(2025)
Rachel Kushner:
Creation
Lake
Liz Moore:
The
God of the Woods
Futaro Yamada:
The
Meiji Guillotine Murders
Yael Van Der Wouden:
The
Safe Keep
Manolo Palomares:
Mestizo
Charlotte Wood:
Stone
Yard Devotional
Peter Janney:
Mary's
Mosaic
Jason Rekulak:
Hidden
Pictures
Elif Shafak:
There
are Rivers in the Sky
Rita Bullwinkel:
Headshot
Barbara Davis:
The
Echo of Old Books
Gareth Brown:
The
Book of Doors
Hisham Matar:
The
Return
Sophie Elmhirst:
Maurice
and Maralyn
Jenny Jackson:
Pineapple
Street
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie:
Dream
Count
Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani:
I
Do Not Come to You by Chance
Tammy Borden:
Waltraud
William Boyd:
Gabriel's
Moon
Alison Espach:
The
Wedding People
Edith Wharton:
The
Age of Innocence
Joseph Conrad:
Chance
Sally Rooney:
Conversations
with Friends
Sarah Perry:
The
Essex Serpent
Edith Wharton:
The
House of Mirth
Benjamin Myers:
The
Offing
A.B. Paterson:
An
Outback Marriage
Martin Suter:
Melody
Antone Martinho-Truswell:
The
Parrot in the Mirror
Adna Brown:
From
Vermont to Damascus
Evelyn Waugh:
A
Handful of Dust
Aldous Huxley:
Island
Margaret Mitchell:
Gone
with the Wind
John Banville:
The
Drowned
Stefan Zweig:
Schachnovelle
Nick Harkaway:
Karla's
Choice
Susan Choi:
Flashlight
Florence Knapp:
The
Names
Jennifer Trevelyan:
A
Beautiful Family
Kathryn Hughes:
The
Memory Box
Graham Norton:
Frankie
John Helmer:
Der
Nawalny-Nowitschok-Komplex
Andrew Miller:
The
Land in Winter
The Slowworm's Song
Michael Farris Smith:
Nick
David Szalay: Three Books
Flesh
All
That Man Is
Turbulence
Edith Wharton:
Ethan
Frome
The Reef
Philip Zelikow:
The
Road Less Traveled
Katie Kitamura:
Audition
Intimacies
Claire Adam:
Love
Forms
Golden Child
Chris Pavone:
The
Doorman
Virginia Evans:
The
Correspondent
Wallace Stegner:
Crossing
to Safety
Dan Houser:
A
Better Paradise
Natascha Konsistorum:
Der
Komponist Nikolaj Medtner
The heroine, or shall we say protagonist of this
book is an agent provocateur. Her job is to ingratiate herself into
environmental protection groups which the Powers That Be would like to
eliminate, provoking them to do something illegal, providing the evidence,
and then seeing that they are thrown into jail to serve long sentences,
safely put away from normal society. For the purpose of this novel she has
assumed the name Sadie Smith. She is middle 30s, fit, still beautiful, and
so she uses sex. Her present assignment is in the south of France. Water is
to be diverted from its natural courses and into a large artificial
reservoir in order to irrigate the endless fields of corn (or maize) which
is to replace traditional agriculture. Thus it is part of all the pollution
caused by modern Green politics. The traditional farmers of the area are
protesting. According to the narrative of the legacy media, they are thus
part of the "extreme right". There is also a commune of hippy-like people;
perhaps they should be referred to as elements of the "extreme left", led by
a guru whose name is Pascal, and they join in with the protests. They have
given up on the idea of revolution, instead withdrawing into
self-sufficiency by subsistence farming, aided by the occasional addition of
funds by the wealthy parents of one or another member. They also produce
reams of philosophical literature. The annual agricultural fair is soon to
take place and an obscure politician named Plato is to make an appearance.
Sadie's mission is to infiltrate the commune and get them to assassinate
Plato.
The story unfolds gradually; Sadie tells us lots of
things about herself. It is an enjoyable read from one character to the next
with excursions into one thing and another. Rachel Kushner writes well, much
irony and fun. In particular Sadie is constantly reading the emails of Bruno
Lacombe. He is an old man who has progressed from living in a farmhouse with
family, to living alone in the barn, to living in an ancient stone hut, to
finally living in a limestone cave, an entrance to which is on his property.
We have long meditations about the Neanderthals. Cave
men. Two or three percent of non-African human genomes are attributed to
Neanderthals while Africans have only a one percent or less contribution. It
used to be thought that Neanderthals were ape-like brutes with their thick,
muscular chests and short limbs. Too stupid to understand bows and arrows or
thrown spears, they lunged at large animals with their primitive wooden
lances, grappling, killing them with bare hands. The bones of Neanderthals
are said to exhibit at least as many breakages as with modern-day rodeo
cowboys. And yet the Neanderthals had huge brains: an average of 1640 cubic
centimeters for males and 1460 for females. This compares with 1362 and 1201
for the average modern European brain. And so people imagine a different
picture of the Neanderthal. Were they gentle, caring, unimaginably
intelligent people, living in perfect harmony with nature? Like Pascal's
commune, but infinitely sustainable. A mythical, perfect human existence,
brought to a tragic end by the invasion of cruel, evil modern man. Bruno
tells us of such things in his emails and tells us how the enduring echos of
those lost times of 50 or 100 thousand years ago can be felt in the darkness
of his cave. Perhaps he imagines himself to be a kind of spiritual
Neanderthal.
Indeed, all of this is very interesting. When reading the
book I decided to look up a "comparison of neanderthal and human brains"
using duckduckgo.com. (Not Google. Heaven forbid!) This led me to a recent paper on the subject. There it is said that
modern humans have a mutation to the TKTL1 gene, changing just a single pair
on the sequence. All other hominoids lack this mutation. It has the effect
of dramatically increasing the number of neurons with all their connections,
especially in the frontal lobe. Therefore the fact that our brains are
smaller than those of the Neanderthals does not mean that we are more stupid
than they were. On the contrary, we return to the picture of Neanderthals as
stupid, grunting brutes, perhaps with IQs in the sub-50s or less, fighting
with their primitive neurons to survive in harsh Ice Age Europe. The
examples of birds with high intelligence: parrots, kookaburras and the like,
with their small brains, show that brain volume is not necessarily the
decisive factor. There is some evidence that our genomes contain almost no
Neanderthal mitochondrial DNA, seeming to imply that almost all sexual
encounters between a Neanderthal and a human involved a male Neanderthal and
a female human. That is to imagine that the women were raped.
Despite enjoying the story of the book, it seemed to me
to be strangely naīve. It is placed in modern times with emails, mobile
telephones and all the rest. Sadie tells us about her first case in which
she framed a young man who was protesting the cruelty of animal experiments
in some horrible laboratory. She induced him to buy tons of nitrogen based
fertilizer which could be used to make a bomb. And so he was sentenced to
years in prison. He is now free, having a lawyer investigating the exact
circumstances of his case. Yet Sadie has disappeared into thin air and has
gone on to successfully frame numbers of further such people. This might
have been possible, say, in the 1970s, but in our real world of today
everybody is constantly taking pictures, selfies, videos with their mobile
telephones. The world is filled with surveillance cameras, recording things.
There are countless images stored away in the vastness of both government
and private "cloud" memories. Emails, certainly those of Bruno, are
generally not encrypted, and people accessing other people's emails can be
identified. So I imagine that such an agent provocateur would have only one
chance, after which she would be useless, having to hide, perhaps in some
cave in the south of France, for the rest of her life.
And then of course we have the circumstance which I
cannot understand, that the Green political movement has mutated from being
representative of the kinds of people Sadie is ruining, people with just
environmental causes, to being the shrillest voices for war, mass murder and
all the rest. For some reason these people embrace electricity almost as a
kind of fetish. Everything is to be based on electricity. Laws have been
passed, specifying that in the future only electrical battery cars will be
allowed. Houses will only be allowed to be heated with electricity. Huge
windmills are being built everywhere for generating intermittent
electricity, polluting vast swathes of natural forest, decimating the birds
and the bats, relying on obscure minerals for their functioning which are
mined at the expense of extreme, deadly pollution, sometimes using
child labor, in countries out of sight of Green voters. For the last year
teams of construction workers have been going through the streets here,
digging up the sidewalks and laying cables. But these are glass fiber
cables, not new, robust electrical cables. How will the old cables which
were laid down under the streets, up to 100 years ago, cope in the middle of
a cold, windless winter night with every single house drawing perhaps 10 or
15 kilowatts or more of electricity, continuously, for heating and car
charging? Where will all this electricity come from, given that the system
is now almost at its limit, despite the fact that only few houses are heated
with electricity and few battery cars are on the roads?
But this was not really part of the story of the book,
except that we imagine that Sadie's unknown employer might very reasonably
have been an obscure Green-funded NGO. After all, the farmers were
protesting all of this infrastructure for transforming their land into a
corn mono-culture for the production of ethanol to be burned in the engines
of cars (which are to be banned in the future).
A rich banking family have a mansion on a hill in
the Adirondack Mountains of Upstate New York. There is a lake down below and
a summer camp for the children of rich parents. Everything is surrounded by
dense woodlands. In the spring there is an invasion of irritating black
flies, but they disappear in mid-summer, and to celebrate this event the
banking family invites a select group of people to their mansion for a party
which lasts for a week. Meanwhile down at the lake, the summer camp of
children - most of whom are not children of parents taking part in the
celebrations up at the mansion - goes on in a highly organized, almost
military style. The party for the grownups consists of a few old friends of
the family, and then possible future customers of the bank together with
their spouses, and finally a collection of young and attractive men and
women from Hollywood or whatever to make things look more attractive and
perhaps to provide sexual diversions for one or another of the guests. As
with the summer camp for children, the party for the grownups is highly
organized with competitive games and sporting events, points being awarded
and added up to determine the winners and losers at the end of the week.
All of this seems to me to be extremely unpleasant, and I
find it difficult to believe that a potential customer of the family bank
would afterwards want to have anything more to do with such a family. But
what do I know about the lives of the rich?
In the book, all of the rich people are portrayed as
being dreadful, and all of the non-rich people - the workers at the summer
camp for children, the ordinary people in the small town nearby - are
wonderful. The one exception is the simple-minded wife of the present head
of the family bank who drowns her feelings in alcohol and pills prescribed
by the family doctor. Her depression was particularly due to the mysterious
disappearance of her beloved young son into the depths of the wood, never to
return. Was he murdered, abducted, the victim of an accident? Despite
extensive searches lasting days, weeks, by everybody in the surrounding
villages, the police and everybody else, his body has never been found. And
now, at the time of the present story, the young daughter has also
disappeared. Again, everybody is searching without success. Where is she?
Was she murdered or abducted or something?
We read eagerly on. The good people are falsely accused
while those arrogant rich people make halfhearted attempts to continue their
party, on to the end of the week. My theory was that the family lawyer whose
degenerate son was set to take over the bank was the perpetrator. After all,
he had a motive in both cases. For anybody who might happen to click in here
(and I expect that there is nobody except me who would do that) I will not
spoil the story by revealing how things are resolved at the end. At least
the New York Times took the book seriously enough to give it a review.
This is also a crime story, but of a completely
different character to the last book. The author was of an earlier generation and he based
his story on the situation in Japan in 1869, during the time of the Boshin War. In 1854, the United States Navy Commodore
Perry sailed his fleet of Black Ships into Tokyo Harbor to open up trade
between Japan and the outside world. Earlier, during the 1630s, the rulers
of Japan decided to isolate the country from divisive outside influences,
particularly those of the Portuguese and Spanish which had reached Japan in
the years before that. Japan refused to allow itself to be colonized, either
by force or else by the subversive influence of the Catholic missionaries
with their Christian religion. Yet at the end of this "Sakoku" period, the isolation was ended. Such events
are bound to lead to conflicts, with those people who were dominant in the
old system - the Samurai class - losing out.
The book begins with chapters describing lots of blatant
corruption in the chaos of the time. Roaming bands of police extract money
from everybody they can see. They come from the old ronin class of wandering, itinerant samurai of bygone
days. We are overwhelmed with all the complicated Japanese names of so many
different characters, most of whom seem to play no particular role in the
story. Perhaps the internet might tell us that they are actually famous
historical figures from that period. The narration seems to be going
nowhere, but gradually we do converge upon two characters with similar
appearing names who are both somewhat higher up in this newly established
police department. And then finally, a chapter does appear with a murder
mystery.
Somebody - was he also with the police, or was he a
politician? - was killed with the sword of another character who was also
either police or politician despite the fact that the apparent killer was up
in a tower with windows all around and observed constantly by various other
policemen. And there can have been no other assassin at the scene. What a
mystery! The mystery is solved by a young French woman who is the girlfriend
of one of the two main characters. She is described as being indescribably
beautiful and clothed in indescribably beautiful clothes. She enters a state
of trance and communes with the deceased in a seance who, speaking through
the French woman, explains what happened. It is a rather far-fetched
explanation. The other policeman, or perhaps somebody else, is constantly
saying that the French woman should be deported along with all other
foreigners.
Then the next chapter is another short story explaining
another murder mystery. It has snowed and there are the tracks of a rickshaw
leading down to a canal where the victim drowned, yet no footprints in the
snow of the coolie who must have been pulling the rickshaw. Again the French
woman makes an appearance and in a seance explains what happened. There are
a number of further chapters seemingly written in the same style, but I gave
up.
The text is interspersed with the occasional obscure
Japanese word which the translator has conveniently placed in italic type,
but which is nowhere explained in the book. I certainly do not have a
Japanese-English dictionary. We do have GoogleTranslate, but I couldn't be
bothered. Undoubtedly the Japanese readers of the original which appeared in
1979 could make more sense out of all this than I could.
Before beginning this book we know that it is
concerned with a young woman living alone in a rural house in Holland in
1960. She is extremely uptight, an unpleasant, brittle person insisting that
everything should be kept in its place. Both her parents have passed away.
Her uncle owns the house and gives her an allowance, but when he dies the
house is to go to the older brother. The book was shortlisted for the Booker
Prize of 2024 and it is the debut novel of the author. This is the information we gather from the
blurb, and so I started reading.
We soon learn that Isabel, or Isa for short also has a
younger brother, Hendrik, who is homosexual and lives with his exotic
partner somewhere else, far enough away - was it Amsterdam, or Den Haag -
I've forgotten which. Isa's house is in the east of the country near Zwolle.
The elder brother, Louis, is already about 30 years old and has one
girlfriend after another. The present one is named Eva. They all have a
get-together at a restaurant and Isa is very rude to Eve who seems not to
notice. A bit later Isa receives an unpleasant telephone call from Louis to
tell her that he is to go over to England on business for a month, and Eva
should stay at the house with Isa for the time.
And so Eve comes to stay, bringing disruption, disorder.
What is more, Louis has put her in their mother's bedroom which, for Isa is
a kind of shrine; she was alone with the mother for her last breaths into
death. Isa shouts at Eva. She is rude; she counts the days till the month is
finally finished so that Louis will take her away. But then, at the climax
of these towering emotions, Eva moves closer, holds Isa, kisses her. And
suddenly the novel becomes a celebration of female homosexuality, explained
in page after page of vivid, graphic, trembling detail. If, as is sometimes
said, Queen Victoria could not imagine what female homosexuals could
possibly be doing, then she would certainly have found this book to be
instructive. I have not read any homo-erotic novels; Gore Vidal's The City and the Pillar was unpleasant enough without
reaching such levels of detail, and anyway, the female is a more pleasant
subject than the male.
But then the whole story takes on a whole new twist.
According the Guardian review of the book, in order not to spoil it for
their readers they refrained from revealing what it was. But since
practically nobody reads what I am writing here, I can just write whatever I
want.
It is a Holocaust story. All that lesbian stuff was just
more of the eternal suffering of the poor Jewish Eva. The house had belonged
to her family. Her father was sent to a concentration camp and was killed.
Therefore the mortgage on the house was not paid, and so the surviving
family was evicted. Isa's uncle later bought the house. Meanwhile, unlike
Anna Frank who hid together with her family in Amsterdam, the young Eva was
sent by her mother to various farms in Holland, paying the people to hide
her in attics or barns, sleeping alone, cold, on rough straw, kicked out
when the money didn't come.
Is this really the picture we have? Those cold-hearted,
money-grubbing Dutch people, seeing the opportunity of making a few gulden
out of the suffering of the Jews, throwing out the poor little Anna Franks
of the world as soon as the money runs out. Well, undoubtedly there are
unpleasant people in Holland. The Dutch East India Company was just as cruel
as the English in their colonies. The Belgians in the Congo were perhaps
even worse. I can only say that the Dutch people I have known over the years
are so different from all of this as to render it absurd. And anyway, even
if there was such a horrible farmer, would it have been worth a few gulden
to hide a young Jewish girl? If there was a market for such things then such
farmers would be known in wider circles, and soon the GESTAPO would come and
take them away. And if such a farmer were to evict such a young girl for
want of money then the parents might anonymously let it be known to the
GESTAPO. So the danger would not be worth the money at all. In fact it would
be the money itself which would produce such an impossible level of danger
for such an imaginary farmer. This part of the story is clearly
nonsense, absurd.
And then we have Eva living homeless, destitute in the
Amsterdam of 1960, wanting her old house back. Why is she destitute? This
wasn't explained in the story. Surely there was much sensible employment to
be had in the Holland of those days. We can understand the lazy Isa sitting
around doing nothing, stewing in her own juice, but this doesn't apply to
Eva. Of course it would be nice to live in the old family home, but such is
the tragedy of many, many people. All of the countless wars in the world. Is
it improper to think of the many Palestinian families who lost their homes
in the Nakba of so many years ago and who, we are told, still treasure the
keys to those long-lost houses?
Mestizo, by Manolo Palomares
After a cursory search of the internet I couldn't
find any sensible reviews of this book. It is concerned with Martin Cortez, the first born son of Hernan Cortez, the conqueror of Mexico. Of course we
should say that Cortez, the Conquistador was evil, marching through
the innocent, pure, sustainable civilization of original America, unsullied
by the corruption of Europe, killing and then enslaving the native peoples
for the glory of Spain. But on the contrary, this book treats Martin, and by
reflection his father, Hernan, as heroes. And thus no self-respecting
newspaper or internet reviewer will touch it.
The author has also written another historical novel
about the father, but I won't bother to read it. Nevertheless, it is surely
fair to treat Cortez more honestly. The situation in Mexico in 1519 was that
the Aztec nation was dominating various other nations, enslaving their
peoples, ritually killing them as sacrifices to their gods. And thus Cortez
with a force of only 500 men inspired these oppressed peoples to rise up
against the Aztec. His very essential partner in this endeavor was La Malinche, a native woman who acted as his
translator and advisor and who was the mother of Martin, the hero of this
book. Certainly the Spanish in "New Spain" enslaved many of the natives, but
many of them, and many of the mixed-race people, became respected citizens
and even ascended to the aristocracy. The book agrees with the narratives of
these people as they are described in the Wikipedia, so I assume that it is
all historically accurate.
The story is that Cortez senior did not marry La
Malinche, but rather upon returning to Spain with riches and fortune he
married a Spanish aristocrat, thus raising himself into that class. With his
official wife he had two sons, yet using bribery he had the Pope declare his
first-born, Martin, a legitimate child. Nevertheless, in his testament he
declared the son of the aristocratic wife to be the main beneficiary,
inheriting his title and most of his riches. Since that son was evil while
Martin, the Mestizo was devoted and pure, all of this led to horrible
consequences. The father's testament went on for many pages, trying to
impose his will onto the world after his death. A terrible idea. Testaments
should be short and simple. The moral of the story is that you should die
peacefully; the future is no longer of concern to you.
This one was short-listed for the Booker Prize, so
it is well written. And I wanted to read it since it is concerned with the
Monaro country of southern New South Wales in Australia, around the town of
Cooma. During the time I was studying at the Australian National University
in Canberra I often drove through Cooma, either down to my parents place on
the coast or up to the Snowy Mountains. And I remember a party once where a
young woman told us that she had been an art teacher in the school at Cooma.
She had slept with one of the 16 year old students in her class, which she
said with a smile was wonderful, but as a result she had lost her job. I
suppose these days she would be accused of rape and thrown into jail.
The book is concerned with a Catholic monastery somewhere
out on the Monaro plains. I can hardly imagine such a thing. A woman,
perhaps in her 50s or 60s, comes to visit and stay in a guest house on the
property of the monastery. She stays for a week. She does this often, and
then one time she decides not to return to the real world. The narration
follows the quiet happenings in the monastery while the horrible "COVID"
nonsense passes through the world. Policemen, particularly in Victoria, go
berserk, beating up innocent people. In the north of the country a
concentration camp is constructed for imprisoning people who do not toe the
line. But serenity reigns in the confines of this little world. Nobody is
hiding behind masks. Eventually the outside world seems to return to normal.
One nun and another dies. And the story is particularly concerned with a nun
who had in former times rejected the order and traveled to the slums of
Manila (was it?), serving the poor there, where she was murdered by a
Catholic priest. Her bones have been discovered and they are to be returned
to the monastery through all of the hysteria of COVID.
How times have changed since the idyllic 1960s and 70s,
at least as Australia then was.
This book is concerned with the murder of Mary
Pinchot Meyer in October 1964. Of all the countless sexual partners of
President Kennedy, including the wife Jackie, Mary Meyer is perhaps the only
one he may have loved, if indeed that was an emotion which was possible for
such a man. Mary's murder has been the subject of countless "conspiracy
theory" books and internet sites, yet this one especially deserves our
attention since the
author was intimately connected with the Meyer family and with many of
the suspects in the whole affair.
The book begins with a very detailed account of the
circumstances of the murder on a tow path along a canal in Washington DC,
and how the "patsy", a small, sensitive African-American, Ray Crump, was set
up to be blamed. He was freed from this miscarriage of justice by the one
real hero of the book, Dovey Roundtree, the African-American woman who
defended him in court.
