when it is. One lady candidly admits that the best English governesses are the illegitimate daughters of English lords:

"...we need the imprudences, extravagances, mistakes, and crimes of a certain number of fathers to sow the seed from which we reap the harvest of governesses. The daughters of trades-people, however well educated, must necessarily be underbred, and as such unfit to be inmates of our dwellings, or guardians of our children's minds and persons."

Charlotte Brontë began writing Shirley, her second published novel after Jane Eyre, in 1848. In September of that year Charlotte's brother Branwell died from a complex of problems brought on by heavy drinking. Two months later, Charlotte's younger sister Emily died of tuberculosis in the same room in which the sisters did all their writing. In May of the following year the youngest sister, Anne, died of the same disease.

After Anne's death, Charlotte resumed her composition of Shirley. A discernible loss of focus in the middle of the story may be a consequence of this hiatus. In the later chapters, Brontë has her three principal characters, Caroline, Shirley and Robert, each go into a decline due to illness or injury. Each comes near to death or fears it. But Charlotte could bring them back to life and health with her pen, something she could not do for Branwell, Emily and Anne.

"You held out your hand for an egg," she wrote, "and fate put into it a scorpion." With the scorpion clenched defiantly in her fist, Charlotte Brontë wrote a bold and beautiful novel.

Category 12: Nobel Prize Winners

Life & Times of Michael K by J. M. Coetzee
First published 1983

 

Life & Times of Michael K is set in a version of apartheid South Africa in which a civil war is raging, though between whom and over what is never explicitly stated. Michael K is a gardener living in poverty in Cape Town with his mother. Michael is severely harelipped and somewhat simple-minded, though he is often taken to be more mentally impaired than he really is. The mother, who is dying, asks her son to take her back to the farm where she grew up. Unable to obtain the necessary travel permits, Michael smuggles his mother out of town in a hand cart. She soon dies, however, and Michael is left with her ashes to carry to a place he knows only by her description. He becomes a solitary fugitive, living off the land, until he is captured and sent to an internment camp.

The first thing that strikes you about this novel is that there is no mention of race whatsoever. We assume that Michael K is black simply from the way he is treated, just as we assume those in authority are white. This is a story set in South Africa and obviously reflecting the apartheid system, yet it clearly isn't the South Africa of past or present. By distancing the narrative from any specific time or issue, the author lets us see Michael K as an individual struggling against the establishment, not as a representative of an ethnic group or political cause. His physical and mental peculiarities make him an outsider even among his fellow outcasts.

The surname "K" is an obvious reference to the works of Franz Kafka, as is the fact that the government headquarters is referred to as "The Castle." Just like K in Kafka's novel The Castle, Michael K is an individual struggling to make sense of a system that contradicts itself at every turn. But unlike Kafka's K, Michael K eventually thwarts the system by withdrawing into his own identity and refusing to act or interact. Eventually it is the Castle which becomes baffled and frustrated trying to figure out K.

Category 8: Other Group Selections and ER Books

419 by Will Ferguson
First published 2012
An Early Reviewers selection

 

In Calgary, Canada, a man drives his car over a cliff hoping (in vain) that the life insurance settlement will compensate his family for his losing everything they owned. He is just one of many victims of a type of fraud known as a Nigerian 419 scheme. His daughter, Laura, and the rest of the family later sit in stunned disbelief as the police explain how her father was lured in by e-mails promising a rich reward for helping a person in need. They are also astonished to learn that there is nothing the police can, or will, do to pursue the defrauder. When asked about taking action as an individual, the police advise strongly against it, saying that it's almost impossible to recover the money, and that going to Nigeria is very dangerous. "What if it's not about the money?", Laura asks.

For a number of years I worked as the manager of an IT department, and it was my job to educate the employees in my organization about these 419 schemes, most, but not all, of which originate in Nigeria. (The number "419" refers to a Nigerian penal statute.) I have seen many variations of the initial fraud message, and I have had highly educated people take the first steps toward disaster, only to bring copies of their correspondence to me for reassurance before taking the final bait. They are always dumbfounded to learn that nothing can be done about these fraud attempts. So I am speaking from some personal experience when I say that Will Ferguson has perfectly captured not only the modus operandi of the schemers, but the psychology of the prospective victims. It's unthinkable that intelligent people would fall for such frauds, even after having been warned, but they do.

