This year (2025)
Previous years: 2025; 2024;
2023; 2022;
2021; 2020;
2019; 2018;
2017; 2016;
2015; 2014;
2013; 2012;
2011; 2010;
2009; 2008;
2007; 2006;
2005
Kiran Desai:
The
Loneliness of Sonia and Sonny
Lisa Feldman Barrett:
How
Emotions are Made
Viviane Serfaty:
Flesh
and Blood
Ben Markovits:
The
Rest of our Lives
Amity Gaige:
Heart
Wood
Mark Macrossan:
The
Volcanologist
Solvej Balle:
On
the Calculation of Volume
Anita Desai:
In
Custody
John Banville:
Venetian
Vespers
Edith Wharton:
The
Custom of the Country
Abdulrazak Gurnah:
Theft
Liane Moriarty:
What
Alice Forgot
The Husband's Secret
Jane Bowles:
Two
Serious Ladies
Jonas Hassen Khemiri:
The
Sisters
W.H. Hudson:
A
Crystal Age
Green Mansions: A Romance of the Tropical Forest
Kathrine Mansfield:
The
Garden Party, and Other Stories
Marius Gabriel:
The
German Daughter
Frans de Waal:
Our
Inner Ape
Sue Hincenbergs:
The
Retirement Plan
Michael Joseph Gross:
Stronger
Mick Herron:
Reconstruction
Elizabeth Dunleavy:
No
Way Home
Malcolm Alexander:
Close
to Where the Heart Gives Out
Clarence Darrow:
The
Story of My Life
Yáng Shuāng-zǐ:
Taiwan
Travelogue
Kate Morton:
Lake
House
Benjamin Myers:
Rare
Singles
Hernan Diaz:
Trust
Guy Spier:
The
Education of a Value Investor
Caro Claire Burke:
Yesteryear
Laura Shepherd-Robinson:
The
Art of a Lie
Henry De Vere Stacpoole:
The
Blue Lagoon Trilogy
Alice Mabel Bacon:
In
the Land of the Gods
M. L. Stedman:
The
Light Between Oceans
Charles Christian Young:
Abused
Russia
Holman Day:
Blow
the Man Down
This was a Christmas present, a real book about 1 1/2
inches thick. But I secretly downloaded the ebook version from amazon since
that is so much easier to read. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and
I had been vaguely thinking of reading it for the last few months. Kiran Desai is not someone who publishes copious
numbers of books. It is almost 20 years between The Inheritance of Loss and the present book.
Again it is very much concerned with India, but at the beginning both Sonia
and Sonny are living in the United States. She is a student of literature in
a New England college, feeling lonely, by chance meeting an older man who is
privately rich, an artist, having a name suggesting degenerate European
sophistication: Illan de Toorjen Foss. She immediately climbs into bed with
him in his country house amid the winter snow. He seems to us to be an
unpleasant old man, leaving the toilet dirty, not bothering to brush his
teeth, expecting Sonia to clean things up between all the sex. He refuses to
show her his paintings, but at least he introduces her to a woman who runs
art galleries in New York, and who gives her temporary employment at a newly
opened gallery, thus perhaps opening the way for her to obtain a coveted
"green card" and the dream of American citizenship. She had thought that
Illan might marry her, but suddenly his wife turns up to boot her out, to
free the air for the next nubile, young sex companion to replace Sonia. She
must quickly clear her things away, but in the process she forgets to take
the magic amulet of the Himalayas - named Badal Baba - which was given to
her grandfather, a German who escaped to live in the mountains of India all
those years ago. And so she returns to India and her family, chastised, at
loose ends.
Sonny is living in New York, unaware of Sonia, working
the night shift for the AP - the Associated Press - receiving stories that
are coming in, editing them and passing them along to all the newspapers
which subscribe to the AP. Sunny's girlfriend is Ulla, a very American girl,
full of sex and self confidence. A letter arrives advising Sonny that he
might like to meet Sonia, whose grandfather is a friend of the grandfather
of Sonny, proposing to relieve her solitude and, in a traditional Indian
fashion, arranging their possible marriage. Sonny and Ulla laugh about it,
discarding the old-fashioned letter. Yet an old friend of Sonny who is
studying medicine in some obscure American university, feeling lonely, has
asked his parents back in India to find a bride for him. So Sonny
accompanies him on a trip back to India in order to help the friend choose
from the various possibilities his parents have found. Certainly neither
Sonia nor Sonny have told their families about their love lives in far-off
America.
They get to know one another and then they travel
separately to Goa where Sonny's friend and new wife are having their
honeymoon. And so Sonia and Sonny come together and also have a beautiful
honeymoon. They aren't married; Sonny must return to New York and his job
and his dream of a green card; Sonia is refused a visa to the U.S. They
agree to meet for a weekend in Venice. Lots of traveling with little money.
The desperation of love. When reading something like this, becoming one with
the characters, I had to put the book down from time to time to gain a
little distance from all the emotions. By chance they go to an obscure art
gallery and it has an exhibition of the art of Illan de Toorjen Foss. There
are erotic paintings of Sonia and esoteric elements connected with Badal
Baba, the magic amulet which she had mistakenly left with Illan and his
wife. Sonny returns angrily to New York. Sonia to her family in India.
The story continuous on, becoming ever stranger. The
amulet has given Illan success but its absence brings Sonia and her family,
and that of Sonny as well, only disappointments, disasters. Sonny sets off
on a quest to regain the amulet, and Sonia is writing a book about a
beautiful young Indian woman who falls in love with a strange artist. At the
very end of the book, in the Acknowledgements, after thanking a few people
(and especially her mother, Anita Desai - What does she think about this
book of her daughter? - ) and acknowledging various institutions which have
supported her, she finishes with the sentence: "And to maestro Francesco
Clemente for the precious gift of Badal Baba"...
- Has she been writing about herself? -
Naturally I quickly looked up the Wikipedia page of Francesco Clemente. A portrait photograph of the
artist made in 2011 when he was only 59 shows an aging man, not in the best
of health. There is an ugly picture of a fat naked woman fingering herself
which he painted in 1981, followed by a photograph of himself in 1991, where
he appears to be a normal, healthy person. Looking for images associated
with the artist we find lots of surrealist art, tending to the primitive. I
see that Kiran Desai has coauthored a book about the artist. But we are left
to speculate about the meaning of his "precious gift of Badal Baba" to the
author.
I would have said that this was a totally wonderful book
if it had ended one or two hundred pages before it did. It would have been
much better than Flesh, which did actually win the prize. What is it
to be a young Indian, sent at great expense to the United States to
university with the expectation of becoming a successful person, a holder of
a green card and perhaps a naturalized American? Clicking about the internet
I have often found essays written by Americans who revile the Indians.
Dreadful things are written about the wife of the Vice President. Whatever
one might say about him, his wife is surely a very admirable person, and I
won't even think of comparing her to the wife of the President.
Interestingly, a day or two ago there was a statistic of
the median incomes of the various nationalities living in Germany. That is
to say normal people doing proper work, not people with inherited riches or
the oligarchs of the arms industries and that sort of thing. The Indians in
Germany doing honest work have the highest median incomes of all
nationalities, followed close behind by U.S. Americans, Austrians, UK and
Irish, Chinese, Swiss, and down the list with the median incomes of Germans
well below, but well above most other nationalities. (Australians were not
on the list.) Of course these Indians are mainly in the MINT professions.
Unlike Sonia and Sonny, their success was achieved without the aid of
magical Himalayan amulets. Also not on the list were the members of those
Arabian clans of Berlin whose only apparent income is the unemployment
support of the government, despite the expensive, top model cars they drive
and the comfortable houses they occupy, leading to a state of perplexity in
the rest of the population. Perhaps their successes could be attributed to
amulets distributed by some modern-day Aladdin with a magic lamp.
It was only after I had finished reading this book
that I realized that I had read another
book by the same author a couple of years ago, and thus there is much
overlap between the two. As the title tells us, this one is more concerned
with her theories of emotions. To begin she tells us that as a graduate
student she had been unable to replicate a well-known experiment. The
hypothesis was that, on the one hand (a) people feel depressed when
they fail to live up to their own standards, and on the other hand (b) they
feel anxious when they fail to live up to the standards of other
people. Many psychologists had confirmed this hypothesis using their
"experiments", while her attempts to confirm the hypothesis using her
"experiments" had failed.
What is an "experiment" in psychology? I suppose the
simplest example would be a multiple-choice test which random people are
asked to fill out. More elaborate examples would involve random people
coming into an official looking "laboratory" in an established, very
official university, and being subjected to some sort of strange or awkward
situation. In the case at hand, the responses of the participants would be
estimated by deciding whether the word "depression" or instead the word
"anxiety" best described the result. But how can that be decided? For
example, how can you tell if a person is "angry"? The book contains a
picture of just the face of a woman who seems to be shouting or screaming,
perhaps in pain, or terror. What unspeakably horrible things are being done
to her? Then we are asked to turn to the appendix C of the book where the
whole picture in its real context is shown. It is Venus Williams at the
moment she has beaten her sister at the finals of the 2008 U.S. Open tennis
tournament, screaming in joyful celebration.
This leads to a discussion of the fact that different
people, in different situations, exhibit different symptoms when feeling the
same emotion. For example with "fear" some people might distort their faces,
some may try to run away, some may stoically confront their fear in silence,
some may shout. There is no common, measurable symptom. The blood pressure
might rise or fall; facial expression might change; using fMRI, we find no specific area of the brain uniquely
associated with "fear", or with any other given emotion. And therefore, in
the end, the experimental psychologist must resort to simply asking the test
subject what their emotion is. In the case at hand, whether or not he or she
feels "depressed" or "anxious", or perhaps both of these emotions
simultaneously, or neither of them. And then maybe some people will ask what
is meant in this particular experimental situation by the words "depressed"
or "anxious"? How are they to be defined in this particular laboratory
situation in this impressive university?
The word "emotion" is defined as being something other
than the basic functions and responses of the body. Hunger is not an
emotion. Nor is the sort of acute pain caused by some physical injury. When
a newborn baby cries or smiles, according to Barrett's definition, this is
not the expression of emotion. Instead emotions are learned phenomena. The
baby, the child, accumulates a collection of situations it has observed, and
it creates groups of possible situations for which such emotions as "anger",
"jealousy", "depression", "anxiety", and so on might apply. These ideas are
supported by experiments she has performed in her laboratory. She also finds
that having words to express these groups of feelings aids in the creation
of emotion concepts - the development of "emotional intelligence". But then
later on in a chapter concerned with the question of whether or not animals
have emotions, she reduces things to the question of whether or not specific
kinds of animals recognize words. Perhaps some of the great apes can
recognize a few words, and therefore she grants them some sorts of primitive
emotions. Of course anybody - except Lisa Feldman Barrett - who has had
anything to do with dogs knows that they are the most emotional creatures of
all, far exceeding the emotions of humans. Yet Barrett seems to assert that
since they have no words, it follows that they have no emotions!
There is a chapter or two repeating what had been in the
previous book about the functioning of the brain. We are told that it is
constantly trying to predict what is happening, not only in the outside
world but within the body as well. It is constantly making models of the
world, and then comparing them to the inputs coming into the brain, trying
to optimize the conditions for life, adjusting the levels of hormones, the
rate of heartbeat and all that, but also optimizing social interactions as
best it can.
A chapter is concerned with Emotion and the Law. She
explains how false it is to say that a criminal act was committed in a
moment of emotional madness - the "reptilian brain" - before the reasoning,
higher brain was able to take over and bring things under control. Yet much
of criminal justice is based on this disproven theory of the mind. And then
the severity of sentencing is determined by judgements on the emotions of a
prisoner. Has he or she showed remorse? guilt? But as we have seen, there is
no way to determine these things objectively. How much is true, how much is
play acting? And on a deeper level, what is remorse, really? Instances are
given of how unfairly women are dealt with in court in comparison with men,
or men in comparison with women. Do people exhibit the emotions society
expects of them in given situations?
And finally she repeats the sensible advice she had
explained in the previous book. To have a healthy mind and healthy emotions
you can start by having enough good sleep, exercise out in the open air, and
good food - not all that processed sugary junk.
The author
is an Associate Professor at Université Paris-Est Marne la Vallée, doing
research about the internet. It seems that she writes these Thomas Sturm
books for enjoyment. A bit of lightweight fun. A year or two ago I read her
first two Thomas Sturm books, and now I see that she has written another.