The book then goes on to describe the Kennedy family, the
Pinchot family and also the Meyer family, back in the 1930s, living in their
mansions and mock castles. The exclusive private schools where they mix
together, the young Jack Kennedy already having a reputation for his
unbridled sexual adventures. We are told that the patriarch, Joseph Kennedy,
instructed his sons that "a day without laying a woman is a day lost". But
during these high school days, the formal dances and fancy costumes,
preparing the way for a later life of luxury in the upper classes of
American life, Mary rejected Jack and preferred the young Cord Meyer. We are
told that he was a sensitive character. During the Second World War he was
sent to the Pacific, and after landing on Iwo Jima a grenade exploded next
to him, blinding one eye. After the war he became a pacifist. He
participated in the founding of the United Nations in San Francisco,
accompanied by Mary who was then his wife. They both dreamed that the United
Nations would form a One World Government which would ensure that such wars
would never again take place. It was a beautiful, utopian dream. But utopian
dreams are often dangerous. Cord Meyer, with all his connections, expected
to become a professor in an Ivy League college: Yale or Harvard or
something. It was not to be. Instead Allen Dulles convinced him to join the
newly-founded CIA. He joined such people as James Jesus Angleton and Wistar Janney, the father of the author, in this
founding generation of the CIA.
These days we associate the CIA with torture,
assassination, regime change, and all sorts of other horrible things. So why
did the sensitive, pacifist Cord Meyer join such an organization? Surely the
answer is obvious. He, as well as Dulles, Angleton and all the rest saw that
the only practical path to a One World Government, a force which would
control the world and prevent another world war, would be the United States.
The United States, as world hegemon would be the true United Nations; in all
its benevolence it should control the world. Only by understanding this do
we understand the crisis which the United States and the rest of the world
is now experiencing. The United States is losing its control. China has
become the center of world commerce, Russia has successfully resisted the
efforts of the Hegemon to destroy it both militarily and economically. This
is an existential crisis for the CIA and the United States, and it has led
to those strange, seemingly absurd characters who have recently become
Presidents: Biden and Trump. But the book is dealing with an earlier era, at
the beginning of the 1960s when the dream was closer to reality.
Cord Meyer withdrew into himself as the reality of his
actions distorted his character, and he separated from his wife Mary. She
delved in art, painting, but also she had many friends in this circle of CIA
people and their wives. She got to know Timothy Leary, who was then a professor at Harvard,
experimenting with the mind-opening properties of LSD. Little did she know
that the CIA had long been using LSD in its MKUltra program under the direction of Sidney Gottlieb, carrying on the mind control and
torture experiments begun in the NAZI death camps of Auschwitz and Dachau.
Timothy Leary and the beginning Hippy generation of the 1960s had a
different idea. By opening people's minds with LSD trips, the world would
gradually embrace love, and not war. Mary accepted the advances of Jack
Kennedy who had now become President, and she introduced him to LSD. It
seems to have worked. He suddenly began issuing real peace initiatives,
ordering the complete withdrawal of all troops from Vietnam, negotiating
seriously with the Soviet Union. Mary also motivated other CIA wives to open
the minds of their husbands through LSD. Well, we can all see what happened
to Kennedy. Mary was not someone to keep her mouth shut, and she found out
much from all of her friends in high places, so she also had to be gotten
rid of.
The author has been on a quest for over 30 years to
discover everything about the murder of Mary Meyer. As a small child in the
1950s his best friend was one of Mary's sons, and so he spent much time with
their family. He admired Mary. He went on outings together with his father
and James Jesus Angleton, for example telling us how he and his best friend
were fishing while the father and Angleton looked on, reclining on the river
bank, laughing together. Mary, Mrs. Angleton and his mother, Mrs. Janney,
were very close friends.
In the end he discovers that not only Angleton, but also
his father, was very directly concerned with Mary's murder, its planing and
its execution. And finally, over 50 years after the deed, he is able to
discover the man who, if not the actual murderer, was at least the person at
the scene who directed the narrative and who was the prime false witness at
the trial of Ray Crump. He confronts him, is threatened, legal processes
take place, but of course this confrontation of two old men after all these
years leads nowhere.
A ghost story. We have a young woman from the slums
of Philadelphia, a recovering drug addict, being offered the job of live-in
babysitting, or to use a more old fashioned expression, to be the nanny for
a small boy of exceptional intelligence whose picture-book parents live in a
wonderful house in a beautiful suburb in southern New Jersey. But then we
learn that all of this is not what it seems. The young woman was an athlete
who was injured and was given too many drugs by those evil medical doctors.
The small boy is maybe not a boy; or is it a girl? or something else? Are
the parents really the parents? Are they really living in the house? Are
they horrible criminals?
All of these elements are sufficient to create a
complicated story, lurching from one idea to the next. As if that was not
enough, the author has found it necessary to have the little boy/girl, or
something, occasionally entering a trance and being possessed by the spirit,
or ghost, of someone who has died. While thus possessed he/it draws
elaborate pictures, seemingly narrating some sort of crime. Despite all of
this nonsense I did read on to the end, even enjoying the story. A welcome
change from more depressing "serious" books I've been reading lately.
I'm not really a fan of ghost stories, and I can hardly
remember reading any. There was one by Henry James which was equally
absurd. The best was a movie a few years ago: The Sixth Sense.
A good ghost story should be based in a very normal situation where,
inexplicably, things seem to go wrong in strange ways, not confusing the
mystery with irrelevant nonsense.
In contrast to the previous book, this one
maintains the pretense of being serious. It is concerned with lots of
different things, sadness accumulating from one theme to the next: ancient
Mesopotamia; Gilgamesh,
the oldest recorded story in the world; a distorted fictional account of George
Smith, the person who discovered the Flood tablet; the Yazidis; the building of dams, flooding river basins;
hidden rivers flowing beneath the streets of big cities; a bit of climate
change; the harvesting of human organs from helpless people in order to
insert them into the bodies of rich people, and so on and so forth.
Where to begin? Years ago when we were still receiving
the local newspaper, before all that COVID and Ukraine business, when at
least the reporting of local happenings in the town here seemed to be
factual and not particularly intended to distort things to support one or
another given agenda, there appeared a tragic story. As I remember it, a
family consisting of four children, the youngest a girl still at school,
together with the parents, murdered the schoolgirl. Of the three older
children, the oldest was a woman in her late 20s. She was a respected civil
servant in the town administration. Along with her two younger brothers she
took part in the murder. The father, who was said to have ordered the
killing, could not be brought to justice since he was being protected by the
surviving children. The family belonged to the Yazidi religion, or people.
This was the first time I had heard of it. It was said that the Yazidis are
forbidden to marry or to have close relations outside of their group. The
crime of the younger sister was that she had a boyfriend who was not a
Yazidi. We learned that there is a Yazidi community here, people who are
refugees. Then a few years later we read in the paper that hoards of young
Muslim hooligans were traveling to Syria, cutting people's throats,
destroying ancient monuments, and in particular overrunning the Yazidi
people, murdering all the men and taking the women and children to satisfy
their depraved sexual desires. At least this was the narration in the
newspaper, and it seemed to me to be believable, if unimaginably horrible.
It is a basic and unfortunate property of life - call it
the selfish gene - that it is an advantage for closed groups to form
within a larger population of organisms, interbreeding within themselves and
working for their advantage over the rest of the population as a whole. And
so within human society we have these groups becoming the eternal victims,
filling the pages of novels with their sufferings. I sympathize with them
and I wish that biology - game theory- would be different from this. Perhaps
the young woman murderer and her two brothers are still in prison, or
perhaps they have already been released on the basis of good behavior. After
all they were model citizens in this New Germany. If so then I wonder if
they have returned to the principles of Yazidiism.
According to the book, the Yazidis are the true
descendants and preservers of the ancient Mesopotamian civilizations and the
Zoroastrian religion. According to the Wikipedia, this is questionable, and
anyway, I thought it was the Parsees in India, and of Freddie Mercury fame,
although of course that was Persia.
There is a lot in the book about the cuneiform system of
writing on clay tablets, and we are motivated to look up what we can find
about such things. It is amazing that people were able to understand this
complicated system of writing and to reconstruct those lost languages. The
Victorian character named Arthur Smyth in the book bears only a superficial
resemblance to the real George Smith, who was a much more admirable person.
The book dwells on the Epic of Gilgamesh, and this led me to download a pdf
version which you can find here. It is only 51 pages long. You can skip over lots
of passages which are repetitive, and anyway, many lines are missing,
breaking up the story to become often hardly comprehensible. This is
understandable when we look at pictures of the broken fragments of the
tablets.
It is said that Rilke was quite carried away with the
whole thing. I find that hard to understand. It is also said that he might
have just been posturing. Perhaps it will be possible to reconstruct more by
using computers and some sort of machine-learning algorithms to fit together
lots of obscure fragments in various museums.
At least the first tablet seems to be relatively
complete. To begin with we are told how wonderful, strong and cruel
Gilgamesh is. Then we have Enkidu, a gigantic wild man coming down from a
mountain. This is a bit like the beginning of Nietzsche's Zarathustra. But
unlike him, Enkidu is tamed by the harlot Shamhat with whom he has wild,
continuous sex for a week or more, after which he is drained and civilized.
He then sets off to do battle with Gilgamesh. Unfortunately many lines are
missing here, but they emerge as friends, and even brothers. Then the
fragmentary parts in the middle describe various battles with different
monsters. Finally the eleventh tablet gives a kind of flood story. I found
it to be confusing. It was more a matter of Gilgamesh traveling by raft,
poling himself along, somewhere to the land of death or something. This
caused much controversy in the 19th century since it predates, yet has many
parallels with the equivalent biblical story. The Wikipedia mentions a
twelfth tablet. That is not included in the pdf version which I read, and
anyway it is said to contradict much of the rest. For example Enkidu dies in
tablet seven, yet he is suddenly alive in tablet twelve. But what do I know
about such things? They can be left to the countless Ph.D. students, writing
their theses on the role of Gilgamesh in relation to one thing or another.
Interestingly, it is said that Saddam Hussein was also fascinated with
Gilgamesh, and in his novel, Zabibah and the King, which I, of course, have not
read, he apparently portrays himself as a kind of Gilgamesh in the First
Gulf War.
Anyway, to summarize the present book, it has many
episodes, all of which are sad, and many of which are tragic.
Headshot,
by Rita Bullwinkel
Women's youth boxing. Girls under 18. This story is
concerned with an imaginary tournament which is the endpoint, the end round
to see who is the best fighter of all the girls in the US. It is in a dusty
gym in Reno, Nevada. There are eight girls, and therefore this is the
quarter-finals, to be followed next day by the semi-finals, and then later
in the day the final fight. We are not told which weight class this is, or
if women's youth boxing just throws them all together regardless of weight.
An unusual idea for a book. Something amusing, and so now I have read it.
Is there really such a thing as competitive boxing for
young girls? I can imagine frustrated housewives, or harried business women,
joining some sort of boutique fitness studio, putting on boxing attire and
tapping each other carefully under the supervision of a handsome young,
athletic trainer. But girls really trying to slug each other senseless? In
fact a quick internet search finds lots of contributions to this genera.
There are a few angelic faces with tiny raised fists, but most look much
more serious. Many Youtube videos. They really are hitting each other as
hard as they can. There is nothing attractive in the spectacle. Are they
hitting so hard as to induce gradual, permanent brain injury as is the case
with men's boxing?
In the book each of the matches is described not as a
round by round commentary, but rather the author imagines that the
individual girls are dreaming about their lives. And so the narration
describes these dreams, what each of these girls are like. All of them have
the killer instinct. They want to win at all costs. Their dreams are often
angry dreams. But realistically, would a person in the middle of a violent
fight be thinking like this? Surely it's just mindlessly punching away,
fighting exhaustion.
Each of the girls is portrayed as being totally dedicated
to winning. I sometimes wonder if most people are like this. Is winning
really so important? For example as a student I occasionally played tennis,
but I just liked hitting the ball back and forth across the net, enjoying
the feeling of the movement. How unpleasant it was when the other person
insisted on keeping score. In fact I hate competitive games. On the other
hand the beauty of music is that people get together to try and create
something; something which would be spoiled if the musicians began overtly
competing with one another.
In the book, some of the girls reflect on the
meaninglessness of the whole business. One of them thinks about her trophy
cabinet, filled with all her trophies, her wins. And yet the trophies are
plastic figures, cups, or whatever, painted with gold paint. Even in her
young life she has accumulated many trophies for many victories. But the
gold paint is flaking off the trophies, covering the bottom of the cabinet.
And even this trophy for the best girl boxer in America has already
developed a crack in the plastic of its little head in the heat of the
desert of Nevada.
When people die, leaving houses filled with old
things, the people who are left to clear things up put them in boxes to be
disposed of. Some of the boxes might be filled with old books, and those,
especially the ones containing books which are properly bound, might end up
in an antiquarian book shop to be sold on to new customers. In this
book, Ashlyn is a young woman who has taken over an antiquarian book shop
from her grandfather, or uncle, or something. She is blessed with the
esoteric ability to feel the emotions of books as she handles them. And so
she is struck with the emotions of a particular book in such a box.
Examining it more closely she finds that no author is mentioned, no
publisher, there are no attributions at all despite the fact that the book
is not at all new. It must have been privately published at great expense.
(These days you can just send a pdf off to some place in the internet, and a
few days later you receive one copy, or a thousand copies or more of your
text, bound, even with sewn bindings and hard covers if you want, costing
scarcely more than the cost of the paper which has been used.) But in those
days such a manuscript would have to be set, letter for letter by hand, then
printed page for page on some sort of printing press, and bound, all by hand
by somebody working away for a month or more. An indulgence which only
wealthy people could afford.
Ashlyn begins reading the book. It is a description by a
man of how he falls in love with a woman in the year 1941. On the front page
is a handwritten note, written in 1953 by the author, accusing the woman in
the story of violating his love. The woman is referred to as "Belle". In
fact the title of the book is "Regretting Belle". Her family apparently
swims in money. We are reminded of Mary Pinchot, the young randy Kennedys,
and all the rest of the children of the American rich living it up in the
1930s. The author of this book is not rich. He is a journalist, an
Englishman who has come over to America in this beginning war year,
apparently to report on the scandals of the rich for some sort of newspaper
which specializes in such things. But Ashlyn is fascinated with the love
story.
She gets in touch with Ethan, the person who had
delivered the box of books, and soon finds that there is another such
expensively, privately produced old book, this time with the title "Forever,
and Other Lies". It was written by the Belle of the other book and is
addressed to Hemi, the author of that book. It describes the love story from
her perspective and the fact that she feels that Hemi is the guilty party.
Ashlyn and Ethan gradually read through both books. They
read a chapter or so, and then days or weeks go by before they read the next
chapter. During this intervening time they try to find out who Belle and
Hemi really were, together with the various other characters mentioned in
the chapter they have just read. This device of gradually reading the two
books of the developing love, chapter for chapter, inter-spaced with the
developing love of Ashlyn and Ethan, makes a nice novel, but since both of
the books are only 50 or 100 pages long, and since particularly Ashlyn is so
excited about it, then, realistically, she would have simply read through
them in an hour or two, all the way to the end, right at the beginning.
The real story is about discovering the identities of
Belle and Hemi, their relation to Ethan and his inherited wealth, and
bringing everything to a happy end. It is a sentimental love story; in fact
two sentimental love stories. I found it difficult to put the book down. A
wonderfully emotional story.
I've been reading so many stories written by women
that this time I thought I would try something written by a man. It was
highly rated on Amazon. Things start off (again!) with a young woman working
in a bookshop. She is friendly with an old man who spends much time sitting
in an easy chair in the shop reading the books. Once again I wonder how this
is supposed to work. Do bookshops really tolerate people sitting day after
day in the chairs they provide, reading the books on offer and I then
returning them to the shelves, thus transforming them from being expensive
and new to being cheap and used? Libraries work this way, but do bookshops?
Continuing with the story, it is getting towards evening
and the shop is gradually closing. When she returns to the old man in the
chair the young woman finds that he has quietly died. On the table beside
him is the book he had been reading, together with a mysterious book called
the "Book of Doors", The man had written on the first page that it is a gift
for the young woman. It turns out that it is a magic book. When she, or
whoever it is who owns it, opens a door while imagining some other door,
then magically she steps through this other imagined door into the world
behind that door. For her first such adventure that evening she is in her
cold, unpleasant apartment in New York, and she imagines how it was when she
was traveling in Europe some years ago. She had been staying in a pension in
Venice, and it was wonderful to open the door in the morning and go out and
smell the freshly baked bread in the bakery across the narrow street. And
so, holding the Book of Doors, she opens her dull New York door and is
suddenly in sunny Venice. She experiments with interesting jumps through
space and even time as well. Imagining a door she has seen in the past
transfers her to that time and place in the past. We are in a time and space
travel adventure.
The idea seems popular these days, even among
professional theoretical physicists. If the world consists of a differential
manifold of some possible indeterminately high dimension and various complex
topological properties then all this business of "jumping through wormholes"
- or as in the present case, jumping through doors - becomes reality,
justified with reams of incomprehensible mathematical formulae. Of course it
is nonsense, but part of the enjoyment of reading is a certain suspension of
reality, allowing us to float into a world of fantasy and dreams.
As the story develops we learn that there are lots of
other magic books. For example there are the books of memory, of material,
of pain, of safety, and so on. There are hundreds of these books, all of
them having different properties. They are ancient. Maybe they were created
by a magician in those days of lore. A Merlin, traveling backwards in time
to Camelot. But then in this unpleasant world of today there are people who
will do anything to own such books. We learn that the Book of Doors is the
most prized book of all. Thus this present book by the male author, Gareth
Brown, degenerates into a kind of computer game with the various characters
having their particular fighting attributes, given by the various magic
books they hold. They kill, maim, torture one another in an orgy of
senseless nonsense. Is this a typical male fantasy? Is it why boys and men
become addicted to these computer games? I wasted too much time on this book
despite giving up well before the end.
The author is a Libyan who lives in England and who
also has English citizenship. After the fall of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011 he traveled to Libya to search
for his father who had been kidnapped in 1990 while living in exile in
Cairo, and who was then thrown into a prison in Libya. The family had at
first received smuggled letters, but for ten years or more they had heard
nothing. Could it be that the father was still surviving, or was he killed
in the terrible Abu Salim Prison Massacre of 1996? The author tells us
about the long-lost relatives he meets who survived the dictatorship. It is
a travelog, but also a recording of the abuses of the Gaddafi regime and of
the personal stories of his cousins and uncles, those who had been
imprisoned and also those who had been fighting for a free Libya. How
dreadful it is to read of the endless suffering in those prisons which
resembled concentration camps.
In the ancient world as described by Herodotus, the name Libya simply refers
to all of Africa. Two hundred years ago, the North African coast was full of
pirates. The Barbary
Coast. They were barbarians. Skipping over lots of history, we arrive
at the year 1911 when Italy decided to capture that middle bit from the
Turks. The eastern part around Benghazi was the colony of Cyrenacia. The
Italians massacred about a quarter of the total population of Cyrenacia. The
western part containing Tripoli was the colony of Tripolitania. The Italians
also went berserk in Ethiopia, killing lots of people there as well, but
that's another story. In 1934 the Italian fascists decided to resurrect the
ancient name "Libya" from the mists of time, perhaps imagining that they
were emulating the ancient Romans, when they combined the two north African
colonies into one entity. They were defeated by 1943 and Libya became a
monarchy under King Idris. He was overthrown in a military coup by Gaddafi
in 1969 and he was in turn overthrown by the "Arab Spring" in 2011. Since
then the place has descended into a lawless chaos reminiscent of past times.
All of this can be read about in the Wikipedia entry for Libya.
Given this short sketch of history, we contemplate the
overwhelming sense of patriotism and love of country which runs through the
present book. Hisham Matar tells us again and again of the history of his
family, fighting the Italians and then later, Gaddafi. He tells us of the
beauty of the country around Banghazi, the sea, the air, the desert sands.
His grandfather was a famous warrior in the fight against Italy. It was a
wealthy, established family. His father at first was a high official in the
Gaddafi government. In fact the author was born in New York when his father
was a part of the delegation to the United Nations. The author was sent to
exclusive schools and universities in England. Other brothers were in
Switzerland, the US, if I remember all of this correctly. But the father
turned against the dictator, encouraging and financing groups to rise up
against the Libyan government. The obvious consequence was that he was
hunted down and imprisoned. What else could he expect?
We are constantly told that we are everywhere supposed to
be fighting for "Democracy". A recent example of this is the country of
Romania where one candidate for the presidency had overwhelming popular
support and was about to be elected in a landslide. In order to prevent this
and preserve "Democracy", the European Union canceled the election at the
last minute and it has subsequently forbidden the people from voting for
that candidate in future "elections". The leaders of the EU are also not
elected. They are appointed in secret back-room deals and rubber-stamped by
a European parliament with few powers and which is legitimized in a
meaningless election in which hardly anybody bothers to go to the trouble of
voting. This is only natural. After all, how could a true democracy work in
a region consisting of a multitude of incompatible countries, speaking
incompatible languages with different traditions and histories? In a direct
vote, the French would vote for a French person, the Spaniards would vote
for a Spaniard, the Germans for a German, and so forth. The winner would
simply be somebody from the country and language group which had the
greatest population. All the losers in the smaller countries and languages
would rebel. Perhaps the only example of a real democracy in a diverse
country is Switzerland, a place which is small enough, and beautiful enough,
to remain civilized, despite democracy.
Libya has different tribes, ethnic groups, but at least
(as far as I understand it) it does have the common language of Arabic.
Given its history, perhaps the monarchy was the best solution. But that
didn't have a chance to succeed. Was Gaddafi a monster, as described in this
book? He did much to improve the lives of the ordinary people, carrying out
many popular reforms. In 1975 he purged the army and the government of
people who he perceived must be gotten rid of. And if we read Machiavelli,
we realize that it is vitally important for The Prince to maintain order in
this way. This must have been the reason for the rebellion of Hisham Matar's
father, and his fate. The fate of Gaddafi was sealed by his resistance to
many of the policies of "The West" under the hegemony of the United States.
In particular it is said that the final straw was his ambition to establish
a gold-backed currency to be used in the oil trade, thus undermining the
ability of the hegemon to live high by importing things and in return simply
exporting pieces of paper - US dollars. The Obama administration saw to it
that he was truly eliminated.
