deebee logs her reading in 2012

2011 was a slow reading year for me - health, travel, and work took up more of me than just time, so leisure reading had to take a backseat. All told, I completed only 35 books, 10 of which were non-fiction. I don't want to set targets but if could keep the F/NF ratio this year, it would make me one happy reader.

Of last year's reading, the most memorable ones were the following:

The King in the Golden Mask by Marcel Schwob (short stories)
Arabian Sands by Wilfred Thesiger (NF)
The Invention of the Jewish People by Shlomo Sand (NF)
Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War by Robert Fisk
African Silences by Peter Matthiesen (NF)

None of my longer fiction reads exactly blew me away, though The Winners by Julio Cortazar and Riders in the Chariot by Patrick White came close.

This year I hope to log a bit more than just my reading -- perhaps will include music and film. Ambitious, I know, but I've been meaning for ages to have some order (and discipline) in recording them in some way. Let's see.

List of books read in 2012

The Master of the Day of Judgment by Leo Perutz (1924, Austria)
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (1925, UK)
The Lizard's Tail by Luisa Valenzuela (1983, Argentina)
Memoirs of an Anti-Semite by Gregor von Rezzori (1979, Austria/Romania)
Shadows and Wind: A View of Modern Vietnam by Robert Templer (1999)
The White Guard by Mikhail Bulgakov (published in parts since 1924, Ukraine/Russia)
Voices of the Old Sea by Norman Lewis (1984, UK)
Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and their Journey by Isabel Fonseca (1996, US)
2666 by Roberto Bolaño (2004, Chile)
Paradise of the Blind by Duong Thu Huong (1988, Vietnam)
The Routes of Man: How Roads are Changing the World and How We Live Today by Ted Conover (2010, US)
The Book of Ebenezer Le Page by G.B. Edwards (1981,UK)
A Dragon Apparent: Travels in Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam by Norman Lewis (1951, UK)
All Men are Mortal by Simone de Beauvoir (1946, France)
The Whispering Land by Gerald Durrell (1964m UK)
Granta 83: This Overheating World (1983, UK)

Great to see you back.

This year I hope to log a bit more than just my reading -- perhaps will include music and film. I will look forward to all of that! I will be interested to see what you have to say about the Luisa Valenzuela. I've just ordered a Bombal collection, after reading her The House of Mist.

Hi deebee! I completely lost track of you as last year went on. Good to run into you again!

Hi deebee, good to see you here again! I hope 2012 affords you a bit more time for reading.

Hi, deebee! I'm thrilled to see you back here, although my TBR reduction plan will likely suffer once you, Rachel, Rebecca, Akeela and others start reading and reviewing books.

Thanks, all, I'm happy to be back! Darryl, you don't really set a good example either -- I'm sure dozens here at LT can attest to how you've singlehandedly broken down their resolve not to add more to their mounting TBRs! :-)

1. The Master of the Day of Judgment by Leo Perutz (1924, Austria)

The Master of the Day of Judgment is an intruiging mystery about a succession of apparent suicides that take place in early 20th century Vienna. First an artist, then his brother. The highly regarded actor Eugen Bischoff who knew those 2 previous unfortunates is himself found dead in his own home, a victim it seemed of his own hand. It was 2 days before the opening of his biggest and most awaited play -- there was absolutely no reason for him to end his life just then. Close friends who were in the vicinity at that time, took it upon themselves to explore the mystery of this series of unexplained suicides. Within two days, they painstakingly try to establish what took place during the actor's last hour and follow clues that, only gradually they realise, placed them at greater and greater peril. Two more suicides in the same number of days bring to light the secret that connected these events.

This is the first work I’ve read of Perutz and I’m impressed by how the real (or what we are led to believe to be real) and the imaginary fluidly merge in his narration. We wonder in the end if we were reading an account by Baron von Yosch (a friend of the actor) of an actual hunt for the "monster" which had triggered the suicides, or if the existence of the "monster" was an ingenious stratagem he took to deflect attention from the real cause of the suicide (the Baron himself). A psychological thriller, completely absorbing, and the eerie ambiguity in the end which could be an unsatisfactory close from a lesser writer, in this case only served to enhance the fantastical elements of the story. Highly recommended.

Sounds like an enjoyable read, deebee.

Agreed. I'm going to look for this one.

deebee--it's good to see you again--and I've already added one of your reads to my wishlist--The Master of the Day of Judgement

Great review - I have it out from the library so will be reading it sometime in the next month or so. I can highly recommend The Swedish Cavalier, The Marquis of Bolibar or By Night Under the Stone Bridge by Perutz - all combine interesting historical stories with some ambiguous twists/fantastic elements.

> 12, I'm sure you will enjoy it, Deborah.

> 13, Thanks for mentioning his other works. I'm already looking forward to my next Perutz.

2. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (1925, UK)

What can I say that has not already been said and more articulately, too, about this wonderful book? What stood out for me was the idea that people's inner selves are infinitely richer and more exciting than what our eyes can perceive.

3. The Lizard's Tail by Luisa Valenzuela (1983, Argentina)

The book opens with a prophecy: a river of blood will flow and afterwards, there will be 20 years of peace. We are taken to the waters along which the Sorcerer grew up and where he, after being deposed in the Capital, now returns to bring to reality the prophecy. Vicious, self-obsessed to an unimaginable degree, he appropriates loyalties that cannot be revoked, as he did in the former days. He is a master of cruelty, of deceit, and he spares no one, not even the Dead Woman (a reference to Eva Peron). Especially the Dead Woman, for he, at the right time, must become the reverence of her faithful. The townspeople living along the riverside are made to build a pyramid of mirrors on which his image can multiply to infinity. And inside that pyramid, a dazzling white cocoon from which he will emerge, transformed into the eternal I, motherfatherson.

The Lizard’s Tail is a fictional biography of Jose Lopez Rega, Minister of Social Welfare during the Peronist government (from Juan Peron’s government, and continued by his third wife and vice-president, Isabel Peron), who was known to engage in occultism and the dark arts, earning him the name El Brujo. Rega was Isabel Peron’s Rasputin, acting as de facto prime minister, ruling Argentina with policies and decisions that were dictated by sorcery and witchcraft. During his rule, he organized the Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance (Triple A), a terrorist group responsible for the deaths of 1,500 persons and the exile of hundreds more. It was this group which was responsible for the Ezeiza massacre in June 1973, which began the “Dirty War” that over the next years would claim up to 30,000 deaths and disappeared. The lizard’s tail refers to the whip that torturers use.

Dark, unrelentingly ominous, every line oozing with the macabre, every page screaming malevolence that’s all the more disturbing being based on the lives of real persons and on real events that took place in a real country -- this was not an enjoyable read in the usual sense. But Valenzuela, like her character is a shaman, whose writing weaves the reader into a spell, allowing entrance to the delirious world of a power-mad sorcerer, that finds no release until the spectacular end.

Great review of The Lizard's Tale, but I am not sure I have got the stomach to read it. I will however be reading Mrs Dalloway later this year it is creeping up my TBR pile.

Sigh. I think I need an escape clause for my TBR reduction plan: "Books purchased after deebee recommended them do not count toward the TBR pile." The Master of the Day of Judgment and The Lizard's Tail are added to the wish list after your irresistible reviews.

*walks away, mumbling to self*

An excellent review of The Lizard's Tale, deebee. Having retired from a career in public social welfare, I am drawn in by your reference to Rega's role as Minister of Social Welfare, even if it is a dark one. Now, if I can just figure out where to find on a copy.

Glad to see you back, deebee! And thanks for the excellent review of the Valenzuela.

Wow, I think I'm going to add The Lizard's Tale to the list. Sounds like you'd have to be in the right mood to read it though or read it along with something a little lighter.

> 17 I agree, Barry, that it needs a strong stomach to read this book. It is not so much the gore (which appears now and then, but only very briefly each time contrary to what might be expected), but the levels to which a sick, sick mind who has been granted dangerous power can reach.

>18 kidzdoc: Darryl, I hope you've written in the clause because I hope to recommend a few more this year -- we're only in January, remember! :-)

>19 Linda92007: Linda, that Lopez Rega who epitomised cruelty, was in charge of an office called Social Welfare added merely to the surreality of events in Argentina that time. I hope you find a copy.

> 20 Rachel! Nice to see you here...

> 21 DF, you're right, it requires a certain mood. It helped that I had a collection of Saki's stories to read along.

Great review of The Lizard's Tail! I have it on my shelf, but had no idea it was so.....intense? I like to pick up books by Latin American authors without knowing what they're about, and this book was one of those. Must get to it soon!

Hi deebee. Happy you're back! I always enjoy your book choices and comments.

> 23 Intense is the word. I didn't expect that myself when I bought the book, now I'm compelled to look for more of her writings.

> 24 Great to see you, too, akeela. I hope to finally get to The Quiet Violence of Dreams this year -- another intense read.

Shadows and Wind: A View of Modern Vietnam by Robert Templar (UK, 1998)

Shadows and Wind attempts at a comprehensive view of post-war Vietnam, exploring its political, social, and cultural landscapes. The intent is obvious, but the outcome is not so convincing. I picked this book up to prepare for my trip there next week as I wanted something that was not about the war, and the book being one of only a handful of such available in English, I gave it a go. Templer covers a lot of ground -- memories of the war, literature, religion, AIDS, drugs, architecture, food, the Vietnamese Communist Party, the country's unique relationship with China, the Viet Kieu (Overseas Vietnamese or the "boat people"). The range of topics is remarkable and provides ample interest for many including those whose idea of Vietnam begins and ends according to Hollywood. His main thesis is that Vietnam is in some kind of an identity conundrum, torn between loyalty to what it stood for and stood against in history (exemplified by its political elite) and eagerness to embrace capitalism and new ways of doing things. He takes pains to show in every example that Vietnam, for all its apparent show of "openness" is still very much run by the remnants of the old cadre -- corrupt, obsolete, ill at ease with what is new and "Western", a political elite clinging tenaciously to power and an ideology that has practically lost ground in the consciousness of its youth, who make up two-thirds of its population.

While Templer writes well for the most part (he was a journalist of Agence France-Presse), he is careless in some, lazy even, with generalizations like "Young Vietnamese defy categorisation." (p.339) ? He seemed to know Vietnam, but only based on what can be gathered from secondary sources and selectively too, in order to support his hypothesis -- his writing is very much that of the typical Western expert who comes and lives for some time in these small countries and makes it a living to dish out criticisms from an i-know-it-better-than-these-locals perspective. All this is not to say that I didn't learning anything from this book, just that I'm taking it all in with a grain of salt.

The book sounds a little humdrum.

A visit to Vietnam on the other hand sounds fascinating.

You're right on both counts. I find it frustrating that there is very little serious writing available about Vietnam and its neighboring countries beyond the Vietnam war. Certainly it is a region that became in geopolitical terms, less important after the war and then again even less after the fall of Communism, though it is not less interesting for that. I suppose, however, that the gathering of primary material and information is still a challenge for would-be authors in what is still considerably a "closed" region.

I'm looking forward to details about your trip to Viet Nam!

Memoirs of an Anti-Semite by Gregor von Rezzori (1979, Romania/Austria)
Translated from the German by Joachim Neugroschel

It is not what you think it is. On the contrary, these are the semi-autobiographical reflections of an elderly gentleman on memorable and dear events in his long life which brought him into more than just passing contact with a people whom he should despise, as he was brought up to believe. Growing up in the easternmost reaches of the dying Austro-Hungarian empire before the 1920s (now Romania), in an upperclass Austrian family who held fast and pathetically to the illusion of imperial injunction to represent civilising influences in this backward region, part of his instruction was to keep clear of Jews. The Jews were of course numerous in this part of Europe and hopelessly for our hero, he is torn between repulsion and fascination by these people who seem to be more clever, more sophisticated (at times more goodlooking even!), and led far more interesting lives than everybody else around him. This uneasy ambivalence followed him from boyhood through adulthood in the early aftermath of the 2nd world war.

Despite appearances to the contrary especially to his family, he did not particularly avoid circumstances that would eventually create a special bond and relationship between him and certain Jews. The memoirs are composed of 5 such episodes -- as a young boy, his summer friendship with a piano prodigy of the same age, as a young man -- a strange arrangement with a girl to secretly go through and dispose of the belongings of her dead relations, a secret affair with a widow which ended in a humiliating way, an intense friendship with an interesting girl who introduced him to the literati of Vienna, and last, his falling in love with and marrying a frighteningly beautiful and intelligent girl broken by the experiences of war and whom even his love could not put back together again. Those experiences marked him in subtle ways for many years to come, all the more for being a witness to the unfolding of the grim events which led these people to the death camps. Despite these bonds, he recalls the times when he acted in petty contempt or perhaps jealousy toward these same people for being "other" and we realise at the end that commiting his recollections to paper many decades after was the gentlest and most loving act he could do to honor them.

von Rezzori crafts each story so beautifully, with subtle humor and humanity. Without sentimentality, he conveys his love for and deep connection with a place and a way of life in that sad, remote part of Europe that now exists only in his memory. As only the best of writers can, he draws us deftly into his world and mind without our being conscious of the transition that we go through each time we open a page of his book. He does this in a fluid way I rarely feel about other equally excellent authors' works, and this is what makes him, in my opinion, a cut above the rest. It's a pity he is not more widely read.