Captain Thomas Sturm is a policeman in the town of Garches, a prosperous suburb west of Paris. A
policewoman, her husband and her son, as well as the dog, are blown up in a
violent explosion in a parking lot in a forest near Garches. It was a car
bomb. And so we follow the investigation, taking Sturm to the instep of the
boot of Italy and the notorious 'Ndrangheta. He even got Inspector
Laura Tonacci onto the case, the beautiful, young Italian
policewoman with whom he had spent a wonderful night of erotic explorations
in his hotel room during his previous investigation. But this time he didn't
even bother to meet her in person. Also his relationship with his colleague
Lieutenant Helen Sennevieres, with whom he had had a torrid hour on the back
seat of her Volvo station wagon during a previous investigation, remained
chaste in the present affair. Indeed, at least for the present story, he has
been true to his real love, Alice Delisle. So that's nice, isn't it?
This one was also shortlisted for the Booker Prize,
and again it was much better than the winner - which just goes to show that
we should not place too much importance on those committees which choose the
winners of prizes, especially those of the Nobel variety. It is concerned
with a not-so-perfect American family. Tom comes from a lower middle class
Catholic family while Amy's family is relatively wealthy and Jewish. The son
Michael is a teenager and the daughter Miri is just 6. Tom had been studying
literature at university but changed to law in order to have a profession
which gives financial security. Amy has assumed the role of housewife. She
is a beautiful woman and is much involved with the synagogue where she
commences an affair with one of its more active members. This becomes known
and she confesses everything, but Tom secretly resolves to leave the family
when Miri begins university, 12 years in the future.
It is now 12 years later. Tom is professor of law at one
of those prestigious New England universities. He is 55. Michael is in Los
Angeles while Miri is about to be driven to a college in Pennsylvania where
she is to begin studying. Amy is still a very attractive woman, still very
much in love with Tom. She doesn't really get along well with her daughter
who is very casual, unconcerned with her appearance. And so, in the end, Tom
heads off alone with Miri, taking a day to drive there and help Miri get
settled, then, supposedly, to come back the next day. But instead of doing
that he heads off, westward. The story becomes a road trip. He stays with
his brother for a day or two in the Midwest; then with the old girlfriend he
had been with for a couple of years, years ago in college, at her house in
Las Vegas; finally with Michael in Southern California, on the coast of the
Pacific. But the book is really concerned with more than just this little
family drama.
A road story, or road movie, is concerned with the
country you are going through. The people, the scenes. What is it like? Some
sort of statement about the essential reality of the place. To begin with
Tom has been told by the Dean of the Faculty that he should take a semester
off from teaching. He has fallen into disfavor. His crime was to neglect, or
even refuse to use the currently acceptable pronouns when addressing the
students. He is a tall man, and in his youth had played basketball even
semi-professionally. (The author played professional basketball in Germany,
such as it is here.) Through his contacts with old friends in professional
basketball he has signed his name to a legal opinion defending someone who
said something or other which was not in line with the accepted level of
political correctness. And then a friend asks him to legally represent an
active professional basketball player, a person of predominantly European
ancestry - a "white" person - who would like to pursue class action
litigation against the National Basketball Association for discriminating
against white people in favor of "black" people - those with predominantly
African ancestry. He says that of the top college players looking to be
recruited into the NBA, 80% are white while in the NBA only 20% of the
players are white, and those are predominantly European players, not
Americans.
I have no idea if these numbers are correct. ChatGTP
tells me that in the 2022-23 season, 70.4% of NBA players were black and
17.5% were white, with the remainder being Latino, Asian, Multiracial/Other,
whatever that means. We are further told that only around 20-27% of NCAA
Division 1 male basketball players - that is, the top college players - are
white, while 50-60% or more are black. Therefore this contradicts the
premise of the proposed class action law suit. Thankfully, Tom refuses to
represent the player. Nevertheless, one way or another, Tom has very
sensibly decided to quit his professorship and be done with it, perhaps
driving across America and writing a book about the various pick-up
basketball scenes he encounters.
#####
We contrast the system of professional sports in America
with that in other countries. The system in the United States is that there
are a fixed number of professional teams in the various cities around the
country. Each team is a purely commercial operation, and the owners do not
want to lose their money. Therefore there is no question that they might
lose, in the sense of dropping down to lower leagues or falling out of the
professional circus entirely. In fact, finishing at the bottom of the league
is an advantage in that the worst teams have the first picks of the best
players coming out of college. The champions are left with what is left
after all the other teams have had their choices. I find it difficult to
understand that, given this system, the fans keep following their teams, and
that the teams have much of a motivation for success. It is just show
business. The show must go on and the fans must be kept entertained and
spending money. In fact all of the players earn millions, I suspect far more
than almost all Hollywood actors, just excepting the very few at the top.
Contrast this with the situation in real football, which is called soccer in
the United States. The bottom two or three clubs in each league drop down,
and in the case of continuing failure they disappear into amateur obscurity.
The top two or three advance up to the next higher league. There is
certainly no question that the losers get good players. The top clubs: Real
Madrid, Paris St. Germain, and so on, spend hundreds of millions - getting
towards billions - on transfers - for the top stars. The question of whether
or not they come from Africa or Europe or Asia or even the United States
plays no role at all. The only question is whether the team is winning. A
few lost games and the trainer is out and the search for the next big player
and the hundreds of millions needed to get him under contract begins. At
least in Germany, almost all of the top clubs are true clubs with the many
thousands of members paying their dues and buying their season tickets.
#####
Returning to the story... it has a similarity to Richard
Ford's Be Mine, but Tom
has a much more pleasant character than the dreadful Frank Bascombe. Not to
mention the rude, primitive blowhard who believes he is presently running
the country.
The Appalachian trail. The northern part up in Maine. A
woman has gone missing. Is she lost, murdered, kidnapped? Beverly Miller -
Lt. Bev - is the forest ranger responsible for the search. She is proud of
being one of the first women rangers, and as the story progresses she tells
us about her life. Eventually the breakthrough comes from an old woman
confined to a wheelchair in a luxurious old people's home, chatting with
somebody on her mobile telephone. This is one of those books in which
everybody is very nice, and even the ones we had at first suspected to not
be very nice turn out to be so. Of course even a woman writing a book like
this filled with loving concern and goodness does allow a sliver of darkness
to enter the picture. We are told that the woman went missing near Sugarloaf Mountain, with the nearby SERE facility of the US military. The view in google
maps is here, and by zooming out a little you can see where
the Appalachian trail passes close by. SERE stands for Survival, Evasion,
Resistance and Escape. The idea is that if an American soldier, in the
process of terrorizing people in some distant part of the world, becomes
captured and imprisoned, then he or she is supposed to execute the four
functions represented by the letters SERE in order to be able to return to
apple pie America. Could it be that one of the SERE participants or
instructors had anything to do with the disappearance of the woman? Oh well.
It was an amusing story.
A couple of years ago the brother of a good friend of
ours had a go at the Appalachian trail, together with his partner who he
had, unfortunately, not married. They began in early spring at the starting
point in Georgia and progressed northwards, sending messages with pictures,
keeping track of things. They sent a view from the top of a mountain and
then in the valley decided to treat themselves to a comfortable night
sleeping in a bed in a hotel, or motel. He did not wake up. Not being
married, his partner was excluded from the inheritance. I don't know how
much of a problem this was for her. Somehow this little tragedy of a man,
still in middle age, and his partner seems to me to be much deeper than the
imagined tragedies, even if they were real, in this book.
The author is an Australian who has been a barrister, an
actor, and certainly a widely traveled person before becoming a writer. This
is a short book telling a fast-moving story, a downfall, or perhaps an
enlightenment. John Penne, certainly not his real name, is a British
intelligence officer. He is at the Geneva railway station, tasked with
observing if Dala Gasnier, also not her real name, a young woman presumably
with French intelligence, will board a high speed train to Paris. If so, he
is to discretely follow her, informing his superiors who are to arrest her.
She was involved in the violent death of another agent in the French Alps.
She eludes him. He follows, to Paris, Bangkok, and eventually New Caledonia
and Vanuatu where he makes contact, not arresting or betraying her, but
falling in love. And so the story continues. I couldn't put the book down,
finishing within a day.
Tara Selter lives with her husband, Thomas, in a
small town in the north of France. They have an internet business selling
antiquarian books, sending things through the mail to their customers. Tara
occasionally travels to auctions and to other book shops in order to acquire
the books. She has just been in the south of France and is now returning,
spending a day or two in Paris, staying in a hotel, visiting friends who
have a real antiquarian bookshop and one or two titles she has been seeking.
She arrives late on the evening of the 17th of November, stays overnight
into the 18th and goes about her business for the day, returning to the
hotel, planning to journey on home the next day, the 19th. But upon waking
up she finds that it is not the 19th. She is in some sort of time-warp. The
18th has come again and although she has gone on to the next day, the world
and everybody in it are back in the 18th. And the next day is the same. For
Tara it is as if it November the 18th repeats itself endlessly, while for
the rest of the world time apparently goes on as ever, on into the 19th and
beyond, leaving Tara behind.
After struggling with this strange situation, spending a
couple of days in a Paris which keeps recycling back to the 18th, Tara
decides to return home, arriving late in the evening. Thomas is astonished
that she has come a day earlier, as it was planned that she would return on
the 19th. She explains all about the situation; they go to bed and the next
morning they wake up. Thomas is shocked to find that she is next to him in
bed despite the fact that it is only the morning of the 18th. She must again
explain the whole story. That evening they again go to bed and the next
morning they wake up and Thomas is again astonished to find that Tara his
here although it is only the morning of the 18th. And so on. Eventually she
tires of explaining the whole thing every morning again and again. She
decides to live in the spare room which, luckily, Thomas never enters on the
18th. The whole thing has interesting consequences. For example she can
spend all the money she wants, since the next day - for her - is always
reset for the rest of the world, including the balance in her bank account,
to what it was at the beginning of the 18th of November. She decides to move
in to a house in the neighborhood whose inhabitants are away, on vacation.
She can do whatever she wants with the house since it will always be again
reset to its state at the beginning of the 18th. And so on.
The novelty of this device soon wore off and the book
came to an end without any particular resolution. Will Tara break out of
this time-warp, or whatever it is? Will she go mad? I am astonished that the
book has received such overwhelming praise. It seems that the author has
gone on to write a whole series of these books, as if they themselves are in
a time-warp. The next book is apparently concerned with the idea that Tara
finds it depressing to always be in the 18th of November in a rainy day in
the north of France. Thus as a year - for her - goes on, she travels to the
south for what for her should be summer and experiences warm, sunny days.
After all, in the southern hemisphere the 18th of November is the beginning
of summer. Then she might travel to northern Sweden in order to experience
the feeling of winter as is was on that particular 18th of November. But we
needn't bother with all those further books in the series.
Maybe the story could be thought of as an allegory on
living alone, as so many people do these days. Each day is practically the
same. Life for the lonely becomes a meaningless sequence of similar days.
And then, in some ways the condition of anterograde amnesia is the opposite of this.
A sad, depressing story. In an interview the author tells us that this is a story of what men are
like, or at least it is a story of the doings of men. Deven is a meek,
somewhat simple-minded teacher of the Hindi language in a college in a town
a few hours north of Delhi. He hardly earns enough to feed his family: his
wife who despises him for his poverty and his small son. But Deven is really
an Urdu speaker. We are told that Urdu is a useless language which nobody
speaks anymore. The college does have a department of Urdu, but there is
just one teacher and practically zero students.
Of course I know almost nothing about the languages of
the Indian subcontinent. The Wikipedia tells us that Hindi is the lingua franca for most of
northern India. But we also learn that Urdu is the national language of Pakistan, and it is
widely spoken in southern India. In fact Urdu is the 10th most widely spoken
language in the world. Thus this attitude of Deven's college can perhaps be
understood in terms of the conflict between Hinduism and Mohammedanism. As I
understand it, the former basically speaks Hindi while the later Urdu. And
after the dreadfully violent partition of India and Pakistan, the hatred of
the one group for the other remains. Thus Deven is a Moslem in the
predominantly Hindu regions around Delhi. It seems that Hindi and Urdu are
closely related in the same way as Ukrainian and Russian are closely related
languages. But it is not necessarily true that having closely related
languages leads invariably to hatred and bloody conflict. For example German
and Dutch are also closely related. And also German, Bavarian, and Swiss
German, while sharing the same vocabulary and being essentially identical in
written form, are mutually incomprehensible as spoken.