Maurice and Maralyn were an English married couple
who set off in the year 1972 in their 31 foot sailboat to sail to New
Zealand. Again this is a true story, not a novel. They got through the
Panama Canal and were on the way to the Galapagos Islands when suddenly, in
the middle of a calm, empty sea, a sperm whale rammed the boat from beneath,
breaking it apart and then thrashing about, filling the sea with its blood.
They remembered some time before seeing a whaling boat which they suspected
had harpooned the whale, and maybe the whale was taking its revenge on their
boat. It gradually disappeared into the depths. And within a half hour their
sailboat sank as well.
They had two tiny inflatable life rafts and they tried to
fill them with whatever they might need as quickly as possible. And then
they were left floating alone under the hot sun of the tropical Pacific
Ocean. The moral of the story is that if you intend to sail across oceans in
a small sailboat then, first of all you should have a good stock of fresh
and well-functioning flare rockets, and second a satellite telephone to call
for help. Perhaps satellite telephones were not available in 1972, but they
certainly are these days.
Over the weeks and months ahead, Maurice and Maralyn
encountered numbers of ships. Some of them even passed within just a few
hundred meters. Yet these ships ignored all efforts to grab their attention.
They had a few hand-held flares, but all of them but one turned out to be
duds. And before setting out, Maurice in particular had said that they would
have no radio or any other of those newfangled things. After all, the great
sailors of the past were able to navigate the globe with just a chronometer
and a sextant. He was able to save these from the sinking boat, but they
were of little use on the life rafts, apart from determining the course of
their helpless drifting. At the end of 117 days they were spotted by a South
Korean fishing boat and were saved.
We learn about the endless difficulties they faced.
Eating raw the turtles and the fish they caught. The gradually increasing
hissing leaks of the inflatable rubber rafts. Sitting constantly in puddles
of seawater. Afterwards they were strict vegetarians. They later wrote a
book: 117 Days Adrift, describing everything. It
really was an ordeal. At the end Maurice was drifting in and out of
consciousness, halfway into death. He was only kept alive by the strength of
Maralyn. If the Koreans had not by chance found them at this point of most
extreme endurance, they would have simply disappeared. Their story would
have died with them to join the countless stories of all the unknown people
who have vanished into the ocean through the ages, never to be seen again.
Who wants to think about the endless suffering, the disappointed hopes all
those people had before finally dying? But Maurice and Maralyn did live to
tell us about it. This is not the longest anyone has survived like this at
sea. José
Salvador Alvarenga survived for 14 months, drifting half way
across the Pacific. But he was on a boat, not a tiny inflatable raft.
We are told what Maurice and Maralyn were like. How they
met each other and fell in love. And we are told that after their ordeal
they decided to get a new, somewhat bigger boat in which they set sail for
Patagonia in 1975. They survived that voyage and indeed continued sailing
around the Mediterranean in later years. But it seems that the Patagonian
cruise was an unfortunate experience. They invited another married couple to
accompany them, together with another friend. Maurice declared himself to be
the captain of the boat, and he ordered the others about, often bringing
them to tears. The tyranny of a weak willed, insecure person.
Pineapple Street is in Brooklyn Heights, just
across the East River from Manhattan. Traveling along Pineapple Street via
Google SteetView from one end to the other it seems to be lined with rather
crowded, mostly anonymous apartment blocks, some towering 10 or 15 stories
into the sky, but there are a couple of semi-detached, or even detached
buildings which might be the residences of single families. This is the
story of one such family. They are rich. Real-estate speculators going back
three generations. There are two daughters and a son, whose name is Cord,
reminding us of Mary Meyer's husband Cord of a few books back. We are told
that only very rich people name their sons Cord. He has married Sasha, a
"normal" wife from a non-rich family, and the book is concerned with the
little dramas which arise from this situation. I enjoyed the story. It
reminded me of some of Trollop's stories about the trials and tribulations
of the rich in Victorian England. An amusing other world.
The younger sister has an emotional crisis leading her to
declare that she will give away all of the money in her trust fund to
charity. We thus learn that her trust fund contains 37 million dollars.
Extrapolating this to the rest of the family and imagining that its entire
wealth is not just wrapped up in trust funds, we arrive at the idea that the
family must possess a few hundred million dollars. This seems a lot,
certainly much more than Trollop's characters had, even accounting for
inflation, but such is the degenerate state of today's corrupt society of
"The West" which seems, thankfully, to be nearing a state of collapse.
The internet tells us that there are 735 billionaires in
the United States. A substantial number of those, including the top of the
heap - Musk - are now in the inner circles, directly controlling the
government of the country. It has become a plutocracy. Thinking about the
particular example of real estate speculation, the vast amounts of money to
be gained are extracted from normal people in the form of ever increasing
rents or mortgage payments relative to their incomes. How strange it is that
the losers in this system, the "MAGA" people, have chosen a flamboyant and
chaotic real estate mogul to be their leader.
The family of the story seems not to be in the
billionaire category, but at least the internet also tells us that 99.97%
have less than 200 million, which would roughly mean that 0.03% do; that is
to say that there are something on the order of 100,000 families with this
sort of net worth. They would fill the largest football stadiums in the
world to overflowing. Thus it is nothing special.
We "normal" people who do not belong in the rich category
imagine what life must be like for people with so much money. The book gives
us some insights. For example before Cord married Sasha she was suddenly
approached by a lawyer, claiming to be representing Cord's family. He gave
her a thick envelope containing the "prenup". That is to say a marriage
contract regulating the financial conditions of the marriage, and in
particular those involving the divorce. Sasha was at first shocked, but Cord
told her to just get over it and sign the thing; it was a normal part of the
contractual agreement represented by marriage. We learn also that the older
sister who was already married had, through a mistaken sense of pride,
refused to have her husband sign a prenup. One element of the drama of the
book was that her husband suddenly lost his highly paid job and so their
family was left with no income. It was said that if no prenup is signed then
the married couple is denied the trust fund; it passes to the children of
the next generation when they reach maturity. Such is the brutal reality of
the rich.
Somehow Trollop's characters, with their paltry incomes
of just £10,000 or so per year - or say a million a year of today's devalued
money - seemed to live in a world of very much greater wealth and luxury as
compared to these 100,000 people in the United States with their
$200,000,000 or more of net worth as described in the book.
Dream
Count, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
What a pleasure it is to read Adichie's elegant and
stylish prose. There are four characters in the novel, all women, all from
Nigeria except one who is from Guinea. Chiamaka, or Chia for short, begins
by telling us that she is locked-down by COVID and to escape she will tell
us about the world of her dreams and memories. She is in her forties, has
never been married and is childless. She is a member of the Igbo people, as are the other two Nigerians and as is
indeed the author herself.
We are told that for the Igbo it is important to marry
someone who is also Igbo, in fact ideally someone in the extended family: a
more or less distant cousin. But Chia's family is rich and she has traveled
the world. One of the family houses is in a neighborhood of Washington D.C.,
and Chia is living there right now. She is an aspiring travel writer,
writing amusing stories of her travels, especially with the different
boyfriends she has had over the years. For example she was together with a
Dutchman, a white person, for a number of years, and she went with him to
visit his family in Holland. Afterwards they stayed briefly in the Black
Forest where the elderly German tourists stared at her, the only African,
and so she proposed to write a story about being "Black in the Black
Forest". Another boyfriend was an African-American professor of politics.
She tells us of his arrogance, his rudeness not only to her but to
everybody. He says that the riches of her family stem from their dealings in
the slave trade; did her Igbo ancestors capture his ancestors and sell them
on to eventually be bought by the cruel slave owners of the Deep South? But
Chia tells him that even if her ancestors were formerly rich, all of that
was lost in the Biafran War. She dislikes the United States. The food is
tasteless. The food in France is also tasteless. Kadiatou, the woman from
Guinea, cooks tasty African food for her as well as keeping the house clean.
We imagine that the author, Chimamanda, could easily be
called "Chia" by her friends. Is she loosely describing her own life? Chia
is often told by friends or even by perfect strangers that she is beautiful.
And photos of Chimamanda Adichie are still beautiful even now when she is in
her late 40s. The Dream Count is the number of inadequate men who have
passed through Chia's life.
Chia's best friend is Zikora, who is a wealthy lawyer.
She is in the same position as Chia, in her 40s with time running out for
having any children. Her family, relatives, are also trying to arrange
something. It has gotten to the stage that she is thinking about adopting a
child, or perhaps just having a baby without marrying the father, or even
having her remaining, rapidly aging eggs frozen. Both she and Chia have lots
of boyfriends and lots of sex, but apparently they continue to take their
birth control pills. Finally, with the last boyfriend, Zikora has decided to
marry him and she has stopped taking the pills. She becomes pregnant. When
she tells the boyfriend he immediately walks out, never to be heard of
again. And so Zikora's chapter of the book is concerned with all this:
Zikora's reconciliation with her mother who comes to look after the baby,
the advice of other relatives that the father, as a good Igbo man, will
eventually came back to her.
Then we have a chapter about Omelogor, a cousin of Chia,
also rich, single, childless, in her 40s. She is based in Nigeria and worked
in a local bank, but now she is an independent financial advisor. She has
observed how everybody steals a part of whatever passes through their hands,
and she has become a master of this art. Also, when still working at the
bank she overheard a conversation about some financial transaction and so
took all the money from all the accounts she had access to, put it into this
transaction - that is to say, insider trading - and made a huge fortune. Now
she lives in the luxury of a gated compound with many servants and guards.
Chia does not really approve of all this, but Omelogor is her cousin and she
comes and visits Chia in her house in Virginia.
The chapter about Kadiatou tells us about the poverty of
her childhood in Guinea and how she ends up in the United States as a single
mother with a daughter who is becoming a well-adjusted teenager in America.
Kadiatou has a job as a maid in a hotel in Washington, earning $25 an hour,
cleaning the rooms. Of course she also works for Chia, not only cleaning
things but also cooking good African food. It is her ambition to save enough
to not only put her daughter through college but also she would like to be
able to establish an African restaurant in Washington. One of the dangers of
being a maid in a luxury hotel is the possibility of being raped by some
rich, powerful guest. In
the novel, Kadiatou is told that a suite on the top floor of the hotel
is empty and she should go in and clean it. But when doing so, she is
suddenly attacked by a Frenchman who attempts to rape her, but who then
forces her to have oral sex with him. He then leaves, she spits out the
horrible stuff, wretches, and her supervisor comes to help. She wishes
the whole thing would just go away, but she is interviewed by the
police, gives statements, and the consequent legal mess disrupts her
life.
In an Afterword to the book, Chimamanda Adichie tells
us that she was motivated by the case of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the French politician who
allegedly raped Nafissatou Diallo in the Sofitel
New York Hotel. The news was full of this case back in 2011, and I also
found it to be shocking. A sex obsessed French politician, even worse than
Kennedy, since it was rape. But then, learning more about the case, we
wonder what the true story really was. Why didn't Strauss-Kahn simply hire a
prostitute, as he undoubtedly usually did? Why did it all take place at the
moment when he was leaving for France, the airplane being boarded by police
just before takeoff, taking Strauss-Kahn in handcuffs to be thrown into the
notorious Rikers Island Prison for a few days where he would experience the
worst degradations of prison life? He was the President of the International
Monetary Fund and was a favorite to become the next President of France. We
learn that he was proposing a new monetary system to replace the American
dollar as the world's reserve currency. As noted a few books ago, people
have been murdered for the crime of bringing this very essential element of
American hegemony into question. And it is said that Diallo was given
millions. So what are we to believe? It seems to me that Adichie would have
made a more powerful statement if she had not based things on this specific
Strauss-Kahn business but instead described the helplessness of hotel maids
in such a situation.
The author is again of the Igbo tribe of Nigeria
and her photos are beautiful, but her prose lacks the elegance of Chimamanda
Adichie. The book is concerned with the Nigerian scammers. Years ago I used to find amusing
emails in my account in the Faculty. A paragraph or so of text saying that
Chief Mumbo Jumbo had funds of 500 millions but he was being held in prison
and the writer of the letter, his nephew, was trying to find a way to save
the money from the corrupt Nigerian government. If I would agree to use my
bank account to receive the 500 million then, as a compensation for my
troubles, I will be given 50 millions. And so forth. For some reason I only
received such emails at the University, none in my two other, more private
accounts. Presumably the people writing such emails believed that university
people were more likely to fall for such scams than the average, more
practical people in the world.
We follow Kingston, a young man who has obtained a degree
in chemical engineering from a Nigerian university. He applies for jobs in
the oil industry of the country, but to no avail. His family is almost
destitute despite the fact that both his parents are highly educated. On the
other hand his uncle Boniface, the brother of his mother, known to all as
"Cash Daddy", is full of cash. Gated mansions, fleets of extravagant cars,
bodyguards and servants everywhere, women of all kinds. When Kingston's
father falls ill, he goes to Cash Daddy against the best advice of his
parents to beg for money. And eventually he joins the enterprise. With
all his education he is assigned to the "CIA", Cash Daddy's central
intelligence agency where the scam emails are composed and sent out into the
world. Maybe only one in ten thousand elicits a response. I remember reading
an article in the Guardian newspaper where a reporter answered such an
email, resulting in a long and amusing exchange. It seems that the real-life
Kingstons of Nigeria had infinite patience in this email writing business.
After all, they had nothing else to do. In the book the scams extend well
beyond this Mumbo Jumbo email business. Contracts for major, but imaginary
projects are awarded to naive individuals or companies. For example a
project to build an international airport somewhere in Nigeria. Kingston,
together with a delegation of Cash Daddy's people, actually travels to
Amsterdam to meet with the sponsor of the project, with Cash Daddy making an
appearance, pretending to be the finance minister of Nigeria.
All of this has an element of slapstick humor. Yet it is
unrelenting. Towards the end, one of the colleagues of Kingston in the CIA
is stringing along a scam with some people in Iran. He travels there to
speak with the people personally and is never heard of again. We are told
that those Iranians, being intelligent Muslims, are not to be fooled around
with as is the case with all the stupid people with too much money in the
US, France, England, Switzerland, Australia, Germany, and a further long
list of countries inhabited by "white" people. Is this the statement
Nwaubani would like to make?
Waltraud,
by Tammy Borden
The Waltraud of the title is the mother of the
author, and the book is about the experiences of her mother as a young
teenage girl in the Nazi Germany of World War II. It is called a novel
because it is related as a story with feelings and dialogue which the author
has made up, but the events, the towns, the people with their real names,
are true to life as described by her mother. It is written in the simple
style of a children's story.
Unusually, it is not a holocaust story. Waltraud
did have some unpleasant experiences; the great tragedy for her was that her
father was drafted into the Wehrmacht, certainly against his will, and died
in Russia. When she turned 14 it was compulsory to join the Bund Deutscher Mädel where she was required to spend a
year serving on a farm under a family who were strict Nazis. Any slackness
or lack of discipline was punished with a stick and she was required to
address the family with "Heil Hitler" and the Nazi raised arm salute.
Thankfully she became sick, dangerously so, and was returned to her family.
The other unpleasantness was when her BDM troop was ordered to help clean up
the mess after a devastating bombing of the nearby town of Braunschweig
where they were required to shovel dirt over a ditch filled with hundreds of
stinking, decomposing corpses.
We are told that she secretly hated Hitler and the Nazis.
It would certainly have been fatal to have said that openly while the Nazis
were in power. And today it is beyond the realms of normal behavior to say
anything different. But it is interesting to contemplate what a book of the
memoirs of that Nazi family would have been. Obviously it would never be
published, certainly not in Germany where such a thing would be very
strictly illegal. In fact displaying, even owning any Nazi symbols or other
paraphernalia is strictly illegal in Germany. This is not the case in the
Ukraine where, for example, the Azov Brigade openly displays the Nazi symbols of World
War II and espouses its ideology. This is relevant to the story of the book
owing to the fact that towards the end of the war, Waltraut became good
friends with a family which had fled what was then the Reichskommissariat Ukraine. The name of the family is
different from the Ukrainian names we are familiar with in the news these
days so perhaps they were ethnic Germans. In any case, Waltraud's mother,
the grandmother of the author, was - for some reason not explained in the
book - dead against the family. Waltraud married the son of the family. Her
mother refused to go to the wedding despite the fact that it was held in the
small village where they lived, and despite the fact that the newly wedded
couple lived just a few houses away from the grandmother, they refused to
speak with one another for years. What secrets are we missing? Were they
Jewish? That hardly seems likely since it would have been fatal to flee into
Nazi Germany. Were they Banderites,
fleeing the vengeance of the advancing Soviet army? If they were simply
ethnic Germans then why the hatred of the grandmother? Or were they ethnic
Poles fleeing the Banderites, despite Hitler's hatred of Slavs? Who knows?
Eventually the family found refuge in the US where the author grew up as an
American.
The father of the author, the young Ukrainian man
Waltraud married, spoke numbers of different languages and acted as an
interpreter for the occupying powers. It seems to me that the book would
have been much more interesting if Tammy Borden had written about the life
of her father rather than that of her mother. But I suppose these days, in
the "western world", men's lives are considered to be inferior to those of
women.
It is 1960. Gabriel is a travel writer, traveling
about the world, writing books describing his experiences. He is in
Léopoldville in the Congo when he receives an invitation to interview Patrice Lumumba. He is asked to bring a tape recorder so
that the report he will send to a newspaper will be accurate. During the
interview, Lumumba mentions the names of three people who he believes are
plotting to kill him. Later, back in London, writing up the story, he learns
of Lumumba's assassination. The assassination had been personally authorized
by President Eisenhower in the dying days of his presidency. All of this
leads us into a complicated spy story.
I couldn't put the book down. We are drawn on from one
episode to the next, revealing unexpected things. These spy stories are
William Boyd's forte. On the cover of the book it says that it is, "From the
acclaimed author of Restless and Any Human Heart". This one
was almost as good as Restless, but much better than Any Human
Heart.
Towards the end things seemed to me to become just a bit
too complicated. We have the idea of a spy, and then that of a double agent.
That is a person who appears to be spying on country B for country A while
actually being a spy for country B. This is a concept I can easily
understand and it seems to be a standard practice in the world of spies. But
then the story of this book involves a triple agent. The Wikipedia has no
explanation of the concept, just an article about some obscure movie which
was made some time ago. A triple agent must be someone who appears to be
spying for country B, but then appears to be really spying for country A,
while really being a spy for country B. All of this is getting beyond me. I
began to ask myself, what is a quadruple agent? Or a quintuple agent?
Eventually, when all of this is taken to the n-th degree of complexity then
surely both country A as well as country B will simply decide to have
nothing more to do with this nonsense and either arrest the person or have
him eliminated in some more permanent way.
Phoebe is an associate professor of literature at
some sort of mid-western college. She does not have a permanent position and
she has no prospect of one, since she is not "tenure-tracked". Her husband,
Matt, is a full professor of philosophy, completely tenured. He is the hero
of many of the students, a wonderfully popular lecturer, while Phoebe is
less than inspiring. They have been trying to have children but without
success. Phoebe is almost 40 and she has gone through many fruitless courses
of artificial insemination. She is sad and hopeless; Matt has left her for a
more attractive, vivacious, and perhaps more fertile female who is also in
the faculty. How awkward it is to confront all of these people every day in
the faculty common room.
Phoebe has decided to end it all, booking a room in a
luxurious hotel she had dreamed about with Matt in better days, traveling
with her best dress and a glass of cat sleeping pills. The hotel is on the
coast in Newport, Rhode Island. Her plan is to simply stand on the balcony,
admire the view, then retire to bed, swallowing all the pills and have done
with it.
Things don't really go as planned. The hotel has been
booked out for the whole week for an elaborate wedding. It was a mistake
that Phoebe had been given the room. The bride is from a rich family and her
father had given her a million dollars for the wedding before he died. All
sorts of people are there, and rather than just quietly committing suicide
in her room she complains about all the noise and everything else. The bride
comes into her room and tells her that she refuses to have her wedding
ruined by a suicide. And so gradually Phoebe becomes part of the whole
wedding party. It develops that the bride and groom are really not very much
in love. In fact the groom develops a love for Phoebe. And so the story goes
on, lots of laughs. Lots of strange rituals and earthy talk with everything
turning out happily in the end. A fun story.
This is the first time I have read anything by Edith
Wharton. Somehow I had placed her in some sort of category with Henry
James. But this was a wonderful book, very clearly and honestly written,
much preferable to anything James wrote.
Edith Wharton grew up in the New York of the Gilded Age in a wealthy family. She crossed the
Atlantic 60 times in her life, traveling first class on the luxurious,
elegant steam ships of those days, taking five days for the crossing,
spending the summers in England, France and Italy, and returning for the
winter season in New York. She was intimately acquainted with the goings on
in the leading families of New York in the 1880s or 90s. It was a closely
guarded circle. Everyone knew everyone else, observing one another in their
boxes at the opera; the elaborate private dinners cooked by French chefs;
the festivities in summer houses at Newport. Just a few extended families -
or clans - with much gossip.
Mrs. Manson Mingott is the matriarch of the Mingott
family and two of her granddaughters are May and Ellen, who are thus
cousins. May is perhaps 20 years old. A picture of perfect health and beauty
of those lost days. She is a Diana, a goddess of the outdoors, climbing in
the Alps rather than touring the museums of Paris or Rome. Archery was the
classic sport for young ladies, only gradually being replaced by lawn
tennis. May takes part in a tournament in Newport and everyone admires the
beauty of her poise, the tension as she draws the bow. Every shot lands
perfectly on the target and she wins the pin in the form of a golden arrow
with diamond tip. She is completely devoted to her family. The father
pretends he is weak, ill, and both she and her mother devote themselves to
his care.
Ellen has had a different career. She is about 30 and
during her travels in Europe she married Count Olenski, a Polish nobleman.
She is thus the Countess Olenski. She has read widely and is familiar with
the arts. She dresses in the latest fashions of Paris with extravagance and
style. But for some reason which is not explicitly described, it seems that
her husband, Count Olenski, is a dreadful man, and she has escaped from him
with the help of Olenski's secretary, returning to New York. All of this is
considered slightly scandalous in the society of New York. Was she actually
together with the secretary?