Laura is a copy editor and highly attuned to patterns in English usage and common mistakes. She will use her skills to track down the man who caused her father to take his own life. She will go to Nigeria. We know this from the beginning of the novel because Ferguson's narrative is broken into dozens of short chapters shifting back and forward in time and from place to place, and we have seen Laura arrive in Lagos before we know why. But Laura's quest for retribution is actually not the predominate theme of the novel. 419 gives us a panoramic portrait of Nigeria through the eyes of three Nigerians, one of whom is the defrauder himself.

One of the others is a young woman named Amina from the arid northern savannas where Islamic law is in force. Expelled from her village for an unwed pregnancy, she undertakes a perilous journey across a parched land, begging, stealing, and scavenging among garbage for food.

The third Nigerian, and in some respects the central character of the novel, is Nnamdi, a boy from a fishing village in the mangrove swamps of the Niger River delta. Through him, and over the course of several years, we see the impact of oil exploration and drilling on Nigeria. Forests are bulldozed, crops destroyed, rivers poisoned, and the air and water turned foul by what one villager calls "the devil's excrement." Oil companies from Europe and America operating free of environmental controls and government oversight turn the delta into a sewer and take unconscionable risks. Corruption spreads, the farmers and fishermen become beggars or criminals, while the rich hide in fortified compounds and drive armored limousines.

The author gives us a vivid and sometimes horrifying picture of Nigeria: its ethnic diversity, economic disparity, and chaotic violence. Homeless children scavenge in raw sewage in the shadow of gleaming office towers. Young men sabotage oil pipelines in the hope of being hired by the oil company to clean up the mess they made. There are riots for fuel in a country rich with oil, and the army and the police fight one another. Interwoven with the Nigerian scenes, the story of Laura's quest for vengeance maintains and edge-of-your-seat tension.

The weakest aspect of 419 is that some elements of Laura's story beg for further development. Her plans seem to depend all too often on the unlikeliest of several possible outcomes, as though the ending is pulling the story to it. But the broader scope of the novel, its depiction of today's Nigeria, and the insightful portrayal of the psychology surrounding the 419 fraud schemes makes this a book I highly recommend.

Category 20: England, Scotland and Wales

The Man of Feeling by Henry Mackenzie
First Published 1771



Following one of the literary conventions of the time, The Man of Feeling is introduced as an accidentally discovered manuscript. It is a biography of a young acquaintance of the writer's named Harley. The man who discovered it, an English curate, saw no value in it, and has used most of the pages as wadding for his fowling piece. This explains why we are given only fragments--19 chapters that begin with Chapter 11 and end with Chapter 46, and some of them incomplete.

Harley is a country squire, just come of age. His parents are dead, but his aunt lives with him. In the chapters preserved we see him fall in love, only to be later frustrated in love. He then sets out to London on a matter of business and along the way encounters a variety of characters: beggars, swindlers, card sharps, a misanthrope, a prostitute, and a wounded veteran. He even visits Bedlam, London's asylum for the insane. His reactions to each are often naïve, but always marked by sympathy and a desire to understand rather than to judge.

Parts of the novel are satirical (especially the visit to Bedlam), and parts are political, but for the most part it is a treatise on feelings. Novels of "moral instruction" telling you how to act were common in the 18th century. This is a novel demonstrating how one should feel, not what one should do. Harley drops tears of compassion on almost every page, and is never hardened by experience.

For the modern reader these case studies in compassion are nothing new, and the novel as a whole is rather sappy and uneventful. The author, Henry Mackenzie, was an admirer of the works of Laurence Sterne, and there is some resemblance between The Man of Feeling and Sterne's A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy. But Mackenzie's work is not the equal of Sterne's. The part I enjoyed the most was not about Harley and his feelings at all; it was the disabled veteran's diatribe against British imperialism in India. To profit by trade with the Indians was fine, he said, but nothing justified deposing their rulers--however despotic they may have been--and taking over another country.

The Man of Feeling was very popular in its day. It is a book I would recommend chiefly for its historical significance, and since it's very short and a free ebook, little investment of any kind is required. It would be best to approach it as you would a book of maxims or fables with no expectations of plot or character development.