But to return to the story... An unpleasant friend of
Deven arrives, and we learn that he publishes a journal of Urdu in Delhi. He
proposes that Deven, who imagines himself to be a minor poet, interview Nur,
the famous Urdu poet who lives in Delhi, and who is Deven's hero, the one
figure who makes life worth living, in all its squalor and poverty. With
great trepidation he makes his way to the house of Nur. It is in a part of
the city of ill repute. Nur, that great figure of literary renown, is a
degenerate, fat old man, hardly capable of movement, spending his time
eating and drinking - rum - together with a hoard of hangers-on who are
themselves just there for the food and drink. Somehow Deven makes himself
known to the guru amid all the loud laughter and coarse shouting, and it
seems that this project of an interview and the recitation of earlier works
of the great Nur might be possible.
It is suggested that Deven should acquire a tape recorder
and tape a session with Nur. Of course in all his poverty he cannot buy such
a thing himself. His friend, the teacher of Urdu, convinces the college to
devote the entirety of its annual library funds to the project, giving Deven
barely enough to purchase a second hand recorder and the promise that a
nephew of the electrical store owner will act as technician and operate the
machine. Owing to the hatred of Nur's wives for each other it is necessary
to do the recordings in a neighboring house, a brothel. The sessions turn
out to be loud, chaotic orgies of food, drink and foul language, only very
occasionally interspersed with a few words from Nur, and over a week of this
there are one or two gems in which Nur recites a few lost poems. But the
"technician" nephew spends the time bored, sleeping, perhaps also partaking
in the general revelry and drink, so that all of that is lost - the tapes
are simply full of meaningless noise, chaos.
Deven returns to his village with its college where a few
students who are studying science - not useless languages - try to extract a
few useful snippets out of the chaos. For this they demand that Deven give
them top marks in the end of year exams. But even these snippets are
useless. And then the brothel which had been renting out the room and
providing the endless food and drink presents Deven with a huge bill and the
threat that if it is not immediately paid then those violent underworld
figures of Delhi will come and extract unimaginable retribution. The book
ends with Deven walking about hopelessly through the night.
I know that these Indian poets and philosophers imagine
themselves to float above the world in their dreams of perfect harmony. But
is it really such a great problem to push the buttons yourself on a tape
recorder? Since I am now an old man, I still remember those tape recorders.
They had three or four buttons. Play. Stop. Rewind. Perhaps also Fast
Forward and Fast Rewind. To record you pushed the red button, together with
the Play button. Is this totally beyond the capabilities of a sensitive
Indian literary intellectual? But I cannot imagine that Anita Desai
considered Deven to be a typical example of the Indian man. After all, her
husband had a software company, and so I am sure that he was capable of
operating a tape recorder despite the fact that he published Between Eternities, a book dealing with the mystical
realities of life, the universe and everything else.
It is the turn of the 19th to the 20th centuries,
the end of the Victorian era. The protagonist, Evelyn Dolman (a man), is an
obscure writer for the periodicals of London. He has recently married Laura
Rensselaer, the younger daughter of one of the richest men in America, a
billionaire who also has extensive properties and lands in England.
Understandably, Evelyn was careful of his valuable bride, demurely
respecting her chastity before the engagement. Yet on the evening of the
engagement they come passionately together to the bewilderment of Evelyn,
demonstrating that Laura was far from being the inexperienced virgin he had
taken her to be. After that, and on into the first weeks of marriage, Laura
coolly dismissed each of Evelyn's attempts to again become intimate. And
then for some reason Laura had become detached from her wealthy family. Was
there some sort of a scandal? Soon after the marriage, when out riding alone
with her father on one of their estates, there was a fatal accident, the
father falling from his horse. In the aftermath it was found that Laura had
been disinherited, all the immense millions going instead to her unmarried
and unpleasant older sister. In this situation, soon after the funeral,
Evelyn accompanies Laura to a winter honeymoon in a rundown ancient palace
on the Grand Canal in Venice.
We think of Venice as being elegant, refined, an
exclusive playground for the rich, full of deep history, art, dreams of a
perfect holiday. But is Venice really such a desirable place? A city
floating in the miasma of a swamp with polluted canals, mosquitoes. A place
of scandal, of rotting stones, a history filled with pain and destruction.
What has Evelyn got himself into in this story of coldly calculated
deception? There are no pleasant characters here to enjoy the warmth of
Banville's elegant prose.
This book was first published in 1913: the Gilded
Age, reflecting our even more extreme gilded age as it is being revealed and
covered up in the ongoing revelations of the Epstein files. Rather than dwelling too much on such
things, let us instead refer to the Wikipedia article for a description of
the plot of the book.
Undine Spragg is a young woman who wants and expects
everything. And that everything is concerned with her beauty. Everybody is
overwhelmed with her beauty. She spends all her time on fashionable dresses,
jewelry, going to the most expensive places in New York, Paris, to have
these things. Seeking out the most exclusive, fashionable people. Each of
the men she successively marries loves her above everything else, even going
into bankruptcy for her. Such a beautiful woman.
I did enjoy reading the book and Edith Wharton's writing.
But really, what is beauty? Is it something absolute? It is said that
clothes make the man - or the woman. Certainly exquisite clothing can
produce a dramatic effect, especially if coupled with a youthful, perfect,
symmetrical face and figure. For example, perhaps you could say that the
most beautiful young woman in the world - as an objective measure - is she
who has been chosen to be "Miss World", whoever she is. Looking at the pictures
of the recent winners of that contest, some seem to me to have very pleasant
faces, some are more ordinary. I imagine what the personality behind the
face might be. And the personality of Undine Spragg is dreadful. Selfish in
the extreme. Thoughtless. Perhaps some of those billionaires, these men of
our modern gilded age, would gladly marry one of these faces, not out of
love but in order to display it as an exquisite acquired article to be
admired by the rest of the world. But how, in particular, can Ralph, her
second husband, keep on loving Undine despite the ugliness of her person?
This made no sense to me.
Theft, by Abdulrazak Gurnah
Again, a beautifully written book by Gurnah. In
chapter after chapter, each of which at first seems to have little to do
with the others, the various characters are introduced. Only gradually do we
understand the connections, the more or less distant branches of family
relationships. It takes place in Zanzibar and Dar es Salaam, with a short
and unpleasant beginning on Pemba Island. After we are well into the book
there is an abrupt change when a young boy, Badar, is driven away from his
home by what we take to be his father, to be deposited in a strange house
where he is to be the lowly servant. Only the old father of this house is
dreadful, frowning in silence with hate-filled eyes. The others try to be as
nice to him as possible. We discover that Badar is related to them; his real
father had cheated the father of the house, stealing all the money, and so
the hatred of the father of the house for Badar's father is transferred to
him.
Badar had been taken from school at an early age. He is
left with little education. The others become professionals in the
corruption of the new state of Tanzania, while Badar, in the end, emerges in
harmony with life. It is what we imagine to be a calm, honest description of
post-colonial Zanzibar. Tourists, NGOs. Flaneuring about the old city in
shorts and t-shirts, complaining of the smells, ignorant of the traditions
they are flaunting. A beautiful young English woman, perhaps 21, arrives for
a stay of three months, vaguely associated with some sort of NGO. She is
looking for a sexual adventure with the natives, leading to disruption in
the family.
Two
Books, by Liane Moriarty
The author is Australian and lives in the Northern
Suburbs of Sydney. Reading these books brings back pleasant memories of
things long ago. But those memories are very different from the stories in
these books. What Alice Forgot is concerned with a woman in her
forties who falls on her head during a gym workout, knocking her out, and
when she wakes up, her mind has returned her to the world of 10 years
before. She is completely confused. Who are all these strange people who
claim to be her friends? In her self of 10 years ago she was newly and
blissfully married to Nick, happily expecting her first baby. They were
living simple normal lives, enjoying everything that Sydney has to offer.
But in this new universe Alice has unfortunately awoken into, Nick is a rich
businessman, overseas, making big deals. Alice has become a thin, nervous
woman, running, spending time in the gym, organizing meetings for the school
and everything else. She is living in a big, luxurious house. There are
three loud children, constantly fighting with one another, and she is
apparently their mother. Complicated divorce proceedings are taking place,
accompanied with various lawyers. Nick demanding some sort of custody of the
children. It is a nightmare. And so Alice tries to get things back to
normal. After all, she loves Nick. And somehow she can cope with these
children, the house and all those unpleasant, skinny, stylish middle-aged
women who say that they are her friends.
The internet tells me that this type of amnesia is
actually possible. But surely the idea of waking up after a knock on the
head and being directly in the world of 10 years ago is a bit far-fetched. I
can imagine waking up, feeling confused, dizzy, head spinning, not knowing
where you are, not being able to remember anything of the past 10 years, yet
having vague memories of those things of 10 years ago. Asking where you are
and who are all these people you don't know. But to be suddenly, actually in
the world of 10 years ago seems to me to be difficult to imagine.
The Husband's Secret again takes place in
Sydney's Northern Suburbs, but with part of the story in Melbourne. I was
seldom in Melbourne, and hardly ever in Sydney's Southern Suburbs, or the
West, or the elegant, expensive Eastern Suburbs. The story is again a case
of then and now. Then was the 1990s and now is the 2010s. In the 1990s world
we have a group of teenagers who more or less know each other. They are
Catholic, exhibiting the attributes we associate with that religion. One of
them, a girl, is murdered, but the murderer is never found. It becomes a
cold case. Forgotten. Yet the mother of the murdered girl does not forget.
Her life is centered around her murdered child. She spends sleepless nights
thinking about her. About what her daughter's life would be if she had
lived. She would have been a perfect angel. One of the young men in the
group in those days was her boyfriend - but being Catholic, she was
forbidden from having a boyfriend. The mother knows that he was the
murderer. Yet there is no proof. He had an alibi from his mother. But
obviously she was just lying. Yet all of that seems to be not part of the
real story of the book.
The real story concerns a happily married mother with
wonderful children and a wonderful husband (whose wealthy family resides in
the fabled Eastern Suburbs). This is also a successful husband who, at the
beginning of the story is overseas on business. The wife is cleaning out the
attic. She discovers a letter, addressed to her from her husband, with the
instruction to be opened only after his death. What is the secret? Well,
since the secret is divulged before we have gotten halfway through the book,
I would not be spoiling things to reveal that it obviously has to do with
the story of the murdered girl all those years ago. And so we read eagerly
on, seeing where all of this leads.
Liane Moriarty is really writing these books for women:
frustrated housewives living in overly expensive houses, looking after their
children, the husbands doing whatever businesses they do in order to gather
enough money to keep the whole thing going. But still it is pleasant to read
these stories.
Some time ago I read The Sheltering Sky by
Paul Bowles, the husband of the author. It is said that the two characters
in that book represent Jane and Paul, traveling about in the French North
Africa of those days. I found the book to be extremely strange. Most novels
are based on the relationships between the different characters, how they
influence one another. Love, hatred, manipulation, curiosity, anger, and all
sorts of other emotions people might have. Yet in The Sheltering Sky
the characters are purely egotistical. They go off on their own without
bothering to say anything, uncaring, in the strange environment of North
Africa. Leaving each other in the lurch. The consequences seem to be
dreadful. And this book by Jane Bowles is the same. One of the characters is
named Christina Goering. She has inherited lots of money - in addition to
the name of that famous Nazi character (the book was first published in
1943). She has a house somewhere on an island, and she accumulates people
there who are also emotionless, robot-like characters. She occasionally
leaves without bothering to tell the others, traveling on a dream-like
railroad to some other island, or maybe to the mainland, where she randomly
picks up a man and has some sort of emotionless, yet intimate relationship
with him. The other "lady" is Frieda Copperfield who travels with her
husband to Panama. There they go into a cheap hotel; the husband departs on
his own into the jungle while Frieda goes into a brothel, seemingly not as a
prostitute herself but as an uninvolved observer of the goings on there.
It is said that both Jane Bowles and her husband Paul
were bisexual. We read that they married in order to satisfy the
expectations of society - perhaps their families. Thus for them free love
was natural, not something subject to jealousy, recrimination and all that.
We read that they traveled to Panama for their honeymoon, and so perhaps the
story of Frieda Copperfield is a loose description of that episode. Paul was
also a musician and composer, and in 1931, before meeting Jane, he traveled
to French North Africa together with Aaron Copeland - the composer of those
wonderful tone poems, Appalachian Spring, Fanfare for the Common Man, and
all that - staying in a house above Tangier Bay. While Jane had a short
life: alcohol, a stroke at 40, dying at 56, Paul lived on in Morocco for
many years.
Tennessee Williams asserted that Jane Bowles was "the
most important writer of prose fiction in modern American letters." So there
you are.
The
Sisters, by Jonas Hassen Khemiri
A long book. I don't know how many pages a printed
edition would have, but in any case there are 137 chapters, not totally
short, alternating back and forth between chapters about the sisters and
chapters about the narrator, Jonas, who, we imagine, is an alter ego of the
author. While the Wikipedia does not inform us about the heritage of the author,
the father of the Jonas of the book is Tunisian, and the mother is Swedish.