A great review. I wonder if the title is deliberately "deceptive".

Fabulous review of Memoirs of an Anti-Semite, deebee. Onto the wishlist it goes.

Very nice review. I have Memoirs of an Anti-Semite and am hoping to read it soon. However, I don't it will be the best book for taking around and reading in public.

A very interesting review, deebee. Unfortunately, our library system does not have it. But there is a Kindle version. So tempting...

I loved von Rezzori's The Snows of Yesteryear and plan to read An Ermine in Czernopol when I'm away next week. I've had Memoirs of an Anti-Semite on the TBR for several years, but haven't found a good time to read it since I do a lot of reading on the subway and that's not a title (however deceptive) that I'd like to be seen with in public!

Enjoyed your excellent review of Memoirs of an Anti-Semite

Memoirs of an Anti-Semite sounds like quite a book. I'm making a note of it.

I've generally avoided Memoirs of an Anti-Semite, irrationally just based on the title, but I have added it to the wishlist now.

thanks, all, for the kind comments.

>29 kidzdoc: no, you won't...it will be all about work :-( but i'll be happy to share photos if i manage to get any during this trip!

>31 Rise: I think yes. A provocative declaration like this made so blatantly and in-your-face renders it a bit false and intriguing. Rather than scaring off would be readers, I would like to believe that he thought such a title would pique their curiousity instead.

>33 DieFledermaus:, 35 i agree, reading it in public does not sound like a good idea.

The White Guard by Mikhail Bulgakov (published in parts beginning in 1926, published in English, 1971, Ukraine/Russia)

It is December 1918 in Kiev, and it is a time of turmoil. The Germans have occupied the city, the Socialists are camped outside waiting for their moment, and the Bolsheviks are in attention, ready to dig up their buried armaments. The Turbin family, Tsarists and wealthy once, has lost their matriarch, and the three siblings - Alexei, Elena, and Nikolka face the unknowable as they suddenly find their world shrinking. We see the disintegration of a society into chaos through the prism of this family's experiences -- Elena's abandonment by her German officer husband, Alexei and Nikolka's brief and frustrating stint with the army, Alexei's being shot by the rebellious forces.

But terror has arrived, and nobody would be spared. And a worse terror it was because on the eve of its arrival, there was nobody to defend the city. The army had been abandoned by their leaders, officers had simply walked away, soldiers had started to disappear on duty -- and it is the likes of Alexei and Nikolka, young, inexperienced, eager and patriotic foot soldiers who were left to look the enemy in the eye. The White Guard had lost the war even before firing a single shot. The victors would celebrate, and the entire city is a well of instant support and adulation for the mysterious, invisible Socialist leader, Petlyura. Amidst the chaos and insanity of the world around them, we see small and ultimately feeble attempts by the Turbins, to continue as before -- there is still the lace on the table, the late parties with close friends, but we know that theirs was already a doomed world.

Bulgakov portrays those terrifying days masterfully -- he conveys us through the city and more than through what our eyes tell us, we become aware of what is happening through its sounds and smells. There is the smell of fear, the unforgettable smell of the dead and decaying bodies in the city's mortuary (this has to be one of the most graphic description in literature!). And simply through snatches of conversations and exchanges, we are able to imagine the parade of the victors to its tiniest detail, sense the mood of the crowds, feel the crush of bodies as the masses move from church to plaza. I could swear I was there, as spectator and eavesdropper.

The White Guard is said to be based partially on Bulgakov's life. Although with slight variation, the home of the Turbins (the exact address is given in the book) describes the Bulgakov's residence in the city. Alexei, the eldest son, was a doctor who specialised in venereal diseases. Bulgakov was one in real life. The book itself has has a dramatic story. Bulgakov could only publish it in parts in 1926. As he could not publish it under Stalin, he adapted it as a play called "The Days of the Turbins." Interestingly, though the play was centered on the life of a bourgeois family, Stalin liked it so much he went to see the play at the Moscow Art Theatre at least 15 times! The book was only published in full 26 years after Bulgakov's death in 1940.

This book was a joy to read, not for the subject which god knows, could not have been more grim, but for the way Bulgakov bridges the epic and the historic, and the familiar and the graspable. It is very much literature as I understand how it should be.

The white Guard sounds a fascinating read. Great review.

I've only read The Master and Margarita, but your review makes me want to dip into more of Bulgakov's writing.

Great review of The White Guard, deebee. Fortunately I don't have to add this to my wish list, since I already own it, along with The Master and Margarita. Which book should I read first?

Just now catching up with your thread. Your reviews have made these books so enticing (well, except Shadows and Wind). I'm adding Memoirs of an Anti-Semite to my wishlist so I might remember it.

Enjoyed your review of The White Guard, which I knew nothing of previously. I have The Master and Margarita but have not read it yet. Maybe I need to add it to my hope-to-reads. Thanks!

I'll certainly look for The White Guard as I think The Master and Margarita is brilliant.

To go back to Memoirs of an Anti-Semite, I did read An Ermine in Czernopol while I was away and really enjoyed it. I do find it somewhat disturbing, though, that von Rezzori moved to Berlin in 1938 (!) and worked as a radio announcer during the second world war, something that must have been sanctioned by the Nazis at the very least.

Hi deebee, thanks to your review, I've also added the White Guard to my mental list of books I'd like to read soon ("soon" being some time in the next decade probably!).

Hi deebee, I hope all is well. I actually picked up The White Guard at the library last month and finished it a few days ago. I'm so pleased to have read it, but I've no idea now how I'm going to review it - your review says it all and much better than I ever could!

Been very busy with work for a couple of months now, have not had the time to review the 6 books I've finished since the last post. Hope to catch up soon.

Rebeki, glad to know you enjoyed The White Guard, and thanks for the kind words!

Hi, deebee! Which books have you read since your last post?

Hi, Darryl! Please see message 2 above which has been updated.

Thanks, deebee. I think I'll just add all of these books (except for 2666, which I've already read) to my wishlist. :-)

Darryl, except for 2666 and The Routes of Man, all others I can highly recommend.

Voices of the Old Sea by Norman Lewis (1984, UK)

Norman Lewis returns to Spain after World War II, drawn by its spiritual and cultural isolation from the rest of Europe, wanting to experience a way of life in its remotest regions that has remained unchanged since the medieval times. He chose to spend three summers in a village called Farol in Costa Brava, on the northeast coast of the country.

Farol is a tiny, poor fishing community where life revolved around the seasonal sardine catches, the Alcalde's bar, and its feuds with the neighboring village of farmers. Nothing, not even the civil war, had been known to break apart their tiny world and life remains simple and perpetual as the tides of the eastern Mediterranean to which their daily fate is joined. As he gets to know more about Farol (also known as the cat village), its colorful and idiosyncratic characters, their customs and folklore, Lewis also gets a glimpse of the "enemy" village -- the peasant community (also known as the dog village) who took care of the thousands of oak trees. On Lewis's second summer, the trees started to show signs of disease, and before long there was no healthy tree standing. The fate and life of these two villages, for all their seeming enmity with each other, are so intertwined that soon enough, the fishing village too felt the decline. Worse, the sardine catches lately had been very poor. The situation was desperate for everybody.

In the meantime, it was observed that some construction was being done on an old, abandoned house. Soon after, a handful of foreigners arrived and and lodged in that house, apparently now converted into a small hotel. More construction, and a busload of tourists later, Farol was on its way to becoming a resort town. Curious, angry, but above all, helpless to stop the wave and having no alternatives, villagers had to struggle between continuing the only way of life they know and love but which was increasingly difficult to sustain, and changing and going with the flow. We know how it ended. What war failed to destroy, mass tourism ruined irrevocably.

Farol's story is not unique, as we are now starkly reminded by travel brochures bombarded on us advertising trip packages in huge hotel complexes, bars and entertainment places up and down the entire Spanish coast that every summer is overran by the tourist hordes. We can be sure that under each of these monstrosities is buried the fishing village that Farol once was. What we want to be acquainted with is that lost village, its singularity, its identity intact and still possessing of a soul.

Lewis does this for us wonderfully without engaging in sentimentality. He brings the past of Farol back to life in a vivid and memorable portrayal that is not short of affection, humor and sympathy. Two events he describes are exceptionally well-written. One is the great sardine fishing to which he had the rare honor as an outsider to be invited, not done in any way you and I would imagine, but with the ritual and ceremony for what amounts to these heretical people (the poor Catholic priest from the neighboring parish has given up on them) as sacred, followed by a violence during the snaring of the fish that is bloody and gracefully choreographed as a ballet. Another unforgettable description he makes is that of spear fishing in the shallower waters.

I enjoyed Lewis's writing thoroughly that I've since bought a few more titles of his, mostly published by Eland.

I share your enthusiasm for Norman Lewis's travel writing deebee1. and that's an excellent review of Voices of the Old Sea.

#54 - on the wishlist

Superb review of Voices of the Old Sea, deebee! That's definitely one for the wish list.

Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and their Journey by Isabel Fonseca (US, 1996)

Between 1991 and 1995, Isabel Fonseca visited East Central Europe many times and lived among families in the various gypsy communities of Romania, Albania, Poland, Bulgaria and neighboring countries. Fonseca is an anthropologist so she had a professional interest in exploring more deeply the history, customs and culture, the present conditions, and the future prospects of this group of people who are perhaps the least understood in the world today. Employing the usual rigorous methods of research during the process, however, does not reduce her subjects to mere objects of scholarship and observation, as her experience transforms her into a witness and a voice. She records stories, plenty of them, of various gypsy - or Roma- groups across these countries, seeking families and individuals who were willing to talk with her, to afford her a glimpse of their daily lives. She meets the poet, the politician, the academic, the self-proclaimed King, the child prostitute, among others and through vivid portrayals of these individuals we understand a little more about the immense challenges the gyspies face in every conceivable aspect of modern life.

The general outlines of the story of the Romas is well-known. Since their exodus from India 10 centuries ago, they have had a long and bitter history of persecution: enslaved by the nobility of medieval Romania, massacred by the Nazis, forcibly assimilated by the communist regimes, evicted by Eastern Europe nationalist mobs, and recently, increasingly rejected by Western European countries as well. It is striking to realise that the last four stages all occurred within the last century. It is not an exaggeration to say that the gypsies have remained the scapegoat that they've always been, it seemed, in history. The only difference between them and others who also stood as scapegoats, is that their story is untold because they are invisible (e.g. except as being objects of the Nazi experiments, their experience during the Holocaust is undocumented).

The gypsies evoke a strange mix of feelings and attitudes in general -- they are at once fabled, feared, romanticised, reviled and spurned. Shamefully for humankind, despite the so-called human progress claimed to have been achieved, being the Other remains a stigma. It does not help that the Romas are fiercely independent, highly traditionalistic, tightly-knit, prefering their nomadic way of life and keeping to ancient customs, stubbornly refusing to be straightjacketed by any modern system. Fonseca doesn't skirt around the uncomfortable issues, she mentions the conceptions and the prejudices that the non-gypsy has about the gypsies and clarifies with her experience but does not judge. She confirms, for example, that gypsies lie. They lie a lot -- not to each other, but to the gadje (non-gypsy), but this is not, for them, something of malice --- it is a telling of a story with embellishments, of crafting a story that the listener wants to hear, of inventing a story because he/she does NOT want the gadje to know as to know is tantamount to exposing their (the gypsies') true self. It is a means of defense, the survival of the group. Contrary to common perception of gypsies being free spirits and with no sense of order or moral compunction, their daily life is in fact strictly governed by a set of age-old customs and taboos that reinforce as well their highly developed community spirit: the gypsies live for the group, individuality is not recognized.

Fonseca paints the gypsies' rich life of traditions, family values, community well-being amidst wretched poverty, squalid conditions, and most worrying of all, the increasing hate crimes being committed against them in various parts of Europe. She mentions appalling events in Central and Eastern Europe, reminiscent of the medieval ages, shocking to the extreme such as burning people, razing villages. Western Europe, on the other hand, is driving back the many Romas who have crossed to their frontiers with the expansion of the EU zone -- but to drive back where, as nobody wants them.

There are some encouraging signs though and Fonseca concludes her fascinating account with mention of the extraordinary efforts being done by a small group of Roma intellectuals who fought for international recognition of the Romas, and whose movement continues to keep the awareness of the Romas, their gaping needs and means to address them, within the sights of EU policymakers specially in the context of the immigration issue.

Enlightening in many respects, this is also a narrative of a skilled story-teller. Highly recommended.

Very interesting review. I've had that book for years, but I don't think I've ever read it. I thought I had, but most of what you wrote doesn't sound familiar and, although I'd be the first to say I forget a lot of what I read, it usually sounds familiar when someone reminds me of it!

58 - Interesting review. There was an article a while back in Columbia Magazine about a lawyer* who is doing civil rights work with the Roma in Europe. Article is here. It's a tragically interesting topic, and one that isn't well known enough.

*He also go his start as a young attorney on Brown vs. the Board of Education. What a life, huh?