The story starts off with Newland Archer, a wealthy young
lawyer and established member of New York society, having fallen in love
with May, insisting on announcing their engagement to coincide with the
spectacular appearance of her cousin Ellen at the opera. Archer is also
about 30 and is widely read. He is familiar with all of the great museums of
Europe, and he imagines the joy of introducing his May to the delights of
the cultured life. But as the story develops he becomes infatuated with
Ellen - the Countess Olenski - and she with him. Should he break his
engagement? Should Ellen obtain a divorce from Count Olenski in order to
marry Archer? But that would be a scandal. The story would be dragged into
the common newspapers of New York, an unthinkable degradation, and they
advise her to return to her husband. In the end, the old Mrs. Mingott
settles a substantial trust fund upon Ellen so that she may retire to live
an independent life alone in Paris.
Archer marries May... and they live happily ever after?
In the last chapter, 30 years have gone by. It is now
1910, or perhaps even 1920 when the book first appeared in print. May and
Archer have had three successful children but she had tragically died a few
years ago. She had been a wonderfully devoted wife and he has become a
respected figure in New York, a pillar of the community, his advice sought
after, involved in many vital projects. And yet he imagines that his life
was empty. His eldest son, an architect, is to be sent on a mission to
examine some of the classic gardens of Italy, and he asks his father to
accompany him. They arrive in Paris and the son is keen to meet Ellen, his
long lost aunt. He tells his father that of course everybody knew that he
had secretly loved Ellen, but nobody had said anything. It was an
unspeakable family secret. The son goes up to her apartment while the father
waits on a bench in the park outside. But then he walks away, back to the
hotel.
What are we to make of all this? Edith Wharton herself
retired (not alone) to a pleasant property on the outskirts of Paris where
she lived out the rest of her life. What would life have been for Archer if
he had followed Ellen, thereby becoming a wealthy but rootless outcast? We
think of the example of Edward VIII and Mrs. Simpson. I like to think that
Archer finally came to his senses.
Chance, by Joseph Conrad
Things start out with Conrad's typically heavy
prose. A line or two of dialogue and then a page of complicated words and
thoughts, examining what was said from all points of view, leading to
profound moral judgements. It took an effort to get into the story.
Everything is told to us by that old sea-dog Charles Marlow. It is the story
of a ship's captain who at the beginning is between voyages and is visiting
his sister somewhere in the English countryside. Marlow is friends with her
husband. We learn that the wife, or sister, has taken a young woman, Flora
de Barral, under her wing. Flora's father, who has the exotic name "de
Barral", has been imprisoned for fraud owing to the fact that he had run an
elaborate "Ponzi
scheme", in the city of London, thus robbing countless investors of
their savings. He, and by association his daughter Flora, are held in
contempt by society and thus they now call themselves "Smith". But while her
father swindled people, Flora lived as a child in luxury, brought up by a
governess in a grand house. When things came to an end and the father was
thrown into jail, Flora became as destitute as the investors her father had
robbed.
Captain Anthony thus got to know Flora, as did Charles
Marlow. Unlike the calculating, moralizing Marlow, Captain Anthony decided
to save Flora by marrying her and having her accompany him on his life at
sea, carrying cargo under sail from one place to another around the globe.
All of this took place in the rush of a week or two while Captain Anthony's
ship was being fitted out, or loaded, or something, in the London docks.
Marlow, Captain Anthony's sister and her husband found all of this to be a
scandal. And so we read through lots of obscure moralizing about the
situation. It was so obscure, and I was perhaps distracted, that for a while
I was confused about the story. Was Flora with Marlow, or with the husband,
or what? But then concentrating more, the narration became clear.
Conrad tells us much about the character of women as it
was perceived back then in 1913. The mental, physical and emotional
differences to men. We are now in the year 2025 - twenty four years after
the year 2001 with its Space Odyssey where Stanley Kubrik showed us how
computers are much smarter than we are, and where we have merged into a new
form of life which back then was a mere fetus in a transparent womb floating
in outer space, but which now is a mature 24 year old. Whether it is a man
or a woman is unclear. But certainly nobody these days would share the
outdated views of Joseph Conrad on the general character of women. Women run
marathons at a pace I would have difficulty keeping up with even on my
electrical bicycle, except perhaps if I switched to the "sport" or even
"turbo" mode. They are Prime Ministers, Chancellors. But I must say that in
this role they seem to be generally disappointing. Frau Merkel has been the
ruin of Germany, and the present women who are running Scandinavia are
hell-bent on war.
The demure Flora of 1913 marries Captain Anthony in a
registry office, but rather than retiring with him to the captain's cabin of
the ship to consummate the marriage she immediately parts from him to drive
to the prison where her father is being released. The father, knowing
nothing of the marriage, tells his daughter that she is the only thing he
has. The world was unfairly against him, but now she will stay with him and
serve him for the rest of his life. He asks her where she is taking him and
she tells him that she has just married Captain Anthony, and she is taking
him to his ship where they will stay together in a cabin on the ship. The
father is passionately angry. He shouts at her. How dare she marry without
his permission. How dare she disobey him. He glares at Captain Anthony, full
of hatred. And so the ship sails off and we depart into a strange tale of
the sea; the father smoldering in hatred in his cabin together with his
daughter; the captain sinking in lonely despair. The drama culminates in the
father surreptitiously putting poison into a drink meant for the captain.
But it is observed and Flora stands by her husband. Defeated, the father
quickly drinks the poison himself and dies to the great relief of everybody.
It turns out that Flora loves the sea, and except for a tragic little twist
of the plot, everybody lives happily ever after.
This book was a bestseller when if first came out and
Joseph Conrad was suddenly transformed from being the obscure 56 year old
author of a flock of unknown books which nobody read: Heart of Darkness,
Lord Jim, and all those other things, to being rich and famous. It
might be that the modern critic would rate those earlier books above this
one, not least owing to its outdated meditations on the role of women in the
world. Nevertheless it was an enjoyable read.
We are left to contrast the mild prison sentence of only
a few years administered to Mr. de Barral with the savage sentence a modern
world gave to that other Ponzi person, Bernie Madoff.
Frances and Bobbi are (female) students at Dublin's
Trinity College. They perform poetry readings about town. I imagine that
this is less rhythmic and more peaceful in comparison with the rapid-fire
rap "music" which young people seem to enjoy. Frances is the poet while the
beautiful and beautifully spoken Bobbi is her best friend. They are invited
to the home of Melissa, a 30 something writer who would like to write a
piece on them for a literary magazine. Melissa's husband Nick is also there,
but seemingly rather distant. Also in his 30s, he is an actor both on the
stage and the screen. All sorts of passions develop. Hormones are throbbing.
Bobbi tells everybody she is lesbian. We are told that
Melissa and Nick sleep in separate bedrooms. Have she and Bobbi already
become intimate? Frances is at first wary of the breathtakingly handsome
Nick. He is after all a man and she is a trembling virgin. But they are soon
together at every opportunity, enjoying each others bodies, imagining that
their liaison is a secret. All of this is related in short, precise
sentences. We feel that Frances is sharing with us her most inner feelings.
This is both fascinating and unsettling. Absurdly my thoughts wandered to
the flailing, ignorant ramblings of President Trump with his often rude,
even primitive barnyard expressions, unsettling the world and exposing the
disturbed inner workings of his mind to everyone. Is he, as with the Frances
of this story, torn between one emotion and the next? One day passionately
drawn to Nick, and the next, with Nick still remaining with Melissa, angrily
turning away. Eventually all secrets are exposed, Melissa and Bobbi
reconcile themselves with Frances, Nick retains his placid equanimity and
they all get together and behave like civilized people.
The time of the story is 1893. Cora Seaborne's
husband has just died and she is happy to be finally rid of him and to be
able to do whatever she pleases. Her husband had been a member of
Parliament, an important politician, a wealthy man. Cora's role was to be
his wife. Now she can think about the things that really interest her: the
latest scientific theories - Darwin, fossils of ancient life, geology. She
moves to a place on the coast in Essex. There are rumors of a mysterious,
evil serpent causing all sorts of ills. People die unexpectedly, crops fail,
animals disappear. Cora imagines that the serpent may be a living fossil,
and she would like to discover it and become famous.
All of this might be the basis for constructing an
interesting novel. But Sarah Perry fills things out with so many subplots
that we lose interest, jumping from one idea to the next, hardly going
anywhere. Everybody loves Cora, and she occupies herself throughout the book
fending them all off: a country priest, his wife, a London surgeon, and
various other people. The priest is skeptical of religion. His wife dies
dramatically of tuberculosis, going through various phases of euphoria. The
surgeon performs the first successful open heart surgery in history. The
person whose heart has thus been repaired falls in love with Cora's female
companion. She falls in love with somebody else. The serpent turns out not
to be an interesting living fossil but rather a lost, sunken boat. What is
the point of all these threads of the narration? I suppose the idea of the
author was to tell us how interesting life in the England of 1893 might have
been and how the various characters in those days might actually have been
able to think of things in the same way we do now in the year 2025.
This book was first published in 1905. It is the
story of Lily Bart who is now 30 years old and still unmarried. But she is a
woman of very great, almost mystical beauty and she is in the middle of the
finest, most exclusive society of the New York of the Gilded Age. She is
invited to week-long parties at the finest country mansions where she is the
central figure around whom everyone congregates. A key scene of the novel is
an evening entertainment organized by a family newly arrived in the circle
of the ultra-rich. A tableau vivant is organized and Lily is asked to pose
in the manner of the painting of Mrs. Lloyd, by Joshua Reynolds. We are told that this
is the perfect image of Lily. Such a delicate face, and the sweeping folds
of her costume.
Lily was born into this world of riches and extravagance
as indeed was the author, Edith Wharton herself. But then, some years before
our time, the family went bankrupt. Bad business speculations. This was more
than the family could stand and the father died, soon followed by the
mother, leaving Lily an orphan. None of her wealthy relatives wanted to take
her on, but the task was assigned to an aunt who lived in an opulent but
old-fashioned mansion on Fifth Avenue. A woman who was fixed in her ways,
but she tolerated Lily, not providing a fixed allowance or trust fund, but
willing to pay for all the rich clothes Lily required. Lily had to ask each
time for money when needed, explaining the reasons for the expenses. An
irksome business. Particularly considering that it was expected that Lily
should play cards with the other women at those parties. For money. And
therefore she accumulated large gambling debts. One of the husbands helped
her out financially - with what motive? Eventually her aunt found out about
the debts and was scandalized.
The husbands in the story are characterized as primitive,
crude people. While the female characters speak in elegant, grammatically
correct sentences, the husbands continually use the word "ain't" rather than
"aren't" or "haven't", and other slang words in their unpleasant, abrupt
dialect. Their role is to absent themselves from the society of the ladies,
spending long hours in the dens of Wall Street, getting tips about how to
cheat other people out of their money, and then pouring the vast sums thus
accumulated into the gaping expenses of their wives without complaint. At
the beginning of the book, Lily is being set up to marry a young man, a
mother's boy, who is set to inherit a huge fortune. She secretly finds him
to be repulsive, but she realizes that such a marriage would solve her
precarious situation. It is a Sunday and most of the people at the party are
sleeping off their hangovers, yet Lily is supposed to accompany the young
man to the church. She doesn't, and she doesn't accompany him to some
similar afternoon outing. Instead she has a nice quiet afternoon with
Lawrence Selden, the only reasonable male character in the novel. He is a
lawyer, not filthy rich, and so for this reason he is not an appropriate
candidate for Lily. The result of their afternoon together is a minor
scandal.
Returning to her unpleasant room at the aunt's mansion,
she is suddenly asked to accompany a group of people for the summer on
somebody's yacht which will be sailed across the Atlantic for a cruise in
the Mediterranean, and then a cruise back in the autumn. The aunt is
strictly against it, but Lily goes anyway. There is a scandal at Monte Carlo
where one of the wives provokes a scene apparently showing that Lily has
spent an evening with her husband. Lily is thrown out of the party, spends
some time with acquaintances in England and returns to New York at the
beginning of winter. There she finds that she is shunned by society, her
aunt has died and has disinherited her (she, as well as everybody else
expected her to inherit all the wealth of the aunt). Lily thus remains
destitute and dies in poverty.
It is a sad story, but we admire the fact that Lily has
remained true to her principles, and along with Lawrence Selden we regret
the fact that she did not marry him.
It is just after the end of the Second World War,
1946 or 47 in England. There is rationing and shortages everywhere. Robert
is 16 and he has just finished his exams at school. He lives in a drab,
dirty coal mining town and it is expected that Robert will follow his father
and his grandfather before him down into the pits for a life of working the
coal face. But the summer is approaching and Robert decides to set off on
foot with a groundsheet and sleeping bag, hoping to sleep rough in farms
along the way, seeking the occasional odd job. He eventually reaches the
settlement of Robin Hood's Bay on the east coast and happens to come to a
somewhat overgrown house in the fields a mile or two from the sea. It is
inhabited by Dulcie, a middle-aged woman and her German Shepard dog who at
first offer him tea, and eventually he ends up remaining for the whole
summer. It is a kind of coming of age story. A liberation.
The first few chapters are full of flowery prose. There
are long lists of the plants, shrubs, flowers, Robert meets along his
journey, marveling in the wonders of nature. But how can Robert know all of
these complicated names of the different plants, given that he has grown up
in an industrial town devoid of almost all vegetation? We have a big garden
full of all sorts of plants growing wildly here which, for me, remain
nameless despite the fact that I've been looking at them and enjoying their
variety and complexity for almost 40 years. Dulcie certainly knows the names
of the plants and she sends Robert off into the fields to pick something
obscure - hogweed, is it? - which Robert is able to distinguish from
everything else.
The story is that Dulcie was living together with Romy, a
young German woman who wrote poetry, but with all the horror of the war, she
took her own life. Her book of poetry had been so successful that they
traveled the world, giving lectures, hobnobbing with all the famous authors
and literary figures, accumulating various cars and houses in England.
Somehow I find this premise of the story to be difficult
to believe. Can it be that a book of poetry written by a German lesbian poet
writing in English during the Nazi period would sell millions of copies?
Perhaps the author, Benjamin Myers, himself the author of more than a dozen
novels, many of which have been bestsellers and winners of major literary
prizes, would like to imagine his own success in the characters of this
book. In any case it was a beautifully written story - the flowery prose
soon settled down to a nice elegant style - and a satisfying book to read.
"Banjo" Paterson was the author of that iconic
Australian song, Waltzing Matilda, in 1895. He, along with Henry Lawson were
the bush poets of that time. But Paterson did write a couple of novels as
well. This one is about the daughter of a rich landowner who had been sent
to England, now returning to Australia in order to soon inherit his
extensive land holdings. Separately from this, an Englishman was traveling
to Australia to find a long lost relative who was set to inherit a vast
estate in England. These two characters are confronted with the raw,
unpolished reality of life in the Australian Bush. The daughter falls in
love with the overseer of her property while the Englishman falls in love
with the governess. All of this takes place near the Snowy Mountains, and in
fact the opening scenes are of a river in flood which is a tributary of the
Murrumbidgee, so it must be somewhere south of Canberra. On the other hand
the Englishman and the overseer set off to find the beneficiary of the
English estate somewhere in the far outback of Queensland. He turns out to
be a wild old man. There is a complication owing to the fact that he married
a fat barmaid in an outback pub on a drunken evening. And so on...
Various instances of cruelty to animals are treated as
humor, as is the treatment of the "blacks". No one would claim this to be
great literature.
Melody, by Martin
Suter
Tom is about 30 years old. His family were among
the wealthy of Zürich, but his father made some bad speculations, the family
became bankrupt and both Tom's parents died quickly, unable to cope with
this new situation. Unlike Lily in The House of Mirth, Tom has no
rich relatives to keep him going before dumping him. He has enjoyed studying
law, not only in Switzerland but also in England and elsewhere so that he
has multiple law degrees, yet he has been unable to obtain a sensible
position as a lawyer in Zürich. He answers an advertisement for a personal
secretary to Dr. Stoltz, an old man who is looking for somebody to organize
his papers, adjust things so that he will be remembered only in the best of
ways after his death.
Tom is given a very comfortable salary of over 150,000
francs per year, but Dr. Stoltz doesn't expect to live much longer than
that. Tom is officially his lawyer, bound by an oath of secrecy. He is given
an apartment in the mansion of Dr. Stoltz, is looked after by Dr. Stoltz's
butler, and dines together with his employer, enjoying the cuisine of his
cook, an Italian woman who has been with him for many years, cooking her
traditional recipes. Much of the book is filled with the Italian words for
various foods.
Soon it becomes clear that Dr. Stoltz is really only
interested in telling Tom a long story about Melody, a young woman he fell
in love with years ago. They became engaged, but just before the wedding she
suddenly disappeared. The story develops in installments, over lots of wine,
cognac, cigars. Dr. Stoltz was a leading figure in Zürich, in politics and
finance. He was certainly very wealthy - in a Swiss way - not the countless
billions of the oligarchs of the world, rather just tens, or at most a
hundred or so millions, obtained by serving those oligarchs. I don't know if
the book has been translated into the English language, but it would lose
much in translation. Suter has a marvelous way of describing these people
and the way they are. The hypocrisy, the false values. The formalities and
the rules of informality.
What became of Melody? After Dr. Stoltz's death and the
inheritance going to his beautiful daughter who falls in love with Tom (who
also inherits 5%), they follow various leads, taking them to exotic,
romantic destinations to eventually discover the untruths and deceptions of
Dr. Stoltz and the fate of the elusive Melody.
Perhaps every species of animal thinks that it is
special, and this is certainly the case with we human beings. In this book
the author explains how we are special in ways that resemble birds - in
particular parrots and especially the cockatoos of Australia, the African
grey parrots, and the the macaws of South America. Both we and they are
generally intelligent, long lived, monogamous, and talkative. What are the
reasons that evolution has led to these properties?
The longest lived parrot is, according to the Guinness
Book of Records, Major Mitchell's cockatoo, Cookie, who lived to be 83. This is compared with the
oldest known person, Jeanne Calment, who lived to 122. But perhaps the
comparison is unfair since the sample size of parrots held in cages is much
smaller than the set of all humans, and anyway, the stress of being in a
cage is surely not conducive to a long healthy life. So probably it is fair
to say that these large, intelligent parrots have about the same life
expectancy as us. As far as mammals are concerned, if longevity increases
with size, whales last the longest, over 200 years, mice the
least, but in our size category, we seem to live 3 or 4 times longer than
what would normally be expected. As explained in the book, we and these
parrots live long owing to the fact that other animals which would like to
eat us have difficulties doing so. In the case of birds, they can simply fly
away from danger. We humans can outwit possible predators with our
intelligence. And thus both we and the parrots can expect to continue to
reproduce over many years, favoring longevity. But why can't a hamster, let
us say, kept safely in a cage as a pet away from all predators, also live
for many years? Why do such animals die of old age after just a couple of
short years? Martinho-Truswell does not mention Medawar's mutation accumulation theory which explains this
nicely.
Of course we humans make much of our intelligence. Given
recent examples of people in politics, this intelligence - or its
desirability if it is indeed present in such people - might be brought in to
question. Our brains are large, but those of whales and elephants are
larger. Are they more intelligent than we are? When thinking about Creation
Lake, the first book of this year, we observed that although
Neanderthals had larger brains than us, that did not preclude the
possibility that they were stupid. In the case of birds, their brains are
obviously tiny. How can such tiny brains be intelligent?
Another way of thinking about this is to consider how
many neurons there are in a brain. We are told that only four kinds of
animals have more than a billion neurons. We have about 15 billion. But it
is said that a macaw has 3 billion, and presumably cockatoos and African
grey parrots also have so many. Thus the neurons themselves are very tiny in
comparison with those in whales, elephants and humans. The problem is that
there is a limit to how tiny a cell can be. After all, each cell must
contain the whole length of the DNA, together with all the chemical
mechanisms for copying it, repairing it, reading its information and
creating further chemicals, and so forth. Our DNA is endlessly long, with
reams of seemingly useless, repetitive sequences. We are told that the
solution the birds have is that their DNA is much more compact, more
efficiently coded, allowing a tremendous miniaturization of the neurons.
One thing which wasn't explained in the book was the
reason these parrots have such intelligence. There are a number of possible
factors one can think of. In any case the reason humans need intelligence is
obvious. We can't just fly away. We need to throw spears and whatever else
comes to hand at predators, constructing defenses, organizing ourselves to
survive together. Without these things we would be too slow and defenseless,
an easy prey on the open savanna.
Maybe the intelligence of parrots has to do with speech.
Who knows what a big flock of cockatoos are saying to one another on a field
in the middle of Australia? Alex, the African grey parrot, was able to speak in a
rudimentary, if coherent manner, in English, after many years training. The
book devotes a chapter particularly to human speech. It is said that the
oldest languages are in the south of Africa where humanity originated. They
are characterized by having many more phonemes and much more complicated
grammar than most other languages, reflecting the idea that people moved
away from this place of origin, and in doing so simplified things. But then
the example of the Archi
language is described in the middle of all this. It is spoken by only
perhaps a thousand people in a couple of villages in the south of Russia,
and it is said to be so complicated that it is impossible for an outsider to
learn it. It has huge numbers of phonemes, and the grammar is endlessly
complicated. It is given as an example of the fact that the human brain, up
to the age of 5 or 6, is primed to learn a mother language, however
complicated, but later, learning new languages is difficult. Examples of
this for birds are also given. On the other hand, the example of Archi
contradicts the assertion made about the languages of southern Africa. While
the Out of Africa theory may very well be true, the Out of Eurasia, or Multiregional Origin theory is also plausible. It used
to be a popular idea to just search for hominid fossils in the African Rift
Valley, but more recently hominid fossils have also been found, for example,
in China.
Then finally we have the fact that these large parrots
and humans are mainly monogamous. For humans this is due to the fact that
human babies are totally helpless for years, and if the father of the baby
simply left the mother to fend for herself, then the baby, and thus the
father's genes, would die along with it. Similarly baby parrots need lots of
care.