On the other hand, the father of the three sisters was Swedish and the
mother Tunisian. They all grow up in Sweden, around Stockholm, but later
things take place on the west coast, somewhere between Helsingborg and
Gothenburg, with various trips to Tunisia and New York.
We learn about the different families. Jonas' father knew
the sister's mother in Tunisia before he moved to Sweden. And the sister's
mother stole the identity of her own sister in order to move to Sweden by
stealing the passport of the sister. As I understand it, as a percentage of
its population, Sweden has accepted more of these North African migrants
than any other country in Europe. The sister then pronounced a curse on her
sister - the mother of the sisters of the book - and in a few passages we
are told of the power of these curses. For a moment I thought it might turn
into an interesting story about magical curses, as in Kiran Desai's recent
book. But no, somehow that story becomes submerged in all the rest of the
narrative before it reemerges briefly at the end when we learn that the
sister of the mother of the sisters has migrated to somewhere in the United
States and has forgotten about the curse, which anyway had no meaning to
begin with.
Both Jonas as well as the sisters seem to have huge
numbers of relatives: cousins, uncles and aunts, most still back in Tunisia,
but they are also in Sweden, Germany, the United States, and so on. Is the
author telling us that the fertility of Tunisian people is greater than that
of Swedish people? Is this novel a loosely told autobiography of the author?
If so, I can understand his interest in writing such a long book, describing
the failings of various people, but for me it became just a bit too tedious.
William Henry Hudson (1841-1922) was a naturalist, an
expert on birds, but also an author, and this, his second book written as a
young man, is a kind of science fiction story. The protagonist who we only
know as "Smith" was walking about in the English countryside, studying the
birds, when he slipped and fell down a slope, being covered with rocks and
dirt, losing consciousness. He awakes presumably a short time later, frees
himself of a few plants with their roots which have curiously grown about
him, and steps forth into the world. He is hungry and tired and hopes to
find some nearby farmhouse to give him shelter and help. He is a comfortably
wealthy member of Victorian society; as we later learn, on this ramble
through the woods he happens to be carrying about £30 in banknotes, gold
sovereigns and other coins in his portmanteau. That would be something like
5,000 dollars or euros in today's devalued money.
He soon finds a large mansion, or castle, and a
procession of people wearing strange clothing. It is a funeral; he hides
behind a bush to observe things from a distance, but then he makes himself
known to them. These people are at first shocked by Smith's dirty appearance
and his crude, tweed clothing which had been made for him by a fashionable
London tailor. They speak English perfectly, and Smith tries to understand
where he is. But much of it makes no sense. They have never heard of London.
In fact they have never heard of the concept of a "city". They know nothing
of Shakespeare, Newton, Aristotle, Rome, and everything else we take for
granted as having existed and being part of our civilization. Smith becomes
a member of this group, or tribe, sect, or whatever it is. But much remains
a mystery to him. Being ignorant of their customs, Smith makes many social
mistakes which are offensive to the community, but which are explained to
him, and he tries to adopt. They seem to be living in perfect harmony with
themselves and with the opulent, flowering nature which is all around them.
Where is he? Is this some sort of leap into a distant
future as in H.G. Wells Time Machine, or the not so distant leap of
William Morris' News
from Nowhere? Or indeed is it a jump through some sort of
wormhole into the many worlds of a different universe? In any case it is
strange that the people speak English, yet they know nothing about English
literature and they have a totally different system of writing, which Smith
gradually masters.
The food is exclusively vegetarian, Smith is astonished
to find that life expectancy is hundreds of years. Seemingly youthful people
are 50, 80 or more years old. There is one old man with a long beard and
long hair who is called the "father" and who seems to be the chief of the
group. All the others seem youthful, the men only have downy facial hair.
Then there is a mysterious figure called the "mother". It seems that Smith
has greatly insulted the community by not immediately having asked to be
introduced to the "mother". She is an old woman, living in her own rooms.
From the beginning, Smith has become totally fascinated,
breathlessly in love with Yoletta, a beautiful young woman of the community.
He admires her perfect figure in the light, airy clothes they all wear. He
tells her of his unbounded love, and she also says that she loves him. But
all the others also say that they love him, just as they love each other.
Yet his love is more than this brotherly love for everybody, and gradually
Yoletta begins to really love him as well. This book was first published in
the height of the Victorian age, and so we are certainly not told if this
love of Smith for Yoletta is consummated, or if Yoletta and all the others
are physically incapable of such a thing as, for example, the worker bees in
a beehive are incapable of having sex.
Smith wonders about all these things. What is the
"father" and the "mother" in this community? Is it really just one big
family with all those who are not the "mother" and the "father" being their
children? Somehow the "father" and the "mother" seem to be treating him very
specially. Reading all this, it is obvious that Smith is to become the new
"father" and Yoletta the new "mother", but for him it is not so. He stumbles
on a library of secret books concerning "Rituals" and "Renewal of the
Family", and he begins to understand these things. There is an elaborate
crystal goblet with writing wound about it.
----
When time and disease oppress, and the sun grows cold in heaven, and
there is no longer any joy on the earth, and the fire of love grows cold
in the heart, drink of me, and for the old life there shall be a new
life.
----
When your soul is darkened, so that it is hard to know evil from good,
and the thoughts that are in you lead to madness, drink of me and be
cured.
----
He drinks from the goblet. It is poison and he dies, ending the book and the
dreams of poor Yoletta.
The protagonist of this story is named Abel. He is
a young man, a Venezuelan who comes from a wealthy family, but through
intrigues he has lost everything and is a hunted man. He escapes into the
backwoods of Guyana and begins living with a group of Indians (or more
correctly, Aboriginal Americans). We think of Colonel
Fawcett in the lost city of Z, or Tony in Eveyln Waugh's Handful of Dust. There is a dense forest near the
Indian camp, but they say that it is haunted with the evil spirits of a
female figure, the daughter of a mysterious god, or devil. Abel's curiosity
is aroused, and he walks over to the forest and finds that it is a paradise.
He is surrounded by singing, bird like sounds and soon realizes that they
are the songs, or the language of Rima, the beautiful young girl of the
forest. She lives there with an old man, said to be her grandfather. The
animals understand and obey her. Of course she is a pure vegetarian and she
runs about, almost flies, in her youthful exuberance. As with the Smith of
the previous story, Abel falls madly, breathlessly in love with her.
But somehow, in my imagination, I preferred Yoletta to Rima. Perhaps this
has to do with the costumes they are wearing. The naturalist mind of W.H.
Hudson, repelled by the voluminous, multi-layered and suffocating garments
enclosing the English women of his day, their faces hidden behind black lace
veils, imagined the female form freed of these gross impediments. While
Yoletta and everybody else, including Smith, has beautiful, clean, light
clothing, Rima, we are told, covers herself with clinging spider webs.
Hardly an appealing vision.
The book was made into a 1950s movie, starring Audrey
Hepburn as Rima, and Anthony Perkins as Abel. It is freely available in
YouTube, and so I spent a few minutes looking at one or another scene, here
and there. In the movie, Hepburn wears a very ordinary dress, unlike the
usual female jungle costumes of that Hollywood era, and Anthony Perkins is
less than captivated, both in the movie and certainly in real life. After
all, he died of AZT poisoning in that earlier pandemic of global hysteria.
But to return to the book, Abel learns the story of
Rima's life and of her mother who died tragically. Rima is obsessed with the
thought of traveling to the place where her mother was first found, thinking
that there she will meet her people who will be able to understand her
special bird like singing language. Upon arrival they find the place to be
nothing special and so they resolve to return. But Rima insists on returning
swiftly on her own, saying that she will prepare everything for their
homecoming after the slow and methodical return of Abel and the grandfather.
When they do finally make it back they find that the natives have horribly
killed Rima, and the grandfather is also slaughtered. Abel is able to
interact with the natives, eventually motivating a neighboring tribe to come
and slaughter all those who had killed his beloved Rima. The book ends with
him trekking back to civilization.
Needless to say, I much preferred The Crystal Age to this
story. And I couldn't be bothered to see enough of the movie in order to
understand if it had followed the book, or rather if they had changed the
story into a 1950s romance with an appropriately romantic musical
soundtrack.
This was an enjoyable collection of stories, not
only of Kathrine Mansfield's native New Zealand but also of life in England
just over a hundred years ago. The first story was about a day in the life
of a town on the beach; how the husbands all went off to the city to the
relief of everybody else, allowing them to have a nice peaceful day,
reclining in the sun, enjoying life, until the evening when the tired
husbands unfortunately returned. Another story, Marriage à la Mode,
takes place in England. The husband, an important lawyer, spends the week in
London and then takes the long train journey to his wife in their opulent
house somewhere on the coast on Saturdays, only to have to return Sunday
evenings to go back to work in London. The house is not only occupied by his
wife but also by three or four other young men, filling the air with empty
banter. Yet the thought of divorce does not cross his mind. And then there
is a story about a young girl in Wellington traveling on the ferry across to
Picton on the South Island to live with her grandmother. It is an overnight
passage. As the ferry leaves the calm harbor both she and her grandmother
sleep in the small cabin to wake up in the morning to the sights of Picton.
But I am sure that I would be totally seasick in that situation, crossing
the choppy waters of Cook Strait.
The author has written many books, 29 of which, if I
have counted the list in the Wikipedia rightly, were "romantic" novels
written under the pseudonym Madeleine Ker. There are at least 15 further
novels listed under his real name, not including this one. A quick internet
search found no serious review of the book, but perhaps this is to be
expected, not only owing to the theme of the book but also owing to the
multitude of other books by the author. This one is concerned with the Lebensborn project of Nazi Germany. The idea was to
breed a superior form of humanity. The Nazis imagined that they were
"Aryans", which seems to me to be a strange idea since we essentially have
the slightly different spelling and pronunciation "Aryan" = "Iran", leading to the idea of an "Aryan race". Yet Donald Trump, whose ancestry is, of
course, German, is constantly telling us that he is "obliterating" the
Aryans, bombing them into the "stone age".
All of this has to do with Darwinism,
the "survival of the fittest", and all that. In fact after reading this book
I began reading Our
Inner Ape, by Frans de Waal, telling us about the similarities of
human behavior to that of the chimpanzees and bonobos. But I gradually
became dissatisfied with that book since de Waal based everything on his
observations of apes in zoos. This would be the same as if human behavior
were to be based on the observations of people in prisons. Obviously if I
were forced to spend my life in a prison filled with convicts then my
interactions with others would be totally different from the peaceful life I
enjoy in reality. I was also irritated by de Waal's belittling of previous
investigators, in particular his criticism of Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene. Perhaps he was simply objecting to
the word "selfish" as being not particularly applicable to the typical
behavior of apes. If so then he misunderstood Dawkins' argument. While we,
as individuals, appear and disappear from the world, the genetic information
we carry continues along our branch of life indefinitely, or at least until
the branch becomes extinct. The genes survive into eternity, the individual
exists merely to carry this information on into the future. So the question
is, what behavior of the individual serves to carry his genetic information
onward, not becoming extinct. Undoubtedly the dominating behavior exhibited
by apes in prison may be favored by evolution. But consider a pack of wolves
in the wild. As I understand it, only the alpha male and the alpha female
reproduce. Yet all the rest of the wolves cooperate to ensure the success of
the pack. From the point of view of genetics this cooperative behavior of
the non-reproducing wolves is also successful since although their
individual genes are not reproduced, still almost all of their genes are
identical with those of the alpha animals, and thus they are helping to
insure that their genes are also carried on into the future. And similarly
the groups of primitive people roaming the savanna for all those thousands,
even millions of years of our evolution cooperated, being more or less
distantly related to one another. In this cooperation they were competing
against other groups with other genetic makeups. This led to some of the
basic emotions people experience. Armies organize themselves into small
groups of soldiers, exploiting the emotion of defending the group, despite
the fact that the soldiers are generally not related to one another. And, in
the end, sadly, this misuse of our genetically programmed emotional
responses leads to nationalism and racism.
When the Nazis, and more particularly Heinrich Himmler,
introduced the Lebensborn project, the absurd idea was not to breed people
who looked like typical Germans, or in fact like Himmler himself who seems
to have had an unattractive, weak face and a badly proportioned body. Being
in the middle of Europe, Germany has been subjected to much migration
throughout history. While many Germans have typically Germanic surnames,
many others have names of Polish, French, Italian origins. Even those with
Germanic names range from blond to dark haired, light, celtic skinned to
swarthy, physically fit to the fat, Himmler-like slouch. Instead of trying
to select something deemed to be superior in this mishmash, the Nazis
decided that the ideal type to be bred was the Scandinavian, Nordic type,
not the typically Germanic type.