Fabulous review of Bury Me Standing, deebee. I've been curious about the Romas, but I haven't read any nonfiction books about them. I'll definitely pick this up soon.

Other remains a stigma. It does not help that the Romas are fiercely independent, highly traditionalistic, tightly-knit, prefering their nomadic way of life and keeping to ancient customs, stubbornly refusing to be straightjacketed by any modern system.

Fascinating review of Bury Me Standing. Now that you have highlighted it, I'm realizing the gypsies, perhaps more than most ethnic groups, are an unknown quantity because so little has been written about them that is not hostile, scurilous or worse. It is just unfortunate that sometimes the only contact we gadje have with them is to encounter the criminal element at one airport or another and so the negative impression is perpetuated. And of course, they don't have a corner on criminality, but those fiercely independent, highly traditionalistic, tightly-knit, prefering their nomadic way of life, etc., traits, their intentional otherness, almost guarantee that they will continue to be viewed as Other. This can be seen in other groups that hold themselves apart as well. It is one of those social dilemmas that perhaps have no solution but are interesting to ponder just the same.

I'm curious about the Gypsies, and will note this book. Very interesting review.

Excellent review of Bury me Standing. This book sounds like required reading. In France a couple of years ago there was a push to rid the country of undesirable immigrants and the Roumanian Gypsies topped the list. President Sarkosy made much political capital (to his eternal shame) out of tough measures against them. Unfortunately it was just what many French people wanted to hear.

I, too, was very interested to read your review of Bury Me Standing. The only times I've really been aware of Roma people have been the couple of occasions on which I've been approached by rather persistent Roma beggars and I would gladly have my mind broadened by reading this book.

Thanks, all, for the comments.

60
Thanks for the link. The Romas couldn't have found a more towering and able figure to rally their cause than Jack Greenberg. Just in April, Columbia Law Review published his report on Roma school segregation. All very interesting and important development.

62
I'm realizing the gypsies, perhaps more than most ethnic groups, are an unknown quantity because so little has been written about them that is not hostile, scurilous or worse.

I don't quite agree that what little there is written about them is "hostile, scurrilous or worse". First, there are very few records about their experience, and what we find available is either academic material or memoir and very little between -- Fonseca's being one of them. (They are, however, a favorite photograpic subject and their images populate many a gallery and photo collection.) Then, outright negative writing seems to be in disagreement with the nature of those material available in that narrow range of writing. Another factor is that the Romas themselves do not have any documentation of their own -- many of them are illiterate, and it seems that as in the case of their experience during the Holocaust (Fonseca mentions this), those who survived and their families prefer to forget those painful events, in effect, erasing them from the collective memory. This is also related to their concept of time -- it is not ordered sequentially, as well as their concept of reality -- imagination and myth play a huge part, so that faithful recording of events and memories is more difficult.

We have gypsies here in Portugal -- the Portuguese gypsies who have lived here for centuries, and those who arrived when the EU zone expanded to include Eastern European countries. The first are well integrated, and it is reassuring to know that the Portuguese government has taken pains to adopt policies which aim to assimilate them. They are citizens, of course, and have exactly the same rights but as their own practices and customs are themselves self-marginalizing, special policies had to be created to take this into account while respecting their tradition (e.g. withdrawing their daughters from school at a certain age). I see them quite often as they live not very far from my place -- they are not the thieves, the petty criminals that they are made out to be. They are different in some ways -- they dress differently, they are loud and always go in groups, they peddle small items, fruits, clothes, anything mostly in public transport areas, they keep to themselves, but there is nothing offensive about that. The newly arrived ones, however, are a different story. They live in makeshift shanties in the edges of town, in abandoned warehouses and they go about the streets selling some cheap, small items. There is one man who frequents our area and looks into the garbage containers for what can be recovered. I see them beg very rarely, and I've never heard stories about them causing any trouble. I don't know what my local government is doing for them, and I'm not quite sure how they could be reached, and in a sustained and meaningful way.

This can be seen in other groups that hold themselves apart as well. It is one of those social dilemmas that perhaps have no solution but are interesting to ponder just the same.

I rather think that Romas are not just "other groups." There are 12 million of them, numbering more than the population of many small European countries -- they are a people with a distinct culture, language(s), history but without a land of their own -- and their presence in practically all European countries raise this to more than just a ponderable dilemma. They are actually very similar in situation to the Jews even as late as seven decades ago. The difference is that they have not been picked up as a political cause, except, again that word, as a scapegoat. The efforts of a handful of Romas and gadje, including Greenberg, to influence policy are inspiring but it is one tough battle.

64
Barry, yes, that was shameful of Sarkozy. He distanced himself too far this time from his own immigrant past. Ditto for Berlusconi for those camp attacks in Naples.

deebee, I seem to have hit a nerve which was quite unintentional. I should have said that most of what I have read is negative rather than assuming I was acquainted with the entire body of published work on the subject, which I am clearly not. So I stand corrected.

I would agree that the gypsies are "not just 'other groups'." You changed my meaning by taking that out of context. I was speaking specifically in terms of "other groups that hold themselves apart," who resist assimilation. In the US we have various examples of religious or ethnic groups who, at various points in their history, either by design or necessity, have "held themselves apart," and that very self-imposed apartness has contributed to various kinds of mindless prejudice. Your point about the EU experience kind of illustrates what I failed to articulate.

A fascinating review and discussion, deebee.

Very interesting and insightful comments about the Romas, deebee; thanks for sharing them with us.

Wonderful review of Bury Me Standing - added it to the list.

Yesterday, I went to a place which I'm sure every Club Reader can easily lose themselves in for an afternoon...a bookstore called Ler Devagar.



Ler Devagar has been featured in Flavorwire, which consider it one of 20 most beautiful bookstores in the world. Wouldn't put too much on this online magazine's claim (i've never been a pop culture fan) though it's been featured in other magazines elsewhere it seems, but the place sure is unique and interesting. Located in a spacious industrial complex in the old docks of Lisbon, the bookstore was converted from an old thread and textile factory (from the late 19th century). The presses are still there and around them are coffee and bar areas, as well as an extensive music collection. They stock small and medium-publishers only, and no "bestsellers" are to be found here. No Paulo Coelho available, but thousands of other books, each worth the paper it's printed on and every inch of shelfspace in this wondrous place.

Ler Devagar sounds great.

They stock small and medium-publishers only, and no "bestsellers" are to be found here.

Oh, I would love to have access to a bookstore like that, deebee. All the hidden treasures that you might otherwise never find. Did you make purchases that you might share with us?

72
It is! They stock second-hand books as well. "Ler Devagar" means read slowly.

73
That's true, Linda. In the literature section, though, there's almost none in English, but there were so many French, Spanish, and Portuguese titles that have not been translated into English. I despair when I think of what I'm losing out on just because my skills in these languages aren't up to par... :-( The other sections, though, had extensive collections in English but as we didn't have much time except to give the place a quick tour (we were there for a talk by the Palestinian ambassador to commemorate the Nakba), a more leisurely inspection of the books (and a purchase or two) had to be postponed for another day.

I've finished about a dozen books since my last review, but have not had the time to catch up on review writing. Just so I can cover the lot, will post short comments or mini-reviews instead.

2666 by Robert Bolaño (2004, Chile)
Translated by Natasha Wimmer

This highly-acclaimed masterpiece of Latin American literature, sadly, didn't do anything for me and not for lack of trying. I picked up this book when it first came out, read more than a hundred pages, and didn't have the heart to pick it up again and finish it until some weeks ago. I recall book 1 to be really flat and unengaging, book 2 perhaps the most interesting, book 3 just okay, book 4 numbing both in its content and its repetitiveness, and book 5 unmemorable. Many reviewers talk of hidden meanings, symbolisms, and a message -- what came across to me was an emptiness after the ~1,000 pages of words -- I felt nothing, or perhaps numbness is the better word, though I do not regret putting time in. I'm sure I missed the point entirely, and this I feel sorry for.

Paradise of the Blind by Duong Thu Huong (1988, Vietnam)
Translated by Nina McPherson

Duong Thu Huong's writings are banned in Vietnam, and this novel, her fourth, gives us an idea why. Paradise of the Blind is a portrait of three women who struggle to realize their dreams under a regime that denies the individual's pursuit of personal happiness, corrodes family ties and values, erases time-honored cultural practices and traditions, and oppresses the will through repression and corruption. Hang is a young woman who is torn between love for her poor, widowed mother and loyalty to her rich, domineering aunt who has devoted her life to fighting what she perceived as injustices perpetuated by the Communist regime through the abuses of its petty cadres. Both elder women devote their lives to sheer backbreaking labour to vie for Hang's love by regaining what they lost in the sweeping and merciless changes that the new government demanded. Misplaced devotion to family ties complicates the situation, when an uncle returning from the war himself becomes an official. All this has unfortunate consequences on Hang, and she is forced to go to Russia as a factory worker where she unavoidably realizes the extent of her country's political leaders' excesses, more than she would have learned of back home. She carries a heavy burden.

In less capable hands, this story would have seemed like a script for a telenovela, but Huong is a wonderful writer and while there is more than enough misery to go around, the story never sounds contrived or untrue, because everything is so close to the ground. I've read some books on the Vietnam war, seen my share of films including those by the great Joris Ivens, have Vietnamese friends and colleagues, and travel regularly to this country, so I have some appreciation for the story's context. Based on what I know, I feel the country in this book. The author portrays customs, traditions so deeply ingrained that not even the regime could suppress them, strong family values, community spirit, hard work, (exquisite) food and the preparation of food which highlights its centrality in the Vietnamese way of life. Apart from being a political commentary, this book succeeds as well as a cultural and social commentary. A very worthwhile read.

Interesting comments on 2666. Terrific review of paradise of the blind. Wondering about your experiences in Vietnam and what bring you there so often.

Excellent review of Paradise of the Blind, deebee.

Emptiness and numbness does not sound good. Have you read anything else by Bolano? I have been intimidated by reviews of his works, but have been thinking of tackling The Savage Detectives, which I own.

>78 Linda92007: I had deebee's problem with 2666 with The Savage Detectives. I seem to have been reading it for months. All will go well for about fifty pages, then I put it down and nothing prompts me to pick it up again, till I start thinking I really must finish it. Then I get another fifty or so pages done and the circle begins again. I always feel I have to finish a book into which I've invested time, but I'm not sure why. I'd be interested to hear how you find it.

I bought a copy of 2666 earlier this year, in the hope that might inspire me by doing the group read, but I haven't opened it yet. Maybe emptiness and numbness emanate from the books themselves:)

Have you read Novel Without a Name by Duong Thu Huong? I read it last year--it was interesting to compare this fictionalized account of the life of a Viet Cong soldier with novels of the Vietnam war from the American perspective.

77 Thanks, dan. I wish I had something really interesting to say about 2666. Vietnam is a fascinating country, don't get me wrong, but my experiences there (i'm working on a region-wide project) which give me the opportunity to deal with the real world and not the one which appears on travel brochures, mirror this "will-crushing" tendency of the system alluded to in the book. It is not a pleasant thing, to say the least.

78 Thanks, Linda. No, I've not read anythine else by him, though I've a couple more of his. Have no plans of picking up either book any time soon, though.

79 Sassy, The Savage Detectives seems to follow the same format as 2666. I was quite frustrated by own reaction. I very much enjoy Latin American literature, and I like books which require a bit of challenge to read. This was not a challenge at all in the sense that I expected. I know that the idea is to create a disjointedness with perspectives of somewhat related events coming from different unrelated sources, mimicking as well the randomness and triviality of things, but it just didn't work for me.

80 No, but it's on my wishlist. I wonder how it compares with Bao Ninh's Sorrow of War.

Looking forward to reading Paradise of the Blind and enjoyed your review. I have read both Novel without a Name and The Sorrow of War and while both were excellent, The Sorrow of War stayed in my mind for years, so much so that I bought a copy for myself and reread it, some fifteen years after first reading it from the library. Only time will tell if Novel without a Name lingers in the same way.

A couple of months of hectic work-related travel on the other side of the world kept me away from my beloved books, so nothing new to review here. But I do have a long backlog beginning from April!

The Routes of Man: How Roads are Changing the World and How We Live Today by Ted Conover
The Book of Ebenezer Le Page by G.B. Edwards
A Dragon Apparent: Travels in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam by Norman Lewis
All Men are Mortal by Simone de Beauvoir
The Whispering Land by Gerald Durrell
Deep Rivers by Jose Maria Arguedas
Bitter Honeymoon by Alberto Moravia
Grant 83: The Overheating World by Granta
The President by Miguel Angel Asturias
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Senselessness by Horacio Castellanos Moya
My Antonia by Willa Cather
The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age by Simon Schama
A Death in Rome by Wolfgang Koeppen
A Time of Gifts: On Foot to Constantinople From the Hook of Holland to the Middle Danube by Patrick Leigh Fermor

It looks like we have some great reviews to look forward to, deebee. I especially love seeing travel narratives that I am unfamiliar with. That is definitely my comfort-read genre.

Yay! Big fan of both Norman Lewis and PLF (particularly the latter - his books are stll treasured although I initially read them probably 25 years ago)...