Category 5: Reading Globally

So Long a Letter by Mariama Bâ
First published 1980 as Une si longue lettre
English translation 1981 by Modupé Bodé-Thomas

 

"Fate grasps whom it wants, when it wants. When it moves in the direction of your desires, it brings you plenitude. But more often it unsettles, crosses you. Then one has to endure." A woman's struggle and endurance against fate and unfairness is the theme of this short novel in the form of a single, long letter. The writer of the letter is a Senegalese woman of fifty named Ramatoulaye. She is writing to her former classmate and lifelong best friend Aissatou. The occasion is the recent death of Ramatoulaye's husband, Modou.

Ramatoulaye describes briefly the funeral rites, but when she addresses her own feelings she is led immediately to the great resentment in her life: that Modou had recently taken a second wife. She recaps how this came about, and weaves into the story Aissatou's own personal history. Aissatou's husband, Mawdo, has also taken a second and younger wife. But Ramatoulaye is quick to point out that Mawdo did this only under pressure from his own family, whereas Modou's second marriage was a personal caprice. Modou fell in love with his own teenage daughter's best friend, and showered gifts upon the girl's mother so that she would be forced against her will to marry a man at least thirty years her senior. After thirty years of marriage to Modou, and having borne him twelve children, Ramatoulaye feels betrayed, not just by her husband, but by the male sex in general and the society it has built.

Mariama Bâ's novel is a statement of personal loss, grief, and perseverance, but it is also a manifesto for the cause of women's rights in Africa and elsewhere. She takes on the issues directly, saying "Nearly twenty years of independence! When will we have the first female minister involved in the decisions concerning the development of our country?" And later: "Instruments for some, baits for others, respected or despised, often muzzled, all women have almost the same fate, which religions or unjust legislation have sealed." The key issue is polygamy in Islamic states, but she also addresses arranged marriages, equality of education, political freedoms, inheritance laws and customs, and recognition for the economic value of homemaking services.

Aside from its feminist message, So Long a Letter offers an interesting look at how ancient traditions and modern values clash in today's Africa, even among the most highly educated and empowered classes. The characters in the novel are all university-educated professionals living in relative comfort, so the injustices of which Bâ writes are not to be overcome by money or education. I can't help but wonder, though, what Modou's side of the story would have been had the author allowed him to tell it.

Good review of So long a letter which I read a few years ago.

Category 6: Author Themed Reads

The Sailor from Gibraltar by Marguerite Duras
First published 1952 as Le Marin de Gibraltar
English translation 1966 by Barbara Bray

 

The Sailor from Gibraltar is both a story of sexual obsession and an extended existential metaphor. The narrator (who never gives us his name) is a French civil servant on vacation in Italy with his girlfriend. Faced with returning to a meaningless job and living with a woman he does not love, he seizes upon the tale of a rich American woman whose yacht is anchored off the Tuscan coast. This woman, so the story goes, is sailing the world in search of her lost lover, a sailor from Gibraltar. But she takes on other lovers in the meantime, picking them up in one port, dropping them off in another when she gets tired of them. The narrator contrives to meet this woman (who turns out to be French, not American), sends his girlfriend packing, abandons his job and his luggage, and sails away with nothing but the clothes on his back as the new lover of the woman who is searching for the sailor from Gibraltar.

"Looking for someone is like everything else: to do it well you must do nothing else, you mustn't even regret giving up any other activity, you must never doubt for a moment that it's worthwhile for one man to devote his whole life to looking for another."

Anna, the rich woman, follows tips sent her by agents (former lovers) from all over the world in search of her runaway sailor. They crisscross the Mediterranean, then voyage to West Africa and finally the Congo on tips that he has been seen running a gas station one place, smuggling diamonds somewhere else.

Anna admits that she is almost relieved when each lead turns up false and the quest can go on. Does she even want to find sailor at this point, or is the search all that matters? "Sometimes it's not what you desire the most that you want, but the opposite--to be deprived of what you desire the most."

Passing at night into the Atlantic, the narrator muses, "We left the Rock behind, and with it the disturbing and vertiginous reality of the world... She turned at last and looked at me. 'Suppose I'd invented it all?' she said. 'All of it?' 'Yes.' 'It wouldn't make much difference,' I said."