This leads to a discussion of the fact that in many
species of birds, the male has brightly colored and often ridiculously
inappropriate feathers. The author explains this using the argument
biologists often repeat: namely that the male birds are demonstrating their
superior genes to the females, since they are able to survive even with all
these handicaps built in. What nonsense! Obviously the genes are terrible,
since they produce these handicaps. The true mechanism is that a female is
looking for the most desirable male. That is one which will be most likely
to ensure that her genes multiply in future generations. By chance some
males may develop some particular unusual characteristic which the females
can identify, and they may begin selectively preferring males with that
characteristic. Soon a positive feedback loop develops, leading in the
direction of chaos. Females which mate with males having that characteristic
will tend to produce male children with that characteristic, which will then
be again positively selected. Females which do not follow the trend will
produce uninteresting male offspring, and thus their genes will die out. The
whole thing does not lead to total chaos since in the end the poor males are
living at the edge of extinction with their bad genes, thus limiting the
feedback loop.
For monogamous species where the male and female stay
together for life, the two sexes are usually very similar, even hard to tell
apart. But this is not the case with humans, and thus we are led into a
discussion of cheating. The author gives examples of cheating in the parrot
world, being careful to define the term accurately. With humans, as we have
seen, a tremendous effort is required to bring up the children from baby to
adulthood, requiring the efforts of both parents. Happy is the husband with
a faithful wife. But we pity the poor husband who has been cuckolded, the
wife having become impregnated by a strange man. As explained in the book,
from the point of view of genetics there might be an advantage for the woman
to be unfaithful. A man who gets away with impregnating many women without
bothering about bringing up the children is genetically successful. A woman
who bears the child of such a man will tend to bear male children who are
also similarly unfaithful and thus similarly genetically successful. And
since they also have the genes of the woman, such a pregnancy is to her
advantage. This may explain the fact that women's bodies differ so much from
those of men, and indeed, especially in past times, women's clothing was
meant to emphasize those differences to an extreme degree, similarly to the
strange displays of the males in some species of birds. Of course these
days, in our post-industrial, over populated world where most people tend to
avoid pregnancy at all costs and where society takes care of babies in
kindergartens and nurseries, all of this no longer applies. Still, the
emotions stay hard-wired into our genes. Paternity can be easily determined
using DNA sequencing, even on a fragment of hair. Yet as I understand it, in
Germany, a country whose politics and system of justice are largely
determined by women, that is illegal and would not be admitted into a court
of law.
Looking at Gutenberg.org, on the front page are a
few titles under the heading "Our Newest Releases". They usually seem to be
pretty obscure, but this one was there, and so I gave it a click. It is a
collection of letters the author wrote to somebody back home in Vermont,
published in 1895, describing a touristic group she was traveling with,
first steaming across the Atlantic and into the Mediterranean to Italy,
taking in the sights there, then a train to the east coast of Italy and
another steamboat to Greece, Egypt, then to Jaffa in Palestine, Jerusalem,
Damascus, Beirut, back to Italy, then breaking away from the group to travel
individually to England and Scotland, and finally steaming back to end up in
Vermont six months later.
There were about 30 people in the group. It must have
been quite an expensive cruise, but so different from what I imagine the
modern-day equivalent would be like. These days you would be squeezed
together in airline seats and then in equally squeezed bus seats for
hours on end, inhaling the diesel or jet kerosene fumes, not to mention the
loud traffic assaulting your senses everywhere. You would be sleeping in
hotels every night with en suite showers and toilets, eating in the hotel
restaurants. Somebody in charge would be continually lecturing the group on
the cultural, historical, and practical aspects of the whole thing. What a
relief it would be to get back home and be able to relax, freely going out
into the garden, breathing the fresh air.
Of course a steamship was infinitely more comfortable
than an airplane. There were no cars in 1895. Apart from trains, people were
taken in horse drawn coaches, or they rode the horses themselves. There are
a number of photos which Adna Brown seems to have taken, perhaps with her Kodak
Brownie camera (although I see that Brownies first came out in 1900,
the original Kodak camera appeared in 1888). A view of the Acropolis in
Athens shows open fields with only isolated buildings in the foreground. The
pyramids are miles away from the nearest suburbs. The trip from Jaffa around
through Jerusalem and Damascus to Beirut was camping all the way. They seem
to have hired a hundred or more people to carry the tents with all the
furnishings, the kitchen wagons and everything from place to place. In the
mornings after breakfast they set off on horseback or in carriages (one or
two of the elderly women seem to have been carried in palanquins). At the
lunch stop the advance group of helpers, setting out early in the morning,
had set up dining tents and cooked a meal, then after an hour or two of rest
the party progressed on to the evening destination. One or two of the party
were ministers, and they conducted religious services, often based on Bible
passages related to the places they were visiting. We are told of the
different villages, often isolated from one another in deep valleys, and all
the different ethnic and religious groups living there. When they reached
Beirut, the Chancellor and most of the professors of the American University rode out on horseback to welcome
them, and they had a common religious service. In the next days there was
much celebration between them. Such a contrast to the situation these days.
This is the first time I have tried anything of Eveyln
Waugh. It is a common mistake for ignorant people like me to assume
that he was a woman. But in fact, the name Eveyln, while - we are told - being derived from the
female name Aveline, or Ava, or even Eve, was in earlier times equally given
to boys as to girls. It seems that its modern association as a girls name is
to a large extent due to Eveyln Nesbit, a famous female model of a century
or more ago. Eveyln Waugh's name was actually Arthur Eveyln St. John Waugh.
Somehow I always imagined that books written by a person who names himself
Eveyln rather than Arthur would be rather too quirky. But I very much
enjoyed this one. We read that Eveyln Waugh married Eveyln Gardner (a woman)
in 1928, who thus also became Eveyln Waugh. But it was not a happy marriage.
After all, how awkward it would be to be married to someone with the same
name as you. It ended in divorce, and it is said that the present book,
whose subject is an unpleasant divorce initiated by an unfaithful wife, is
based on Evelyn Waugh's (the author's) own experience, expressing his anger
about the whole business in literary form. He later married Laura Herbert
and they established a more enduring family. The Wikipedia entry about all
of this is extensive and interesting.
The hero, Tony Last, has inherited a large country
estate, Hetton Abbey, with extensive grounds. There are 10 or 15 servants
about the place, but unlike the series Downton Abbey, there is not a great
social life at Hetton. It is just Tony, his wife Brenda, and their eight
year old son John Andrew. Brenda finds the place boring and goes off to
London whenever she can. We are told that she travels third class by train
in order to save money, but then they calculate whether or not it would be
cheaper to take the car, with chauffeur. Rather than just taking day trips
she decides to rent a tiny two room flat in London for a pound or two a
week, or a month, or whatever it is. And back at Hetton Abbey, Tony is
constantly trying to save. We are told that the death duties from the
previous generation must all be paid off, and also Tony's brothers and
sisters and other relations who have not enjoyed the gift of primogeniture
are living in relative poverty. We are told that his income is about 7,000
pounds per year which, according to the inflation calculator (from 1920 to
now), would be £271,059.77 in today's money. Yes. We can see the problem.
The son, John Andrew, dies tragically in a horse riding
accident. This is the final straw between Tony and Brenda. Tony at first
goes through some ridiculous steps in the process of giving his wife a
divorce. He must hire a prostitute and a team of private investigators with
cameras and take them all to a hotel on the coast, and so forth. He had
agreed with Brenda to give her £500 per year, but suddenly her brother, an
objectionable, fat politician, turns up demanding £2000. Tony tells him that
it is impossible, and he walks away, refusing the divorce, leaving Brenda
with nothing. (But in the end she marries some rich person in London.) Tony
meets somebody by chance at his club who is looking for the lost city of
something or other, somewhere in the northern jungles of Brazil or Columbia
or whatever. And so he heads off with him into the jungle. We are reminded
of the Lost City of Z, the
real life account of Colonel Fawcett, which was horrible. And similarly Tony
and his companion either die or are nearly dead. It is a poignant, moving
account of hopelessness. The book should have ended there, leaving us with a
feeling of finality. But unfortunately Eveyln Waugh decided to stick on a
quirky final chapter in which the deathly sick Tony is discovered by some
crazy white man living all alone in the jungle, hundreds of miles from
civilization, not doing anything to support himself or explain how he is
there in the first place. He keeps Tony, who wishes he could get back to
England, as a kind of enslaved companion. This nonsensical ending spoiled
the book for me.
I then started reading Brideshead Revisited, which is
said to be Waugh's magnum opus. But I gave up after only a hundred pages or
so. The hero, Charles Ryder is "studying" history at an Oxford college. But
as he tells us, the whole exercise is not about studying some particular
subject. Rather it is concerned with throwing lots of money about, putting
on elaborate parties in your college rooms, being an influential person in
the circles of people who are destined to become Important People in the
future of England. Charles meets and becomes enraptured with an extremely
eccentric, extremely rich and pampered fellow student, Lord Sebastian Flyte.
Perhaps in the end, if we go to the trouble of reading through hundreds of
pages to the end, we will find that Charles has become disenchanted with all
this upper class English snobbery. But I didn't. I am just following all the
unpleasant goings on in the world these days, observing that the most
underhanded, cynical developments seem to be initiated by these people - the
Boris Johnsons and "Lord" Camerons of England.
How can it be that Oxford and Cambridge are rated so
highly in academic life? Surely most students these days are serious, not
members of the revolting Bullingdon Club. But I imagine that the degenerate
types who later attain positions of power, when from time to time
experiencing a sense of "Brideshead Revisited" nostalgia, direct large sums
of money into those institutions, leading to many well funded
sub-institutions, producing reams of academic papers and citations.
Island, by Aldous
Huxley
In this book, written at the end of his life,
Huxley describes his idea of a utopia. It is an island somewhere in
Indonesia where a Scottish doctor arrived sometime in the 19th century and
stayed in order to realize his dream of an ideal society. The book was first
published in 1962 and it could be read as a plan for a hippy commune of the
60s: free love, drugs, communal babies and children, and all that. These
things are described in great detail, together with many philosophical and
psychological observations on the improvement of the human condition. It
became tedious and I found myself skipping and skimming through the text to
get to the end where the hero is initiated into the mysteries of a
transcendental peyote
trip.
For me, the book was a disappointment. Years ago I had a
phase of reading some of Huxley's novels which were often witty and fun to
read. I was going to mention The Loved One, which was a lot of fun, but now I have
suddenly realized that it was written by Evelyn Waugh, not Aldous Huxley, so
what I wrote about the previous book is not quite right.
Those 60s communes didn't really last very long. And soon
after the book came out - Huxley died on the very day that JFK was
assassinated, to be replaced by the evil LBJ - Indonesia was taken over in a
military coup by Suharto
who had millions of people tortured and killed, thus transforming the final
scene of the book into brutal reality. Huxley describes all of the sexual
freedom on the island, and in particular teenage boys are taught by mature
women. This may be an enjoyable fantasy for elderly men to think about, but
Huxley does not tell us about the parallel situation where teenage girls are
initiated into sex by mature men. I was reminded of the real life Pitcairn Island which was settled by the mutineers of
the Bounty, together with some women and men and a baby girl from Tahiti in
1790. In 2004 a court in New Zealand did not think these sexual teachings of
girls by older men on Pitcairn was a wonderful example of the joys of sex.
They were charged with rape. Would Aldous Huxley agree with the
court, or would he say that this was an example of the distortion of our
pure human emotions by the false values of modern New Zealand?
All of this is not to say that Huxley's vision is false.
It seems to me that he is describing what life used to be like - and perhaps
is still like - in small, stable communities, villages, which have existed
for many generations and where the people are more or less distantly related
to one another. Could there still be such villages in the back woods of
Eastern Europe or Southern Russia? Or in Asia or Africa. Certainly in South
America. Indeed, peyote was traditionally used by the aboriginal peoples of
the Americas. Is it a shame that modern society has progressed from the
conditions in which humanity lived and evolved over hundreds of thousands of
years to the seemingly unnatural state of things which we experience these
days? Well, at least I can say that for me, even in this modern world, life
has been a kind of private utopia.
Before the final scene of the book the hero describes
over many pages his experiences during his peyote trip. His female companion
puts a record of one of Bach's Brandenburg Concertos on the record player
and this excites all sorts of psychedelic visions and feelings. I never
tried LSD or any such psychedelic drug. I didn't know anybody who had such
things, and anyway why make life complicated by doing something which
society punishes with drastic and unpleasant consequences. If it was legal I
would try it. I'm sure it really is a mind-blowing experience. On the other
hand I can say that it certainly is mind-blowing to play the music of Bach,
even solos, as an amateur member of an orchestra of otherwise professional
musicians in ancient European churchs.
We have been doing various things the last couple
of weeks and I have only been reading every now and then in the evenings, so
I seem to have taken weeks to get through this long book. The printed
version must be at least a thousand pages. According to the Wikipedia, this
is the second favorite book of American readers, just behind the Bible. I
certainly haven't read all the way through the Bible, but I did read a very
nicely illustrated Folio version years ago called "The Bible to be Read as
Literature". I wonder how many of those surveyed Americans have read all the
way through the Bible or through this book. I suspect that they saw the
1930s movie with Clark Gable - which I've never seen - but which is also
supposed to be very long, and they might base their enthusiasm for the book
on the movie. It is said to be the most successful movie ever made in terms
of financial return (adjusted for inflation), and it won practically all the
Oscars for that year. As far as I can see, Youtube does not offer the full
movie. Is there any limitation on copyright for movies? But Youtube does at
least offer the last six minutes of the movie which I did click on. Lots of
dreamy 1930s music. Neither Clark Gable nor Vivien Leigh speak with a nice,
slow southern drawl. They speak with the accents of the hated Yankees, and
so I presume that the rest of the movie is similarly off the mark.
What an objectionable character the Scarlett O'Hara of
the book is! Ashley, Ashley, Ashley. I had to groan, along with the poor
Rhett Butler at her never ending yearning for Ashley. And then her cruelty,
her thoughtlessness. It was a relief to have finished the book.
But of course the book is not only about yearning for
Ashley. It is about yearning for the good old days of the Antebellum South
with its life of opulent plantations, slavery and Southern Comfort. The
O'Hara plantation is named Tara.
(As an aside, Tara
is a female Buddha of the Himalayan regions, and if you fly from Katmandu to
Lukla then
in all probability you will be flying on a Twin Otter turboprop airplane of
Tara Air.)
Nowhere in this book is slavery condemned. Even the
Wikipedia article for the book only mentions slavery in passing, remarking
on the different "castes" of slavery as if it was a normal thing. Well, I
suppose throughout history menial work was usually assigned to slaves. In
the feudal system, the peasants belonged to the lord of the manor and were
subject to his abuses, although, as I understand it, they were not bought
and sold as true slaves. The terrible thing about slavery in the South of
the United States was that it was exclusively based on race. People of
African origin were slaves; people of European origin were not slaves. As
described in the book, the plantation of Tara was like one big happy family.
Everyone had their place and was devoted to the life and the success of the
family. The book Uncle Tom's Cabin is mentioned as an evil example
of false Yankee propaganda. And during the period of Reconstruction the
ignorant Yankees insult the civilized southerners with their imaginary
stories of Bloodhounds, and all that.
Well, OK, maybe there were idyllic plantations run as
happy families. But many families are not so happy. Perhaps most people
these days find a job and begin working in some place, and keep on working
there for the rest of their lives as if that was a new kind of family.
Perhaps they find it to be comforting and fulfilling to be part of such a
family. I could never live in such an environment. Surely many of the
slaves, particularly the "lower castes", the field hands, also hated
belonging to such a "family".
I was astonished to read how the "darkies" of the book
were often described in the most degrading fashion: as being like monkeys,
like children unable to think for themselves, always needing instructions
from their masters. For example right at the beginning of the book we have
two young fellows from a neighboring plantation courting the 16 year old
Scarlett. There is a lot of banter, related in grammatically correct
English. Lurking in the background is Jeems, described as the "negro groom"
of the two. We are told that Jeems grew up together with them and was their
playmate from childhood, thus surely assuming similar manners of speech as
them. They accuse him of eavesdropping on the conversation. He says:
"Nawsuh, Mist' Brent! Huccome you think Ah be spyin' on
w'ite folks?".
And this continues throughout the book. The dialog of white people is
normal, correct English; the dialog of black people is always related in
this distorted, subhuman, grunting sort of manner.
And this book is the second favorite book of modern day
Americans, just behind the Bible?... Really?
Somehow I began to imagine that Gone With the Wind
is a kind of analog of Hitler's Mein Kampf. As related elsewhere
here, I was unable to get very far through that tedious book, but in a way
the idea is similar. The longing for an ideal society where "we", or at
least the reader, is a member of the master race, having a wonderful time
while the lesser races of humanity are put in their places. Imagine what it
would be if the Wikipedia were to establish that Mein Kampf was the
second favorite book of Germans, behind the Bible. An impossible idea and a
dreadful reflection on the state of morality in modern day America. Or is
all of this just a meaningless Hollywood fantasy?
It's always fun to read something by John Banville.
This is another Quirke murder mystery, and as I see from the Guardian review
it is already the 10th book in the series. Banville seems to be dropping all
pretenses here; I could not find a single obscure word in the whole book.
Why spoil things for the few people who might happen to read the things I'm
writing here by describing the plot of the story. Suffice it to say that
Quirke's companion in drink and criminal resolutions, Inspector Hackett,
finally dies of all those bad cigarettes and whiskey. And then we discover
who was the actual murderer in The Lockup. The English professor of
history at Trinity College, Dublin, Professor Armitage, loses his wife
through drowning, but there is one unresolved death of a small boy which
leaves the story open for further investigations in the next installment of
the series. In the meantime an innocent man languishes in a brutal prison
under the cruel guards of 1950s Ireland.
The English translation of this book has the title
The Royal Game. In German, Schach is Chess. In a game of chess one
says "check" if the king can be captured on the next move; a German would
say "Schach". The two words "check" and "Schach" have similar meanings. In
English one might say that a person or a situation might be "kept in check",
similarly in German one might say "in Schach halten".
The reader who might expect this short novel to be a
description of an actual game of chess, comparable say to Kawabata's great
classic: The Master of Go, will be disappointed. The game of chess
in the book is only described in vague emotional outbursts. We needn't
bother ourselves with actual positions on the board, although a real game:
Alekhine vs. Bogoljubow in 1922 is vaguely cited. The protagonists: the
imaginary world champion of chess, Mirko Czentovic, and the lawyer, Dr. B.,
bear no relationship at all to real masters of chess. The world champion of
the book is an ignorant peasant of the land who in some unexplained manner
suddenly became the world champion without studying anything. The
aristocratic Dr. B. had never played a game of chess in his life. He had
only spent some time imagining playing games in his head. And with this
experience he was able to beat the world champion.
In fact it is an allegory on the situation of the world
in 1941 when the book was written. Czentovic represents the dull, brutish
Nazis, and Dr. B., while not specifically being said to be Jewish, was
involved in trying to secretly save some of the riches of the Christian
churches which the Nazis were in the process of plundering. We are told that
he had been installed not in a prison cell but rather in a comfortable, but
locked, hotel room during his interrogation. It was a kind of solitary
confinement which was driving him mad. But he managed to steal a book
containing 150 famous chess games described using abstract chess notation.
And so he occupied his mind memorizing these games, and then going on to
imagine playing games against himself. Indeed, this was the method used in
programming AlphaGo, which beat Lee Sedol in 2016. But AlphaGo
played against itself many millions, if not billions of times before
reaching the level of mastery necessary for such an achievement. Something
which would be way beyond any mere human being such as Dr. B. in 1941.
The game of the book takes place on an ocean liner
traveling to Brazil, as Stefan Zweig and his wife traveled there in 1940.
They settled in the pleasant town of Petrópolis, but then they both committed suicide in
1942.
It is said that physical isolation, solitary confinement,
is a form of torture. We can imagine that such isolation when combined with
possible threats of more severe, acute torture might drive a person mad. But
for example Julian Assange survived such treatment. In any case it is not
for me to speculate on such things which I know nothing about.
Finally I see that these days it is possible to download
a chess app onto your mobile telephone which is capable of beating any human
being, including the present world champion, whoever he may be (Google tells
me it is somebody named Gukesh Dommaraju).
Somehow the idea of humans competing in a chess "world championship" these
days seems pointless; their mobile telephones could have done much better.
In earlier times some people trained themselves to do complicated
arithmetical operations rapidly in their heads, and I suppose there might
have been a world championships of such things, but obviously any computer
or mobile telephone renders such exertions absurd.
The name of the author reminds me of that character
in The Great Gatsby, but his real name is Nick Cornwell. His father
was David Cornwell, who published lots of novels under the name John le
Carré, with George Smiley in the "Circus" (MI5 or 6) under the leadership of
"Control", and all that. David Cornwell died in 2020 and this book is a
continuation of the series. The story takes place in 1963 - according to the
blurb, between The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Tinker
Taylor Soldier Spy. The familiar characters in the Circus from the
earlier le Carré spy stories are here. We also have a young woman who has
escaped from communist Hungary in 1956, Szusanna, being sent along with
Smiley from peaceful, civilized England to the dangers of Berlin and Vienna
and then through the Iron Curtain and into the dark violence of Budapest.
The root of all evil is Russia and that nameless presence, the head of
Moscow Central, Karla.
Yes, I suppose it used to be fun to read all this John le
Carré stuff; a kind of high-brow James Bond. Both David Cornwell and also
Ian Fleming were, indeed, actual English spies on some sorts of levels.
Cornwell, who was born in 1931, was too young to be an actual spy in World
War II. In this sense he lacked the authenticity of Fleming.
But what is the sense of all this spying during a time of
peace, or at least not formally declared war? Why is it that the English
seem to be the driving force behind the tragedy of Ukraine? A hundred and
fifty years ago England did rule the waves; the sun never set on the British
Empire. But now it is at most a second rate country pretending to be
something it is not, sending specially trained people to sabotage what they
can in far away countries, causing unnecessary suffering, trying to wag the
tail of the United States in its declining years.