It will be a slow start, Linda, but I'm determined! Norman Lewis is my new discovery for travel writing. Yes, nothing like a good travel narrative for a comfort read.

Z, have you read his biography written by Julian Evans? Lewis seemed to have led a life most of us can only dream about..."For twenty years Lewis spied for the British government, raced Bugattis before the war, lived in Ibiza after it, and was a crack shot, flamboyant host, and businessman with Mafia connections."

Another big fan of Patrick Leigh Fermor, and I loved all the Gerald Durrells when I read them as a young teenager. I've also been rereading some Sherlock Holmes over the summer.

deebee - no I haven't read the biography.

I think I've read Golden Earth, Dragon Apparent & Naples '44 (my favourite).

I remember being surprised coming across his obituary only a few years back - because he seemed like someone from a fast - receding past

The Routes of Man: How Roads are Changing the World We Live Today by Ted Conover, 2010

As I spend a significant part of my life "on the road", anything signifying journey pulls me in immediately so my interest was piqued when I saw this book. Conover explores six key byways in various continents, journeys down these roads and records the stories of the men and women who use them. By hitching a ride on a truck in the Peruvian Andes that was carrying a load of rare mahogany, he understands more about the origins and the trade of the much sought after raw material for furniture destined for wealthy American homes. It was planned that an east-west route across South America will traverse this part of the Amazon Basin. He goes to northeastern India to a village high up in the Himalayan valleys, to join a group of teenagers in their slow (and for him, perilous) hike down to the main town through the frozen riverbed for the start of the school season. The existing road is open only for 5 months a year, so any journey to the town has to be done through this route. As a new all-weather road was going to be built to connect the isolated region of Ladakh to the region below, he may be seeing the last of these foot journeys over the ice.

In East Africa, he gets acquainted with truckers. Truckers, who drive from the coast to the interior and back have been linked to the spread of AIDS in the continent. In Kenya, he hitches a ride on a truck going to Rwanda. Along this trip, he finds out what the men, and the women they meet during their stops, think about AIDS. Everybody knew somebody who had died of it or were infected, knew a little bit about the science, but seemed content enough to leave things to fate. In the West Bank, he joins Israeli soldiers monitoring checkpoints, and passes through them with Palestinians. He witnesses the hardships, the injustices, and the danger borne by both sides. Inevitably, he feels a sense of futility in all this exercise at terrorizing each other. It is telling that Conover manages to meet a few Palestinian families in their homes, but was limited to interviewing Israeli soldiers in their posts.

In China, he joins members of an Auto Club in one of their cross-country trips, and got acquainted with the car culture boom of China, as highways are continually being built and new wealth afford the middle class new toys to pile up miles with. Conover, naturally, reflects on where it all could be headed -- the congestion, pollution, competition for increasingly scarce and expensive fuel -- all spell an environmental disaster in the making, but he also asks "They were out to have fun, the kind we've already had. Who are we to say we can't?" His last trip takes him to Lagos where he joins an emergency team stationed in a major intersection. There he sees only chaos and congestion on the freeways -- signal of the rise of a megacity.

There are a few interesting things in this book, but I didn't enjoy it as much as I thought I would. I had expected it to be a kind of biography of roads, or at least to include a bit of it, but there was no history, and no context. His choice of location (road) was obvious only in some cases, and some people's stories do not seem to have a direct link to the road in question (e.g. Lagos, Peru). The only compelling example (and the better-written chapter as well, I think) was the West Bank story. Between these chapters, he inserts 3-4 page essays that are a mishmash of information. In one, he writes of Napoléon Bonaparte, Tenochtitlán, Third Reich, US road budget in Afghanistan, The Mad Max, The Road -- it's quite clear what he wanted to say -- that roads can be meant for war, the road as battleground -- but the idea is not neatly explored. Just irritating, rather than enlightening.

Overall, this is so-so reading on a topic that could be infintely interesting. I've not given up on Conover, though. There is his prize-winning book Newjack which I want to read, and hopefully, be impressed by.

89 - That's a shame as it's a topic that had a lot of potential.

I agree with Jane; it does have a lot of potential.

The Routes of Man seems to have been an ambitious project that the author did not quite pull off.

Nice review of The Routes of Man, deebee. I'm also disappointed that it wasn't a better book.

The Book of Ebenezer Le Page by G.B. Edwards (UK, 1981)

Ebenezer Le Page is a grumpy,rough, and fiercely independent 80-year old bachelor who lived in Guernsey Island all his life. In his old age, he decides to write his life story and living where he did, in a tiny crop of island, that meant writing about almost everybody.

Rather than an idle rambling or a sentimental reminiscing of times and people long gone, Ebenezer's journal is as vivid and as colourful as the characters he writes about. He has seen a lot of comings and goings in his day, the island itself was no longer the same -- it has gone through two "invasions" -- the German occupation during World War II, and the hordes of British tourists in summer. Apart from this, nothing much seems to have happened in Ebenezer's life, other people's lives always seemed much more interesting than his, but he is an astute collector of memories, and what can easily pass as commonplace, takes on a larger than life quality in his narration. He writes about his early life, about members of his large extended family, the gossips which fueled fierce family feuds, the loyalty of friends, births and deaths, betrayal, love lost, Guernsey-men and -women, disillusionment and remembrance. Along all this, we glimpse how an island that was "neither English nor French", lived out the influences of these two cultures on their daily lives -- on the language, religion, on temperament. Good as well as nasty things happened to people Ebenezer cared about, new things arrived on the island that were strange and unfamiliar, and he rejoiced and suffered accordingly in his quiet, stern way. For all his tough exterior, Ebenezer's writing reflects his deep understanding of the human heart, and love for the island which was world enough for him. Ebenezer is at turns tender and funny and acerbic, and just like most old men, he goes on and on and on, but as a good storyteller does, he already has you captured well before, and it is with regret that you reach the end.

To my mind, this book comes closest to what perfect storytelling is.

The Book of Ebenezer Le Page is the only novel by G.B. Edwards, who was born in Guernsey in 1899. After his retirement as professor of literature, he chose to live a recluse's life. Edwards wrote this book when he was in his sixties, and it was published posthumously. Not much is known about him.

Nice review of The Book of Ebenezer Le Page, deebee. It was already on my Amazon wish list, so I've bumped it up a bit.

Excellent review of The Book of Ebenezer Le Page. I could never read it though, because after spending many holidays on the Island I came to dislike the way it seems to cling to its British culture.

> 96 Since Guernsey was most of the time under British control, I presume British cultural influences would be dominant and secure though from your comment it seems that becoming Frenchified (or some other) is regarded there as sort of a threat? Hmm...curious.

Cities of Salt by Abdelrahman Munif (originally published in Lebanon in 1984, Jordan)
Translated from the Arabic by Peter Theroux

The inhabitants of Wadi-al-Uyoun are in a turmoil. Strange men have arrived in the wadi. They were not bedoiuns or Arabs though a few accompanied these strangers. The wadi was an important stopoff point for caravans crossing the desert -- here was water, rest, and a place to exchange news from far and wide. Each arriving caravan was to the residents a sign of renewal, and a link to the world outside -- they brought with them flour, sugar, and the much longed-for news of the son or the husband who has been away for many a year. The people of the wadi have always lived like this, life was simple and as predictable as the rains that were sure to come in the end of autumn. But the strangers who came with strange objects and set up camp just off the wadi -- they elicited a mix of curiousity, wonder, suspicion, but most of all fear, a terror of something unknown. Stories went around, passed quickly from one end of the wadi to the other that these strange men were sent by the emir. Which means they were to be treated as friends. Days turned into weeks, and these pale men with light hair who spoke among themselves in a low voice in an unintelligible language, continued doing things nobody understood -- they would go out to the dunes, stand on them with sticks, keep looking afar, and confer with each other from time to time. The men of the wadi kept a careful watch, some even slept just outside the camp just not to miss anything, but nobody could make neither head nor tail of it. Then one day, some very odd looking objects were brought to the camp. A loud noise was heard which continued through the night and many nights and days after, causing even more fear and confusion among the villagers. They could no longer go to the well as often as they used to, so much water was being taken by the strange men and poured into the sand that little was left for the villagers. Stories went around that the wadi sat on a big deposit of gold, and the men were digging under the sand for it. They were told that riches unheard of will soon be theirs, but that they have to be patient and do as they were told. The villagers were very much perturbed by all this, but kept quiet -- it was Allah's will. All except one man. Mitel al-Hathal, whose father and grandfather before him had been fierce defenders of their tribe, was never, for one second, fooled by any of this. He understood. He knew that the Devil had come, and what he was seeing was the destruction of the wadi, together with everything that they ever knew and loved, forever to be gone. And that he was powerless to stop it.

The swift transformation of the tiny, forgotten village in the sands into a modern town for the Americans, and the waves of new arrivals from unknown lands, brought with it problems and situations that were unrecognizable to them. The opening of the port and new roads brought many new things that caused the people consternation and misery. The changes shocked the community, and each one struggled to make sense of it but they continued to be ignorant, as no explanations were forthcoming and the Americans refused to deal with them. They could not expect anything from the emir who was inept, infantile and only cared for the newfangled toys that the Americans gave him. Superstitions and fatalism dictated the people's actions. One injustice bred another, then another until things came to a head, and the people who were meek as sheep who in their oppression left all to Allah, finally shouted enough was enough.

Cities of Salt is the story of the destruction and the diaspora of a poor oasis community in an unnamed kingdom in the Persian Gulf, following the discovery of oil there. It narrates the evolution of the modern-day Gulf states from the perspective of the people whose lives have been upended with the arrival of the Western oil companies. This is a sad and disturbing novel, but ultimately it is a powerful portrayal of displacement and marginalization, of cultural confrontation fueled by mutual incomprehension and clash of values, and the reclaiming of community honour. The book is not high literature, the writing is sometimes disjointed and the pace deliberate, characters seem to be two-dimensional, yet Munif drives home the point powerfully, and raises questions that would make politicians and big business uneasy, which is why it continues to be banned in several Middle East countries. Cities of Salt is the first of a quintet, although only three have been translated into English so far. This is a book that will stay with me.

ETA: translation info

Excellent review of Cities of Salt which sounds a powerful if very depressing novel. I wonder where the subsequent novels will go with the story.

>94 deebee1: The Book of Ebenezer Le Page sounds great! I really enjoyed The Guernsey Potato Peel Pie and Literary Society. This sounds like it would make a nice companion to it.

Wonderful review of Cities of Salt, deebee. I am going to look for this one.

I've been thinking about reading Cities of Salt for years; thanks for the review.

A Dragon Apparent: Travels in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam by Norman Lewis (1951, UK)

Norman Lewis traveled to French Indochina in 1950 as the war clouds were gathering in the region. He hoped to catch a glimpse of the people who lived in this remote and still unknown area, and record their way of life before war changed everything. These countries would very soon after and for the next four decades suffer terribly in a way nobody could have imagined. Lewis is one of the very few writers who saw these places in the twilight of the French regime, whose experience would provide a rare insight into the rich cultural diversity of Indochina, which the wars, genocide, and the communist governments that would come soon, would stifle or destroy altogether.

Saigon is his first stop, and he roams the streets forming his impressions. Like a typical Western tourist on his first trip to Asia, he is repelled and at the same time fascinated by the strange food, and had the rather naive notion that the national mania in Vietnam for gambling is explained by religion. He manages to arrange with local French officials trips inland to more dangerous territory, traveling on military convoys. He visits Cao-Daists who include Victor Hugo as one of their divinities, and continues to the high plateaus of Central Vietnam where he meets the Moïs, a tribal people of Malayo-Polynesian stock regarded in the early part of the century as "articulate animals rather than human beings" and whose numbers are rapidly dwindling. He is witness to their innumerable rituals, all of which require the participants to reach a drunken stupor in order to gain respectability. He learns about their conception of the universe and their motivation for everything, which was obedience to the spirits.

Lewis continues on and meets the M'nongs, the Rhadés, the Bahnars -- tribes which were vanishing, either because of Viet-Minh reprisals for supporting the French, or missionaries whose evangelizing work transformed their way of life in the most complete way. He crosses over to Cambodia and receives his introduction by way of Phnom Penh's leading opium den, and gets to meet the Prime Minister, as well as King Norodom both of whom lectured him about relations with the French and communist influence among the rebellious Issarak tribes. He heads to Siem Reap to the magnificent temples of Angkor, and then flies to Laos where he joins another convoy driving up from Vientiane to Luang Prabang, enjoying the fantastic, yet untouched landscape of Laos while at the same time, terrified of possible ambushes and road mines. He gets a chance to visit the Meos, a major tribe living in the mountains in the heart of Indochina, who cultivated poppy fields. On his return to Vietnam, he was able to arrange a visit to a Viet-Minh camp, and saw with his own eyes how a future victorious people's army was being shaped and moulded.