The meaning of life--"God" if you wish--is never something we find, only something we look for. Life's purpose is only the journey, not the destination.

Anna asks the narrator at one point what he will do with the rest of his life, and he replies that he will write an American novel about their time together. Why American? Because in American novels they drink whiskey, and he and Anna are drinking it then. They both drink a lot, in fact, and the narrator's moments of sobriety are very few. In style, content and setting Duras's writing here much resembles that of Ernest Hemingway, and there are several references to Hemingway in the novel itself. I found even more similarity between The Sailor from Gibraltar and the work of Duras's American contemporary, Paul Bowles.

Category 3: Communism

Animal Farm by George Orwell
First published 1945
Second reading

 

This novel is too well known to need another review. My grandson had just read this as a summer reading assignment for high school, and since I hadn't read it since high school myself, I decided to re-read it. When I first read it, it was at the height of the Cold War, and it was presented as a novel about the evils of communism. It isn't that at all, of course, but rather about how Stalin and his followers betrayed the ideals of communism.

I wonder what today's teens can make of this story when they are now generations removed from the era it reflects and haven't yet had any classes in world history or political science that would give them important background. It probably comes across to them as just a moral fable on the evils of selfishness and bullying.

Category 2: London

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
First published 1886
Second reading

 

My grandson's other summer reading assignment. It will be quite a challenge to a vocabulary honed on twelve hours a day of Spongebob Squarepants. He will probably go into it expecting something more like its modern derivative, the Incredible Hulk, and be disappointed that Mr. Hyde doesn't go around smashing stuff.

One of the common misconceptions about this story is that Jekyll represents "good" and Hyde "evil." Jekyll is not, by his own admission, "good." He relishes the sins and pleasures* he enjoys as Hyde, but is tormented by fear and guilt. The serum allows the evil side of Jekyll to operate unfettered by qualms or remorse. But as Jekyll he is fully complicit in Hyde's sins, hiring a separate flat and a housekeeper for Hyde's convenience. There is no formula for isolating Jekyll's good side (nor does he seem interested in finding one).

* What are Hyde's secret pleasures? I suspect we are expected to infer that Jekyll is homosexual. He is a middle-aged man with no wife, children, or female acquaintances. Hyde is allowed to act out what, in Victorian England, were unmentionable desires.

@ 199 -- I totally agree with your reading of Jekyll & Hyde. Hyde may be pure evil, but Jekyll is far from being pure good!

Category 6: Author Themed Reads

India Song by Marguerite Duras
First published 1973
Translation by Barbara Bray 1976
(The title is the same in the French and English editions: the English phrase "India Song.")

 

India Song is a play Marguerite Duras wrote in 1973 based largely on her own 1965 novel The Vice-Consul, which, in turn, used characters from her 1964 novel The Ravishing of Lol Stein. The play was both produced on stage and, in 1975, made into a film by Duras herself.

The drama takes place mostly in Calcutta (now Kolkata) at the French embassy. (Duras says in her preface that she knows full well the embassy would have been in New Delhi, not Calcutta, but she is deliberately imprecise in her geography.) The story centers on the ambassador's promiscuous wife, Anne-Marie Stretter, whose languorous beauty is irresistible to the younger men around her. She and her lovers suffer from a self-destructive despair because of the tropical heat and the human misery surrounding them, especially the leprous beggars who encircle every European compound.

The play is unique in that no words are spoken on stage. In the opening act the players are silent, and all we hear are two disembodied female voices. Voice 1 is fascinated with Anne-Marie and wants to know details of her background. Voice 2 supplies some of the answers, but is clearly in love with Voice 1. In the long second act the players speak, but only when they are off stage. We hear them conversing in an adjacent room, but when they step into sight they are silent. In the final three short acts the female voices return, accompanied by a pair of male voices. And once again the actors on stage are merely posing.

Like many of Duras's other works, India Song combines strong political opinions on colonialism and inequality with a haunting story of erotic obsession. It is well worth reading both the play and The Vice-Consul. The novel has many additional elements not found in the play, but the disembodied voices in the play add a new dimension to the story.