Thus in the story, the woman who eagerly offered herself
into the breeding program was from the far north of the north of Norway, in
the town of Berlevåg, near Kirkenes. You can hardly get any more Nordic than
that! The SS officer who was personally selected by Himmler to impregnate
this woman did not come from so far north. In fact he came from a town in
Germany, although he was tall, blond, blue eyed and extremely fit. They had
two goes at it. The first produced Karolina, who was initially put into the
family of an aristocratic German general. The second produced Agnes who was
born after the defeat of the Nazis and who was taken by an aristocratic
Englishman to England where he adopted her. Thus Agnes grew up as the
official grandchild of an English aristocrat while Karolina was sent from
bombed out Munich to the relatives of the general in the east. They were all
killed in various horrible ways by the Russians, then, as a 3 or 4 year old
"Wolfskind", Karolina existed in the forest until 1947, at which point she
was taken captive, the Russian commissar wanting to have her killed, but the
socialist German assistant claimed her for the newly formed East Germany to
be groomed into becoming a spy who was to prostitute herself in the West in
some sort of communist version of the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, providing
material for blackmailing prominent people. And so the story develops. Agnes
learns that she has a sister; she makes contact with the mother in northern
Norway, contacts others in Germany; the secret SS network living in luxury
on the Spanish Costa del Sol orders the father, who is hiding out in obscure
Spanish poverty owing to the fact that he was not like those other bad
people, is forced to help Agnes free her sister in a heroic action during
which he dies; and finally the two sisters travel to England to live life
happily ever after. I read on quickly from one episode to the next,
turning the pages (on my Kindle) to find out how it ends.
All of the elements of Hollywood reality are here.
England good, Germany bad. Russia even much, much, unspeakably worse. During
her two or three years of toddling about the woods of Eastern Europe,
Karolina is hunted by horrible groups of Russian soldiers. They are rapists,
pedophiles, murderers. When they meet any of these "Wolfskinder" they go
wild with their blood lust. Perhaps they even barbecue and eat them! What
was the author thinking here? As I understand it, he wrote the book before
the recent, disgusting revelations of the "Epstein Class" of Anglo-Saxon
oligarchs became public.
Really, this story is nothing but nonsense. The idea of a
3 or 4 year old toddling about in the woods of Eastern Europe for two or
three years, during those extreme winters, might be something for the
Epstein Class to enjoy thinking about, but we normal people suffer from the
wars they start, based on all of these absurd fantasies.
A town with a
casino somewhere on the northeast coast of the USA. I had thought that that
must refer to Atlantic City, but an internet inquiry shows that these days,
as morality degenerates, there are lots of towns up and down the coast with
casinos. The story involves four married couples getting towards retirement
age. Some years ago one of the husbands, the one who is the manager of the
casino, heard from someone that there was a surefire investment, guaranteed
to make lots of money, and so he convinced the other husbands to join him,
cashing in their retirement plans and putting everything into this gambol.
It went bust and they lost everything. Prosperity was transformed into
disgruntled poverty. One of the other husbands also worked in the casino,
being a technician for the slot machines. He discovered a bug in the
software allowing him to transfer a couple of hundred thousand dollars each
month to a private account somewhere. One of the other husbands was a
manager of a local bank and so he could arrange all of this. This scam went
on for a few years, accumulating about ten million dollars. They didn't tell
the wives (after all they didn't want to be discovered). The plan was to
retire in riches and say that they had made successful investments. To cover
all eventualities they took out life insurances valued at a couple of
millions each.
But suddenly the slot machine technician husband dies in
what appears to be an accident. His garage door has crashed into his head,
smashing it. On his corpse, on top of his chest, lies a casino chip worth a
thousand dollars, showing that the scam has been discovered. The husbands
are terrified, particularly considering that the casino has been taken over
by an Indian gambling conglomerate known for its brutal, mafia-like tactics.
They contact the local barber - a refugee from Costa Rica who was a killer
in the drug mafia, asking him to protect them and offering him much money
for this service.
Meanwhile the wife of the slot machine technician gets
paid the millions from her husband's life insurance and retires in luxury to
Florida. She tells the other three wives that she had seen in the papers of
the insurance representative that all of their husbands also have such high
life insurance policies. They are at first perplexed, yet still angry with
the husbands for having to live in poverty, and so they also speak with the
local barber, asking him to murder their husbands in order to also be able
to cash in on the life insurance.
The book is meant to be a comedy; according to some
reviews it is "laughing out loud funny". Everything turns out nicely in the
end and the evil casino does not get its money back. It is one of those
books written to be read by women (nearing retirement age). But surely the
whole premise of the story is nonsense. Any beginning student of mathematics
taking a course on probability theory immediately learns about the Law of Large Numbers in all its refinements. The slot
machines in a casino produce, day for day, a continuous stream of steady
income and any deviation would be immediately flagged and investigated. The
writers of these books for women may imagine, in sympathy with the little
old ladies sitting hour after hour, day after day at the slot machines, that
somehow their hopes and dreams, realized using this mindless pulling on the
handle of a slot machine thousands of times, might lead to a joyful
refutation of mathematical truth. Such is the irrationality of visitors to
casinos.
Stronger,
by Michael Joseph Gross
This was not a novel. The book is concerned with
how we can become physically stronger. For some reason, amazon was offering
this book for free, and so I clicked on it. Why not? There are three parts
to the book. Part One is devoted to admiring all of the wonderful qualities
of a person named Charles
Stocking. He not only sets world records in weight lifting, he is also
Professor of Kinesiology and Classics at the University of Texas at Austin.
For persons as ignorant as I am, kinesiology is the study of human movement. But
Charles Stocking is not only extremely strong and extremely learned, he also
speaks 6 or 8 languages, and he is an expert on all things to do with
ancient Greek athletics. We learn lots of interesting things about ancient
Greece as our author tells us about a trip he took to Greece along with a
collection of Charles Stocking's students to listen to the stories of the
master. We are told that the beginnings of the Olympic Games was when a
group of men gathered at one end of the "stadium" - that is a clearing in
the woods somewhere near Olympia - then a priest raised something or other
which was a signal for everybody to run as fast as possible to the other end
of the "stadium" to a sacred circle where an animal was confined, and the
winner had the honor of slicing up the animal, blood flowing all over
circle, and everybody finding this to be an ecstatic religious experience.
Well, OK, we are not strictly vegetarians, so I am in no
position to criticize such practices. But then we are told that there are
almost no writings which have survived from ancient Greece describing the
actual training schedules of Olympic athletes. And so we are subjected to
many pages analyzing the meanings of ancient Greek words and their
relationships to the practice of athletics as understood by Charles
Stocking.
Part Two concentrates on the exploits of Jan Todd who, while setting countless world records
for women's weight lifting, is also a Professor and Chair of Department of
Kinesiology and Classics at the University of Texas at Austin. We are told
about the wonderful exploits of Katie Sandwina who was a circus strong woman with the
Barnum & Bailey circus, being the center ring attraction. Although she
was extremely strong, it is not said that she was a university professor.
Nevertheless Jan Todd's husband Terry
was also a great weight lifter (although it does not appear that he broke
countless world records, as with the others - only national records). He was
also a university professor.
So all of this just goes to show that you can be a great
he-man or she-woman while at the same time being a great university
professor. Since I am now too old for either of these great achievements, I
gave up on the book. It may be that Part Three was concerned with how old
people like me might be able to attain whatever strength is possible, but I
didn't get that far.
I used to be a member of a fitness studio which was quite
satisfying except for the fact that it cost 50 euros each month. I had
joined a couple of years before and the deal was 50 euros if you only commit
to an initial one year but 40 if you had committed to an initial two years.
And so, unfortunately, in September 2019, if I remember rightly, I decided
to newly rejoin, committing myself to initially paying for two years at the
lower rate. During the first year of the COVID hysteria I was still able to
exercise there, smiling at the silly plastic partitions and disinfectants.
But then the next year the German government clamped down, forbidding
anybody who had not allowed themselves to be injected from taking part in
any of these activities. Thus I resigned my membership in the studio but
still had to pay for a whole year without being allowed in. Then last year I
thought perhaps it might be nice to again join. It seemed to me to be a fair
thing to ask them to allow me to just pay 40 euros and only commit myself
for one year. After all, I had already paid a whole year's worth for
nothing. But no. The evil owner of the place refused to accommodate me. Good
riddance. And judging by the hysterical, full-sized photo and huge letters
at the top of today's BBC news page showing people in full-body plastic
coverings with breathing masks spraying each other with poisons after being
allowed off that cruise ship where the so called "hantavirus" was supposed
to have occurred, I expect the next lock-down very soon. After all, the
Powers-That-Be desperately need something to keep people under control,
given the various messes they have made which are gradually getting out of
their control.
A spy/hostage story. A man with a gun takes
hostages in a nursery school near Oxford. He demands to speak with a very
specific person, Ben Whistler, in the London center of MI5 or 6 or whatever
it is. Ben is flown in by helicopter and enters the nursery, beginning a
long and involved negotiation surrounded by police and snipers all about the
place. There are lots of twists and turns to the story, a good read. In the
end it is about somebody stealing hundreds of millions from all the slush
funds these spy agencies swim in and transferring them to some secret bank
account somewhere where he will then live out the rest of his life in
luxury. But the plan misfires due to another twist of the plot.
Again, I find the basic premise of this story to be hard
to believe. How is a single person, alone, able to successfully hide
hundreds of millions of pounds or dollars and then live from such riches?
You can't just put a few tons of gold in your suitcase and lug it off
somewhere; you have to transfer it about the place electronically. But then
you need ways of washing the money, all those mafia organizations with their
seemingly legal businesses. Totally unrealistic for the character in the
story. In reality the people who are making billions and billions out of the
tragedy of the Ukraine war do so "legally" by being in the
"military-industrial-complex", charging huge amounts of money for things
which cost only a tiny fraction of that. Not to mention the oligarchs who
simply take the money and have the power to silence anybody who protests.
And then there is insider trading, taking the money of naive people willing
to bet in ignorance. Happy is the Trump family which has increased its
wealth by a few billions in the last year or two.
No Way Home, by Elizabeth Dunleavy
This is the story of the author's mother and her
mother's sister in the aftermath of the Second World War. For some reason
the Amazon Kindle version of the book is not in the usual ebook format. The
printed book has just been scanned and each page appears in a somewhat
reduced format as a Kindle page. Thus the printing is hard to read and all
the usual functions available in an ebook are missing. With a real book, at
least you can flip easily through the pages, keeping your place with a
bookmark or a finger, but here that isn't possible.
The book begins with a chapter describing the lives of
the sisters in Gleiwitz, which was a town way over on the eastern border of
Germany as it was defined before the Second World War. The boundaries of the
countries in the middle of Europe - and indeed the countries themselves -
have been subjected to constant changes throughout history, borders moving
one way or another and countries disappearing entirely, only to reappear
years, even centuries later. In the present case the German town of Gleiwitz
has now become part of today's Poland and is named Gliwice. There are lots of photos of the family and of
life in Gleiwitz in this first chapter of the book. The older sister,
Ursula, was 20 years old in 1945, and the younger sister, Christa-Maria, was
19. There are many relatives and close friends. Life is described as being
idyllic. The family is Roman Catholic and very religious. This becomes clear
as we read through the diary of Ursula and the letters of Christa-Maria
which constitute the rest of the book. As the Soviet Army approaches
Gleiwitz the situation is that Christa-Maria is living in Wahrenbrück, which today is a part of eastern Germany,
in a work camp (Reichs Arbeits Dienst), something that was required of all
girls in Nazi Germany. The sister Ursula remained at home with her parents
owing to the fact that she suffered from hyperthyroidism
and thus was excused from this service for medical reasons.
Ursula's diary describes what it was like when Gleiwitz
was taken over by Soviet soldiers, then as time progressed how Polish
people came to take over everything, displacing the Germans. Drunken
Russian soldiers plunder, burn, mindlessly destroy things. They enter the
apartment at will, different groups, day after day, taking whatever they
happen to see. For example the grandfather clock is taken. What could
soldiers on the move possibly do with a grandfather clock? But the diary
contains no specific mention of any particular physical abuse. Of course
the people did suffer from hunger and deprivation.
-----
Now the story we are always told is that when the
Russian soldiers entered Germany they raped any German women they found.