I read this book earlier this year because I wanted to know more about the places where my work would take me for stretches of time, and though I had visited them before as a tourist, these countries remain to me an enigma, and any outsider's experience there prior to the wars would help me complete the picture. Lewis's writing is wonderful, though at times I wished he were more enthusiastic about his subject and less simplistic in his conclusions. I also think he could have written more about this trip although perhaps because of constraints to travel and safety, he had less opportunity to really explore. The book includes full-page photos of people and places that he himself took, and they are stunning. Lewis's portrayal of a world that was little known and now gone, enriched by the collection of rare photos, is a gift to any curious and interested mind.

That does indeed sound fascinating, and perhaps more so for me because earlier this year I read a book about Burma that discussed some of the remnants of tribes that have also vanished there.

Wonderful review of A dragon Apparent deebee. Lewis was a great traveller and his writings leave lasting impressions. I have a Norman Lewis Omnibus edition in which his travels in Cambodia Laos and Vietnam are recorded. it is a great book to dip into a lose yourself in.

I think the problem with Lewis and to a certain extent Wilfred Thesiger is that we always want more. These travellers saw and experienced things that have gone forever and in some cases the only records we have are sometimes fleeting glimpses.

Great review of A Dragon Apparent, deebee. I am very anxious to read this book and had thought I might get the e-book version, but am now concerned that I would miss the full effect of his photos.

Catching up. Fascinated by your reviews of The book of Ebenezer Le Page, Cities of Salt and The Dragon Apparent.

>104 rebeccanyc: Lewis, in fact, travelled also to Burma and wrote Golden Earth: Travels in Burma so those tribes might be mentioned there. I've not read the book yet but I'm very keen to. I don't know how the military government now treats the cultural minorities there, but I've learned in my own interactions with people I've met along the course of my trips in the region that they are handled in very different ways in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam, with the latter pursuing a policy for many years of eradication of the remnants of these minorities in the north and central regions. This policy has only recently been upturned, when the government saw them and the areas they occupy, as potential tourist attractions. The region in the north of the country now is a top tour destination. They had suffered much under the communist rule, and even now, they are (other tribes in the Center) still regarded as troublesome and various types of control and access to these places are still in place.

>105 baswood: I discovered Lewis only this year (this is my second book of his), and would love to read more by him. It's an interesting fact that both were avid photographers, though I think Thesiger was a special breed, more like the explorer type who immersed himself in the communities of the places he went to, while Lewis seemed very much the modern traveler who spent a couple of days in one place before moving on to the next. What I would be very interested to know is if there is a collection of his photos somewhere, like those of Thesiger's (at Pitt Rivers Museum). They would be something to see.

>106 Linda92007: Linda, in this particular case, I encourage you to get the print version. (I suppose it's just Eland who published this). I think old photos are captured best on paper, and even if they appear more grainy, it's not a bad thing as it's part of the nostalgia the images evoke. I'm still "old fashioned" that way. :-)

Fabulous review of A Dragon Apparent, deebee. I've added this to my wish list, and I'll look for it next week.

More thanks here deebee! A Dragon Apparent goes on the list. Really nice thread by the way!

>109 kidzdoc: Thanks, Darryl. Looking forward to what you think of the book when you get to it.

>110 Polaris-: Thanks, PB! Nice to see you here.

Bitter Honeymoon by Albert Moravia (Italy, short stories publised individually between 1927 and 1952)

Bitter Honeymoon is a collection of eight stories about relationships between men and women. In "Tired Courtesan", a young man tries to discard his ageing mistress, a young patient in a sanatorium becomes infatuated with a girl whom he will never see again in " A Sick Boy's Winter", in "the Imbroglio", a student in Rome falls for a beautiful girl out to swindle him. "The Fall" is about a small boy who, in his exploration of the rooms of an old mansion where the family was staying on holiday, spies without meaning to, on an indiscretion, "The Unfortunate Lover" is about a heartbroken man who gets an unexpected visit from the woman he loved but who realizes she had no plans of staying, "Back to the Sea" is about an elderly politician who realizes too late that he had fallen in love with his much younger wife who is now leaving him, "The English Officer" is about an officer and a girl he meets in a foreign city who only wished to find someone who would buy her a coveted silk scarf, and "Bitter Honeymoon" is about how a wife's politics weighed heavily on the husband's mood on their first days as a married couple.

Most of these stories depict trivial and commonplace encounters, but it is this ordinariness which Moravia captures so well that the stories feel like our own. Who is not familiar with the angst of young love, crushed expectations, and silent acrimony in any relationship? A common thread in these stories which I find disconcerting, though, is that women are portrayed as flippant and easy, or rejecting and opportunistic. The men, on the other hand, except for the first story, are portrayed as gullible, committed, and passionate. Moravia wrote these stories between 1927 and 1952, so the stereotyped roles played out by his characters are suggestive of the period. Still, they are well-written and provide entertaining snapshots of the idiosyncracies of love and attraction. Moravia is considered one of Italy's foremost novelists of the 20th century.

Very interesting on Moravia.

The President by Miguel Angel Asturias (1963, Guatemala)
Translated from the Spanish by Frances Partridge

It is approaching nighttime, and in the porch of the cathedral of the capital of an unnamed Latin American country, the beggars and the most destitute of the city, gather to inspect their miserly belongings, nickel coins, and scraps of food before appropriating empty spaces for themselves to sleep in the night in. Their sleep was punctuated only by the sound of the footsteps of police patrolling the square below and the click of the sentinel's arms at the gates of the presidential palace. But tonight, something happened which would turn their miserable existence into something even more pitiful and horrifying. They were witness to a murder committed on the steps of cathedral. And the dead man was no ordinary person, for he was one or formerly one of the President's close allies.

The novel opens on this scene and sets the stage for the dark and ominous mood that pervades the country under the dictatorship. From this scene, the story shifts its focus on the President's favorite, a man called Angel Face, who was tasked to take care of the "disappearance" of General Canales, also a close associate of the President but who recently fell into disgrace. We do not know the exact nature of his offense, but he is now considered to be a rebel. The complications occur when Angel Face, in attempting to convince the General to flee (this was his specific assignment), was preempted by the arrival of other military who took the General away by force, and was left with the General's daughter, Camila. Angel Face himself was ruthless and cruel, he was not top hatchet man for nothing, but seeing the injustice of it all and the effect on the devastated young woman evoked in him a sense of duty and compassion, and he grows to love her. He knew what he was in for, but his devotion to Camila and now awareness of truth and justice brooked no halfhearted commitment on his part. Angel Face marries her, supposedly with the blessings of the President, but he knew too that his days were numbered. He is now the enemy. Many other incidents took place, highlighting the terror that dictated the actions of the citizens -- fear of being spied on, of displeasing those in power, of falling out of the favour of the President. Horrific deeds were widespread and commonplace and were never talked about. Years pass, the President continues to be at the height of his power, opponents are nowhere to be found for they have all been crushed, and a sinister calm pervades. We see a woman with a child, still waiting in hope for a certain prisoner to be released. But we know it is a hopeless wait. Deception, secrecy and lies hound our protagonists until the very end.

The novel is relentlessly depressing throughout, evil seems to have won the day, the characters are oppressed in the most damaging way, the images brutal. It is all the more disturbing because we know that the portrayal of this society is based on the reality of living under various dictatorships across Latin America. The writing itself, I found uneven. There were chapters (like the first one) which were almost poetic, if not for the subject matter. The characters are not very well developed, and we do not really know what goes on in their minds. The dialogue, sometimes, is stilted and unnatural, with some words sounding very awkward. If the original Spanish had been retained in these instances, the tone would have been preserved, otherwise, it's just annoying. The themes of the book, however, are too important and these quibbles can be easily overlooked.

Excellent reviews of Bitter Honeymoon and The President, deebee. I am trying to gradually read all of the Nobel Prize in Literature winners, and Asturias is one I have yet to come across. I will probably have to do some searching to find his books locally.

Excellent review of Bitter Honeymoon deebee. It is difficult to read fiction from the early 20th century when values were so different to some of ours today. It boils down to putting those thoughts aside otherwise they spoil your enjoyment of some fine writing.

I've had The President on the TBR for a while; will have to get to it one of these days. Thanks for reminding me about it.

The President seems a notable example of the dictator novel genre. It seems there's several novels like these published for every Latin American country. I've a plan on reading martial law novels closer to home.

>112 deebee1: - Great review of Bitter Honeymoon - I'd thumb if you posted it on the page. Moravia's a favorite author of mine but often when I stumble over his books in the used bookstores, they have pulpy covers and that mass-market flimsiness.

I wouldn't disagree with your characterization of the men and women in the books I've read but thought that the men frequently came off as worse in a number of ways - selfish husbands who precipitate the relationship crisis, intellectuals who spend so much time intellectualizing their relationships that they destroy them, some who are just out and out predators.

>114 deebee1: - Good review of The President also - one I've been meaning to get.

Not sure I want to read The President, but fascinating review. And noting your last sentence.

> 115 Thanks, Linda. Good luck in your search. I look forward to reading about your Nobel winners project.

> 116 Thanks, Barry, and yes, I totally agree with you on that.

> 117 I look forward to your thoughts, when you get around to reading it.

> 118 The novels simply mirror events which happened practically wholesale in Latin America for several decades, so it's not surprising that the dictator novel genre developed shortly after. I'm very interested in your reading plan of similar novels set closer to home -- do let us know when you get to it!

> 119 Oh, mine had such a pulpy cover that on the two occasions that I read it in the subway, I made sure I folded the spine all the way back. This was my first Moravia, and I enjoyed it so I'm sure to be reading him again, pulpy cover and all. Thanks about the book page posting reminder -- I will try to do that next time.

> 120 Thanks, dan.

Senselessness by Horacio Castellanos Moya (2004, El Salvador)
Translated by Katherine Silver

Our narrator is a writer on his first day at work, editing testimonies of the survivors of the massacre of Indians in the mountain villages of the Andes. We learn that, thanks to a friend who remain faceless throughout the novel, he was taken on by the Catholic Church to do the tidying up job. It would not have been easy to find him another work -- he is a recent arrival in the capital, on the run from his own country's secret police right over the border, wanted for some unnamed revolutionary activity. Besides, the pay is good, even though he hated the institution. As he peruses the pages of testimonies of illiterate Indians, he is stunned by the eerie poetry of their description of the horrific events. I am not complete in the mind, was the first sentence to jump out at him and as he reads along, he finds more. He notes them down, and the lines begin to possess him. His is a delicate job so he knew he had to watch it, but this is almost beyond him -- the language, the expressions, following no syntax, jarring even, pierced and agitated him. The words expand and they torture his imagination. Beyond work, in his narrow world between girls and drink, they continue to pursue him until he assumes the terror of the survivors and victims, and everything around him turns into a grand conspiracy against his person, in his mind. But was the fear really just in his mind?

Senselessness is a tight little novel, shot with tension and delirious fear. Still our narrator manages to be comic, needless to say, darkly. Moya's writing is fluid, relentless, and the language brilliantly recreates the paranoia that our narrator is experiencing, though there is nothing of the chaos around him in the storytelling. A worthwhile read from a very fine writer.

Sounds fascinating.

Hello deebee, just popped in to catch up and have enjoyed reading about what you've been reading, as ever. I really like the sound of Cities of Salt; I'll look out for that one. I read Senselessness a couple of years ago - details of the plot came back to me on reading your review, but I needed no reminder of the eery atmosphere of fear and paranoia. I thought it was brilliantly done, albeit not particularly comfortable to read. You've reminded me that I wanted to read more by Castellanos Moya.

Great review of Senselessness, deebee. Another one for the wishlist!

#122 - First paragraph reads like an excerpt. Superb review of Senselessness.

Terrific review of A Dragon Apparent, which now goes on the must have list. Also intrigued by The President, despite the limitations you note. Perhaps there are other translators.

Nice review of Senselessness, deebee, and I second your recommendation of it.

Senselessness sounds a very powerful novel - excellent review.

>124 rachbxl: Nice to see you here, Rachel. I hope you like Cities of Salt as much as I did. I hope to read the 2 other books of this trilogy, The Trench set during the period when Ibn Saud was uniting the peninsula into a country that would bear his name, and Variations on Night and Day, which covers the period up to the 1950s under King Saud's rule.

>125 Linda92007:, 126, 128, 129 Thanks, all.

>127 SassyLassy: As far as I know, this is the only English translation available (at least in Amazon, where I purchased it). It sure could use a good translator, I've always liked Margaret Jull Costa -- she would do a great job of it. I was rather surprised to find that this, despite being the best known among his books (and him being a Nobelist), was never taken up by any big publisher.

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (UK)

This 56-story collection of the detective's adventures (complete and illustrated, it says in the cover) was my daily reading treat for a few weeks this summer. I thought the following to be the most memorable accounts: The Red-headed League, The Musgrave Ritual, The Dancing Men, and The Six Napoleons though it was The Adventure of the Speckled Band which I liked best. Reading The Final Problem, where Sherlock Holmes meets his equal, Moriarty in a fatal confrontation, however, was quite upsetting as I had, like many many others, grown attached to this beloved fictional figure. I enjoyed the illustrations as they heightened the drama and the tension of each episode, and very well imagine the anticipation with which readers looked forward to each installment when the stories first came out 120 years ago.