Category 4: Translated from the Spanish

The Lost Steps by Alejo Carpentier
First published 1953 as Los Pasos Perdidos
English translation by Harriet de Onís 1956

 

A composer makes an epic journey into the jungles of South America in search of rare native musical instruments but finds, instead, a succession of revelations that transfigure him and his art.

The composer is a man of Latin American origin but multi-national heritage living in what we presume to be New York. His marriage to an actress is failing because their careers separate them physically and emotionally. He has taken a mistress, a French astrologer whom he calls "Mouche." Intellectually they are worlds apart, but their relationship is physically satisfying. When the curator of a museum coaxes the reluctant composer into going in search of a fabled Native American instrument, Mouche insists on going along.

The country to which the composer and his mistress travel is not named in the novel, but in a postscript the author identifies the places visited as composites of actual localities in Colombia and Venezuela. Through various vicissitudes and discomforts, they find themselves journeying as if back in time to ever more primitive means of conveyance and accommodations. More importantly, the human customs, values and beliefs they encounter become more akin to the medieval than the modern. The composer, who begins to gain musical insight from this, is ever more eager to press on. He and Mouche, who misses the comforts of civilization, grow steadily apart. A new woman, Rosario, enters the picture.

Eventually the composer passes from the medieval to the paleolithic, as he comes among tribes so remote that they know almost nothing of the outside world, and are innocent of agriculture, the wheel, and all of modernity. But he sees that they are genuine in a way civilized man has forgotten how to be. We obey customs without bothering to understand their origin or significance, but with the Indians "...not one gesture was made without cognizance of its meaning."

He makes discoveries about himself as well. He passes some tests, but fails others. "I told myself," he reflects, "that the discovery of new routes embarked upon without realization, without awareness of the wonder of it while it is being lived, is so unique, so defies recapture, that man, puffed up with his vanity, thinks he can repeat the feat whenever he wishes, master of a privilege denied to others." But he who turns back and later seeks to recapture the miracle of discovery will find "the setting changed, the landmarks wiped out, and the faces of the guides new."

The Lost Steps is told in language as dense, fragrant, and verdant as the jungle itself. This moving and insightful novel is full of aesthetic insights and reverence for the natural world, not just in musical terms, but in visual modes as well. "A day will come," the composer tells us, "when men will discover an alphabet in the eyes of chalcedonies, in the markings of the moth, and will learn in astonishment that every spotted snail has always been a poem."

Category 1: The Works of Émile Zola

The Ladies' Paradise by Émile Zola
First published 1883 as Au Bonheur des Dames
English translation by Brian Nelson 1995

 

“The silk department was like a huge bedroom dedicated to love, hung with white by the whim of a woman in love who, snowy in her nudity, wished to compete in whiteness. All the milky tones of an adored body were there, from the velvet of the hips to the fine silk of the thighs and the shining satin of the breasts.”

In such sexual terms, Émile Zola repeatedly describes the merchandise on display in Paris’s first and greatest department store, “The Ladies’ Paradise,” or simply “The Paradise.”

The fabrics and articles of clothing are designed to appeal to all the erotic senses. A pair of leather gloves smells “like an animal in rut which has landed in a girl’s powder box.” Women plunge their hands into bales of silk and piles of lace, their rapture reaching an orgasmic intensity which translates into a frenzy of spending. The shop floor, seen from above, was a “sea of bosoms bursting with life, beating with desire.” And at the end of big sale “the customers, despoiled and violated, were going away in disarray, their desires satisfied, and with the secret shame of having yielded to temptation in the depths of some sleazy hotel.”

The setting is Paris in the 1860s during the extravagant, materialistic years of the Second Empire. The owner and manager of The Paradise, Octave Mouret, is one of the two principal characters of the novel. An ambitious young widower of modest origins, he has built The Paradise up from a simple draper’s shop to become the marvel of Paris through his audacity and his merchandising genius.