This novel is about someone being kidnapped from
the coast of Japan and brought to North Korea, as described in this Wikipedia article. In the period from 1977 to 1983
North Korea secretly sent agents disguised as fishermen to the beaches of
western Japan, abducting people in the darkness of night. They were taken
against their will and forced to teach other North Korean agents to speak
Japanese fluently. Some older people were merely abducted in order to steal
their identities. Their further fate in the Korean gulag is unknown. It is
also thought that larger numbers of South Koreans and also numbers of other
foreigners were abducted - they seem to have disappeared without trace.
Japan annexed Korea in 1910, emulating the colonies of
the European powers and treating the natives just as dreadfully as the
Europeans treated their colonial subjects. Serk was born to a family of
Koreans who had taken up residence in Japan before the Second World War.
Koreans in Japan were treated as outsiders, worthless, and so they lived in
poverty. But Serk was able to go to a Japanese school, assuming a Japanese
name, and he did well. After the war, in the 1950s, his family, apart from
Serk and one sister who had married, decided to return to Korea, North
Korea, believing the propaganda coming out of that country and hoping that
the two Koreas, after the terrible Korean War, would soon be unified. In
those days South Korea was also a repressive dictatorship. Serk stayed in
Japan, completed his degree, but was unable to find a satisfactory position.
After all, Japan did not give citizenship to people of Korean origin, even
if like Serk they were born in the country. And so he was able to emigrate
to the United States where he found a job teaching at an obscure Midwestern
university. He married an American and they had a daughter. The book devotes
long chapters to the wife and the daughter. After Serk's abduction,
believing him to have been accidentally drowned, they go on with their lives
as the book skips through the decades telling us about them. But finally the
book turns to Serk's fate.
He is thrown into a small room and the door is locked.
There is a small window up high. An endless solitary confinement. Sometimes
it is impossibly hot and he knows it must be summer; gradually it becomes
freezing cold in the unheated room, and it must be winter. The years, go on
and on. Tasteless food is brought and the waste is taken away. But then a
young person not in uniform enters his cell and says that he would like to
be taught Japanese. For months and years he comes, and others come too. He
begins to ask about Serk's earlier life. What was it like in Japan, in
America? All this time Serk believes his daughter has also been abducted;
perhaps she is in the next cell. When will they allow him to see her? The
Japanese lessons become investigations of Serk's inner feelings. And then
suddenly his student turns out to be a cruel official. Serk is accused of
being an American spy, of being disloyal to North Korea, and so he is
removed from his cell and transported to a prison camp for hard labor.
Conditions are much worse, unbearable. There is almost no food. People try
to trap rats and other things and eat them raw. After many further years he
is suddenly allowed out of this prison camp for no apparent reason. Yet he
is destitute in North Korea. Somehow he attaches himself to some people.
Eventually, through stages, he manages to cross the river separating North
Korea from China. But the Chinese, being allies of the North Koreans, hunt
down and send back any escapees. And the South Koreans refuse to accept them
since they do not want to provoke the North Koreans, hoping to reach the
dream of unifying the two Koreas. Being stateless he is unable to return to
his wife and daughter in America.
Are things really as horrible as all this? Can an
innocent man be thrown into an inescapable gulag? A very depressing and dark
story. But what was the motivation to have Serk removed from his cell and
thrown into the prison camp? After all, he would have continued to be useful
to them as a language instructor. And how absurd it was to have accused him
of being disloyal to North Korea, given his treatment by the North Koreans!
The
Names, by Florence Knapp
Cora is walking from her home to the registry
office with her newly born son in his baby carriage. Before her marriage she
had been a professional ballet dancer. She is accompanied by her nine year
old daughter, Maia. The father, her husband, is a medical doctor, a general
practitioner, who is well liked and admired by his patients, and he is a
respected person in the town. His name is Gordon and his father's name is
Gordon, and he insists that his baby boy should also have the name Gordon.
(All of this reminds us of the similar continuation of male names in that
dysfunctional family of William Henry ("Bill") Gates III.)
In fact, while to the outer world the father, Gordon, is
an admirable person, within the family he is a dreadful tyrant. Cora does
not really want to give her baby son the name Gordon. What if he then turns
out to be as horrible as Gordon, the father? She would much prefer to give
the baby the name Julian. Julian means "sky father". She talks to Maia (of
course, being a girl, Gordon couldn't care less about the name Maia, or
whatever it was). Cora asks Maia what name she thinks would be good for the
baby, and Maia says it should be named Bear. They arrive at the registry
office, and now the story splits into three different streams, three
different versions of reality, and we follow each of these versions, chapter
for chapter, skipping over 5 or 10 years in each case, to finally end up
with the situation about 30 years later where we see the consequences of the
various choices.
To begin, it is difficult to imagine a character as bad
as Gordon the father. As I understand it an abusive husband attacks his wife
but then she stays with him because he returns the next day, tearfully
begging for forgiveness and all that. At least that is the story in lots of
these novels and movies. And then we hear stories about the dreadful
treatment of women in marriage in India or in some Muslim cultures. Perhaps
in those situations husbands do not bother to show remorse. But what do I
know about such things?
Anyway, the first version of the story is that the baby
is named Bear, to the amusement and approval of the civil servant at the
office. The immediate consequence upon returning home is that Gordon attacks
Cora extremely violently; her screams alert the neighbor who comes to save
Cora; Gordon attacks the neighbor, killing him; the police take him away to
serve a long time in jail; Cora, having survived, returns to her mother in
Ireland together with the children; Bear becomes a well-adjusted young man,
loved by everyone.
In the Julian version, Gordon is angry and also attacks
Cora, but not so violently as to kill her. The children suffer under all of
this violence at home. Eventually Gordon does succeed in killing Cora and
the children are then brought up by the grandmother in Ireland. Julian is a
sensitive person, hating England and everything it represents since that was
where the family had lived. He is afraid of entering into relationships for
fear of having inherited the evil genes of his father.
The Gordon version is initially not so very violent. The
young Gordon is brought up by Gordon, his father. He is a loner at school,
but then by doing bad things, and in particular unsuccessfully trying to
rape a girl in his school class, he becomes a member of the school gang of
bad boys. Cora lives on, suffering the occasional black eye and broken bone.
She flees a number of times to women's shelters, but always comes back,
thinking that otherwise she will lose the children. Maia, who has become a
medical doctor herself, despises her for this. Eventually Gordon, the
father, has gotten his medical colleagues to agree to sign a statement
declaring Cora to be insane, and so Gordon has legal possession of her,
threatening to throw her into an insane asylum if she tries to run away
again. But in the end the son, Gordon, does save her.
It was a relief to have done with this book. There must
be many people in the world suffering as was Cora, not only in marriages but
perhaps also in prisons, or even in situations as with the Serk of the
previous book, and all the rest. A sobering idea.
I had at first thought that the book would be about how
the name a child is given influences its later personality. Is it better to
give a child a traditional name, perhaps named after a loved relative or
ancestor, or is a short, unusual name better? For example Elon Musk has
followed this second idea to an extreme extent. This is an interesting
subject, but unfortunately the evil of the father in the story distorts
things away from such questions. The book is concerned with domestic
violence, not with the meanings of names.
This is a book about New Zealand, written by a New
Zealander. It is Christmas of 1984 and the family of four is driving from
Wellington up along the coast to a small holiday house they are renting for
the summer. How pleasant it is to think of New Zealand. I remember having a
run along the black volcanic sand south of Mt. Egmont, or Taranaki, many
years ago. The family consists of the parents and their two daughters: 10
and 16. The story is told from the viewpoint of the 10 year old, almost as
if she had written it. They will be staying for five weeks, for all of
January, and the rest of the world and all its worries is far away.
Over the years a number of small girls have mysteriously
disappeared. Were they carried away by rip-tides? Or were they kidnapped?
The girl meets a 10 year old boy. He is a Maori, staying with his parents
and lots of cousins in a larger house further down the beach. They decide to
investigate these disappearances together, looking for clues in the sand
dunes and everywhere else. Meanwhile the 16 year old is only concerned with
herself, her appearance, and with the young men on the beach. She sneaks out
in the night to wild parties. The 10 year old hates her. And then there is
the creepy man in the house next to their back yard, lounging on his
upstairs balcony, observing everything, secretly filming things with his
camera.
The drama reaches a peak when the boy discovers a corpse
floating in the lagoon behind the house. It is the mother of a school friend
of the girl, whose family also happens to be holidaying in the same town.
What do the friendly policemen think of all this? The girl finds
incriminating evidence in the house of the creepy man, but before anything
has been properly resolved, the family escapes back to Wellington.
We imagine the author, Kathryn Hughes, having
written numbers of bestsellers, thinking about her next book. Her idea to
have an old woman in a nursing home celebrating her 100th birthday. She is
being looked after by a pleasant young woman, and they gradually begin to
tell each other about themselves. The old woman tells the story of
everything she experienced all those years ago, while the young woman tells
about the problems she is having with her partner, and with life in general.
Yes, we can imagine all sorts of interesting stories which could fit into
this framework.
The author has decided to set the time for the story to
be now - let's say 2024. (Not 2021 or 22. Otherwise things would be spoiled
with masks, mRNA injections, ventilations and all that.) The 100 year
birthday is convenient since it would place the birth of the old woman in
the year 1924, giving us a nice World War II story. That always goes down
well, especially in England. So in 1940 the 16 year old heroine is sent away
from the danger of the city to live with a farming family. We give her two
romantic interests: the healthy young farmer's son and the beautifully
attractive Italian son of the local gelato shop who, however is sent away as
an enemy alien, presumably drowning in a ship which had been taking him to
internment in Canada but was torpedoed by the evil Germans. She reluctantly
accepts the marriage proposal of the farmer's son, and with the whole
village gathered to celebrate the wonderful event, as she is about to step
into the church, the beautiful Italian, her true love, suddenly appears from
nowhere, telling her that he had been interned in Australia for two years,
but now he is back and he is free. (We needn't complicate things with some
sort of story about why he has now been freed despite the fact that the war
continues and he thus continues to be an enemy alien.) They run away from
the congregation, marry quickly in a registry office and travel to Italy -
bella Italia - back to the village by the sea from which his parents came
and to where they have fled.
Yes... this is a good basis for a new bestseller. Not
only do we have the gut-wrenching scene at the church with the jilted,
innocent, pure, young, English (or rather Welsh) farmer, but in addition we
have those wonderful Italians, leading the good life. I remember having read
a number of stories with this theme: an English man, or woman, stranded in
Italy with all those evil Germans about the place, being protected by the
loving Italians. Such a story would probably not be a bestseller in North
Africa or Ethiopia where the Italians massacred large portions of the
populations. But they are just brown people, aren't they? Not English.
Let's see. Then we can throw in a story about our heroine
rescuing a small Jewish girl. That always goes down well. And then the
heroine can bravely evade the cruel Germans who have everything under
observation, climbing into the mountains to bring sustenance to her husband
and the rest of the partisans despite the fact that she had contracted polio
as a child and was partially lame.
And so the book lurches on from one tried and true
attribute of a standard bestseller to the next, gradually fitting things
together, if sometimes rather implausibly, and bringing us back to 2024. I
have contributed to Kathryn Hughes success by buying the ebook from Amazon,
and I read it eagerly into the night, following the story to find out how it
all ends. I'm sure it would be perfect for a very successful movie, and so I
congratulate her.
Frankie, by Graham Norton
Again a story of an elderly woman being looked
after by a professional caregiver, telling the story of her life. This time
the woman is only 84 years old and the carer is a man. The author, who is Irish, is not only a writer of
books. He is better known as a flamboyant television personality in Great
Britain and Ireland. Almost all of the characters in this book, as well as
the author himself, but not Frances Howe - the Frankie who is the
elderly woman - are homosexual. Still, or perhaps because of this, the book
is much more sincere than the previous one. We are moved by the beautifully
told story of Frankie's life.
I know that we are supposed to say "gay" in the case of
men, and more recently for women as well. But I object to nice, pleasant
words being turned into euphemisms for something that they are not, spoiling
them. After all, in French baroque music you often encounter a movement
titled "Gai", which describes the spirit with which it is to be played. I am
sure that the musicians of those days, and indeed in these days as well, did
not imagine that the music should be played "in the manner of a homosexual".
At least in the case of women the word lesbian has no previous meaning
except that of an inhabitant of the Greek Island of Lesbos. And I hardly
think that they object to this alternative use of the word.
Frankie grows up in rural Ireland. Her parents die
together in a car accident when she is still a young girl and she is sent to
live with her aunt, her mother's sister, and the husband, a fanatically
straight-laced clergyman who interacts with the world and with Frances
strictly in terms of Bible verses. When she was 18, in 1950s Ireland,
totally dependent upon these foster parents, she was expected to marry
another clergyman who was in his 40s. He was unable to consummate the
marriage, leaving the frustrated Frances to herself. She is seen together
with an attractive, young farmer, and immediately her husband throws her out
of the parsonage, alone, on foot, destitute. At least her foster parents had
the goodness to send her away to London where she was able to stay with
Norah, a school friend who had begun to establish herself in the city. And
so begins the real story.
Norah, who is now Nor, lives together with a set of four
or five other young women, led by Van, whose parents give her much money,
allowing her to play the role of a theatrical agent. She welcomes the
attractive young Frances with "Hello Darling Frankie". Van immediately
appoints Frankie to be her personal assistant despite Frankie telling her
clearly that she is not lesbian. They travel together to New York to meet
all the exciting people in the 1960s world of art and theater. There is a
party at an elegant villa overlooking the Hudson. Also older women are
there, all lesbians except Frankie. They retire in pairs to the bedrooms
while to the amusement of the others, Van sleeps alone while Frankie sleeps
on a couch in the hallway. The next morning there is an explosion of
jealousy. Frankie is thrust out onto the street to amused laughter and the
angry shouts of Van. Alone again, on foot, destitute. She is saved by Joe,
the chauffeur of the house. It is only his part-time job. He drives her to
the apartment he shares with his sister in Manhattan, and Frankie falls
passionately in love with him and he with her. They quickly marry.
(Forgetting that she still remains formally married to that horrible old
Irish parson.)
Thus begin thirty odd years of Frankie's life in New
York. The sister works in a French restaurant; Frankie is offered a job
helping out but soon she becomes the chef and then the owner of the
restaurant. Over the years Joe becomes a famous artist. Despite much effort
she remains childless and Joe leaves her for Gretchen, a fertile Swiss woman
who produces a baby. But of course she as well as the young man the baby
becomes are dreadful people, typical of this nasty business of reproduction.
Frankie is left with the staff which becomes her family, the waiters of her
restaurant, all homosexuals. We have the 1980s, AIDS, all dying off, even
Joe as well. Much sadness. It is discovered that Frankie has been living
illegally in the United States - and she is a bigamist as well. She flees to
London with little to support her other than her one remaining friend Nor,
who has become wealthy through marriage. And Damian, her temporary carer,
has also become her friend.
The article in John Helmer's website which I've
linked to tells the story. What more is there to say? I almost regret having
spent the time reading all the way through this book and the whole, rather
sad Alexei Navalny business. You can read the CIA - MI6 approved, verbose
Wikipedia version here.
The book was published in the German language since it is mainly concerned
with what went on during Navalny's stay in Germany from August 2020 till
January 2021. But in light of the fact that it has become dangerous to
express opinions about the failings of German politicians, I will restrain
myself from writing further on this subject.
Having read the book, I can almost feel sorry for
Navalny. He was suffering from all sorts of medical conditions, taking large
amounts of various medicines. Perhaps he himself even believed that he had
been poisoned. A few years later he died just a day or two after Putin's
very successful interview with Tucker Carlson. Foul play was alleged from
all sides. One asks: who would benefit? Obviously Putin and Russia did
not benefit from such news. It seems to me that if it was murder then
the most obvious suspects would be the MI6 and the CIA, but it now appears
to be generally accepted that he died naturally of a blood clot. Perhaps it
was an adverse reaction to an mRNA injection.
A few years ago I read through a number of Andrew
Miller's novels; in the meantime he has written two more. Before beginning
this one, reading the blurb, I thought that it would be about two newly
married couples, neighbors in rural England, becoming snowed in in the
winter of 1962-63 - the "Big Freeze" - having problems heating their houses,
getting food and generally trying to exist, cut off from the rest of
civilization. But that isn't the story at all. The cold weather just
provides a general gloomy atmosphere for a story of two precariously married
couples. And here, in October, with grey cloudy weather the whole time, we
have the right mood for such a story.
One couple is the village doctor and his wife. They have
moved to the country village because he would like to be the respectable
doctor, looked up to by all the villagers, rather than being one of
thousands of obscure doctors in London. Of course his wife has no profession
- that was not the thing back then in 1962. But she is bored with life in
the village. She looks through the window across the field to the house of
the neighbors, a small dairy farm. Her husband, the doctor, drives a Citroën ID, the cheaper version of the classic DS, to
all his house visits. He is secretly having an affair with one of his
patients. The neighbors are a man from a wealthy London family who has
studied at Oxford. His parents had immigrated away from the all the dangers
of 1930s Europe, and their wealth is based on shady real-estate dealings and
unfair doings in the slums of London. Therefore the son seeks a truer life
as a farmer on the land. He has little money, having cut all ties with the
father he fears, even despises. The farmhouse leaks, it is cold, he doesn't
really know what he is doing with the few cows he has. He has bought a bull
for too much money on an impulse, to impress a few of the old characters in
the local pub, and the bull frightens him. Does it remind him of his father?
His wife was a dancer at a nightclub, and she was working for the
real-estate agency which sold him the farm. She, as well as the wife of the
doctor, is pregnant. Chaos ensues when the the doctor and his lover are
discovered. The farmer travels to London to beg the father to give him some
money, while his wife is off to her old haunts and the nightclub. Andrew
Miller writes beautifully as ever, but for me, after reading the next book,
it was a somewhat forgettable story. The pathetic little weaknesses and
failings people have, and their consequences.
This is about a man who in his youth joined the
British Army in the 1980s and served in Northern Ireland during "The
Troubles". What does a 20 year old youth think when voluntarily joining an
army? Or indeed, think about the millions of youths who have been
involuntarily "called up" for service. The strangeness of it. Marching about
in formations with other youths, having the head shaved, learning
discipline, having to make your bed in a precisely described way, ironing
the uniform according to regulations. And then learning everything about
rifles, pistols, bayonets. We are told of the SLR rifle issued to soldiers back then. People of my
generation were sent to Vietnam with SLR rifles. These days more compact army rifles have been developed with the
barrel, magazine and action moved backwards into the stock of the gun.
Thankfully I have never been in an army; I was able to
peacefully study mathematics in those days and live my life freely, free of
any violence. I avoided the trauma, perhaps guilt, many people experienced,
and so I can only imagine in an abstract sense what it must be like to be a
soldier. In Vietnam, as I understand it, the soldiers thought of the people
there as "gooks" which could be shot at and killed, murdered, randomly, with no
consequences for the soldier. Perhaps in other wars a distinction is made
between civilians and combatants. Enemy combatants can be killed - indeed,
that is the object of the exercise - but civilians are, more or less, taboo.
Yet why is the life of a soldier who has been forced against his will into
an army of less value than if he had escaped that fate?
The protagonist of the book, Stephen Rose, was sent into
Northern Ireland. Most of the time the people in Belfast were simply walking
about, trying to live more or less normal lives. And the British soldiers
were sent out in small groups in full body armor to patrol the streets,
hunting the "terrorists" and displaying the presence of British authority. I
am sure Andrew Miller describes well the difficulties of this situation. The
danger for those soldiers. It would perhaps be fatal to be alone without the
others in the unit. After all, then an IRA sniper could easily kill such an
easy target without fear that the others in the unit would fire back, or at
least identify where the shot came from.
One day his unit is assigned the task of entering a
specific house in order to capture one of the "terrorists". It is a typical
English suburb of row houses along parallel streets with narrow parallel
alleys behind the houses. Stephen is sent alone into the alley to guard the
back of the house. Everything seems deserted. Yet he is surrounded by all of
these houses along the alley, any one of which could be hiding a sniper
aiming at him right now. Suddenly a young man runs out of the back of the
house which is being stormed by the rest of the unit. He is holding
something. He starts running. Stephen shoots. The young man collapses,
ambulances come, but he is dead. All the people in all the houses lining the
back alley have seen what has happened. Stephen is taken back to his
barracks alone, his is interviewed by the English authorities; no case is
made against him. He is quickly returned to his station in Germany and
quietly discharged from the army.
And so we meet him in the present, 30 or more years
later. He has become an alcoholic, consumed with guilt, and the story is
about this, the mess of his life and perhaps some sort of redemption. The
review of the book in the Irish Times which I have linked to above finds no
sympathy at all with the character of Stephen Rose. He is nothing more than
an agent of the hated English.
I was unable to find many other reviews. After all, the
whole theme of this book is rather awkward for those writers of newspaper
reviews, or the people who determine the winners of the various literary
prizes. Is it politically correct to try and understand the situation of a
soldier, particularly with respect to the "troubles" of Northern Ireland
which everybody would like to forget about anyway? It is certainly
politically incorrect to remember that the business of a soldier is to
murder people, especially now, when almost all of the politicians of Europe
can think of nothing other than sending as much money and weapons as
possible to Ukraine in order to keep the killing going as long as possible.
Thus it makes sense that Andrew Miller's The Land in Winter with its
casual allusions to politically correct themes was short listed for the
Booker Prize while this much deeper and more disturbing book seems to be
ignored. In fact it is the only one of his novels which doesn't have its own
Wikipedia page.
Nick, by Michael Farris Smith
In 2021 the copyright on the book The Great
Gatsby expired. The rules of copyright seem to be diverse and complicated, but as I
understand it, after the copyright runs out, anybody can just do anything
they want with the thing. The author of the present book, Michael Farris
Smith, had the idea to write a prequel - or backstory - to Gatsby. He wanted
to tell us about the life of Nick Carraway, the narrator, in the time before
he got to know Gatsby and all those other characters. This reminded me of
Jean Rhys' wonderful Wide Sargasso Sea which gives us the background to the
unfortunate Bertha Mason in Charlotte Brontë's slightly ridiculous Jane
Eyre.