All Men are Mortal by Simone de Beauvoir (1946, France)

How does it feel to live forever? One man finds out. And when Regina, an ambitious actress, takes Fosca into her life and discovers the amazing truth, she becomes obsessed with the idea that through him and his memory, her performances will live forever. Regina learns that Fosca was involved in the most significant events in history for the past six centuries as a ruler, as a warrior, and many other things. His great deeds though became less and less interesting (this seem to be the point) as he took on the most dangerous assignments just to expose himself to all sorts of harm in the hope of dying in the process. He himself becomes less and less interesting as a human being, becoming almost a zero when he reaches the 20th century. He has died inside a long time ago -- hope and love has ceased to exist for him, and living on was his hell on earth. Regina at first takes this as a challenge -- she would wake him up from this sleep, this numbness -- she would release him from his perpetual agony and bring him to "life" again -- such was the extent of her belief in her powers. Slowly, but surely, however, she realizes the futility of her efforts, and with it, the futility and the aburdity of eternity. She would die and whatever she was would die with her. It was the kinder of the two destinies, Fosca teaches her.

This novel is is pretty straightforward in its premise -- the tragedy of immortality. It seemed in the beginning that it would make a great theme, however, I didn't feel the story or the characters to be well-developed. Fosca is as appealing as a piece of granite, although his helplessness makes him actually more human. Regina, however, is pure fluff -- neither having the great talent nor the capacity to know what she wanted, making her an odd one to be obsessed with immortality. A pity this turned out to be a disappointing read. But then I've always thought that themes that deal with hubris, immortality and the tragic have been exhausted by the ancient and Elizabethan playwrights, and better left at that. This book seems to have confirmed the idea.

#131 I too have been rereading The Complete Sherlock Holmes off an on all summer, having first read it at approximately age 12 (I had to buy a new copy, because my original copy belonged to my grandfather and both is a tome and has very very thin paper). I am enjoying rediscovering them, and was happy to find I loved many of the tales that had stuck with me for nearly 50 years, including the Speckled Band and the Red-Headed League. A year or two ago I read Favourite Sherlock Holmes Stories: Selected by the Author, which got me started rereading all of SH. I was happy that the author's favorites were much the same as mine.

Interesting review of All Men are Mortal. I had not come across this book of hers before, shame it was a disappointment.

Glad you read and reviewed All Men are Mortal, it's the first review of De Beauvoir that I've read. Very interesting.

Deep Rivers by José María Arguedas (1958, Peru)
Translated by Frances Horning Barraclough, 1978

High up in the Peruvian Andes, Ernesto travels with his itinerant-lawyer father as he looks for work in the hacienda towns. Ernesto is a mestizo, who in the home of his uncaring stepmother and without the presence of his father, was driven to the care of the Indian servants. Living among them, he learned their ways, their language, their stories, and the myths of their people, and it is them and these stories that he longs for as wanders with his father. On their journeys, he is left by his father in a Catholic boarding school in the town of Abancay, with a promise to return at the end of the school year. In the school compound, he is witness to and player in the games, innnocent and not so innocent, that the boys fill their time outside class with. But for this strange, lonely boy, the top is not merely a toy that is carved from wood, it is a magical being, its whipping sound recalls the sound of certain insects, of trumpets resembling the bellows of bulls charging, of the songs of his beloved Indians. He is witness to the loyalties and the violence of the boys, and the school yard is a stage where both are played out in both its innocent and dangerous forms. And beyond the school gate, the abuses of the landowners and merchants of this desolate town become fertile ground for an uprising of the women. The priests themselves are not wholly indifferent, and took sides. Ernesto knows whose side he was on. He is a mute observer, in his heart he wills the Indians of the haciendas to take up arms with the women but he feels their agonizing silence, their crushed souls, their powerlessness to follow the women beyond the mountains to plan their revolution. The town is later visited by the plague which is ravishing the region, and Ernesto is the only one in his school left unscathed at least outwardly, waiting for his father, his salvation.

Ernesto's extraordinary connection to nature sprung from his Indian upbringing. The mountains are high and majestic, the rivers are deep and swift, nature here overwhelms and is rightly considered, Mother. Everything comes from and returns to Her, and in the insecurities that saddle him -- loneliness, adolescent longings, and bewilderment amidst the conflicts around him -- his solace and comfort lie in the memories of his Indians and his deep love for nature, which he tries to conjure through songs of his childhood, the songs of the Quechua. He is young, but the author imbues in him a frightful maturity -- still possessing of childish attributes such as longing for a toy, jealousy over friends, or a lack of hesitation to exchange punches in the yard, but at the same time, having a capacity for reflection and memory and an astuteness that is rooted in something ancestral.

This is a moving story, lyrical and sad, and hauntingly beautiful. It is a meditation on solitude -- the solitude of the misfit and the dispossesed --, on awakening, on nature, and on the poetry of the indigenous peoples. The narrative is punctuated by verses and songs in Quechua, but which have immediate translation on another column in the same page, so there is no interruption in the reading. There is a glossary and the translation of the poetry seems to capture excellently the moods that are portrayed. Deep Rivers is an unforgettable book, and the best I've read so far this year. I've to mention that it's thanks to msjohns615's enthusiastic review on his thread in 2011 I believe, that I picked up this book.

Arguedas was an ethnologist, a poet, a folk musicologist, and considered a major indigenista writer. He was committed to giving voice to the Andean Indians through his works, and worked hard for their recognition. This voice mainly refers to attributing identity to the Indians beyond the dehumanizing one assigned to them by the Spanish conquerors. In his works, he explores the themes of the conflict between the forces of "tradition" and "modernity." He published his poetry in Quechua, but invented a language for his novels in which he used native syntax with Spanish vocabulary, which makes translation of his work into other languages extremely difficult. Arguedas was tormented by the dilemma of authentically illuminating the life of the Andean Indians which drove him into depression. He died by his own hand in 1969. Deep Rivers is a semi-autobiographical novel.

Wow, that sounds like a fabulous book. Off to look for it!

Fabulous review of Deep Rivers, deebee. I am going to look for a copy that I can read and pass on to a Peruvian friend.

Deep Rivers has gone on to my wishlist - thanks!

I like the seemingly ethnocentric aspect of Deep Rivers. The indigenous peoples are underdogs everywhere and literature is one of the things where their plights are given import.

Great review of Deep Rivers deebee1

Deep Rivers is going on my wishlist too. Terrific review, certainly caught my imagination.

Fabulous review of Deep Rivers, deebee. I'll look for it soon.

>132 deebee1: - Too bad about All Men are Mortal, the premise did sound good. Recently read a book about immortality so I would have been interested - book bullet dodged. I must admit to having a fondness for Karel Capek's modern take on the tragedy of immortality, The Makropulos Case, though I'm probably biased because Leos Janacek did a wonderful operatic adaptation of the play.

>136 deebee1: - Deep Rivers sounds excellent, glad to learn about this book.

Thanks for mentioning The Makropulos Case, DieF. Would be interesting to see another modern take on immortality.

The Harp and the Shadow by Alejo Carpentier (1979, Cuba)
Translated by Thomas Christensen and Carol Christensen

In the latter half of the 20th century, a petition by the aristocracy of the Catholic Church for the canonization of Christopher Columbus was received by the Pope. It will be 500 years since his discovery of the Americas, and while the circumstances were extraordinary -- too long a period since the death of the concerned, the lack of certain biographical documentation necessary to attribute sainthood according to the canon -- still, it was pointed out, Columbus deserved sainthood at the very least, being the instrument of God to bring the light of Christianity to the heathens in those dark lands. His halo has been invisible all these centuries and the time has come to make it manifest. The Pope ponders the issue and, for his own reasons as well (Columbus would be both an "indigenous" saint as well as a European one, thus unique in bridging the two worlds, and the Pope himself believed in "political action inspired by the politics of God"), put his signature on the petition that would the start the wheels turning on the process that would lead Columbus to either sainthood or eternal subsidiarity to other hallowed figures in the Catholic firmament.

The scene changes -- we are in a small room in a monastery in Valladolid, five centuries back. Christopher Columbus is on his deathbed, and as he waits for the priest to arrive for his last confession, he contemplates what the world knew of him and what they did not know of what it took for him to get there. Should he tell all to the priest, hiding nothing, or should he carry his secrets to his grave? He was not sure. Instead, he recalls everything -- the almost insurmountable challenges he faced before, during, and after his so-called discoveries of new lands, his singlemindedness to reach the place where gold was to be found, and the deception (always the deception) in all forms and excepting no one, that he employed without compunction throughout. Beneath all the hero worship, the celebrity status, the strong, indomitable image, the title conqueror for king and God -- and known only to himself and to the men he took with him on his voyages, however, he is none of the above. He knew he was no saint.

Fast forward, and he is a spirit wandering among the crowds in the piazza in the Vatican, and heading to the inner rooms where his possible sainthood was being deliberated, becomes a witness to the Morality Play of his life and deeds. It is all out now, the darkest of his secrets has been laid bare, history's con man exposed. He ends at the piazza where he meets the spirit of Andrea Doria, Grand Admiral of Venice and Genoa, a real hero who fought off the Turks in the Middle Ages. Columbus is embarassed -- he never did such battle for Christ or even contemplated it. He comes to a realization, and the reader does, too, that perhaps like the dreams of treasure that he spun in the imagination of the rulers of the Old World, he, too, was ephemeral.

Alejo Carpentier wrote this novel in 1979, which was translated into English in 1990, in anticipation of the quincentenary of Columbus's arrival in the New World. It is an excellent tale, written with exemplary wit and imagination in Carpentier's baroque style, which is pure pleasure to read. This is a short novel, as most of Carpentier's works are, but it is wonderful and for literary quality packs so much more than many books several times its size can.

Great review of what sounds like a wonderful book. I read The Lost Steps and as you say, his style is a pure pleasure to read. I will look for this one.

Great Review of The Harp and the Shadow It sounds absolutely fascinating and I have added it to my "to buy" list

I'm going to have to add that to my list too, as I'm a fan of Carpentier.

I am also adding The Harp and the Shadow to my wish list, deebee. Thanks for the great review.

Terrific review. Wondering whether Cubans typically like Columbus or not.

Thanks, all. Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

>148 baswood: Columbus and the discovery of the Americas is a subject a number of Latin American authors have fictionalized, published especially around the event's quincentenary. I'm eager to compare Carpentier's version with 2 others that I have which are still unread -- Christopher Unborn by Carlos Fuentes and Abel Posse's The Dogs of Paradise.

>151 dchaikin: I have no idea, Dan, about the Cubans' feelings, though as many of them are of Spanish ancestry, this might be a moot question. As for those who have indigenous as well as African roots, Columbus symbolized slavery, so there is reason not to like him very much if that indeed is the case. Carpentier actually wrote about this somewhere else. In The Kingdom of this World, the locals' sentiments about the colonizers are portrayed in an exceedingly vivid manner.

A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East by David Fromkin (1989, US)

Fromkin tells a superb account of the fall of the 600-year old Ottoman Empire and the creation of what we know today as the Middle East, with a focus on Britain's decisive role. The scope is daunting and the stage immense but Fromkin manages to keep focus, and in accessible narrative makes the region's complex beginnings easier to understand for a non-specialist. He introduces some of the shakers and movers of the early 20th century, led by Lloyd George and Churchill who would shape global events in and well beyond their lifetimes. They were those who drew the lines across the territories of the dying Ottoman Empire, divvying it up and appropriating for themselves vast unknown lands, and with a little left over for one or other ally but guided, secretly then, by 2 main reasons: to create a buffer against Russia (still a follow on of the Great Game) and to create a route, all the way from south of Africa to India, thus sealing the great British empire as one continuous territorial mass. Fromkin puts together a compelling picture, starting from the ship incident which precipitated Britain's war with Turkey, to the rise of the Young Turks (and the overthrow of the Sultan), the battle at the Dardanelles, the crippling defeat of the Allies at Gallipolli, the drama of British politics and the conflicts between the bureaucrats back home and in the territories, the changing fortunes of Churchill, the introduction of the cause of Zionism into the equation, the changing composition of allies and enemies throughout the war, the creation of new states like Iraq (whose people actually did not demand or wish for anything, but which the British assumed they wanted anyway), to the division of the spoils among the victors, including the drafting of the Mandates (for Palestine, for Syria). Two points, rather contemptible, characterized British policy and actions from the beginning and were consistently adopted throughout the war -- the deceptions they employed towards the Arabs and towards the allies (justifying their decisions ostensibly on Arab wish for British protection en route to independence), and the utter disregard for verifying intelligence information. It is astonishing, for example, that some critical decisions that later led to the toppling of leaders and the creation of new regimes, had its roots on the revelations of a Turkish officer who went over to the British side introducing himself as speaking on behalf of Arab revolutionary groups, but whose claims the British never bothered to verify. It was only recently found out that all his claims were a fabrication.

To the extent that events in Russia that were happening at the same time influenced the outcome of the war, Fromkin mentions them briefly. T.E. Lawrence makes an appearance, of course, but as he is, not as the legend of the British press and of Hollywood. The book does not discuss oil politics, as the existence of oil reserves mainly in Iraq was then officially only a possibility.