The other principal character, Denise Baudu, appears on the scene as an orphaned teenage girl from the provinces throwing herself and her two brothers unexpectedly upon the charity of her uncle. But the uncle, the owner of a small fabric store across the street from The Paradise, is in the process of being driven out of business by competition from the monster store and can barely feed his own family. Facing starvation, Denise winds up working as a shopgirl in the very store that is ruining her family. Here the pretty teenager soon attracts the eye of the lustful Mouret, a man as accustomed to manipulating women into his bedroom as he is to enticing them onto his sales floor. But Denise, he finds, does not share the casual sexual attitudes of many Parisiennes. Instead he discovers in her a strength and intelligence that both frustrates and inspires him.

The Ladies’ Paradise is a novel in Zola’s “Rougon-Macquart” series. The series relates the fortunes and misfortunes of an extended family during the Second Empire period. Many of the titles focus on the influence of heredity and environment on the character of family members, but that is not so much the case here. Octave Mouret, the Rougon-Macquart descendant in this case, is not as much the subject of the novel as the institution he has created. (He actually first acquires The Paradise in Zola’s previous novel, Pot Bouille, translated most recently as Pot Luck.) The Ladies’ Paradise is actually rather short on plot and character development compared to Zola’s other novels.

A major theme in the novel is the effect The Paradise has in driving out of business the small, family owned competitors, which can’t complete with The Paradise’s low prices and sex appeal. One constant contrast is between the brilliantly lit interior of The Paradise and the dark, dingy spaces of the other stores where “the dark shadows were falling from the ceiling in great shovelfuls, like black earth into the grave.” The misery into which the small shopkeepers descend is often depicted melodramatically, yet Zola never suggests that the large department store is evil or unfair, but rather that we are witnessing a natural stage in the evolution of commerce.

It is fascinating to see in this novel the beginnings of retail practices with which we are now quite familiar. The physical arrangement of departments within a store is done for psychological, rather than logistical purposes. Traffic flow in busy aisles is deliberately impeded to create the illusion of bigger crowds and more excitement. A generous return policy encourages impulse buying. With a staff growing into the thousands, the store becomes a community of its own with dormitories, dining halls, and recreation rooms. Cutthroat employment practices are softened in the interest of employee loyalty, and we see the emergence of employee benefits such as onsite health care, maternity leave, and education programs. On the outside there is a new business/government partnership for further development, and we see the buying power of a large retailer begin to control its suppliers.

Octave Mouret explains at one point that he has built his success upon “the exploitation of Woman.” Is the novel demeaning to women by depicting them as so easily exploited--so readily seduced into an orgy of spending? Not necessarily, because what we also see is the increasing power of women in the marketplace as independent consumers. Inside the store Zola shows them growing in power and responsibility as managers, department heads, and buyers (though we still never see a woman supervising a man). Behind the scenes they have additional influence as key investors.

The Ladies’ Paradise is a fascinating and enlightening look at the birth of an institution which is still a dominating force in retail. It can be seen as a critique of materialism and greed, but as such is not as forceful as some of the author’s other works. Nor is the novel particularly strong in plot or character. But Zola’s immense powers of description are on full, sensuous display.

Category 2: London

London: The Biography by Peter Ackroyd
First published 2000

 

Part history, part homage, London: The Biography tells the story of London from its mythical beginnings to the end of the 20th century. The opening chapters, from prehistory to the middle ages, are conventionally chronological, as are the closing chapters from roughly 1880 to 1999. Everything between is thematically organized, though there is a general chronological drift. There are chapters on food, prisons, mobs, children, plagues, trade, fires, smells, sounds and so forth--over sixty topics in all.

Though Ackroyd's history gives the impression of being based on sound research, he writes more from a novelist's perspective about ideas, feelings of identity, and cultural traditions. Most of the quotes he offers come from the fiction or travel writings of literary figures rather than histories and biographies. This is a history that will especially please those with an interest in literature and local heritage; it's likely to disappoint those who want to learn London's place in the larger picture of British or European history.

There are several sections of black and white and color plates, as well as a couple of rudimentary maps. One could wish for more, especially when specific paintings or photographs are mentioned in the text but not included in the illustrations. Instead of footnotes and bibliography there is a twelve-page essay on sources. All of the sources appear to be previously published works; the book makes no claim to include original research. There is an index, but it is not comprehensive. When I tried to find the first reference to Whitehall, I discovered that the term is omitted.