Well, they certainly didn't rape Ursula, and her diary doesn't mention any
such incidents. These days I often listen to various podcasts; in
particular Stanislav
Krapivink has much to say. I recall one conversation he had where he
mentioned that his grandfather, as I recall, was an officer in the Soviet
army at the end of the war, and he told him that rape was totally
forbidden. It would have been punished with immediate execution by firing
squad. So who knows what is true and what is mere Hollywood propaganda?
Perhaps the Soviet occupation of eastern Germany was less cruel and
violent than was the earlier occupation of Poland by Germany. When I first
arrived here the mother of someone I knew told me about her experience of
the initial occupation. Her family was living in a town on the Lahn river
in western Germany, so the occupation was by American and Canadian forces.
There was certainly no plundering. In fact the soldiers were strictly
forbidden to interact with the native population. But one day a group of
Canadian soldiers came to their apartment, made themselves comfortable and
demanded to be served wine. The mother was a young, attractive woman in
those days. Her father was able to quickly flag down a passing military
police patrol who took the Canadians away.
-----
Returning to the present story, Ursula's parents were
able to bribe a Russian officer to have him drive them by car to the west,
to Gera, which became part of East Germany. Christa-Maria did not write a
diary, rather she wrote a number of letters, imagining that they might
some day be delivered to her family. The first letter says that things had
been horrible, without telling us any more, and saying that she has been
transferred to Gamnitz, a camp in what is now in the Czech
Republic. There she assisted in a kind of camp hospital, but was evicted
and treated cruelly by the Czechs. She ended up in Ditfurt, also in East Germany, where she was taken
in by a farming family and made to work many long hours, but was able to
eat as much as she wanted. And she was thankful to thus survive while
others were starving. She learned that her family was in Gera; they got
together; they were able to make it out of the Soviet occupied zone and
eventually ended up here in Bielefeld, first in cramped refugee
accommodation but in the end in a comfortable apartment which became the
center of the family, almost as before in Gleiwitz.
-----
I wonder if history will repeat itself. German society
seems to be wallowing in a strange combination of hysteria, and guilt for
things which practically nobody now living is responsible for.
Nevertheless the hysteria is expressed in two political directions,
represented by two different parties which we might call "A" and "C".
Party A believes in peace. Germany should not be
involved in a war with Russia. The Nordstream pipelines which were blown
up by the USA should be restored and energy should again be imported from
Russia. Subventions for politically correct projects should be cancelled.
The bureaucratic excesses of the EU should be restrained. The government
should exercise fiscal restraint and return to the stability of the past.
The COVID restrictions were false and people should be free to determine
for themselves what medicines they wish to take. Immigration should be
controlled in a similar manner to the usual rules as exemplified for
example by Switzerland. The party is led by a lesbian woman who is married
to a woman of Asiatic descent.
Party C believes that Germany should take on hundreds
of billions of new government debt in order to force a rapid
militarization, in particular producing long-distance drones to be sent
into Russia, effectively creating a state of war between Russia and
Germany. Everything Russian must be sanctioned and no energy at all should
be allowed from there. In the future, internal combustion engines should
be forbidden. The government must have the power to shut down society and
force medical interventions when required. As with party A, party C also
believes that immigration should be controlled as for example in
Switzerland. The party is led by a very straight-laced man married to a
German woman.
Almost half the population of present day Germany
believes that one of these parties should be banned despite the fact that
it is more popular than any other party. They think that if that party
should ever come to power then it will be like the Nazis, leading to a new
catastrophe. Which of these parties are they thinking about? I will not
write anything further on this subject since in the hysterical state of
present-day Germany, writing such a thing might be dangerous.
Again this is a true life story, not a novel. The
author was a medical doctor in Glasgow during the 1980s in general practice.
Every morning he was confronted with 20 or 30 people, mainly elderly women,
sitting in the waiting room with nothing wrong with them. They came in to be
given another prescription for pills which they didn't need. Only
occasionally was somebody there with a real condition.
-----
Perhaps it is unfair of me to write this. I do also occasionally go to a
doctor. Indeed, the last time there were only few in the waiting room and
all looked completely healthy, as I did myself, but in fact I had a painful
shoulder impingement. The doctor did not give me pills and I certainly would
have refused if she had tried to. Instead I was given a prescription for a
course of 10 sessions with a physiotherapist which was very helpful.
-----
Dr. Alexander's wife in Glasgow was also a medical doctor, but looking after
their three small children she had quit actively practicing medicine. The
elderly doctors in his practice had promised him partnerships, but they kept
putting it off, leading to even more frustration. The whole situation came
to a crisis and they decided to apply for a position as the local doctor on
the Island of Islay
in the Orkney Archipelago, which at that time had about 200 inhabitants. He
was thus transformed from being one of a number doctors in an anonymous
practice in the city, perhaps considered by some to be in it only for the
money, to being the respected center of a small, isolated community, living
as modestly as all the others, perhaps being thought of as rather an
eccentric by his colleagues on the mainland.
The book describes their first year on the island,
getting to know everybody. The few medical emergencies which came up. As I
understand it, the Alexanders stayed on in the Orkney islands, and they are
even now living there in retirement. It was pleasant to read of Dr.
Alexander's experiences. The title of the book comes from a Scottish
literary reference (if I remember that rightly). Having some connections
with the Scottish medical authorities, he was able to have a certain medical
apparatus for dealing with heart patients sent from the mainland to his
island practice, and it proved to be very useful at least on one occasion
during this initial year.
This book was first published in 1932, and although
gutenberg.net.au offers it to be read online - I've linked to it here - for
some reason gutenberg.org does not list the book despite the fact that they
do publish a number of his other books. Thus in order to read it on my
Kindle, I downloaded it via Amazon, which cost no more then a couple of
cents. As the title says, this is the autobiography of Clarence Darrow, the famous American defense lawyer.
He doesn't really tell us much about his personal life. Instead we are told
about his professional life. At the end of the 19th century there were many
bitter, violent conflicts between the workers and the owners of factories
over inadequate pay and working conditions. Unions were forming and the men
were going on strike. We are told that it was almost as in a war between the
different classes of American society. Were strikes illegal? Should they be
fought using the police, the National Guard? Darrow was on the side of the
working man and he declared himself to be a socialist. Then reluctantly he
began to accept criminal cases as well, always on the side of the defense:
the McNamara brothers; the Leopold and Loeb case; the Scopes Trial; the
Ossian Sweet case; the Massie trial. All famous cases which were headline
news for weeks on end. The Wikipedia article sketches each of these cases,
and each is dealt with in separate chapters of the book. I found it
fascinating to read about all of this; but what a frustrating business it
must have been.
For example consider the famous Scopes Trial. In those days - the 1920s - hillbilly
Kentucky passed a law making it illegal to teach evolution in public
schools. And so Clarence Darrow was brought in to point out the obvious
facts that the law was plainly unconstitutional, and the Biblical passages
upon which it was supposedly based were themselves full of contradictions.
What is the point of exhausting oneself in a hot courthouse filled with
nasty, bigoted people clinging to superstition and ignorance? Those
"evangelical Christians" are still there in the Bible Belt, a hundred years
after the Scopes trial, continuing to determine the wild lurching of
American politics from one violent adventure to the next.
In a number of chapters toward the end of the book Darrow
tells us of his thoughts regarding crime and punishment, and why it is that
some people become criminal. He tells us that the prisons are filled with
people who have no education, no qualifications for making an honest living.
It is the responsibility of society to correct this. He compares crime to a
disease. A person taken seriously ill is brought to a hospital to be cured
of the disease, and similarly the criminal should be taken to a humane
institution to cure him of the "disease" of crime. I remember seeing a
program on television years ago dealing with the prison system in
Norway, following this philosophy. And as I understand it, there is
very little criminality
in Norway. According to Darrow, the prospect of punishment never
deters anybody. But is this really true? He was dealing with criminals who
were not deterred. But could it be that normal people might behave in
unpleasant ways if the constraints of society are withdrawn? This was the
experience of the sisters Ursula and Christa-Maria, as described in the book
No Way Home, which I've just read.
For Darrow, the worst people were the "reformers", those
people who are ever trying to improve society by passing laws for the
betterment of others. Repeatedly in the book he writes about the evil of the
Prohibition laws which were the basis of much of the organized crime which
has carried on until today. After his retirement he traveled to Europe with
his wife, and in an extensive chapter he tells us about the contrast between
the civilized world where people are able to enjoy a glass of wine in a
restaurant and the harsh puritanism of his native country.
This one has recently been awarded the
International Booker Prize. It concerns a year the Japanese writer Aoyama
Chizuko spent in Taiwan in 1938-9 giving lectures, traveling about the
island and very particularly trying out all the various foods especially
native to Taiwan. During most of the time she is accompanied by a young
Taiwanese woman who she affectionately calls Chi-chan, and who tells her all
about the different kinds of foods and the stories of Taiwan. Chi-chan
often cooks the dishes for Aoyama, looking after her almost as a servant.
Aoyama develops great affection for Chi-chan, a kind of love which, however,
is not reciprocated, or perhaps if it is, it is held back by the fact that
Aoyama is part of the dominant Japanese while Chi-chan is proud not to be.
The authenticity of this travelogue is reinforced throughout, the book
beginning with an Introduction by Hiyoshi Sagako; then we have the twelve
chapters of the book, each centered around some exotic menu; then there is
an Afterword entitled "Memories of My Mother" by Aoyama Chizuko, the
daughter of the author, explaining various things about the fate of the
first edition of the book and the manuscript; then a Translator's Note by
Wáng Chiēn-hò, who translated it into Chinese; then another Translator's
Note by Lin King who translated the Chinese version into English. All of
this is very learned, with lots of footnotes, and so I wondered why this
Yáng Shuāng-zĭ, who is listed in Lin King's Note as just another of the
translators, is receiving half of the Booker prize money. Well, in fact it
is all an invention, a novel, which was written (in reality) by Yáng
Shuāng-zĭ in Mandarin, and then (in reality) translated from Mandarin into
English by Lin King.
So what is all this about Taiwan being under Japanese
rule in 1938? According to the narration we are constantly being subjected
to by the legacy media, the story is that China and Taiwan and all the rest
of it was happily minding its business before the evil English came along
and attacked them with the Opium War. Then there is a kind of blank where
impoverished coolies were imported to the Wild West to build the western
railroads. Then the evil Mao stirred up lots of trouble with his communism
and Chiang Kai-shek was banished to Taiwan where he was protected by the
United States. But now China is good, or at least successful, and the United
States, especially under Trump, is bad, and so Taiwan should be returned to
its rightful place as a happy province of China.
Looking up the Wikipedia article on Taiwan in order to at least get a gist of the real
story, we see that the original inhabitants were first subjected to Chinese
immigration around the year 1600. Soon after that the Dutch came and made it
a colony of its East India Company. That didn't last long and the Dutch were
kicked out by the Quing, a Chinese dynasty which held the island until 1895
when the Japanese took over after its victory in the First Sino-Japanese
War. They held it until they were defeated by the United States in 1945.
Given all of this, I can understand the statement of the
author in a short video clip that was included in the BBC News website in
which she said that Taiwan should remain independent. In a similar way I
would understand - even have more sympathy - with a Hawaiian saying that
Hawaii should return to being independent. After all Hawaii was a free
kingdom long after Taiwan had been subjugated to Chinese rule. We used to
say "small is beautiful". But one must accept reality, and according to the
Wikipedia, the population of Taiwan is now 95% Han Chinese while the native
population of Hawaii is only around 10%. These islands have been inundated
by outsiders.
Another thing that I had not really thought about before
is that there is whole chain of islands, dotted along the arc of a circle,
following a path from the south of Japan along to the final island, Yonaguni, pointing directly at Taiwan, only about 100
km away, all belonging to Japan. They delineate the eastern boundary of the
East China Sea. Therefore we can understand the unease which the recent
militant rumblings in Japan have caused in China.
Finally, to return to the book, it goes on and on about
all kinds of foods and how eagerly Aoyama and Chi-chang consume huge amounts
of it. Things practically descend into a litany of gluttony, particularly
when the two consume a full banquet of 12 dishes meant for a party of 12 (or
was it 24?) cooked by the master cook of Taiwan during a temporary
reconciliation of the two. When reading a book I imagine the hero or heroine
- at least to begin with - as being a pleasantly normal person. But with all
this compulsive eating, Aoyama must have been monstrously obese. Apart from
that, I've read numbers of books by Korean writers, and they uniformly
portray the occupying Japanese as being cruel and oppressive. The short
video segments of Yáng
Shuāng-zĭ I've seen, talking about her book, show an elegant woman,
certainly not obese or even overweight, unconcerned about the Japanese part
of the history of her island.