Fromkin shows how the drawing of the lines on the map was arbitrary, utterly without regard for the opinion of the people who lived in these places, their wishes, their history, and driven simply by British expansionist policy that was tempered only by the French and the Russians who had expansionist claims of their own although on a much smaller scale. In the void created by the disappearance of the Ottoman rulers, these lines which created new states, put in place new powers, set up new regimes, also created a complex set of dynamics among the Arab peoples based on identity, religion, and aspirations and ignited a tinderbox of tensions just simmering below the surface. The mess the region is in now traces a direct line to those events of almost a hundred years ago. It is quite shocking, and even as I write these words, it is continuing to happen, that the destiny of peoples were decided by in fact a handful of bureaucrats in powerful nations, thousands of miles away, who seemed to believe they knew what was best for those people.

This book provides an excellent overview and introduction to the Middle East, and a good starting point in understanding the roots of the problem which it is facing now. Highly recommended.

Excellent review of A Peace to end all Peace. Sounds like a good starting point for an understanding of the issues that are current today.

deebee, great summation of Fromkin's book. the title alone is already provocative.

Excellent review of A Peace to End All Peace, deebee. It is always astounding to see how history unfolds, with all its small determining events and unintended consequences, and how little it seems we have learned from it.

I read A Peace to End All Peace a long time ago and found it just as eye-opening and shocking as you did. Plus ça change . . .

Not really surprising, but very interesting. A book I'll keep mind.

The Harp and the Shadow sounds fantastic - excellent review. I have had The Lost Steps on the "read soon" pile for a long time now. I should really read it soon and get The Harp and the Shadow.

I loved The Lost Steps, DieF.

A Death in Rome by Wolfgang Koeppen (Germany, 1954)
Translated by Michael Hofmann

It is 1950s Rome, a city which has ties with Germany going back centuries. Four members of a German family are reunited there by chance: Siegfried, a young composer; his father Friedrich, a former local official during the Nazi regime who has now resumed his public role as a democratically elected burgomaster; Judejahn, Siegfried's uncle, an unrepentant former SS general; and Judejahn's son, Adolf, a Catholic seminarian.

The younger generation attempts a return to expressions of Germany's glorious past. Adolf, with his tortured soul, seeks redemption in the enduring rituals of the Church. For Siegfried, it was the grand tradition of the creation of music -- both acts of cleansing, a renewal, an upliftment of the soul. By these vocations, they might escape the evil shadow which they until very recently, simpy by virtue of who they were, helped cast. The older generation, complicit and guilty, deals with it in the here and now, brutish and extreme. Judejahn, now a renegade military adviser to an unnamed country in the north of Africa, is the central figure in this story, whose actions precipitate the disastrous events that take place within a few days of the crossing and crisscrossing of paths of the members of this family in the labyrinthian maze of the ancient streets and belowground -- a kind of macabre ballet where each meeting raises the temperature a notch higher, and the reader watches with an almost morbid fascination the tension that must soon give. Koeppen draws us into the workings of Judejahn's mind, crazed with hatred still, and obssessed with the fact that he was not able to exterminate them all, and deluded with the idea of his eventual return to Germany, through the graces of his brother-in-law, to resurrect the Reich believing that among his countrymen, many remain believers. Friedrich is the ultimate bureaucrat, loyal during the regime, accommodating, a broker of conveniences, useful to whomever is on top.

The novel is full of symbolisms, beginning with the major characters' names. The characters represent four areas of German achievement, or as Michael Hoffmann, the translator, describes it, the four quarters of the riven German soul: murder, bureaucracy, theology, and music. Koeppen's writing is powerful, compelling, and at a time when the 1950s Germany wanted disavowal, severance, Koeppen opts for confrontation. He was (and seems to be, until now) little forgiven for this.

In taut and searing prose and a plot that is both complex and elegant, Koeppen draws a portrait of the wrestling of immediate post-war Germany with its demons that many prefer to bury. Notes by Hoffmann explain that Koeppen's books, even in Germany, never had the acclaim they deserved, because they unsettled. His position never attained that of the returning exiles like Mann and Brecht. As the preferred form of literature was a clean slate -- an extension of collective amnesia, the nature of Koeppen's work exacerbated his position. He wrote of memory, of continuance, of criticism -- he was savaged for it by the press, which responded with "hostility, even revulsion and repugnance." The political content of his books embarrassed even those who praised them -- the conservatisim of the German public won out. Interestingly, though, he won the Buchner prize, Germany's most prestigious literary award, in 1962.

This is a profound novel, grand in scope, all this contained in less than 200 pages of masterful writing. Koeppen's works are few (only 5 novels) but they deserve to be more widely known. If there is one underrated giant of European literature, it is Koeppen.

Highly recommended.

Fabulous review of Death in Rome, deebee. That definitely goes onto my wish list.

I'm fascinated... I've been curious about how Germany responded to WWII, postwar. This might be the book to start my explorations.

Thanks, Darryl.

Dan, A Death in Rome forms part of a loose trilogy that he wrote, with the common theme of exposing the residual effects of Nazism and war on the German society. The two other novels are Pigeons on the Grass and The Hothouse.

Death and the Penguin by Andrey Kurkov (Ukraine, 1996)
Translated by George Bird

In Kiev, Viktor, a writer, becomes increasingly frustrated as the draft of his first novel finds no takers. Finally, he lands a job writing obituaries for a respectable newspaper, and soon enough, he discovers that his literary talents are properly appreciated there and even generously rewarded. His task was to compose tributes to well-known personalities, all of them still quite alive and well -- the point being (at least what he was told) that the newspaper had to be ready and should be the first to publish a well-written obituary any time the unexpected happened to that particular individual. No harm in being ready, all will all end up the same way anyway, that's what he thought. He starts to feel impatient -- when will anybody ever read his fine pieces, it was taking time. Then one day, he opens the papers and sees his work (signed Friends of X). He feels gratified, only, he realizes the macabre situation -- that somebody had to end up dead in order for his work to see light. More assignments start coming in, and he sees more and more of his work published. After some time, he realizes there is so much more than meets the eye. Why do people turn up dead soon after he completes his commissions? Meanwhile, through all this, Misha, his pet penguin reassures with his presence and provides a bit of comic relief. But he is not meant to just play a passive role, and increasingly he is also drawn into the dangerous world that our writer unknowingly found himself in.

This book is a fast, entertaining read. It is enough that references and associations to the workings of Ukraine's underworld remain vague and peripheral -- we get the idea of how dark it is. I enjoyed this story and will be looking for more by Kurkov.

I've seen Death and the Penguin in the bookstore, but never picked it up. It does sound entertaining. On the other hand, I had never heard of Koeppen, but your review certainly makes me want to look for his work.

Great review of Death and the Penguin, deebee; it goes onto my wish list, too.

How cool to have a pet penguin

Wonderful reviews of A Death in Rome and Death and the Penguin, deebee. You have been reading great books recently and adding considerably to my wishlist.

I really enjoyed Death and the Penguin when I read it a couple of years ago. I recently learned that there is a sequel, which I'll try to read at some point.

Just a few lines about 2 books I read (in summer still!) which I think most CR members are familiar with.

My Antonia by Will Cather (US, 1918)

There is something in the story of the pioneer and the early settler that does not fail to draw the reader in -- we must all be wired to regard triumph of both will and brawn over harsh nature as elemental to our being. I liked Antonia, she was curious, intelligent, energetic, spontaneous, but she was also very much a product of her times -- her connection to the land was something she could not set aside in order to be a town lady. Enjoyed this book overall, though I wish Antonia had more ambition. She did show a lot of promise in the beginning.

The Whispering Land by Gerald Durrell (UK, 1962)

Durrell recounts his trip to Patagonia to gather animals for his zoo. Together with his team, he goes to remote villages and towns to try to purchase sought-after species from petowners. He was faced with a dillemma: more animals were being offered to him than he could take. Their forays into penguin and into seal territory were filled with humourous small adventures. He also met some colorful characters, though what struck him most was the warmth with which he was received everywhere he went. After months of collection, there was the sordid business of dealing with customs, and then the complex preparations involved with the transport of the animals. Fun read.

I've never heard of Koeppen before but A Death in Rome sounds fantastic. Added it to the list.

Good review of the Kurkov - I liked Death and the Penguin also but couldn't find the sequel, Penguin Lost, for a while. It's on the pile now along with some other books by Kurkov.

The Shipyard by Juan Carlos Onetti (Uruguay, 1961)
Translated from the Spanish by Nick Caistor

Larsen, or "the bodysnatcher" is back in Santa Maria, a small, backwater town in an unnamed Latin American country. He is just back from prison for an unnamed offense, something to do with his running a brothel, and perhaps more, we are not sure. He is a quiet man in his 60s, not at all the typical jailbird, courteous and gentlemanly even in his ways, at the same time dark and brooding. He is hired by old Petrus, once a powerful industrialist but who is now reduced to a senile shadow of his former self. Larsen's new task was to be manager of Petrus's bankrupt shipyard -- an enterprise which has closed its doors to business years ago. The shipyard is now a huge rusting hulk, decay to be seen everywhere -- in the ruins of buildings, structures, and equipment or what's left of it after parts had been sold or stolen. Two others constituted the staff of this ghost enterprise -- a German engineer, and the bookkeeper who, with his young wife, lives in a rundown shack in the corner of the yard.

The pretense has to be kept up -- this is the essence of their jobs. Yellowed sheets of paper, faded blueprints, crumbling offices, telephones long dead -- evidence of life from years ago provide material for their daily bizarre routine. Petrus assures them the investors are just waiting for his signal to put in the money. This is the hope, and all appearances must be kept at all cost. The desolation follow these workers even outside work -- the absence of hope, more than their grinding material poverty, crushes the soul, and only the barest hints of civility keep them human. The dilemma faces them all: to continue like this or to give it up, bolt from here? The existential void. Everything is clothed with a haze, uncertainty, even Larsen's courtship of Petreus's daughter -- what did he feel for her really? He leads her on, the townspeople are led to believe there will be a marriage soon, but we know that nothing is going to come from this, as with many things in this place.

This novel is all about setting, all about mood. Everything is bleak -- the images are sparse, the characters and the townspeople all seem trapped in the desolation of their existence -- there is unbearable sadness, though not tedium, not boredom. The unawareness characterizes everything, life had to be lived though they behaved like condemned men because they bore the weight of nothingness. Except for Petrus, Onetti's characters are deliberate, purposive, and despite the degradation of their circumstances and their delusional lives, they retain an element of respectability. At the novel's end, we do not see them doing the terrible things we expected them to do. Instead of a dissolution, some kind of resolution occurs, and Larsen too, goes quietly. We also learn that in the junk heap of the shipyard, cries of a newborn were heard which could only mean that all is not lost.

What is reality, what is farce? Is farce reality, or reality farce? The one who decides to cut himself off, return to the world of reality, the one who manages to escape, in whatever form that may take, is he really better off? And if the illusion falls apart, what is left? Who are the deceivers, who the deceived? Where is the boundary between the real and the imagined? What is the value of an illusion -- is it in its ability to keep our hopes up or the meaning it renders to small, daily, repeated acts? Aren't we, in one way or another, living in such a shipyard?

This was a difficult and unsettling novel to read -- each page, each line, each object, each thought exposed layers and angles that I could not have anticipated. And more eerily, each exposure did not serve to illumine, it merely showed that more layers lie underneath, and I was left with the feeling that the real story, the one that is coherent and neat, had escaped my grasp. I don't normally re-read books, but I will make an exception in this case, hoping to capture a bit more of the symbolisms next time. It is a book I can heartily recommend to CR regulars, fearless readers all.

Juan Carlos Onetti (1909-94) is one of Latin America's most distinguished writers, and this book is considered one of the best existential fiction.

I have this Onetti book on my shelf, deebee. I left it hanging somewhere in the middle since I wanted to start it again and read closely as I felt I was not getting a foothold on it. With my partial reading, I could somehow relate to what you observed on the quality of the writing.

An excellent and intriguing review of The Shipyard, deebee. Knowing that you and Rise both felt the need for re-reads is somewhat intimidating. But amazingly, our local library actually has this book in their holdings, so I may give it a try.

Excellent review of The Shipyard It certainly seems to have given its readers pause for thought and seems essential for anybody interested in Latin American literature.

I read a review on the book page that said that it was an allegory reflecting the decay and breakdown of Uruguayan society and Urban life. Did you pick up on that?

#176 - I picked up all but the Uruguayan part from the review...

Brilliant review, hoping the book inspired at least half as many thoughts as your review does. The book is going on the wish list.

ETA - I like that Linda's review on the book page is date Dec 31, 1969...

Fabulous review of The Shipyard, deebee. That definitely goes on my wish list!

The only book I own by Onetti is Let the Wind Speak. Have you read it?

Thanks, all.

> 174

I've looked at the book pages of other works by Onetti, especially Bodysnatcher, and I've realized that part of the difficulty in getting into this book is that it picks up from his previous ones. Without being acquainted with some characters, or their incarnation, in one or other of these books, and familiarity with Onetti's fictional world of Santa Maria, I understand where this feeling of the entire thing just evading one's grasp comes from. I read somewhere that the approach has to be to read Onetti's entire body of work as one work. I hope to pick up a few of his other books before returning to this, and perhaps something on Onetti himself.