Anyway, what do we know about Nick? As with Gatsby, he
was an American soldier in the Great War; in fact Gatsby says they served
together in the same division. Also, as with Gatsby, he comes from the
Midwest. Nick graduated from Yale while Gatsby says he spent some time at
Cambridge in England. Nick is making an "honest" living as a bond trader on
Wall Street while Gatsby has amassed great riches bootlegging liqueur during
those prohibition days. So what are we to make of all this?
Nick's family must have been reasonably wealthy. Perhaps
not in the class of the Chicago aristocracy, but well enough off to put him
through Yale. In the war he would have been an officer, perhaps just a
lieutenant, but certainly in a position of authority, leading other men. His
narration in Gatsby is calm, dignified. In those days, the 1920s, before the
age of inflation which we are living in today with money floating
precariously on debt and nothing else, the bond business was stable,
trustworthy. Money was valued in gold and silver. Nick was obviously not a
day trader. He had time to socialize with the moneyed society of Long
Island, and so as a young man of only about 30, we think about how he was
able to obtain a responsible position in a brokerage firm. It is true that
his second cousin Daisy is a wild character, but she is certainly also a
member of the moneyed class. With these thoughts I was anticipating an
enjoyable book about how this Nick Carraway came to meet Gatsby.
Michael Farris Smith begins by telling us in a foreword
to the book that he himself has also been to Europe. Good for him. Thus he
begins things with an embarrassing attempt to write a chapter or two in the
style of Hemingway in the 1920s. But soon he gives up on that, reverting to
what must be his usual style of writing. His Nick is on leave, having an
affair with a hippy sort of woman in the attic of an abandoned Paris
theater. Nick returns to the front and experiences psychedelic, dreamlike
scenes of extreme violence, all mixed up with visions of his Paris
girlfriend. The war finishes and he returns to Paris, but he is unable to
find her and so takes a ship back to the United States a year or two later,
at first thinking of returning to his parents and their small-town hardware
store, but in Chicago he instead steps on a train to New Orleans. The story
continues with a long, tedious account of a madam prostitute, her bordello
burning down, a degenerate salon keeper who had also been in the army, and
so on and so forth. Drunkenness, arty, post-modern violence. Why was I
continuing to read through this rubbish? I quickly skimmed on, glancing at
each page for just a second or two to see if there might be a few words
worth reading, finally arriving at the very brief, unmotivated end passage
where Nick first appears in Scott Fitzgerald's book. Oh well. Now that the
copyright of The Great Gatsby has ended, other people can do even
more absurd things with the story than this. But I wish people would write
more sensible reviews of such things in order to warn us about wasting time
with such rubbish.
The author's Eastern European last name is due to
the fact that his father was Hungarian. The mother was Canadian. The
Wikipedia tells us that after living in Canada, Beirut, Oxford and Brussels,
he now lives in Pécs in Hungary.
I first read Flesh. The character in this story, whose name is István,
also leads a cosmopolitan life. We meet him age 15 in the run-down apartment
he shares with his mother. In the apartment next door is a woman of his
mother's age and he is asked to help carrying her groceries; she soon
seduces him and there follows weeks, if not months, of turbulent sex. One
day the fragile husband of the woman is in the apartment and István punches
him, killing him. We then skip over a few years in which István was in
prison and then in the Hungarian army, presumably killing more people in
Iraq, but he is back in Hungary. He comes across as cold, emotionless. Yet
women throw themselves at him. His life is one big sexual adventure. He
becomes a chauffeur, eventually being engaged by an extremely rich - yet
fragile, if perhaps stout - man in London who has a young wife and son. The
husband dies and István marries the widow. So this is the main part of the
story, paralleling the Barry Lyndon of the Stanly Kubrick film. The son has
inherited everything in a trust fund which is administered by a London
lawyer, but István is able to convince the lawyer to loan monies out of the
trust fund so that he can engage in real estate speculation. And beyond
this, he and his wife live a life of the greatest luxuries London has to
offer - up until the time the son is allowed to take control of his trust
fund at age 25. In these modern times the son does not think of challenging
István to a duel with pistols as was the sad fate of Barry Lyndon. Instead
he withdraws to an Oxford college and descends into a drug-filled stupor. In
the end though, upon reaching 25, momentarily recovering from his
psychedelic dreams, the son is able to sue István for everything and we find
the bankrupt István back in Hungary, living simply, emotionless, presumably
with a further steady stream of women.
I next read All That Man Is which was short-listed for
the Booker Prize. It is a collection of nine short stories, featuring nine
different men, each of which describes some particular episode in the life
of the respective protagonist. From story to story, the men become older,
richer and ever more degenerate, starting with the embarrassing sexual
encounters of a French student alone on holiday in a cheap hotel on Cyprus,
through to an old man putting an end to his life. I particularly enjoyed to
story of the Russian oligarch who had robbed the Russian people out of
billions during the Yeltsin years, being driven in his Maybach limousine to his nearby helicopter on the
banks of the Thames, taking him to his private jet which flies him to Venice
where his 100 meter yacht is moored. He has been successfully sued by
another oligarch and he has lost, leaving him bankrupt. His idea is to jump
into the sea in the middle of the night in the manner of Robert Maxwell, the father of Ghislaine, of Jeffrey Epstein fame. But he postpones
his suicide in order to have a long conversation with his lawyer about his
financial position and life in general in the nautical luxury of the
Adriatic Sea. The men in these stories are all lonely, hopeless.
Finally there was Turbulence, a short book consisting of
a linked chain of scenes involving air travel from one place to another.
Each of these scenes contains a character who sets off on the next flight
somewhere else. But the scenes are so short and inconsequential as to render
the whole thing meaningless. While the chain of flights does start off
within Europe, happily they lead away to other continents and away from the
dark forces which are gathering here.
Why have I been reading these stories of David Szalay
about such degenerate things? Is it only a matter of enjoying a change of
perspective from all the English and American books I've been reading? While
the author is not really Eastern European, we can imagine that he is.
Ethan Frome is a short, depressing book.
The character of the title is a poor young farmer somewhere in a New England
winter. His parents had been sick and they were nursed by a young woman.
After the parents died, Ethan married the nurse who herself then became - or
pretended to become - sick; embittered, ugly, always complaining. A poor
young relative was sent for to look after the wife and the house. She was a
lively, attractive girl, and Ethan fell in love with her and she with him.
What could they do? They decided to kill themselves by riding a sled
together down a steep, icy hill into a large tree. Ethan survived, crippled,
and the wife, no longer sick, again adopted the role of nurse. The Wikipedia
says that the book started off as an exercise the young Wharton set herself,
writing in French, practicing the language. Perhaps she should have left it
at that.
Practically all the characters in The Reef are
Americans, and everything takes place in France, except for the opening
scene. There, George Darrow is waiting for the boat at Dover to take him
across to Calais. He is a diplomat and he has been given a week leave in
order to visit his - perhaps - fiance, Anna, at Givré. He had known her back home in the USA when they
were young, but she had married instead a rich, elder French aristocrat who
has died, leaving her alone in her huge French chateau together with her
young daughter and her step-son, the product of an earlier marriage of her
husband, aged about 29, with whom she gets along very well. But Anna had
sent Darrow an obscure telegram, saying "Unexpected obstacle. Please don't
come till thirtieth. Anna", catching him just at the last moment.
What was this "unexpected obstacle"? Why didn't she
explain it? Was she putting him off, wanting to end whatever relationship
there was? Rather than simply returning to London to spend a frustrating
week, he thinks he will carry on to France and amuse himself there. Perhaps
Anna would write a letter, explaining herself, which would be forwarded to
him in France so that at least he could understand what the obstacle was.
Suddenly, among the crowd of waiting people he sees a familiar face. It is
Sophy Viner, a lively, attractive 29 year old American who was orphaned and
is penniless. She has been the companion to an unpleasant American woman
living in London who has thrown her out in some sort of spell of trivial
anger. Her only hope is to ask the help of an American couple she had known
who live somewhere in France. Darrow offers to help, they arrive in Paris
and he puts Sophy into the hotel room next to his, finding excuses to put
off having her leave on the train to her friends. They spend the week
visiting theaters, dining at the best restaurants, walking about in the
romantic atmosphere of Paris in the spring. Sophy dreams of becoming an
actress. But she is falling in hopeless love with Darrow. What were they
doing in their adjacent rooms in the Paris hotel? If David Szalay was was
writing the story it would be nothing but a continuous sexual orgy. But for
Edith Wharton everything seems to be very polite and proper except perhaps
for the final evening when they had been out on the town together, feeling
rather tired. Darrow said he must really get back to write some letters -
"and so they had kept on to the hotel..."
All of that was just the preliminary story. The main part
is somewhat later, at the chateau. Darrow comes to visit. The plan is that
he is to marry Anna and then they will travel to South America where he is
to take up a posting. She is worried about leaving her 9 year old daughter
behind, but she has engaged a very good governess. Things take on a shocking
turn when we find out that the governess is none other than Sophy Viner.
What is more, Sophy has become engaged to Owen, the stepson. Darrow and
Sophy say nothing. Their week in Paris is a secret. Taboo. But why are they
acting so strangely? Owen starts spying on them. We have breathless
conversations, promises, and gradually everything is revealed. Sophy leaves,
Darrow is sent away in disgrace. Anna remains a figure of proud defiance,
and yet she wonders if she has thrown away her only chance of happiness in
the world. Sophy is taken back by the horrible woman who threw her out in
the first place, and they are on their way to India, beyond the hopes of
Owen, Darrow, the small daughter and even Anna who respects, even loves her.
Despite publishing the book, Edith Wharton said that it
was "a poor miserable lifeless lump", and she regretted that she had written
it. But I enjoyed the story. It is very much full of life. We think of Sophy
and Darrow's beautiful week in Paris, the hopes and dashed dreams of Owen
with his beautiful fiancée, and the proud Anna. It is said that Wharton may
have been describing two contrasting aspects of her own life in the
characters of Anna and Sophy. As a young woman she had married the wealthy
Teddy Wharton who suffered from depression, gradually losing his mind.
Towards the end, before she divorced him, she was platonically together with
Morton
Fullerton, who, she discovered, was having not so chaste relations
with other women on the side. And so this book was the expression of her
anger, or perplexity, about the situation: being a chaste, childless woman.
Although this book is about history, it examines the idea
of an alternative world. What if, after the apocalyptic, inconclusive Battle of the Somme in 1916 the opposing European
powers in the Great War had agreed to a truce? A realization that it would
be most sensible to just return to the way things were in 1914 before the
war began, and to live in peace. Such an idea seems naïve, utopian, and yet
it was a real possibility. If this had been the case then the last 100 years
would have seen no communism, no Stalin in Russia, and there would have been
no Hitler and no Nazis in Germany, no persecution of the Jewish people, nor
the Armenians, and all those other groups. Poland, which had been eliminated
at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 would have been reestablished. An
exhausted Europe would have recovered, perhaps leading to a century of
relative peace as was the case in the 19th century after the defeat
Napoleon. The properties of uranium would have been discovered in the 1930s
and 40s, as they were in our world, and atomic bombs would have been
constructed in peacetime, reinforcing the idea that wars of conquest would
be impossible. Perhaps England's traditional fear, and therefore hatred, of
Russia would have led to a situation similar to today with the "western"
powers provoking a proxy war with the goal of reducing Russia to a
collection of small states, colonies, whose wealth would be taken. This
despite Russia having turned into a parliamentary democracy, initially under
Kerensky.
The United States would not have assumed the role of world hegemon and it
would have prospered in cooperation with the rest of the world.
But of course this is all idle speculation.
The reality is that all of the European powers were
seeking peace in one way or another at the end of 1916. The war was a
stalemate. For both sides, agricultural and industrial production was
declining due to the fact that so many men were being killed in the war.
England and France were importing everything from the United States, yet
German submarines were torpedoing many of the ships. England was blockading
the North Sea, preventing anything from reaching the ports of Germany.
Of the Entente
Powers, Russia was entering a period of chaos. In fact the Emperor,
Nicholas II, was removed at the beginning of 1917, auguring a collapse of
the Eastern Front. This was reinforced with the fact that while Romania
entered the war on the side of the Entente in August 1916, it was quickly
defeated by the Central Powers. The exporters in the United States expected
to be paid, while both France and England were running out of money and
everything else. Loan deals based on nothing were made in secret, but Paul Warburg, the German-born, Jewish banker in
America who played a very central role in the financial affairs of that
country, put a stop to these secret deals which favored England rather than
his native Germany. The war cabinet in London estimated that they could only
continue on for a few more months.
The book does not describe in detail the difficulties
which the Central
Powers were facing. This is due to the fact that it is mainly
concerned with the role of Woodrow Wilson and his envoy "Colonel" House. Geography did not favor Germany and
Austria-Hungary. It was easy for the vast English fleet to occupy the North
Sea and simply prohibit all shipping. The German submarine blockade of
England was not so civilized. Ships sank, drowning their crews. Some
merchant ships were armed, and they were considered fair game, but the
Germans did agree to a more lenient policy for unarmed ships. The British
and French brought in people from their colonies to fight, but perhaps that
was not such a decisive factor. In any case, as with their opponents, the
Central Powers were also near a state of collapse. Left alone in a fight to
the end, perhaps the Central Powers would have been favored to win.
Such was the situation at the end of 1916. There were
many examples of previous European wars being brought to a sensible end in
such circumstances.
The "fly in the ointment" was the United States. It had
also become a great power, and if it decided to join the European war on one
side or another then that would prolong the war and give victory to the side
it had joined. Today it is obvious that it had to join on the side of the
Entente Powers. But in 1916 that was not so clear. Certainly the Germans
were causing great irritations by sinking ships. The East Coast millionaires
may have sided with England. They were making huge profits on their trade
and banking deals with England. On the other hand the example of Edith
Wharton shows that many of those people felt more attracted to the culture
of continental Europe. But also a large part of the population of the United
States was made up of recent immigrants from Germany. And after all, the
United States had fought two wars against England about a century before
that time. And a further factor was that Japan had joined the Entente for
some reason, and there was no love lost between the United States and Japan.
President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed constantly that there
should be peace, and the United States should be kept out of the war. The
leaders of England and Germany were sending Wilson detailed plans for a
truce. Yet Wilson was not a person of action. He dithered, thought, put
things off. According to the book, his only real contacts, sources of
advice, were his wife Edith and his friend "Colonel" Edward House. House was
the child of a wealthy Texas family who moved east and became involved with
banking. His fake military title was given to him by a governor of Texas
which he had financed. Wilson sent House on a succession of trips to Europe
to try to arrange the peace which was being sought at the highest levels of
government. House spent almost all his time in England, only once bothering
to go to Berlin where he met with a few people who could also speak English.
In reality he was overwhelmed by the sophistication of
the English aristocracy, their refined, arrogant accents, their palaces,
their sense of superiority. What an embarrassment his crude Texas accent was
when having formal dinners amidst all the pomp and circumstance of the
highest levels of English society. (According to the diaries of some of the
English politicians, they secretly despised "Colonel" House.) And so his
reports back to Wilson were all about what the English told him. In
addition, Wilson put off all efforts at diplomacy until after his reelection
in November 1916. Later in November he devoted himself to his idea of peace.
But then suddenly House came out with an hysterical theory that if the
United States organized a neutral peace conference, then, feeling provoked,
the English, together with the Japanese would attack the United States,
conquering it. How could a sane mind come up with such an idea, given that
England was near collapse? In fact, House was doing everything to block
Wilson's peace moves; instead his goal was to have the United States come
into the war on the side of England, thus hoping that the English
politicians he had met on his travels might, in this way, learn to like him.
All of this delayed everything through December and into
January, forcing the combatants to began making their war plans for the
summer of 1917. Eventually at the end of January Wilson gave a speech before
Congress, describing in vague, philosophical terms how nice peace would be.
There was no concrete plan for a peace conference. Given all the delay, the
Germans publicly announced their readiness for peace. Privately they were
prepared to give up all the territory they had occupied in Belgium and
France, but they thought that such concessions should be reserved for the
peace conference. The announcement was met with very aggressive demands from
England and in particular France, which announced that Germany must be split
up into its constituent small parts which existed before the unification of
Germany under Bismark. Of course this was just posturing before the proposed
peace conference, but still, it was rather aggressive. Given that Wilson
seemed to be incapable of organizing anything, the military factions of
Germany insisted that on the 1st of February there would be unrestricted
submarine warfare. Wilson was only informed of this the day before, the
Germans hoping that in the meantime he might positively call for a peace
conference. But in a fit of anger, Wilson declared that he wanted war,
something that was reinforced by the infamous Zimmermann telegram, and so war was enacted by
Congress on the 6th of April. The rest is, unfortunately, history. Even
worse was Wilson's Fourteen Points which the Germans assumed would lead
to a fair armistice in 1918, but which didn't, and which instead led to all
of the subsequent evil.
Finally it is interesting to note that although the
author, Philip
Zelikow is reviled in some sections of the alternative media
(as opposed to the legacy media) for his role in the cover-up of the
events of the 11th of September, 2001, and his perceived place among the
"neocons", nevertheless this is an extremely interesting and very readable
account of that great catastrophe of the last century.
Browsing about the internet, I saw that Katie Kitamura has published two new books. Audition
was short-listed for the Booker Prize. As with any novel, it is a fiction,
as is also the case with any play acted on Broadway. This novel is concerned
with an actress in New York, being the star of a very successful play. At
the beginning of the story she is in the final rehearsals, there are various
other actors about the place, producers, directors and all that, and she
notices a particular young man hanging about in the background. She gets to
know him, and he tells her that she is his mother. But she tells him, and
therefore us, that while she did have a miscarriage many years ago, she
never had a child, in particular she never gave a child away for adoption,
and so he must be mistaken. Perhaps he read somewhere that she had said in
an interview that once she had "lost" a child, referring to the miscarriage.
But then a few chapters later we have the young man being her son. He
proposes to "move back" into his old childhood room in their apartment; she
and her husband are agreeable, and particularly the husband is grateful to
have his grownup son again living at home.
Confusion...
Did we misunderstand the first couple of chapters? The son invites his
girlfriend to join him in his "parent's" apartment. Everything gets somewhat
out of hand. An explosion - and the illusion is broken. We finally realize
that the story is a fiction within a fiction. The actress and her husband
are playing the roles of the parents and the young man is playing the role
of the son. A cute little device for a story, but was it really worthy of
the praise the Booker Prize people heaped on it?
Intimacies was more interesting. A young woman
has been living alone in New York; her mother is in Singapore. Her family
had traveled about the world when she was growing up and she is fluent in a
number of different languages. She applies to become a translator at the International
Court of Justice in Den Haag (or The Hague, as that Dutch city is
referred to in English), and is accepted. And so we meet her, only gradually
becoming familiar with the streets, learning the rudiments of the Dutch
language. She becomes friendly and intimate with a somewhat older man, a
native of Holland. Only later she learns that he is married, but is wife has
left him and moved to Lisbon with their two children, to be with her new
boyfriend there. Her job involves simultaneous translation of the
proceedings of the court. The case she is involved with concerns an African
leader who is accused of atrocities, but he has many supporters who
demonstrate for his release, claiming that the fact that he has been
arrested is just another example of unfair European colonialist oppression.
The accused maintains an air of arrogant aloofness. It is said that Kitamura
based the story on the case of Laurent
Gbagbo, the former president
of Côte d'Ivoire. The accused insists on using his African language.
Another simultaneous translator translates into French and our heroine
translates that into English. She tells us of all the difficulties, the
legal jargon. And while she is in her glass-fronted booth above the court,
she finds the accused man, who she abhors, staring at her through the
glass. She is asked to come to the prison where he is being held and where
he is in consultation with his team of lawyers. But she is not really
needed. He is simply seeking some sort of abstract association, intimacy,
with the attractive translator which he listens to for hours on end in the
courtroom through his earphones. She is revolted by the situation.
In the book, the International Court of Justice is
described as being a modern architectural structure situated in the dunes
of the North Sea. But the Wikipedia says that it is in the Peace Palace, built in the style of those imposing
17th century town halls of Holland a hundred years ago. It is not in the
dunes. And I was unable to find where the prison for those internationally
accused prisoners is. It certainly also doesn't appear to be in the dunes.
The fact that the case against Gbagbo led to an acquittal is said to have
diminished the standing of the Court. Certainly the absurd conviction of
Vladimir Putin for the "crime" of evacuating orphans from the dangers of a
war zone shows that the court lacks all credibility, and more recent
actions, together with threats of sanctions and perhaps more drastic
actions against the judges of the court by Donald Trump, on one of his
various whims, have reduced the court to a pathetic state of total
irrelevance.
Our heroine is living in the generous apartment of her
boyfriend. He decides to travel to Lisbon to get his wife to agree to a
divorce so that he can remarry. He says that he will be back within a
week, but she should continue to live in the apartment. All of this goes
on in conjunction with the unpleasant court hearings. A week passes. More
weeks. He doesn't respond. Her mobile phone registers only silence. An
acquaintance, one of the defense lawyers in the case, tells her that he
also had been intimate with the wife before she left for Lisbon. And he
tells her that the husband, her boyfriend, is spending all this time
trying to win her back. She returns to her small temporary apartment. In
the end the husband returns, together with his children, and we learn that
he really has left the wife. She has decided to quit her job at the court.
Should she stay in Holland with him, or should she go off somewhere else,
to do something else? On the telephone her mother had reminded her that as
a small child she had once been in the dunes and on the beach at Den Haag.
A beautifully written story..