It is 1933. A wealthy family living a life of
leisure in their mansion in Cornwall organizing a big party to celebrate
midsummer day with all their many wealthy friends. Their income is obtained
exclusively from their inherited family income. Who would know that there
was a Great Depression elsewhere in the world? The family consists of the
mother and father, three girls in various degrees of puberty, and a one year
old baby boy of questionable paternity. The baby boy disappears in the
middle of the night. What happened? Was he murdered? Abducted? Kidnapped?
Police search everywhere for weeks on end. The extensive gardens are dug up,
potential criminals investigated. It is a lengthy book at over 600 pages,
and so we learn about everybody, and in particular the middle daughter Alice
and her unsatisfactory erotic endeavors with the gardener's assistant. Time
goes by, the Second World War comes and goes, taking away the youngest
daughter who has become a pilot (but not, as today, in combat roles, rather
ferrying airplanes about the place). The disappearance of the baby boy has
become a long forgotten cold case.
And we have now, or at least 2012 when the book was first
published. Sadie Sparrow, the young London policewoman, is visiting her
grandfather in Cornwall, not really of her own free will. She discovers the
old house by the lake and the cold case. We read on from page to page, Kate
Morton drawing us on from episode to episode. In the end everything turns
out extremely happily with various characters unexpectedly discovering that
they are not who we thought they were. An anticlimax of coincidences.
A while ago I enjoyed reading The Offing by Benjamin Myers, and so thought I'd give
this one a try. The story involves Bucky Bronco, an American character who
as a young man in the 1960s recorded two country and western songs which, at
least in America, have fallen into complete obscurity. Now Bucky is in his
70s and he has reaped the consequences of a life of bad living. He is
overweight; his joints are full of pain. He drinks whiskey by the gallon,
has become addicted to prescription drugs, and he has lost his wife who was
his only source of solace. Suddenly he receives an invitation from somebody
in England to perform those songs at some sort of venue in Scarborough for
5000 dollars, or pounds, all expenses paid, including the air fare. He gets
into an airplane and leaves the Chicago which has been his whole life up
till now, to experience for the first time a trip to another country.
He is picked up at the airport by the simple-minded but
caring older woman who is organizing the thing, and they drive to
Scarborough in her small, dilapidated car. She tells him that in England,
even overall in Europe, Bucky Bronco and his two songs are the greatest
thing there is. Why isn't he a millionaire with all the royalties? The
answer: It seems that when he was a simple-minded 17 year old back then in
the 60s he had signed, without looking at it, a 55 page document of legal
mumbo-jumbo which removed all of his musical rights. The woman tells him
that her husband is an offensively degenerate, bad smelling alchoholic, and
her son lolls about in his bedroom playing computer games during the night
and sleeping the whole day, taking various drugs as well. Scarborough turns
out to be an equally degenerate place with Bucky put into a dirty, run-down
hotel.
*****
It must be almost 40 years ago now that we drove around England and stayed
for a day or two in Scarborough. I thought it was nice, not at all the
degenerate mess described in this book. Is this the consequence of
everything that Thatcher made of England all those years ago, or is it
simply the grim fantasies of the author?
*****
Bucky had mistakenly left in the airplane the bottle of
prescription pills to which he was addicted, and so for the time he is in
Scarborough he is suffering from an advanced case of withdrawal which he
tries to still with large volumes of whiskey, combined with the occasional
dose of cannabis. Despite all of this, and the fact that he has never sung
in public in his life - apart from singing in the church choir as a small
boy - he appears on the stage of the auditorium in Scarborough and delivers
a performance of transcendentally sublime country and western music to the
enraptured English people in attendance, lifting them out of their empty
lives into a never-imagined world of emotional fulfillment.
Well... Yes. Somehow I think that Benjamin Myers had a
different idea when conceiving of this book. Something about love,
redemption, all that. Instead it reminded me of something which was said in
an interview the other day by the person here in Germany who is the
principle figure in Party A who is most hated by the people in Party C (to
use the notation in my thoughts about No Way Home, reviewed above).
Namely, he considered the people in the former West Germany to be well and
truly Americanized while those in the former East Germany are still able to
think sensibly for themselves. Does the drugged up, alcoholic, country and
western Bucky give a true representation of the present state of the United
States and also of England, with all of those Trumped up delusions? I hope
not.
Trust, by Hernan Diaz
Looking for something to read next, I thought I'd
click on this one. But nothing happened. What had gone wrong? Was Amazon
down? Then I discovered that the book was already in my Kindle, buried
beneath everything else. I had "bought" it a couple of years ago. Opening
the file, it seems that I had given up after only reading 15 or 20%. Would
it be better on a second reading? After all, it had won numbers of
prestigious literary prizes.
The Table of Contents lists just four chapters, or parts.
Yet we soon find that each of these chapters consist themselves of chapters.
In fact the book can be thought of as being a collection of four short
novellas. The first is entitled "Bonds: A Novel, by Harold Vanner". It
describes an extremely unpleasant Wall Street character of the 1920s era,
amassing a huge fortune. His wife is also described with much biographical
detail: extremely intelligent; music lover; philanthropist, giving away the
husband's ill-gotten riches; decline into insanity and death in a Swiss
clinic as a result of pharmaceutical experiments by the "experts" at one of
the husband's many companies.
The second part is "My Life", by Andrew Bevel. It is a
sketch of an autobiography by an extremely unpleasant Wall Street character
of the 1920s era, describing the facts that (1) he is a financial genius who
outsmarted everybody on numerous occasions - in particular the crash of 1929
- and as a result he is the richest and greatest man on Wall Street, and (2)
his wife was a wonderful person, a loving companion who died tragically in a
Swiss clinic of cancer. We are puzzled by the fact that the first two parts
describe similar things, but the names and many of the details of the
stories are different.
The third part is "A Memoir, Remembered", by Ida
Partenza. The author tells us that she was hired as a young secretary by
Andrew Bevel in 1937 or so, in order to take down his dictation and write
his biography. The purpose is to correct the slanderous lies in Vanner's
novel. With all his riches Bevel has destroyed Vanner, but that is not
enough. The world must know that he is the greatest and richest man on Wall
Street who was married to the most wonderful woman who died tragically in a
Swiss clinic of cancer. But Bevel himself dies suddenly before getting very
far with this project, and so the book is never written. Partenza becomes a
famous author of novels, and it is now the 1980s when she is in her 70s. She
often passes by the gigantic 5th Avenue mansion where Bevel had lived. It is
now a museum devoted to all the great things associated with Bevel, but she
has never even thought of entering the place. Yet her curiosity about the
true character of Bevel's wife remains, and she is given access to the
private papers. They are almost unreadable. The handwriting was almost
indecipherable. She smuggles out the personal diary of the wife.
The fourth part is "Futures", by Mildred Bevel. We read
of the pain of cancer in the Swiss clinic; of how her husband is always off
to Zürich, and all those Swiss banks, yet trying to arrange everything for
her comfort in her Alpine clinic. And then in a few revealing passages she
tells us that she was the mathematical genius, directing everything. That
her husband only carried out her financial plans. For example she realized
that in times of financial panic, the ticker-tape would become many minutes,
even hours, behind the present trading. By manipulating such panics and the
resulting delays she could make immense profits. She was using her husband,
Andrew Bevel, in this way due to the fact that as a woman she couldn't
personally trade on Wall Street.
What are we to make of all this? Was it really an
enjoyable book, worthy of all those literary prizes? I thought I'd read the
next book by a guy named Guy, whose dream it was to become the richest and
greatest man on Wall Street, in order to think about what these real-life
Wall Street people are really like.
The author tells us that after finishing top of the
class in his Oxford economics studies, and also top of the class in his
Harvard MBA, in a fit of hubris and ignorance he joined a sleazy Wall Street
outfit whose business it was to sell bad financial products to naive and
innocent people. But he learned his lesson and has realized that the key to
success is to be a good person. A good guy. And so the book becomes, in
large parts, a kind of rewriting of the classic "How to Win Friends and
Influence People". He is in the "F" part of the "FIRE" economy, to use Michael Hudson's acronym: "F"=finance; "I"=insurance;
"RE"=real estate". Guy Spier's role in finance is to buy and sell shares in
companies and thus increase the value of his hedge fund. Well, I am
certainly in no position to make fun of these FIRE people. After all, as
with everybody else I realize that it makes no sense to put your savings in
the Piggy Bank, or even into a savings account in a real bank. In this age
of inflation the Piggy Bank loses money continuously; a savings bank only
provides interest at below the rate of inflation so that it also loses money
continuously, just somewhat slower.
Yet I remember reading somewhere about H.G: Wells'
thoughts on the concept of "shareholders". Buying and selling shares in a
company as if they were casino chips. Who knows what these chips - or in
modern reality, ephemeral symbols flashing across the screen of the laptop -
really represent? You anonymously own some minuscule portion of some sort of
entity, having no responsibility at all for any liabilities that entity may
entail. After all, even the Lord of the Manor in the olden days was
responsible for his bad debts, even if he lived a life of debauchery in
London, Paris, or wherever it was.
So now the world is full of these finance people, buying
and selling shares in the hope of doing well at the expense of others. We
have the financial indexes: DOW, S&P, FTSE, DAX, and so forth. If
your hedge fund outperforms the index then you have won. Otherwise you have
lost. Guy Spier tells us on multiple occasions that his Aquamarine Fund has outperformed the S&P by a huge
margin. But looking further, I see that since its inception in 1997, the
fund has had an average yearly growth of 9.4%, only slightly ahead of the
S&P's 9.2%. Still, that's OK. Most of these funds are losers.
Twenty or more years ago I attended the festival of
ancient music at Innsbruck, and I got into conversation with a retired
German professor of mathematics who also was playing the baroque flute. He
told me a bit about his work, but then he said that he had sufficient
investments that he could comfortably live off the dividends even without
his pension. I was impressed. His subject was pure mathematics, not the
mathematical economics which is offered in many universities today. But
indeed, I see that there have been various mathematicians who have developed
complicated models which have made them billions. The Guy Spier of the
present book does not believe in such things. Instead he believes in a kind
of "Zen in the Art of Shareholding". His guru is the famous Warren Buffet, the success of whose Berkshire Hathaway
fund is the basis of legends. Maybe the simplest idea would be to mirror the
holdings of Berkshire Hathaway. Their top investment is
Apple, and then the third heaviest investment is with Coca Cola.
Well, I had an Apple II back in 1983, and then one of the
first Macintoshes a year or two later. Apple realized that it was easy to
clone the Apple II, and so the Macintosh was designed to make that
impossible. And now their business model is to make expensive, stylish
products which work well together but which are incompatible with other
kinds of electronic gadgetry. That is to say, people are locked into an
expensive system which is difficult to get out of. Coca Cola gives you a
sudden hit of sugar while giving the feeling of satisfying thirst. It is the
cause of much of the obesity and sickness in the western world. Are these
things wonderful investments?
Guy Spier goes on and on about the panic he experienced
during the financial crisis of 2008. These days we have etfs: "exchange
traded funds". Surely the simplest thing is to put your money into one of
those and just leave it there, being only vaguely aware of the day by day
fluctuations. I would steer clear of an MSCI-World etf, since that is almost
exclusively based on fancy American computer stocks which seem to me to be a
questionable proposition. But what do I know? Best to just put your savings
into one of these things and forget about it.
As a final note, some of the most successful traditional
companies in Germany are privately owned. For example Bosch, or Miele. They
are not run by managers whose goal is short-term increases in their share
prices at the expense of long-term planing. Unfortunately, in the present
political climate based on Green thinking they are being driven into the
ground, on the verge of bankruptcy, possibly saving themselves by
transferring production to China, as far as that is allowed to them.
Yesteryear, by Caro Claire Burke
Natalie is a young woman who grew up in the hills
of Wyoming or Montana or whatever it was, in a small town where her father
was the minister of the local church. She is strictly conservative and
religious, yet quick in her thinking, sufficiently so to enter Harvard where
she is shocked with the immorality of the other women students in her
dormitory. But she meets Caleb, also a student at Harvard, coming from a
rich family and thus having been admitted despite his extremely low
intelligence. Caleb's family's money comes from California wine. His father
is a prominent politician, having run once or twice unsuccessfully for the
position of President of the United States. As with the family of the
present inhabitant of that tainted office, Caleb's two older brothers are
devotedly increasing the family's common riches while Caleb simply lies
about in bed playing computer games, wasting his time. But at least he is
religious, and he tells Natalie that his dream is to have a farm and live
the natural life, thus sharing the dreams of all those millions who vote for
the Green Party, imagining a life of pure sunlight and wind, powering the
telephones with which they chat with like-minded people and the electrical
cars which grant them a feeling of superiority over the rest of us, still
dwelling in the age of gasoline and diesel. Thus Natalie marries the
simple-minded Caleb, going off with him to his family's California mansion
amidst the wine fields, the approval of that famous politician, Caleb's
father, who is hopeful that she will make something out of Caleb, and his
mother, existing in a haze of prescription drugs and alcohol.