London: The Biography is highly readable, entertaining and imaginative. It is meant for popular rather than scholarly consumption, and its informal thematic organization may frustrate those who want to learn more about a particular period in London's history. The author's love for his subject is obvious and occasionally carries him away. He is apt to see mystical connections where there is only coincidence, and the notion "only in London" is overused. But Ackroyd makes a convincing case that London is not only a great city, but perhaps the greatest, and one whose history and heritage are certainly worth our attention.

Category 15: Science Fiction and Fantasy

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket by Edgar Allan Poe
First published 1938



The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, Poe's only novel, is a nautical adventure with elements of science fiction and horror. It reads like a series of brilliantly told stories somewhat arbitrarily connected and capped by an abrupt and mystifying ending.

The story takes place in 1835-36. Pym, a young New Englander, desires to go to sea with a friend, Augustus, whose father captains a whaling brig. Pym's relatives refuse him permission, so Augustus helps him stow away in the hold. Pym's confinement in the dark, unhealthy hold last days longer than he expects, and he fears he will die there, alone and forgotten. Finally Augustus gets word to him that there has been a mutiny, and that Augustus, because of his youth, had been the only non-mutineer allowed to remain alive on board the vessel.

There follows a succession of adventures involving a counter-mutiny, a storm, a shipwreck, and a prolonged survival ordeal at sea. Pym eventually finds himself on board another ship which is off to explore the Antarctic in the hope of finding some previously undiscovered land where there are seals to hunt or natives to trade with. His adventures have only begun. Each episode in the novel is told briskly with edge-of-the-seat tension. Poe's descriptions are as vivid and rousing as any nautical adventure I have read.

At the time of Poe's writing, a number of European and American expeditions had attempted to determine if there was an Antarctic continent. Most had been turned back by ice. Two or three explorers had only recently come upon dry land within the Antarctic circle, but were unable to determine if these were the shores of a continent or just isolated islands. There had been some reports or rumors that the waters actually grew warmer as one approached the pole, leading to speculations about hidden tropical civilizations. Others believed that the Earth was hollow, and that the poles were the points of entry to a second world inside. Poe recaps much of this in the novel, and Pym and his companions make discoveries that begin to hint that some the wildest theories may be true.

The science fiction elements of the novel are found in the "lost world" idea, though this surfaces only in the final chapters. The horror elements are found in the terror of premature burial (a common theme in Poe's short stories) and in the superstitious fear of the reanimated dead. But there is nothing overtly supernatural in the novel.

There are two objectionable aspects to the novel. One is the abrupt and unsatisfying ending which has frustrated and mystified readers since its original publication. The other is the strong presence of racial stereotypes. I found myself, while reading the novel, unable to put it down and wondering why it has been so neglected relative to Poe's poems and stories. The puzzling ending is the answer to that question, but it remains a memorable reading experience.

Challenge Complete

My goal was to do a step challenge using 13 categories out of a list of 20, reading 13 books in one category, 12 in another, 11, 10, etc.

Here is the list showing the goal and, in parentheses, the actual number of books read in each category:

13 (13) Author Theme Reads
12 (13) 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die
11 (13) Group Reads and ER Books
10 (10) Science Fiction and Fantasy
9 (9) Translated from the Spanish
8 (9) Reading Globally
7 (9) England, Scotland and Wales
6 (6) Émile Zola
5 (5) London
4 (5) Decadence, Gothic and Surrealism
3 (5) Slipstream and Experimental Fiction
2 (3) New (to me) Authors
1 (2) Sequels and Series
0 (2) Nobel Prize Winners
0 (2) Award Winners
0 (2) Literary Centennials
0 (1) Communism

Congratulations! Again this year, your thread has been a pleasure to read.

Hurray! Congratulations!

Congratulations!!! And, thanks for the great review of London: The Biography - thumbing - I just picked up a copy and it looks great!

Congratulations! I have thoroughly enjoyed following your reading through the challenge.

Congrats on finishing!

Wow, congratulations!

Thanks, everyone!

Now I'll have to confess that I haven't been keeping up with this group except to cross post my own reviews. I'm active in several other groups that are all I can handle at this time.

Belated Congrats, am so far behind!

congrats, I know what you mean about trying to keep up on LT. Still its been interesting your reviews, thanks