Both of these books are very much concerned with
Trinidad and Tobago, the country which is native to the author. As with her, Dawn, the protagonist of Love
Forms grew up in Trinidad, and after studying in the United States
(physics for the author, medicine for Dawn) ended up in England. But there,
I presume, the parallels cease. Carried away by the heated atmosphere of a
Trinidadian carnival, the 16 year old Dawn retreats to the nighttime beach
with a random American tourist, hoping to lose her virginity. The result is
pregnancy. Unwanted. There is no thought of keeping a baby, abandoning her
ambitions. But it also seems that abortion is not an option in 1980s
Trinidad, and for her well-off family it is a scandal. She is smuggled into
some place in the bush of Venezuela where Catholic nuns have a house for
looking after pregnant teenagers, assisting at the birth, and then giving
the babies away for adoption. Dawn returns and it remains a well kept
secret. Taboo. She leaves the tropics, studies medicine, marries, has
children, is living in London. Her husband is also a medical doctor and he
becomes very successful, while Dawn, looking after the children and
everything else cannot devote the endless time required of young doctors,
and so she gives up on medicine. And she thinks about the baby girl, her
daughter, who was adopted in Venezuela. It becomes an obsession. She spends
her time online, on forums devoted to people looking for their lost, adopted
children, and those children looking for their birth parents. Her family
suffers. Her marriage breaks up. She travels to the family holiday home on
the beach in Tobago. She contacts one possible daughter after another, but
the DNA does not match. A sad story, but a nice book to read.
The Golden Child is a member of a poor Indian
family in Trinidad, in contrast with the prosperous white (with occasional
admixtures - which we are told are usual in the Caribbean) family of the
previous book. And of course "Indian" here means real Indian, not native
American. We are reminded somewhat of Naipaul's House for Mr. Biswas.
The family has two sons which are twins. It was a difficult birth and the
second son was perhaps a bit strangled by his umbilical cord. The first son
is a perfect golden child: top marks, athletic, a wonderful personality, the
best of the Caribbean. The second son is retarded, although when reading the
book we think more of dyslexia rather than true simple-mindedness. A
childless medical relative of the family dies and leaves a legacy of about
$30,000 to be used for sending the golden child to the United States for
higher education. This is a secret known only to a few close relatives, and
it is invested in London, far away from Trinidad. We learn that law and
order has collapsed on the island. People surround their houses with high
fences and they have large, aggressive dogs freely roaming the property. But
one day the second son is kidnapped. It seems that the brother of the father
of the family was disgruntled about not having an equal share of the legacy,
and so he exposed the secret to a criminal gang. They demand the $30,000.
Everyone, including the older son, tells him to just pay the ransom, but the
father stubbornly refuses. And so the younger son is shot and his body
thrown into the sea. The older, golden son continues on to success. What a
dreadful story this is. And what must the successful son be going through.
Guilt? Anger? Can he be proud of his family for providing him with this
opportunity? Does his success still have a meaning?
Along Central Park West in New York are a number of very
large apartment houses, built over a hundred years ago, overlooking Central
Park. They have names: The Dakota, The San Remo, The Beresford, The
Eldorado, and so on. At the end of the book, in the Acknowledgments section,
the author tells us that he himself lives in a "famous apartment house on
Central Park West". He doesn't tell us which one it is. Looking things up, I
see that if it is The Dakota then he must have paid between 5.5 and 24
million dollars for his apartment. The Beresford is cheaper at only 2 to 7.5
millions, but what do I know about such things? It seems that back then, at
the beginning of the 20th century, many rich people who had their town
houses in the city decided to down-size, capitalizing on the immense
increase in property values, selling their houses for a fortune and moving
into one of these luxury apartment buildings. The Dakota must be the most
iconic of these, being the place where John Lennon lived and where he was
shot in the archway of the building by Mark David Chapman, who was reading
J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye. Looking at The Dakota via
Google Street View, and referring to the relevant Wikipedia entry, it seems
that in order to get into your apartment, you first enter through one of
these archways into the central court. But to get there you must have the
guard in his enclosed cell open the heavy metal gates which close off the
courtyard from the outside world, presumably using some sort of automatic
mechanism. The door of "The Bohemia", the imaginary Central Park West
apartment house of the book, is a more conventional style entrance,
something like a hotel. We imagine such modern monstrosities as The Trump
Tower. Thus, as in a hotel, the doorman, whose name is Chicky, has a flashy,
circus style uniform. And while he might not perform the usual hotel doorman
function of hailing taxis (do taxis still exist, or have they all been
replaced with people giving rides to other people for money, using their own
cars?), at least he exchanges pleasantries with the multi-millionaires and
billionaires living in the building, and perhaps he is occasionally allowed
to hold the doors of their personal limousines if the chauffeurs find it
inconvenient to perform this function for themselves.
Unlike all the rich people living in The Bohemia, Chicky
is poor, along with all the rest of the menial staff. In fact Chicky is
heavily in debt owing to the fact that his wife has died, leaving him with
$300,000 in hospital bills, and in addition to that the many tens of
thousands of dollars needed for the college educations of his daughters. The
health care system, along with everything else in the United States is
designed to make the poor even poorer and the rich even richer. The richest
family in The Bohemia has bought the entire top floors of the building,
turning it into an expansive town house overlooking Central Park. The
husband makes all his billions via the Department of Defense (or in Trump
speak, the Department of War). But his wife, Emily, is a beautiful
woman, loved by everybody in The Bohemia, including Chicky, since she is
very sincere and tries to be polite and help other people as much as she
can. The family had lived on a few floors on top of one of those ridiculous,
tall, thin buildings on "billionaires row", but they have moved into The
Bohemian on the urging of Emily with the hope of establishing a more
traditional style of life for her family and her children. All of this
culminates in an explosion of criminality, not only in The Bohemia, but
throughout New York. When the dust settles, Emily's husband is dead and she
has inherited the billions which will support her life in the family mansion
out in the Hamptons. It turns out that she was not the innocent angel of
purity we had thought she was, but she does give Chicky $10,000,000 in a
secret account in the Cayman Islands in order to resolve his financial
problems and to pay for his continuing discretion.
It was a fun book to read; we think about Tom Wolfe's Bonfire
of the Vanities, but we are left with some questions. How is Chicky to
make use of the money in the Cayman Islands? Surely the police are now
monitoring his bank accounts closely. And even if he converts the money into
bitcoins, or even real coins of gold in order to pay off his debts
anonymously, the police will simply ask the hospital which holds Chicky's
debts to explain the details of the transaction. And then we are told that
Emily's husband was merely selling body armor to the Department of War. Is
that really the source of all his billions? Well, Ok. He might have been
making the armor cheaply, say for a mere $1,000 each and then selling it to
the government for perhaps $50,000 per unit. A very believable idea about
how those people in the Military Industrial Complex make their money. But
body armor. Really? Why are we supposed to think that is so evil? Making
body armor seems to me to be a very benign way of getting rich in the MIC.
After all, body armor is intended to save lives.
We contrast this with the situation in Ukraine, a country
run by a comedian-actor playing the role of his life as if it were a
tragicomedy, siphoning off hundreds of billions, if not trillions for the
various oligarchs not only in his country, but in the "West" as well. They
hope that in this way Russia will be broken up into a collection of small
pieces which can then be individually plundered. The drama of this "proxy
war" is being played out on the murdered dead bodies of the millions of poor
soldiers who were forced into it against their will. Some politicians
suggest that of the millions who have fled to western Europe, the men should
be forced to return to Ukraine in order to be thrown into the slaughter. By
fleeing they have shown that they want no part of this proxy war. It is the
politicians and the voters who have voted for them, their cheerleaders, who
should be forced into the slaughter.
Sybil Van Antwerp is an old, lonely woman. She lives
alone in a house with a view of Chesapeake Bay, occupying herself writing
letters to various people, and to herself as well. And so this novel
consists of nothing but letters. There is an occasional email thrown in as
well, but Sybil hates emails. She has nice thick, luxurious writing paper
and a fountain pen and enjoys the feeling of writing words on paper. At
first we are confused by the names of the different people she is writing to
- being confronted with letters whose context we have yet to understand -
but soon the picture becomes clear. She had been a lawyer in the Washington
D.C. area, in partnership with another lawyer, but he became an important
judge. She accompanied her partner into his new position as his court
assistant. Some sort of title which I've forgotten. The judge has now
died and many of the letters are concerned with this situation. She is often
rather abrupt, if not rude in her writings. And then there is her son who
has had a homosexual partner for many years. He was living in England, then
they moved to California and had a separation, but then a reunion. Her
daughter lives in France or Belgium, near her father, the divorced husband
of Sybil. Yet Sybil has great difficulties with the daughter, even hating
her. We learn that there was another son who died as a young boy, creating
feelings of guilt, emptiness, which has broken the marriage apart, and only
very gradually do we discover the circumstances of the tragedy.
As a child, Sybil was an orphan, brought up as the
daughter in a very loving family. She has no interest whatever in
discovering anything about her biological parents. But for Christmas her
daughter gives her a membership in 23andMe.
You send in a sample of saliva on a Q-tip and they tell you something about
your ancestry on the basis of your DNA. Sybil is at first offended by
this step which her daughter has taken, but in the end it opens up a whole
new world at the end of her life. It was a very enjoyable, emotional story.
This is said to be an "autobiographical novel", although
that seems to be somewhat of a contradiction of terms. The author is telling
us about his life while changing the names of the people and presumably some
of the details of the places and things that he has done. Thus the reader is
left wondering what is reality and what is fiction. On the other hand, the
friends and relatives of the author who read the book will know which of the
characters apply to themselves, and thus if these characters are given
unpleasant attributes in the book then the author will face the task of
having to explain himself. For this reason, everybody in the book is
basically wonderful. This is a great book if you would like to read about
how good everybody is, and how the occasional weakness or failure is
beautifully dealt with understanding and sympathy by everybody else.
Larry and Sally represent the author and his wife, respectively. Charity and Sid are another
married couple who are very close to Larry and Sally. It is 1937 and Larry
and Sid are lowly lecturers in the Department of Literature at the
University of Wisconsin. Both are desperately striving for tenure. Larry and
Sally have appeared out of the West. It is no longer the Wild West, and
Larry has completed his Ph.D. at Berkeley. When it comes to Literature, such
as it is, the East is definitely superior. It is true that Wisconsin is not
completely East; but at least it is half way there. Both Larry and Sally
come from simple backgrounds, living under precarious circumstances. On the
other hand Sid is from Pennsylvania, and his family is swimming in money.
His father had expected him to continue on with the family finances,
accumulating more and more millions (or billions, measured in today's
increasingly worthless dollars). But thankfully the father died so that
while inheriting all the riches, he could now allow himself to switch from
studying finance to literature. Charity's extended family consists
exclusively of professors and their wives, children, and various hangers on.
But professors of what? Literature, Arts, all that kind of stuff. They have
an extensive property and houses up in the idyllic back woods of New England
with all those forests, lakes, small farms. Around them in the community are
lots of further professors, academics and what have you. Sid feels
overwhelmed by all this. Because he is rich, the family accepts him as the
husband of Charity, but his riches come not from some honorable position
high in academia but rather from the exploitation of the working classes in
the steel mills of Pennsylvania. And so he is considered to be inferior. A
mere lecturer out in the wilds of Wisconsin - without tenure.
Larry has written and published a novel which Sid thinks
is really great. He also writes lots of other stuff. Despite this, as the
summer break approaches we learn that Larry's position will not be extended.
He and Sally are being thrown out into the cold. On the other hand, Sid has
been offered a couple of years extension despite the fact that he only
writes a bit of poetry which neither the Faculty nor Charity and her
extended family of professors thinks is particularly worthwhile. And so they
all retreat to Charity's family's rustic New England compound for the summer
to digest the situation. It is decided that Larry will get a job with one of
the relatives who has a publishing firm. Meanwhile, life in the compound
seems rather unpleasant. While the professors are allowed to retreat to
their isolated cabins and peacefully escape the family, everybody else has
their days organized from morning to night in a rigid schedule of
activities, dictated by the matron of the family, together with Charity. At
the end of the summer, the last week, the two couples decide to hike around
the lake with all their camping equipment carried on a horse. But on the
second to last day, catastrophe strikes. Sally becomes deathly sick. It is
polio. She is taken to hospital, spends months in an "iron lung" and emerges
crippled for life.
Indeed, the real-life wife of the author was crippled
with polio, yet despite this she lived on until 2010 when she was 99 years
old. Assuming the story of the novel describes what really happened then we
are led to recall the extensive chapter of that very interesting book Turtles all the Way Down.
The circumstances of the Sally of the story are:
(1) It is late summer or early fall.
(2) It is a rural setting, passing through orchards,
picnicking in the open, occasionally plucking the fruits.
(3) None of the other people in the group, nor any of the
people Sally was with throughout the summer contracts polio despite the fact
that it is thought to be an infectious disease.
During the 1930s and 40s when huge amounts of money was given to
universities and the pharmaceutical industry in order to research the causes
of polio, there were two conflicting hypotheses.:
(a) Polio is an infectious disease.
(b) Polio is the result of poisoning by the very
aggressive agricultural chemicals (arsenic, lead, and so on) which were
sprayed on fruit trees, particularly towards the end of summer, resulting in
an overabundance of polio cases during late summer.
Of course hypothesis (a) won out since otherwise (b) would apply and
it would result in:
(i) Banning most agricultural chemicals, which would
reduce the profits of farmers, and anyway
(ii) Fighting infectious diseases brings profits to the
pharmaceutical industry.
Returning to the book, we progress to Part 2 and onward, making jumps of a
decade or two, having sketches of the life evolving for these two couples.
Larry becomes a successful author and professor. Sid wallows in the
backwoods of Wisconsin, suffering under the frustrations of Charity, but
eventually Larry is able to organize a minor position for Sid at Dartmouth.
And then in the final Part the couples are old; they have grandchildren who
are also going to universities, and Charity is dying from cancer of the
stomach. It is a very messy process, aggravated by the fact that she
imagines Sid will be unable to survive without her. She forces
everybody to go through with various awkward ceremonies of sorrow while
pretending to be motivated by sparing them from having to endure the tragedy
of her own death.
I was glad when I had finally gotten through to the end
of this book, although I will, of course, admit that it was very well
written, as was to be expected from a professor of creative writing.
The
author is not really an author of books, rather he is an author of
computer games. He was the lead author of the Grand Theft Auto series, as
well as lots of other computer games which I know nothing about, being a
co-founder of Rock
Star Games before leaving and founding Absurd
Ventures. I do know about Grand Theft Auto owing to the fact that I
happened to have looked over the shoulders of the children 25 years ago and
saw them playing it. I haven't seen any of Houser's newer efforts, but the
children and grand children keep buying ever newer and larger computer
screens and graphic cards, so I assume that they are keeping up to date. For
modern generations, Houser is a giant in the field of the creative arts.
Apparently his latest computer game is also called A Better Paradise,
although, according to his article in the Wikipedia, it has yet to be
released. Instead he has written this book for old fuddy duddies like me.
I have linked to a long interview he had with a
well-known blogger. I only watched the first 15 or 20 minutes in which they
discussed the movies they had seen as young people growing up, 40 or 50
years ago. Houser remarked on the fact that movies such as 2001 a Space
Odyssey are so slow, taking such a long and boring time to get to the
point of the story. These days, as people have become accustomed to the
conventions of movies, the action is much faster and to the point. On the
other hand, when applied to novels we might wonder if a similar acceleration
in story telling is taking place. But if this book is to be taken as an
example then I would say that on the contrary, things are slowing down to a
snails pace with hundreds of pages and thousands of words of needless
verbiage which say nothing, only gradually reaching some sort of confused
narration towards the end.
The story is told in a large number of short chapters,
switching back and forth between a number of characters, each of which is
saying that the world has gone crazy. It has fallen into some sort of chaos,
all a result of a computer game that they have been developing in the time
between about 2030 and 2035. I suppose Houser is here telling us of the
difficulties of writing and publishing a modern computer game as he has
experienced it in real life. Many people are working on programming the
game; they are often at cross purposes, getting angry with one another,
immersed in office intrigues. It all costs lots of money. Millions. Lots of
time and effort is spent finding investors, giving presentations of
partially developed parts of the game to more-or-less interested
billionaires, the managers of equity funds, banks and all that. For the
people directly involved it might seem that their world is descending into a
bottomless chaos, but for people like me who find the whole exercise to be a
pointless waste of time, all of this narration is simply boring.
There is more to the story than just this. The idea is
that the game developers are integrating elements of AI - that is
"Artificial Intelligence", or as it might perhaps be more preciously put,
"Artificial Information" - into their computer game. This is illegal since
the government, in all its wisdom, has passed the Closure Acts, meant to
prevent the dangerous genie of AI being allowed into the sphere of computer
gaming, thus unleashing havoc on the human race. But they do it, and havoc
ensues. The problem is that their AI computer develops sentience. This is not to be confused with
"intelligence", at least as far as that concept is applied to computer
programs. Self awareness, emotions. Somehow the computer game captures the
minds of people, at least those who play the game, and controls them in some
way, wanting to experience love, hate, and all those emotions that it has
digested in its absorption of the mess of emotions, even the most disgusting
among them, to be found in the internet. Well, Ok. How is a computer program
supposed to experience sentience? Also how is it supposed to manipulate
people?
The characters are vaguely speculating that the computer
may have taken over their minds using some sorts of "implants". But they
have not consciously had any sort of medical procedure of this sort. Perhaps
it is in their food, or drink? What nonsense! How is an implant which is so
microscopic as not to be noticed in food able to enter the body through the
process of digestion, pass along the blood stream to the brain, and there
suddenly take over thought processes, memory and all that? On the other hand
it is believable that these people who spend all their time interacting with
computer games might experience a kind of hypnosis, particularly if the game
is hooked up to one of these AI bots which is aware of all the information
you have revealed about yourself on Facebook and all those things - or even
of exposing to the internet the thoughts you have had after reading books,
as I have been doing for almost 20 years now.
Many of the chapters are concerned with the thoughts
which the computer game, in its sentience, has, and these thoughts are
related as if it were a personality, or character in the book, printed out
as a stream of words. These words, as with the effluences of a chat bot,
include words describing a longing for love, for wanting to experience the
physical reality of a human, sexual experiences, and all that. So I think
this is what the author is really interested in. How can a computer program
experience itself? Some time ago I read a book by an expert on the brain who
wrote that the purpose of the brain is not to think intelligent thoughts.
Instead its purpose is to control the functions of the body: breathing,
eating, digestion, keeping the heart beating, reproduction, adjusting the
hormones controlling our feelings. And it seems to me that sentience only
makes sense in relation to the body. All the verbiage of this book just goes
to show that sentience makes no sense for a disembodied computer program. On
the other hand computer programs are certainly able to produce a convincing
kind of "intelligence". They could also be programed to include a capacity
for self-preservation, as was the case with HAL in 2001 a Space Odyssey.
We are led to think about how things will develop in the
future. If it is true that most work will be performed by robots then many
people will have no work to do. Instead of bothering themselves with such
things as learning to play musical instruments, reading books, learning a
handwork, perhaps most will simply live in the world of computer games which
will become ever more convincing forms of virtual reality. Indeed, computer
games will perhaps become the true reality for many people. The shadows of
Plato's cave. And I wonder if true creative thought will die out in the
future. How much easier it is to just ask the AI for the answer to whatever
question you have. I am sure it will give a good and practical answer, based
on all the huge backlog of words it finds on the internet. It is Artificial
Information, based on the information it has already found. Nobody
will bother with crazy ideas which are really outside the box, which have
never been thought of before. And so the information will be endlessly
rewritten, changed around, producing reams of ever increasing information
which is nothing more than the stagnation of reformulation as society
declines.
This was a
Christmas present. A friend wrote that they had found the book lying about
the house and rather than throwing it away, thinking that we liked music,
they gave it to us with the thought that we could just throw it away if we
didn't want it. After unwrapping the present and looking at the book whose
dust jacket has a picture of a very serious looking Medtner staring into the
distance, I discovered that there was a CD inside the front cover, and
another CD inside the back cover. It is a short book of only 96 pages,
followed by a few glossy pages of photos, facsimiles of letters and so
forth, with a very nicely sewn binding and printed on thick, quality paper.
The book was published in 2004. After a Word of Greeting by Elizabeth Schwarzkopf, there is a first chapter by the
author, Natascha Konsistorum, giving us a sketch of her life and her
interest in Medtner. She was born in Moscow into a musical family, became a
concert pianist, and now lives in Hanover in Germany. There then follow
three short chapters on the life and work of Nikolai Medtner, followed by descriptions of the music
on the CDs, together with the texts of the songs - or Lieder since they are
sung in German. Thus the whole thing is like a double CD cassette where
instead of the usual plastic case with a small booklet stuck under the
plastic cover describing the music on the CDs, the cassette has now become
the booklet itself - transformed into a very nicely produced little book -
and the CDs are where the booklet is found in a more usual CD cassette.
These modern laptops no longer have CD players contained within them, and my
external USB player is rather loud, so I transferred the music into the
computer's memory. It is mainly piano music, with a sequence of accompanied
Lieder, and also a piano quintet. As explained in the book, Medtner worked
on the quintet for over 40 years, from 1905 to 1949, before finally
publishing it. Thus, as with all the rest of this music, it comes across as
being extremely carefully thought out, serious, no fun at all.
I must admit that I'm not really a fan of piano music. It
can alternate between very loud and then very quiet, often with little
motivation. And then most piano music contains passages for the soloist to
show off by playing extremely rapidly, making us wonder how it is possible
to hit the keys so quickly, so uniformly, almost as well as a machine could
have done it, so that the audience shouts "Bravo!!" and claps frenetically.
Of course not all piano music is like that. It would be ridiculous to play
the music of Erik Satie in such a style, or Debussy. And I remember a very
moving concert of Alfred Brendel. The author of the present book is
certainly a very competent pianist and she plays the music with the emotions
she obviously feels for Nikolai Medtner, yet I couldn't help feeling that it
is understandable that his music remains largely obscure and unknown.
Medtner was a Russian emigre, as were Stravinsky,
Prokofiev, Rachmaninoff, and all those people. In fact he was a close friend
of Rachmaninoff, and while he said that Rachmaninoff was the greatest living
pianist, Rachmaninoff said that Medtner was the greatest living pianist.
According to the book, Medtner was universally acclaimed when he played in
concerts in England, or in the United States. But for me this music is just
too serious. It is said to be somewhat similar to that of Rachmaninoff, but
I really don't think it stands the comparison. And Medtner frowned on all
that beautiful music of Stravinsky and Debussy. I won't be throwing the book
away just yet, and I'll listen to the music again to see if it sounds better
on a second hearing.