After a few years of this, during which she was able to
half arouse Caleb to a sufficient degree to generate a baby or two, Natalie
comes up with the idea that the wealthy father could buy a ranch back in
Idaho, or wherever, near the small town where she grew up, and thus give
herself and Caleb something to do. And so they start farming, or ranching,
in an isolated valley between the mountains. They soon find that it is not
as easy as one imagines. Gradually the ranch becomes filled with Latino
workers and the fields are sprayed with poisonous agricultural chemicals.
Nevertheless, chatting with her circle of social media "friends", she
pretends that the idyll is real. One thing turns to another and she has
become a sensation on social media with a following of millions. A young
woman comes to live on the farm with the role of producing short videos of
all this fake country and family life for Natalie's myriads of followers.
But this young, attractive producer becomes disillusioned with all the
falsity. Worse, she comes closer to Caleb, elevating him to new heights of
arousal. All of this leads to crisis and Natalie collapses in a swoon.
She wakes up in a new world. Children she doesn't know
are clinging to her, calling her mama. She is in a farmhouse similar to her
own, but it is run-down, falling apart. The washing machines, dryers,
refrigerators, electrical appliances, stoves which were all carefully hidden
away in her fake farming life have disappeared. An unpleasant, older man,
bearing an uncanny resemblance to Caleb, and who pretends he is her husband,
orders her about. What is this? Some sort of version of life in the 1870s?
Is it an internet recreation of that old television series This Is Your Life? Natalie expects the Master of
Ceremonies to suddenly appear any minute so that she can return to her real
life. Where are the hidden cameras? We read on for page after page about how
Natalie is suffering under the impossible conditions somebody has imposed on
her. Is this really the primitive 19th century? It is horrible!
Continuing to read onward, remembering Fred Hoyle's
science fiction book in which the world becomes mixed up in different times,
we wonder what this is all about. But gradually it is explained that 10 or
15 years have simply passed. There have been various legal processes.
Caleb's wealthy family might have suffered the fate many hope and expect
could await the present hero of Washington. The unfamiliar children are all
those Natalie has produced in the intervening years; her original children,
following the crisis with her social media producer, have been removed, and
they live normal lives in the Big City. The hardened, unpleasant man is
indeed Caleb, 10 or 15 years on. And so this time-warp device is as fake as
everything else in the book.
This is a story of murder, deceit, betrayal, set in
the London of 1749. Henry Fielding, the great novelist, plays a role in
his character as the Chief Magistrate of Westminster and the founder of
London's first police force, the Bow Street Runners. Hannah is a woman in her 30s. She
has a fashionable confectionery shop in Piccadilly. Sugar and all that. It
is a hot summer, but she has a supply of ice in the cellar for cold drinks,
and also she learns to make the fashionable new creation: ice cream. There
is also a hole in the cellar floor, down to one of those small, enclosed
rivers of London, feeding into the Thames. Hannah's husband has been
murdered. He was a key figure in the criminal underground of London. We soon
learn who did it, but that is only part of the story. It is is really all
about Hannah and Daniel Devereux, an attractive, well spoken man, also in
his 30s, who, soon after the murder, shows up with much sympathy for Hannah,
saying he had known her husband well. In reality he is a predator. His
business is to scan the newspapers, on the lookout for youngish widows who
he befriends, has them fall in love with him, then extracts all he can get
from the inheritance.
Poor Hannah seems to be falling for all the deceptions of
Daniel in the twists and turns of the plot where alternatively he plays the
part of the debonair, wealthy gentleman in the presence of Hannah, and then
elsewhere the cynical, hard-hearted, foulmouthed manipulator of everybody.
Henry Fielding occasionally comes on the scene during his investigations,
believing, or at least pretending to believe, in the sincerity of Daniel. We
learn one or another thing about the life of Henry Fielding. I had a phase
some years ago of reading through his novels, and so I had imagined him to
have been an extremely admirable person. He describes his final journey into
death in The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon. But we are
told in the present book that he died young, only 47 years of age, of
alcoholism and generally bad living.
In the end, Hannah was not as gullible as we had feared
and we almost feel sorry for Daniel.
The author was born in Ireland in 1863, he qualified as a
medical doctor and at first became a ship's doctor, presumably becoming
acquainted with the islands of the South Seas. Living in England he combined
medicine with literature, gradually becoming a successful author, but
achieving spectacular success with The Blue Lagoon in 1908. He was a
prolific author, writing many further novels, but in the 1920s he was
inspired to continue the story of the Blue Lagoon with The Garden of God in 1923 and The Gates of Morning in 1925.
The story of The Blue Lagoon is that a man is traveling
with his son Dick and his niece Emmeline, both 8 years old, on a passage to
San Francisco. Somewhere out in the Pacific the ship caught fire during a
nighttime fog and the children ended up in a dingy together with Paddy
Button, the ship's cook. The father and all the others are in different
boats, but as dawn and the fog breaks, they are nowhere to be seen.
Eventually they drift to a tropical island and exist there, first expecting
to be saved but gradually becoming one with the island. Paddy teaches the
children in his simple-minded way practical things, but after a couple of
years he discovers a stash of liqueur and drinks himself to death. The
children are left to themselves in a kind of Garden of Eden of innocence.
They find love for one another and they are surprised and puzzled when
Emmeline disappears into the trees and emerges with a baby. And so the story
develops through the following episodes; the baby growing up to himself
become Dick; his love for the castaway Katafa from Karolin, the big atoll 50
miles to the south; Dick becoming the chief of the the atoll and the tragic
love of Le Moan for Dick. (The real life Caroline Atoll is in the right place, but it is too
small to be the place of the story.) All of this is described in the
Wikipedia articles for each of the books.
The author, writing well over 100 years ago, indulges in
observations of a racial nature which would hardly be acceptable today.
Dick, being of European ancestry, is superior in every way to the Polynesian
inhabitants of Karolin. I have - perhaps regretfully - never had the
experience of living on an island in the South Pacific together with its
Polynesian peoples. It is known that they stem from the indigenous peoples of Taiwan, an East Asian ancestry
notable for its intelligence. But despite this objection it was a wonderful
story of a mythical paradise to divert the mind from the unpleasant
happenings in the world these days.
The author, an American, lived from 1858 to 1918. As a
child she became close friends with Princess Ōyama Sutematsu who was staying
with her family in New Haven, Connecticut as part of the Iwakura Mission, bringing selected aristocratic young
people to study in the United States. Alice Bacon spent time in Japan,
teaching, and later adopted two Japanese girls to be her daughters. All of
this was twenty years and more after Isabella Bird's Journey to the Deep North of Japan, and in any case
Alice Bacon was dealing with the refined upper classes, not the common
people.
This book is a collection of short stories concerned with
the ghosts and hobgoblins, the culture and mythology of Japan, not reality.
Very different from the contemporary stories the Japanese write these days,
at least those we can read in translation. All very much concerned with
death. The last two stories had to do with love fulfilled. In the first a
young man dreams of a young woman whose portrait from long ago hangs on his
wall. She is the object of his dreams. And then he meets her in real life
and they are completely in love. In the final story it is the same woman in
a former life, highly born yet through circumstance she has been forced to
become a dancer, a geisha, yet now in reincarnation she achieves fulfillment
with the young man of the first story.
happenings in the world these days.
The story takes place in the 1920s on an imaginary
island 100 miles out from the southwest corner of Australia. Tom has
returned from the Great War unscathed but guilty about having survived when
most others didn't. He seeks solace in the isolation provided by being a
lighthouse keeper. He marries the young Isabel from the town on the coast
and they live in the harmony of this lonely island life, only being visited
by a boat bringing supplies once every three months, storms permitting.
Their dream is to have a family with many children. Isabel becomes pregnant
but has a miscarriage. Then again, and again. Is this Rhesus Factor Incompatibility? She has now had a new
miscarriage and feels totally destroyed. (All of this is a far cry from the
pampered island life described by Dr. Malcolm Alexander in the book which I
read a month or two ago.) Suddenly, a few days later, a small rowboat washes
ashore on the island containing the dead body of a man and a perfectly
healthy newborn baby girl. Is this the answer to Isabel's prayers? Is it a
gift from God in his all-knowing, benevolent wisdom?
Tom knows that it is his duty to report this incident to
the authorities. The circumstances must be investigated, the baby must be
officially taken care of. But Isabel tearfully begs him to put off signaling
for a day, and then another day. How can he allow Isabel's baby to be torn
away from her? And so the world, or at least the small town on the coast of
Western Australia nearest to the lighthouse, learns that Isabel has finally
experienced the joy of having a baby of her own and Tom becomes the loving
father of his new family.
But who was the dead man Tom has secretly buried on the
island? Where is the real mother? Did she fall overboard and drown? The
truth comes out. It seems that a movie has been made, based on the book. I
can imagine it is just the thing for an overwhelming explosion of cinematic
drama! Huge scenes of the wide ocean; wild storms; the great Australian
landscape; motherhood denied and motherhood robbed; the hatred and violence
of rough, drunken returned soldiers for The Other; and the final, poignant
scene overlooking the Southern Ocean, of the reconciliation of the aging Tom
and the young Lucy/Grace who has grown up and come to show him her newborn
baby. All of this with vast, expansive music. I haven't seen the movie, but
at least I have read the book.
Abused Russia, by Charles Christian
Young
It is sometimes interesting to have a look at the
list of New Releases at gutenberg.org. This one caught my eye. It was first
published in 1914 at the start of the Great War. Now - well over 100 years
later - the United States and NATO, and especially Perfidious Albion, manipulating the pathetic vassals
of the EU, have entered into a new frenzy of Poking the Bear,
sacrificing the poor people of Ukraine, in the hope of rendering it asunder
and dividing the spoils among the oligarchs of the world. Will this again
lead to all-out war? Atomic bombs?
Judging by his name, the author is not Russian. Yet the
book contains many photos, one of which is of a school in Russia with the
caption that here the author went to school. He tells us that he is from
Texas. The book is not a travel story. Instead we are told about Russian
society and its history as the author perceived it during his travels in the
country long ago. Much of it is so politically incorrect that if it were to
be published in the EU today, I am sure the author would immediately land in
prison. Thus I will write no more on this subject.
Another old book, this one first published in 1916.
It is an enjoyable, if ridiculous, romance of the sea on the Northwest Coast
of the United States. The hero is Captain Boyd Mayo, a young man of 25 yet
with vast experience, if not of that between the sexes. We begin with
Captain Mayo navigating a large yacht through the Maine fog into a safe
haven while Alma, the beautiful daughter of the owner, is flirting with poor
Boyd in the pilot house. We certainly imagine the boat to be much bigger
than the Honey Fitz, the Kennedy yacht which was the scene of
much more open and intimate encounters. More on a scale favored by the
Russian oligarchs. Alma's father, Julius Marston, is a mogul of the Gilded
Age, controlling all shipping along the East Coast, destroying all
competition by fair means or foul. The innocent young Captain Mayo has
certainly started off on the wrong foot, philandering with the daughter.
He is soon swept away in an accident on a simple old
fishing yawl and finds himself out to sea with the cantankerous old captain,
together with Polly, his modest, innocent, yet beautiful daughter. We have a
storm, wrecking everything. The yawl capsizes in the violent winds and waves
and ends up floating upside down with everybody trapped inside. The heroic
Boyd manages to chisel out a hole in the hull saving everybody. We have
nasty intrigues by a character named Fogg, an agent of Marston, resulting in
Captain Mayo being suddenly appointed captain of a large ship carrying 800
passengers from New York to Boston, full speed ahead through the nighttime
New England fog. Fogg is standing in the pilot house, intimidating Mayo. He
is carrying a large concealed magnet in his pocket to throw off the ships
compass and so to cause the ship to run aground on a sand bank somewhere
beyond the passage through Vineyard Sound. In disgrace, Mayo flees, hires
onto a ship at Newport News disguised as a simple seaman, discovers that
Alma and some lackey of her father have also boarded the ship to elope
together. Yet again a storm sinks that ship with the heroic Captain Mayo
saving the day. There follow further intrigues. Boyd is back in Maine on an
old fishing boat, and another ship is wrecked on a rocky reef. The story
lurches from one shipwreck to the next, ending with the hero and the
wonderfully true Polly living happily ever after.