>175 Linda92007:

I encourage you to give it a try. I hope your library has the other works of his too that might help putting in a bit more context into this.

>176 baswood:

I don't know a thing about Uruguay, I'm ashamed to say, so this allegory is lost on me, but not that on general urban decay and breakdown.

>177 dchaikin:

Oh, my review consists only of the more obvious thoughts and questions but thanks just the same. There's so much more if one looks deep enough and tries to peel away the many layers of meaning suggested in it.

>178 kidzdoc:

I don't know the book, Darryl. Will look it up.

Great review of The Shipyard. Your reviews are always dangerous to the growing TBR pile.

As a side note, I started reading The Lost Steps after reading your review of The Harp and the Shadow. I was really loving the prose and was into the book, but then I lost it - misplaced it somewhere in back and forth over the Thanksgiving break. Hoping it'll turn up soon.

Thanks, DieF. It's an accusation I'm glad to be guilty of!

You lost The Lost Steps? Hope it retraces its way back to your hands soon. It's a joy to read, isn't it? I'm now reading a novella of his, The Chase and like The Lost Steps, music plays an essential role in the story. Great writing, as usual from him, though the translation could be better, I think.

The People of the Abyss by Jack London (US, 1903)

Excepting war memoirs and accounts of genocide, I have never read a more harrowing book based on facts than this one. What is even more shocking is that everything that Jack London writes about here took place in 20th century England, at the height of British imperial power, not too long ago.

Jack London, in 1902, already an accomplished and famous writer by this time, undertakes a journalistic excursion to the East of London, to see and to write about how the "other end" lived. It seemed that nobody knew anything about this place (nobody even knew exactly where it began and where it ended) except that it was a no-man's land, the devil's lair, and to be avoided at all costs. Nobody would vouch for his safety, and he was thought crazy and suicidal by everybody who knew.

London begins his "field research" by adopting a new persona -- that of a recently unemployed sailor who is out of luck. Acquiring the appropriately wretched rags and finding a nearby "decent" room that would serve as his base, for quick showers and rest when badly needed were difficult -- yet this was nothing compared to what he would experience very soon after. The East of London was a miserable hole, a Dickensian setting, where he would see such abject poverty that reduced many thousands of families to a crawling existence that offered absolutely no hope. In this area can be found the millions of workers who were paid dirt wages, from which they had to pay exorbitant room rents, with very little left over for food, and nothing for clothing. They lived in constant penury. In this hellhole, many families had to make do with one-room dwellings, where as many as 7 to 10 individuals lived. Filth, destitution, and illness were to be found everywhere. Hunger, persistent and chronic, drove many to their deaths, and for those with a bit more muscle to spare, to acts of complete desperation. Working conditions were abominable, and workplace related injuries and deaths were common. He recorded the unimaginable conditions that many corpses were routinely found in -- people dead of hunger and neglect. London went with the most abject of them, the homeless, and found out about the workhouse system, and began to understand why many people would rather kill themselves than end up in the workhouse. He saw how man's spirit is shrunked when physical conditions are too crushing, and how this created a breed of people who became less and less like human beings. This was the abyss.

It was a menagerie of garmented bipeds that looked something like humans and more like beasts, and to complete the picture, brass-buttoned keepers kept order among them when they snarled too fiercely....

The dear soft people of the golden theaters and wonder mansions of the West End do not see these creatures, do not dream that they exist. But they are here, alive, very much alive in their jungle. And woe the day, when England is fighting in her last trench, and her able-bodied men are on the firing line! For on that day they will crawl out of their dens and lairs, and the people of the West End will see them, as the dear soft aristocrats of Feudal France saw them and asked one another, "Whence came they?" "Are they men?"

There is much to fuel anger here, but what compounded this shock was the apathy with which the government regarded all this. He raged at this injustice, and this rage jumps out from every line.

The book is divided into two parts, the first narrates his direct experiences, and the second presents secondary data and information he gathers from reports, the news, and official sources. The micro picture is supported by the macro data, and vice-versa. The People of the Abyss is a powerful indictment of a system that sought and was successful in its global domination first through its mercantilist then its imperialist policies, but who neglected its own, the very backs on whom the wealth those policies created, rested. This work, apparently, was the one which inspired George Orwell to do something similar a few decades later, and which was recorded in works such as The Road to Wigan Pier and Down and Out in Paris and in London.

This book is short but it is very hard going, and I had to put it down several times. It creeped me out like no horror fiction possibly can (or at least as I imagine as I don't read the genre). It is not the degradation to be found in the slums of third-world impoverished nations, it is closer to and certainly more harrowing than any post-apocalyptic scene that Hollywood directors can conjure up.

With the growing and increasingly widespread poverty now in Europe because of the crisis, this book gives pause for reflection. While living conditions have changed drastically from when this book was written, there is no guarantee that a return to something similar is an impossibility. The systems which workers themselves fought very hard to establish, such as the number of working hours and work conditions, are under threat. From what we've seen, governments opt to rescue big business and bail out banks, and it is the small man on the street who pays. It seems that Jack London's observation still holds. I started this book before I went to London on a short trip a few weeks ago, the images were so strong that they seemed to follow me around, so that when I emerged from a show at West End one night, and almost stepped on a beggar by the entrance with "homeless and hungry" written on a cardboard propped up on his side, I had the extraordinary sensation that I had just emerged into a scene right out of this book, and if the beggar had been aware, I would be, from his point of view, one of the "soft ones" Jack London refers to. Not an easy thought.

Great review of The People of the Abyss deebee and I agree with the sentiments expressed in your last paragraph which is eloquently written - bravo.

That is a great review of a book I'd never heard of and now must get.

I wonder (naively, possibly) what was it that made London (the city) so different in this regard from the Continent? Everyone had/has slums, but nothing quite like the English ones. Was the population pressure exceptionally heavy? Rural flight exceptionally severe? I can't remember the source now, but I read someplace that the conditions obtaining in the English countryside in the 19th century were unequalled anywhere except maybe Russia. Hovel dwellings like burrows, and suchlike.

What Barry said!

Deebee, your review of The People of the Abyss is very powerful.

Excellent review. I have seen this book in bibliographies, but you have convinced me to get it and read it.

>184 LolaWalser:, Lola, one of the problems that everyone from Engels to Mayhew agreed upon was the unprecedented population growth in London. In 1800, the population was about 865,000. By 1850, it had grown to 2.5 million and by 1890, it had increased by about another 70% to 4.2 million. Contrast that with the two next biggest western cities, NYC at 2.7 and Paris at 2.5 million respectively. Migration to the cities for work due to the loss of rural cottage industries to industrialization, the loss of common farm lands to the enclosure acts and natural population growth within the city itself all contributed. Conditions in the East End were so abysmal, that middle and upper class people would actually tour the areas for various reasons, often including titillation, giving rise to the word "slumming".

Fabulous review of The People of the Abyss, deebee! I downloaded the free Kindle version of the book as soon as I read your review of it yesterday.

Great review and commentary on London on London.

Thanks, all.

> 184, London (the city), as the great industrial hub that it became, probably held more attractions for people fleeing poverty and persecution (starting with the French Huguenots in the mid-1700s), including the fact that there were no immigration restrictions until towards the end of the 1890s. And to add to Sassy's comments (#187), apart from the influx coming from the countryside, London's population exploded around the 1860s to the end of the 19th century due to the waves of immigrants first from Ireland fleeing the potato famine, and then from Russia and Eastern Europe fleeing persecution and war. East End, because of its proximity to the docks, and where casual work may be found in the associated industries, was where they settled. Where work could be found, the wages were abhorrently so low, and even while significant gains were achieved by the Great Dock Strike of 1889 which unionised the casual worker, many still fell between the cracks. Jack London provides a sketch but does not go further than that except some mention of the emptying of the English countryside, which he actually portrays as a kind of paradise compared to East End. In this sense, he seems to have gotten only the partial picture.

Hope to review the following before yearend...

A Walk on the Wild Side by Neal Algren
The Day of the Owl by Leonardo Sciascia
Oblomov by Ivan Goncharov
The Edge of the Storm by Agustin Yañez
The Procedure by Harry Mulisch
The Singapore Grip by J.G. Farrell
The Spell by Hermann Broch

and some non-fiction.

People of the Abyss was $1.99 as a Nook book, so I ordered it.

Thanks,

Robert

Looking forward to your reviews.

The Edge of the Storm by Agustin Yañez (Mexico, 1963)
Translated by Ethel Brinton

In the months preceding the Mexican revolution in 1910, not everyone is preoccupied with the political tensions they wrought. In a remote Mexican village in the Archdiocese of Guadalajara, one's whole existence is a never-ending Lent. In this monastic village, daily life revolves around the church and its rituals, every villager's thought, action, and motive engaged in through the prism of Catholicism's rigid teachings, the threat of eternal damnation the silent censor. In this village of black-robed women, to exercise one's own will is sinful, contemptuous, and heretical, and to feel a sense of happiness is to feel a sense of guilt. Here, there are no fiestas, dancing is held in horror. The only music is the sound of the bells tolling the passing of the dead, and the reminder for prayers, marking the faithful's penitential existence from one oppressive hour to the next... eternity cannot come soon enough! A central figure in this village is Father Martinez, an elderly priest whose devotion to his flock is equalled only by his understanding of human nature. His faith is sublime and forgiving. He is assisted by several priests, who supervise the pious societies -- heart of the village life. Most important of these societies are the Association of Good Death and the Daughters of Mary, whose rigid discipline govern dress, movements, speech, thought, and feeling of the young women.

But the silence, required by the inhabitants' unceasing contemplation of reward and punishment in the afterlife, is, here and there, starting to break and ripples are appearing on the surface of what had seemed to be a pool of sacred placidity. Not even the close and stern guardianship of Father Martinez and his priests, and neither communal nor individual acts of remorse for past or future sins, could hold back the auguries of change that they fear will destroy the security of their medieval-like existence and everything they believed in.

Agustin Yañez portrays the life of this village in a vivid and very compelling way, allowing us access into the minds of the characters who would play a role in the drama that would soon unfold. We feel the guilt-ridden thoughts and feelings of young Mercedes who believes she is in love; the rebellious anger of Micaela who has been to the city, seen a different world, and loathed her return to this prison-like place; the tortured soul of Gabriel who could only speak through the bells and whose life was upended with the arrival of a city woman; the conflicted feelings of Damian who has been to America but has returned for his inheritance; the unspoken dreams and secret hopes of Marta and the restless spirit of Maria who read forbidden books that spoke of the bigger world. Over all this, we feel the anguish of Father Martinez as he witnesses the struggle in the souls of his flock as they are confronted with seemingly small, innocuous changes brought into their lives by outside influences but whose impacts on their small, sheltered, innocent world would be tremendous. We feel his helplessness to prevent the tragedy that occurs, that he understands is even then, just the "edge of the storm."

This is a powerful and masterfully written novel, and the characterizations are well developed. Yañez builds to great effect through the narrative structure, the dark and crushing weight of religion, that in the face of something unknown such as change, drives men and women literally out of their minds, and into extreme acts that provide the only channel to their repressed thoughts and feelings. Most evocative was the former seminarian Luis Gonzaga's atmospheric celebration of the Mass of the Catechumens on Good Friday which he enacts on one of the bare hills, while the real procession was going on below -- the litany that lifts him up also signals the final downward spiralling of his mind. It is heart-wrenchingly painful to see, but it is also beautiful. The wonderful illustrations by Julio Prieto add to the dark atmosphere of the story.

Augustin Yañez (1904-80) was the author of numerous books, of which The Edge of the Storm is considered his masterpiece. He was also a political figure, having been Governor of Jalisco, and Secretary of Public Education. Yañez is not as well known to the general readership outside Mexico, but his work has received much attention in the international academic community.

I don't remember how I came across this book, but I'm very glad I did. It is a gem of a book, and deserves wider readership. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Excellent review of The Edge of the Storm. Hope your enthusiasm leads to other club members giving it a try.

The Edge of the Storm is not available new from Barny Noble, but his partners have it starting at over a hundred dollars. I may have to look elsewhere.

Robert

Sounds like a fascinating book!

Excellent review of what sounds like a fascinating book.

> 196 Robert, I checked out the Amazon.com marketplace and saw that a new copy can be had for US$12, and Amazon itself is selling it at US$30. I wonder why Barney's prices are so prohibitive. Certainly doesn't promote wider readership.

ABE has used copies starting at $1.

Excellent review of The Edge of the Storm, deebee. It was particularly interesting to read this review just after Steven's review of Recollections of Things to Come. This will also go onto my wish list.

Deebee, I only just now managed to catch up on your excellent thread - so many good reads in here - and wanted to especially thank you for your review of London's People of the Abyss. It's a book that I've been casually keeping an eye out for for far too long now...I'm a Jack London fan and also have a personal family connection to the East End of London at the time this book covers, so your review has certainly jogged my memory that this is a book I should hope to finally read sooner rather than later.

Paul, thanks for stopping by. Happy to know that the review worked as a reminder. See you over at the 2013 forum!